[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George H. W. Bush (1992, Book I)]
[May 11, 1992]
[Pages 744-748]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 744]]

Remarks at a Bush-Quayle Fundraising Dinner in Philadelphia

May 11, 1992
    Thank you all. And Peter, thank you very much for that wonderfully 
warm introduction and for making me feel so welcome. I loved walking out 
through that crowd because it gave me a chance to see so many people who 
have been so supportive over the years, and I am very, very grateful to 
you. Barbara and I count our blessings, even in complicated times, and I 
am very privileged to serve as President of the United States. Believe 
me, I'll never forget how I got there. It was good, strong, loyal 
friends out in the precincts and at dinners like this over the years, 
and I am very grateful to all of you.
    May I thank Reverend Gambet for his invocation; it was a unique 
invocation, and I kind of went along with the last part and could learn 
from the first part, but--[laughter]--and Malcolm Evans for the national 
anthem. I missed the Pledge of Allegiance crowd. I hear they were 
absolutely fantastic, and some of them are back there, but thank you 
very much for a unique joint Pledge of Allegiance. And I want to thank 
Peter and David here for making this dinner happen. Of course, Senator 
Specter, I'm just very pleased to have been with him today in what for, 
I think, both of us was a very moving tour through some of the less 
privileged, some of the impacted parts of this great city. Larry 
Coughlin is with us, who is our Bush-Quayle cochairman; Congressmen 
Weldon and Ridge and Ritter, all good people. We've got a great 
Republican delegation from Pennsylvania, I might add, in the United 
States Congress.
    I was delighted to see Barbara Hafer earlier on. And, of course, 
Governor Mike Castle, an old friend who's done a great job in a 
neighboring State with us tonight. And I'd be remiss if I didn't single 
out Elsie Hillman, heading the campaign effort here in the Keystone 
State, and thank Dexter and then, of course, our team of Bobby Holt, 
Wally Ganzi. And then again, I'll single out Dexter, who gets the star 
seat. He gets to sit next to Elsie, and that means he sold more tickets 
than anybody else. So that's terrific. And, of course, Charlie, Charlie 
Kopp, he is a fundraising czar. He is our finance chairman, a great 
friend, and a loyal, loyal supporter. And he is very successful--so 
successful that he didn't have to go to our dog Millie for a single 
dime. [Laughter] You may have seen our income tax returns, and you can 
tell who earns the money in the family. Millie is not a ``fat cat,'' but 
nevertheless has done a great job as our dog. [Laughter]
    I am pleased to be here. And I want to share with you just some 
observations. This is a year where you're hearing a lot of talk about 
change. And I would be the first to concede that we must make 
significant change in this country. I hear a lot of talk about it coming 
out of the political arena, but we've been trying to effect constructive 
change.
    I came back from a very moving visit to Los Angeles; we got back 
Friday evening. And let me just give you a short report of what I saw 
and what I heard. Each one of us saw the images of hate and horror. That 
was all around you, images that we won't soon forget. But what I saw 
during my time in Los Angeles, even in the hardest hit parts of south 
central L.A., should give us some cause for hope. Everywhere, the people 
I talked with told about acts of individual heroism, about the 
extraordinary courage of just plain ordinary people. And some braved the 
gang of looters to form these bucket brigades to put out fires when the 
firetrucks couldn't get through. And then some stood up in the face of 
angry mobs and reached across the barrier of color to save lives of 
their fellow men and women. And many of these aren't the stories that 
you'll see on the nightly news. But believe me, they are the stories 
that tell us the power of simple human decency.
    What it tells me is that the time has come to set the old, worn-out 
ideas aside. And the time has come, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, 
``to think anew and to act anew.'' And we start with the principles at 
the heart of this great Republican Party, princi-

