[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.