    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [February 13, 1996]
    [Pages 243-245]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 243]]

    Remarks to the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council and
    an Exchange With Reporters
    February 13, 1996

        The President. Thank you very much. I want to thank Ed and Del, and
    I want to thank all of you for serving. This was truly a distinguished
    council, a very diverse group. I bet you had some interesting meetings.
    [Laughter] I wish I had been privileged to hear all of them.
        When Ed McCracken was talking about the reports and he compared it
    to President Kennedy, he said, you know, President Kennedy launched a
    move that sent Americans--men to the Moon--no, men into space, he said,
    men into space. I thought he was going to say this is going to send all
    of our children into cyberspace. [Laughter]
        And what I was thinking about, watching Ed and thinking about the
    work his remarkable company has done--all of you have probably seen that
    picture of me when I was in high school, shaking hands with President
    Kennedy. After I saw ``Forrest Gump'' and thought about Ed, now every
    child in America will be able to shake hands with President Kennedy.
    [Laughter]
        Let me assure you that we are going to take these recommendations
    seriously. The council's work may be done, but the Nation's work is just
    beginning. And I know I speak for the Vice President, who 20 years ago
    coined this term ``information superhighway,'' and Secretary Brown and
    all the other members of our administration who are around this table,
    Deputy Secretary Kunin, Mr. Gibbons, Mr. Barram, and others: We are very
    grateful for this work.
        All of you know that we are entering an age of incredible
    possibility for the American people. I believe that the signing of the
    Telecommunications Act of 1996 last week will help to increase those
    possibilities, and I want to thank Reed Hundt and all others who worked
    on that legislation and all of you who supported it.
        If you just think about what has happened since this council was
    formed in 1993, the growth of the Internet, the hit movie created by
    computer animation, the explosion of technology, we know that the
    potential to improve the lives of the American people, both economically
    and otherwise, is absolutely staggering. And we all know that we are
    just at the beginning of that process.
        The thing that I liked so much about the Telecommunications Act is
    that that act was passed in a manner and requires a certain public
    interest in its implementation that I think represents the best of what
    we ought to be doing and how we ought to be doing it. You know, the act
    in the end passed almost unanimously. And it, to me, represents the
    model of the public and private cooperation we ought to have for the
    future in so many ways.
        It obviously unleashes the forces of the market more than ever
    before. It will bring vast new opportunities for information, for
    learning, and for entertainment to the American people. It will do it in
    a way that is consistent with the best principles of fair competition
    and public interest. Among other things, it will help your
    recommendations in the KickStart Initiative to become law because of the
    guarantees in there for access of schools and libraries and hospitals.
    So all of these things are very hopeful.
        If you think about the challenges facing our country, if you just
    take the ones that I mentioned in the State of the Union--the challenge
    to build strong families and to give all children a childhood, the
    challenge to give every American access to the education we need for the
    21st century, the challenge to provide greater economic security for
    Americans in a time when their particular jobs may be less secure than
    they were in a former economy, the challenge to make our streets safe,
    to keep our environment clean, to restore integrity to our Government,
    to maintain out leadership in the world--all these things will be aided
    by the technological explosions symbolized by the information
    superhighway.
        We know now, for example, that we can make families more secure by
    providing better health care because of technology. People in rural
    areas can contact a doctor in a city all the way across the country for
    help in dealing with a medical problem. We know we can make our criminal
    justice system work immensely better because of computers. We see that
    dangerous criminals can be arraigned by computer without having

