[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[June 15, 1993]
[Pages 853-855]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the College Democrats of America
June 15, 1993

    I want to thank Adam Kreisel and Jamie Harmon and Jenny Ritter for 
this gift and for their leadership in the College Democrats, and I want 
to welcome all of you here. I know I'm not the first person to speak to 
you. I've been over lobbying Members of Congress and being lobbied by 
them about various issues today, and I'm awfully glad to see all of you 
here.

[[Page 854]]

    The first time I came to these grounds was in the summer of 1963, 30 
years ago next month, before virtually everybody on these steps was 
born, long before most of you were born. That visit made a lasting 
impression on me, and I hope this visit makes a lasting impression on 
you. I was raised at a time when mothers wanted their children to grow 
up to be President, and I hope there will be another time when people 
want their children to grow up to be President. Now there can be 
daughters as well as sons who can really make a difference in our 
future.
    There is around here a wonderful old photograph of three great 
Democrats standing on the steps of this building together: President 
Franklin Roosevelt, who was then a young Assistant Secretary of the 
Navy, standing next to his President, Woodrow Wilson, and alongside them 
was William Jennings Bryan, who was then the Secretary of State in the 
Wilson administration during World War I. Between those 3 men, they 
represented 9 Democratic Presidential candidacies in 13 consecutive 
elections. Maybe there's magic on the steps that will rub off on some of 
you someday. I hope so. I hope some of you will be here.
    But I also want to remind you that even though I am profoundly 
grateful about the help you have given to me and to the Vice President 
in the past election--and without the young people of this country 
voting in record numbers, we might not have been able to come here--I 
remind you that the reason for your party identification and the reason 
for your work in elections is to change people's lives for the better. 
That change is, under the best of circumstances, never easy. And after 
12 years in which people have been given siren song after siren song 
after siren song about how evil Government is and all we have to do is 
just get it out of your lives and everything will go away, all the 
problems will go away, and every year the problems get worse and worse 
and worse, still people get used to being told what they want to hear. 
And now the President is not telling people what they want to hear.
    The President is saying we have to bring down the deficit, find some 
money to invest in jobs and education and our future. We have to be 
competitive with other nations. We've got to do some tough things. We 
have to cut spending and raise taxes. But I have given the Congress a 
proposal that essentially, for every dollar of deficit reduction, takes 
50 cents in spending cuts, 37 or 38 cents in taxes on people with 
incomes above $100,000, and 12 cents in taxes on the middle class, and 
holds people with incomes of under $30,000 harmless. It's a proposal 
that puts all the money into a deficit reduction trust fund. It has led 
to lower interest rates already. The head of the Federal Reserve was in 
to see me last week saying if we could just keep going and pass an 
economic program that will keep interest rates down, he believes there 
will be a significant continuation of our economic recovery.
    If someone had told you in December, as you looked forward to the 
Inauguration of the new President and Vice President, that by June 1st, 
after 3 years of recession, we would be on our way to passing a budget 
in record time--the first budget to be seriously considered by the 
Congress since 1981, presented by a President--if someone had told you 
that by June 1st, as a result of the serious efforts of this 
administration to get the economy going and bring the deficit down and 
to do it in a fair way so that those who benefited most in the 1980's 
would pay most in our efforts to do this, that we would have a 20-year 
low in home mortgages, a 7-year high in housing sales, unemployment 
under 7 percent for the first time in a year and a half, and 755,000 new 
jobs in the private sector, I think you would think that's a pretty good 
record.
    And let me remind you of what else has already happened. We have 
passed the family leave bill so people don't lose their jobs when they 
have to go home for a baby or a sick parent. We overcame a filibuster in 
the Senate to pass the motor voter bill to open the franchise to more 
people. After thwarting the attempts to build a responsible global 
environmental policy for years, on June 4th the United States signed the 
Biodiversity Treaty and once again resumed its leadership in the effort 
to promote responsible environmental policies.
    And we have introduced into the Congress a vigorous campaign finance 
reform bill. And I pleaded again today with the Republican Senators who 
voted for the same sort of bill last year not to filibuster and kill 
that bill this year. We need to lower the cost of political campaigns, 
limit the influence of PAC's, open the airwaves to honest debate, and 
give the American people their political system back. If you want 
economic reform, we need political reform;

