[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George H. W. Bush (1992, Book I)]
[February 21, 1992]
[Pages 292-296]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Charleston, 
South Carolina

February 21, 1992
    The President. Thank you, thank you. It is great to be here in 
Charleston, I'll tell you. I'm delighted to be back in the South. And 
may I say to our Governor, my dear friend Carroll Campbell, we're 
grateful for your hospitality and even more for your leadership as one 
of the finest Governors in the entire country, a real leader, Carroll 
Campbell. And I might say how pleased I am that Governor Campbell will 
serve as our national cochairman of the campaign and once again as 
southern regional chairman. I couldn't be in better hands, and thank you 
very much.
    May I thank the Citadel Bulldog Band over there for some fine music. 
I appreciate it very much. And this is a real star-studded event. And I 
want to salute the Governors here today, past and present. I know 
Governor Jim Martin's here from North Carolina. And Members of the 
United States Congress, I think four or five Congressmen with us here 
today, a couple of them with us right here: Congressman Ravenel, 
hometown boy, and others. And other distinguished guests. And may I say 
that an early supporter and friend of mine is running for the Senate 
here, Tommy Hartnett. And I want to see him elected to the United States 
Senate--former Member of Congress. And I also want to acknowledge key 
members of our political team: Rich Bond is with us, our new chairman, 
and Jeanie Austin, doing a superb job. And of course, the conference 
chairman Martha Edens' superb work here. Keep up the good work, and 
thank you very much, Martha.
    And it's great to be here in South Carolina, host for the first 
time, but I'm sure not the last time, of this prestigious Southern 
Republican Leadership Conference. Four years ago, the South led our 
party to a great victory across the entire country. And this year, the 
South will lead us to victory in November 1992.
    And just to be perfectly clear about it, I am confident of winning 
the Presidency for 4 more years. I come here fired up and confident. But 
I'll need your support. We have much to do these next few months because 
we have much to do these next few years. Together, we can finish what 
we've started and move this country forward.
    Let me open with a true story from my own past about the old days, 
Midland, Texas, 1956, trying to organize--I hear Ernie Angelo over 
there--[laughter]--trying to organize a Republican Party. And this is 
the gospel truth. I was a precinct judge, a poll judge, polling judge at 
primary election time, the first time the Republican Party had ever held 
a primary in Midland County. And Barbara and I were there alternating at 
the polls, poll watchers. She and I voted Republican, and we represented 
two-thirds of the Republican vote that year, gospel truth. The only 
other guy that voted was a slightly inebriated Democrat. He thought he 
was voting in the--[laughter]--and you can go back and look up the 
records.
    But some of you all are old enough to remember those days. And 
sometimes if you tried to register Republican, they'd tell you not to 
bother because there was no Republicans to vote for in the primary. Or 
times, out and out, there was intimidation, sometimes violence. And we 
went through a lot back then. And in fact, I'm sure many of you can 
share similar experiences.
    And you say, well, why did we do it? Why did we build a Republican 
Party in the South when some said it was impossible? We did it because 
we wanted change, and we did it because we believed in some fundamental 
values: faith and family, responsi-

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bility and respect, community and of course country, the United States 
of America. And we did it because we saw the Government getting too big 
and getting into our pockets, into every corner of our lives. And we did 
it because we worried about our families and our schools and our 
neighborhoods. And we did it because our taxes always seem to go up at 
the same time America's problems got worse. And each of us in our own 
small way finally said, ``Enough is enough.''
    We were upstarts and mavericks. And we challenged the status quo. We 
challenged the old, what was known as the courthouse crowd, the closed-
door, one-party rule of the Democrats. And we did it because we knew 
Republican principles were right. And they fought us every step of the 
way. But we fought hard, and we fought fair. And we took our message, 
smaller Government, better Government, to the people of the Carolinas 
and Virginia and Mississippi and Florida and the rest of this great 
region of America.
    And we started winning, at first a House seat here and a Senate race 
there. But our momentum grew. Momentum grew, and it grew. And we owe a 
great debt of gratitude to our standard bearer in those early days, 
those that were out front: Howard Baker, the late John Tower, the Bo 
Calloways and Bill Brocks, Drake Edens and Clark Reeds, and Bill 
Dickinson and John Paul Hammerschmidt and of course, the phenomenal 
favorite son of South Carolina, right behind me, Strom Thurmond. When I 
think back to one year ago almost to this very day, the tough decision 
that had to be made about committing your sons and daughters into a war, 
Strom Thurmond was of more support to me than any single Senator in the 
United States Senate. And we should be grateful for him.
    Well, these leaders paved the way, and they inspired a generation of 
talent that transformed the Nation's political landscape. And I'm 
thinking now of another South Carolinian, a good man and a good friend, 
Lee Atwater. We miss him. We miss him still. And it was great to have 
Sally Atwater flying down with us this afternoon on Air Force One. 
Sally, we're so pleased to be with you.
    Well, today the Republican Party is the force for positive change in 
the New South, and I'm proud to have played a modest role in that 
success. Our message then and our message now is simple. Carroll said a 
lot of it. We believe Government is too big and spends too much. We 
believe in good schools and safe streets and a Government worthy of the 
people's respect. And so, we believe in less Government, low taxes. 
Surely we believe in a strong defense. And we believe that we put 
America first when we put America's families first.
    And so, we believe that parents, not the Government, should make the 
big decisions. Parents, not Government, should choose their children's 
schools. Parents, not the Government, should decide the family's health 
care. And parents should choose who cares for their children, not some 
bureaucrat in Washington, DC, telling us how to do it. And yes, we 
believe it ought to be okay to have a voluntary prayer for children in 
the classroom, and I'm not going to change my view on that ever.
    Those are our beliefs. And those are why we built a party in the 
South and why we continue, with your help, to build it today. Those 
beliefs don't change from one election to the next. They still guide 
each and every one of us each and every day.
    And now we're at the beginning of a new era in the history of our 
country. The cold war is over, and America won. The Soviet Union, as we 
remember it, has collapsed, gone. Imperial communism is finished for 
good. American leadership changed the world. Republican leadership will 
change America.
    I know we've got tough times, but I am totally confident about our 
future. But we've got a lot of work ahead of us. There are some things 
that are simply on the wrong track in our country. Take our courts, for 
example. When fathers stop coaching Little League because they're afraid 
of liability lawsuits, something is wrong. And when doctors stop 
delivering babies 
because they fear a malpractice lawsuit, something's wrong. Or when 
people stop volunteering to help each other because they fear ambulance-
chasing lawyers, something is terribly wrong. These days a sharp lawyer 
would tell the Good Samari-