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    to move them from police station to courthouse. We can expand our
    opportunities to identify problems because of technology. Today if
    someone steals a car and drives it halfway across the country and leaves
    it in a shopping mall parking lot, within literally a matter of a couple
    of seconds, as soon as the car is found, its owner can be identified and
    the facts surrounding its loss can be established.
        We know that technology can enable our Government to work better,
    and it already has in so many ways. Millions of Americans will file
    their tax returns electronically this year because of the advances of
    technology, lifting a lot of burden and time off of them. We know
    Americans starting small businesses can get all their SBA information
    from a single place on-line now. And these are just the beginnings. The
    KickStart Initiative is particularly important to me because of the
    promise it holds to achieve one of my major goals, to connect all the
    schools, the libraries, and community centers in this country to the
    information superhighway by the year 2000.
        And it can be done community by community. I was in Concord, New
    Hampshire, the other day, just 2 days after all the schools in that
    community were connected. And it was truly a community effort, the kind
    of thing that we have to have. I happened to be in a school in the
    neighborhood with the lowest per capita income in the community. And I
    saw what local community leaders had done to make equipment available to
    students that they could take home and share with their parents, even
    students who came from modest circumstances, with parents with no formal
    education or previous experience.
        The community grassroots KickStart element of this whole endeavor, I
    think, is incredibly, incredibly important, and I applaud you for making
    it a separate report and making sure that we all do our part to help
    that succeed.
        As you noted in your report, educational technology has actually
    helped to raise educational performance. You can see it in test scores
    at the Clearview Elementary School in Chula Vista, California, which you
    mentioned. You also know that it's allowing students around the country
    to do things they could never have done before, to examine gray whales,
    to study Hawaii's volcanoes, to explore the Galapagos, all without
    leaving the classroom. I remember I met a young man not very long ago in
    Albany, New York, an eighth grader who has done a research paper on
    volcanoes entirely based on resources in Australia, because of his
    access to the information superhighway.
        We know, too, that technology can brighten educational prospects in
    all kinds of schools, even in areas where achievement had previously
    been very modest. The Christopher Columbus School in Union City, New
    Jersey, which you mention in your report, is a school I plan to visit
    later this week to try to highlight the importance of your
    recommendations and our goal, and to demonstrate to Americans all across
    this country that it really can make a difference.
        As I said in my State of the Union Address, as we change the nature
    of work and we change the nature of the workplace, and more and more
    organizations become less bureaucratic, less hierarchical, and more
    flexible, the era of big Government is also passing from the scene as
    defined by big, centralized bureaucracies. This Government today is the
    smallest it's been since 1965. By the end of this year it will be the
    smallest it's been since 1963.
        But just because we don't have a big Government, in a traditional
    sense, doesn't mean that we should have a weak one. It doesn't mean we
    can allow individuals and families and communities to go back to a time
    when they had to fend for themselves. In this new world we are facing,
    we can only take advantage of the opportunities and beat back the
    problems if we work together.
        You have set an example. And this report shows the kind of framework
    of partnership that enables people to make the most of their own lives
    and communities to do the best they can in seizing their own
    opportunities that I believe should be followed by Americans in many,
    many other areas of our Nation's life.
        Your support for the Benton Foundation, which I particularly want to
    applaud, will help countless schools and libraries and communities learn
    from each other and speed their progress much faster than what otherwise
    had been possible.
        And thanks to the help of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, with the bow
    tie--that I can't tie--[laughter]--the video produced by Disney and AT&T
    will make it easier for everyone to understand the information
    superhighway. I want to thank Bill and Disney and AT&T, and I want to
    thank all the other companies that

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    have made their own contributions to this endeavour.
        Finally, let me just emphasize what is to you obvious, but may not
    be obvious to all of our fellow Americans who have not been exposed to
    these developments. This is not about technology for technology's sake.
    It's about using technology to help people work together to realize a
    better future for themselves and for their families. You have helped to
    challenge America, and you have shown us the way, a way which offers the
    promise of the American dream to all of our citizens who are willing to
    work for us and offers us a way to continue to work together in a new
    era.
        That is the most important lesson I have learned as President. We
    have to find new ways to work together so that people, as individuals
    and families in the communities, can realize their great promise. And
    you have done that for us in these two reports. Your country is indebted
    to you, and I thank you.
        Thank you very much.
        Q. Thank you, Mr. President.
        The Vice President. You did great.
        The President. You led the way. Thank you very much.

    Iowa Democratic Caucus

        Q. [Inaudible]--think of the Iowa Democratic caucuses--the results?
        The President. Well, obviously I was pleased. I think we got all the
    delegates and almost all the votes, 99.8 percent. [Laughter] The thing
    I'd like to point out, though, that I was astonished by, and I did not
    learn until about midnight last night, is that apparently, in an
    uncontested caucus, 50,000 people went. By contrast, there were only
    about, I think, 100,000 people in the Republican caucus with nine
    candidates, and they had anticipated 30,000 or 40,000 more.
        And to me, the fact that 50,000 people went out on a cold winter
    night in Iowa to reaffirm their support for the positive direction in
    which we're taking the country, and the idea that we do have to work
    together, we do need a strong set of new ideas in which the Government
    is a partner in the fight for the future, that's the most rewarding
    thing of all. I was stunned. There never have been 50,000 people go to
    the Iowa caucus in an uncontested election--never had been anywhere
    close to 50,000 people.
        And I want to thank the people of Iowa for the reception they gave
    to me. I want to thank the people who worked for our efforts. And most
    of all, I want to thank those 50,000 Americans who showed that our
    people are not cynical, they haven't given up on citizenship, and they
    are prepared to take control of their future.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:09 p.m. in the State Dining Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to NIIAC cochairs Edward R.
    McCracken, chairman and chief executive officer, Silicon Graphics, Inc.,
    and Delano E. Lewis, president and chief executive officer, National
    Public Radio; Assistant to the President for Science and Technology John
    H. Gibbons; Deputy Secretary of Commerce David J. Barram; Federal
    Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt; and Bill Nye, host of the
    PBS children's television program ``The Science Guy.''