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the bill is in the Congress.
    And finally, the issue which attracted so many college students to 
this campaign: The idea that we ought to open the doors of college 
education to all is making its way through the Congress in two bills. 
One is the national service bill, which will be marked up tomorrow in 
both the Senate and the House, with broad bipartisan support, to give 
more and more young people, tens of thousands of them, the chance to 
earn credit against college, to work in college, or to work off some of 
their college loans by giving service to their country here at home to 
rebuild America. And let me remind you what the other part of that 
pledge was, because it is also in the administration's economic program. 
It will save $4 billion over the next 5 years in excessive costs to the 
present student loan program and make a deal with the students of 
America. It will say anybody, without regard to income, can borrow the 
money they need to go to college and pay it back, not based on how much 
they borrow alone but on what they earn after they go to work. You don't 
have to pay it back until you go to work, and it's based on your 
earnings after you go to work. [Applause] Yes. Thank you. I think that's 
a pretty good record for 5 months, don't you?
    Yesterday I had an opportunity to do something no Democrat since 
Lyndon Johnson has done, and that is to nominate someone to serve on the 
Supreme Court of the United States. I nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a 
judge on the Court of Appeals here, whose pioneering work for women in 
the 1970's, taking six cases to the United States Supreme Court and 
winning five of them, has a lot to do with the fact that all of you will 
be able to grow up and compete with one another and cooperate with one 
another on more equal terms in so many ways. She symbolizes, in my 
judgment, the kind of achievement that we ought to have in this country. 
When somebody works hard, when they play by the rules, when they are 
performing at a level of excellence that deserves to be recognized, they 
ought to be recognized. That should be the rule for everybody in this 
country.
    All of these things that we're talking about today in the end will 
produce more jobs and higher incomes, will offer more opportunity and 
demand more responsibility of people, and rebuild the seeds of the 
American community. I am tired of our people being divided by race, by 
region, by income, by party, and every other way. We've got to pull this 
country together again. But it can only be done when people have a sense 
that if they work hard and play by the rules, they'll be treated fairly.
    I hope that the people who have followed the work of the First Lady 
and all the health care task force also believe that that is going to be 
an effort to treat all the American people fairly. She went to the 
American Medical Association and reached out to the doctors. We've 
reached out to the hospitals. We've reached out to the people who 
consume health care, the people who provide it, and all the people in 
the middle. Let me remind you: If you really want to be able to raise 
your children in an environment that is free of this awful deficit, 
where there is still enough money left to invest in our future, we have 
got to bring health care costs under control, and we have got to restore 
to the American people a sense of family security. You cannot have 
millions of people waking up every morning terrified that they're going 
to lose their health care if somebody in their family gets sick or if 
they lose their jobs. We've got to do something about that if we really 
want to build America.
    When you leave here I want to ask you to go back home and gin up 
some support among your people for this economic program. Call the 
Members of the Senate, without regard to party, and ask them to do it. 
Tell them we cannot afford to turn away from our obligations to bring 
the deficit down, increase investment in our future, keep interest rates 
down, and rebuild the economy.
    This administration came to Washington to restore hope and jobs, to 
demand more responsibility but to reward people if they do it. We have 
got to do it. And when they ask you what we've done, give them the list 
I gave you. It's a pretty good list, it's a good beginning, and it 
justifies the faith you put in Bill Clinton and Al Gore last year. Let's 
keep working, and we can make the kind of a country we ought to.
    Goodbye. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:47 p.m. on the steps of the Old Executive 
Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to organization officers 
Adam Kreisel, president; Jamie Harmon, former president; and Jenny 
Ritter, vice president.