    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [May 31, 1995]
    [Pages 777-783]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Billings
    May 31, 1995

        Thank you very much. Thank you for that wonderful, wonderful
    welcome. It is great to be back in Montana and great to have that kind
    of reception. I know it's hot, and I was thinking you might just feel
    the need to stand up and down now and then to keep cool. [Laughter]
        I want to thank the Billings High School Band. Didn't they do a good
    job on ``Hail to the Chief ''? Thank you, Chancellor Sexton, for making
    me feel at home. Thank you, Governor Racicot, for coming out here and
    meeting me at the airport and coming over to be with us here. You know,
    I was a Governor for 12 years, and I served with 150 other Governors.
    Most of my friends in Arkansas thought that I just couldn't get another
    job. [Laughter] But in a lot of ways, it was the best job I ever had. At
    least you could know people, and they knew you, and--because I come from
    a State that's a little bigger than Montana but not much, more populous
    but smaller. And I always loved being Governor. Three people I served
    with are also here today, and I'd like to introduce them: the Governor
    of Colorado, Roy Romer; the former Governor of Wyoming, Mike Sullivan;
    and your former Governor, Ted Schwinden. They're all over here with me.
    I hate to tell Governor Racicot this, but when we started, Governor
    Romer and Governor Schwinden and I didn't have any gray hair, and
    Governor Sullivan had lots of hair. [Laughter]
        Congressman Williams, thank you for your wonderful introduction and
    for your incredible enthusiasm and for occasionally playing golf with
    me. [Laughter] I'd also like to say a special word of appreciation to
    Senator Baucus, who is not here but who has given me a lot of good
    advice over time, and I've been better off when I've taken it than when
    I've ignored it. [Laughter]
        I also want to tell you, I'm glad to be here at this campus. You
    know, the last time I was here, I appeared at the other college, so this
    is sort of equal time. And I thank you for giving me a chance to give
    you equal time.
        I feel very much at home here. I was saying before, before I became
    President, for 12 years I was Governor of Arkansas. And I knew every-

    [[Page 778]]

