    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [April 25, 1993]
    [Pages 496-505]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Newspaper Association of America in Boston, Massachusetts
    April 25, 1993

        Thank you very much. Frank, I am delighted to be here. You reminded
    me, when you said that I came last year to the Waldorf, that I was in
    Los Angeles last year on the day before this convention. And I was
    flying back, and I got somewhere around Las Vegas, and our plane

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    malfunctioned. We had to go back to California, and I took the red-eye
    into the Waldorf. I've always thought that was why I was the first
    Democrat in 28 years to receive a majority of the newspaper endorsements
    in the last election. I was thinking today whether there was some stunt
    I could pull that would have the equal effect. [Laughter]
        When Frank was giving me the introduction, he said it was just a
    year ago, and this young, charismatic Governor was out--I thought to
    myself, what happened to that guy? [Laughter] You know, people ask me
    all the time whether there's anything really different about being
    President, and is it different from being a Governor or some other job?
    And it really is.
        One of the things is that people walk around on eggshells all the
    time, and they're always trying to protect you, even from things that
    aren't necessarily in need of protecting. The other day I came down from
    the residence floor at the White House to the first floor. And I didn't
    know this, but my wife was having a meeting with some women there, about
    30 of them, talking about health care, and the meeting just let out as I
    got off on the floor. I was going around the corner to another little
    room, and all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of 30 people whom
    I had never met before. I literally just walked out into their midst. So
    I shook hands with them, said hello. It was quite pleasant. And this
    young aide who was working there, a man who's a full-time employee of
    the White House, said, ``Oh, Mr. President, I'm so sorry that I let you
    out in the middle of all those people.'' And I looked at him, and I
    said, ``That's all right, young man, I used to be one.'' [Laughter]
    That's the way I sort of feel sometimes.
        I want to tell you how very proud I am to be here today with you,
    all of you who offer our fellow countrymen and women the information,
    the analysis, the range of opinions that they need to make decisions
    about their future.
        I know that there's always a healthy tension between the people in
    public service and the press. And when I have bad days I remember that
    another President who had a few bad days with the press himself, Thomas
    Jefferson, said that if he had to choose between having a Government
    without newspapers or newspapers without a Government, that he would not
    hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter. I think that was on one of
    the days when he got a good press. [Laughter]
        I want to say, in all seriousness, that I've had the opportunity
    over the last several years to read a fairly large number of newspapers
    from around the country. As all of you know, I believe very strongly
    that over the last 10 to 12 years the political system, which includes
    both parties, in many important ways failed our people. And oftentimes,
    it was newspapers of our country who continued to put the human concerns
    of people back at the center stage of public debate, reporting on the
    stagnation of living standards that created so much anxiety for the
    middle class and so much despair for the poor.
        I think, in particular, of the incredible series run by the
    Philadelphia Inquirer, called ``America: What Went Wrong?'', and the
    detail in which that series documented what happened to the middle class
    in America as most families worked harder for lower wages and had more
    insecurity in the fundamentals of their lives.
        But many other papers, perhaps all of them all across the country,
    issued various reports on other problems that were neglected for too
    long: how we went from a $1 trillion to a $4 trillion deficit in
    national debt in 12 years; how most of the gains, the economic gains of
    the 1980's went to people in the top 3 to 4 percent of income brackets;
    how we came to spend over 33 percent more than any other country in the
    world on health care and still had over 35 million people without any
    health insurance and millions of others at risk of losing it at a
    moment's notice; the problems we had in our school systems, our welfare
    systems; the problems we had with drug abuse and crime; the problems we
    have in the rising tide of people in what may well be for them a
    permanent underclass, most of them young women and their little children
    or young, single, unemployed and uneducated men.
        Editorial writers warned us about organized interest having too much
    dominance over public policy, and the slogans and the smears and the
    sound bites having too much dominance over public debate and election
    decisions. Newspaper after newspaper reported on the profound
    disaffection of so many of our people from the political process itself.
