    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
    [November 4, 1996]
    [Pages 2071-2076]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
    November 4, 1996

        Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, I didn't expect to see so many
    of you here this late at night. Senator and Mrs. Daschle; Senator-to-be
    and Mrs. Johnson; Congressman-to-be and Mrs. Weiland. And I want us to
    give a real good hand here to Rick Weiland and his fine wife. They've
    done a great job out there campaigning, give them a hand. [Applause] Pam
    Nelson, thank you for your candidacy. Give Pam Nelson a hand. Stand up,
    Pam. She needs your help tomorrow. [Applause] I want to thank CeCe
    Peniston for singing so beautifully; the Bill Gibson Orchestra. Thank
    you, South Dakota State University Marching Band. You were fabulous.
        Now, you know, if the rest of us can maintain that level of energy
    till the polls close tomorrow night, we're going to be just fine, and
    this is great. We're going to be fine. Thank you.
        And I want to thank my longtime friend who was with me 4 years ago
    on this night under similar circumstances. He's going to bring us good
    luck again, Jerry Jeff Walker and his band. Thank you for being here.
    God bless you, friend.
        You know, folks, I appreciate what Tom Daschle said in thanking us
    for our lavish attention to South Dakota and all that. It's not
    complicated. I like it here. I like coming here. I enjoy being here. I
    feel at home here. I feel this is a place where people still know their
    neighbors and where they care about what happens to their neighbors and
    where they understand, in the best sense, as Hillary often says, it does
    take a village for us to raise our children and build our future.
        This is the last election of the 20th century for President, the
    first election of the 21st century, an election occurring against a
    background of almost breathtaking, unimaginable changes in technology
    and science, in the way we are simply organized to work and live and
    relate to each other and the rest of the world. The young people here in
    this audience today, in a few years many will be doing jobs that have
    not been invented yet. Many will be doing jobs that have not been
    imagined yet.
        One little piece of evidence about how much the world is changing:
    When I became President there were 3 million Americans who were living
    and working in their homes, making a living. That was 4 years ago.
    Today, there are 12 million Americans doing that because of technology,
    and 4 years from now there will be 30 million Americans doing that.
        We just signed a contract, the United States did, with IBM to
    develop a supercomputer that will do more calculations in one second
    than you can do at home tonight on your hand-held calculator in 30,000
    years. That is an example of what is happening.
        I say that to make this point: This is an election of enormous
    consequence, not because of Tim Johnson or Bill Clinton but because of
    the sweeping changes going on in our country. And

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    the great question is, how shall we respond to those changes?
        There's been a lot of back and forth in this campaign that I think
    is, unfortunately, a byproduct of much of modern politics, a lot of
    negative stuff. My experience has been that most people in public life
    in both parties are good, honest, hard-working people who give their
    lives to their country and love their country. In this case we just have
    different views. And you should be happy about that because in an
    election of great consequence there ought to be a clear choice and you
    ought to have some way of measuring whether the choice you're making is
    right. And I would argue to the people of South Dakota--I know that
    there are more registered Republicans than Democrats here; I know there
    are a lot of registered independents here. This vote tomorrow should be
    the first vote of the 21st century. It ought to be a vote about people
    and progress and hopes and dreams. Party is not nearly as important
    tomorrow as reaching out for our dreams and our deepest hopes for our
    children, and that is what I am asking.
        Now, you know, maybe some of you have noticed this, but I am now
    speaking at the last rally of the last campaign I will ever run. And I'm
    honored to share it with you. It's hard for me to believe that this
    January it will be 23 years ago when, as a young 27-year-old man, I
    asked the people of my rural hill country congressional district in
    Arkansas to send me to Congress. They said no, by the way. [Laughter]
        And everybody thought I was washed up. Then I got to be my State's
    attorney general and Governor, and then in the Reagan landslide of 1980
    they said no again. [Laughter] By the time I was 34 years old, I had
    already been defeated twice. I was in Ripley's already. I was the
    youngest ex-Governor in the history of America. [Laughter] But the
    people of my home State were good to me. We learned a lot together, and
    we did a lot together. And 4 years ago you gave me the chance to be
    President.
