    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [June 23, 1995]
    [Pages 929-937]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the America's Hope, Arkansas' Pride Luncheon
    in Little Rock, Arkansas
    June 23, 1995

        Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being in
    such a good frame of mind. And thank you for making Hillary and Al and
    Tipper and me feel so wonderful today.

    [[Page 930]]

        You know, I've always kind of resented Al Gore for being a little
    smarter than I am and knowing a little more about various things. And
    now he's gotten funnier than I am. I really--[laughter].
        I thank you, Maurice Mitchell and Skip Rutherford and Jay Dunn and
    Doug Hatterman and all the others who worked. I have to mention one
    person I know is not here and another person I have not yet seen. I know
    a lot of people worked hard on this, but I know that my longtime friend
    Merle Peterson, who's away, and Jimmy Red Jones sat in a room and called
    a lot of you and harassed you until you bought tickets to this.
    [Laughter] And I want to thank them and all the rest of the committee
    for the work that they did.
        I would like to thank Mack McLarty and all those from Arkansas who
    work in the administration, as well as those who work here in the
    Arkansas office who've tried to give you a lifeline through the fog that
    Washington can become. I thank them for representing me. I want to say a
    special word of thanks to Mack for all the many things he's done over
    the last 2\1/2\ years. I got a vivid picture of one of them yesterday
    when we were in New Jersey at a Ford plant which doubtless had made
    various vehicles that the McLarty dealerships had sold over the years.
    But I couldn't help thinking, you know, Mack has basically become the
    country's point person in all of our developing economic and political
    relationships with Latin America, which have expanded by more in the
    last 2\1/2\ years than in any previous point in history. And this Ford
    plant in New Jersey was making trucks being sold in Latin America. And I
    never realized it before, but there was McLarty always thinking about
    what it's going to be like 20 years from now when he's running all those
    Ford dealerships again. [Laughter] You can be very proud of the
    leadership he has given to our country, and I thank him for his long
    friendship.
        And Bruce Lindsey, Marsha Scott, all the other people from Arkansas,
    and the people who run this office, they have enabled me to try and stay
    in touch with you in times when it has not always been easy. And Carol
    Rasco is not here; she's getting ready for our economic conference in
    the Pacific Northwest. But I see some people here particularly involved
    in health care and social services I know call her. I thank them for the
    work they've done to make it possible for us to try to stay in touch
    with one another.
        I also want to say a special word of thanks to Congresswoman Blanche
    Lambert Lincoln and Congressman Ray Thornton. And congratulations,
    Congressmen, to you and to our Senators and to our Governor on Red
    River. Nice work. Truman Arnold is very happy he can keep working for
    the--[applause]--Truman Arnold woke up this morning thinking he could
    keep working for our reelection and for our party now.
        We wish you well, Congressman Thornton. I wish you weren't retiring,
    but whatever you decide to do, I imagine you will make a good show of
    it. You always have. And you've really served our State well, and you've
    served our Nation well, and we thank you for that.
        I want to say, as Hillary did, a special word of thanks to Senator
    Bumpers and Senator Pryor. They have fulfilled a lot of roles that maybe
    on some occasions they would rather not have done in the last 2\1/2\
    years. And we've had some rough spots in the road. We've had some ups
    and downs, but they have always, always, always been there. And in very
    personal ways that will probably never become fully known or
    appreciated, I can tell you that I am profoundly grateful to both of
    them.
        I saw Dale on television the other night speaking to the Small
    Business Conference, talking about the importance of balancing the
    budget and doing it in a humane way and the right way. And a lot of
    those Republicans were really listening to him in ways that only he can
    communicate. I think of all the times when David has taken the floor of
    the Senate to try to restore just a little bit of humanity and sanity to
    a national political debate that has gotten way too out of hand too
    often in the last 2 years, and I thank him for that.
        And let me also say I am especially glad to see Governor and Mrs.
    Tucker here today and especially grateful for the reception you gave
    them. As an Arkansan, I felt exactly the same way. And thank you,
    Governor, for being here. We're proud of you. Thank you.
        I might also note that the last time I checked, the unemployment
    rate in Arkansas is down to 4.1 percent, which is--after what we
    suffered all those years, that's another reason to rejoice.
        You know, I was listening to the Vice President go through that
    whole litany, and I have to say I'm also especially indebted to the
    people

