    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [February 11, 1996]
    [Pages 232-239]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Des Moines
    February 11, 1996

        Thank you so much. First let me thank all of you for making me feel
    so welcome. It was a wonderful feeling just to come into this room today
    and see you full of energy and commitment and conviction, and apparently
    pretty happy. I liked it, and I thank you.
        I want to thank President Ferrari, and your Young Democrats
    president, Sherry Desing, and

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    your student body president, Sandy Marshall, who met me outside, and all
    the people from Drake who have played any role in this. I want to thank
    the Knapp Center event staff. And I want to say a special word of thanks
    to the band, who played so well today and did such a good job. I thank
    Amber Schafer for her wonderful introduction and for embodying what a
    lot of this election is all about--your future and your hopes and your
    dreams.
        I thank Mayor Davis for being here. We've known each other a long
    time. I was thrilled when he got elected mayor, and I think he's doing a
    fine job for you, and I'm glad he's here. I want to thank two other
    Iowans, one of whom is not here and one of whom is, who have been a big
    part of our administration. The one who is absent is your former
    attorney general Bonnie Campbell. She directs our Office of Violence
    Against Women, and we are doing a good job finally bringing America's
    attention to the problems of domestic violence and violence against
    women. And I want to thank the other public servant in the Harkin
    family, Ruth Harkin, the President of the Overseas Private Investment
    Corporation, for doing a magnificent job in promoting our economic
    interests around the world. And finally let me say, Tom Harkin and I
    have been together all weekend and that's the third time I've heard him
    tell those jokes, and they get funnier every time he tells them.
    [Laughter]
        You know, if you do this as long as I have you have the privilege,
    sometimes the burden, of hearing a lot of people speak, watching a lot
    of people work. And I want every person in Iowa to know, whether you're
    a Democrat or a Republican or an independent, there is not a single,
    solitary soul in the Congress of the United States that every day works
    harder to do what he believes is right to the very core of his being
    than Tom Harkin of Iowa. And on some of the long, cold days and weeks of
    1995, it was immensely reassuring to have him in the Senate speaking up
    for what we believe is right.
        Let me say to all of you, I'm delighted to be here on the eve of the
    caucuses. I want you to go for all the reasons that Senator Harkin said.
    I have a selfish, entirely personal reason for wanting you to go. All my
    life, since I was a little boy, I've heard about the Iowa caucuses. I've
    waited for the returns to come in. In 1992, I couldn't seem to get many
    votes in the Iowa caucus. This is my last chance, and I would really
    like to do well. I would appreciate it if you would do that.
        Let me thank not only Amber but the other young students and their
    parents and their employers who met with me just a few moments ago when
    we discussed the work-study program as you were coming in here, because
    they really represent what this election is all about.
        You know, people descend on Iowa every 4 years and they try to
    discern what new development is going on in national politics, and that
    makes the election. That's what the election is all about. And this year
    I read all these columns and I see all this news coverage on whether the
    ads are more important than the grassroots campaigning, or the negative
    ads becoming more influential. Let me tell you something, folks: Every
    election is about you. Not us, not those of us who run, but those of
    you--this makes you the boss. This is about your responsibilities. This
    is about your opportunities. It's about your future. It's about your
    Nation. It's about what kind of country we're going to have. It is your
    election, and it's about you, and don't you ever forget it. It is your
    chance to chart your future.
        This is an election that is full of perplexities, or a time full of
    perplexities. I've watched the signs. I saw a job sign up there and I've
    seen some very generous, nice signs about what we're trying to do. I
    like the ``My President'' one. Thank you very much, young man.
        Let me give you some perplexing things to think about, sort of the
    good news of this moment. I said in the State of the Union Address that
    this is a time of great possibility, and it is. But it's also a time of
    great challenge. And sometimes you read about what is going on in the
    country and you think, well, that's inconsistent with my experience; why
    are all these things happening?
