[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
[June 21, 1996]
[Pages 943-948]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 943]]


Remarks at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal 
Employees Convention in Chicago, Illinois
June 21, 1996

    The President. Thank you. Thank you. Let me say, first of all, when 
I was standing up here with Gerry McEntee on my right and Bill Lucey on 
my left, I thought the best I could do is to ask you to give Clinton/
Gore the same majority you gave McEntee/Lucey in 1996. I will accept it.
    I'm also proud to be joined today by two of your friends from 
Illinois, two Members of the House of Representatives, Congressman Bobby 
Rush from Chicago and Congressman and Senator-to-be Dick Durbin from 
Illinois.
    I understand I missed a lot at this convention. I missed the formal 
transfer of the gavel to Speaker Gephardt. I'm sorry I missed that. I 
missed Senator Kennedy pleading guilty once more to wanting all 
Americans to have health care. And I'm sorry I missed that.
    Before I go further, I want to also congratulate someone else who is 
very special to this union, who celebrates today her 25th anniversary 
with AFSCME, Gerry McEntee's tireless and indispensable right hand, 
Gloria Caoile. Please stand up and be recognized. [Applause] Thank you.

[At this point, Ms. Caoile ran up to the President and hugged him.]

    If I had known she was going to do that, I'd have done it first 
thing. It was great. It was quite wonderful. [Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, I will never forget as long as I live----
    Audience members. Down in front!
    The President. You all calm down. Relax. You want everybody to sit 
down. They're taking pictures. We're going to have a little fun. Just 
relax. Be loose. Be loose.
    I want to tell you that I will never forget as long as I live the 
fact that AFSCME stood with me early in 1992, when it was lonely and 
cold, and never stood back, never backed out. And I will never forget 
that no organization in America stood with the First Lady and with our 
administration more strongly when we fought to give health care to all 
Americans and preserve the dignity of Americans in our health care 
system. And I thank you for that.
    I also will always be proud that when I was a State employee as the 
Governor of my State, I was a dues-paying member of AFSCME, because it 
got out of fashion for a while, but I have always believed in the 
dignity of public service. I believe it's important to honor people who 
take care of our parents and watch over our children and care for the 
sick, who protect the environment, and who are always there in 
emergencies. That's what you do. America should know it and be grateful. 
And I know it, and I'm grateful. I thank you for that.
    I enjoyed watching the film that was shown just before I came out. 
It gave me a chance to reminisce a little about that campaign 4 years 
ago. I ran for that election because I had a vision for what I wanted 
America to look like in the 21st century, a vision which you shared. I 
wanted us to go into the next century with every American, without 
regard to race or gender or income, every American, having a decent 
opportunity--not a guarantee but an opportunity--to live up to their 
dreams. I wanted to see us coming together as a country, not being 
driven apart by cheap partisan politics designed to divide the American 
people. And I wanted us to continue to be the strongest force in the 
world for peace and freedom and prosperity.
    Now, we've worked for 4 years to meet our challenges and to protect 
our values with a simple strategy: opportunity for all, responsibility 
from all, a community of Americans working together. We are all in this 
together. And I am tired of all the people who seek to divide us every 
day for their own personal advantage.
    Four years ago the economy of the United States was drifting, high 
unemployment, an out-of-control deficit, few new jobs, a nation 
increasingly divided. We charted a different course with a new economic 
strategy: to cut the deficit; expand the sales of American products; 
give tax cuts to the 15 million hardest pressed American working 
families; invest in education, the environment, research, and new 
technologies, give incentives for people who live in distressed areas; 
and yes, pass programs like the Family

