    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [October 30, 1996]
    [Pages 1980-1985]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to Colorado Democrats in Denver, Colorado
    October 30, 1996

        Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. Mayor, Mrs. Webb, Governor
    Romer, Congressman Fields, Chairperson Vivian Stovall, and Mike Beatty,
    my old friend Norm Early--I'm glad to see him again. And I want to say a
    special word on behalf of Diana DeGette, who's trying to make sure that
    we have a different leadership in the House of Representatives and for
    the Congress.
        I'd also like to say a word for our Senate nominee, Tom Strickland,
    who is, as you know, going to another one of his debates with Mr.
    Allard. And you have to be thinking about him. You're going to be
    enjoying a dinner, and he won't be able to eat. [Laughter] But I think
    he'll represent us well, and I hope you will help him prevail on
    election day.
        Let me also say, if you have never heard Cleo Fields give a speech,
    when I finish you will have not heard the best speaker tonight on the
    platform. And I want to thank him. He comes from my neighboring State of
    Louisiana; I was elated when he was elected to Congress. I was
    downhearted when he was redistricted by a court. And I think he has a
    brilliant future ahead of him, and I'm glad he's here with you. Ron
    Brown would be glad he is here with you tonight.
        I would like to talk a little history with you tonight, just to
    bring you to this point so soon, so near to our election. First, I thank
    you for

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    naming these awards for Ron Brown and Barbara Jordan. They were both
    friends of mine and my relationship with each of them, though different,
    is something I will treasure all of my life.
        I too remember the first time I ever heard Barbara Jordan speak, and
    I thought, maybe God is a woman after all. [Laughter] I always--I got to
    where I wanted to say ``yes, ma'am'' before she ever opened her mouth,
    every time I was ever around her. [Laughter]
        She never lost her love for this country, and the more her body
    became weakened by her condition, the stronger her heart and voice
    became. And in her last year she agreed to chair for me a commission
    looking at what we should do about the issues of immigration in our
    country, how we could remain a nation of immigrants and still take a
    strong stand that people who come here should do so legally. And she did
    it with a grace, a strength, a balance, a fundamental sense of fairness
    and common sense that everyone who worked with her marveled about. And
    that was her last great contribution to our Nation. And I've done my
    best to implement the ideas that Barbara Jordan advanced. And I'll
    always be grateful to her.
        And all of you know, of course, of my relationship with Ron Brown. I
    doubt very seriously that I'd be standing here as President of the
    United States tonight if it hadn't been for Ron Brown. And so I'm going
    to keep him smiling from up there the next week. I'm going to do
    everything I can to keep that big smile on his face.
        I also want to thank you for honoring Wellington and Wilma Webb. I
    not only like them very much, but I admire them very much. And Hillary
    and I identify with them. We love being around them. And I like seeing a
    strong first lady, and I like seeing a mayor who is strong enough to
    want to be married to a strong first lady--[laughter]--and I like that.
        So I thank you for that. And let me say that Colorado has--I've been
    coming here a lot for the last 15 years, a long time before I ever
    thought I'd be here as President. I came every chance I could because it
    represented something very special to me. And I think you've been
    blessed by the quality of your leaders. Roy Romer I think is clearly,
    both in terms of accomplishment and intellect and vision of the future,
    the most gifted Governor in the United States in terms of his
    contribution to our future.
        And he's like all of us aging warriors. He was reluctant to give up
    on his youth, so he broke his leg on a motorcycle and--[laughter]--he's
    left his cane, and he's kind of trading up his shoes gradually, you
    know. [Laughter] But I am delighted to be here with all of them.
        This election we're going to have will elect the last President of
    the 20th century and the first President of the 21st century. Colorado
    sort of embodies both the promise and the struggles of the present and
    the future. And I was thinking when Mayor Webb was talking about Abraham
    Lincoln and the long talks we had about Lincoln when he was staying in
    the White House that the great thing about America is that there's
    always been a relentless quest for a better future in a way that would
    embrace the moment and, in doing so, not abandon our traditional values
    and ideals but instead try to perfect them.
        A lot of people have this idea that, well, if you were really a
    future-oriented person, it means you're too material or you're too
    concerned about ideas, and that's very exciting, but you must be a
    little shy on the traditional ideals and values that have kept our
    country strong. But I don't see it that way at all. I think that our
    expanding abundance only gives us the opportunity which we then have to
    seize to live up more closely to our ideals and our values.