        Let me just go through the areas that I ran for President to
    address. I said in 1992 that I was running because I wanted to restore
    the American dream for every citizen in this country willing to work for
    it, because I wanted our country to be the world's strongest force for
    peace and freedom, and because I wanted us to come together and not be
    divided. I am tired of people trying to divide the American people for
    their own interests instead of unite us for our common interests.
        Now, that is still our mission. How are we doing? Look at the
    economy. In the last 3 years

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    we have nearly 8 million more jobs; we have a big drop in the
    unemployment rate in Iowa, as well as throughout the country; we have a
    15-year high in homeownership; we have--the so-called misery index,
    which is the combined rate of unemployment and inflation, is the lowest
    it has been in 27 years. We have all-time high exports, which is one of
    the reasons that corn and soybeans and wheat are at high prices now, and
    the farmers are enjoying that. We have--listen to this--in the last 3
    years alone, in each successive year there have been record numbers of
    new small businesses started and record numbers of new self-made
    millionaires, not people who inherited it, people who worked for it and
    made it. Now, that's one side of America's economy, and it is
    exhilarating. And it is the side of America's economy that most of you
    who are students here at Drake will move into.
        But there is another side to America's economy: About half our
    people still haven't gotten a raise in terms of the real purchasing
    power of their incomes in 10 or 15 years. A lot of our people who have
    worked hard all their lives worked for these big companies that are
    doing all this downsizing. Hardly a week goes by that I don't hear from
    somebody I've known who is my age, nearly 50--I hate to say it--
    [laughter]--it's hard for me to look at you and think I'll be eligible
    for the AARP in 6 months--[laughter]--but there it is. But anyway, I get
    letters from people my age, people I've known. And they've been
    downsized, and they've got kids the age of the students that are here.
    And they say, ``Well, this is great. My corporation's stock went up.
    They laid me off. How am I going to educate my kids?'' So you ask
    yourself, well, if all these incredible good things are happening, how
    did that happen?
        Or let's look at the march of the world toward peace after the cold
    war. There are no nuclear missiles pointed at the people of the United
    States for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age. Your
    country is continuing to fight to reduce the threat of weapons of mass
    destruction. We have thwarted terrorist attacks on our soil. We have
    worked for peace from Haiti to Northern Ireland, to South Africa, to the
    Middle East, to Bosnia. This is all a good thing. The world is plainly
    more secure than it was 3 years ago.
        But it only takes a few people to decide that they don't want to
    bear the burdens of the daily work of peace, to do an act of cowardice
    and madness, like those people that blew up that building in London
    yesterday, or the cowards that killed the Prime Minister of Israel
    because he stood for peace, or the people that walked into the subway in
    Japan and broke open that little vial of poison gas and killed all those
    folks, or the people who are still terrorizing the citizens of their
    communities in Latin America because they insist on running drug cartels
    because there's just too much money in it and they don't care who they
    kill in the process. So this is a safer world, all right, but there are
    still a lot of things out there that we have to face.
        Or look at the most important thing of all: How are we doing in
    being true to our basic values as a people? There's a lot of evidence
    that we are getting our act together, and it's good. In the last 3 years
    in the United States the crime rate is down; the welfare rolls are down;
    the poverty rolls are down; the teen pregnancy rate has dropped. That is
    good news, and America should be proud.
        On the other hand, we all know they're still too high, don't we?
    When can we be satisfied about crime? I'll tell you when: when crime is
    the exception, not the rule again; when you flip on the evening news and
    you're surprised to see the lead story be a murder or a rape or arson or
    something else that a civilized people shouldn't have to look at every
    night on the news.
        So, my fellow Americans, I tell you again, this is the age of
    possibility. More people will be able to have more opportunities to live
    out their dreams and to fulfill their God-given capacities than at any
    point in our history if we find a way to solve the challenges we have
    and to do it together.
