[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book I)]
[April 28, 1994]
[Pages 793-798]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 793]]


Remarks to the National Conference of Black Mayors
April 28, 1994

    Thank you so much. I didn't know where Henry was going with that 
story. I thought it was going to get down to where he couldn't think of 
anything to thank me for but giving his brother a good job. [Laughter] 
My imagination was running wild, and so was yours. [Laughter]
    Mayor Kelly, thank you for being with us and for giving such 
leadership to what is now my hometown. I've enjoyed being a citizen of 
Washington, DC, and going to schools and walking streets and doing 
things that Presidents often overlook. You can be in a cocoon here and 
forget you live in a city full of people and promise and problems. I've 
enjoyed that.
    I want to thank Mayor Espy for his leadership and for his 
friendship. I want to say a special word of appreciation to Secretary 
Cisneros, who's agreed to be our administration's main link to you, for 
the outstanding leadership he has provided at Housing and Urban 
Development, the things that he's doing that have needed doing for so 
many years, some of which have immediate payoffs, some of which may have 
years to go before we fully see the benefits of them. But we have 
somebody in that job now who's full of ideas and heart and who works 
hard, who spent 2 nights in the public housing projects in Chicago so he 
could see what the people were going through up there.
    I want to thank my longtime friend Carroll Willis and my friend 
Loretta Avent for the work they've done with this organization and 
keeping up with you. Sometimes you keep up with them and give them 
plenty to do, and I appreciate that. Give them a hand there, yes. 
[Applause] I knew I wanted Loretta to come to work for this 
administration when she worked in the campaign. And then after I got 
elected President, she moved into the Governor's Mansion, where we were 
getting literally hundreds of gifts and things a day. And we couldn't 
keep up with them all, couldn't box them up, couldn't keep up with them, 
and people streaming in there all the time. Loretta--I don't think 
Loretta ever went home before 2 o'clock at night, never got there any 
later than about 6:15 in the morning, and I figured anybody that needs 
less sleep than I do needs to be working in the White House. [Laughter] 
It's hard to have, you know--we had 24-hour-a-day security at the 
Governor's Mansion without the Secret Service and without even spelling 
Loretta; she was just there all the time. [Laughter]
    I also want to say a special word of thanks to the members here who 
have been my friends for many years. I see a lot of you out there I've 
known for such a long time, and especially to the people from my home 
State who did a lot of work to help make it possible for me to get in a 
position to run for this job.
    This is a remarkable week. We are seeing the unfolding of the first 
genuine multiracial elections in South Africa. We are seeing people who 
have been denied the vote for 350 years willing to stand in line in 
record numbers. And when they started this whole process, your country--
I'm proud of this--put up about $35 million to help the people of South 
Africa learn how to conduct elections and how to participate and all 
that. I'm very proud of them.
    You ought to see their ballot; they've got, I think, 18 different 
parties, maybe more, maybe 21; anyway, a big old number running for the 
various seats in the Parliament. And those people, they've got it 
figured out. There's one party called the Soccer Party, and there are 
little symbols of soccer balls just in case you forget who you want to 
vote for. If you like soccer, you can vote for them. They've got one 
party called the Kiss Party, and their symbol is a lipstick kiss, in 
case you're feeling romantic on election day. [Laughter] The man who got 
at the top of the ballot has got his picture up there. He looks 
remarkably like Nelson Mandela. In case you make a mistake, he wants 
your vote. [Laughter] It's very impressive, really. The whole thing has 
been astonishing. But the most impressive thing has been the way the 
people have showed up in record numbers, poor people, old people, people 
who never learned to read, people who just want to be a part of this.
    And I couldn't help thinking that the struggle which started in this 
country with the Voting Rights Act three decades ago now, which made it 
possible for us today to have 355 black mayors across America and which 
required a lot of our

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fellow citizens to risk their lives, it's now being replayed on the 
world stage in a stunning spectacle in South Africa. And I know a lot of 
you take a lot of pride in that and know that in your own way, in your 
own lives and careers, you helped to pave the way for this important 
day. And I thank you for that.