        And this period that we're living in now involves such a remarkable
    change in the way people are living and working, relating to each other,
    the way we're relating to the rest of the world, that it has only
    basically one parallel in American history: 100 years ago--very
    interesting--when we moved from the farm to the factory, when we moved
    from the country to the city, when we then had our first big wave of
    immigrants coming in. And because we did not put aside our racial
    bigotry after the Civil War, even though we stayed together as a country
    and we abolished slavery legally and we adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th
    amendments and we began to move forward, we still were a country that
    said one thing and did another.
        All of us are like that still, you know. [Laughter] Every one of us
    had a parent at one moment in a lapse said, ``Well, I still want you to
    do what I say, not what I do.'' But what happened was, those immigrants,
    when they came in here 100 years ago, they felt terrible prejudice, the
    Italians, the Irish, the Poles. And then we had the Red Scare, and then
    we had

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    the Ku Klux Klan rise up in America; no more than 50 years after the
    Civil War they were hanging black people again in the South where I grew
    up.
        Because of the civil rights struggle and because of the progress
    which has been made, even though we're a long way from where we ought to
    be in the relationships between African-Americans and the white
    majority, we have a chance to deal with this new infusion of immigrants
    and all the new explosion of diversity of all kinds in our country in a
    different way than we did 100 years ago and to take advantage of all
    these technological and other changes to move closer to our ideals.
        We also have a chance--it's very important to Coloradans--to take
    advantage of these new exploding economic opportunities in a way that
    preserves and indeed enhances our environment instead of undermining it,
    which is what happened 100 years ago.
        So this is a time of enormous possibility. And it's very important
    that we not be distracted from the big issues here. There are two great,
    different philosophies at stake in this election. One of them basically
    says that the main thing about America is that everybody came over here
    to get a good letting-alone, and that's true. Our Constitution was
    constructed to limit the ability of Government to oppress people. But
    one of the things we've learned over the last 100 years is, in the world
    we're living in and in the world we're going to, as Wellington said,
    none of us get there by ourselves.
        You know, I was thinking of Wellington's story--I was raised by--I
    was born to a widowed mother, and my stepfather didn't graduate from
    high school. And it's inconceivable, I think, to a lot of my kinfolks at
    home that I ever turned out to be President. [Laughter] But I know one
    thing: If I had been born black instead of white, I wouldn't be
    President. I know that. But I know we're closer to the time when anybody
    can run for President, fulfilling the Constitution's requirements, and
    be considered on his or her own merits. We're closer.
        And so I still believe that the Government in many areas of private
    life--choice, religion, many other areas--should let people, as long as
    they're not hurting other people, make their own decisions and go
    forward. One of the proudest moments of my Presidency was signing the
    Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And most of you probably don't even
    know I signed it because there was no fight about, and if there's not a
    fight in Washington, it doesn't get on the news in Denver. [Laughter] It
    passed unanimously. And then we have vigorously enforced it, including
    in a controversial case out here in Colorado where--every case I have
    bent over backwards to make sure that we never interfere with any
    person's exercise of his or her religious convictions, whatever they
    are, unless it's really going to threaten to bring the Government down
    or something terrible.
        And so, here we are at this moment, and I think what we've learned
    is, yes, we should guarantee, first and foremost, the individual liberty
    of people; but to guarantee their security and to give them all the same
    chance--not a guarantee but a chance in life--there are some things we
    have to do together. And it is the difference of opinion over how much
    we should do together and what we should do together that this election
    is all about.
        It is not about big Government. Our administration has reduced the
    size of Government, the number of regulations, the number of Government
    programs eliminated, and we have privatized more Government operations
    than the previous two Republican administrations combined. If they had
    this record, they would be saying it's the greatest thing since sliced
    bread.
        But what I have not been willing to do is to see us walk away from
    our common obligations to give all of our people educational
    opportunities; to give health care to poor children, to families with
    disabilities, to the elderly in nursing homes; to preserve the gains of
    Medicare, even as we reform the system; and to protect the environment
    and to continue our investment in research and in technology in our
    endless quest to move into the future so more people can live closer to
    what we all say we believe.
        That's what this election is about, whether you think we're better
    off being told, ``You're on your own, and we hope you make it,'' or
    whether we think it does take a village to raise our children and build
    a country. That's what this election is about.