    body and everybody knew me, and they called me by my first name. And
    even my enemies smiled when they saw me. And if people were mad at me,
    they told me to my face, but they didn't have to hear it indirectly from
    somebody else; we all really knew what was going on.
        And one of the most frustrating things about being President is,
    with 260 million people in this country and so many intermediaries
    between you and the White House and the people out where they live, it's
    hard to know sometimes--I mean, look, half the time when I see the
    evening news, I wouldn't be for me, either. [Laughter] So I'm glad to be
    back at a place where we can be directly involved and know the truth,
    right?
        I'd also like to thank my friends from the American Indian tribes
    from Montana for coming today. Thank you very much. I'm glad to see you.
        I see another person from Montana back in Washington from time to
    time that some of you know and all of you must admire very greatly,
    Senator Mike Mansfield. You know, he's 90-some-odd now, and he still
    gets out and walks every day, and he's still just as blunt and
    straightforward as he ever was. About a year and a half ago, we had a
    ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House, naming former Vice
    President Mondale to be the Ambassador to Japan. And Mike Mansfield
    showed up because they had served together in the Senate. I saw him back
    there, and I thought, well, I'll just mention that Mike's here, and he's
    probably gone out and had his walk for the day, and he'll like that. So
    I said, ``And I see Senator and former Ambassador to Japan Mike
    Mansfield in the back, and I'll bet he's already walked his 5 miles
    today,'' And there was total quiet before they started applauding, and
    he said, ``Seven.'' [Laughter]
        When I was a young man in college in Washington, I worked for my
    Senator, Senator Fulbright, who served with Mike Mansfield and who just
    died at the age of 90, just before his 90th birthday. And when I showed
    up in Washington, he was 87. And the day before he had lunch with me,
    he'd had lunch with Mike Mansfield. And Mike Mansfield said, ``Now,
    Bill, how old are you again?'' And he said, ``I'm 87.'' And Senator
    Mansfield said, ``Oh, to be 87 again.'' [Laughter] I say that to tell
    you he's still in real good shape, and you can still be very proud of
    him.
        Ted Schwinden and I were laughing as I was coming in here today. Ten
    years ago this summer, my family and I came here to Montana and spent
    the night in the Governor's Mansion and got up the next morning about
    4:30 and piled into a helicopter to explore the wildlife of the Missouri
    River area where you have the wildlife refuge. Then we got on a rail
    line and went from Cutback all the way to Whitefish, except we weren't
    in a railcar, we were in one of those Blazers that has the attachments
    to the rails. Now, I thought I had been in remote circumstances and
    rough conditions--[laughter]--but we went over a gorge that was about
    300 feet high in a Blazer on a narrow set of railroad tracks, and I
    wasn't nearly as courageous as I thought I was. But I still remember how
    beautiful it was all the way down in that gorge and how well I could see
    it. We went to Glacier National Park. We stayed on a little lake in a
    lodge I think that's now closed. It was one of the great experiences
    that our family has had together, ever, in our whole life, and I'm
    always grateful for that.
        Tomorrow I'm going to have a townhall meeting here, and we're going
    to bring in all kinds of people with things they want to say about what
    they think the National Government should be doing. And a bunch of them
    are going to say things they think we ought to stop doing. And I'm just
    going to listen and then try to respond.
        Tonight what I'd like to do is to tell you a little bit about why I
    ran for President and what I've tried to do, where we are now, and some
    things that are going on in Washington that I think very much affect you
    and your future. And I want you to think about it and then just tell
    your elected representatives what you think about it. I wish it were
    possible for this kind of atmosphere to be recreated all across America
    and for people to see and feel the kind of informal communication and
    openness that I feel here.
        I ran for this job because, frankly, I was worried about the
    direction of our country. And in 1992, we were in a recession. We'd had
    the lowest job growth rate since the Depression. We'd had almost 15
    years then--actually more--of stagnant incomes for most Americans. I can
    now tell you that for the last 15 years, 60 percent of the American
    people are working longer every week for the same or lower incomes they
    were making 15 years ago. And we kept piling

    [[Page 779]]

    up a big national debt and at the same time reducing our investments in
    the things that make us richer and stronger, like education and
    technology and things that grow the economy and finding a way to
    preserve the environment and still permit economic opportunity to
    flourish.
        And I went to Washington with some pretty simple goals. I wanted to
    get our economic house in order so we could grow the middle class and
    shrink the under class. I wanted to see us face problems that had been
    long ignored, like the deficit problem and the crime problem in many of
    our high crime areas. I wanted to find a way to promote environmental
    protection and economic growth. I wanted to give the American people a
    system of education and human investment that would permit people to
    make the most of their own lives, whether they were moving from welfare
    to work or we were just giving everybody a better chance to go on to
    college or providing apprenticeship programs for young people who didn't
    go to 4-year schools but did want to have good jobs. And I wanted to
    shrink and reorganize the Federal Government so we could give more
    decisions back to State and local governments and private citizens but
    so that we could do what we have to do in Washington well and give you
    greater confidence in doing it. That's why I went there.
        In the last 2 years, we have made, I think, some remarkable progress
    in changing the circumstances in Washington, less progress in changing
    the circumstances in people's lives in America because when a country
    gets going in one direction for 10 or 20 years, it's hard to turn it on
    a dime. But let me just give you a little bit of a progress report.
        To use the 7-year figure now favored by the Republican majority in
    Congress, the budgets we adopted in 1993 and '94 reduced the deficit by
    $1 trillion over 7 years, 3 years in a row, for the first time since
    Harry Truman was President. So much so--I want you to understand, we've
    still got a big deficit problem, but the Federal budget would be in
    balance today--today--but for the interest we have to pay on the debt
    that was run up in the 12 years before I moved to Washington. So we've
    made a good beginning on the deficit.
        We expanded trade in ways that really help agriculture, and we
    fought for fair trade. We've been able to sell things from the West that
    I never thought we'd sell in Japan, like apples and other kinds of
    fruit. We got a deal with Canada on wheat at least for a year and set up
    a joint commission to try to get wheat farmers here in the northern part
    of our country a fair deal in growing and selling their wheat. We have
    taken some very strong action, as you know, in Japan with regard to
    their trade practices on automobiles and auto parts. But we've also been
    able to sign over 80 trade agreements with various countries, including
    Japan, in the last 2 years. And as a result of that, the economy is
    healthier.
        We've had over 6.3 million new jobs. The unemployment rate in
    virtually every State in the country is substantially lower than it was
    2 years ago. And we're in the second year in a row when the economies of
    all 50 States are growing. It's been a long time since that happened,
    and I'm proud of that.
        We were also able to cut Federal programs, many of them, eliminate a
    lot of them, and focus more money on things that I thought would matter.
    We increased funding for Head Start. We increased funding to make sure
    everybody could get immunized, all parents could immunize their children
    under the age of 2 by the year 2000. We put more money into child
    nutrition, and we put lots more money into various education programs,
    especially programs to increase access to higher education.
        We reformed the student loan program to lower the cost of student
    loans, make the repayment easier, but collect more of the loans. It's an
    unbelievable story, what has been done there. It may not be popular to
    say at a student audience, but I went through college and law school on
    student loans, and it really burned me up that we were spending nearly
    $3 billion a year of taxpayers' money covering for the loans of people
    who took out student loans and wouldn't repay them. I don't think that's
    right. And we cut that by two-thirds in 2 years. So we had more
    investment in education but also more accountability. We made progress
    there.
        We shrunk the size of the Government. Forget about the budget that's
    being debated in Washington now. If not one more thing were done, the
    size of the Federal Government would shrink by 270,000 people over 5
    years, to its smallest size since John Kennedy came here to Billings,
    Montana, in 1963--if nothing else were done.

