[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

[[Page 2112]]

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

[[Page 2115]]

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.