        The American people 4 years ago took us on faith when I said that I
    hated what had happened in politics in Washington; it was too much hot
    air, too many insults, not enough issues, not enough results, not enough
    people reaching across the partisan divide and working together in a new
    and different time to try and build a new politics for America. I said
    that if you elected me, I would follow a vigorous and disciplined
    approach: more opportunity for everybody, more responsibility from
    everybody, and an American community in which everyone who works hard
    and is responsible has a place at the table and a role to play. We have
    done that for 4 years, and you don't have to guess anymore.
        Our friends on the other side, they honestly believe that we're
    better off when we're on our own. I think we're better off when we work
    together to give each other not a guarantee but a chance to make the
    most of our own lives and our families and our future. And you don't
    have to guess anymore.
        This economy is stronger than it was 4 years ago. The deficit has
    gone down by 63 percent and there are 10.7 million more jobs and the
    lowest rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years. Something that's
    always been important to hard working families in this part of our
    country is that everybody who works hard ought to have a fair share.
    We've had the biggest decline in inequality of incomes among working
    people in 27 years, the biggest drop in child poverty in 30 years, the
    lowest rate of poverty among seniors in America ever recorded since
    we've been keeping statistics. We are moving in the right direction to
    the 21st century. We are.
        And in our country as a whole the crime rate has gone down to a 10-
    year low. The welfare rolls have dropped by nearly 2 million. Child
    support collections, by the way, are up by about 50 percent. And more
    children are getting what they are entitled to. Our economy is in better
    shape than it was 4 years ago, but so is our environment. We've taken
    millions of tons of pollutants out of the atmosphere, raised the
    standards for safe drinking water and the purity of food. And I might
    add, we've done that with the support of the agricultural community.
    We've cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than our opponents
    did in 12.
        So we're moving in the right direction. And you have this clear
    choice. They say all these terrible things they say about all of us, you
    know, but it obscures the fact that we're moving in the right direction,
    that we have now 4 years of evidence that ``you're on your own'' is not
    nearly as good as ``we're working together to build a bridge to the 21st
    century we can all walk across.'' And that's what this is about.
        Now, there is another very important piece of evidence here, and
    that is when our friends

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    in the other party were in power and were given the power to enact their
    Contract With America--by the way, how many times has Congressman
    Johnson's opponent mentioned that contract in this election? But anyway,
    they did it, and it wasn't just the House under Newt Gingrich. It was
    the Senate under Senator Dole. They did it together. And they passed
    their version of what they thought America's future ought to be. They
    did it all by themselves. They told us they didn't want our help, they
    didn't want our votes, and they weren't interested in our input. They
    wanted to do it, and they wanted to show America what they wanted to do.
        And we saw. We saw. They passed a budget which cut 3 times as much
    from Medicare as was necessary to save the Trust Fund and divided the
    program so that the oldest, the poorest, and the most ill of our seniors
    ran the risk of being put in a second-class program at a time when it
    wasn't necessary and at a time when we know it's wrong. We've got the
    lowest poverty rate we ever had among seniors. And in America, if you
    live to be 65, you have the highest life expectancy of any group of
    seniors in the world. That's a high-class problem. Why would they mess
    that up? That's what they tried to do.
        They also took the Medicaid program, which has for 30 years provided
    a guarantee of health care to poor women and infant children, to middle
    class families with family members with disabilities so they could take
    care of their family members and still work and maintain their middle
    class lifestyle, to a lot of our seniors in nursing homes and standards
    for those nursing homes and they got rid of all that. And they cut
    education funding from Head Start to college loans for the first time in
    modern history, abolished the Department of Education, abolished the
    program to put 100,000 police on our street, which has played a critical
    role in bringing the crime rate down, and paralyzed environmental
    enforcement and cut it back by 25 to 30 percent. That's what they did.
    They also--oh, by the way--raised taxes on 9 million of our hardest
    pressed working families and gave companies the authority to raid their
    workers' pension funds. We went through that in the 1980's. In 1994, Tom
    Daschle and Tim Johnson and I passed a worker protection pension act to
    protect the pensions of 40 million retired and still working people, and
    they wanted to turn around and undo that. That's what they did.
