    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
    [October 15, 1994]
    [Pages 1769-1773]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Stratford, Connecticut
    October 15, 1994

        Thank you so much. ``Governor Curry''--that has a good sound,
    doesn't it? [Applause] I am delighted to be here with Bill Curry and Joe
    Ganim and all these fine people, your State officials behind me,
    Attorney General Blumenthal and others, and especially with my good
    friends and allies Rosa DeLauro and Barbara Kennelly.
        Hillary and I were very pleased to be asked to come to Connecticut
    today to campaign for Bill Curry and, in a larger sense, to campaign for
    the change we're trying to bring to our country. If you will permit me,
    though, I'd like to begin with a few comments about what this day means
    for us as Americans setting an example around the world.
        Today is a day of celebration for Americans as our leadership has
    helped to bring peace and democracy and the restoration of the
    democratic President of Haiti, as President Aristide goes home there.
    And I have to tell you that one person who wanted to be here today with
    us is on that plane going back because he has played a major role in the
    liberation of Haiti: Senator Chris Dodd is back there today.

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        Today is a day of sorrow for America in our efforts around the world
    to bring peace, because just yesterday, as Prime Minister Rabin and
    Foreign Minister Peres and Chairman Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace
    Prize for their progress in peace in the Middle East, a young corporal
    named Nahshon Waxman was murdered by terrorists who are the enemies of
    peace in the Middle East. He was a son of Israel, but many of you may
    know he was also a citizen of the United States. And our prayers and our
    hearts go out to the people of Israel and to the Waxman family as we say
    to them, the United States will stand with you in the cause of peace in
    the Middle East. We have come too far to turn back, and we must not let
    the wreckers and the killers turn us back today.
        And this is a day of determination for America in the world as our
    men and women in uniform stand up again in the Middle East and the Gulf
    and say that Iraq will not be allowed to threaten its neighbors or to
    intimidate the United Nations in its work to make sure they never again
    have weapons of mass destruction. We will stay there until we are sure
    that the threat is gone.
        What I want you to do today, my fellow Americans, as you must be
    filled with pride for the incredible work, the skill, the discipline,
    the bravery of our men and women in uniform from Haiti to the Gulf, is
    to understand that our overall strategy to increase our security--a
    strategy that Sikorsky has played a major role in--involves not just the
    effort to bring peace and democracy to Northern Ireland, the Middle
    East, to South Africa; not just our efforts to become more secure from
    weapons of mass destruction, as for the first time the missiles of
    Russia are no longer pointed at the American people; not just an effort
    to expand international economics, although all that is important. I
    came here today because I know and you know we can never be strong
    abroad unless we are first strong in the United States of America, in
    every State, every community, in every neighborhood.
        You know, as I flew over the beautiful Connecticut countryside
    coming down here in the helicopter, and I saw those fall leaves I came
    to love over 20 years ago, and I thought about how proud I was to be
    coming down here to campaign for somebody like Bill Curry, who was
    outspent and counted out but never gave up because he wanted to be an
    agent of change to make life better for ordinary citizens, to have
    sensible programs to develop the economy, to have programs to reform the
    Government and make it work again for average people, to give a tax
    break to people who deserved it. I liked the way he won the primary, and
    I have to say I also really admire the way his principal opponent, John
    Larson, came over and endorsed him and is trying to help him get
    elected. And I hope the rest of you will, too.
        I want to talk to you today a little as a political rally and a
    little just as an old-fashioned visit about why this race here fits into
    what I'm trying to do as President and why we need your help. I went to
    Washington 20 months ago to try to change this country, to do some very
    basic things: to bring the economy back, to make the Government work for
    ordinary citizens, and to empower individual Americans to take
    responsibility for their own future. I offered the American people not
    so much a set of promises as a real challenge that we could compete and
    win in the 21st century, we could keep the American dream alive, if we
    had the courage to change. I asked people of all parties and persuasions
    to work with me to fight for the future. It's been an interesting 20
    months. And what I want to talk to you about is this: As we come onto
    these elections, I want you to think about the problems we found when we
    got there, the opposition we got from the leadership of the other party
    on every issue, the progress we made, and the stakes in the future.
        After all, we confronted 30 years of serious social problems
    developing--they didn't happen overnight--the loss of jobs in our inner
    cities and rural areas, the terrible problems of the breakdown of
    families and communities and the rise of crime and violence and drugs
    and gangs. This has been happening for three decades. We confronted 20
    years in which working people have been working harder and harder just
    to hang on and wages have been stagnant. And we confronted 12 years of
    trickle-down Reaganomics, the economic theory that if you cut taxes on
    the wealthiest Americans, loaded them up on the middle class, exploded
    the deficit, you could somehow spend your way into somebody's
    prosperity. Now, that's what we found. The last 4 years before I took
    office had the slowest job growth since the Great Depression. In the
    city of Bridgeport alone, the average job loss was about 6,000 a year.
        And so we set to work to try to make the Government work for
    ordinary people, to try

