    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [September 20, 1996]
    [Pages 1632-1635]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Reception for Tom Bruggere in Portland
    September 20, 1996

        The President. Thank you.
        Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
        The President. You know----
        Audience member. Twelve more years!
        The President. When Al Gore and I started out together, he had a
    reputation of being too stiff. [Laughter] If anyone ever had told me 4
    years ago that I would be counseling him about not being too rowdy, I
    never would have believed it. [Laughter]
        We're having a good time here, Hillary and Tipper and Al and I. We
    love Oregon. We love to come here. We love what you're doing and what
    you stand for. I want to say that I'm deeply honored to be here today
    with Tom and Kelley and Maria and T.C. and their friends, with our
    candidates for Congress, Darlene Hooley and Mike Dugan, with the mayor
    and Congresswoman Furse, with all of you. But I want to say to you that
    I do not view, in all candor, this election as primarily a struggle of
    parties. I think, more than that, this election is primarily a
    definition of our country.
        Once in a great while, our country has gone through profound periods
    of change in how we work, how we live, how we relate to one another, how
    we relate to the rest of the world. Everybody who thinks about it knows
    that this is a period like that.
        There have been four or five such periods in our country's history.
    And you make these decisions, and when you make them, they dramatically
    impact 30 or 40 or 50 years and shape the country forever. And I want
    you to think about it like that. I do not want you to vote

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    for any of these people because it would be nice if President Clinton
    had a Democratic Congress. It would be nice, but I don't want you to do
    that.
        Instead, I want--to build on what the Vice President said--I want
    you to define what you want your country to look like when we start the
    21st century, what you want your country to look like when these
    children are our age, and then make your decision based on that. Forget
    about the politics of it; think about your country.
        I was listening to Al talk and he did such a good job, I didn't have
    any idea what I was going to say. [Laughter] But I think what he was
    saying and what I would like to say to you is that there are these two
    polar opposite views competing for America's image of itself in this
    time of change. One is a unifying vision; the other is fundamentally a
    divisive vision. One says, ``We're all in this together;'' the other one
    says, ``You're on your own. The Government's the problem.'' One says,
    ``Let's build a bridge to the future;'' the other says, ``Let's build a
    bridge to the past, when times were simpler, and we didn't have to worry
    about all this.'' One says, ``We believe you can do well by doing
    good.'' The other says, ``Do-gooders always mess up the private
    economy.'' And you have to think about which you believe. I believe that
    the example of Tom Bruggere's life and success and the results achieved
    by the policies of our administration in the last 4 years make an
    overwhelming case for the unifying vision of our future as opposed to
    the divisive vision of our future.
        Every time we try to do something to sort of spread opportunity and
    let the American people succeed at home and at work and give everybody a
    chance to live up to the fullest of their God-given potential, those who
    opposed it said it was big Government and it would mess up a one-car
    parade; we would weaken the economy; it would be inefficient; it would
    be this, that, and the other thing.
        But 4 years later, yes, we passed family leave, and yes, we continue
    to protect the environment, but we have 10\1/2\ million new jobs, and we
    have--and I might add that the job growth rate is faster than has
    occurred under any Republican administration in 70 years. But this is
    not about party. The things we are debating today don't fit within the
    old party labels. The new competing philosophy abandons a lot of what
    the Republican Party adhered to for 25 years.
        But if you look at it, that's what's going on. They said, ``Oh, if
    you don't let people continue to live on $4.25 an hour minimum wage, you
    will just cost jobs.'' Well, October 1st we'll get a chance to test that
    out, because 10 million people are going to get a pay raise. But in the
    same bill we proved that you could have a unifying vision.
        Do you know what else was in that minimum wage bill? We also, in the
    minimum wage bill, increased the tax deductions that businesses get when
    they invest more in their own business to grow the economy. We have
    improved--we have given more tax relief for self-employed people to get
    health insurance. It wasn't either/or.
        The bill also has a $5,000 tax credit for people who will adopt
    children, because there are still a lot of kids out there that need
    homes. So it was pro-work, pro-business, and pro-family. It was a
    unifying vision.
        When Tom helped his workers be better parents, he increased the
    productivity of his company; he didn't weaken it. That is our argument.
    Our argument is that we have been forced into too many false choices for
    too long by people who were too shortsighted, and the nature of the new
    economy is such that we can do best by doing the right things, that
    there must not be a dichotomy between what people have to do in raising
    up their children and what they have to do in raising up their work
    lives. And if there is, we lose from the beginning. If you have to
    choose one or the other, we're beat from the start. We believe we can do
    both.
        We believe there must not be a dichotomy between preserving and,
    indeed, enhancing the environment and public health and growing the
    economy because if that is true, then that ultimately would spell the
    doom of every civilization, and many have been doomed because of the
    refusal to develop a unifying vision that would permit people to grow
    the economy in ways that are in harmony with their natural surroundings.
    That's a fundamental choice you have to make.
        We believe that the First Lady is right, that it does take a village
    to raise children, to build an economy, to build a country. Therefore,
    unlike the other folks, we don't think it was a waste of money to give
    50,000 young people, like this young woman here, a chance to work

