    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [August 26, 1996]
    [Pages 1364-1368]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 1364]]

    Remarks in Bowling Green, Ohio
    August 26, 1996

        The President. Thank you so much. Thank you for that absolutely
    wonderful welcome. You know, Hillary left us yesterday to go on to
    Chicago, her hometown, to get things ready for us, and we always call--
    Chelsea and I do--at night and give a report. I can tell you what our
    report tonight will be: You should have seen the crowd in Bowling Green.
    [Applause] Thank you. Wow!
        I want to thank all of you for being here. I want to say a special
    word of thanks to Representative Marcy Kaptur. There is not a more
    aggressive advocate for the people she represents in the entire United
    States Congress in either party than Marcy Kaptur. She does a great job
    for you.
        I want to thank John Glenn for his many years of service to our
    country in the Marine Corps, in the space program, in the United States
    Senate. I want to thank him for the work he's done on the economy, on
    foreign policy, on defense. I want to thank him for worrying about our
    children being able to grow up in a safe world. And I want to just cite
    two things.
        It is true, as Senator Glenn said, that while some of our friends in
    the other party would criticize Government, they did much to downsize
    it. We have the smallest Federal Government since John Kennedy was
    President. It's very efficient, and we didn't have to throw a lot of
    people in the street to do it. And we saved billions of dollars of your
    tax money, thanks in no small measure because of the leadership of John
    Glenn.
        I will also tell you, when you hear a word like nuclear
    proliferation, it sounds like a big old word and you can't imagine what
    it means. It means, among other things, that tonight and in the last 2
    years, for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there is
    not a single nuclear weapon pointed at the children of the United
    States, thanks in no small measure to John Glenn.
        I've got a few folks I'd like to recognize. I brought a slew of
    Ohioans over here on my right, your left, but one of them, in
    particular, I want to recognize, your former State treasurer and now our
    national Treasurer, Mary Ellen Withrow. She's doing a great job. Thank
    you, Mary Ellen, for coming with us.
        Thank you, Mayor Hoffman, for welcoming me here and for your gift,
    sir. And thank you, City Council President Joyce Kepke, for presenting
    the gift and making me feel so welcome here. Thank you, County Chairman
    Al Baldwin, for your work in getting this magnificent crowd up. I want
    to thank some candidates who are here, beginning with Annie Saunders.
    Thank you for running for Congress. Thank you, Chris Redfern, for
    running for the State senate. Thank you, Alvin Perkins, Wood County
    commissioner candidate. Thank you John Garand, for running for
    prosecuting attorney here.
        And now I want all of you to recognize these young people who are
    here because they won the poster contest. They just came up to see me
    and they're your kids and they're terrific. Let's give them a big hand.
    [Applause] Thank you. I want to say I love all these posters. I like all
    the posters that I see. I thank you for the Hillary poster. And I thank
    you for the poster back there that says, ``The President cares for
    kids.'' Thank you. I like that Bill of Rights poster, but now that I'm
    50 years old, it may not be truth in advertising anymore. [Laughter]
        Yesterday Chelsea and I started out with Hillary in West Virginia.
    We went into Kentucky; then we came into Ohio. We've had a wonderful day
    on this train. I wanted to take this train through the heartland to
    Chicago because I wanted to see people like you, the people I've been
    working for for the last 4 years, on the way to accept, for the second
    time, the nomination of my party for President.
        I also very much wanted you to see us on this train because it's not
    only on the right track to Chicago, this train is on the right track to
    the 21st century, and I want you to keep us on it.
        Folks, 4 years ago I came before the American people--and it is true
    what Senator Glenn said, Ohio put me over the top in the nomination and
    put me over the top in the general election, and I hope you will do it
    again. But when I came before you, I had never before served in office
    in Washington. I spent most of my time in places like Bowling Green. I

    [[Page 1365]]