[[Page 944]]

and Medical Leave Act that enable people to succeed at home and at work.
    It's very fitting that I am here today because this week--tomorrow, 
to be exact--is the fourth anniversary of the issuance of our economic 
plan in 1992. We called it ``Putting People First.'' I said that if we 
did that two things would happen: First of all, we'd cut the deficit in 
half, and second, we would create 8 million new jobs in 4 years.
    Now, after leaving us with a weak economy and record deficits and 
quadrupling the debt, the Republicans said it couldn't be done. They 
said my economic plan was a disaster. They said it would bring on a 
recession. Let me just read you some of the things they said. Senator 
Dole said, ``The American people know this plan doesn't tackle the 
deficit head on.'' Speaker Gingrich said, ``This will lead to a 
recession next year.'' Dick Armey said, ``Clearly, this is a job 
killer.'' John Kasich said, ``This plan will not work. If it was to 
work, I'd have to become a Democrat.''
    Well, 3\1/2\ years later, we cut the deficit by more than half, and 
the economy has not produced 8 million new jobs, it's produced 9.7 
million new jobs. Mr. Kasich said if this plan was to work, ``I'd have 
to become a Democrat.'' I expect him to show up at the United Center in 
Chicago; we'll save a seat for him at the convention.
    There are other ways that this strategy has helped real Americans. 
We've got 3.7 million new homeowners--new homeowners. We are moving 
toward our goal, led by Secretary Cisneros, of having more than two-
thirds of the American people in their own homes by the end of this 
decade for the first time in the history of the United States of 
America.
    We have an all-time high in the exports of American products and 
services. We've got an all-time high 3 years in a row of people starting 
new businesses in our country. We are moving this country in the right 
direction. The rates of unemployment and inflation combined are the 
lowest in 28 years. This country is on the move again. We've got a lot 
of problems out there, but we are moving in the right direction.
    Maybe most important of all to me--because I think the test of the 
economy must always be, does it work for average Americans, does it help 
people build strong families, do all these numbers mean something in the 
lives of our people--the most important statistic of all to me, 
therefore, is that last year average hourly earnings for American 
working people started to go up again for the first time in 10 years, 
and it's high time.
    So when it came to the economy, with all respect, I think the 
evidence shows that they were wrong and AFSCME, the administration, and 
our friends in the Congress were right.
    Then came the elections in `94, and they won the Congress. And they 
gave us their Contract With America. Their idea was, under the guise of 
balancing the budget, to fundamentally alter the Medicare program to 
create two classes of care, turn Medicaid into a block grant and make 
sure that it couldn't cover the populations that it had protected for 
three decades, dramatically reverse education funding at a time when 
it's more important to educate more people for their future than at any 
time in the history of the United States of America, gut enforcement of 
the environmental laws, weaken enforcement of the occupational safety 
and health laws, allow employee pension funds to be raided, and raise 
taxes on 8 million of the most vulnerable working families in the 
country. That was their plan. They passed it; I vetoed it. They were 
wrong about that, too.
    But we have more to do. It is high time we began the move on the 
future and forgot about the divisive and self-destructive elements in 
the contract. Let's do something positive to help build on the good work 
that's been done. Let's raise the minimum wage and not let it fall to a 
40-year low and lift the American people. Let's pass the Kennedy-
Kassebaum health care reform bill and guarantee that you don't lose your 
health insurance if you change jobs or if someone in your family gets 
sick. Let's do it now.
    Senator Kennedy's bill passed the United States Senate 100 to 0. Why 
has it not passed the Senate and the House and been sent to my desk? 
Because we are debating matters that have nothing to do with Senator 
Kennedy's bill being put on that bill that would undermine our ability 
to improve health care for all Americans. Let's stop all the 
controversy. Let's make an agreement. Let's get off the dime and stop 
depriving the American people of something 100 Senators have already 
said they're entitled to. Pass the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill now, and send 
it to my desk.
    Let's give pension security to all those people out there working in 
small businesses, people