    When the political system seemed brain-dead and deadlocked, with so many
    people locked into yesterday's rhetoric and yesterday's policies, many
    in the newspapers helped to give the American people not only

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    the information they need but the sense that with that information,
    something profound could be done to change the course of our Nation's
    history.
        I don't think there's any question that the size of the turnout last
    November, the nature of the turnout, with so many people from
    traditionally underrepresented groups in the electorate, including so
    many millions of young people, indicated that the American people wanted
    some fundamental change in the way our Government does the people's
    business. And fortunately for me, I was given the opportunity to try to
    lead that change.
        Now that we have taken office and had almost 100 days to work at it,
    I know that you are about the business of playing your roles, not as a
    cheering section for our administration but as a conscience for the
    Nation, measuring the deeds against the words, reminding us still,
    always, no matter what happens in Washington, of the hurts and the hopes
    and the capacities of the people who do the voting and who challenge us
    now to live up to the promise of America.
        For those who serve in Government and for those who watch Government
    up close in Washington, it's all too easy to concentrate on the daily
    events and the inside stories, to worry about who's up or down or in or
    out, who won or who lost the moment's battle; too easy to forget about
    the real people whose real lives will be changed for better or worse by
    what we do or do not do: the unemployed people, the people who are
    afraid of losing their health insurance, the teenagers who wonder if
    they'll have a chance to work this summer, the families who feel less
    safe on their streets when we don't provide enough law enforcement
    officials, and on and on.
        We can't forget, amidst all the gamesmanship of American political
    life which is a high form of entertainment, that there are real people
    with real stories, and they are what all of our efforts are ultimately
    about.
        Every day, I try to devote some time to looking past the deadlines,
    to look ahead of the headlines, to look beyond the beltway, to go beyond
    the false choices and the failed policies and philosophies that still
    grip so much of the debate that I must confront every day, to go beyond
    the politics of abandonment or the politics of entitlement, to think
    about how we can all be in this together. No more every person for
    himself or herself, and no more something for nothing.
        I am doing my best to offer every American an opportunity to succeed
    and to challenge every American to give something back to our country.
    Everyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules ought to have
    a chance to be a part of this American community, and I think we all
    know that that is not the case today.
        In the first 96 days of this administration, I think we have begun
    to fundamentally change the direction taken by the Government over the
    past decade, to go beyond trickle-down and tax-and-spend to a new
    approach to our deficit and to Government's role that reduces the
    deficit and increases investment in our future with an economic plan
    that reduces the deficit by over $500 billion in the next 5 years, has
    led to a 20-year low in mortgage rates, which the business writers say
    this year alone, if we can keep the interest rates down, will result in
    refinancings which will put over $100 billion back into this economy; an
    economic plan that includes an attempt to avoid the inevitable conflict
    between the environment and the economy by finding ways to create jobs
    with responsible environmental policy; an economic plan which tries to
    deal seriously with the enormous problems occasioned by the dramatic
    reductions in the defense budget and the impact that's had on high-tech,
    high-wage employment in the United States.
        And I might add that tomorrow here in Boston we're going to have the
    first of five national conferences on that subject here to try to work
    in partnership with the private sector, to use the fact that the cold
    war is over and the defense budget is going down to find new ways for
    these people to work, to bring their talents and their knowledge and
    their enormous experience to bear.
        We've tried to go, in the trade debate, beyond the old debate
    between free trade and protectionism to a new policy rooted in the
    notion that we ought to expand trade to grow our economy and to grow the
    economy of our trading partners. That is driving us as we seek to
    conclude a new agreement on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades,
    as we seek to conclude a treaty with Mexico and Canada to integrate our
    economies over the long run, and as we seek to redefine our relationship
    with Japan in the economic area.