    I'd like to make a couple of remarks that Henry's already mentioned, 
some of the issues I wanted to touch on. I came to this job, as those of 
you who have known me a long time know, with some very clear convictions 
about what our country was doing wrong and what it would take to change 
it. I believed very strongly that we needed a different economic policy 
and we needed to try to get this economy growing again, connected to the 
world economy in a positive and good way. I believed very strongly that 
we needed to try to bring the American people together again because 
it's obvious that we're going up or down together. And I thought we were 
coming apart when we ought to come together. And I'm trying to do that, 
and I think we are making some headway in that direction. And I think 
that the statements that have been made by some of the people in our 
administration have really helped. I think when Secretary Cisneros, for 
example, refused to tolerate what was going on in Vidor, Texas, and 
insisted that people, without regard to race, have a right to live 
wherever they wanted to live, I think that was the sort of thing that 
was very important to be done.
    And I also felt that the Government needed to work in a different 
way, that what we were doing was just not working, that in a way, the 
way we were doing our business was not very well suited to the 
challenges of the world we're facing and the world toward which we're 
all moving. And so I wanted to try to change the way we do that. I 
wanted a better partnership between the White House and the 
Governorships and the mayoralties. And we're moving toward that.
    I wanted the White House to have a partnership where we heard a 
broad spectrum of voices in America. We're having tomorrow--I'm so 
excited about this--for the first time in the history of the United 
States, the President of the United States tomorrow on the lawn of the 
White House will meet with the leaders of every federally recognized 
Native American tribe in the entire United States. And I'm excited about 
that.
    I wanted us to change the way we do our business up here, and I've 
tried to support efforts to reform congressional procedures. And we are 
going to get a campaign finance reform bill out of this Congress. And I 
think we're going to get a good lobby reform bill out of this Congress 
which will restrict some activities and, most importantly, disclose 
others, which I think is very, very important to try to balance the 
scale. There's nothing wrong with lobbying; everybody, we're all lobby 
groups when we want something that somebody else has to decide on and we 
don't. But it needs to be done in an open and balanced and completely 
forthright manner so that everybody has a chance to have their fair 
share and their fair say.
    So we're working on changing those things. The Vice President's 
reinventing Government initiative has been very, very important. It's 
enabled us, for example, without firing anybody, to give incentives to 
Federal employees to take early retirement and to phase down the size of 
the Federal Government and to reform our procedures over a period of 5 
years by about a quarter of a million people. So that 5 years from the 
date I became President, we'll have fewer than 2 million people working 
for the Federal Government for the first time since 1960. We will do it 
by phasing down, not by putting people in the streets, giving people 
incentives for early retirement, and we will take all that money and put 
it in a trust fund and pay for this crime bill to put police officers 
back on the street.
    So those are the things that I wish to do. And I wanted us to blend 
our policies at home with our policies abroad so that--we realized we 
couldn't be strong abroad unless we were first strong at home, that it 
is the power of our example and the success of our efforts that gives us 
real influence abroad, and that we can never fully rebuild ourselves at 
home unless we were involved with other nations around the world.
    We have an interest in what happens in South Africa. South Africa 
rekindles the whole spirit of democracy and the spirit of free 
enterprise all across the southern part of Africa, as it has the 
potential to do. We, the United States, are in the best position, 
perhaps, of all the advanced countries to trade with and benefit from 
that revitalized South Africa and its neighbors.
    So these are the things that I wanted to do. And in pursuit of that, 
I hope you have been

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pleased with the progress we have made in just the first 16 months. 
We've had over 2.3 million private sector jobs come into this economy, 
more than twice as many as in the previous 4 years. We are looking at 
steady growth, steady decline in the deficit, and a strong outlook for 
the future.