[[Page 745]]

ples that tell us something very obvious, and that is that we ought to 
keep the power close to the people, that we've got to strengthen 
families.
    I'll never forget when Tom Bradley, the Mayor of Los Angeles, and 
others came to see me, large-city mayors, small-city mayors, 
Republicans, Democrats, liberals and conservatives joined, their 
National League of Cities. And they came and they said the one thing 
that united them in terms that they all agreed on was that the 
fundamental problem that the decline of the American family is causing 
in the cities. The prime cause of much of the unrest, the problems of 
crime, whatever, comes from the dissolution of the American family.
    And we think we've got to find ways to strengthen that, instill 
character and values in our young people; that we must encourage 
entrepreneurship, ownership, increase investment, and create jobs. Now, 
these aims have got to form the heart of our agenda for economic 
opportunity, an agenda that can literally restore hope, can't solve the 
problem overnight but restore hope to our inner cities. And they define 
what we must do.
    First, and let's be very clear on this one, we have got to preserve 
order. We've got to keep the peace because families can't thrive, 
children can't live, and jobs can't flourish in a climate of fear. And I 
support the police. I saw the commissioner here today, had a great--I 
see Governor Martinez, the head of our drug effort, here with him. He 
and I were together with the Senator and others. And I told the 
commissioner and told the people out here, ``We support your efforts.'' 
They put themselves in harm's way to save all of us. And we must start 
by standing strongly for order and keeping the peace.
    Now, those thoughts were foremost in my mind from the first hours of 
the violence in Los Angeles. A civilized society simply cannot tackle 
any of the really tough problems in the midst of chaos. It's just that 
simple. Violence and brutality destroy order. They destroy the rule of 
law. They must never be rationalized. And it must be condemned, 
violence, whenever you find it; we must condemn it as a society.
    When I was out in Los Angeles, I called a woman that had been a 
member of our little church in Houston, Texas, St. Martin's Parish. I'd 
got a message to call her. I called her, and she told me a tragic story 
of her brother and her son. They had gotten a call from a neighbor, a 
minority, a member of a minority group, and they'd climbed on their 
motorcycle and driven down to see this person. On the way, their 
motorcycle was surrounded by a gang. The motorcycle was upended. Her son 
was beaten. Somebody put a gun up to this kid's head, pulled the 
trigger, and it didn't go off. Her brother, not so lucky. He was beaten, 
and they put a gun up to his head, and he was killed right on the spot. 
This didn't have anything to do with Rodney King. This didn't have 
anything to do with anything other than wanton violence. We simply 
cannot be asked to condone that in our society. And so we're going to 
stand for----[applause]
    In Los Angeles, I announced an addition to a program that's already 
at work here in Philadelphia, an exciting program that we saw today, an 
initiative that I call ``Weed and Seed.'' The idea is to weed out the 
gang leaders and drug dealers and career criminals and then seed the 
community with expanded employment, educational, and social services. So 
we're going to push for that. I'm going to push and try to see that we 
can do more for the American people with this innovative new program.
    Secondly, we must spark an economic revival in urban America. The 
best answer to poverty is a job with dignity in the private sector, and 
that means establishing what we call enterprise zones in our inner 
cities. It means reforming our welfare system, putting an end to the 
pervasive disincentives that encourage welfare and discourage work. So, 
enterprise zones and reform of welfare.
    Thirdly, we've got to revolutionize American education. I might add, 
parenthetically, that I wish Barbara was here to see what you're doing 
with this show of support for literacy. Mr. Notebaert, wherever he may 
be, I would like to make this contribution. I'm not trying to sell this. 
[Laughter] This is ``Millie's Book,'' and we want to donate this here as 
a contribution from the breadwinner in the Bush family. So please, we 
want

[[Page 746]]

