[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.''