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tan, ``Keep on walking.''
    We've proposed reforms to our court system--they've got them sitting 
up there in the United States Senate now--to address the questions of 
frivolous lawsuits, and that's a good step. But the real answer for 
solving problems is to be more concerned with helping each other than 
suing each other.
    And then I think about our Nation's health care system. Our health 
care system provides, and let's not forget this, the highest quality 
care anywhere in the world. But it's not perfect. We all know that. And 
too many people do not have access to health insurance. Too many people 
worry that they're going to lose their coverage if they change jobs or, 
worse still, if they lose their job. And anybody who's had even minor 
surgery knows that health care costs are going through the roof.
    The answer is not to go down the road of socialized medicine with 
its long lines and faceless, impersonal service. If that's what we 
wanted, we'd put our doctors and nurses to work for the department of 
motor vehicles. Our plan, my approach, written out in detail, is to 
reform our health system, make insurance available to all, keep the 
quality high, the bureaucracy low, and preserve choice. And that is 
vital. And the last thing we want is the Government standing between you 
and your doctor.
    And then there's the sorry welfare system. It's pretty obvious that 
the system now too often perpetuates dependency when it should promote 
independence, promote initiative. We need to encourage individual 
success through personal responsibility, the dignity of a job. And so, 
I've asked the departments and agencies to make it easier--and this is 
upon the advice of Jim Martin and Carroll Campbell and others--to make 
it easier for State and local government to reform the system, reform 
policies that promote broken families. We need to get people to work, go 
after the deadbeat fathers who run out on those little kids, or as they 
do in Wisconsin, to make recipients work or study and to keep families 
together.
    But we all know what the number one issue on the minds of Americans 
is, and it is the economy. And it's people worried about their jobs, 
providing for their families, meeting the everyday challenges of paying 
the bills and providing a home and teaching the kids and putting aside 
for our retirement.
    The American people, your neighbors, want this economy fired up 
again, and so do I. And in my State of the Union Address, I put forward 
a two-part plan. And the first part gets business growing again right 
now, instantly upgrading plant and equipment again, hiring workers 
again. It uses incentives like an investment tax allowance. And yes, it 
is clearly time for the Congress to wake up and cut that tax on capital 
gains.
    And to get housing back on its feet, I put forth several commonsense 
proposals--they're sitting right there in House now--to get people 
buying and building homes. And perhaps the most easily understood 
proposal is a $5,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. With our 
plan, young people almost able to buy that first home could do it with 
the extra $5,000 in their pocket. And the plan we're fighting against in 
the Congress this very day gives them absolutely nothing, nothing to 
that first-time homebuyer.
    You're worried about the Democrats' current plan. I don't want to 
say too much about it. It's a nice evening here, and I don't want to 
ruin it. Current plan, I say current because it seems to change just 
about every hour as they change it to garner in some votes from the 
special interests, to buy votes. And that's why it's really not a plan. 
It is simply a bad deal. It smacks of, and you've heard it before, class 
warfare. And listen to the tradeoff in their deal: 25 cents a day in 
temporary tax relief for 2 years, paid for, true to form for the 
Democrats, by a large permanent tax increase.
    Now, some Democrats in the Senate have other ideas. They want to get 
a bidding war going. But to pay for that they'd have to hike tax rates 
for the middle class, people making $35,000, you know, people like 
teachers and factory workers and everyday Americans. And they won't tell 
you that about their sorry plan. But that's the estimate I've been given 
by our experts. Any economist will tell you the last thing our economy 
needs now is a tax increase by that Democratic Congress. And their plan