        Sometimes people come up to me and say--I mean just almost as if
    they're my neighbors--they say, ``What's the most important thing you've
    learned in the last 3 years?'' And I've learned a lot, so it's a pretty
    long list. [Laughter] But if you ask me what the most important thing
    is, it is that the debate this country should be having is not whether
    we're going to have big Government solve all the problems--no one
    believes that anymore--but it is certainly not whether we can just leave
    everyone to fend for themselves. It is whether we are finally going to
    get serious about working together on a daily basis the way we do when
    the town floods out, the way we do when the chips are down, the

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    way we did when Oklahoma City--tragedies happen. If we are going to do
    this together, or not--that is the most important lesson I have learned.
        There is no more big Government. Our Government has been shrunk now;
    the National Government's the smallest it's been in 30 years. We did
    that. It's the smallest it's been in 30 years. But I saw those young
    people today and their parents and their employers right before I came
    in here--and your work-study program here at Drake, that's the kind of
    country we ought to have, where we say, nationwide, we want more young
    people to go to school; we think you ought to be able to go to school
    even if your family's hit on hard times and you don't have all the
    money. We think it's a good investment to pay people who are willing to
    work their way through school. We think that's a good thing. We're not
    going to tell you how to do it, who to hire, what to do, but we think
    it's a national responsibility to help people get this done. It is a
    good thing.
        So let me ask you very briefly to consider where we are as a country
    in light of what I said. First, don't be discouraged. We are going
    through a period of change as profound as anything that's happened in
    100 years. One hundred years ago, we moved as a country mostly from
    rural areas to where we mostly lived in cities and small towns. We moved
    from a time where most of us worked on the farm to a time when those who
    stayed on the farm were productive enough to feed ourselves and the
    world and most of us worked in the factory. It happened 100 years ago.
        Now what's happening is we are moving from a time when our economy
    is dominated not by industry but by information and technology, and
    where we live in a global village of worldwide markets. The changes in
    work are staggering. There's more mind and less muscle. The changes in
    the workplace are staggering. There are more computers and fewer
    bureaucrats and people moving up and down the line, and more workplaces
    are smaller and more flexible. The changes in communications are
    breathtaking, and the changes in the markets are amazing. The money
    markets and the markets for goods and services are global.
        Of course, there are going to be changes in our lives. And of
    course, there must be changes in what our Government does. Whenever you
    have a big uprooting like this, you can look at all of human history and
    you will see when things change this much, a lot of people do very well,
    but a lot of people are disoriented and suffer and are challenged.
        So our challenge is to figure out a way for everybody to benefit,
    for all people to participate who are willing to work for it and to grow
    this country together instead of letting it continue to be divided. We
    should not use elections to divide; we should use elections to unite
    this country and move it forward.
        Now I ask you all to see every issue debated this year in that
    context. When you hear a discussion about the national budget, you
    should say: We want you to balance the budget. This country has got no
    business running a deficit every year, even when times are good. We
    never should have gotten into that pattern of the 12 years before I
    became President when we were exploding the deficit. We shouldn't have
    done it. We have cut the deficit in half in 3 years, and we need to
    finish the job. But you should ask yourself when you hear a proposal:
    Will this help all people who are willing to work for it achieve the
    American dream? Will this bring us together instead of dividing us? Is
    this consistent with our values of work and family and community? Will
    this help us be a leading force for peace and freedom?
        The budget that I favor enables us to balance the budget by the
    congressional score-keeping and still protects our obligations to our
    parents through Medicare and Medicaid, our obligations to our children
    through education and protection of the environment and investment in
    their health care. That's the kind of balanced budget we ought to have.
    It is consistent with our values.
        Let me say this: As we go from now to November, I hope we will see
    that deficit as yesterday's legacy and ask ourselves, what are the great
    challenges facing all these young people in this audience, in this
    country, today or in the future? I believe they are seven, and let me
    reiterate them for you.