    We recognize that that alone will not provide jobs or raise incomes 
in a lot of most distressed urban and rural areas. We have seen a lot of 
our places suffer when the economy was good as well as when the economy 
was bad. So we've tried to do some special things, the creation of the 
empowerment zones and the enterprise communities that Secretary Cisneros 
has worked so hard on, the creation of a community development bank bill 
to try to establish these community development banks all across America 
to make microenterprise and small business loans in places and to people 
who otherwise would not get them.
    We have worked on reforming the community reinvestment act to ensure 
that there will be more reinvestment in our cities and in our small 
towns and rural areas. We've tried to have a dramatically streamlined 
operation for getting loans for community-based business start-ups 
through the small business administration.
    We've changed the tax laws. This year, one-sixth of our working 
people who work for modest wages and have children in their home will be 
eligible for income tax cuts because they're trying to do what everybody 
in America says they want: They are people who are choosing work over 
welfare. They are people who are choosing to be good parents and good 
workers. And our tax system should reward them. We should have a tax 
system that says, hey, if you're willing to go out there, even taking a 
low-wage job and trying to take care of your family and pay your taxes 
and be a good citizen, we ought to use a tax system to lift you out of 
poverty, not put you in it. And I think that is a very important thing.
    This administration has worked hard in the area of education and 
training. The Goals 2000 bill that I just signed sets world-class 
standards of educational excellence but supports grassroots reform. We 
have a school-to-work bill, which I'm going to sign pretty soon, which 
will help States to establish systems to move children who don't want to 
go to 4-year colleges but do need further education and training in the 
systems that give them a chance to get good training so they can get 
good wages and good jobs, not dead-end jobs.
    We're going to reform the unemployment system of this country to try 
to make it a reemployment system. You know in your own communities that 
the unemployment system doesn't work anymore because usually when people 
go on unemployment, they do not get called back to their old jobs like 
they used to. So there's no point in letting them just draw unemployment 
until it runs out and then figuring out what to do. People should be 
able to start retraining programs the minute they become unemployed, not 
after they exhaust their unemployment. This will make a significant 
difference.
    In the area of health care, we're working hard, as I'm sure all of 
you know, to expand early childhood health, along with the expanded Head 
Start program. We have an immunization initiative which will provide 
more free vaccines to poor children and people who need it but which 
will also help to set up systems which will enable us to reach all the 
children of this country. Only two-thirds, actually slightly less than 
two-thirds of our kids, get all their recommended shots by the age of 2. 
There are lots of third world countries that have a higher rate of 
immunization than we do. And we need your help in that. We want you to 
be a part of that. It can make a big difference. [Applause] Thank you.
    I just want to mention two issues in closing. One is the crime bill, 
and the other is health care, because they relate to and embody so much 
of what I've been trying to say. How do you get the country moving in 
the right direction? How do you get people together, instead of drifting 
apart? How do you make this work again so that it makes a difference in 
people's lives?
    First of all, with regard to the crime bill, we do provide more 
police officers in small towns and big cities. And that will make a 
difference if they're community police officers, if they know their 
neighbors, if they know how to work with people, if kids trust them, if 
they can work to prevent crime as well as to catch criminals. This will 
work. I have seen it drop the crime rate dramatically in city after city 
where it has worked. So I urge you to participate in this, not just to 
get more people on the payroll but to make sure they're well trained, 
connected to the folks, and doing the

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right things. In other words, we owe it to the American people to prove 
what we already know, which is that we can lower the crime rate if we 
use these resources in the right way.
    The second point I want to make is--and Henry mentioned this--we 
passed the Brady bill last year. Some people argued against it because 
they said, ``Well, the Brady bill will only work against honest people; 
they'll have to wait longer to get their guns because crooks will go buy 
them off the street.'' Well, do you realize we would never do anything, 
we would never take one positive step in our personal or public lives if 
we listened to people who said, ``Well, if you do this, it won't solve 
all your problems.'' Well, the Bible says nothing we can do will solve 
all our problems, right? I mean, we'd never do anything. If the test 
was, will this solve everything, we would never get anything done.