    [[Page 931]]

    who have spoken here before me, to Tipper for all the work she's done in
    mental health and for the courageous and sometimes lonely battles she
    always wages within the administration to remind all of us that that's a
    very important part of health care, and to Tipper and to Hillary for the
    work they've done to try to make sure we increase our emphasis on
    women's health concerns.
        And I was very proud of Hillary yesterday in particular. She took me
    along, and I spoke to a remarkable event in front of the Arlington
    Cemetery yesterday where we broke ground, long overdue, on America's
    first memorial for the 1.8 million women who have worn the uniform of
    our country in military service. One of the things that I am quite proud
    of that almost nobody knows--there are a lot of achievements of this
    administration that fall into that category--one of the things that I'm
    very proud of that almost nobody knows, that I think is part of the
    enduring influence of my wife and my wonderful departed mother, is that
    in the last 2\1/2\ years we have opened up to women in the services
    260,000 positions previously denied them in the service of their
    country. And I'm very proud of it, and the military is very proud of it.
        I said that last comment, and the Vice President was up here giving
    our record and it reminded me about a week ago, maybe 2 weeks ago now,
    we had an event at the Treasury Department. And we were announcing one
    of our continuing Al Gore genius moves to reinvent the Government and
    make it easier to deal with. And this one had to do with the fact that
    next year, in 32 States, people can file their taxes, State and Federal
    together, electronically, no paper, no hassle, file them both together.
    We'll distribute it, we'll do all the work. And we always try to have a
    real person like one of you at one of these announcements to explain how
    this will actually change people's lives.
        So, it was just before the Small Business Conference started, and we
    got this John Deere dealer from west Texas come who happened to be a
    supporter of mine, probably the only person in the whole county--
    [laughter]--there he was. But anyway, he ran a good-sized John Deere
    dealership, and he got up there and he said--I got so tickled--he said--
    he brought all the paper that he'd been using on his taxes and he said,
    ``I can throw all this away, and it's great.'' And he explained how much
    money he was going to save, but he said, ``You know,'' he said, ``you
    fellows have been doing a great job of reinventing Government. What you
    need to do is reinvent communication because it ain't getting out to the
    rednecks that I sell John Deeres to.'' [Laughter]
        You know, some nights I watch the news and I feel like that old
    country song ``They Changed Everything About Me But My Name.''
    [Laughter] That's beginning to change as well. I want to have--for just
    a moment I want to have a serious conversation. The Vice President has
    outlined a great deal of what we have done--and I use the word ``we'' in
    the largest sense. One of them, our proudest achievements, has very
    little to do with me except that I made it possible, and I think the
    history books will reflect that Al Gore was the most influential and
    effective Vice President of the United States in the history of our
    Republic through the 21st century.
        We were at the Small Business Conference the other day; we hauled
    out 16,000 Federal regulations that we were getting rid of because of
    the reinventing Government task force: cutting half the regulations of
    the Small Business Administration, 40 percent of the regulations of the
    Department of Education, dramatically changing the way the Occupational
    Safety and Health Administration is going to work, reducing the
    paperwork burdens of the Environmental Protection Agency by 25 percent,
    setting up a hotline so that if a small business person calls the EPA
    now, that person cannot be fined if he or she is calling for help to try
    to figure out how to solve a problem.
        These are important changes in the way our Government relates to
    people. But I have to tell you that what is going on in America today is
    more than just whether this administration is achieving things that are
    or are not known about. This is a period of deep and profound change in
    the whole world and in this country, the way we work, the way we live,
    the conditions in which we raise our children, the opportunities
    available to us, and the challenges confronting us. They're different.
    And all of us are the product of our own experiences. I tell everybody
    that works at the White House all the time, especially young people who
    see things they don't understand, I keep telling everybody we all see
    the world through the prism of our own experience. Even our imaginations
    are limited by what we have known and felt and seen.