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that maybe have to change jobs four or five times in their lifetime. I 
have sent to the Congress a package of initiatives designed to make it 
easier for people who are self-employed or who work in small business to 
take out a pension plan, to keep it when they lose their jobs, to take 
it with them when they change their jobs. Every American who works hard 
ought to have pension security in this country, even in the global 
economy.
    And let's continue to make education available to all Americans. I 
said the other day, and I want to reiterate, if you look at the future 
of America in the global economy, if you want all working people to have 
a chance to raise their incomes, all people have to have a chance to get 
more education. I have asked the Congress to do two things, and I will 
reiterate them here today. Number one, give every family a tax deduction 
for the cost of tuition up to $10,000 a year for college. And number 
two, make 2 more years of education after high school just as universal 
as high school by giving a tax credit of $1,500 a year for the next 2 
years of education so that everybody can have it--everybody. [Applause] 
Thank you. Thank you.
    That is what this is about. But it's about more than economics. We 
also need other things to keep our country strong. We need strong 
families, strong communities, safe streets, and a clean environment.
    When I became President, I had literally talked to hundreds of 
Americans who despaired about the crime problem. They really didn't 
believe anything could ever be done to lower the crime rate. But I did, 
because I had seen the crime rate go down in communities where community 
policing had been adopted, where the police were back on the street 
again working in the neighborhoods, working with people to try to 
prevent crime and catch criminals and making things work. I have seen 
that happen.
    And so I asked the Congress in 1994 to pass the crime bill and, 
earlier, to pass the Brady bill. And the leadership of the other party, 
they fought us on it all the way. They fought us on the 100,000 police; 
they fought us on the assault weapons ban; they fought us on the Brady 
bill. They convinced a lot of good God-fearing Americans, including some 
members of this union, I'll bet, that if those bills passed they were 
going to be weakened in their ability to pursue their hunting and 
sporting interests, somebody was going to come get their gun. Well, now 
it's been 2 years later, and guess what? Every AFSCME member in America 
that wants to go deer hunting is still hunting with the same rifle. 
Nobody lost their gun. It wasn't true. They didn't tell you the truth.
    In my home State in the fall, in a good year the ducks are so thick 
you can hardly see the sky. Every Arkansas AFSCME member who wants to go 
duck hunting is still hunting with the same rifle, if that's what they 
want to do. They did not tell them the truth. But I'll tell you who is 
not having a gun. There are 60,000 people who have criminal records, who 
are stalkers, who had no business buying guns who couldn't get them 
because of the Brady bill. We were right, and they were wrong. It was 
the right thing to do.
    In just 2 years, we have almost half of those police officers paid 
for. We're ahead of schedule and under budget. And in that budget last 
year they tried to repeal the commitment to put 100,000 police on the 
street with the crime rate going down and the murder rate going 
down.They tried to turn back on a strategy that worked. I said no then; 
I say no today. We're going to make the American people safer. We're not 
going to put them at risk again. We're going to keep working until crime 
is the exception, not the rule in America again.
    And there is a lot of talk about welfare reform. Well, let me tell 
you something. There are a lot of people in this audience that know more 
about moving people from welfare to work than the politicians in 
Washington will ever know. And if you work with people on welfare, you 
know that most people on welfare would very much like to be off of 
welfare. You know that there are flaws in the system which keep people 
on it, but they're not often the ones that others think are there. And 
there are changes that ought to be made. Well, they talked about it, and 
they're still talking about it, but while they were talking, we were 
acting. We have given 40 States a total of 62 separate experiments to 
move people from welfare to work.
    But I did veto their bill because it was tough on kids and weak on 
work. You cannot expect people on welfare to be different from people 
who aren't on welfare. We want to succeed at home and at work. We want 
people to succeed to home and at work. We don't want to be tough on the 
kids; we want to be good to the