    The Brady bill has already helped to save lives. It has caught 
people trying to buy guns who had criminal records, who had mental 
health histories, who had stolen weapons in the past. It is beginning to 
work. In this crime bill, I am doing my best to get the House to agree 
with the Senate that we ought to ban a large number of these assault 
weapons. We can put police on the street, but if they're outgunned by 
the gang members, it's pretty tough to deal with it. It's not right.
    The Senate bill actually protects--because a lot of you come from 
rural places, and I know a lot of you've got constituents and over half 
of them have a hunting license now. So this Senate bill actually 
protects almost 700 kinds of hunting weapons and sporting weapons 
specifically, in the bill. This does not outlaw guns, it outlaws assault 
weapons, the purpose of which is to kill people, not shoot ducks or 
quail or deer or squirrel. And I think it's real important that you take 
this opportunity to be in Washington to let your Representatives know 
that you would like it if they would adopt the assault weapons ban. And 
tell them to go on and adopt the protection for the hunting weapons, 
too, so that no one can really say--who looks at the bill--that this is 
designed to undermine people's ability to hunt. It's designed to 
undermine people's ability to hunt other human beings in large numbers. 
That is what we're trying to do.
    The last point I want to make about the crime bill is this. In this 
crime bill, we give the States some more money to build prison space 
where they need it, but we spend more money than has ever been spent by 
the Federal Government giving communities and States prevention funds, 
everything from opportunities for schools to open early and stay open 
late, for communities to have midnight basketball leagues, for rehab 
programs to have drug treatment for everybody who needs it, for--we're 
going to try something a lot of you will like--we'll have enough money 
in this bill to give a respectable number of communities significant 
funds to hire, provide jobs for unemployed young people. I don't want to 
mislead you, it's not a national jobs program, but a part of this 
prevention strategy requires us to identify some communities and give 
them enough money to really take a dent in the youth unemployment 
problem and just see what happens to the crime rate. If the crime rate 
drops in half, then what's anybody else going to say about it? We'll 
then know what we can do to lower the crime rate.
    I want to make this point: There will be a big argument, again, not 
by the law enforcement officials, but maybe--and the politics of this 
over the next week is, well, should we build more prisons and do less 
prevention? And my own view is: If you listen to the law enforcement 
people, they'll say you can build prisons from now til kingdom come, and 
you need to stop kids before they do these things. So, what I want to 
urge you to do is to say, ``We want the 100,000 police, and if you give 
us the police, we'll do it right.'' That's your responsibility, make 
sure they're well-trained, well-connected and they do it right.
    We'll support the law enforcement provisions in here and the tougher 
punishment, but we want you to take the assault weapons off the streets, 
and we want you to give us the prevention funds, and we will prove that 
we can reduce the crime rate. We have to give our young people something 
to say yes to as well as tell them what to say no to. This is an 
astonishingly important bill. It's the biggest and most serious 
anticrime bill ever considered by the Congress. The Brady bill took 7 
years to pass. They've been fighting about a crime bill for 5 years. 
We're going to get it, but this is a big chance. We ought to do it 
right.
    The last point I want to make is about health care. And I'd like to 
make two or three points about it. A lot of you know--I look out across 
this crowd, and I know the communities from which a lot of you come. 
There are people here who represent towns with 300 people. Some

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of them I built sewer systems in and water systems when I was a 
Governor. There are people here who represent massive cities and all in 
between.
    You face essentially three or four big problems in the health care 
system. You've got a lot of folks who still don't have health insurance. 
They do get health care, but they get it when it's too late, too 
expensive. They show up at the emergency room, then they either pass the 
cost along to the rest of your folks, or they can't pass the cost along 
in which case they risk going out of business. So you've got a lot of 
rural hospitals and some urban hospitals at risk of going out of 
business, partly because of no uncompensated care.