    [[Page 932]]

        And yet, all these things are happening around us, some utterly
    wonderful and some utterly horrible that go beyond our ability even to
    imagine a resolution of. A lot of good things, the end of the cold war,
    the growth of the information age, the fact that a kid in the most
    remote mountain school in Arkansas can now hook into an Internet which
    will pull information out of a library in Australia, just for example--
    now, these are wonderful things. And we see all these things, and it's
    just staggering, it's so wonderful. We see a lot of our old problems
    appear to be getting better. The crime rate as a whole is dropping in
    almost every major city in America. That's the good news. And I could
    give you 50 other examples of good news. We had the biggest expansion of
    trade opportunities in our country in the last 2 years that we have had
    in a generation, maybe ever.
        But underneath that, it seems that every opportunity has within it
    the possibility of something new going wrong. Crime rate goes down, but
    the arbitrary rate of violence among teenagers goes up, giving us
    chilling feelings about what the crime rate might be like in 10 or 15
    years. And more and more and more young kids are just being kind of left
    alone out there to raise themselves, struggling to figure out what to
    do, stuck in home environments, community environments, and school
    environments that aren't likely to help them to turn around the
    challenges they face.
        All this wonderful technology and this easily accessible information
    has its dark underside. You can get on the Internet now and tap into one
    of these fanatic extremists, and they will explain to you how you too
    can make a bomb just like the one that blew up the Federal building in
    Oklahoma City. The explosion of technology means that a radical
    religious group in Japan can figure out how to get a little bitty vial
    of gas and walk into a subway and break it open and kill a bunch of
    totally innocent people and put hundreds of others in the hospital.
        So you see the point I'm trying to make: There is so much good in
    the world, so much new possibility; but the Scripture tells us that the
    darkness that is in the human soul will be with us until the end of
    time, and those dark forces are finding new expressions as well. And
    we're all sitting around here trying to figure out how to make sense of
    this and what to do, so that what is really going on in Washington,
    which is confusing to people, is not much different than what's going on
    inside a lot of people's heads, which is confusing to people. And it's
    because it is really new.
        I am proud of the fact that this administration negotiated
    agreements, which means that there are no nuclear weapons pointed at the
    children of Arkansas since the dawn of the nuclear age. I'm proud of
    that. But the paradox is--let me just give you the paradox--the paradox
    is a year or so ago, Hillary and I went to Riga, Latvia, to celebrate
    the withdrawal of Russian troops there for the first time since before
    World War II, tens of thousands of people in the street weeping with
    joy, loving America. A poll just came out and said that Bill Clinton was
    the most popular politician in Latvia. I'm trying to figure out how to
    get on the ballot there, give them some electoral votes. [Laughter]
        But then we go into--it was a wonderful survey. It wasn't me; I was
    America. It didn't have anything to do with me; I was the United States.
    But then we go behind closed doors into a meeting, and the first thing
    they ask me for is an FBI office. Why? Because when you rip away the
    iron hand of communism and you take out the Russian army--there is this
    huge port, the largest city in Northern Europe that most people couldn't
    even find on a map here, that they're now terrified will become a great
    transit point for drug trafficking and organized crime of all kinds. The
    most popular thing we've done in Russia in the last year is not
    dismantling the nuclear weapons, it's opening an FBI office in Moscow.
    Why? Because they got rid of communism, and they didn't have things like
    the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Securities and Exchange
    Commission, so within no time at all, half of their financial
    institutions were controlled by organized crime.
        I say this to make a point. We have to go back deep inside now to
    our basic values and our basic institutions. And the debates we are
    having in Washington now are over fundamental things that we used to
    take for granted.
        When I was Governor here, in all the years until the last year when
    I ran for President, we only had an unemployment rate below the national
    average one month, one month. A lot of my legislators are out there.
    They remember how we struggled with that, but we had a consensus. We
    disagreed on the details, and we fought at election time, but there was
    a general consensus that if we made our State more at-