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    to turn the economy around. And I think it's fair to say that we've got
    a long way to go, but we made a very good start. You be the judge. You
    be the judge.
        After 7 years we passed the family and medical leave law to give
    people some time off when their babies are born or their parents are
    sick. The Congress voted at long last to put America at the front, not
    in the rear, of taking care of its children by immunizing all the kids
    in this country under the age of 2 by 1996; to put 200,000 more children
    in Head Start programs; to provide apprenticeship programs for young
    people who get out of high school and don't go to college but want to
    get good jobs; most important of all, to provide longer term, lower
    interest rate college loans to middle class Americans so that everybody
    could afford to go to college. Already, 20 million Americans are
    eligible to refinance their college loans, including about 540,000
    people right here in Connecticut.
        We sent genuine welfare reform legislation to Congress that would
    invest in education and training and make welfare a second chance, not a
    way of life. And we gave 18 States a chance to find ways to put people
    to work and get them off the welfare rolls. We gave nine States a chance
    to try to find ways to cover all people with health insurance.
        And I want to tell you, we didn't win that battle, but just remember
    this: It took 7 years to pass family leave, 7 years to pass the Brady
    bill, 6 years to pass the crime bill, and we just started. Another
    million Americans lost their health insurance last year. We can find a
    way to give people their choice of doctors, to keep the cost coming
    down, and still cover all Americans. And we're going to keep going until
    we do it.
        We passed the first serious assault on crime in a generation: the
    Brady bill, the assault weapons ban, the ban on handgun ownership by
    children, 100,000 more jail cells for serious offenders, ``three strikes
    and you're out,'' and other things to strengthen laws against the
    victims of domestic abuse, women and children, and to protect the rights
    of victims in the criminal justice process. And we've provided
    prevention funds to give these kids who can still live a good life
    something to say yes to, as well as something to say no to. And the
    police officers asked us to do it. It was the right thing to do.
        And just this week--for all those naysayers who said that the money
    would never get out there to make a difference--this week, only 2 weeks
    after the crime bill was signed, we have already given funds to
    Bridgeport, Bristol, East Hartford, and Norwich to hire more police
    officers this week.
        When Barbara Kennelly and Rosa DeLauro and Senator Lieberman and
    Senator Dodd voted for the economic program, every Republican in the
    Congress voted against it. And they said that if we asked the wealthiest
    Americans to pay a little more, and if we cut taxes on 15 million
    working families who were working 40 hours a week and had kids in the
    home and were still fighting to stay above the poverty line, and if we
    cut $255 billion worth of spending, they said, the Republicans, that the
    economy would fall and the deficit would explode, that the world would
    come to an end if we reversed trickle-down economics. They said if
    84,000 working people in Connecticut, who are barely above the poverty
    line even though they're working 40 hours a week and trying to raise
    their kids in a decent way, got a tax cut and we still cut spending, we
    brought the deficit down, the world would come to an end.
        Well, we have now been here 20 months, and we have seen whether they
    are right. And what has happened? You heard Barbara Kennelly; the
    deficit's going down 3 years in a row for the first time since Truman.
    We have 4.6 million new jobs. The unemployment rate in Connecticut is a
    point and a half below what it was on the day I was elected President of
    the United States. Now, believe you me, this is the beginning. We have a
    long way to go. There are a lot of people in the Bridgeports of America
    who have not felt this economic recovery. But what you have to decide
    is, what is the best way to feel it?
        We have to bring investment back into our cities. I just signed a
    bill to set up banks in all the cities of this country to make loans to
    poor people who couldn't get them otherwise, to put people in business
    and bring free enterprise into the cities. It has worked around the
    world; it will work in America. And we are going to do that. We are
    designating cities around the country, giving them extra incentives for
    people to invest in these cities to put people back to work. The answer
    is to do more of what we are doing, not to turn around and go back the
    way we came from. If you want to