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        We seek to go beyond inertia and ideology to experimentation and
    initiative and a reliance on more individual responsibility in social
    policy, with initiatives in welfare reform and national service and
    national health care and community policing. We seek to go beyond
    politics as usual to political reform with a serious effort to reduce
    the influence of lobbying in our political process, to reform the
    campaign finance system, to reduce the Federal bureaucracy and increase
    the amount of your tax dollars that can be invested in ways that
    directly promote the health and welfare and economic well-being of the
    American people. We seek to go beyond the divisive rhetoric of family
    values to an administration that values families, one that gives
    everybody a chance to be part of America's families. That's what the
    Family and Medical Leave Act was all about. That's what repealing the
    ban on fetal tissue research so that we could save the lives of children
    afflicted by diabetes and other dangerous diseases was all about. That's
    what the effort to immunize all of our children is all about.
        There is such an incredible gulf in this country between what we say
    and what we do, it is an awful burden to bear if you're a serious
    American citizen. You hear all this talk about how much we care about
    our children. Well, I'll tell you something. We make over half the
    vaccines in the world in this country, and we have the third worst
    immunization record in the Western Hemisphere. And everybody goes around
    piously talking about how all this Government stimulus program I had was
    a bunch of pork barrel. It wouldn't have been pork barrel for the kids
    we would have immunized against preventable childhood diseases.
        In the aftermath of the cold war, we are trying to fashion a new
    world rooted in democracy and human rights and economic reform, a world
    in which the United States will lead but in which we will continue to
    work with our allies. There is, as we speak now, a Russian election
    which has just concluded. We don't know how it came out. I can tell you
    that I know the polls show that the American people think that the
    President of the United States should not have spent time or their money
    on Russia. But I respectfully disagree.
        I grew up in an age when the biggest threat to my future as a little
    child was whether there would be a nuclear war between the United States
    and what was then the Soviet Union. Historic events in the former Soviet
    Union and in Eastern Europe have given democracy new hope. The START I
    and START II treaties, if they can both be implemented by all the
    nuclear powers, give our children new hope. We cannot afford to withdraw
    from the struggle of promoting democracy, human rights, market reforms,
    and an end to imperialism in that part of the world. And whatever
    happens today, we must engage the Russian people on those fronts,
    because my children and our country's future, all of our futures and all
    of our children's, are at stake there.
        We have other interests as well, in Bosnia. The United States in the
    last 96 days has tried to increase the efforts of the West to bring
    about a settlement. We led the effort to put a no-fly zone and to
    enforce it through the United Nations. We started airlifts of supplies
    to people who were isolated. We got two of the three parties to sign on
    to the Vance-Owen peace process. We have dramatically increased the
    enforcement of tougher sanctions. It has not been enough, and now we are
    considering what our other options are. I say, frankly, it is the most
    difficult foreign policy problem this country faces, but we have to try
    to bring an end to the practice of ethnic cleansing and to bring a
    beginning of peaceful resolution of the conflict there.
        We told the American people, I and the people who work with me, that
    we would restore real, not just rhetorical, responsibility to the
    actions of Government. That's what our education initiative to write the
    national education goals into the law of this country, to have real
    standards, is all about. That's what the initiatives that the HUD
    Secretary, Henry Cisneros, is undertaking to have certain strict rules
    of conduct for people who live in public housing is all about. That's
    what the initiatives we're taking to help people move from welfare to
    work is all about.
        We told the American people we would try to accomplish what no other
    administration has ever been called up to do in the history of this
    country before. We would try to reduce this massive Federal deficit and
    increase investments in areas critical to our future, because, funny
    enough, in the last 12 years we exploded the deficit and reduced our
    investment in areas critical to our future. We have to do that because
    we have to free this economy of the burden of debt we are shouldering.
    And we have

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    to invest because while we're doing it, we have to realize that we're in
    a competitive global economy, and we still have technologies and workers
    and students that have to have the benefit of appropriate investments in
    order to be fully competitive.
        Doing these things will expand job opportunities and incomes for
    middle class people and help others to move into the middle class,
    something that has all but stopped in the last couple of years.