the record to show we brought a book in.
    Now, we have a good education program. It burns me up when I hear 
some of the old thinkers, the pass-the-mandated-Federal-program 
thinkers, criticize. We have a program called America 2000. It's an 
innovative strategy, and it has things in it like choice. You can choose 
your colleges; why not choose your schools and thus make them more 
competitive?
    Competition, community action, all of these things are a part of it. 
Children in our inner cities deserve the same opportunities that kids in 
the suburbs have, and that's what a lot of that program is about. That 
means we've got to break the power of the establishment, the education 
establishment. And whether it's public or private or religious, parents, 
not the government, should be free to choose their children's schools. I 
am going to fight for that concept.
    Then another ingredient of our urban policy, and one I've been 
trying to get through for a long time, is homeownership. And I've never 
understood how anyone could be content with the present system, to take 
pride in the warehousing of the poor. The aim behind our HOPE initiative 
is to give poor families a stake, give them a stake in their 
communities, to give them something of value they can pass along to 
their kids, by turning public housing tenants into homeowners. And we 
are going to fight for that principle.
    At every turn during my time in L.A., I heard people talking about 
the principles that guide these initiatives. And these weren't big 
shots; these were community leaders. These were people that were out 
there on the front line trying to help the kids. Personal 
responsibility, that was one; opportunity; ownership; independence; and 
then, of course, with great pride, dignity. And you know the sound of 
those words. We all do. It really adds up to the American dream.
    And we all know what the critics will say, and you've heard it. 
They'll say, ``Well, you've proposed all this before, Mr. President.'' 
And the answer: It's true. That's right. But now it is time to act on 
these proposals because this time they know we are right. We are right, 
and we want to get it passed through the Congress. Tomorrow I'll be 
meeting with the leaders to try to get it done. It's no longer good 
enough to try the old ones. Let's try these new ideas and see if they 
can't help some of the kids that we saw today here in Philadelphia.
    My first order of business is, then, to build a bipartisan effort in 
support of immediate action on this agenda. We won't settle for 
business-as-usual, measuring what we achieve by the size of the 
bureaucracy we build or the number of mandated programs we can send down 
to these communities who are crying out for flexibility. This time, 
we've got to put our principles to work and take the case for change 
directly to the American people.
    What's going on in urban America is just one part, though, of a 
larger issue because the need for reform doesn't end simply with our 
inner cities. It starts with the revolution in American education that I 
mentioned. America 2000, we call it. It starts with that. When you get 
down to what we've got to do really to be competitive in the future, to 
offer kids an opportunity, it is education. And it includes our 
aggressive action, also, to break down barriers to free trade. Opening 
markets to American goods the world over has got to be a part of it. In 
each case, we've taken aim at the status quo, and we've set our sights 
on change. That's why I'm fighting hard for a GATT agreement. That's why 
we have proposed and are working with Mexico's able President, Carlos 
Salinas, to try to get a North American free trade agreement. It will 
mean more jobs for the United States, more jobs for Mexico, and a Mexico 
much better able to do what it must do with its environment and do what 
it must do in controlling its own borders.
    America needs legal reform to put an end to these outrageous court 
awards that sap our economy and strain our civility. We've gotten to a 
point where doctors won't deliver babies, where fathers are afraid to 
coach Little League, all because of the fear of some frivolous lawsuit. 
That won't change until people spend less time suing each other and more 
time helping each other. And we've got to change the laws in Washington. 
We must and we will reform the legal system.

[[Page 747]]