    identified with schools like Bowling Green State--and I thank you for
    the music and the cap. And Dr. Ribeau and anyone else who's here from
    the university, I thank you for the music, the cap, the jogging outfit,
    but I thank you most of all for the military aide who's here with me
    tonight. You may know, the President gets a distinguished military aide
    from each branch of the service. My Coast Guard military aide,
    Lieutenant Commander June Ryan, is here with me tonight, a graduate of
    Bowling Green State. She's over there somewhere. Where is she? Come
    here, June. You did a good job, didn't you? Give her a hand. [Applause]
    Thank you. She's an Iowa farm girl. There aren't many oceans bordering
    Iowa, but somehow she made it into the Coast Guard, and I know you all
    gave her a good start here.
        The thing that was bothering me when I ran for President was the
    economy was stagnant. As Marcy Kaptur never fails to remind me, there
    were and there still are too many blue-collar workers, people that work
    hard and never seem to get a raise, never seem to get ahead.
    Unemployment was high. The crime rate was going up. There are a host of
    problems that were going unchallenged. Cynicism was on the rise in the
    country. And I wanted to do something about it.
        I wanted to bring some hope and direction and movement and progress
    back into American life. And I thought we had to change the way people
    were thinking in Washington, away from the kind of intensely partisan
    rhetoric and intensely stale debate. If you listen to things coming out
    of Washington, very often it sounded like it was more about who to blame
    than what to do. I'm more interested in what to do than who to blame,
    and I think you are, too.
        So, for the last 4 years, we've been out there doing. I have a
    vision of the 21st century for America. I believe they'll be our best
    days. I believe the children in this audience will have more chances to
    live their dreams than any generation of Americans in history. The
    global economy, the information explosion, the computer explosion, the
    technology discoveries, the medical discoveries, it is unbelievable. We
    just commissioned--let me give you an example--we just commissioned a
    supercomputer between IBM and the Federal Government. We're going to
    build one that will do more calculations in a second than a person with
    a hand-held calculator can do in 30,000 years. That's how we're growing.
    There is more computer power, more computer power in a Ford Taurus today
    than there was in the first spaceship that went to the moon in 1969.
    That's how fast things are changing.
        But we also know we've got some problems in this country. And what I
    want to do is to build an America for the 21st century where the
    American dream is open to everybody who is responsible enough to work
    for it, an America where we're coming together across the lines that
    divide us, not being torn up by race and religion and other things that
    are just engulfing the world, from Bosnia to the Middle East to Northern
    Ireland to Africa--you name it. All over the world people are fighting
    because of their differences.
        In our country, we're not about race and religion. If you believe in
    the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of
    Independence, and you're willing to show up for work tomorrow, you're
    our kind of person, you're part of our America, and we're going forward
    together. That's what we believe.
        And I wanted our country to continue to be what John Glenn has given
    his life for it to be, the leading force for peace and freedom and
    prosperity in this whole world. And I believe we can achieve that. And I
    want to give you a report compared to 4 years ago: We passed a sweeping
    economic program in 1993 that, as Senator Glenn said, cut the deficit 60
    percent 4 years in a row and every year of this administration. That's
    the first time it's happened since the 1840's. And if it were not for
    the interest we're paying on the debt run up in the 12 years before I
    came here, we'd have a surplus in the budget today, and that's important
    for you to know.
        Now, what does that mean in Bowling Green? It means lower interest
    rates. It means lower home mortgage payments, more homeowners, 4\1/2\
    million new American homeowners. Ten million Americans have refinanced
    their mortgage at lower interest rates. It means lower car payments. It
    means lower credit card rates. And most important of all, it means new
    investment, new businesses. We've got a record number of new businesses
    started and 10\1/4\ million new jobs in 3\1/2\ years. We're better off
    than we were 4 years ago.
        We have worked to deal with the problems we heard Americans talking
    to us about 4 years ago. Our administration worked hard to try to