        When I submitted to the Congress the core elements of my budget
    plan, designed to change these policies of debt and disinvestment and
    decline in return for thrift and investment and growth, the Congress
    adopted that budget plan in record time, the first time in 17 years a
    budget resolution has passed Congress on time.
        When people say to me, ``Well, what did you do in your first 100
    days?'' I say, ``What did the other guys do in their first 100 days?''
    The United States Congress deserves a lot of credit for taking all the
    heat after all these years of antitax rhetoric, ``No such thing as a
    good tax. Taxes are terrible.'' They adopted a budget with 200 specific
    budget cuts, over and above the last budget adopted under the previous
    administration, and some tax increases, 70 percent of which fall on
    people with incomes above $100,000, over 50 percent of which fall on
    people with incomes above $200,000; with an energy tax that the middle
    class will have to help pay that is good for conservation and good for
    the environment and good for the long-term direction this country needs
    to go in. Budget cuts and revenue increases.
        We are already seeing the fruits of that. Because of interest rates
    going down, the deficit this year is going to be less than we thought it
    was going to be. This is something of very significant importance. The
    financial markets have clearly responded. Stock prices are at all-time
    highs, and many key interest rates, including home mortgage rates, are
    at 20-year lows. As I said, this means $100 billion more in money coming
    from refinancing of homes and businesses, credit card rates, and
    automobile interest rates going directly into the economy over the next
    year. And that's not my figure. Those are the figures of the business
    writers who have examined the circumstance that exists. These
    refinancing possibilities mean that farmers and small business people
    and homeowners are going to have a better deal in their ordinary lives,
    but that money will then flow back to more productive purposes in the
    economy.
        Along with the $514 billion deficit reduction program, we're also
    trying to confront the long-term economic problems of this country with
    a lifelong learning package that includes an attempt to devise
    apprenticeship opportunities of 2 years after high school for every
    American who does not go on to college, with initiatives to build a
    21st-century infrastructure that focuses on technology as well as
    physical infrastructure, with efforts to revitalize our community and to
    strengthen our economy.
        As I said, I think to get this done--and we're coming back now to
    try to pass the details of the budget--we will have to begin to see the
    world new, not as tax-and-spend, not as trickle-down, but as invest-and-
    grow. We'll have to think of Government not as the sole problem or the
    sole savior but as a partner with the private sector in trying to work
    our way out of the problems that we have. We'll have to think about new
    approaches based on old values like work and faith and family and
    opportunity, responsibility and community. Our success will ultimately
    be measured not by how many programs we've passed but by whether we
    improve the lives of our fellow Americans, not simply by what we do for
    people but by what we help people to do for themselves.
        We start, I think as we must, with honoring and rewarding work. Just
    17 days into this administration, we made family and medical leave the
    law of the land after 8 years of gridlock and delay and two vetoes.
    Hard-working men and women now can know that if they have to take a
    little time off for a genuine family problem, they can do it without
    losing their jobs.
        Again I say, I heard all the clamor about what a terrible bill this
    was. And I looked around the world, and a hundred and some nations have
    found a way to give family leave that we just couldn't find it in our
    heart, our minds, a way to provide before we got around to doing it.
    It's time Americans put their actions where their rhetoric is, and
    that's what this administration is trying to do.
        Forty-four days into the administration we were called upon to
    extend unemployment compensation to hundreds of thousands of jobless men
    and women, something now Congress will do as a matter of course without
    regard to party. Everybody is willing to pay people to remain

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    unemployed. But this time we changed the law so that we spend a small
    portion of that money to offer the unemployed new opportunities for job
    training and counseling to try to move them back to work more quickly,
    based on a New Jersey experiment which shows clearly that we can do that
    if we don't just pay people to stay out of work but we take some of that
    money to get them back to work.
