[House Document 105-1]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
105th Congress, 1st Session - - - - - - - - - - - House Document 105-1
STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE
__________
MESSAGE
from
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
transmitting
A REPORT ON THE STATE OF THE UNION
February 4, 1997.--Message referred to the Committee of the Whole House
on the State of the Union and ordered to be printed
To the Congress of the United States:
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of the 105th
Congress, distinguished guests, and my fellow Americans:
I think I should start by saying thanks for inviting me
back.
I come before you tonight with a challenge as great as any
in our peacetime history, and a plan of action to meet that
challenge, to prepare our people for the bold new world of the
21st century.
We have much to be thankful for. With 4 years of growth, we
have won back the basic strength of our economy. With crime and
welfare rolls declining, we are winning back our optimism, the
enduring faith that we can master any difficulty. With the Cold
War receding and global commerce at record levels, we are
helping to win an unrivaled peace and prosperity all across the
world.
My fellow Americans, the state of our union is strong, but
now we must rise to the decisive moment, to make a Nation and a
world better than any we have ever known. The new promise of
the global economy, the information age, unimagined new work,
life-enhancing technology, all these are ours to seize. That is
our honor and our challenge. We must be shapers of events, not
observers. For if we do not act, the moment will pass, and we
will lose the best possibilities of our future.
We face no imminent threat, but we do have an enemy: The
enemy of our time is inaction.
So tonight I issue a call to action, action by this
Congress, action by our States, by our people, to prepare
America for the 21st century. Action to keep our economy and
our democracy strong and working for all our people; action to
strengthen education and harness the forces of technology and
science; action to build stronger families and stronger
communities and a safer environment; action to keep America the
world's strongest force for peace, freedom, and prosperity. And
above all, action to build a more perfect union here at home.
The spirit we bring to our work will make all the
difference. We must be committed to the pursuit of opportunity
for all Americans, responsibility from all Americans, in a
community of all Americans. And we must be committed to a new
kind of government, not to solve all our problems for us, but
to give our people, all our people, the tools they need to make
the most of their own lives.
And we must work together. The people of this Nation
elected us all. They want us to be partners, not partisans.
They put us all right here in the same boat. They gave us all
oars, and they told us to row. Now, here is the direction I
believe we should take. First we must move quickly to complete
the unfinished business of our country, to balance the budget,
renew our democracy, and finish the job of welfare reform.
Over the last 4 years, we have brought new economic growth
by investing in our people, expanding our exports, cutting our
deficits, creating over 11 million new jobs, a 4-year record.
Now we must keep our economy the strongest in the world. We
here tonight have an historic opportunity. Let this Congress be
the Congress that finally balances the budget.
In two days, I will propose a detailed plan to balance the
budget by 2002. This plan will balance the budget and invest in
our people while protecting Medicare, Medicaid, education and
the environment. It will balance the budget and build on the
Vice President's efforts to make our government work better
even as it costs less.
It will balance the budget and provide middle class tax
relief to pay for education and health care, to help to raise a
child, to buy and sell a home.
Balancing the budget requires only your vote and my
signature. It does not require us to rewrite our Constitution.
I believe it is both unnecessary and unwise to adopt a
balanced budget amendment that could cripple our country in
time of economic crisis and force unwanted results, such as
judges halting Social Security checks or increasing taxes. Let
us at least agree we should not pass any measure, no measure
should be passed that threatens Social Security. Whatever your
view on that, we all must concede, we do not need a
constitutional amendment; we need action.
Whatever our differences, we should balance the budget now.
And then for the long-term health of our society, we must agree
to a bipartisan process to preserve Social Security and reform
Medicare for the long run so that these fundamental programs
will be as strong for our children as they are for our parents.
And let me say something that is not in my script tonight:
I know this is not going to be easy, but I really believe one
of the reasons the American people gave me a second term was to
take the tough decisions in the next four years that will carry
our country through the next 50 years. I know it is easier for
me than for you to say or do, but another reason I was elected
is to support all of you without regard to party to give you
what is necessary to join in these decisions. We owe it to our
country and to our future.
Our second piece of unfinished business requires us to
commit ourselves tonight before the eyes of America to finally
enacting bipartisan campaign finance reform. Senators McCain
and Feingold, Representatives Shays and Meehan have reached
across party lines here to craft tough and fair reform. Their
proposal would curb spending, reduce the role of special
interests, create a level playing field between challengers and
incumbents and ban contributions from noncitizens, all
corporate sources and the other large soft money contributions
that both parties receive.
