    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
    [May 1, 1995]
    [Pages 618-624]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Women Voters Project Kickoff Luncheon
    May 1, 1995

        That may be the best introduction I ever received, and if I had
    really good judgment, I'd just sit down. [Laughter]
        Thank you, Ellen Malcolm, Senator Mikulski, and Congresswoman Sheila
    Jackson-Lee, and to the Members of Congress who are out in the audience,
    my longtime friend Ann Richards. I met Ann Richards over 20 years ago.
    And I think she was living in a place called Lacy Lake View. And it was
    easy for me to see even then, and even by Texas standards, she was a
    little bit larger than life. [Laughter] Humor and empathy, grit and
    grace, courage and decency, I respect her, and I envy her. Her jokes are
    always better than mine. [Laughter] And you'll all remember that she
    delivered one of the best political lines ever. It perfectly captured
    the mood of America. Do you remember? ``Pass the Doritos, Mario.''
    Didn't you always want to do one of those commercials? I did. [Laughter]

    [[Page 619]]

        I'm also indebted to Ann Richards for another reason. She and
    Hillary went out to dinner last night, and by apparent happenstance,
    Julia Child was eating at the same restaurant. So the people who were
    running the show decided that they should have everything Julia was
    having, plus whatever they ordered. According to my wife, anyway, they
    had a 10-course, 4-hour meal, after which they were wheeled out on
    gurneys. [Laughter] The good news is, I got home from New York last
    night about 1:30 a.m., and it was perfectly easy to get Hillary up to
    talk with me. [Laughter]
        I want to say a special word of appreciation to Ellen Malcolm, for
    her vision and her work, her phenomenal energy have played an
    immeasurable role in electing more women to high public office in this
    country than would have been conceivable before she began her important
    work.
        I thank her for her recitation of the work that our administration
    has done. We have tried to involve women at an unprecedented level. I
    noticed when I started this administration, people were, even in some of
    the great establishment newspapers, they were always criticizing me for
    trying to have a diverse administration, as if there were something
    wrong with it. Well, I never had any quotas, and evidence of that is, we
    still only have only 44 percent of my appointees are women, but that's
    about twice as good as anybody else ever did, and I'm proud of that.
        But I have always believed we could achieve excellence with outreach
    and effort, without quotas, and I always thought we had kind of a stupid
    quota system before. It was just never stated. There were just some
    things that weren't women's work. Now, that's a quota system, and we
    paid for it. And our country's better off now that we're scrapping it.
        In the beginning, they used to criticize the judicial appointments
    process. But after 2 years, mercy, they looked up, and we'd named more
    judges in that time period than previous administrations and more women
    and minorities than the three previous Presidents, Democratic and
    Republican, combined. But the thing that was interesting and important
    to me is, we had the highest percentage of people rated well-qualified
    by the American Bar Association of any administration since they'd been
    keeping records.
        Under the leadership of Erskine Bowles, who is now my Deputy Chief
    of Staff, the Small Business Administration increased loans to women
    businesses by over 80 percent in one year. And they did it without
    reducing the number of loans to white males, and they did it without
    making a single unqualified loan.
        We can do this, folks. The old system was the quota system. We need
    a system where everybody in America has a chance to serve and live up to
    the fullest of their God-given abilities.
        Women's health is a terribly important issue to me. Ellen talked
    about it. My grandmother and my mother were working women and nurses.
    And this morning Hillary kicked off a new chapter in our campaign
    against breast cancer. The most important issue in women's health this
    week is the need to raise our voices in support of Dr. Henry Foster to
    be our Surgeon General.
        He is a good man. He is a good doctor. He has spent his entire life
    delivering babies, bringing health care to people who wouldn't otherwise
    have it, training doctors to go out and help give health care to people
    who otherwise wouldn't have it, and spearheading a nationally
    televised--nationally recognized program to reduce teenage pregnancy. It
    received one of President Bush's Point of Light awards. Henry Foster is
    a pro-life, pro-choice doctor who deserves to be confirmed as Surgeon
    General. Henry Foster's record should be seen in the lives of thousands
    of babies that he has helped come into this world in a healthy way and
    the people he has tried to educate and the people he has tried to help.
    And he deserves to be more than a political football in the emerging
    politics of this season.
        We are on the verge of a new century and a difficult and different
    time when everything is changing and everything, including our politics,
    is somewhat unpredictable. As we look into the next century, there's a
    lot to be happy about: the end of the cold war, the receding of the
    conventional nuclear threat, the emergence of the information age, and
    all the exciting possibilities of the global economy. But the great
    challenge of this age and the great challenge I predict to you of the
    next 50 is that all the forces that are lifting us up and opening
    unlimited possibilities to our children and our grandchildren, all the
    forces that are driving us toward a more integrated and cooperative
    world have a dark underside of disintegration. Because of so many of the
    things that are happening, we