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kids. That means what we need is child care and health care for the 
kids. We need jobs for the people to do, then require them to go to 
work. It's fine. Be very tough on that. Require them to go to work.
    Now, who was right in this great debate? All I know is, after 3 
years child support enforcement collections are up 40 percent; there are 
a million fewer people on food stamps; there are 1.3 million people 
fewer on welfare than there were the day I took the oath of office. I 
believe our approach has been proved to be right, and I think we should 
stay with it: work; child care; support for the kids; let people succeed 
at work and at home.
    There are other things we're doing that have been controversial, 
that have engendered opposition from the leadership of the other side. 
They didn't like it when we proposed tough restrictions on tobacco 
advertising, and they have been richly rewarded for their dislike of 
that position. All I know is, it's illegal in every State in America for 
kids to smoke. Three thousand of them start smoking every day, and a 
thousand of them are going to die sooner because of it. I think we ought 
to do something about it, and I'm not about to apologize for it to 
anybody.
    Some of their leaders didn't like it when we enacted the V-chip and 
said that televisions ought to include this V-chip now that we've got 
all these cable channels, so that parents would have more control over 
the programming their young children watch. I'm a big believer in the 
first amendment, but I think it's pretty hard to raise a kid in today's 
society, and we ought to give parents all the help they can get to help 
them raise their kids free from violence and other destructive 
influences.
    In all these debates, a clear picture comes through. We're going 
through a big change, folks. You all know it. You're having to change. 
You're dealing with it. We're moving from an economy based on big 
organizations in an industrial age that do mass production to an economy 
based on rapid transfer of information and technology in smaller, less 
bureaucratic, more creative organizations. It's affecting all of us in 
the way we work and live. We're moving way away from that cold war world 
where the world was sort of divided in two, into a world where there is 
a global society and things are happening so fast we can hardly keep up 
with it. And that's requiring a lot of changes.
    They believe that the Government is the problem and that what 
everyone needs is to be told, ``You're on your own. Go out there into 
the tender mercies of the global economy. Have a great time in 
cyberspace, and we'll get out of your way.'' I believe no great nation, 
at any point in human history, has ever, ever, gotten greater without 
extending opportunity to more and more people and having responsibility 
for more people to build a strong community. This is the greatest nation 
in human history because we have built a middle class of people, and 
average people have had a chance to make it if they have done the right 
things. And that's what I think we ought to be doing into the 21st 
century.
    So I say to them, I want us to go into the 21st century meeting our 
challenges and protecting our values together. Should we have a smaller 
Government in Washington and give you folks more responsibility? Yes. 
Should we walk away from our obligations to our people? No. No. Should 
we balance the budget? Yes. It will get interest rates down and create 
more jobs. To balance the budget, do we have to wreck Medicare and 
Medicaid, undermine education, and destroy the environment? No.
    I don't know about you, but I think this country was right 30 years 
ago when we said through the Medicaid program that no poor child or 
pregnant mother, that no elderly person, that no person with disability 
should be denied quality medical care just because they can't afford it. 
I think we've got a stronger, better America because of that. I don't 
think we're weaker; I think we're stronger.
    The majority in Congress today insists that we repeal this 
guarantee. I vetoed it once; I'll do it again if I have to. I think 
we're right. I think we're stronger because we honor these obligations. 
I don't know about you, but I think this is a better country because 30 
years ago we decided that through the Medicare program we would provide 
adequate health care to every senior citizen in this country. And you 
know, we now have dramatically improved circumstances as a result of it. 
If you live to be 65 in America, you then are in a group of seniors that 
have the highest life expectancy in the entire world because of Medicare 
and Social Security.
    Now, should we give people on Medicare more options? Should we 
expect people to pay their fair share? Should we do everything we