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    deal with the health care problems of ordinary Americans. We've worked
    to contribute to the decline in the medical inflation rate, so that the
    costs wouldn't keep going through the roof. And I'm proud to say last
    year health care costs increase was the lowest it's been in 23 years,
    and this year it's running under 2 percent. And last week, right before
    I left, I signed a bill the Congress passed, the Kassebaum-Kennedy
    health care bill, that says no longer can you be denied health insurance
    because somebody in your family has been sick or lose it because you
    changed jobs. That's a good thing for America. Twenty-five million
    Americans will be helped by that.
        What else have we done? I knew that there were a lot of people who
    were working hard, raising their kids, and still falling further and
    further behind. In 1993, we tried to create more good jobs by helping
    small businesses. If they invest more in their business, they can get a
    tax cut. And then again in 1996, just before I came here, we did some
    very important things. We raised the minimum wage for 10 million
    American workers. We preserved the tax cut we won in 1993 for the 15
    million Americans working hard with children on the most modest income
    so we could cut their taxes. This year that's worth about $1,000 for a
    family of four with an income below $28,000. When you get down to those
    lower wages and there's still people with kids in the home, we wanted to
    say clearly, ``If you work full time and you've got children in your
    house, the tax system will not put you in poverty, it will lift you out
    of poverty. You're entitled to raise your kids in dignity.''
        That minimum wage bill did some other things, too. It gave another
    tax break to small businesses. So now we have increased by 2\1/2\ times
    the tax relief 90 percent of our small businesses can get if they invest
    more money in their business. I'm proud of that. They're creating most
    of the new jobs. Most of us are going to be working for small
    businesses. We better create a climate in America second to none for
    small businesses to grow and flourish. And I know all of you will
    support that.
        We've tried to help families do a better job in raising their kids
    and working. I think it's fair to say that maybe the number one worry of
    most families in this country is how to raise their kids and do a good
    job of that and still do a good job at work. There's probably not a
    family in this audience tonight that hadn't had some problem at some
    time in juggling the demands of school for your kids or health care for
    your kids or just being with your kids and the responsibility to be at
    work. We passed the family and medical leave law that says you can have
    a little time off without losing your job if there's a baby born or a
    sick child or a sick parent. Marcy Kaptur and John Glenn voted for that
    law and strongly supported it. And in the last 3 years, 12 million
    American families have made use of it, and our economy is stronger, not
    weaker, than it was 3 years ago. It helps to lift up families and
    support children. And people are more productive at work when they can
    do it.
        And last week, in the minimum wage law, we did something else that
    was good for families. I signed a bill that gives a $5,000 tax credit to
    any couple willing to adopt a child and give that child a good home, and
    an even more generous one if the child is disabled. And it removed the
    barriers to cross-racial adoption. So now we can say there are hundreds
    of thousands of kids out there trapped in foster care; they need loving
    homes. We have now made it more economically feasible for people to
    really be pro-family for those kids, too. And I'm proud of that.
        Four years ago, a lot of Americans talked to me about crime. I
    started off this morning at the Ohio police training academy, and I
    talked about the crime problem. Let me just say, I have a simple
    strategy: more police, more punishment, more prevention; take the
    serious offenders and punish them; do what you can to prevent crime from
    occurring; and help to save the kids--give them something to say yes to
    as well as to say no to; and put more police officers on the street to
    catch criminals and prevent crime. That's been our strategy for 4 years
    in a row. The crime rate has been coming down in the United States of
    America, and I'm proud of that.
        There's been a lot of talk in the news in the last few weeks about
    welfare reform because I signed the welfare reform bill. It's a little
    bit longer story than that, and I want to talk to you about it. Nearly
    every American I talked to for years wanted us to do something about
    welfare because they felt that it trapped people in dependency. The
    people I met on welfare wanted me to do something about welfare. They
    wanted a path to independence. Most poor people want what we want for
    everybody else; they

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    want to succeed with their kids, and they want to succeed at work. They
    want to be good, productive citizens.
        And so we sat about 3 years ago working with the States to give
    people permission to move people from welfare to work. On the day I
    signed the bill, already three-quarters of the people in America were
    under such experiments. We have reduced the welfare rolls by a million
    and a half since I became President of the United States, moving people
    out there into the work force. And I'm proud of that.
        But I signed this bill because we need to do more. But let me tell
    you, folks, the welfare reform bill is the beginning, not the end. What
    it does is to say nationally, we're going to protect all these families.
    We're going to protect their medical care. We're going to give them
    child care when the parents go to work. We're going to make sure the
    kids are in the school lunch program and can show up and get extra
    nutritional help that they need. But we're going to give the money that
    used to be in the welfare check to the States to devise ways to put
    people to work.
        I want to talk a lot on Thursday night about this. But let me just
    say to you, if you care about this and if you want what I want, you want
    poor people to have the same life that everybody else has, having a
    chance to succeed at home and at work, then let's say to everyone in
    America without regard to party, ``Let's don't let welfare reform be a
    fraud. If you're going to make people go to work, make sure they have
    jobs to find when they go to work.'' We have to create more jobs in this
    country so people can work.
        When I look out at all these children I think about our natural
    environment. And one of the things I think we have to do to be
    responsible to the future is to find a way to grow the economy and
    preserve the environment. Fifty million Americans are breathing cleaner
    air than they were 4 years ago. We have upgraded the standards for meat
    inspections, for putting pesticides on crops that become food. We have
    cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than were cleaned up in the
    previous 12. We created the biggest national park south of Alaska in
    California. We saved Yellowstone Park, our Nation's great treasure, from
    a gold mine. We are pushing forward to preserve the environment and to
    promote the economy.
        Finally, let me say one other thing that I think is important. I
    believe you can have opportunity and responsibility, but it has to be
    for everybody, and then we have to treat everybody the same. That's why
    I've reacted so strongly against the church burnings of black churches
    and the burnings of white churches and the people who have defaced the
    mosques and the synagogues in this country.
        This was a country founded in religious liberty. That's why I was so
    angry the other day when African-American soldiers in the Special Forces
    in North Carolina found swastikas painted on their doors. Let me tell
    you something, folks, the Special Forces are just what they say; they're
    special forces. If I call them at midnight tonight and tell them to be
    halfway around the world by noon tomorrow to defend you and put their
    lives on the line, they'll do it. They don't deserve to be discriminated
    against because of their race. That's not America. That's not America.
        And so I say to you, we have to bring this country together and go
    forward together. The reason I vetoed the budget that passed was not
    because I didn't want a balanced budget. I presented a balanced budget.
    But we can't have a balanced budget if we cut student loans and cut back
    on Head Start and cut back on problems that improve education. We can't
    have a balanced budget if we cripple our ability to protect our
    environment. We can't have a balanced budget if we take unnecessary cuts
    in the Medicare program that aren't necessary to save it. We can't have
    a balanced budget if you walk away from our commitment to guaranteed
    medical care for the elderly, for families with persons with
    disabilities in the family, for pregnant women, and for poor children.
    We've got to go forward together. That's what that whole thing was all
    about.
        And as I go forward into Chicago, I want you to know that's the
    record we've made. But we've made a beginning; we have more to do. What
    is the task of the next 4 years? We have our economic house in order.
    We've got to make sure it's possible for every single solitary American
    to take part in this economic recovery and to live out their dreams and
    to take care of their families. That has to be our task for the next 4
    years. That means to me, among other things--I just want to mention just
    a couple of things that I want to do in the next 4 years.