    [[Page 620]]

    are lifting people up and seeing people beat down at the same time.
        There is great economic division in all the advanced countries. Why?
    Because more than ever before, education determines income and future
    prospects. So there is a great fault line in the great American middle
    class today which is responsible for a lot of the anxieties and a lot of
    the political issues and a lot of the divisiveness in our country. Those
    that have a good education are being lifted up; those that don't are
    being left behind.
        More than half--more than half--of the male workers in this country
    are working a longer work week for a lower wage than they were making 10
    years ago. That is a phenomenally important fact, not just economically
    but psychologically. All over America, men come home from work at night
    and sit down across the table with their families and know they're
    working as hard as they can, and they feel less secure, and they wonder
    if they've let their families down.
        We have to do things that will change that. We have to bridge the
    economic divide and unleash the potential of all of our people. And the
    key issue there is education, constant, unrelenting dedication to
    excellence in education for a lifetime. It is necessary if we're going
    to bring this country back together.
        We have these profound social divisions in our country. We have so
    much diversity now it is really a--it's a gold mine for us. Ann Richards
    took the lead in trying to get the Congress to ratify the NAFTA
    agreement because she knew that we had to be more closely connected with
    other countries in the world and that our ethnic and racial diversity is
    a gold mine. But when people are frightened, it's easy to focus that
    fright on people who look different than we do or who think differently
    than we do about certain things. So there is this great social division:
    Will our diversity become a source of unity and strength, or will it be
    a source of our undoing?
        And then there are deeper moral divisions that I want to talk about
    today which are most clearly manifested in the varying attitudes in this
    country toward violence. And it's something we're all living with in a
    very personal and human way because of the way we have shared the grief
    and outrage of Oklahoma City.
        The condition of women in all three of these areas is profoundly
    important. And the response of women to all of these changes is
    important. As Ellen said, we've made a good beginning to try to help
    deal with these problems, to strengthen families and support incomes
    with the Family and Medical Leave Act. The earned-income credit this
    year will give the average family of four with an income of under
    $25,000 an average tax cut of $1,000. We have set in motion a plan under
    the leadership of Secretary Shalala to immunize all the kids in this
    country under the age of 2 by 1996. Those are important things.
        This Congress of the last 2 years voted virtually to fully fund the
    Women, Infants and Children program to make sure that child nutrition
    and care for pregnant women was on the front burner. We have had
    dramatic expansion in our education efforts, from Head Start to
    apprenticeships for young people who don't go to college but want good
    jobs, to more affordable college loans for millions of people, to the
    national service program which has enabled young people to serve their
    communities and earn money to go to college. All these things are
    terribly important.
        We have a future economic agenda and a families agenda that involves
    raising the minimum wage, which I hope you will all support. Two-thirds
    of all the beneficiaries of an increase in the minimum wage will be
    working women, working women.
        There was a remarkable show on one of our television stations up
    here the other night, a news program on a little town south of here that
    had a lot of minimum wage workers. And they went and interviewed a woman
    working in a factory. And the news reporter said, ``Now, you know, your
    employer says that if the minimum wage goes up, that they'll either have
    to put more money in machines or they'll lose business. In any case, you
    might lose your job if the minimum wage is raised.'' And she looked at
    him and said, ``Honey, I'll take my chances''--[laughter]--which I
    thought was the best one-line response I've seen on the news in a long
    time. If we don't raise the minimum wage, next year it will be at a 40-
    year low. That is not my idea of what America should look like as we
    move into the global economy.
        We ought to have welfare reform, but it ought to be the right kind
    of welfare reform. We shouldn't be punishing people for mistakes in the
    past. We should be giving them opportunity and imposing responsibility
    as they move into