        That's why we are trying to dramatically increase the earned-income
    tax credit to working poor people. It is a solemn commitment to those
    who work, who care for our sick or tend to our children or do our most
    difficult and tiring jobs, that we're going to do our best to enshrine
    in our tax law and in our country's life the principle that if you work
    for a living 40 hours a week and you've got children in the house, you
    should not live in poverty. I think that is an important principle and
    one that's worth fighting for.
        That is why I tried for several weeks to pass an emergency jobs
    program through the Congress which, I want to point out, I did not
    campaign on in the campaign of 1992. I ran a fiscally responsible
    campaign. I did not offer to do anything that we did not pay for in the
    moment we did it. And this jobs program was a responsible approach based
    on the fact that the American economy was not producing new jobs, even
    though we were allegedly into the second year of a recovery.
        We're supposed to be in the 24th month of a recovery, according to
    the economic statistics. But jobs have increased by only eight-tenths of
    one percent. And private sector jobs have not increased in that period.
    If we were following the trend of typical past recoveries, jobs would
    have grown by more than 7 percent. We are still 3.5 million jobs behind
    the rate generated in a normal economic recovery. And we have reclaimed
    only one-half the jobs we lost in the last recession. This past week,
    jobless claims went up yet again. At a time in which 16 million men and
    women are out of work or looking for full-time work with part-time jobs,
    I'm fighting to give them a chance to earn a paycheck, to do useful
    work, to support their families, to contribute to their communities.
        Now, the stimulus package that I offered, the jobs plan, would not
    have revolutionized the economy. It was a $16 billion program in a $6
    trillion economy. The purpose of it was to do just exactly what it would
    have done. It would have lowered the unemployment rate by half a
    percent. And it might have sparked a new round of job creation in other
    sectors of the economy.
        I decided to do it, even though it was not part of my campaign,
    because the economy was sluggish and because as I looked around the rest
    of the world, I discovered that all of the advanced industrialized
    countries were having great difficulty creating jobs even in recovery.
    If you go back and look at what happened to Europe in the last decade,
    they had two different economic recoveries that have produced virtually
    no new jobs in many of those countries. And all I wanted to do was to
    try to find a way to deal with what I think is the number one problem.
    If everybody in this country who wanted a job had one, we wouldn't have
    half the other problems we've got. And I think every one of you, without
    regard to party or philosophy, would agree on that.
        There were two objections raised to the program. Some said, ``Well,
    you ought to pay for it all right now.'' Well, we had a 5-year deficit
    reduction plan that reduces the deficit by $514 billion. And Congress
    pays for things all the time over a multiyear period, number one. Number
    two, because of unpredicted reductions in defense, if we'd spent every
    penny I recommended, we'd still be under the spending levels approved by
    the Congress for this year.
        The other thing people said, well, was, ``There's a lot of pork in
    this plan.'' Well, I don't know how you define that. I think if you put
    700,000 kids to work this summer, particularly under our plan, which for
    the first time said that the at-risk kids had to do some education as
    well as take jobs--we tried to take more pork out and put more standards
    in--it would be a good thing. I think if you open these immunization
    centers this summer, I think if you had more kids in summer Head Start
    and you paid people to work in that, I think if you rehired 20,000 of
    these police officers who were laid off because of tough economic times
    and made the streets safer, I think if we accelerated funding under the
    highway program, which has always had enormous support from the other
    party as well as from the Democrats, and I think if we gave some more
    money to the Mayors and the Governors of this country for job purposes,
    that would be a good thing. I don't think it would be a lot of pork.
        It was amazing to me to listen to some of

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    the debate about the community development program. I was a Governor for
    12 years. I used that program. You might quarrel with some of the things
    we did, but usually what we did was good for creating jobs in my State.
    And the Republican Party had always supported community development
    block grants before. They thought Mayors and Governors were smart enough
    to make the decisions. I wanted to give money to Governor Weld, a
    Republican Governor of Massachusetts--I thought he had enough sense to
    figure out how to best spend the money here for the Massachusetts
    economy--or the Republican Mayor of York, Pennsylvania, or the
    Republican Mayor from Indiana who's the head of the Republican Mayors
    Association. You know, all we did was change the occupants of the White
    House. We didn't change the party or the personality of the Governors
    and the Mayors. I don't know what happened that made that program such a
    bad idea all of a sudden. It was a good idea.