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    tractive economically and that if we continued to invest in the skills
    of our people, that in the end that strategy would be rewarded. And it
    might take a decade to turn it around, but it would be rewarded.
        And I'm convinced that everybody in this room, in addition to the
    great leadership we have in our State today, played a role in the fact
    that we have an unemployment rate below the national average today. It
    did not happen overnight. It's all of you who are entrepreneurs, all of
    you who built your own companies, all of you who came in here and
    invested in our State from beyond our State's borders, sometimes from
    beyond our Nation's borders. It happened--being driven in a direction.
        But we basically accepted fundamental assumptions. A lot of that is
    out the window now. And I want you to try to understand what we're going
    through and why sometimes it doesn't seem to make sense when you see it
    over the airwaves. We are debating now really first principles in
    Washington. For example, there's a significant number of people in
    Congress who believe all of our problems are personal and cultural in
    nature, and if everybody would just wake up tomorrow and behave
    themselves, we wouldn't have any problems, and therefore, we don't need
    the Government to do anything, whatever the Government does will only
    make it worse. And if we just give you the money back, everything would
    be fine, because all of our problems are personal and cultural.
        Now, at a certain level that is true, isn't it? I mean, no matter
    what we do with the government in Arkansas or Washington, if people
    won't behave themselves and do right and make the most of their own
    lives, nobody can do that for you. That's something you have to do for
    yourselves. At some point, no matter how much adversity people face,
    some people make it, and some don't. And it's their responsibility. On
    the other hand, if you play the odds, you know that really successful
    communities, States, and nations do the best they can to make sure that
    everybody has the best chance to make the most of their own lives.
        I don't see it that way; I don't think that it's either--that it's
    an either/or thing, that all of our problems are personal or cultural on
    the one hand or political or economic on the other. I think the answer
    is both. But because things are changing and people are confused, the
    extreme sides of the debate are really being argued out all over again,
    just as they were literally decades ago at the beginning of this century
    when the excesses of the industrial revolution were being felt.
        Let me give you another example leading from that. A debate--we
    never had that debate in Arkansas. We never saw any inconsistency
    between fighting teenage pregnancy on the one hand and trying to get
    more responsibility and investing more money in preschool education on
    the other. The idea was both, right?
        Give you another example--a lot of people feel, flowing from the
    first debate, that since the Government only messes things up, the
    fundamental responsibility of the Government is to maintain national
    defense, cut taxes, and balance the budget as quickly as possible
    without regard to the other consequences of what's being done. They
    honestly believe this. This is not a--I'm being, I think, fair and
    accurate.
        Then there are others who feel that the budget deficit is a terrible
    thing but not the only deficit the country has; and that if we don't
    educate our kids and if we don't at least take care of our fundamental
    obligations to the elderly people on Medicare who don't have enough
    money to live on as it is, that the country will come apart at the seams
    more; and that we have certain common responsibilities. And some people
    think that if we never balance the budget, it's better to keep investing
    that money.
        But I don't see it that way. I think that we ought to balance the
    budget, because we never had a permanent deficit before 12 years ago--I
    mean, 12 years before I took office--we haven't had a balanced budget
    since '69. But in the seventies, all of you will remember we had all
    that stagflation. Oil prices were going crazy, and the reasons for the
    deficits were largely localized and--we never had a built-in deficit
    every year, year-in and year-out, in this country's history until 1981.
    And we've taken it down by a trillion dollars over a 7-year period since
    I've been in office.
        We ought to balance the budget. Next year--we'll be seeing more
    money on interest on the debt next year than we will spend on national
    defense. The budget would be balanced this year, right now, because of
    the cuts we've already made, were it not for the interest we have to pay
    just in the 12 years before I showed up up there. That's how big a
    problem it is. It erodes our competitive position in world markets. It
    drives our incomes down. And it under-