    [[Page 780]]

        We also did something I'm very proud of, and there's some people in
    the audience that are the beneficiaries of it. We created a national
    service program to promote community service and give people education
    credits. If they would work in their community, they could earn money to
    go to college. And I know we've got some national service people from
    Montana here, and I thank you for your service. Up there they are.
        There were a lot of difficult and controversial issues that the
    Congress had to face in the last session. One of them was the crime
    bill, which split the country over the issue of gun control, I think
    largely because of the rhetoric as opposed to the reality. I supported
    and signed the crime bill that put another 100,000 police out in our
    country. It put police, I think, in some 40 communities here in
    Montana--already have received funds to hire more police officers here--
    perhaps more. It increased the application of capital punishment to
    about 60 new offenses. It provided for more funds for States that have
    to build prisons. It provided some funds for prevention programs to give
    young people in trouble something to say yes to as well as something to
    say no to. You know, if every kid in the inner cities in this country
    belonged to the 4-H, we wouldn't have much of a crime problem, but they
    don't have that option here, and a lot of you know that.
        And it had the infamous assault weapons ban, which some people I
    hear have characterized as ``my war on guns.'' Now, I want to say
    something about that. Senator Howell Heflin from Alabama, a great friend
    of mine, 73 years old, got up in the Senate, and he gave--this is almost
    verbatim, the brief speech he gave on this. He said, ``I have never been
    for gun control, but,'' he said, ``I read this list of 19 assault
    weapons, and,'' he said, ``I have never seen an Alabama hunter with one
    of these guns.'' [Laughter] He said, ``But I read the other list in this
    bill everybody talks about. There are 650 weapons in this bill that now
    can't be regulated by the Government, that are protected from Government
    regulation, and every weapon I have ever seen in the hands of an Alabama
    hunter is on that list. So I'm going to vote for this, because I think
    the bill does more good than harm.''
        Now, I say that to make this point. Whether you're for or against
    that, we have made a big mistake in this country, with all the tough
    issues we've got, to let an issue like that become more symbol than
    substance. So we've got a tough problem in a lot of cities in this
    country. I've gone to hospitals and met with emergency room personnel
    who tell me that in some of our urban areas, the mortality rate from
    gunshot wounds is 3 times as high today as it was 15 years ago because
    people are more likely to have more bullets in their bodies when they're
    hauled in.
        Now, that may be very foreign to you here. But the Congress and the
    President sometimes have to make legislation that applies to the whole
    country and that deals with the problems of America, and we try to do it
    in the fairest way we can. That doesn't say that we never make a
    mistake. I think we did the right thing there, because I got tired of
    hearing police officers tell me that they were scared to put on their
    badge and go outside and go to work every day. And I got tired of
    reading about little kids who were honor students in their inner-city
    schools being shot at bus stops because they got caught in crossfires.
    And I decided that we should take a chance to try to make a difference.
    This is a terrible, terrible problem. I say that to make this point in
    general--[applause]--thank you.
        I say that what we need in this country desperately today is more
    meetings like this. And I wish we could stay all night, and you could
    just ask questions, and I'd answer them, and I'd ask you questions,
    you'd answer them. That's what I'm going to try to do tomorrow night.
    I'm going to go out tomorrow and meet with some farmers, and we're going
    to do that and talk about the farm bill, because I think that's a big
    part of it.
        But we have got to stop looking for simple answers to complicated
    problems, and we have got to stop demonizing each other as Americans.
    And just let me give you an example. Let's look at what we're facing
    now; all these things affect you. Should we--let's just look at all the
    issues we're facing.
        We've got to pass a budget now, and we have to continue to bring the
    deficit down, and we ought to be able to tell you that we're going to
    balance the budget. That's true. Why? Because in a global economy, if
    you run a big debt all the time and you have to keep borrowing money
    from other people, they have too much control over your economic well-
    being, and because if you have to keep spending tax money paying off
    yesterday's deficit and today's