    Then you have a lot of people, particularly in rural areas, who do 
not have access to health care because there aren't any doctors out 
there anymore or properly trained nurse practitioners and people working 
with them. Our health care bill attempts to resolve all those things by 
providing for guaranteed private insurance for all Americans, by 
strengthening the public health networks in urban areas and rural areas, 
too. In my State now, 85 percent of the immunizations are being given 
out in the public health clinics. The children of wealthy citizens of my 
State are getting their shots in the health clinics. We have to 
strengthen the public health networks. And this is a terribly important 
thing. And the emphasis on covering primary and preventive services, 
breast cancer tests for women, cholesterol tests for men, giving these 
kids their shots early when they need them, these things are terribly 
important.
    And I can say that it is necessary to preserve the network of health 
care in America. It is necessary to give Americans the health care they 
need. It is also entirely necessary, if you want me to keep bringing the 
deficit down and still have some money to spend, working with you to 
build America, because the only thing we are really increasing spending 
on overall now is health care.
    We're bringing down domestic spending. We're bringing down defense 
spending. We've stabilized interest on the debt because we're bringing 
the deficit down, but we're still increasing spending on Medicaid and 
Medicare by 2 and 3 times the rate of inflation, largely because of the 
system we have in America. And you know, people are trying to say, 
``Well, Clinton wants to impose a Government-run system on America.'' 
That's not true. It's guaranteed private insurance. And they're trying 
to say, ``Well, it's not fair to small business.'' But what about the 
small businesses that do cover their employees?
    Our plan says every employer and employee without insurance or 
without adequate insurance should make some effort but we'll give a 
discount to the small businesses with low-average wages so they don't go 
out of business. It is a private plan where Americans have choice. And 
it will work if we have a chance.
    I say that because while a lot of you don't run public health 
programs--unless you're in a big city, you probably don't have anything 
to do with the public health program--our ability to work with you to 
build this country is directly related to our ability to guarantee a 
healthy population, to give people the security they need.
    Every one of you has got somebody living in your city, even if you 
live in a really small town, who's had somebody in their family that's 
been sick. So they've got what's called a preexisting condition, which 
means they can't get insurance or they pay too much for it or they can 
never change their job because they'll lose their health insurance. 
Every one of you does. Isn't that right?
    So, again, I would ask you to ask your Members of Congress not to 
let this year go by without solving this health care problem. There's no 
reason in the wide world America is the only wealthy country in the 
world that can't figure out how to provide health care security to all 
its people.
    People talk to me about reforming the welfare system all the time. 
You think about this. If somebody gets out of jail and goes into a low-
wage job without health care, right, they're working for a living, 
paying taxes so that they're giving health care to people who are still 
in jail while they got out. If somebody gets off the welfare rolls and 
takes a lower wage job without health care, they're then working hard, 
paying taxes, going home at night looking at their kids without health 
care, and their taxes are going to pay for people who stayed on welfare 
so they and their kids could get health care.
    Now, you don't have to be Einstein to figure out that doesn't make a 
lot of sense. And I just simply refuse to believe that we are the

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only country in the world that can't figure out how to fix that. I 
believe we can.
    So I ask you, please, while you're here and when you go home, tell 
your Members of Congress, it's a new day in America. We're changing 
things. We're facing our problems. We're seizing our opportunities. And 
you'll stick with them if they have the courage to make the tough 
decisions: health security for all and a crime bill that really gives us 
a chance to lower the crime rate and make the American people safe 
again.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 6:17 p.m. in Room 450 of the Old Executive 
Office Building. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly 
of Washington, DC; Mayor Henry Espy of Clarksdale, MS; Carroll Willis, 
senior adviser to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee; 
Loretta Avent, Special Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental 
Affairs; and Nelson Mandela, president, African National Congress.