        It's about whether we're going to build a bridge to the 21st century
    that's big enough and wide enough for all of us to walk across, and then
    whether we're going to have in our hearts the capacity to say, ``If you
    believe in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the
    Constitution and you're willing

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    to show up for work tomorrow--or, if you're of that age, to show up for
    school tomorrow--if you're willing to do your job as an American, we
    don't need to know anything else about you, nothing. Nothing else
    matters. You're part of our America, and we're willing to walk hand in
    hand with you across that bridge into the future.''
        Now, that is what the election is about. I was reading today an
    amusing--I thought it was amusing--an article in a magazine about my
    judicial appointments, because they pointed out that one of the things
    that has not been discussed much in the election is the fact that the
    next President may well get to make a couple more appointments to the
    Supreme Court. And they were saying that the previous administration
    imposed--two administrations--imposed strict ideological litmus tests on
    a lot of judges and that a lot of my supporters were disappointed that I
    didn't turn around and do exactly the same thing on the other end, but
    instead I had insisted on two things, excellence and diversity.
        And they pointed out that I had appointed more African-Americans,
    more Hispanics, more Asian-Americans, and more women to the Federal
    bench than any President in history and that, in spite of that, we had
    the highest ratings from the American Bar Association for excellence of
    any judicial selections in the history of the country since they've been
    doing that.
        I think if you have a Federal bench that reflects the vast
    experiences of America, with people that are smart enough to figure out
    the issues that are put before them and they share the experiences of
    America in all of its permutations, chances are pretty good that they'll
    do what they ought to do. And judges aren't like Presidents or
    Congressmen, but they should reflect America.
        I say all that to make this point. Every election time the election
    is always decided by those who vote and by those who don't. And the
    people that have the biggest stake in whether we build a bridge that we
    can all walk across together--in whether we adopt my education agenda,
    which is to expand Head Start; to teach every 8-year-old to read a book
    independently; to have every classroom in the country, even in the
    poorest school districts, in the most remote rural districts, hooked up
    to the information superhighway by the year 2000; to make 2 years of
    college as universal as high school is today by giving people a tax
    credit, a dollar-for-dollar reduction on their tax bill of up to $1,500
    a year, the cost of a typical community college education; to give every
    family a tax deduction of up to $10,000 for any college tuition,
    undergraduate or graduate, for people of any age; to let families save
    in an IRA and withdraw from it tax-free if the money is used for
    education or buying a first home or a medical emergency--that agenda, if
    you embrace that, it means that you think we have a common obligation to
    help each other live up to the fullest of our abilities and that we'll
    all be better off if we all have a chance to do well.
        If you support my agenda--that I think we have a common obligation
    to eliminate discrimination of all kinds in the workplace; to protect
    the environment; to continue to try to expand coverage of health care
    step by step to people, so that people who work have a chance to buy
    health care--you have to believe that it's because we're all going to be
    better off if we live closer to what we say we believe and we give
    everybody else a chance to do the same. That's what the election is
    about.
        And the people that have the most at stake are the ones that will
    have the best excuse not to vote. How many mothers do we know out there
    raising two or three kids, working two jobs, having to figure out,
    ``I've got to figure out how to vote on a workday, and I've got to get
    my kids somewhere before I go to work, and what's going to happen to
    them after school, and I don't have enough money for child care, and
    what have I got to do tonight?'' All the people that may have the
    biggest stake in this election may have the best excuse--not a reason
    but it's a pretty good excuse--because their lives will be crowded with
    other things.
        And maybe they have or haven't felt it, but it makes a difference.
    Ten million more Americans got an increase in the minimum wage. The
    average income is up $1,600 for the typical family in the last 2 years
    after 20 years of wage stagnation. Last month we found out--or just 2
    weeks ago we found out that we had the biggest decline in income
    inequality among working people in 27 years, since this administration
    came in; the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years; the biggest
    drop in poverty in female-headed households in 30 years; the lowest
    recorded poverty levels ever for senior citizens and African-Americans;
    the largest number of new businesses owned by minorities and

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    women in the history of the country; the largest number of new small
    businesses owned by anybody in the history of the country. It makes a
    difference. It makes a difference.