You know and I know that this can be delayed, and you know
and I know that delay will mean the death of reform. So let us
set our own deadline. Let us work together to write bipartisan
campaign finance reform into law and pass McCain-Feingold by
the day we celebrate the birth of our democracy, July 4th.
There is a third piece of unfinished business. Over the
last four years, we moved a record two and a quarter million
people off the welfare rolls. Then last year, Congress enacted
landmark welfare reform legislation demanding that all able-
bodied recipients assume the responsibility of moving from
welfare to work. Now each and every one of us has to fulfill
our responsibility, indeed our moral obligation, to make sure
that people who now must work can work.
Now we must act to meet a new goal, 2 million more people
off the welfare rolls by the year 2000.
Here is my plan: Tax credits and other incentives for
businesses that hire people off welfare; incentives for job
placement firms and States to create more jobs for welfare
recipients; training, transportation and child care to help
people go to work.
Now I challenge every State: Turn those welfare checks into
private sector paychecks. I challenge every religious
congregation, every community nonprofit, every business to hire
someone off welfare. And I would like to say especially to
every employer in our country, whoever criticized the old
welfare system, you cannot blame that old system anymore. We
have torn it down. Now do your part. Give someone on welfare
the chance to go to work.
Tonight I am pleased to announce that five major
corporations, Sprint, Monsanto, UPS, Burger King and United
Airlines, will be the first to join in a new national effort to
marshal America's businesses, large and small, to create jobs
so that people can move from welfare to work. We passed welfare
reform. All of you know I believe we were right to do it. But
no one can walk out of this Chamber with a clear conscience
unless you are prepared to finish the job.
And we must join together to do something else, too,
something both Republican and Democratic governors have asked
us to do, to restore basic health and disability benefits when
misfortune strikes immigrants who came to this country legally,
who work hard, pay taxes and obey the law. To do otherwise is
simply unworthy of a great Nation of immigrants.
Now, looking ahead, the greatest step of all, the high
threshold of the future we must now cross and my number one
priority for the next four years is to ensure that all
Americans have the best education in the world.
Let us work together to meet these three goals: Every 8-
year-old must be able to read; every 12-year-old must be able
to log on to the Internet; every 18-year-old must be able to go
to college; and every adult American must be able to keep on
learning for a lifetime.
My balanced budget makes an unprecedented commitment to
these goals, $51 billion next year. But far more than money is
required.
I have a plan, a call to action for American education
based on these 10 principles.
First, a national crusade for education standards, not
Federal Government standards, but national standards
representing what all of our students must know to succeed in
the knowledge economy of the 21st century.
Every State and school must shape the curriculum to reflect
these standards and train teachers to lift students up to them.
To help schools meet the standards and measure their progress,
we will lead an effort over the next 2 years to develop
national tests of student achievement in reading and math.
Tonight I issue a challenge to the Nation: Every State
should adopt high national standards, and by 1999 every State
should test every fourth grader in reading and every eighth
grader in math to make sure these standards are met.
Raising standards will not be easy, and some of our
children will not be able to meet them at first. The point is
not to put our children down, but to lift them up. Good tests
will show us who needs help, what changes in teaching to make,
and which schools need to improve. They can help us to end
social promotion, for no child should move from grade school to
junior high or junior high to high school until he or she is
ready.
Last month, our Secretary of Education Dick Riley and I
visited northern Illinois where eighth grade students from 20
school districts in a project aptly called ``First in the
World'' took the Third International Math and Science Study.
That is a test that reflects the world class standards our
children must meet for the new era. And those students in
Illinois tied for first in the world in science and came in
second in math.
Two of them, Kristin Tanner and Chris Getsla, are here
tonight, along with their teacher, Sue Winski. They are up
there with the First Lady, and they prove that when we aim high
and challenge our students, they will be the best in the world.
Let us give them a hand. Stand up, please.
Second, to have the best schools, we must have the best
teachers. Most of us in this Chamber would not be here tonight
without the help of those teachers. I know that I would not be
here.
For years, many of our educators, led by North Carolina's
Governor Jim Hunt and the National Board for Professional
Teaching Standards, have worked very hard to establish
nationally accepted credentials for excellence in teaching.