    Now, we need health care reform and to open up access to affordable 
health care for all Americans. I was talking to Charlie about this a 
little earlier here. It used to be that going to the hospital didn't 
conjure up visions of financial suicide. Today, the cost of even minor 
surgery has gone right out through the roof. More than 30 million 
Americans have no health care coverage at all.
    We can change that. And we can do it better than some of these 
nationalized programs that we're hearing about from the opposition. We 
have a comprehensive health care reform plan that will help us keep the 
quality health care. Make no mistake about it, people are still pouring 
into the United States for specialized care because they know we have 
the best quality health care in the entire world. So we want to keep the 
quality health care that makes us first in the world and at the same 
time open up access to all Americans.
    Contrary to what the big Government folks say, we can do it without 
putting the Government in charge of everybody's health care. If you want 
to stand in line, you can go to the department of motor vehicles. You 
don't need to go for a nationalized health care program. Let's face it, 
national health care, in my view, literally would be a costly national 
disaster, and I am not going to let that happen. We are going to fight 
for our plan of reform that gives access to insurance to the poor and 
the middle-income people alike. That's what we need, and that's what I 
believe we'll be able to get when we take this case to the American 
people.
    So far, I've spoken a little bit about what Government can do. So 
let me conclude by speaking about what society absolutely must do. 
Because there's something society must cultivate that Government cannot 
provide, something we can't legislate, something that we can't make 
happen by Government order. I'm talking about the moral sense that 
guides us all. In the simplest of terms--you want to get it to 
fundamentals--I'm talking about knowing right from wrong and then doing 
what's right.
    You go back to Los Angeles for a minute. Time and again the people I 
met with there put their finger on one root cause for the turmoil we 
see, and that, of course, back to the point, the dissolution of the 
family. And they're right. They're absolutely right. And ask yourself: 
What's the determining fact right now for whether a child has hope, 
stays in school, stays away from drugs? It is not Government spending. 
It's not the number of SBA loans or HUD grants. It's whether a child 
lives in a loving home with a mother and a father.
    Barbara Bush was absolutely right when she said, ``What happens in 
the White House doesn't matter half as much as what happens in your 
house.'' We have tried, both of us, augmented by tons of grandchildren, 
et cetera, to put the emphasis on American family, put that emphasis 
first.
    That's why I keep coming back to the Good Samaritans that we have 
called and will continue to call Points of Light: Everybody here 
devoting some time to helping someone else in the community. The people 
who help the poor, the elderly, kids in trouble, and never ask a nickel 
in return. Government alone simply cannot create the scale and the 
energy needed to transform the lives of people in need. Let the cynics 
scoff about it, but we know these volunteers are the lifeblood of the 
American spirit.
    And I wish you could have been with me today because you heard it: 
Community action. People overburdened with financial problems but 
finding time to help the guy next door. It was a wonderful thing we saw 
right here in some of the most impoverished areas of Philadelphia. It 
was a community spirit. Government has a role, but it never can supplant 
the propensity of one American to help another. So we've got to find 
ways to help in that concept and help encourage it.
    I believe there is a great future in store because I believe that 
all of these principles will be coming into focus now. I believe we're 
right about family. I think we're right about freedom and free 
enterprise, and I think we're right about faith. Most of all, I think we 
are right about America's future.
    You know, we've been through a very tough time. There's been a 
sluggish economy with recession in many parts of the country. I have a 
feeling this thing is beginning to move a little bit, and it's long 
over-

[[Page 748]]

due. I hope like heck I'm right this time, but I really do feel that 
it's beginning to move. And with that there will be a return of this 
innate feeling of American optimism. And when it happens, let's all vow 
that we will save time to help the other guy, to do what we can to be 
Points of Light.
    We've got the strength. We've got the spirit in our Government. 
We've got it. You can sense it even in the ravaged communities of Los 
Angeles. We've got it in ourselves to transform America into the Nation 
we've dreamed of for generations. So don't listen to those doomsayers. 
Don't listen to those top 20 seconds that tell you everything that's 
wrong with the United States of America. We are the freest and the 
fairest and the best country on the face of the Earth. And we are going 
to get the job done.
    We have nothing to be apologetic for. We've got big problems. But 
the message, I think, is if we can try this new approach, I believe we 
can solve them and offer hope to those little kids we saw with their 
eyes bulging as we came by there today into these little community 
centers.
    Thank you all very much for your support. Save a little energy for 
the campaign in the fall. I'm going to need you. But I believe we're 
going to win this election. Thank you very, very much.

                    Note:. The President spoke at 7:40 p.m. in the Grand 
                        Ballroom at the Hotel Atop the Bellevue. In his 
                        remarks, he referred to Peter Terpeluk, Jr., and 
                        David Girard-diCarlo, dinner cochairmen; 
                        Representative Lawrence Coughlin, Bush-Quayle 
                        Pennsylvania cochairman; Barbara Hafer, 
                        Pennsylvania auditor-general; Elsie Hillman, 
                        Bush-Quayle Pennsylvania chairman; Dexter Baker, 
                        Bush-Quayle regional cochairman; Bobby Holt and 
                        Wally Ganzi, Bush-Quayle national finance 
                        cochairmen; Charlie Kopp, Bush-Quayle 
                        Pennsylvania finance chairman; Willie Williams, 
                        Philadelphia police commissioner; Bob Martinez, 
                        Director of the Office of National Drug Control 
                        Policy; and Edmond Notebaert, president and 
                        chief executive officer, Children's Hospital of 
                        Philadelphia.