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adds almost $30 billion to this deficit. And the jobs it creates are 
more likely to be for more tax collectors.
    I believe the American people have about had it with this tax-and-
spend thinking. And we drew a line in the sand in the Persian Gulf and 
kept our word, and I'll draw another line in the sand right here today. 
If the Democrats send me this nonsense they're talking about now, I will 
send it right back. I will veto it the minute it hits my desk.
    I sent them a plan, a good one. And that's what they ought to work 
on, not some phony partisan maneuver that they know won't fly. And I'll 
say it again to the Congress: Here's the deadline, March 20th. And if we 
act by then, we can see some results this spring. No more games, no more 
empty gestures, just pass this plan and get the economy going again, and 
then we can have all the political fights we want. But let's set it 
aside now and do something for the American people that are hurting out 
there.
    I said the plan had two parts; you may remember that from the State 
of the Union. The second part is a long-term plan to keep this country 
competitive, keep us vigorous. And it's a road map for competing and 
leading America in this fast-changing world of the 21st century.
    Our plan revolutionizes America's educational system. Our plan gets 
the billions of dollars' worth of cutting-edge Government research and 
development into the hands of our private sector businesses and the 
workers faster than ever before. And that helps us get a real return on 
your tax dollars, investment helping to create new jobs and products.
    Our plan provides tax relief to strengthen the family. We raised the 
tax deduction for children by $500. Make no mistake, I want this plan 
passed in this session of Congress. Keep the heat on the Congress, and 
we can get that done.
    But a central idea behind our approach is that to succeed 
economically at home, we have to lead economically abroad. Carroll 
touched on this very eloquently. What he means and what I mean is jobs 
right here in America by opening markets for our exports all over the 
world. And I'm going to fight hard in every foreign market to do just 
exactly that. We've made headway. We have made dramatic headway with 
this increase in exports, but we are going to do even better.
    Some people wish the rest of the world would just go away. That is 
naive, and that is defeatist. They're saying that a level playing field 
isn't level enough, that American ingenuity, American know-how, and the 
American can-do spirit are simply a bunch of hackneyed phrases. I don't 
believe it. I don't believe that for one minute, and neither do you. 
America is not going to cut and run, ever. We're going to stay involved, 
and we are going to continue to lead the entire world.
    Before I finish now, I have something to say about this primary 
campaign. Of course, this campaign is important, not just to me but to 
you and to our country. And for the sake of our country, we must not 
turn over the Nation's leadership to the Democrats. Republican 
leadership must continue.
    For 8 years, Ronald Reagan, I was at his side, led this country. For 
the last 3 years, I've stood on our principles and against a Democratic 
Congress that would undermine them. And with the help of our Republican 
leadership on Capitol Hill, 25 times our principles were upheld, vetoes 
of bad legislation sustained.
    And the next 5 years of American history are just too important to 
entrust to the inexperienced. I believe the American people want to hear 
about how we're going to address our country's challenges, how we can 
unite our people, create more opportunity and hope for all Americans. 
And I believe the American people want to hear solutions, not just a lot 
of name-calling and running this country down.
    And frankly, I also believe that sometimes somebody's got to stand 
up and say what's right about the United States of America. And you 
can't hear it from this campaign going on out there. We are number one, 
and make no mistake about it, and we're going to stay that way.
    And another thing, maybe this is just my personal prejudice talking, 
let's not listen to the gloom and doom from all those intense talking 
heads who are happy only when

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they say something negative. We are the United States of America, and we 
don't have to put up with all that.
    Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
    The President. Let me just say, you and I believe in America, and we 
are optimistic about its future. And we believe in our party. And I am 
tremendously fortunate to serve as your President at this most exciting 
time in our Nation's history. Barbara and I count our blessings every 
day for the good fortune that we have to live in that majestic White 
House and to do our level-best to serve the people of this great 
country.
    These next primaries are critical. I need your help. I need your 
help to keep our party strong and united so that we can win this fall. 
And yes, we have much to do. But I guarantee you, we will get the job 
done. And yes, we have many challenges before us. I guarantee you, we 
will meet them, each and every one of them. And yes, there's an election 
in November. And I guarantee you this: We will win it. I want to be your 
President for another 4 years.
    Thank you very much. Thank you very, very much. Now let's go out and 
beat the Democrats in the fall. And may God bless the United States of 
America. Thank you.

                    Note: The President spoke at 4:40 p.m. at the Omni 
                        Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Richard N. 
                        Brown, chairman, and Jeanie Austin, cochairman, 
                        Republican National Committee; Martha Edens, 
                        chairman, Southern Republican Leadership 
                        Conference; and Ernie Angelo, Republican 
                        national committeeman from Tennessee.