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    in AmeriCorps to serve their communities and earn some money to go to
    college while they were doing it. We think that's a good thing to do.
        They believe there's two kinds of money, the Government's money and
    your money, and the Government's money is money they've stole from you,
    and the more they give back to you, the better off you are, because the
    Government would mess up a one-car parade. We believe it's all your
    money.
        And the question is, are there things we can do together that we
    cannot do alone? And that is the question. We cannot, by ourselves,
    guarantee equal access to college education. We cannot, by ourselves,
    guarantee more equal opportunities for children in the schools. We
    cannot, by ourselves, guarantee what the Vice President and Tom have
    worked for, which is to make sure there is equal access to technology,
    including access to the information superhighway, to all the children in
    all the schools of America. That's something we have to do together--
    together.
        We cannot--let me just give you three examples. Christopher Reeve
    talked about this at our convention. We cannot, by ourselves, fund the
    research necessary to push back the barriers that are destructive of
    human existence. Just in the last few weeks, for the first time in
    history, laboratory animals with severed spines have shown movement in
    their lower limbs because of nerve transplants. It never happened
    before. You cannot afford to get that done by yourself. Together, we can
    fund that kind of research. We have doubled the life expectancy of
    people with HIV and AIDS in 4 years because of the more rapid--
    [inaudible]--you cannot afford to do that on your own. We just entered a
    partnership, the United States did with IBM--even IBM did not want to do
    it on its own--we're going to build a supercomputer that will do more
    calculations in a second than you can do on your hand-held calculator at
    home in 30,000 years. We have to do that together.
        But as we do these things, we change the whole nature of the future.
    The children in this audience will be doing jobs that have not been
    invented yet, many will be doing work that has not been imagined yet
    because of what we do together as well as what we do on our own.
        So you have to decide that. You look around this room. Look at all
    this diversity in this room. Look how different we all are. Do you know
    how much of your time I spend as President, trying to get people around
    the world not to do destructive things because they can't live with even
    a limited amount of diversity, because they literally cannot exist,
    because they have to have a divisive vision of themselves and their
    lives, they've got to be thinking they're important because they're not
    someone else? That's what the deal in Bosnia is all about. That's what
    Northern Ireland's about. That's what the Middle East is about. That's
    what the slaughter between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Burundi and
    Rwanda was all about. All over the world.
        That's what the church burnings are all about. When a synagogue is
    defaced or an Islamic center is burned, that's what it's all about.
    There are lots of folks that just can't get up in the morning and go
    through the day unless they've got somebody to look down on to make
    themselves feel bigger, a divisive view of the world.
        Now, I am not being naive here. I don't pretend for a moment that
    there aren't tough decisions that have to be made, that there are lots
    of moments when there is no 100 percent perfect answer. But I'm telling
    you, where you go in life depends not only on all the details in dealing
    with the tough decisions, it depends on what your view is, how you look
    at this. And that's why I tell you, if you look at how the world is
    changing, going from the cold war to a global economy, if you look at
    the new security threats of the 21st century, terrorism, ethnic strife,
    the proliferation of dangerous weapons, organized crime, and drug
    smuggling, they all cross national boundaries. We have to be unified in
    dealing with that. I asked the Vice President to head that commission to
    figure out how we could make our airports and our airlines safer. We're
    dealing with a problem that every country has to deal with, so we have
    to work together on that.
        If you look at the way the economy's going and the competition that
    we're in with people all around the world, we have to hold ourselves to
    international standards and then we have to work together to make sure
    we all do it.
        If you think about all of us in this room, most of us would do well
    if there were no Government efforts of any kind. We would do okay. But
    we're doing a lot better because everybody else has a chance to make the
    most of their lives as well.
        So I say to you, you're going to have 6 weeks and 4 days of
    television wars here in Oregon,

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    and half of what's on there may be irrelevant. But this is a big deal.
    This is a huge deal. This is the last major election of the 20th century
    and the first election of the 21st century. Things have changed. We have
    to change. And America is going to go into that next century with either
    the unifying vision dominant or the divisive vision dominant.
        That's what I want you to think about, not Democrats or Republicans
    or any of that. I want you to think about your country. And if you look
    at the life and career and work of this man, it would be hard to think
    of someone who could be a better poster boy for a unifying vision of
    America's future in the 21st century than Tom Bruggere.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:46 a.m. at the Oregon Museum of Science
    and Industry. In his remarks, he referred to Oregon senatorial candidate
    Tom Bruggere, his wife, Kelley, and their children Maria and T.C.; Mayor
    Vera Katz of Portland; and actor Christopher Reeve.