        One, we have got to do more to strengthen family life and give all
    of our children their childhoods back. That's why I want to do something
    about crime. That's why I want more Head Start for children. That's why
    I want our children immunized. That's why, in the telecommunications
    bill, I fought to give parents the V-chip, because we had another study
    last week which showed that years and years of

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    hours a day of sustained, mindless violence have a deadening, numbing,
    destructive impact on young people, and parents ought to be able to
    limit it.
        We have got to do more. We have got to do more to raise the level
    and the reach of education in America. Every one of our public schools
    should be able to have the low dropout rates and high achievement rates
    that you generally find in Iowa. There is no reason that should not be
    in every State in the country, in every school in the country.
        By the year 2000, every classroom, every library in this country,
    and every schoolhouse in this country, no matter how poor, no matter how
    rural, no matter how inner-city, should be connected to the Internet so
    that every child, no matter how poor, should be able to reach the world
    with learning.
        And we know that every young American should be able to go on to
    college. I am proud of the fact that this administration has improved
    the student loan options for students, has passed the national service
    program and put 25,000 young people out there serving their communities
    and earning money for college, has increased the Pell grant program. But
    it is not enough. I have proposed that we now give a $1,000 national
    merit scholarship to everyone who graduates in the top 5 percent of any
    high school in the United States of America every year. And I believe
    that we need to increase the work-study program by 50 percent, so that
    we can have one million students every year working their way through
    college, contributing to the workplace, growing America, and improving
    their chances for the future.
        And finally, let me say, on the question of education, if we are
    going to have a tax cut, the best way to spend the money is to give
    families a deduction from their taxes of up to $10,000 a year for the
    cost of college tuition. We couldn't make a better investment.
        Our third great challenge is to bring economic security to working
    families who never get a raise, lose their jobs, don't have health care,
    and are worried about their pensions. Because every family that's out
    there working and raising children deserves to have a measure of
    security. It used to be security came because you could guarantee
    someone a job for a lifetime at the same company. If you see all this
    downsizing now, how will we define security in the future? Here's how I
    think we have to define it.
        Every working family should, number one, have access to immediate
    education and training whenever they lose a job. People ought to be able
    to look to the Federal Government for a ``GI bill'' for America's
    workers. If a person loses a job, they ought to get a voucher in the
    mail worth $2,600 a year to take to the nearest community college or
    other appropriate training institution to begin right away preparing for
    a new line of work.
        Number two, all of you know that the First Lady and I and our
    administration tried hard to solve the health care problem so that every
    American family could have health insurance. Now we have apparently made
    a decision, with the help of hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbyist
    advertising, that we will remain the only country in the world with an
    advanced economy that cannot figure out how to give health insurance to
    everybody under 65. If you're over 65, we did it. Well, at least we
    ought to be able to guarantee that the people who don't have it have
    access to affordable health insurance that they can buy. At least we
    ought to be able to do that.
        There is--it's not too late to ask everybody who wants to be
    President about this issue. There is before the United States Senate
    today a bill sponsored by 45 Republican and Democratic Senators,
    endorsed by not only the labor organizations and the consumer
    organizations but the national chamber of commerce and the association
    of manufacturers, which would say simply, you cannot lose your health
    insurance when you change jobs or when you or someone in your family
    gets sick. That's what health insurance is for. That bill would help
    millions of families to have a little peace of mind as they struggle
    with life's challenges.
        That bill is on the floor of the Senate, but the insurance companies
    do not want it brought up to a vote. I want the people of Iowa to write
    their Members of Congress and say, ``Bring it up to a vote and pass it,
    and send it to the President of the United States so I can have some
    more peace of mind.'' It is the right thing to do.
        Finally, our working families need the security of knowing they can
    get and keep a pension. Whether you're a small-business person, a
    farmer, or somebody working in a big outfit, you ought to be able to get
    a pension and know it's going to be secure. I do not intend to let our
    pension funds be raided again as they once

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    were. I don't want our pensions endangered. And I want to make it easier
    for small-business people and farmers to take out pensions for
    themselves and their employees. That's a very important part of family
    security as well.