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    bring Bridgeport back, let's keep doing what we're doing, and we will do
    that.
        Now, my message to you is this: We're trying to change things,
    folks, and it's hard to do in Washington, but we've made a good
    beginning.
        Now, what are our opponents trying to do? Look what they did. Every
    one of them voted against reversing Reaganomics. Every one of them voted
    against college loans to the middle class. Most of them voted against
    the Brady bill, the crime bill, and family leave. Now, at the end of
    this last congressional session, what did they do? In the United States
    Senate, the Republican Senators ganged up and killed campaign finance
    reform; they killed lobby reform; they killed all the environmental
    measures that were there except the desert bill for California.
        We had a bill to clean up toxic waste dumps, the Superfund
    legislation. Everybody in the country was for the bill; made you kind of
    wonder about it. We had the chemical companies, the labor unions, and
    the Sierra Club; they were all for it. They have never been for the same
    thing, ever. [Laughter] The only people in America who were against the
    Superfund bill were the Republican Senators. And why were they against
    it? Because they didn't want Rosa and Barbara and Joe Lieberman and
    Chris Dodd to be able to come back to Connecticut and say that they
    helped to clean up toxic waste dumps. There was no other reason. It was
    politics.
        Now we know why they killed campaign finance reform and lobby
    reform. This week in the Washington Post, it was reported that they
    killed campaign finance reform and lobbying reform on the weekend, and
    on Monday the leaders of the Republican Party in the House and the
    Senate got all the lobbyists together and they said--it's quoted in the
    Washington Post--``We killed campaign finance reform for you. We killed
    lobby reform for you. We share your values. So you give us money, and
    don't you give the Democrats money, or else.'' That's what they did.
        Now, what will they do if we give them power? Have you seen their
    contract for America? They promise everybody a tax cut, mostly the
    wealthiest Americans. They promise huge increases in defense spending.
    They promise everybody everything, a trillion dollars. And you say,
    ``Well, how are you going to pay for this?'' And they say, ``We'll tell
    you later.'' [Laughter] Well, you know it's election year, folks. I'd
    like to make you a trillion dollars' worth of promises, too. I could
    show you a good time with a trillion dollars. [Laughter] We could have a
    lot of fun; that's real money.
        But what happened when they did it before? They quadrupled the debt
    of the country. They sent our jobs overseas. We're going to have to cut
    Medicare, veterans benefits, the crime bill for police in the cities,
    and we're going to run this economy in the ditch if they get their
    promises. This is not a contract with America, it's a contract on
    America. You have been there; turn away from it. You know better than
    that.
        So they have told us what they are going to do. They are going to
    give us their trickle-down economics of the 1980's. They are going to
    give their politics of the enemies list of the 1970's. They are going to
    gang up with the Washington lobbyists whose values they share and run
    this country any way they please and try to tell you what you want to
    hear and give you a bunch of idle promises. We tried it before. It did
    not work.
        We are moving this country forward. The economy's coming back. We're
    making the Government work for ordinary citizens. And the Congress is
    looking for a message from the American people.
        I say to you, what is this election about? It's about all those kids
    in the uniforms over there that provided the music. It's about what kind
    of future they're going to have. That's what this election's about. Are
    we going forward, or are we going back? Are we going to be united, or
    are we going to be divided? Are we going to vote for our hopes, or are
    we going to vote for our fears?
        That is what Bill Curry represents here, everything we are trying to
    do. You have got to elect him Governor. And you have got to say to
    America, ``We have tried what they are offering, and it failed. We heard
    them say what the President was doing was failing, and it has
    succeeded.''
        So let's keep on going into the future with our heads held high. I'm
    telling you something, folks, we are just a few years from the next
    century. And what will really count is whether every man and woman can
    live up to the fullest of their God-given capacities. That's what we
    offer, the promise of challenge, the promise of succession, because we
    are doing what we can to make sure every one of you can be what God
    meant you to be. Don't fall for the Repub-

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    lican promises one more time. We don't need to go back; we need to go
    forward.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:39 a.m. at Sikorsky Memorial Airport. In
    his remarks, he referred to William E. Curry, Jr., Connecticut
    gubernatorial candidate; Mayor Joseph P. Ganim of Bridgeport, CT,
    candidate for Lieutenant Governor; and Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut
    attorney general.