    [[Page 781]]

    deficit, you don't have the money you need to invest in education. And
    sooner or later, all the money you take in in taxes, you're paying out
    in interest. So that's a good thing to do. But the reason it is a good
    thing to do is, it will contribute to raising the living standards and
    increasing the security of the people of our country. Therefore, it
    ought to be done in a way that raises the living standards and increases
    the security of the people of our country, which is why I say we should
    not cut education to do it, we should find a way to do it and increase
    our investment in education.
        We all know that we have to slow the rate of growth of the
    Government's medical programs, Medicare and Medicaid. They've been
    growing at about 9, 10 percent a year, when inflation's about 3 percent
    a year and health care inflation generally was 4.5 percent last year. We
    know we've got to slow the rate of growth of that. But we don't want to
    do it in a way that closes a bunch of rural hospitals that are the only
    access to health care people in places like rural Arkansas and rural
    Montana have. Does that mean we can walk away from the problem? No, it
    just means we need to have our head on straight when we're dealing with
    it. We need to do what's practical and understand how it will work.
        We all know that the Government can overreach in its regulatory
    authority. Does that mean there should be no national standards on clean
    water or clean air or safe drinking water, after what happened to those
    poor folks in Milwaukee? I don't think so. So we've got to find a way to
    make the bureaucracy more flexible.
        The Environmental Protection Agency, under our administration, is
    going to cut paperwork burdens by 25 percent in one year next year. The
    Occupational Safety and Health Administration is going to dramatically
    slash regulations on businesses that will work with them to be in
    compliance with safety rules. The Small Business Administration has cut
    their budget and increased their loan volume by 40 percent. There is a
    right way and a wrong way to do this. And the only way we can do it in
    the right way is if we stop looking for simple answers to complicated
    problems and talk common sense to one another, if we stop treating each
    other like enemies and start treating each other like we're all friends,
    we're all Americans, we're all part of a big American family.
        I believe that if we'll keep our eye on the prize--what is the
    prize? We have to increase the incomes and the security of the American
    people. We have to protect what is good about our country and what works
    and change what doesn't and get ourselves into the next century with the
    American dream alive and well for our children.
        I'll just give you one last example: You look at this farm bill.
    Most Democrats and Republicans in the Congress are from urban or
    suburban areas. Most of them want to do the right thing. Most of them
    think we spend too much money on farm programs. Well, the farmers in the
    audience know we have already substantially cut farm subsidies in the
    last 5 or 6 years, substantially. I've fought like crazy to get the
    Europeans to make a deal on agriculture so we could cut agricultural
    subsidies some more. I don't know a farmer in my home State that
    wouldn't give up every lick of Government support if every other country
    would give up all theirs and we just had a fair chance to compete in a
    global marketplace.
        So, do we need to deal with this agricultural issue? Yes, we do. But
    if you just blow off all these supports and everybody else keeps doing
    it, what's going to happen? One of two things: We either lose markets,
    or we'll lose all the family farmers, and big corporations will be
    running all the farms in the country, or a little bit of both.
        So let's do this in a sensible way, and let's listen to one another.
    You'd be amazed how many of these hot-button issues we have in
    Washington are basically more rural-urban issues, more regional issues
    than they are partisan issues. And I'm telling you, a lot of these
    things have a commonsense, sensible resolution if we will simply work on
    it.
        Now, this is a great country. And if you look at where we are, going
    into the next century, I'm telling you, I have had the privilege of
    representing you all over the world. And no American who understood the
    facts of the 21st century would trade places with anybody in any other
    country, because of what we have here.
        But what we have to realize is, the thing that gives us all this
    juice for this global economy in this information age--where people in
    Montana can hook in on the Internet and find out things that are in a
    library in Australia and do all kinds of things that I can't even figure
    out how to do but my child, because she grew