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    the future so people can succeed as successful workers and successful
    parents. It ought to be a work-based, parent-based strong program that
    lifts people up, not puts them down basically just as a guise to save
    money. That is very important. You should be involved in the welfare
    reform effort.
        And we should continue to invest more in education, not less. I say
    to the Congress over and over, we have two deficits, not one. Yeah,
    we've got a budget deficit, but we've also got an education deficit. And
    if we try to solve the budget deficit at the expense of the education
    deficit, we will be cutting off our nose to spite our face, because we
    will lower the incomes of America and their capacity to pay taxes. So
    there are things we can do to deal with the economic divide where the
    fault line is education. And we are working to do things that will bring
    us together and to lessen these social tensions by lifting up everybody
    in their work and in their family life.
        But we have to say that America has special problems which we have
    all begun to think more about because of the heartbreak of Oklahoma
    City, and that is violence. It has many forms. We live with it in our
    streets and our schools and our homes, where we work, where we live,
    where we play. Yes, we see it visibly if there is an action against a
    clinic where legal abortions are performed. But we also see it in some
    of our churches and synagogues. I never will forget being in Brooklyn
    one day with Congressman Schumer and driving by a synagogue with a big
    swastika on it--in the United States in 1992.
        We also see it, unfortunately, in our families. Violence can do a
    lot of damage in a country and it certainly has here. In Oklahoma City,
    we suffered a terrible wound because it was an act of terrorism. And as
    we mourn the dead and heal the injured, console the grieving and begin
    the rebuilding, we must also spare no effort to bring to justice those
    responsible. We must also understand that even punishing the guilty will
    not be enough if we cannot protect the innocent in the future. So I say
    to you my fellow Americans: I take a back seat to no one in my devotion
    to the Constitution. But we can protect the Constitution and our freedom
    and be tougher on terrorism in America, and we must.
        I have sent to Congress a large number of suggestions that will
    strengthen our hand in dealing with this issue. And again, I urged them
    to act on it and act on it without delay. The stories you do not read in
    the newspaper are those that are most important--the bombs that don't go
    off, the schemes that are thwarted before they succeed--and we must be
    better and better and better at that. Whether terrorism is hatched
    abroad or within our borders, we must be better.
        But we must also stand up against those who say that somehow this is
    all right, this is somehow a political act, people who say, ``I love my
    country, but I hate my Government.'' These people, who do they think
    they are, saying that their Government has stamped out human freedom?
        I don't know if there's another country in the world that would, by
    law, protect the right of a lot of these groups to say what they want to
    say to each other over the shortwave radio or however else they want to
    say it, to assemble over the weekend and do whatever they want to do,
    and to bear arms, which today means more than the right to keep and bear
    arms, it may mean the right to keep and bear an arsenal of artillery. Is
    there a--who are they to say they have no freedom in this country? Other
    countries do not permit that.
        I plead with you, do not lose your concentration on this issue. This
    is a big issue. Remember what I said earlier: The forces that are
    lifting up the world have a dark underside. What makes the global
    society work? What makes the information age work? Openness. Free
    movement. Low barriers to the transfer of people, ideas, and
    information. What does that mean? You can have a terrorist network on
    the Internet exchanging information about building bombs. What does that
    mean? You can build the bomb in one State and get in your truck and
    drive somewhere else freely and without being interrupted. What does it
    mean? It's easier to get into other countries where you want to make
    mischief. The open society is at more risk to the forces of organized
    evil.
        Don't forget about the people in Oklahoma City. Don't forget about
    their families. Don't forget about what they need to rebuild, and don't
    forget about what we need to try to prevent future incidents of this
    kind. Do not lose your interest in this issue as it fades into the past.
    We have a lot of work to do.
        Let me also say that I hope that this incident will focus us a
    little more on the general problem of the extraordinary level of
    violence in

