    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book II)]
    [December 3, 1993]
    [Pages 2111-2115]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the ``Celebration '94'' Reception in Albuquerque, New Mexico
    December 3, 1993

        The President. You know, when Bruce said to Alice, ``Just give the
    President whatever it is you have,'' I said, ``Heck, Bruce, I want the
    ranch.'' [Laughter] I like the Stetson, but I mean, if I really get a
    choice--[Laughter]
        Ladies and gentlemen, I am glad to be here. Glad to be back in New
    Mexico. How many of you were here--I just got off the phone with
    Hillary. She was working in New Hampshire yesterday, so she's home
    tonight. I just got off the phone with her. How many of you were here
    when we were here the night of the election--all night--remember that?
    The press has a way of finding out everything about you if you become
    President. President Reagan loved jelly beans, and President Bush didn't
    like broccoli and last week the Wall Street Journal reported our dark
    secret that Hillary and I are addicted to salsa. [Laughter] And it all
    happened because of you, because we stayed up all night

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    living on that before the election.
        I am so glad to be back in New Mexico. I'm glad to be here with Ray
    Powell and with you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you for being such a good emcee.
    I want to thank my longtime friend Bruce King. I don't know if you
    remember what he said. There are only three living Americans who served
    as Governors in the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties: Cecil
    Andrus of Idaho, Bruce King, and me. It was the longest time before any
    of us could get a promotion. We had a lottery, and in the beginning we
    thought I won, but sometimes in the last year I wasn't sure I didn't
    lose. [Laughter] I love Bruce King. The first time I ever met Bruce and
    Alice and Bruce laid all that, you know, that ``Aw, shucks,'' stuff on
    me--[laughter]--``Aw, shucks,'' you know, I checked three times to make
    sure I still had my billfold in my pocket. Aw, shucks. [Laughter] I
    appreciate the fact that Bruce is missing the start of the annual Lobo
    Classic Basketball Tournament tonight. I know what a sacrifice it is. He
    did it for the money, not me. [Laughter] But I'm glad he's here anyway.
    You can tell we're friends; you can't make fun of your enemies.
    [Laughter]
        I want to say, too, how glad I am to be here with Bill and Barbara
    Richardson. Bill Richardson was the national cochair of the Adelante Con
    Clinton movement. Thank you for bringing your posters; there's two
    there. But he never did anything more important for America than in his
    leadership in the fight for the passage of NAFTA. I can tell you, on
    September 14th, the day after we had the signing of the peace agreement
    between Israel and the PLO, we formally kicked off the NAFTA fight after
    all the side agreements on labor and the environment were done. And we
    had the endorsement of all the living former Presidents. We had four
    Presidents and former Presidents there, President Ford, President
    Carter, President Bush, and myself. We were 100 votes behind. We were
    maybe that close--[laughter]--100 in the House of Representatives. And
    Bill Richardson soldiered on when others were saying, ``Well, they ought
    to give up.'' And some of my friends who were on the other side of the
    issue even suggested maybe we ought not have a vote because they didn't
    want us embarrassed. And Richardson and I were too dumb to know we were
    beat--[laughter]--so we just kept on going. It worked out all right, and
    the Nation is in his debt. And New Mexico will benefit enormously
    because of the astonishing national leadership he provided on that
    issue.
        I gave--what did you say?
        Audience members. [Inaudible]
        The President. I need a vitamin pill tonight. [Laughter] I also want
    to say that Jeff Bingaman likes me because I brought Anne here tonight.
    I gave her the day off at the Justice Department. Sometimes being
    President is just like being a school principal, you give people an
    excused absence. [Laughter]
        And I want to say Bill mentioned the technology reinvestment
    projects, but I want to, if I might, just take a minute to talk about
    Jeff Bingaman and what he did, not only for New Mexico but for the
    country there. In 1992, when I was running for President, the United
    States Congress under the leadership of Senator Bingaman provided for
    the expenditure of a few hundred million dollars to help America make
    the conversion, the painful conversion from a high-tech, defense-based
    economy to a high-tech commercial economy. And there were a number of
    things in the bill that they passed. And as a candidate for President, I
    strongly supported the bill. And it passed before I could be elected
    President. And guess what? And I thought, well, here I am cutting off my
    nose to spite my face. I'm out there asking Congress to pass this bill,
    which will put a few hundred million dollars into the hands of the
    President I was running against to put the American people back to work
    in the way I've been saying we should do for the last 5 years. And guess
    what? They wouldn't spend any money because they didn't believe in it.
        And so when I became President, we went to work on trying to give
    life to Jeff Bingaman's idea that a little bit of public money in the
    context of the hundreds of billions of dollars we've been spending on
    defense should be offered to the private sector in matching funds for
    people who would come up with ideas that could be used to take defense
    technologies and turn it into domestic jobs and American high-tech
    opportunities for the 21st century. So earlier this year, we released
    the first round of grants, and in the whole year we wound up with over
    $400 million worth of funds. Congress was so astonished by the success
    of the program that they have come back and voted to spend even more
    money on it in the year we're now involved in, in fiscal year '94.