        And while I'm at it, let me make one last point about family
    security. I learned that these young people working on work-study here
    are making between $4.65 and $7.00 an hour. Most of them make between
    $4.65 and $5.00 an hour. But do you know--and that's not a lot of money,
    but it will buy a pizza and take you to the movie every now and then,
    pay some of your costs and relieve the burdens on your families. But the
    minimum wage in America is still $4.25 an hour. If it is not raised this
    year, it will be at a 40-year low in terms of purchasing power. You
    cannot raise a family on $4.25 an hour, but millions of Americans are
    trying to do it. We have consigned--you think about that, I want you to
    think about that--I want the young people out in this audience who are
    on work-study making $4.65 an hour, knowing how you have to watch every
    penny if you just want to order a pizza once a week, to imagine what you
    would do if you were working for $4.25 an hour, trying to support
    children of your own. It cannot be done. There's a lot of talk in this
    country about family values every election time. Well, my family value
    says, we ought not to ask people to raise children on $4.25. We ought to
    raise the minimum wage.
        Stronger families, better education, economic security. Fourth, we
    have to continue to fight for safe streets, to lower the crime rate. It
    is abysmal that young people today feel the fear they do from crime and
    violence. We are making progress. We are going to put 100,000 police on
    the street because we know with community policing you can prevent crime
    and drive the crime rate down.
        We were right to pass the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. It
    has made this a safer country. I just want to point out--I imagine that
    Iowa is not all that different from Arkansas, where half the people have
    a hunting or fishing license or both. I just got back from New Hampshire
    where they had a big deer season, and I can tell you we had plenty of
    ducks in Arkansas, and they shot them with the same weapons they used
    before we passed the assault weapons ban. All those people who said
    those hunters were going to lose their guns didn't tell them the truth.
    They weren't right; they were wrong. But I'll tell you who did lose
    their guns: 41,000 felons could not buy handguns because of the Brady
    bill. It was the right thing to do.
        And what we ought to do, we must have a renewed effort to finish the
    work of putting the police on the street and to move against gangs and
    drugs and guns. And we must continue to fight it abroad as well as at
    home.
        The fifth thing we have to do is to leave the environment safer and
    cleaner for today and tomorrow. Until the last year or so, the work of
    cleaning the environment was by and large a bipartisan one. Until the
    last year or so, it would have been unthinkable for a majority in either
    party to say, ``Let's cut the enforcement at the Environmental
    Protection Agency by 25 percent. Let's delay all regulations. Let's tie
    all new efforts to clean air and clean water up in knots in court for
    years and years and years. Let's walk away from our commitment to safe
    food and safe drinking water and the kinds of things that make this
    country a safe and good place to live. Let's delay regulations designed
    to address problems like the E. coli problem where people ate
    contaminated meat and some died, or the cryptosporidium problem that got
    into the water system in Milwaukee and 100 died.''
        We cannot afford to have a partisan division on this. We cannot
    afford to say we can't grow our economy unless we pollute our
    environment. We have to do everything we can to grow our economy by
    preserving our environment. That's why I supported ethanol and electric
    cars and natural gas cars. That's why I have supported these things, and
    I want you to support them, as well. This can never be a partisan
    political issue again.
        The people of Iowa and the United States can put this away for
    decades as a partisan political issue if you will just stand up and say,
    ``I want my environment preserved. I want my children to grow up in a
    healthy country, and I know the planet cannot be preserved unless we can
    grow the economy in a way that is good for the environment, not
    destructive of it.'' You can do that. You can give that to the future,
    and you ought to do it.
        Finally, let me just briefly say there are two other things that we
    have to face. One is we have to continue to be the leader of the world
    for peace and freedom and security. It is so easy to say we should walk
    away from these

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    challenges now with the cold war over. But we can't. We have a chance
    this year to get a comprehensive nuclear test ban through, no more
    nuclear testing. We have a chance to do that. We ought to do that, but
    we have to lead to do it.