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    our society, to find its common roots as well as to understand the
    differences in the different kinds of violence we have. I have to say
    this, and maybe it's an old-fashioned view, but I believe that it is
    innate in human nature that there is the capacity to do wrong and to
    harm others. And we are all balanced in different ways, subject to
    different forces. There are always excuses or reasons that can be given.
    I'm sorry for whatever terrible thing happened to the suspect in the
    Oklahoma City bombing case, but we have to stop making excuses and start
    thinking about what we can do to build a responsible, nonviolent
    society.
        There is a lot of good news out there. I was in New York yesterday,
    where the crime rate has been going down for several years and where
    this year the murder rate is so far--knock on wood--more than a third
    below what it was last year. And this is happening all over the country.
    But violent crime is much higher today than it was a generation ago.
    There's been rising incidence of sexual assaults, muggings, homicides,
    some of it caused by street gangs which themselves systematically
    terrorize law-abiding citizens in their area of operation, first in our
    inner cities and now spreading more and more to suburbs and to small
    towns.
        Increasingly, the victims of crime and the culprits alike are young
    people, even children. Today, believe it or not, there are thousands of
    children who stay home from school every day in America because they're
    afraid that violence will await them there. And even more children go
    and learn about fear in their classrooms and hallways.
        Sometimes the sole motivation for crime is hate or racial prejudice
    or extreme ideology. We've seen people killed and others wounded only
    because they were working at clinics. In the last decades we've been
    forced to acknowledge the full extent of reality about which we had long
    remained in denial which may not be able to be explained in terms of
    hate, racial prejudice, or extremist ideology, and that is the epidemic
    violence visited on women and children, often in the home.
        I have known about this problem for a long time. I understand how it
    rips up family. Hillary and I were regular visitors at a shelter for
    battered women and their children when we lived at home. I have talked
    with abused children. I know that this problem of domestic violence is a
    difficult one. We have begun to be aggressive with it. America must be
    aggressive with it.
        We see how much of crime among our young people is still due to
    drugs. And it's shocking to me that, for reasons that are not entirely
    understandable, as the economy has gotten better but some places have
    been left behind, casual drug use among some of our young people is
    going up again. This is a bad thing. We must speak against it. It will
    lead to more violence.
        If you look at the profile of every penitentiary in the country,
    every Governor in America, including Ann Richards and Bill Clinton,
    every Governor in the country in the last 15 years has given speech
    after speech after speech about how tough we were on crime and how many
    prison cells we've built. If you go behind those bars, you'll see them
    just full of people who basically had two problems: They had no
    education, and they were either addicted to drugs or alcohol. And so we
    continue to pay the price in violence and wrecked lives.
        All of you have cared a great deal about making democracy work for
    all Americans. And you've done a good thing. And when we change our
    economic policy, when we broaden the doors of opportunities for people
    and permit more women and others who have been traditionally denied a
    chance to live up to their fullest capacities a chance to do it, we're
    all better off, and we're all strengthened. But when this country has
    the plague of violence we endure in so many ways, we are all weakened.
        The most tragic thing outside the human loss in Oklahoma City itself
    to me was seeing the absolute terror that inflicted the lives of
    millions of American children who felt vulnerable, who felt that they
    somehow no longer understood what the rules were, didn't know if their
    parents could protect them, didn't know if right and wrong would reign
    in America.
        So I say to you, we need to take a serious look at this whole issue
    of violence. We tried to address it in the crime bill last year with
    more police on the street because we know that that prevents crime, with
    the assault weapons ban and the Brady bill, with stronger sentences and
    prevention programs for our young people, and programs for drug
    education and prevention and treatment.
        We also understand that poverty breeds crime. That's why I worked so
    hard on the earned-income tax credit, to say that if you do work you
    shouldn't be still in poverty. We ought