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can to cut inflation? Do we have to make sure that this program will 
survive for the next century and beyond? Of course we do. But the plan 
that I vetoed, and the one they still propose, would put in place a 
Medicare plan that would literally create two tiers of care for our 
seniors and put millions and millions of our poorest and sickest seniors 
into second-class Medicare. I don't believe in that. I think we're 
stronger because we treated our senior citizens in a good and dignified 
way without regard to their income. I believe that.
    I don't believe that we ought to weaken the worker safety laws. We 
can find better ways to work in partnerships with employers, but do we 
want to go back to the time when there were no protections for worker 
safety?
    We can find better ways to operate in the environmental sphere. 
We're giving 50 different companies, right now, the opportunity to throw 
the rulebook away if they're subjected to tests for clean air and clean 
water and the other environmental tests. We're not hung up on the 
bureaucracy. But do we want to forget about the standards for clean air 
and clean water and chemical right-to-know and all those things? I don't 
think so.
    Audience member. No-o-o!
    The President. I say we should stand up for the notion that America 
will be stronger in the global economy of the 21st century if we give 
our people clean air, clean water, safe streets, a solid education 
system, if we honor our commitment to our parents, and if we decide we 
are going forward together. It's always worked before. Why won't it work 
in the global economy of the 21st century?
    I understand the other side is criticizing us because we have the 
support of labor unions. Well, I plead guilty to that. [Applause] Thank 
you.
    Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
    The President.  Thank you. Thank you.
    I would put--it is true that I have done some specific things that 
all of you wanted that I believed in. I believe in the Executive order I 
signed on striker replacement. I believe in the repeal of the antiunion 
Executive orders from the previous administration. I believe in the 
appointments I've made to these Federal agencies that finally are giving 
a fair break to both labor and management and not being too one-sided. I 
believe in that. I think you're entitled to a fair break. I think you're 
entitled to the respect and the full protection of the laws that were 
out there for you. I believe in those things.
    I don't believe that we should weaken the power of labor by going 
back to company unions. I don't believe that. But I also want to point 
out, and based on my experience as a Governor and my experience as a 
President, it is simply a myth to pretend that everybody who serves the 
public is antichange. I'd like to see some of these people who criticize 
people in public service go out and look at how the changes have been 
made in some of the welfare programs that you serve in and some of the 
health care programs that you serve in. I would like to see that.
    I'd like to remind everybody in this country, if you'll let me now 
in my role as President, crow that Business Week last year said that the 
best customer service on any toll-free line in America was not given by 
L.L. Bean or Federal Express but by the Federal employees at the Social 
Security Administration. I am proud of that.
    The Labor Department last month released a report by the mayor of 
Louisville, Jerry Abramson, and former Governor Florio of New Jersey, 
pointing out that when State and local governments work in real 
partnership with their workers and let the people on the frontline who 
know how things really work make decisions, then taxpayers can get 
better services at lower cost. You are willing to, able to, and actually 
effecting change. And you ought to get credit for the changes you're 
making to make the American people's lives better.
    Now, let me say in closing, this is a very important election, 
because there is no status quo option here. You remember how in '92 we 
said the issue was change; it was change against drift and more of the 
same. Not true anymore. There are two very different views of change 
before the American people. We are going to walk straight into the 21st 
century on the strength of the decision we make in November. We are 
going to take one of those paths into the future.
    And the good thing is the American people don't have to guess 
anymore. They know what I will do because I have done my best to do what 
I said I'd do in 1992. And the results have been good for the American 
people.

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    But to be fair, perfectly fair to our friends on the other side, 
they have also made it clear what they will do. The budget I vetoed 
would be the law of the land within 6 months after they had the 
Presidency and the White House. If the American people want it, they 
know how to get it. The environmental measures I stopped would be the 
law of the land within 6 months after they controlled the White House 
and the Presidency. And the worker safety weakening and all the other 
things.
    So if you believe that the message we ought to give to Americans is, 
``You're on your own. Have a good time in the tender mercies of the 
global marketplace. Enjoy cyberspace,'' you have a option. But if you 
believe as I do, that the only way this country is going to be able to 
lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity, the only way we're 
going to be able to get this country to come together with all of our 
diversity is to create opportunity and demand responsibility from 
everybody, to meet our challenges and protect our values together, then 
you have that choice for the future as well.
    I know where you stand. I know where you're going to be working to 
see America stand in November. And all I can tell you is, as long as I 
live I'll be grateful that you stood with me.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 11:02 a.m. at McCormick Place East. In his 
remarks, he referred to Gerald W. McEntee, president, William Lucey, 
secretary/treasurer, and Gloria Caoile, special assistant to the 
president, AFSCME; and James E. Florio, former Governor of New Jersey.