[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[June 15, 1994]
[Pages 1083-1084]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Exchange With Reporters Prior to a Meeting With Iowa Attorney General 
Bonnie Campbell
June 15, 1994

    The President. Welcome. I'm glad to be here with Attorney General 
Campbell. I've known her for a long time. I was very pleased by her 
decisive victory, and I'm glad she's here for a visit about the things 
that we would be working together on in partnership with the State of 
Iowa.

Iowa Gubernatorial Campaign

    Q. What are the big issues in the campaign, Ms. Campbell?
    Ms. Campbell. I think they may be the same all over the country. In 
Iowa, it's the budget and questions of taxes, health care reform, 
welfare reform, protecting the environment. I have had a special 
interest in child support recovery, which I think is critical to any 
discussion of welfare reform, so I'm really happy to have an opportunity 
to talk today about that.
    The President. A lot of people believe the strongest part of the 
bill that I announced yesterday on welfare reform is the child support 
provisions, because they're the toughest in the history of the country. 
They permit tracking across State lines, garnishment of wages, 
suspension of driver's licenses and other privileges. They require the 
identification of both parents, or at least they require every hospital 
to make a real effort to do that whenever there's a birth in a hospital.
    And we estimate that we will go from $9 billion a year to $20 
billion a year in child support enforcement recoveries if this bill 
passes. And I know that's something that's been very important to Bonnie 
for a long time.
    Q. [Inaudible]--giving Ms. Campbell for the race?
    The President. I don't know what she wants me to do, but in the 
fall, I'll be out trying to help people who share my values and my 
interests if they want me to do so. I find that most voters in most 
States are pretty independent. They don't need the President or anyone 
else to tell them how to vote. But I certainly have admired Bonnie 
Campbell for a long time. I think a lot of her. And I'm going to be 
going to an event for her here in Washington tonight.
    But what I do depends in part, obviously, on what happens here with 
the health care debate and how much time it takes and how close it gets 
to the election, as well as welfare reform and lobby reform and the 
other things we're trying to do to change the way that Government works 
and relates to the American people. And, of course, there could be 
foreign policy issues that require more time.

Welfare Reform

    Q. Mr. President, Senator Harkin, who supported you quite early in 
your campaign and has been a loyal supporter up on the Hill, was very 
critical of your welfare reform package yesterday. He's supporting his 
own bipartisan with Senator Bond that's based on the Iowa plan. And he 
says that yours goes back to the Depression and is a make-work, dead-end 
jobs and all that. How does this fit with----
    The President. I don't think so. You can have various--States with 
low unemployment rates can have absolute cutoffs of welfare benefits 
once certain training programs have been gone through and people are 
prepared to enter the work force. You can just say you're not eligible 
for benefits. And as I understand it, that's what the Harkin-Bond bill 
does.
    But if you live in a country where some of these people on welfare 
live in areas where the unemployment rates may be as high as 20 percent, 
then if you want to require them to go

[[Page 1084]]

to work after a certain period of time, it seems to me you have to be 
willing to either say they're going to do a public service job--not 
make-work, but work for the city or for the county--or that you will 
help to subsidize their job in the private sector to make it attractive 
to hire them, because otherwise you'll be cutting people off benefits in 
areas where they will not be able to get jobs in the private sector.
    The other major difference is, Senator Harkin's bill, as I 
understand it, has a graduated cutoff of benefits after you go through a 
training program from a low of 6 months to a high of 4 years. And ours 
just has one set 2-year limit, but if any State wants to go beyond it, 
they're free to do so. That is, since I've been President, we have 
granted more flexibility to the States in the area of welfare reform and 
health care reform in a year and a half than in the previous 12 years. 
We've really encouraged States to go out and try things on their own. So 
I wouldn't oppose Iowa or any other State implementing a program like 
that.
    Q. [Inaudible]--Ms. Campbell, do you have any problem with the 
welfare plan? You are a supporter of the Iowa plan, aren't you?
    Ms. Campbell. I'm a cautious supporter of the Iowa plan. I think the 
most important thing the President has done is put welfare reform on the 
agenda. Our plan is being phased in right now. I do think it's 
progressive and tough, but it remains to be seen. There are some 
problems with it. One is the availability of day care; one is the 
availability of jobs. It presumes there are jobs, and we are a low 
unemployment State.
    I want very much for our welfare reform plan to work because the 
philosophy behind it is investing in people in our society and 
inculcating the notion of work and reward for work. But we're a long way 
from knowing whether our own welfare reform will be successful. I hope 
it is.
    The President. Let me also point out that from my point of view, a 
large part of this national bill is giving the States the power to make 
welfare reform work. Yesterday I was in Kansas City, and I met with 12 
women who had moved from welfare to work. They all agreed that our plan 
was right to require everybody on welfare to go through one of these job 
placement programs. But they agreed that to make it work, you would have 
to provide some transitional aid for people for child care and for 
medical coverage for the children, that we needed tougher child-support 
enforcement, and that we ought to have with this a national campaign to 
try to lower the rate of teenage out-of-wedlock births, because the 
truth is that the welfare problem in the country--indeed, the poverty 
problem in the country--is increasingly a problem of young women and 
their little children.
    So, from my point of view, I don't see a necessary conflict between 
the Iowa plan and what we're trying to do. The States like Iowa would be 
perfectly free to design their own plans and to be as tough as they 
wished under our law. And as a matter of fact, for the first time under 
this bill, if it passes as I have proposed it, we will specifically and 
clearly authorize States to go beyond the requirements of the Federal 
framework. But remember, this is a very large, complicated country in 
which the economic realities are very different from place to place, 
often within State borders, and certainly across State lines.

Note: The President spoke at 4 p.m. in the Oval Office at the White 
House. A tape was not available for verification of the content of these 
remarks.