        And again, I tell you that it is not nearly as important as the big
    picture budget that has already passed. But it is symbolic of the idea
    battle that we have to fight. We have to be prepared to think anew. Now,
    if no western country is creating jobs, even in the midst of economic
    recovery, it is not readily apparent that the $100 billion we're going
    to put back into the economy with lower interest rates are going to lead
    to a whole lot of new jobs. They may. It depends on how the money is
    invested.
        That's the big deal, the fact that we've got interest rates down,
    we've passed the budget resolution, it's going. All I wanted to do was
    to strike a little match to that and see if we couldn't put several
    hundred thousand people back to work in useful places and see if that
    would help the economy to get going on the job machine. I think, still
    think, it was a worthwhile effort. And I'd a lot rather get beat trying
    to put people to work than get beat fighting putting people to work.
        Let me also tell you that I regret the partisan tone of the rhetoric
    of the last several days, because a lot of the things that I support
    have a lot of support among Republicans. I'm for the line-item veto.
    There are Democrats that are against it and Republicans that are for it.
    I'm for the crime bill. I hope we can pass it with bipartisan support,
    the Brady bill and more police on the street. I'm for cuts in the budget
    that a lot of people in my own party won't support. But a lot of them
    voted for cuts in the budget, because they thought it was a responsible
    way to go overall.
        There are lots of things that I think we need to do that I hope we
    can get bipartisan support, toughening the child support system, having
    a national service program that will give every young person in this
    country a chance to borrow the money to go to college and pay it back,
    either as a percentage of their income at tax time so they can't beat
    the bill or by working it off and giving something to their country.
    These are things that ought to have bipartisan support. We cannot solve
    the problems of this country if every last issue that comes up, just
    because the President recommends it, becomes a source of a filibuster in
    the Senate or, frankly, attracts only members of my own party. I don't
    want that. I want us to debate these ideas anew, to look at them anew,
    to take our blinders off. And I'm not going to be right about everything
    I recommend, but at least I want us to be up there all working together
    fighting for change.
        Let me say one thing in particular about the work that two very
    important people in my administration are doing, the Vice President and
    the First Lady. I met with a lot of you before I came out here, and
    several of you said, ``Well, I generally support what you're doing, but
    you ought to bring that deficit down more.'' And I will say to you what
    I say to everybody: Send me a list of the things you want cut, because
    we found 200 things that we were cutting that weren't cut in the
    previous budget, and we're not done yet.
        But I want you to know what this Government is like now. In my
    judgment, if you want further meaningful cuts, you have to do two
    things: You have to look at the whole way the Federal Government is
    organized, because there is a limit to how much you can get just out of
    cutting defense unless you deal with the way it is organized, like
    procurement and issues like that, structural things. And that's what the
    Vice President is involved in, this whole initiative to reinvent the
    Government. We've got hundreds of gifted people from all over America
    coming to work with us in Washington now, reexamining every last
    Government program, every last Government organization, committed to
    thinking about it anew.
        This fall, when we come out with our program, we're going to ask the
    American people

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    to think about the role of the Federal Government: What it should do;
    how it should be organized. And it's going to be a very challenging
    report. I hope all of you will read it and give it a lot of publicity.
    And on the tough things that we recommend, in terms of changes, I hope
    we can get some good support without regard to party, because a lot of
    the things that we have to do now require us to rethink how this whole
    thing is organized.
        We've already cut 14 percent in administrative costs, 25 percent of
    the personnel in the White House, and a lot of other things that we can
    do symbolically and substantively that will save billions of dollars.
    But to get more, we're going to have to literally rethink the whole
    Government.