        Now, along toward the end of this last Congress they adopted our
    program. They said, ``Oh, we've got to go face the voters. We'll give
    the President what he wants.'' And they hope you have this case of
    collective amnesia. [Laughter] The Vice President told a story today in
    Cleveland when we were together--I had forgotten this story; we used to
    tell it at home all the time--but it captures what they're trying to get
    you to think about their budget.
        It's a story about a politician who's out in the country, and he
    sees a farmer. He's running for office, and the farmer is sitting up on
    his porch rocking, and he says, ``I'm going to go talk to this farmer,''
    but there's a big old dog in the yard that's ferocious looking. So he
    says, ``Sir, I'd like to come visit with you, but does your dog bite?''
    He said, ``No.'' So he hikes over the fence, goes over on the porch,
    shakes hands with the farmer and tells him he's running for the
    legislature and would like to have his vote. And the dog runs up and
    bites him right in the rear. [Laughter] And he runs back and jumps in
    his car and rolls the window down and said, ``I thought you said your
    dog didn't bite.'' He said, ``Son, that ain't my dog.'' [Laughter]
        And let me tell you something, folks, that budget that I vetoed, it
    is their dog, and it was a mangy old dog, and that's why I vetoed that
    dog. And everybody--and I'll tell you, if you reward them, everybody--
    oh, I can see it all now in the columns the next day--well, that budget
    wasn't so unpopular after all. You have to decide.
        They said, ``Well, the Democrats--Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson, people
    like that--they love the Government so much they'll never let us shut it
    down, and we'll just make the President cave. We'll put them all on
    their knees. If they don't take our budget and let us shove it to the
    American people, we'll just shut the Government down, and we'll show
    them who's boss.''
        And they did it, and we didn't cave. And they did it again, and we
    didn't cave. And what I finally told them was, I said, ``Look, I hate to
    see the American people inconvenienced for 30 or 40 days, but that is
    nothing to seeing the American people hurt, divided, and set back for 30
    or 40 years. Shut her down. We are

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    not going to cave.'' Thank you, Tim Johnson, for staying there. Thank
    you.
        Now, let me give you an idea of what the practical impact of that
    was on you. I was in Denver the other night and we had a nice little
    indoor rally like this--I think you got more folks here tonight. But
    they were really great, though. We had a great rally, and after the
    rally I did what I always do: I started at one end, went to the other
    end, just shook hands with everybody I could reach. And while I was
    moving in a space about like this, I met the following people: I met a
    young woman who started crying who thanked me for the work we were doing
    in trying to combat domestic violence and violence against women. She
    was obviously a victim. That was in the crime bill that they opposed. So
    if they had had their way, it wouldn't be law.
        Then I met a young woman in a police uniform from a smaller
    community in Colorado thanking me for the five new police officers that
    her community had, and she was going to feel safer on the street and the
    kids were going to be safer in her community. That was in the crime
    bill, and that was in the budget that they tried to do away with. All
    those police officers, they wouldn't have been there.
        Then I met a young man who had dropped out of college and went back
    when we changed the college loan program so you could borrow a lot of
    money and then pay it back as a percentage of your income so young
    people would never be bankrupted by borrowing the money to go to
    college. They did away with that, too. They tried to kill it, and they
    did away with that.
        Then I met a man who told me that he and his wife had just adopted a
    2-month-old baby, and his wife was able to go home and make that child
    more comfortable in their new circumstances without losing her job
    because of the family and medical leave law. And they led the fight
    against that. This happens to me all the time.
        Then I met a young woman who was going to college because she'd
    worked in AmeriCorps, the national service program, serving her
    community, and earned the money to go to college. Seventy thousand young
    people have done that. They are solving problems and helping people all
    across America, and they did away with that in the budget.
        Now, those are just people that I just ran into in a line just like
    this in South Dakota. This has huge consequences for America. Now, I
    know that in Congressman Johnson's race there's a lot of talk about
    clout. And that's an interesting concept, clout. [Laughter] It looks to
    me like you'd have a lot of clout if Tom Daschle were the majority
    leader of the Senate. You would have a lot of clout because everybody in
    the entire United States Congress, in both parties, who knows him
    respects Tim Johnson as one of the most hard-working, effective,
    intelligent, persistent Members of Congress in the entire country.