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    mines our ability to borrow to invest in the future.
        You know, there's a difference between borrowing money to build a
    business or buy a house and borrowing money to go out to eat tonight.
    There's a big difference. And we've got it all mixed up. You can't tell
    what we're doing now. So we need to do that.
        But we also have to realize--I think that we do have more than one
    deficit. And at the end--in this information age and this global
    economy, for us to be cutting education is like cutting defense at the
    height of the cold war. I don't think it makes any sense.
        But there is this ideological debate over--and the third big debate,
    maybe the most important one of all, is the one that--there are people
    who honestly believe that if you think all of our problems are personal
    and cultural and moral, if you believe the Government can't do anything
    right but mess up a one-car parade, the only thing it's supposed to do
    is national defense, cut taxes, and balance the budget, then a lot of
    the same people believe that anyone who disagrees with them are
    intrinsically a threat to the Republic and anything you do to beat them
    or put them in a bad light is all right, so that the politics of
    demonization, the meanness quotient of our politics, the distortion
    level of it has increased quite a bit in recent years.
        Now, I think it's good to fight and argue, but I think we're around
    here after way over 200 years because, no matter how the arguments came
    out, we kept this thing going in the middle of the road and going
    forward, not too far left, not too far right, but always forward. And
    that's why we're still around.
        But I'm just telling you these are fundamental debates that are
    going on so that it's no longer the kind of normal debate you see in
    Washington. Instead of the range of difference being like this, it's
    more like this now. And it's because of all these changes that are going
    on in the country and in the world.
        Let me just give you some specific examples because I think it's a
    phony debate. I think we need to worry about going forward, now how far
    we can get out on these extremes. I think we need to return to our basic
    values. You know, go back and read the Constitution, the Declaration of
    Independence. We got together as a Nation because we thought it was
    self-evident that all people were endowed by God with certain
    inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of
    happiness and that it was necessary to form governments to pursue these
    ends.
        And our Constitution was created with the flexibility to enable us
    to change to meet the challenges of new times and with the iron-clad
    guarantees of the Bill of Rights that there were limits beyond which
    Government could not go in infringing upon the freedoms of individuals.
    And all of our debates, if we'll get back to those basic things and the
    facts, will lead us to a practical solution that will push us ahead. But
    I'll just give you some examples.
        The family leave law: There were people who were ideologically
    opposed to the family leave law because they said Government shouldn't
    tell business anything. But the truth is that most parents are also
    workers today. Whether you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, whether
    it's a single-parent household or a two-parent household, most parents
    are also workers. If you believe that the family is the most important
    institution in our society, on the one hand, and you also believe that
    if we're not competitive globally, on the other, we're in deep trouble,
    then this country has no more important objective than enabling people
    to not have to make a false choice. We must enable people to be
    successful parents and successful workers. That's why I was for the
    family leave law.
        But not everybody feels this way. That's big debate up there. And
    when you hear this rhetoric you have to understand that. There are a lot
    of people--there are honest people who honestly believe that it was a
    wrong thing to do.
        It sure didn't hurt the economy. We've had 6.7 million new jobs
    since it passed, record numbers of new business formations in 1993 and
    1994. So all those predictions that it was going to hurt the economy or
    be burdensome were wrong. It's an ideological debate.
        Second, the environment: Most people, I believe, here think that we
    have to be able to grow the economy in a way that preserves the
    environment so our grandchildren and our grandchildren's grandchildren
    will still have Arkansas to live in. And a big part of what we define of
    Arkansas is that. And most of the time when we fought about the
    environment when we were--when I was Governor, we fought over how to
    achieve that goal and whether the Government was going too far, the
    regu-