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    to reward work. The real heroes in this country today are people who are
    being pounded by this global economy, who are living in neighborhoods
    that are difficult, and still get up every day and go to work and raise
    their children the best they can, obey the law, pay their taxes, and try
    to make things work. They deserve economic policies and security
    policies that give them a chance to be honored for their work.
        I do want to say again, though, we have to try to look deeper at the
    cause of the violence. Ellen mentioned that I recently appointed Bonnie
    Campbell, of Iowa, to direct our Office of Violence Against Women. And
    one of her most important jobs will be simply to educate the American
    people about the scope of this problem and what should be done and how
    to root it out. But our goal must be not just to punish people who do
    this but to stop it from happening in the first place, to change the
    spirit and the culture of America.
        Yesterday--or, excuse me, late last week, I met with Eileen Adams,
    another distinguished appointee at the Justice Department, who runs our
    Office of Victims Rights. And we honored people who spend all their time
    working with victims of crime. I met mothers who'd lost their children.
    I met a woman who had been victimized by a repeat sex offender who was
    released on parole, who molested her, poured gasoline over her body, set
    her afire, and left her to die. And this young girl--having literally
    had her body burned beyond recognition--and her brave mother have worked
    for more than a decade, after this child was maimed and blinded and
    burned almost beyond recognition, to put her life back together
    physically and spiritually. And now the mother and the daughter spend
    all their time trying to help victims of crime.
        We must address what is causing the United States to commit the
    whole range of violence that we see. And none of us can escape our
    responsibility. We have to say: What do we expect from individuals? And
    we're not going to tolerate the defense that somebody else made me do
    it. What will families have to do? What will community organizations
    have to do? What must the churches do? What must the Government do?
    Where have we been wrong? What must the media do? And what must the
    culture do, the influence centers in our culture, the entertainment
    industry, the sports industry?
        There have now been--the Vice President told me this morning before
    I left to come over here, there have now been 3,000 studies on the
    relationship between violent behavior and exposure to violence through
    entertainment in ways that desensitize people to it, and they all show
    that there is a connection.
        Now, that doesn't mean that we should have all movies and books
    without violence. This is a violent country. It's a part of real life.
    It doesn't mean they can't be exciting. But it does mean when we
    desensitize and deaden people to the reality of violence, we cannot be
    surprised when our children, who do not know right from wrong and are
    not as well developed as those of us who are older, have a desensitized
    reaction to their own conduct. So we must all say: What is our
    responsibility? We must all accept the fact that our words do have
    consequences. We must accept that.
        We must ask, without pointing the finger of blame necessarily, we
    say: Do you say things or do things that either reinforce violent
    behavior, encourage violent behavior, act as if at least it doesn't
    matter to you, or numb people to what it's really like? And what could
    we do to deal with this in a comprehensive way? We don't need to make
    this a political issue. We must not make it a partisan issue. But
    neither can anybody run and hide under the sheet and say, well, I didn't
    do this, that, or the other thing; therefore, what I did do was fine.
        This horrible thing that has happened to us in Oklahoma at least
    imposes on us a responsibility to all examine the roots of violence in
    this country. We need not be more violent than other countries. We need
    not abuse our freedom so cavalierly. We need not snuff out more lives.
    But above all, if we do this, we can't be selective. We can't condemn
    one act of violence and condone another. That would be like trying to
    put out a fire by just watering one room and leaving the others to burn.
        For too long, people, I think, have taken the easy way out and
    blamed violence only on the environment in which a person grows up.
    Well, that's, doubtless, true. But if that's true, why do most people
    who grow up in horrible environments turn out to be law-abiding
    citizens? Why do some people succeed against all the odds? Other people,
    because it lets them off the hook, just want to blame the individual and
    ignore the root causes. Well, if that's true, why are some groups of
    people so much more law abiding than others and so much less violent
    than others? We've got to set aside our pre-

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    conceptions and our ideological baggage. And I say again, we don't need
    partisanship here; we need to look at violence with new and fresh eyes.
        My administration has worked to make our country safer. It's worked
    to give more people the liberation of education. It's worked to make the
    economy stronger. And we can do more on all these fronts. But the thing
    that is driving violence in America is deeper than that, deeper than all
    these things.
        So I ask you to work on this, to work on this with me. Yes, continue
    your passion for the cause of violence against women and children. Yes,
    continue your passion for the proposition that people who only perform
    legally under the law should not have their places of business bombed.
        But be concerned about the political violence that makes people
    believe that they can literally claim to be political prisoners when
    they murder innocent children. And be concerned about the violence that
    grows out of our total insensitivity to the welfare of all these
    children who are growing up on the meanest streets in America. Be
    concerned about the violence that may at least be legitimized by the
    cultural forces and the daily words that all of us endure and sometimes
    enjoy.
        We all have a role in this. This is a big issue. It will not be
    solved overnight. But it will be hard enough, I will tell you again, it
    will be hard enough for us to combat the forces of disintegration and
    organized evil into the 21st century if we are at our best. If we are at
    our best, it will be hard enough. If we continue to be insensitive to
    the role all the forces in our society play to the environment in which
    we operate, it may be a battle we can't win.
        I honestly believe that the years ahead of us will be the most
    exciting, most productive, most rewarding years in all of human history,
    especially for people who historically have not been able to live up to
    the fullest of their capacity. But to do that, we must--we must--root
    out this scourge of darkness within our country, and we can do it.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:02 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the
    Washington Hilton at the EMILY's List 10th anniversary celebration. In
    his remarks, he referred to Ellen Malcolm, founder and president,
    EMILY's List, and Ann Richards, former Governor of Texas.