    [[Page 782]]

    up in the computer age, understands--the reason we are in this kind of
    position is because of everything we have in this country, because of
    the natural resources and the phenomenal beauty and the massive space,
    because of the ethnic diversity, because of the strength in the cities
    as well as in the rural areas, because of all these entrepreneurs, these
    high-tech people, in these burgeoning suburban areas. But the thing that
    makes it work is that we've got all this stuff in one place, one
    country, but we are all so different.
        So we have to have some common values, some common allegiance to the
    law of the land, and some way of working out our differences. But
    instead of thinking our differences ought to make us put our head in the
    hole and try to tell everybody else to go home and leave us alone, or
    just vote against anybody that we think disagrees with us or comes from
    some different place, we should learn to resolve these differences in a
    humane and decent way, because it is the differences in America that are
    our meal ticket as a whole country to the 21st century and the American
    dream.
        I'll tell you something: One of the reasons I wanted to come here to
    have this townhall meeting, apart from the fact that I have such
    wonderful memories about this State and I'm grateful to you for voting
    for me last time, but the other reason is that out here in Billings,
    Montana, a while back when a group of skinheads threw a bottle and a
    brick into homes of two Jewish families displaying menorahs, you didn't
    throw up your hands and sit around and just take sides. You said that
    this was a community issue. Your police chief--your former police
    chief--said hate crimes are not a police problem, they're a community
    problem. And I guess that's what I want to tell you about the political
    divisions in this country today. They're not just a political problem,
    they're a community problem.
        The publisher of the Billings Gazette, Wayne Shile, published a
    full-page drawing of a menorah. And I want to tell you something: In the
    orthodox Jewish communities in New York City, they knew about Billings,
    Montana, and they felt more like Americans because you did that. Ten
    thousand families pasted these drawings in their windows. That's what we
    need to do in other areas as well.
        I spoke at the Air Force Academy commencement today down in Colorado
    Springs. There were 11 foreign students graduating from the Air Force
    Academy. All of our service academies take a limited number of students
    every year from other countries. And it's a great thing for our country.
    They go back home; they do very well; it builds a lot of good will. The
    number one student this year was from Singapore. And when he stood up to
    be recognized, all those red-blooded American kids that he scored higher
    than clapped for him and were proud of him. That is the American way.
    They did not feel threatened by that.
        I stood there and shook hands with nearly a thousand of those
    graduates, the finest looking young men and women you can possibly
    imagine, from every State in this country, from all kind of backgrounds,
    all different racial and ethnic groups. They were all Americans. And
    they learned to live with each other and to work out their differences
    there.
        And I'm telling you, if I could wave a magic wand and do one thing
    for this country, just one thing--it would be more important than who
    the President is, how the Congress votes on a particular bill--it would
    be to try to get us out of this way we are communicating with one
    another so that every time we have a difference, we turn it into a wedge
    and a divide and we try to beat each other to death with it. That's not
    right. It's not the American way.
        Look, we got a lot of complicated problems. And we are a very
    different, divergent country. But it's our meal ticket to the future.
    It's what makes us the most relevant place in the world in the 21st
    century.
        Why do all these people want to come here? Why do they ask us for
    help everywhere? Because they think, with all of our problems, we've got
    our act together. And we ought to have it together.
        So I say to you, my fellow Americans, whatever your party, whatever
    your views on any particular issue, this country is slowly turning, and
    we are moving toward the 21st century. And what we don't want to do is
    take a position on a complicated issue that starts throwing the babies
    out with the bath water.
        What makes us great is our people, our land, our vision, our system
    of opportunity. And we have the opportunity now to tackle some long-
    delayed problems, like the budget deficit, and some long-ignored needs,
    like competing with other countries in our investment deficit so that we
    invest in our people's education; we invest

