[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.