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    lations should be done in a certain way or another way. But we were
    fighting over how to achieve that goal.
        That is not the debate up there anymore. The debate is far more
    fundamental. There are people who believe, ``Well, it's a nice thing to
    preserve the environment, but in the end nobody will ever really let it
    go down the tubes. And the Government will mess it up. Get the
    Government out of it. And if the environment is abused in the short run,
    so what. Somehow the planet will regenerate itself.''
        Let me tell you--a committee of Congress just the other day voted to
    eliminate all controls on offshore oil drilling in the United States,
    all of them, everywhere, without regard to any evidence of how much oil
    is there or whether it's worth the risk or whether there's any evidence
    of safe drilling or what the differences in the areas are or what would
    happen to tourism or what would happen to retirement or what would
    happen to anything. Why? Because they're ideologically opposed to the
    Government having any kind of partnership at all with the private sector
    on this.
        And that's just one example. But I'm telling you, folks, it is an
    economic as well as an environmental issue. We're on our way to
    Portland, Oregon, the Vice President and I are, when we leave you. And
    we're dealing with a terrible set of problems up there, where a lot of
    the timber people want to cut more timber in the forest, and because the
    waters have been more polluted they're losing the salmon. And that's
    just one example.
        I believe we've got to find a way to do both. Our State has used the
    Nature Conservancy more than any State in the country, I think, to buy
    land to set aside, because, as Will Rogers said, ``They ain't making no
    more of it.'' And the people who supported it were the business people
    in our State. This is a fundamental debate.
        I'll give you a third example: Dr. Foster. Al Gore alluded to him.
    Dr. Foster. There are people in Washington, and they were--they had
    enough influence to keep his nomination from coming to a vote--who
    believe that he is unfit for any public office ever because he performed
    a few legal abortions, and therefore, he should never be considered for
    any public service and if the people who wanted to be President in the
    other party knew what was good for them, they would vote no. And since
    we had enough votes to confirm him, they could not even let him come to
    a vote.
        Now, here's a guy, unlike the rest of--most of the rest of us--who's
    actually done something to try to reduce teen pregnancy, to try to
    reduce the number of abortions, and to try to tell kids on a consistent,
    disciplined way, who don't have other role models to tell them, that
    they should not have sex before they're married. Here's a guy who's
    actually gone out and organized a program that was recognized not by me
    but by my predecessor, President Bush, in an organized, disciplined
    fashion to tell young people, ``I don't care what kind of problems
    you've got, I don't care what your peer pressures are. I don't care what
    you're going through. You have no business having sex. You cannot
    promote teen pregnancy, and you ought not to do it to your life. You
    ought to stay off drugs, stay in school, and do a good job with your
    life.'' Here's a guy who's ridden country dusty roads in Alabama and
    brought health care to people that they never could have gotten
    otherwise. Here's a man who's delivered thousands of babies, and had at
    least one of his former patients stand up and publicly say, ``I was
    going to have an abortion, and he talked me out of it. He talked me out
    of it.''
        In other words, here's a guy who has actually lived what other folks
    say they believe in. But in this sort of new world that's taken hold up
    here, he wasn't politically correct and pure enough to serve as Surgeon
    General, even though he had actually done the things they say they wish
    to do. This is a profound debate. And so they were even willing to abuse
    the filibuster process.
        Clarence Thomas could have been kept off the Supreme Court if the
    Democrats had said, ``Well, we don't have enough votes to beat him, but
    we sure got enough votes to keep him from coming to a vote.'' But they
    said, ``No, that would be morally wrong. The President has a right to
    make an appointment. The committee has a right to make the
    recommendation. And the Senate ought to vote.'' But not in this new
    world. In this new world that are no rules except winning and losing,
    because one side is all good and the other side is all bad. If we had
    had that attitude for the last 219 years, we wouldn't be here today. We
    wouldn't be here today.
        So what is to become of us as a people? I ran for this job because I
    wanted to do two things, two big things: I wanted to restore the

    [[Page 936]]

    American dream; I wanted to get the economy going; I wanted to lift
    stagnant wages and get the jobs coming back into the economy and fix the
    education system so people could actually get out of this awful two-
    decade slump we've been in where even when the economic numbers get
    better, nobody ever gets a raise. But I also wanted to bring the country
    together.
        Now, the second issue is even more important than the first. And it
    can be a very good thing that we are having these big debates over
    fundamental questions. But I want you to understand just how deep and
    fundamental these debates are.
        If you look at the budget debate here, I applaud the Republicans for
    being for a balanced budget, and I hope all the Democrats will be, for
    the reasons I just explained. It is not right for our country to have a
    permanent deficit. I wasn't for the amendment because we ought to have
    the right to borrow when we need to. But we shouldn't be in a system of
    permanent deficits.
        But my budget reflects what I just talked to you about. My budget
    reflects the idea that we need to keep going forward. So I believe that
    I'm right. I think we should balance the budget but increase our
    investment in education. I think we have to cut the rate at which we're
    increasing health expenditures but not so much that we're going to close
    down rural hospitals or urban hospitals and not so much that we're going
    to burden elderly people who don't have enough to live on as it is and
    can't afford to pay a whole lot more for their health care and shouldn't
    be asked to give up health care. I believe that we ought to cut spending
    on welfare but not so much that we don't invest in child care and basic
    training so we can actually move people from welfare to work instead of
    just throwing poor kids in the street. The objective of welfare reform
    should be to help people, again, become good workers and good parents,
    not just to save money.
        I believe any tax cut we have should be so small it doesn't require
    us to cut these other things and should be focused on the people who
    need it to help them raise their kids and educate them. That's why I
    proposed a tax deduction for the cost of education after high school. I
    think that's important.
        And I know if you cut the tax cut back and focus it on education and
    childrearing and take 10 years instead of 7 to balance the budget, then
    you don't have to cut education, and you don't have to imperil Medicare
    and Medicaid and you don't have to go from a welfare reform plan that
    should be tough on work but good to children to one that doesn't have
    any work and sticks it to kids. It moves us ahead. But it's not an
    ideologically extreme position. It says we have two things we want to
    do: balance the budget and bring our country together and raise incomes
    and move forward. And we can do them both. And that's what's going on up
    there now. These are big, fundamental questions.
        I just want to say, in closing, that a lot of what's happened to you
    here, a lot of the outrageous, outrageous things that have been said
    about our State and a lot of the licking that you've taken is a product
    of the confusion and the disorientation of the times and the idea that
    there are no rules and people just sort of flailing around trying to win
    another one to get to tomorrow. That is not what made this country
    great. That is not what made this country great, and it's not what you
    taught me to do here.
        And I just want you to know, the greatest thing that ever happens to
    me is when I get to be all of you. Hillary and I were in Ukraine for the
    50th anniversary of the end of World War II. And I gave a speech at the
    university there, and there were, I don't know, 60,000 people or
    something in the streets. And then everywhere we drove, they were four
    or five deep waving American flags. And I met all these old veterans
    from World War II who fought with the Americans then, telling me
    everything they did and showing me all their medals, you know. They
    weren't waving at me, they were waving at America. They were waving at
    America.
        You know, everything the Vice President said--I'm glad I have a
    chance to play a major role in what we're doing in the Middle East and
    what we're doing in Northern Ireland and what's happening in Haiti and
    the deneutralization of the world--I'm glad about all that. But the only
    reason I had that chance is because for a little while in our country's
    history I get to become all of us, the United States. And I am telling
    you I've been there.
        There is no country in the world as well positioned as we are for
    the next century. There is no country--[applause]--because we do have a
    limited Government that allows the private sector to flourish and
    entrepreneurs to do well,