Just 500 of these teachers have been certified since 1995. My
budget will enable 100,000 more to seek national certification
as master teachers.
We should reward and recognize our best teachers. And as we
reward them, we should quickly and fairly remove those few who
do not measure up, and we should challenge more of our finest
young people to consider teaching as a career.
Third, we must do more to help all our children read. Forty
percent, 40 percent, of our 8-year-olds cannot read on their
own. That is why we have just launched the America Reads
Initiative, to build a citizen army of 1 million volunteer
tutors to make sure every child can read independently by the
end of the third grade. We will use thousands of AmeriCorps
volunteers to mobilize this citizen army. We want at least
100,000 college students to help.
And tonight I am pleased that 60 college presidents have
answered my call, pledging that thousands of their work/study
students will serve for 1 year as reading tutors.
This is also a challenge to every teacher and every
principal: You must use these tutors to help your students
read. And it is especially a challenge to our parents: You must
read with our children every night.
This leads to the fourth principle: Learning begins in the
first days of life. Scientists are now discovering how young
children develop emotionally and intellectually from their very
first days and how important it is for parents to begin
immediately talking, singing, even reading, to their infants.
The First Lady has spent years writing about this issue,
studying it, and she and I are going to convene a White House
Conference on Early Learning and the Brain this spring to
explore how parents and educators can best use these startling
new findings.
We already know we should start teaching children before
they start school. That is why this balanced budget expands
Head Start to 1 million children by 2002. That is why the Vice
President and Mrs. Gore will host their annual family
conference this June on what we can do to make sure that
parents are an active part of their children's learning all the
way through school.
They have done a great deal to highlight the importance of
family in our life, and now they are turning their attention to
getting more parents involved in their children's learning all
the way through school. And I thank you, Mr. Vice President,
and I thank you especially, Tipper, for what you are doing.
Fifth, every State should give parents the power to choose
the right public school for their children. Their right to
choose will foster a competition and innovation that can make
public schools better. We should also make it possible for more
parents and teachers to start charter schools, schools that set
and meet the highest standards and exist only as long as they
do. Our plan will help America to create 3,000 of these charter
schools by the next century, nearly seven times as many as
there are in the country today, so that parents will have even
more choices in sending their children to the best schools.
Sixth, character education must be taught in our schools.
We must teach our children to be good citizens, and we must
continue to promote order and discipline, supporting
communities that introduce school uniforms, impose curfews,
enforce truancy laws, remove disruptive students from the
classroom, and have zero tolerance for guns and drugs in
schools.
Seventh, we cannot expect our children to raise themselves
up in schools that are literally falling down. With the student
population at an all-time high and record numbers of school
buildings falling into disrepair, this has now become a serious
national concern.
Therefore, my budget includes a new initiative: $5 billion
to help communities finance $20 billion in school construction
over the next 4 years.
Eighth, we must make the 13th and 14th years of education,
at least 2 years of college, just as universal in America by
the 21st century as a high school education is today, and we
must open the doors of college to all Americans.
To do that, I propose America's HOPE scholarship, based on
Georgia's pioneering program, 2 years of a $1,500 tax credit
for college tuition, enough to pay for the typical community
college.
I also propose a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for
all tuition after high school, an expanded IRA you can withdraw
from tax free for education, and the largest increase in Pell
grant scholarships in 20 years.
This plan will give most families the ability to pay no
taxes on money they saved for college tuition. I ask you to
pass it, and give every American who works hard the chance to
go to college.
Ninth, in the 21st century, we must expand the frontiers of
learning across a lifetime. All our people, of whatever age,
must have the chance to learn new skills. Most Americans live
near a community college. The roads that take them there could
be paths to a better future. My GI bill for America's workers
will transform the confusing tangle of Federal training
programs into a simple skill grant to go directly into eligible
workers' hands. For too long, this bill has been sitting on
that desk there without action. I ask you to pass it now. Let
us give more of our workers the ability to learn and to earn
for a lifetime.
Tenth, we must bring the power of the Information Age into
all our schools. Last year, I challenged America to connect
every classroom and library to the Internet by the year 2000,
so that for the first time in our history, children in the most
isolated rural towns, the most comfortable suburbs, the poorest
inner city schools, will have the same access to the same
universe of knowledge. That is my plan: a call to action for
American education.
