    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [October 24, 1996]
    [Pages 1911-1915]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in Birmingham, Alabama
    October 24, 1996

        Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Hello, Alabama! Can you hear
    us all the way back down there to the road? Thank you for coming.
        Ladies and gentlemen, I promised Howell Heflin I would come to
    Alabama and ask the people of Alabama to support our efforts to build a
    bridge to the 21st century. It is such a beautiful day, and the crowd is
    so large, maybe Alabama is going to come along with me on that bridge to
    the 21st century.
        Let me say first of all to Dr. Berte and all the people who are here
    from this wonderful, wonderful school, I thank you for hosting us. I've
    looked forward to coming here for a long, long time. I have two great
    friends who teach here at Birmingham Southern, Mark Lester and Jeanne
    Jackson; I thank them. And I have heard about what a great place this
    is. Senator Heflin told me he had lifetime tenure on the board here, and
    he was going to continue to serve, even after he left the Senate. He
    didn't ask me for permission to leave the Senate, or I wouldn't have let
    him do that. [Laughter]
        I want to tell you how honored I am to be here with all the people
    on this program today: the candidates for Congress; the officials of our
    Democratic Party; the distinguished mayor of Birmingham, my longtime
    friend Richard Arrington; Chief Johnson; the leaders of the Alabama
    Teachers Association, the Alabama Federation of Teachers, the Education
    Association; the Birmingham Southern College Young Democrats; all the
    others that are here.
        I want to thank Congressman Earl Hilliard for being here with us and
    for his service. I want to thank another distinguished Alabamian who is
    retiring, Congressman Tom Bevill. I'd like to ask him to stand up, Tom.
    He's back there with his partner, Bob Wilson, who's trying to succeed
    him. I thank him and Mary Lynn Bates and Bob Gaines and Judge Ingram.
    Thank you all for being here with us today.
        I'd like to say a special word of thanks to Lieutenant Governor Don
    Siegelman, who's been our friend a long time. And I'd like to say too
    that I'm very, very glad to be here with another distinguished
    Alabamian, the President's Special Assistant for Public Liaison and the
    highest ranking African-American ever to serve in the White House,
    Alexis Herman, from Mobile, Alabama, who's here with me today. Thank
    you, Alexis.
        The last thing I want to say is that--by way of introduction--is
    that I met Howell Heflin

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    21 years ago, when he was the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court
    and I was a former candidate for Congress and a loser, I might add. He
    came in the law school at the university, and I thought that he was the
    darnedest fellow I ever met in my life. He had a wonderful sense of
    humor, a great sense of compassion, a fine mind, and a lot of country
    commonsense wisdom. And as he leaves the United States Senate, I can
    tell you that Hillary and I have come to know and love both Mrs. Heflin
    and Senator Heflin. We will miss them. They have been a treasure for
    Alabama and a treasure for America, and I want you to bring them home
    and lift them up and make their days happy and warm and good.
        Folks, we are on the verge of a new century. All of you students
    here in this crowd--and I thank all of the young people for coming
    today--you are moving into a time with more opportunities for people to
    live out their dreams than any period in human history. You are moving
    into a time where things will change more rapidly in how we work and
    live and relate to each other and the rest of the world. And you have to
    decide how we're going to walk into that 21st century.
        This is the last election for President of the 20th century and the
    first election for President of the 21st century. And you have to
    decide. Many of you young people in this audience, in a few years you
    will be doing jobs that haven't been invented yet. Some of you will be
    doing work that has not even been imagined yet. And you have to decide,
    what kind of America do you want? From all the way over here to way back
    yonder down the street, I want to ask you to do something when you go
    home tonight. Before you go to bed, just take a few minutes with a piece
    of paper and a pencil and see if you can write down the answer to this
    question: What do I want my country to look like when we cross that
    bridge into the 21st century? What do I want my country to be like when
    my children are my age?
        You know, if you ask the right question, America nearly always gives
    the right answer. We only get in trouble when we let ourselves get
    confused and start asking the wrong question. That's the right question.
    And when you ask that question--I tell you, I've been asking myself that
    question since before I made the decision to run for President in 1991.
    And for me the answer is simple but profound. I dream of an America in
    the 21st century where every person, without regard to race or region or
    income or religion or gender or background, who is responsible enough to
    work for it, can have a shot at the American dream.