    [[Page 937]]

    but we have enough ability to work together to solve common problems
    that we can do that. We have the potential for the right balance and the
    right flexibility.
        There is no country that is any better positioned because of our
    terrific geographic and economic and racial, ethnic and religious
    diversity. But unless we learn to how to recover both the sense of
    personal responsibility and a sense of appreciation for people who are
    different from us, unless we learn how to resolve our differences
    without demonizing people and how to look toward the long run, we could
    squander the most colossal opportunity our country has ever had.
        Because of the way technology works in the 21st century, Arkansas
    can not only have a lower unemployment rate than the rest of the
    country, our people can actually enjoy a standard of living equal to
    that of any people in the world. And that can happen everywhere. But it
    depends upon whether we can go back to these first principles and go
    forward with a sense of balance and mutual respect.
        At the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said, ``We cannot be
    enemies. We must be friends.'' That is what I say to you. And when you
    get angry about things you think are happening and when things happen
    you don't understand, just remember, this is still the greatest country
    in the world. It is still the greatest country in the world.
        Stand up and fight for what you believe in. But fight against people
    who want to throw this country way off the track. And fight for the idea
    that we can pull together. After that Oklahoma City bombing, America was
    shaken to its very core. But it threw some of the meanness out of all of
    us. And it made all of us reexamine where we are. And our sort of heart
    and our common sense were reasserted. After that wonderful young Air
    Force Captain Scott O'Grady survived 6 hideous days in Bosnia and was
    rescued by a brilliant American operation, we were all exhilarated, and
    that put some of the energy back in all of us.
        What I want you to know is to get to tomorrow, we have to have the
    heart and the openness to other people that we found in the tragedy of
    Oklahoma City and the self-confidence and energy that we had when that
    boy came home. And if we do that, we're going to be just fine.
        That is the issue in 1996. That is what you're investing in. It's my
    last election. I'll never run for anything else. [Laughter] You'll never
    have to come to one of these again. You'll never be dunned again.
    [Laughter] You'll never have to stand in line again if you don't want
    to. But just know this time, this time, the stakes are the highest they
    have ever been, higher than they were in '92 because of where we have
    moved and where we can go. It is worth the fight. And I can't make it
    without you, but together I think we will.
        God bless you, and thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:35 p.m. in the William J. Clinton
    Ballroom at the Excelsior Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Maurice
    Mitchell, legal counsel, Arkansas Democratic Party; luncheon organizers
    James L. ``Skip'' Rutherford, Jay Dunn, Doug Hatterman, Merle Peterson,
    and Jimmy Red Jones; Truman Arnold, acting national finance chair,
    Democratic National Committee; and Gov. Jim Guy Tucker of Arkansas and
    his wife, Betty.