Some may say that it is unusual for a President to pay this
kind of attention to education. Some may say it is simply
because the President and his wonderful wife have been obsessed
with this subject for more years than they can recall. That is
not what is driving these proposals. We must understand the
significance of this endeavor. One of the greatest sources of
our strength throughout the Cold War was a bipartisan foreign
policy. Because our future was at stake, politics stopped at
the water's edge. Now I ask you, and I ask all our Nation's
governors, I ask parents, teachers and citizens all across
America, for a new nonpartisan commitment to education, because
education is a critical national security issue for our future,
and politics must stop at the schoolhouse door.
To prepare America for the 21st century, we must harness
the powerful forces of science and technology to benefit all
Americans.
This is the first State of the Union carried live in video
over the Internet. But we have only begun to spread the
benefits of a technology revolution that should become the
modern birthright of every citizen.
Our effort to connect every classroom is just the
beginning. Now we should connect every hospital to the
Internet, so doctors can instantly share data about their
patients with the best specialists in the field. And I
challenge the private sector tonight to start by connecting
every children's hospital as soon as possible, so that a child
in bed can stay in touch with school, family and friends. A
sick child need no longer be a child alone.
We must build the second generation of the Internet so our
leading universities and national laboratories can communicate
in speeds a thousand times faster than today, to develop new
medical treatments, new sources of energy, new ways of working
together.
But we cannot stop there. As the Internet becomes our new
town square, a computer in every home, a teacher of all
subjects, a connection to all cultures, this will no longer be
a dream, but a necessity. And over the next decade, that must
be our goal.
We must continue to explore the heavens, pressing on with
the Mars probes and the international space station, both of
which will have practical applications for our everyday living.
We must speed the remarkable advances in medical science.
The human genome project is now decoding the genetic mysteries
of life. American scientists have discovered genes linked to
breast cancer and ovarian cancer, and medication that stops a
stroke in progress and begins to reverse its effects, and
treatments that dramatically lengthen the lives of people with
HIV and AIDS.
Since I took office, funding for AIDS research at the
National Institutes of Health has increased dramatically, to
$1.5 billion. With new resources, NIH will now become the most
powerful discovery engine for an AIDS vaccine, working with
other scientists to finally end the threat of AIDS. Remember
that every year we move up the discovery of an AIDS vaccine
will save millions of lives around the world. We must reinforce
our commitment to medical science.
To prepare America for the 21st century, we must build
stronger families.
Over the past 4 years, the family and medical leave law has
helped millions of Americans to take time off to be with their
families. With new pressures on people in the way they work and
live, I believe we must expand family leave so that workers can
take time off for teacher conferences and a child's medical
checkup. We should pass flextime so workers can choose to be
paid for overtime in income, or trade it in for time off to be
with their families.
We must continue, step by step, to give more families
access to affordable, quality health care. Forty million
Americans still lack health insurance. Ten million children
still lack health insurance. Eighty percent of them have
working parents who pay taxes. That is wrong. My balanced
budget will extend health coverage to up to 5 million of those
children. Since nearly half of all children who lose their
insurance do so because their parents lose or change a job, my
budget will also ensure that people who temporarily lose their
jobs can still afford to keep their health insurance. No child
should be without a doctor just because a parent is without a
job.
My Medicare plan modernizes Medicare, increases the life of
the trust fund to 10 years, provides support for respite care
for the many families with loved ones afflicted with
Alzheimer's, and for the first time it would fully pay for
annual mammograms.
Just as we ended drive-through deliveries of babies last
year, we must now end the dangerous and demeaning practice of
forcing women home from the hospital only hours after a
mastectomy. I ask your support for bipartisan legislation to
guarantee that a woman can stay in the hospital for 48 hours
after a mastectomy. With us tonight is Dr. Kristen Zarfos, a
Connecticut surgeon whose outrage at this practice spurred a
national movement and inspired this legislation. I would like
her to stand so we can thank her for her efforts. Dr. Zarfos,
thank you.
In the last 4 years, we have increased child support
collections by 50 percent. Now we should go further and do
better, by making it a felony for any parent to cross a State
line in an attempt to flee from this, his or her most sacred
obligation.
Finally, we must also protect our children by standing firm
in our determination to ban the advertising and marketing of
cigarettes that endanger their lives.