        And you'd have a lot of clout because the President likes
    Congressman Johnson and listens to him. And when he says, ``Mr.
    President, you're wrong; you shouldn't do this. This, this is what's in
    the best interest of the people of South Dakota,'' I would be highly
    likely to listen to Tim Johnson if he said this.
        So it makes a difference. You know, the title is not enough. There's
    a difference. You have to draw these distinctions. It reminds me of my
    other favorite dog story. [Laughter] You know about--this guy is going
    down the highway, and he sees this sign that says, ``George Jones,
    Veterinarian/Taxidermist. Either way you get your dog back.'' [Laughter]
        It makes a difference. Tim Johnson will have good clout. He'll be
    very, very good, and he won't be using a committee chairmanship to
    saddle the American people or the people of South Dakota with the kind
    of budget that I had to veto that would have divided this country and
    set us back. He'll be building a bridge to the future.
        So you ought to go to the polls tomorrow happy and upbeat and
    feeling good about your country. You ought to go to the polls tomorrow
    with absolutely no doubt in your mind that the best days of America lie
    ahead. But you should be heavily aware of the responsibility you and all
    Americans bear to seize this opportunity to say, if we're going to meet
    the challenges we face, if we're going to seize the opportunities we
    have, we have to do this together. There are some things we must do
    together. I talked about that supercomputer. The richest person in this
    audience tonight cannot afford to build that.
        Every American who won a Nobel Prize this year in physics and
    chemistry started with a public research grant. The Internet, which is

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    going to be the salvation of so many people in rural areas, allowing
    them access to things they would never have otherwise, started as a
    Government research project. It's now in the private sector where it
    belongs, but I just announced another investment of $100 million to
    modernize and expand it because when we all get on we don't want it to
    break down. We want it to take us out to the rest of the world.
        Now, we have to do some things together. So your vote is going to
    decide whether we go on and balance this budget, have a targeted tax cut
    for education, childrearing, health care, and homebuying that we can
    afford in a balanced budget, protect Medicare, Medicaid, education, and
    the environment; or whether we go back and replay what happened before
    with their big, risky tax scheme that still raises taxes on the hardest
    pressed working people, will require bigger cuts in those things than
    the ones I vetoed, will blow a hole in the deficit, and violates every
    fiscal principle that I know that the people of South Dakota,
    Republican, Democrat, or independent, all believe in. You have to
    decide. Let's go on and balance the budget and build that bridge to the
    21st century. You will have to decide. You have to decide.
        You have to decide whether we're going to finish the work of the
    crime bill and put a whole 100,000 police on the street; whether we're
    going to continue to support the safe and drug-free schools program
    which we have doubled so that more people will be out there telling
    these young people drugs are wrong, illegal, they can kill you. This is
    not the time to turn back on that problem. There's still too many kids
    out there raising themselves. They need a strong hand and guidance, and
    I want to give it to them. We dare not cut back on that program and walk
    away from it. You have to decide.
        I say let's keep bringing the crime rate down. In 4 more years we
    might actually feel safe in this country again if we can do it. You have
    to decide.
        You have to decide whether you really believe, not just something to
    cheer about on the eve of an election but whether deep inside you
    believe that America will never be what it ought to be until we give all
    of our children and all of our adults now access to world-class
    educational opportunities with high standards, accountability,
    technology, and all the benefits that the best schools have. You have to
    decide.