        The second point I want to make is, you can do all that, and unless
    we address this health care crisis, the Government's deficit cannot be
    erased. Under every scenario we saw, from every political source--that
    is, the Republicans and the Democrats agreed, the bipartisan
    Congressional Budget Office agreed, everybody agreed--no matter how much
    we cut the deficit, we could bring it down for 5 years. But after that,
    it would start going right back up again because of the breathtaking
    increase in health care cost.
        The estimates are now that over a 5-year period, Federal spending
    for Medicare and Medicaid alone will go up by 67 percent in 5 years.
    Taking away the defense cuts, taking away the interest savings, taking
    away the cuts in other Government programs, taking away the cuts in farm
    support programs, taking away, you name it, anything you want cut,
    you're just transferring the money to health care and not new health
    care, more money for the same health care. So that this is not only an
    incredibly compelling human issue--how do you give coverage to those who
    don't have it? How do you give courage to those who want to change jobs
    but can't because they had somebody in their family sick, and the
    preexisting condition keeps them from getting any health insurance? But
    how do you restore sanity to the Nation's budget? And by the way, how do
    you restore health to big chunks of our economy, a lot of our biggest
    and best companies striving to be more competitive. We say, ``We
    desperately want you to start investing in America and stop investing so
    much of your money to create jobs somewhere else.'' And they say, ``Give
    me a break. I'm spending 19 percent of payroll on health care.''
        This country is spending 15 percent of its income on health care. No
    other country is up to 10 percent. Only Canada is over 9 percent. So
    when people say--you'll hear it all--they'll say, oh, they're dealing
    with health care again, there they go again; it's all taxes and terrible
    and everything. You figure out what you're paying right now. Every one
    of you figure out what you're paying for health care, in taxes,
    premiums, uncompensated care that gets shifted on to your health
    insurance bills.
        And so I say to you, we have got to face some other big fundamental
    issues. Not just this budget but how the Government is organized, what
    it delivers, whether it needs to deliver what it does, whether it needs
    to stop doing some things altogether. And then, what are we going to do
    about health care? We cannot go on ignoring the fundamental problems. If
    you've got it, it's still the best health care system in the world.
        There are a lot of things about it that are wonderful. I want the
    delivery system to stay in private hands. I want people to still be able
    to pick their doctor. I want the best things about this health care
    system to stay just as it is. But you cannot look at it as long and hard
    as we have without concluding that we are spending a dime on the dollar
    on unnecessary paperwork and bureaucratic and regulatory expenses.
        People say to me all the time, ``You've got to do something about
    doctors' fees.'' Let me tell you just one little interest number. In
    1980, the average doctor, working in a clinic, took home 75 percent of
    the money that came into the clinic. By 1990, that doctor was taking
    home 52 percent of the money coming into the clinic. Where did the rest
    of it go? Mostly to paper, to regulation, mostly from the proliferation
    of insurance policies, but some from what the Government did.
        We can do better. We must. And we're going to bust a gut trying in
    this administration. We're going to do our best.
        The last thing I want to say about this is, I ask for your scrutiny
    and your understanding as we get into the difficult business of
    political reform. I intend to ask the Congress to pass a tough campaign
    finance reform law. I intend to ask the Congress to adopt some
    restrictions on lobbying and some disclosure requirements that are not
    there now. We had the toughest ethics rules any President ever imposed
    on his appointee that prevent people from leaving my

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    administration and going to work anytime in the near future to make
    money as lobbyists in the areas in which they worked for us.
        These things are important. It may never be possible to be perfect,
    but it is important that we take these things on and that the voters of
    this country understand what is at stake as these matters begin to be
    debated.
        And finally let me say--I think it's important to talk about today--
    I'm doing my best to restore a sense of real community in this country.
    As I said right when I came to you last year, we'd just seen Los Angeles
    racked by riots, and we were all talking about how we had to learn to
    live together without regard to race or income or region. I want to
    reiterate what I said to you a year ago: We don't have a person to waste
    in this country, and we're wasting them by the bucketful. We're letting
    people go, this way, that way, and the other way. And that's one of the
    reasons that I have said that we have to fight for a society that is not
    at all permissive but that is tolerant.