        I want an America that is still leading the world for peace and
    freedom and prosperity. And I want an America which is coming together,
    not being driven apart by our differences. And that is important. How
    long did we live in the shadow of our differences in the South? How much
    do we see around the world today, from Bosnia to the Middle East to
    Northern Ireland to Africa and Rwanda and Burundi, everywhere around the
    world, to the problems of terrorism and people sending each other
    dangerous weapons. What is driving it all? Racial, ethnic, religious,
    and tribal hatred. That's why I said the church burnings were wrong.
    That's why I said we couldn't go back down that road again. When we
    respect each other and work together there is no stopping America. There
    is no stopping America.
        Now, that's my vision. You ask yourself tonight what your vision is.
    If you ask the right question, you'll get the right answer. What I have
    tried to do is to expand opportunity, increase responsibility from all
    citizens, and bring us together in an American community. And even
    though our friends on the other side don't like to admit it, we are
    better off than we were 4 years ago. And we are moving in the right
    direction.
        The unemployment in Alabama has dropped from 7\1/2\ to 4\1/2\
    percent. We have 10\1/2\ million more jobs. The other side said they
    were fiscal conservatives, but our administration, with the help of
    Howell Heflin, reduced the deficit in all 4 years. That's the first time
    a President's done it in every year of his administration in the 20th
    century. We're moving in the right direction.
        Incomes are on the rise again. The typical family income is up
    $1,600 in the last 2 years. And we're growing together again. The
    inequality of incomes among working people, which had become so deep in
    the last 20 years, had the biggest drop in 27 years last year; the
    biggest drop in child poverty in 20 years; the lowest rate of poverty
    among senior citizens ever reported since we've been keeping statistics.
    We are moving in the right direction to that 21st century.

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        You heard the police chief and the mayor talk about it, but we've
    had 4 years of declining crime rates. We've also had 4 years of
    declining welfare rolls. We have almost 2 million people fewer on
    welfare and more at work than we did 4 years ago. And child support
    collections have been increased by 50 percent in 4 years. People are
    paying for their kids more.
        Just in the last few weeks, we raised the minimum wage for 10
    million working Americans because they couldn't live on $4.25 an hour.
    We made 25 million working Americans eligible to keep their health
    insurance by saying that you can't lose your insurance anymore just
    because you change jobs or someone in your family has been sick. If
    somebody like Roger Bedford gets sick and has a spouse working, they
    ought not to have their insurance taken away from them; that's what
    health insurance is for, and that's what we have done. We also said that
    insurance companies can't make hospitals kick new mothers and their
    newborn babies out of the hospital after 24 hours anymore.
        So we're moving in the right direction. And you have to decide
    whether you like this direction, whether you want to build a bridge to
    the future wide enough and strong enough for all of us to walk across,
    or whether you want to say, ``There's the future. You're on your own. I
    hope you make it; good luck.'' You've got to decide whether we're all in
    this together or we're just a swarm of isolated individuals. You've got
    to decide, in short, whether you think it takes a village to raise a
    child and build a community and build a future.
        You know, there is a lot of talk here about these labels. You know,
    our adversaries love labels. I'll bet you there are good professors here
    at Birmingham Southern who would tell you that you start throwing labels
    at people and calling them names when you don't have anything to argue
    about any more and you can't win. When the evidence is not on your side,
    when all else fails, call somebody a name. Maybe it'll work. That's what
    Senator Bedford's up against.
        I am proud to be running on the same ticket with a person like Roger
    Bedford who supported our efforts to lower crime and improve education
    and who would represent good, old-fashioned mainstream Alabama values
    and modern Alabama economic, educational, and environmental interests in
    the United States Senate.
        But you have to decide. When they call names, you've got to look at
    the facts. I want to balance the budget. I want to finish the job. We
    have cut that deficit 60 percent in 4 years. I want to finish the job.
    But we can do it while protecting Medicare and Medicaid and investing in
    education and investing in environmental protection. They want to pass
    this big, risky tax scheme that will increase the deficit, require
    bigger cuts than I vetoed when they shut the Government down, raise
    taxes on 9 million hard-working people, and allow companies to raid
    their workers' pension funds.