To prepare America for the 21st century we must build
stronger communities. We should start with safe streets.
Serious crime has dropped 5 years in a row. The key has been
community policing. We must finish the job of putting 100,000
community police on the streets of the United States.
We should pass the victims rights amendment to the
Constitution, and I ask you to mount a full-scale assault on
juvenile crime with legislation that declares war on gangs,
with new prosecutors and tougher penalties, extends the Brady
bill so violent teen criminals will not be able to buy
handguns, requires child safety locks on handguns to prevent
unauthorized use and helps to keep our schools open after hours
on weekends and in the summer so our young people will have
some place to go and something to say yes to.
This balanced budget includes the largest antidrug effort
ever to stop drugs at their source, punish those who push them
and teach our young people that drugs are wrong, drugs are
illegal and drugs will kill them. I hope you will support it.
Our growing economy has helped to revive poor urban and
rural neighborhoods, but we must do more to empower them to
create the conditions in which all families can flourish and to
create jobs through investment by business and loans by banks.
We should double the number of empowerment zones. They have
already brought so much hope to communities like Detroit, where
the unemployment rate has been cut in half in 4 years.
We should restore contaminated urban land and buildings to
productive use. We should expand the network of community
development banks, and together we must pledge tonight that we
will use this empowerment approach, including private sector
tax incentives, to renew our capital city so that Washington is
a great place to work and live and once again the proud face
America shows the world.
We must protect our environment in every community. In the
last 4 years we cleaned up 250 toxic waste sites, as many in
the previous 12. Now we should clean up 500 more so that our
children grow up next to parks, not poison. I urge you to pass
my proposal to make big polluters live by a simple rule: If you
pollute our environment, you should pay to clean it up.
In the last 4 years we strengthened our Nation's safe food
and cleaning drinking water laws, we protected some of
America's rarest and most beautiful land in Utah's Red Rocks
region, created three new national parks in the California
desert and began to restore the Florida Everglades. Now we must
be as vigilant with our rivers as we are with our lands.
Tonight I announce that this year I will designate 10
American Heritage rivers to help communities alongside them
revitalize their waterfronts and clean up pollution in the
rivers, proving once again we can grow the economy as we
protect the environment.
We must also protect our global environment, working to ban
the worst toxic chemicals and to reduce the greenhouse gases
that challenge our health even as they change our climate.
Now, we all know that in all of our communities some of our
children simply do not have what they need to grow and learn in
their own homes or schools or neighborhoods and that means the
rest of us must do more, for they are our children too. That is
why President Bush, General Colin Powell, former Housing
Secretary Henry Cisneros will join the Vice President and me to
lead the President's Summit of Service in Philadelphia in
April.
Our national service program, AmeriCorps, has already
helped 70,000 young people to work their way through college as
they serve America. Now we intend to mobilize millions of
Americans to serve in thousands of ways. Citizen service is an
American responsibility which all Americans should embrace, and
I ask your support for that endeavor.
I would like to make just one last point about our national
community. Our economy is measured in numbers and statistics
and is very important. But the enduring worth of our Nation
lies in our shared values and our soaring spirit. So instead of
cutting back on our modest efforts to support the arts and
humanities I believe we should stand by them and challenge our
artists, musicians and writers, challenge our museums,
libraries and theaters.
We should challenge all Americans in the arts and
humanities to join with their fellow citizens to make the year
2000 a national celebration of the American spirit in every
community, a celebration of our common culture in the century
that is passed and in the new one to come in a new millennium
so that we can remain the world's beacon, not only of liberty
but of creativity long after the fireworks have faded.
To prepare America for the 21st century we must master the
forces of change in the world and keep American leadership
strong and sure for a uncharted time.
Fifty years ago, a farsighted America led in creating the
institutions that secured victory in the Cold War and built a
growing world economy. As a result, today more people than ever
embrace our ideals and share our interests. Already we have
dismantled many of the blocs and barriers that divided our
parents' world. For the first time more people live under
democracy than dictatorship, including every Nation in our own
hemisphere but one, and its day too will come.
Now we stand at another moment of change and choice and
another time to be farsighted, to bring America 50 more years
of security and prosperity. In this endeavor our first task is
to help to build for the very first time an undivided
democratic Europe. When Europe is stable, prosperous and at
peace, America is more secure. To that end we must expand NATO
by 1999 so that countries that were once our adversaries can
become our allies. At the special NATO summit this summer that
is what we will begin to do. We must strengthen NATO's
partnership for peace with non-member allies and we must build
a stable partnership between NATO and a democratic Russia.