        Today in Washington, many Americans came to demonstrate against
    discrimination based on their sexual orientation. A lot of people think
    that I did a terrible political thing--and I know I paid a terrible
    political price--for saying that I thought the time had come to end the
    categorical ban on gays and lesbians serving in our military service and
    that they should not be subject to other discrimination in governmental
    employment.
        Let me tell you what I think. This is not about embracing anybody's
    lifestyle. This is a question of whether if somebody is willing to live
    by the strict code of military conduct, if somebody is willing to die
    for their country, should they have the right to do it? I think the
    answer is yes, if somebody is willing.
        But in a larger sense, I want to say to you that I think the only
    way our country can make it is if we can find somehow strength out of
    our diversity, even with people with whom we profoundly disagree, as
    long as we can agree on how we're going to treat each other and how
    we're going to conduct ourselves in public forums. That is the real
    issue.
        It's very ironic to me to see that the traditional attacks on the
    position I've taken on this issue have come from conservatives saying
    that I am a dangerous liberal. I took on two issues like this as
    Governor of Arkansas, and I was attacked by liberals for what I did, and
    I want to tell you what they were.
        One was the leadership role I took in crafting a bill that permitted
    people to educate their children at home, consistent with their
    religious beliefs and their educational convictions, as long as the kids
    could take and pass a test every year. And people say, ``Oh, that's a
    terrible thing. All those kids should be required to be in a school. How
    can you do that?'' And I said, ``Because at least these people have
    coherent families and that's still the most important unit of our
    society, and people ought to have a chance to try other things. And it
    wouldn't do the schools any harm to have a little competition,
    unsubsidized by the taxpayers, just letting people do it.''
        Two, when the fundamentalist religious groups in my State were
    confronting a legal issue that swept the country in the mid-eighties, a
    bunch of them came to me and said, ``We do not mind having our child
    care centers subject to the same standards that everybody else is
    subject to. But it is a violation of our belief to have to get a State
    certificate to operate what we think is a ministry of our church. Don't
    make us do that.'' I don't know if you remember this, but in one or two
    States there were preachers that actually wound up going to jail over
    this issue, the certification of child care centers.
        We sat down and worked out a law that permitted those churches to
    operate their child care centers without a certificate from the State as
    long as they were willing to be subject to investigation for health and
    fire safety, and as long as they agreed to be in substantial compliance
    with the rules and regulations that those who were certified observed.
    And people said, ``How can you do that?'' You know how many complaints
    we've had coming out of that, to the best of my knowledge? Zero. Not a
    one. Why? Because they were good people, and they were willing to play
    by the rules, and they wanted to have their religious convictions, and
    they wanted to stick up for their minister, and they desperately love
    the children that were in their charge. And we protected the public
    interest.
        But all the criticism I got was from the left, not the right. This
    doesn't have anything to do with left or right. This is about whether we
    are going to live in a country free of unnecessary discrimination. You
    are free to discriminate in your judgments about any of us, how we look,
    how we behave, what we are. Make your judgments. But if we are willing
    to live together

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    according to certain rules of conduct, we should be able to do so. That
    is the issue for America. And it has ever been unpopular at certain
    critical junctures. But just remember this: A whole lot of people came
    to this country because they wanted a good letting alone. And that's
    what we ought to be able to do today.
        That's it. I've already talked longer than I meant to. I'll still
    stay and answer the questions for the allotted time. We've got to change
    the direction of the country. We've got to compete in a new world we
    don't understand all the dimensions of. But we ought to be guided by
    three simple things: How can we create opportunity; how can we require
    all of us to behave more responsibly; and how can we build a stronger
    American community. And I don't believe that the answer necessarily has
    a partisan tinge. And I hope we can begin tomorrow the business of going
    forward with what this country urgently needs to do.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 4:14 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the
    Marriott Copley Place Hotel.