    [[Page 2113]]

        Now, I want you to understand how important this is. In the first
    round of applications, when we put up $400 million, we had almost 3,000
    projects submitted for funding that, with public and private money
    together, would require $8.5 billion. That's how hungry American
    entrepreneurs, universities, laboratories, and big companies are to be
    part of this defense conversion effort, to find ways to create the jobs
    of the 21st century out of all the work we've put into defense research
    over the last 40 years. It is a very important thing. And none of this
    would have happened if Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico hadn't been the
    catalyzing influence, the energy behind this idea.
        I also want to say it is true that in the first three rounds of
    grants that we're now completing today, New Mexico got a total, I think,
    of nine big projects. And on a per capita basis, you almost certainly
    led the country in grants. But you did it on the merits--not just the
    labs but the universities.
        So I'm honored to be here tonight with all these friends of mine on
    this stage and all of you out there to thank you for voting for Bill
    Clinton and Al Gore in 1992, to thank you for providing leadership like
    Bill Richardson and Jeff Bingaman and Bruce King, to ask you to keep
    them in and keep them strong, and to ask you to keep supporting the
    direction our country is taking.
        When I became President, we had had the 4 worst years of job
    creation since the Great Depression. We had had 12 years in which our
    national debt had quadrupled, while our investment in our people had
    gone down. We had had 20 years of the global economy requiring American
    middle class people to work longer hours every week for the same or
    lower wages. We had out-of-control health care costs with 100,000
    Americans a month losing their health coverage. So we were paying more
    for less. And almost everybody in this country thought things were going
    in the wrong direction. I said until I was blue in the face, even to
    those who were most enthusiastic about our campaign, that we couldn't
    expect immediate overnight results, but we could turn the country
    around. And what I want you to know, my friends, is after the first
    year, we have turned the country around. We are moving in the right
    direction.
        The economic plan which the Congress adopted reduced the deficit,
    had over 356 separate--over 350, 356 to be exact--separate spending
    cuts. Now, that's not Government language for ``We're cutting the rate
    of increase in the previous budget.'' There's 356 accounts that have
    less money this year to spend than they did last year; increased
    investments in things like defense conversion and new technologies and
    worker training and Head Start, things that build our country over the
    long run; raised taxes on fewer than 2 percent of the American people
    earning the largest amounts of money whose taxes had been lowered while
    their incomes went up in the eighties; gave an enormous, an enormous
    boost to the ideas of family and work by providing tax cuts to over 15
    million working families whose incomes were $23,000 a year or less,
    because we wanted to say to people, ``We know you've got kids in your
    home; we know you're working hard for modest incomes. We want the tax
    system to lift you out of poverty, not drive you into it. We want you to
    be successful as parents and successful as workers.'' That will affect
    over 40 million Americans who are either the workers, the spouses, or
    the children of the families who will get tax relief under this economic
    plan in April.
        And what are the results? What are the results? Historically low
    interest rates; very low inflation; increased investment; a 14-year high
    in housing sales last month; a 10-year drop in unemployment this month,
    that is, it dropped more from month to month than in any time in 10
    years; almost 50 percent more private sector jobs created in the first
    11 months of this year than in the previous 4 years. Has it affected
    most Americans yet? No. Are we moving in the right direction? You bet we
    are. We have to keep going until we do see the benefits go to every
    American family. But we are moving in the right direction.
        This Congress not only passed the motor voter bill, which Bill
    Richardson mentioned, it also passed the Family and Medical Leave Act,
    which gives people the right to take a little time off without losing
    their jobs when there's a baby born or a sick parent. This Congress
    passed the national service bill, which 3 years from now will give
    100,000 young Americans the chance to earn some money against further
    education after high school by working in community service projects to
    rebuild the fabric of our country from the grassroots up. This Congress
    passed the Brady bill, which will require a waiting period for handguns.
    And both Houses of Congress have passed campaign finance re-