        Everything we want other people to do for us in the rest of the
    world requires us to be willing to lead because we are strong and great
    and we are trusted. We want the Europeans to be fair and buy our
    agricultural products. We want Latin America to grow with us in trade.
    How can we walk away from them if they're willing to risk their lives to
    work with us to do what we did in the last year and a half, to arrest
    seven of the eight leaders of the Cali drug cartel? We can't; we've got
    to work with them.
        So it isn't particularly popular. Every time I talk about foreign
    policy in a large group I get the feeling people are going to yawn or
    say, ``Well, you're doing all right. I trust you, but don't make me
    think about it.'' This is a very small world. We've got corn over $3
    today because of foreign policy; wheat is over $5; you've got $7
    soybeans because we've got a growing world market. But you can't just
    have economics without a commitment to freedom and decency. And we have
    to be a part of all of that, and we must understand how it fits
    together.
        The last thing that I want to say to you is that we have got to have
    a political system capable of generating support and trust from the
    American people. The Congress has to pass the line item veto they've
    been promising. The Congress has to pass campaign finance reform, like
    they've been promising.
        But let me say this, this is a two-way street. That's why I like the
    caucuses; you actually have to make some effort to have your voice
    heard. You need to say, ``I'm going to stop this uncritical bashing of
    Government and instead ask myself what do we have to do together to move
    this country forward.''
        When the streets were flooded here, you did not want a weak FEMA or
    a weak SBA. When we can collect, as we did last year, a record amount of
    child support payments to give back to families that have been
    abandoned, you don't want us to be weak; you want us to be strong. You
    want us to be strong. You don't want a weak student financial program,
    you want a strong student financial program. We can cut the default
    rate, but we ought to loan more money to people.
        My friend James Carville has a line in his new book that I just
    commend to you. He said, ``Everybody likes to bash the Government.
    But,'' he said, ``in the 30 years, our Government has spent half of our
    tax money on just three things: national defense, Social Security, and
    Medicare.'' That's half your money. What happened? We won the cold war,
    cut the poverty rate among senior citizens in half, and Medicare means
    today, if you get to be 65 in America, we have the longest life
    expectancy for senior citizens of any country on the face of the Earth.
    We can do things together, folks, when we do it right, and we ought to
    say that.
        Let me say especially to every young person in this audience, this
    country has got a lot of problems, and every politician in it makes
    mistakes, and Government sometimes does dumb things. But this is a very
    great country. And in this period of change, remember something
    President Kennedy said to my generation when the Berlin Wall was up and
    the Communist world was divided from the free world. He said, ``Our
    democracy is far from perfect, but we never had to put up a wall to keep
    our people in.'' You remember that.
        And remember, most of the problems we have in this country are
    broadly shared by other nations who are where we are in our development.
    And of all those wealthy nations, we have created the largest number of
    jobs; we have the highest rate of growth; nobody has a lower tax rate;
    nobody has a lower deficit as a percentage of their economy. We have
    problems, but we are moving on them.
        Cynicism is a cheap excuse for inaction, for walking away from the
    responsibilities of citizenship--citizenship.
        So I say to you, I will do everything I can as long as I am your
    President to meet those seven challenges for the future. I will do
    everything I can to complete my mission to see that every American who
    will work for it can achieve the American dream, to see that we remain
    the strongest force for peace and freedom, to see that we keep coming
    together instead of being torn apart. But in the end, what happens to
    this country still depends on what it has depended on for almost 220
    years: you, the people; we, the people. You be there. You lift up your
    sights. You fight for your future. And we will see the best is yet to
    come.

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        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:05 p.m. in the Knapp Center at Drake
    University. In his remarks, he referred to Michael R. Ferrari, president
    of the university, and Mayor A. Arthur Davis of Des Moines.