An expanded NATO is good for America and a Europe in which
all democracies define their future, not in terms of what they
can do to each other but in terms of what they can do together
for the good of all, that kind of Europe is good for America.
Second, America must look to the East no less than to the
West. Our security demands it. Americans fought 3 wars in Asia
in this century. Our prosperity requires it. More than 2
million American jobs depend upon trade with Asia. There, too,
we are helping to shape an Asian Pacific community of
cooperation, not conflict.
Let our progress there not mask the peril that remains.
Together with South Korea, we must advance peace talks with
North Korea and bridge the Cold War's last divide. I call on
Congress to fund our share of the agreement under which North
Korea must continue to freeze and then dismantle its nuclear
weapons program.
We must pursue a deeper dialogue with China for the sake of
our interests and our ideals. An isolated China is not good for
America. A China playing its proper role in the world is. I
will go to China, and I have invited China's President to come
here, not because we agree on everything, but because engaging
China is the best way to work on our common challenges like
ending nuclear testing, and to deal frankly with our
fundamental differences like human rights.
The American people must prosper in the global economy. We
have worked hard to tear down trade barriers abroad so that we
can create good jobs at home. I am proud to say that today
America is once again the most competitive Nation and the
number one exporter in the world. Now we must act to expand our
exports, especially to Asia and Latin America, two of the
fastest growing regions on earth, or be left behind as these
emerging economies forge new ties with other nations.
That is why we need the authority now to conclude new trade
agreements that open markets to our goods and services even as
we preserve our values. We need not shrink from the challenge
of the global economy. After all, we have the best workers and
the best products. In a truly open market we can outcompete
anyone, anywhere on earth.
But this is about more than economics. By expanding trade,
we can advance the cause of freedom and democracy around the
world. There is no better example of this truth than Latin
America, where democracy and open markets are on the march
together. That is why I will visit there in the spring, to
reinforce our important ties.
We should all be proud that America led the effort to
rescue our neighbor, Mexico, from its economic crisis. We
should all be proud that last month Mexico repaid the United
States, 3 full years ahead of schedule, with a half a billion
dollar profit to us.
America must continue to be an unrelenting force for peace,
from the Middle East to Haiti, from Northern Ireland to Africa.
Taking reasonable risks for peace keeps us from being drawn
into far more costly conflicts later.
With American leadership, the killing is stopped in Bosnia.
Now the habits of peace must take hold. The new NATO force will
allow reconstruction and reconciliation to accelerate. Tonight
I ask Congress to continue its strong support of our troops.
They are doing a remarkable job there for America, and America
must do right by them.
Fifth, we must move strongly against new threats to our
security. In the past 4 years we agreed to ban, we led the way
to a worldwide agreement to ban nuclear testing. With Russia,
we dramatically cut nuclear arsenals, and we stopped targeting
each other's citizens. We are acting to prevent nuclear
materials from falling into the wrong hands, and to rid the
world of landmines.
We are working with other nations, with renewed intensity,
to fight drug traffickers and to stop terrorists before they
act, and hold them fully accountable if they do.
Now we must rise to a new test of leadership, ratifying the
Chemical Weapons Convention. Make no mistake about it, it will
make our troops safer from chemical attack. It will help us to
fight terrorism.
We have no more important obligations, especially in the
wake of what we now know about the Gulf War. This treaty has
been bipartisan from the beginning, supported by Republican and
Democratic administrations, and Republican and Democratic
Members of Congress, and already approved by 68 nations. But if
we do not act by April the 29th, when this convention goes into
force with or without us, we will lose the chance to have
Americans leading and enforcing this effort. Together, we must
make the Chemical Weapons Convention law, so that at last we
can begin to outlaw poison gas from the earth.
Finally, we must have the tools to meet all these
challenges.
We must maintain a strong and ready military. We must
increase funding for weapons modernization by the year 2000,
and we must take good care of our men and women in uniform.
They are the world's finest.