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    form--they just have to reconcile the two bills--and a crime bill which
    will enable us to put another 100,000 police officers on the streets,
    have boot camps for first-time youthful offenders, and do other things
    to make the American people safer in their homes and their schools and
    on their streets and in their neighborhoods.
        Bill Richardson was generous in what he said, that no one knows that
    this was the most successful legislative session in history, since we've
    only been keeping score like this for 40 years. But it's not bad since
    they've been keeping score.
        I say to you, this is a good beginning. But it is just the
    beginning. NAFTA was important, but we need to keep going until we've
    got all of Latin America committed to democracy, free-market economics,
    and an economic partnership with the United States. That's good, but we
    also need a new global trading agreement. I spent a good deal of time
    today working trying to get the nations of the world to conclude this
    so-called GATT agreement by December 15, our deadline, because it is
    estimated that that will add over one million jobs to the American
    economy within the next decade if we can successfully conclude it.
        Why is this important? Why was it important enough for people like
    Jeff Bingaman and Bruce King and Bill Richardson and Bill Clinton even
    to argue with some of our friends over? It is this simple, it is this
    simple: We can't keep any of our businesses in America today unless we
    become more productive. But being more productive means the same person
    can produce more goods or more services; maybe even fewer people can
    produce more goods and more services. Well, if there's no more demand
    for the goods and services and fewer people produce them, what happens?
    Unemployment goes up, and you don't have to raise wages because there
    are all these people who are out there unemployed who are more than
    happy to work for less. So if you want productivity--which you have to
    have to compete with other countries--to lead to higher wages and more
    jobs, you must have more customers for American products and American
    services. That's what these trade agreements are all about.
        We have got to expand the rate of growth in the world to find more
    customers for what we do well. And that will enable us not only to have
    more jobs but to change the job mix to get the higher wage jobs in
    there, to raise people's incomes for the first time in 20 years. It's
    going to be hard to turn this around. But for 20 years most Americans
    have been working harder for less. We have got to try to do better than
    that. And the only way to do it is to provide more customers.
        The second thing we have to recognize is that a lot of our people
    are still not able to compete in that global economy, which means we
    have to have a better system for training our young high schoolers who
    don't go on to college, a better system for giving our working people
    lifetime education and training opportunities, a better system for
    recognizing that the unemployment now is not like it used to be where
    people would go on unemployment and then a couple of weeks later they
    would get called back to their old company. Most people who are
    unemployed now have to find a new job with a new employer. That means
    that this coming year we're going to have to totally revise the entire
    unemployment system and make it a reemployment system, immediately give
    people education and training and job placement. I challenge all the
    people who supported us in NAFTA, who wanted America to have more
    customers, to make sure Americans can take advantage of that instead of
    be punished by it, by retraining the American work force for the 21st
    century. That is our great challenge.
        That's why the welfare reform program that we're going to deal with
    next year is so important. You have a lot of people out there who had
    children when they were children, who have never been in the work force,
    who have no education. They cannot command a living wage in a global
    economy. We owe it to ourselves, as well as to them, to set up a system
    where we favor work over idleness but where we give people a chance to
    succeed in a highly competitive economy. We are all going to have to
    face the fact that we have new challenges. If we want our people to
    succeed as workers, we have to let them succeed as parents too, because
    most working people have children, and most people with children have to
    work. That means family leave is important, that means a tax system that
    doesn't punish low-wage workers is important, and that means that it is
    important to have welfare reform and lifetime training.
        The last thing I want to say is I came here, before I was here
    tonight, to go out to a wonderful little community near here to talk
    about health care. If we don't control health care costs

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    and provide health care security to all of our people, we will not have
    the underpinning of social security we need to have the courage to make
    the changes that the global economy imposes on us.
        Next year we are going to do health care, welfare reform, and revise
    the education and training program. Then they'll say, ``Well, that's a
    better year than they had last year.'' And it will be for America. We
    can do it together.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 8:35 p.m. at the Albuquerque Convention
    Center. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Bruce King of New Mexico and
    his wife, Alice; Ray Powell, State chairman, Democratic Party of New
    Mexico; Representative Bill Richardson and his wife, Barbara; and
    Senator Jeff Bingaman and his wife, Anne.