        You have to decide. I don't think you need a label on that. You
    don't need to call anybody any names, just say, ``I'm for the right kind
    of balanced budget, and I'm for targeted tax cuts.'' We can afford tax
    cuts, but they need to be targeted to help you pay for education,
    childrearing, buying a first home, paying for health insurance. We can
    afford that, and we can pay for it in our balanced budget plan. But you
    have to decide. Will you help us build that bridge? You have to decide.
        Everybody is for family values, but do we value families? You heard
    Roger Bedford talk about the Family and Medical Leave Act. Twelve
    million families have benefited from that, taken a little time off from
    work when a baby was born or a family member was sick.
        The other day I was down in Longview, Texas--no hotbed of
    liberalism--[laughter]--and I'm shaking hands in the crowd and this
    woman's there with tears in her eyes, saying, ``Mr. President, my
    husband had cancer, and I was the only one in our family working. And he
    was desperately ill. Because of the family and medical leave law I did
    not lose my job, our family was not ruined, and we were able to keep
    going.'' That was a good thing for America. That's not against American
    values; that's for American values.
        The other side led the fight against it. My opponent still says it
    was wrong. I say it ought to be expanded to let parents go see their
    children's teachers once a semester and take their kids to the doctor.
    You have to decide.
        You have to decide what we're going to do in health insurance. We
    worked hard for the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill to expand that health
    coverage. Now we want to say in our balanced budget plan, paid for, if
    you lose your job, you're between jobs, we're going to help you keep
    your family's health insurance for 6 months. We're going to add another
    million kids in low-income working families to the ranks of

    [[Page 1914]]

    those who have health insurance. We're going to help families who are
    taking care of their parents with Alzheimer's get a little respite care
    so they can care for their families and still survive and keep their
    sanity and keep going. We're going to help women on Medicare get regular
    mammograms. And we're not going to turn away from medical research.
        We're going to put a billion dollars more in medical research. Why?
    In the last 4 years we've doubled the life expectancy of people with
    HIV. We've uncovered two genes that cause breast cancer, two genes that
    will enable us to detect it earlier and maybe to prevent it. We have
    used technology that we use in space and intelligence for imaging that
    will help us to detect all kinds of cancers early. We have detected
    unbelievable things about strokes; for the first time we've got some
    treatment for strokes, all from medical research. We now have for the
    first time in history seen movement in the lower leg of laboratory
    animals whose spines were completely severed, because nerves were
    transferred from the rest of the body to the spines. We must continue to
    pass legislation that pushes the frontiers of knowledge and have medical
    research. Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century?
    [Applause] Will you help us, way back there, build that bridge to the
    21st century? [Applause]
        Most important of all are two things to me. One is education. We are
    living in a world--let me just give you one example, one tiny example of
    how fast knowledge is exploding. We've just signed a contract, the
    United States did, to do a research venture with IBM to build in the
    next couple of years a supercomputer that will do more calculations in
    one second than you can do on your hand-held calculator in 30,000 years.
    Now, I would say in a world where knowledge is increasing like that,
    education is pretty important. I just want to talk about three things
    today.
        Number one, kids can't learn if they can't read. Forty percent of
    the 8-year-olds in America today cannot read a book on their own. I have
    a proposal to mobilize 30,000 people--reading tutors, AmeriCorps
    volunteers--to get a million volunteers to go in and help parents and
    teachers teach our young children to read so that by the year 2000,
    every 8-year-old in American can pick up a book and say, ``I can read
    this all by myself.''
        Secondly, I want to hook up every classroom and every library in
    every school in the United States to the information superhighway by the
    year 2000, with computers, with educational materials, with trained
    teachers, on the Internet, on the World Wide Web. Now, for all of you
    older folks like me who are not great computer geniuses, let me tell you
    what that means in practical terms. It means that for the very first
    time in history--and this is important to us in the South--for the first
    time in history, the children in the poorest inner-city schools, the
    most remote rural schools will have access in the same way at the same
    time at the same level of quality to the same learning that the children
    in the wealthiest school districts in the United States have. It has
    never happened before. Will you help me build that bridge to the 21st
    century? [Applause]
        And finally, as Senator Bedford said, we are going to make college
    education available to every single American of any age who needs it. I
    want to be able to say in the year 2000 that we've made 2 years of
    education after high school just as universal as a high school diploma
    is today. And I propose to do it not by a big, bureaucratic program but
    simply by saying to every American, if you want to go to a community
    college for 2 years, you can deduct from your tax bill, dollar for
    dollar, the cost of a typical community college tuition. It will
    revolutionize opportunity.