We must also renew our commitment to America's diplomacy,
and pay our debts and dues to international financial
institutions like the World Bank, and to a reforming United
Nations. Every dollar, every dollar we devote to preventing
conflicts, to promoting democracy, to stopping the spread of
disease and starvation, brings a sure return in security and
savings. Yet international affairs spending today is just 1
percent of the Federal budget, a small fraction of what America
invested in diplomacy to choose leadership over escapism at the
start of the Cold War. If America is to continue to lead the
world, we here who lead America simply must find the will to
pay our way.
A farsighted America moved the world to a better place over
these last 50 years, and so it can be for another 50 years. But
a shortsighted America will soon find its words falling on deaf
ears all around the world.
Almost exactly 50 years ago, in the first winter of the
Cold War, President Truman stood before a Republican Congress
and called upon our country to meet its responsibilities of
leadership. This was his warning. He said, ``If we falter, we
may endanger the peace of the world--and we shall surely
endanger the welfare of this nation.'' That Congress, led by
Republicans like Senator Arthur Vandenberg, answered President
Truman's call. Together, they made the commitments that
strengthened our country for 50 years. Now let us do the same.
Let us do what it takes to remain the indispensable Nation, to
keep America strong, secure, and prosperous for another 50
years.
In the end, more than anything else, our world leadership
grows out of the power of our example here at home, out of our
ability to remain strong as one America.
All over the world people are being torn asunder by racial,
ethnic, and religious conflicts that fuel fanaticism and
terror. We are the world's most diverse democracy, and the
world looks to us to show that it is possible to live and
advance together across those kinds of differences.
America has always been a Nation of immigrants. From the
start, a steady stream of people, in search of freedom and
opportunity, have left their own lands to make this land their
home. We started as an experiment in democracy fueled by
Europeans. We have grown into an experiment in democratic
diversity fueled by openness and promise.
My fellow Americans, we must never, ever believe that our
diversity is a weakness. It is our greatest strength.
Americans speak every language, know every country. People
on every continent can look to us and see the reflection of
their own great potential. And they always will, as long as we
strive to give all of our citizens, whatever their background,
an opportunity to achieve their own greatness.
We are not there yet. We still see evidence of abiding
bigotry and intolerance and ugly words and awful violence in
burned churches and bombed buildings. We must fight against
this in our country and in our hearts.
Just a few days, before my second inauguration, one of our
country's best known pastors, Reverend Robert Schuller,
suggested that I read Isaiah 58:12. Here is what it says:
``Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations, and
thou shalt be called, the repairer of the breach, the restorer
of paths to dwell in.''
I placed my hand on that verse when I took the oath of
office on behalf of all Americans, for no matter what our
differences in our faiths, our backgrounds, our politics, we
must all be repairers of the breach.
I want to say a word about two other Americans who show us
how. Congressman Frank Tejeda was buried yesterday, a proud
American whose family came from Mexico. He was only 51 years
old. He was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and the
Purple Heart fighting for his country in Vietnam, and he went
on to serve Texas and America fighting for our future here in
this Chamber. We are grateful for his service and honored that
his mother, Lillie Tejeda, and his sister Mary Alice, have come
from Texas to be with us here tonight, and we welcome them.
Gary Locke, the newly elected Governor of Washington State,
is the first Chinese American Governor in the history of our
country. He is the proud son of two of the millions of Asian
American immigrants who strengthened America with their hard
work, family values and good citizenship. He represents the
future we can all achieve. Thank you, Governor, for being here.
Reverend Schuller, Congressman Tejeda, Governor Locke,
along with Kristin Tanner and Chris Getsla, Sue Winski and Dr.
Kristen Zarfos, they are all Americans from different roots
whose lives reflect the best of what we can become when we are
one America.
We may not share a common past, but we surely do share a
common future. Building one America is our most important
mission, the foundation of many generations, of every other
strength we must build for this new century. Money cannot buy
it. Power cannot compel it. Technology cannot create it. It can
only come from the human spirit.
America is far more than a place. It is an idea, the most
powerful idea in the history of nations. And all of us in this
Chamber, we are now the bearers of that idea, leading a great
people into a new world. A child born tonight will have almost
no memory of the 20th century. Everything that child will know
about America will be because of what we do now to build a new
century.
We do not have a moment to waste. Tomorrow there will be
just over 1,000 days until the year 2000; 1,000 days to prepare
our people; 1,000 days to work together; 1,000 days to build a
bridge to a land of new promise.
My fellow Americans, we have work to do. Let us seize those
days and the century.
Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America.