    [[Page 783]]

    in the technology and the research and the things that will generate
    high-wage jobs; so that we show prudence in the budget, but we still
    figure out how we're going to keep a viable agricultural sector, for
    example, into the 21st century; and so that we face up to the fact that
    a whole lot of people's anxieties are because of all these changes that
    we haven't adjusted to. We can't keep the American dream alive if 15
    years from now 60 percent of the people are still working harder for
    less money.
        So let's talk about what's really eating us. Let's deal with each
    other as neighbors. And let's make ourselves a promise that as we go
    through these next 6 or 7 months, that we won't take the easy way out.
    We will bring the budget into balance, while investing in our future. We
    will make the Government less bureaucratic, but we will protect our
    environment. We will find a way to give local control to people, but we
    will still do the right thing.
        When it's all said and done, we'll still have heated disagreements--
    nobody will know if they're right, and nobody will be right about
    everything--but at least we can recreate a process, an environment, a
    spirit of community that will permit us to go on. We cannot get from
    here to where we need to go if everything we do is dictated by the most
    emotional, highly charged 15-second sound bites we can think of to send
    our opponents up the flagpole. We cannot get there.
        And let me just close with a story, a true story, that will show you
    my bias in all this. In 1989 I was the Governor, and I was trying to
    decide whether I should run for a fifth term. And everybody in my State
    believed in term limits, but they sort of liked me. And they couldn't
    figure out what to do about it, and neither could I, frankly, because I
    had this big education program I wanted to get through the legislature
    before I left office.
        And I went out to the State fair one day, and I visited all the, you
    know, the livestock barns and saw all that, and then I came into this
    hall where I always had a Governor's Day every day. And anybody in the
    State could come up and talk to me and say whatever they wanted, which
    was hazardous sometimes for me. [Laughter]
        And along toward the end of the day, this old boy came in in
    overalls. He was somewhere in his mid-seventies. And he put his hands in
    his overalls, and he said, ``Bill, you going to run again?'' I said, ``I
    don't know. If I do, will you vote for me?'' He said, ``Yeah, I guess
    so. I always have.'' And I said, well--I'd been Governor 10 years by
    then--I said, ``Aren't you sick of me after all this time?'' He said,
    ``No, but everybody else I know is.'' [Laughter] He said, ``I'm going to
    vote for you because of the way you nag us all the time. All you talk
    about is education and the economy and forcing everybody to work
    together and making things better.'' And he said, ``You're just a nag.''
    But he said, ``Frankly, I think it's finally beginning to work.'' And my
    State had an unemployment rate above the national average in every year
    I was Governor until the year I ran for President, when we led the
    country in job growth.
        It takes a long time to turn and to face things. But this country is
    still around here after 200 years because we found a way to disagree in
    a way that permitted us to work together and move forward. And we can
    win the struggle for the American dream in the 21st century if we will
    find that way now.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 7 p.m. in the Alterowitz Gymnasium. In his
    remarks, he referred to Ronald Sexton, chancellor, Montana State
    University, Billings.