        So it makes a difference what policies we pursue, and it will change
    people's lives here. And so I ask you to go out and help our Senate
    candidate, help Diana DeGette, help Bill Clinton and Al Gore, not as a
    matter of party, now, but because it has fallen to our party to embrace
    a philosophy that the other party embraced briefly under Abraham
    Lincoln, that they embraced briefly under Theodore Roosevelt, but that
    they have abandoned. And so it has fallen to us to carry this banner,
    not as a matter of party but as a matter of carrying on the great
    American experiment in a way that will truly realize the era of greatest
    possibility ever known.
        I honestly believe these kids here in this audience, they'll be
    doing things in 10 or 15 years we couldn't even dream of. They'll be
    doing jobs that haven't been invented; some of them will be doing jobs
    that haven't been imagined. It's all out there. But we have to make the
    right decisions. And as much as anything else, that's why I have fought
    so hard not only to make the right governmental decisions but to say the
    right things as your President when the hatred of the Government led a
    demented person to blow up a Federal building in Oklahoma City--
    allegedly; they haven't been tried yet, and we can't presume anybody's
    guilt. But we know that Government hatred has led people into bands of
    folks that are paranoid that terrible things are going to happen to
    them. I had to speak against that.
        When the black churches are being burned or white churches are being
    burned or synagogues are being defaced or Islamic centers are being
    defaced, that's not our America. But that is the dominant theme of life
    that caused people to slaughter each other's children in Bosnia. And it
    still bedevils Northern Ireland; they're still arguing over things--
    they're my ancestors, you know, and they're my relatives now, so I can
    talk about them. They're still fighting over things that happened 300
    years ago and battles that occurred 600 years ago, when all the kids
    want to do is to let it go and go on into the future. In the Middle
    East, where I have worked so hard, the Holy Land for the three great
    monotheistic religions in the world--if anyplace in the world ought to
    be a peaceful sanctuary for Jews and Muslims and Christians, it ought to
    be the Holy Land. But so many of them just can't let it go.
        And we're going to beat all that if we do the right things. When
    Hillary and Chelsea and I went to open the Olympics and I looked at
    those people--we had people from 197 different racial and ethnic groups.
    Almost every single one of them had people in America. And that's
    because we're not about race or religion or anything else. We're about
    these ideas and trying every, every, every age to live up closer to
    them.
        This is a very historic election, not because of me but because of
    what's happening to us. And we go through periods of huge change like
    this only rarely. And that's a good thing, because nobody can change--
    you know, any of us can just stand so much change at once. One of my
    laws of politics: We're all for change in general, but we're against it
    in particular. [Laughter] Or as one of my friends said, ``Yes, I agree
    with you, we ought to change. You go first.'' [Laughter]
        So this is our responsibility. Now, you know what to do, and you
    know how to do it. And if Ron Brown were here giving a speech tonight,
    that's all he'd be talking about. That's all he'd be talking about. And
    Barbara Jordan, if she were here, she'd make you feel so guilty you
    wouldn't sleep between now and Tuesday--[laughter]--until you dragged
    every human being you knew to the polls. Now, you know that.
        So I want you to think about that. And I want you to understand that
    you carry with you the great burden and opportunity of American history.
    Every one of us should be grateful to be alive at this time, should be
    grateful to have this moment in which we have a chance to further break
    down the walls of discrimination in our minds and hearts, explode
    opportunity for all Americans, and that these changes that are going on
    give us this incredible opportunity to really actually enhance the
    natural environment God has given us and leave it stronger and better
    for our children and grandchildren, even as we prosper.
        That's what I want you to think about. I want you to think about,
    Tuesday morning when you get up, that bridge to tomorrow, and how you
    wouldn't let your child have to go down deep valleys and cross rushing
    rivers and climb big mountains if they could just get on a bridge and
    walk straight across. And that's what I want for everybody. And in order
    to do it, we've

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    got to show up. You know what to do. You know how to do it. Your country
    needs you. I know you'll be there.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 7:20 p.m. at the Red Lion Inn to the
    Colorado Democratic Coordinated Campaign and the African-American
    Initiative of Colorado Democrats. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor
    Wellington Webb of Denver and his wife, Wilma; Representative Cleo
    Fields of Louisiana; Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado; Vivian Stovall, chair,
    African-American Initiative of the Colorado Democrats; Mike Beatty,
    chair, Colorado Democratic Party; Norm Early, former Denver district
    attorney; Diana DeGette, candidate for Colorado's First Congressional
    District; Colorado senatorial candidate Tom Strickland; and
    Representative Wayne Allard of Colorado.