        Let me just give you an example. I want to do three things. Number
    one, you know 40 percent of the 8-year-olds in this country still can't
    read a book on their own. A lot of them come from places where their
    first language is not English. That will be cold comfort to them when
    they can't learn later on because they didn't learn to read when they
    were young. We have a plan to mobilize a million volunteers. We have
    100,000 more work-study slots that we'll make available to college
    students if they'll teach 8-year-olds to read. I want to go into the
    schools and work with the parents so that by the year 2000 every 8-year-
    old in this country can pick up a book and say, ``I can read this all by
    myself.'' Will you help me do that? Will you help us do that? [Applause]
        The second thing I want to do--we had an event about this in South
    Dakota not very long ago. I think the Vice President was here. We are
    working hard to connect every classroom and every library in every
    school in America to the information superhighway by the year 2000. And
    here's what it means. It means that children in every American tribe in
    America, children in the poorest rural school districts, children in the
    most remote districts in Alaska, children in the biggest--poor inner-
    city school districts in our biggest cities; children in urban,
    suburban, and rural districts; rich, poor, middle class--for the first
    time in the history of America, because of these connections we can make
    available the same learning from all over the world at the same level of
    quality in the same time to all of our children. It will revolutionize
    education. Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century?
    [Applause]
        And finally, when you look at these college students, let me say
    that we must--we must--open the doors of college to all Americans. And
    we can do this, number one, by making 2 years of college as universal as
    a high school diploma is today. In 4 years we can do it by simply saying
    you can deduct from your tax bill, dollar for dollar, the cost of the
    typical community college tuition. All you have to do is go and make
    your grades and do your business.
        Number two, I want to make it possible for more people to save in an
    individual retirement account, but withdraw from it tax-free if the
    money is used for education or homebuying or health care.
        And finally, something that would help virtually every person in
    that band up there. I

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    think the people ought to be able to deduct up to $10,000 per year for
    the cost of tuition at any college or university in any place in the
    United States. Now, will you help us do that? [Applause]
        But again, I say, all these issues, all these divisions, they're not
    a matter of party. Every time we go through a period of big change, we
    are given an opportunity not only to increase our prosperity, not only
    to make our lives more interesting but to build stronger families and
    stronger communities and to live closer to our values. That is what this
    election is about.
        This is the last speech of my last campaign. If you came up to me
    and said, ``What have you learned in 23 years that never changes?'' I
    would say, when people look into their hearts and they ask, ``What is
    the right thing for my children and for my family and for America's
    future,'' when they set aside their prejudices and embrace people of
    different racial and religious and ethnic groups who share their values
    of work and family and belief in the Constitution, when they roll up
    their sleeves and work together, America always wins.
        This is the greatest country in human history because we have
    created a system in which you are the boss. Tomorrow you will be the
    boss, and you will go in there, and you will be asked, will we renew
    President Clinton's contract? You will be asked--you're going to be
    asked, should we hire Tim Johnson to be our Senator? Should we hire Rick
    Weiland to be our Congressman? Should we hire Pam Nelson to be our
    corporation commissioner? You're going to be asked these questions. But
    the real question is, are we going to do it together? That's what I've
    learned. I have learned that when we are divided, when we look down on
    each other, when we look for what these politicians call wedge issues to
    divide each other, to win a campaign because we get people in a lather
    so there's more heat than light in our debates and discussions, we
    always get hurt.
        But when we join hands and run our country the way you try to run
    your families, your churches, your farms, your factories, your
    businesses, your communities, your charities, when we do that, we always
    win. There is no person living in this country today who knows that
    better than I do. There is no person living in this country today who
    has been given more gifts, who feels more humble on this night than I
    do. Fifty years ago, when I was born in a summer storm to a widowed
    mother in a little town in Arkansas, it was unthinkable that I might
    have ever become President. I'd like for you to believe I did it because
    I always worked 60 or 70 hours a week, I had an understanding and
    supportive and wonderful family, and I just did it. But it isn't true. I
    did it because at every step along the way for 23 years and long before,
    there was a Sunday school teacher, a teacher in school, a doctor, the
    guy running the Red Roof in my hometown who always stopped and talked to
    me and tried to give me encouragement when I was despondent, over and
    over and over. We just need to run our country the way we want to run
    our lives. That is what I have learned in 23 years, and that is what I
    ask you to vote for tomorrow as we build our bridge to the 21st century.
        Thank you, God bless you, and good night. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:40 p.m. in the Sioux Falls Arena and
    Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Linda Daschle, wife of
    Senator Tom Daschle; Tim Johnson, South Dakota senatorial candidate, and
    his wife, Barb; Pam Nelson, candidate for public utilities commission;
    singer CeCe Peniston; and musician Jerry Jeff Walker.