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        Number one, I want to make at least 2 years of college as universal
    for Americans as a high school education is today. Now, how do we
    propose to do that? By giving a $10,000 tax deduction to families for
    the cost of college tuition for any kind of education after high school
    and a $1,500 refundable tax credit for the first 2 years of college, if
    that helps you more. That will get everybody through a community college
    in any State in the country just about. That's a good thing to do, and
    we ought to do it.
        Number two, I want to make sure that every child in every school in
    America has the same chance everybody else does to grow and learn, which
    means we not only need computers in every school and classroom, and also
    trained teachers, but all those classrooms need to be connected to this
    vast information superhighway, that will give any child anywhere in
    America, in the poorest inner-city neighborhood, in the most remote
    mountain village, access to the same information that any other child
    has anywhere in the world. We're going to connect all those classrooms
    by the year 2000, if you'll let us do it.
        And finally let me just say one word about health care. We have done
    a good thing by saying you can't have your health insurance taken away
    from you if you change jobs, and you can't be denied if you've got
    somebody in your family who is sick, but we still have good, hard-
    working people who are unemployed for longer periods than they used to
    be. I want to see us also help those people who are unemployed, who are
    dying to get back in the work force, keep their families in health
    insurance for at least 6 more months. And that's a noble and good thing
    to do. The kids need it. It will help them perform in school. It will
    help the families stay together. It will make America stronger. I hope
    you'll support it.
        And all these things--the last thing I want to say is, we can afford
    a tax cut, but we ought to only have the tax cut we can afford--remember
    what I said--because we're bringing the deficit down, because everybody
    knows we're going toward a balanced budget, your interest rates are
    lower. That's lower mortgage payments, lower car payments, lower credit
    card payments, more business investment, and more jobs.
        And finally, for the first time in a decade, for the last 2 years
    average wages are rising again. We can't jeopardize that, but we can
    afford a family-friendly tax cut, a $500 tax credit for children under
    13, the education tax deductions that I just mentioned, and an IRA
    available to families making up to $80,000, moving up to $100,000 a
    year, that you can withdraw from without any penalty to buy the first
    home, to deal with a medical emergency, and to educate your kids or
    yourselves. That is a program we can afford, and that's what we ought to
    have. It will build America and balance the budget.
        Well, that's the America I want to build for the 21st century. Will
    you help?
        Audience members. Yes!
        The President. Will you help for 70 more days?
        Audience members. Yes!
        The President. Will you help for 4 more years?
        Audience members. Yes!
        The President. Thank you, and God bless you. Hang in there! Let's
    go!

    Note: The President spoke at 8 p.m. on the rear platform of the 21st
    Century Express. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Wesley K. Hoffman
    of Bowling Green, and Sidney A. Ribeau, president, Bowling Green State
    University.