        I want to say to people, you can save in an IRA, and more families
    can save in an IRA, but they can take the money out without any tax
    penalty if they use that money to educate their children or themselves,
    to buy a house, or take care of medical care. And yes, I'll say it
    again: I want to make for every form of college tuition a tax deduction
    of up to $10,000 a year from now on. Will you help me build that bridge
    to the 21st century? [Applause]
        And finally, will you help me build an environment of security and
    good values for our children? We have to make our children safe from
    gangs and guns and violence and drugs. And for our children, it is
    illegal for them to be exposed to tobacco as well, and I'm proud that
    our administration has tried to stop that.
        We are putting 100,000 police on the street. We supported the safe
    and drug-free schools program so that our children could hear early that
    drugs are wrong, drugs are illegal, drugs can kill you. We have done
    what we could to

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    strengthen our control of our borders more than any administration ever
    has. We have also supported, as the mayor said, local initiatives like
    school uniforms for younger children, truancy law enforcement, curfews
    at night.
        You know why? Because the crime rate was going down all 4 years I
    was President, but the crime rate among juveniles, people under 18, only
    started going down last year; because the violence rate has been going
    down all 4 years, but the rate of violent crime among juveniles only
    started going down last year; because drug use in America has dropped
    dramatically in the last 4 years, cocaine use down 30 percent, but drug
    use among children under 18 is still going up.
        There are too many of our children out there raising themselves on
    the street. We need to take them back into our bosoms, into our homes,
    into our hearts, and give them a chance to live good, positive lives.
    Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century? [Applause]
        I said the other day, and I expected to get a lot of grief from it
    from a lot of young people in America, that even though 90 percent of
    our children were clearly drug-free and had never experimented with
    drugs, I wanted to ask them to do something really responsible to help
    us find the other 10 percent before it's too late and they're too much
    trouble. I think we ought to have a drug test as part of the driver's
    license process in America to find those kids and help them before
    they're in trouble and before it's too late. Will you help us build that
    bridge to the 21st century? [Applause]
        Now, folks, my opponent has a different vision, and I don't want to
    get into what they said. You don't have to believe anything bad about
    him to disagree. I was raised to respect people. I told somebody the
    other day--they started doing all this, ``He's a better person''--I
    said, ``I don't know, but where I was raised, my mama would have whipped
    me if I ever said I was better than anybody else.'' We were taught never
    to look down on anybody but to look up to everybody and try to lift
    everybody up. We were taught it in church and at home. This has nothing
    to do with who's a good or a bad person.
        I've been in this business for some time now, although I've only
    lived in Washington 4 years. Let me tell you something, folks, nearly
    everybody I've met in public life works harder than average and tries to
    make a difference. This is not a question of who's good and bad, it's a
    question of what's right and wrong for our future. I was for the 100,000
    police, and he was opposed to it. I was for the Family and Medical Leave
    Act, and he led the fight against it. I'm for making college education
    tax deductible, and he wants to eliminate the Department of Education,
    so that there will be nobody to speak for education in the President's
    Cabinet as we stand on the brink of the 21st century.
        Our economic policies are working. Our crime policies are working.
    And our partnership with America for opportunity and responsibility is
    working. So I want to say to you, Alabama has to decide. Go home
    tonight, ask yourself, ``What do I want my country to look like when we
    cross that bridge to the 21st century?'' I know what the answer will be.
    Will you help us build that bridge? [Applause] Will you help us build it
    wide enough and strong enough for everybody to walk across? [Applause]
    Are you proud to be an American on the brink of America's greatest days?
    Do you believe we can make America even greater? Then you be there on
    November 5th, and we'll do it.
        Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:18 a.m. in the Academic Quadrangle at
    Birmingham Southern College. In his remarks, he referred to Neal Berte,
    president, Birmingham Southern College; Johnnie Johnson, Birmingham
    police chief; Mary Lynn Bates and Bob Gaines, candidates for Alabama's
    Sixth and Second Congressional Districts, respectively; Kenneth F.
    Ingram, candidate for reelection to the Alabama Supreme Court; Elizabeth
    Ann ``Mike'' Heflin, wife of Senator Howell Heflin; and State senator
    Roger Bedford, Alabama senatorial candidate. A portion of these remarks
    could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.