Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)

[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[July 22, 1996]
[Pages 1167-1175]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

[[Page 1167]]

Remarks to the Community in Denver
July 22, 1996

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for that wonderful
welcome. Thank you, Mayor Webb, for your leadership and for your
extraordinarily powerful personal statement. Thank you, Governor Romer,
for being my friend for such a long time now and for being a shining
example of the best in public service. Thank you all for keeping him on
the job.
Ladies and gentlemen, before I begin my remarks today, I'd like to
say just a word about an issue that I believe is on the minds and hearts
of all Americans, the ongoing recovery operations involving TWA Flight
800. This is a very long and difficult period for the families and loved
ones of the people who were on that plane. It is literally an agonizing
process, made worse by the fact that the weather has been so poor and
that many of the things that would have been done by now have not been
able to be done.
I want the families to know that I am working as hard as I can to
speed this process and to make it as easy as possible. I've asked the
relevant Federal agencies to provide pathologists to the recovery teams
in New York if they're requested by the State. And we are working very,
very hard to get to the bottom of this. We will do that, and we will
give them the answers they seek as soon as we possibly can.
Meanwhile, I ask the rest of you to keep them in your prayers. It is
this awful hanging fire that is the difficult and agonizing thing for
them. We can all imagine how we would feel if we were in their place.
And so I ask you to keep them in your prayers, and I assure you that we
will do everything we can to get to the bottom of this as quickly as
possible.
Let me say I have come here to Denver today, as the Governor and the
mayor said, to discuss the issue of welfare reform and specifically to
talk a little bit about the child support issue. But I want to put it
into a larger context of where we are as a people, why this is
important, and what we're trying to do together to get ready to march
into that new century just 4 years away.
Denver's a good place to do this. This is a city that believes in
itself and in the future, and America needs to believe in itself and in
its future. Denver is clearly getting ready for a new century only 4
years away. I arrived last night at your new airport, the first one of
its size in 20 years. I now am speaking in this incredible arts complex,
the second biggest in America, looking at this wonderful auditorium that
is lined with sandstone that I'm told was hewn right out of the
beautiful mountains that are just beyond these walls. This is a large-
minded place. And America needs to be large-minded as we stand on the
threshold of this new century.
Because the information age is so dramatically changing the way we
work, the way we live, the way we relate to each other and the rest of
the world, the next generation of Americans is literally going to have
more opportunities to live out their dreams than any generation of
Americans in history. The young people that are in this audience today,
within a matter of 10 years, will be doing jobs that have not even been
invented yet. Some of them have not been conceived yet.
So this is going to be a very exciting time, full of enormous
possibility. But as is inevitable in the human condition, it will also
have some very stiff challenges. We know that the very things that make
the world more exciting, more open--the rapid movement of information
and ideas and capital and technology and people from community to
community, from State to State, from nation to nation--all that openness
and speed that brings so many new opportunities also impose new
challenges on us that are economic, that are social, that deal with our
very essence of security.
We know, for example, that there are more economic opportunities,
but the people without the education to take advantage of them may be
left behind. And so, the very prosperity that is coming to our country,
if we don't work very hard at it, can increase inequality among working
families, not just poor families on welfare.
We know, for example, that this great mobility that we have and all
the choices we have as consumers and our ability to stay before a
computer or a cable television for hours on end may isolate us one from
another and further strain the fragile bonds of community. We know

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that if people have too many individual choices, they may neglect their
responsibilities to others and to the community at large.
We know that the more open our society is to good things moving
around, the more vulnerable we become to the organized forces of
destruction. We know that you can get on the Internet, for example, and
if you know how to plug in you can learn how to make a bomb like the one
that destroyed the Federal building in Oklahoma City.
So the trick for us is to meet the challenges of this new age and
protect the values that have sustained America through more than 200
years of life. That is the way to make the future the best time for
America.
When I sought this job, I had a simple vision for what I wanted
America to do as we stand on the threshold of this new century. I wanted
us to make sure that the American dream was alive for everybody who was
willing to work for it without regard to their race, their gender, their
background, their station in life. I wanted this to be a country that
was coming together, not being divided by racial and ethnic and
religious forces that are tearing the world apart in other places on the
globe. And I wanted our country to continue to be the world's leader for
peace and prosperity, for security and for freedom.
Yes, the cold war is over and we are trying to complete its
unfinished business of reducing the nuclear threat and reconciling
ourselves to former Communist countries. But we must recognize that
there are new security threats, and we must recognize that there are
continuing responsibilities on the United States if we want our children
to have a safe world to live in.
Now, to me there is a simple formula that I try to keep in mind
every day about how we ought to approach this. We need to create
opportunity for all Americans; we need to insist on responsibility from
all Americans; and we need to do everything we can to create a greater
sense of community in this country, a sense that we're all in this
together.
Today I want to talk mostly about responsibility, but let me just
mention a few things about the other issues. This issue of community
could hardly be more important. I worked so hard to get the Congress to
create the national service program, AmeriCorps, to give now 45,000
people, by the end of this year as many as 60,000 young people, the
chance to serve in their communities, meeting challenges in their
communities and earning some money to go to college, and opening that
program to people right across the income spectrum because I wanted a
symbol of the way we ought to work together. I wanted it to stand as
sort of a cross between a domestic Peace Corps and a domestic GI bill,
so that we could pull people together and move forward together into the
future.
We worked very hard to help people in our country deal with racial
differences. I tried to take the affirmative action issue, for example,
out of politics and into real life, and say we ought to mend it but not
end it as long as we have continuing discrimination in our country.
We've tried to find a way to help people with profound religious
convictions express those convictions even in public forums without
violating the first amendment. We've worked especially hard with our
schools on that issue, trying to reconcile the differences between us so
that we can respect our diversity and grow stronger because of it.
If you look around in this room today and you see all the different
backgrounds from which we come, if you watch the Olympics and you look
at the American team, depending on what sport and what athlete, you
could think you were watching someone from Europe, from Scandinavia,
from the Middle East, from Africa, from Latin America, from Asia. They
could all be on America's team because we are not a one-race nation.
We're a nation bound together by shared ideals and shared values and
shared convictions.
So whether it's abroad in trying to help deal with the ethnic
problems in Bosnia or the religious problems in Northern Ireland or the
difficult problems in the Middle East, to the tribal butchery in Rwanda
where our people went and saved so many lives, we tried to live our
sense of community and our conviction about it.
We've also tried to help parents and working people deal with what I
think is one of the most significant challenges to preserving the
American community in America today--and that gets me into the other two
issues--and that is the inherent tension that so many people feel
between work and family, especially in this economy.
The truth is that the average working family is now spending more
hours at work and less hours at home, fewer hours at home, than 25

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years ago, a stunning statistic. So much for the proposition that there
are a lot of lazy Americans.
But what we want is to be able to succeed at home and at work. And
what we want is to understand that our most important job is raising our
children, but we also have to do a good job at the other work of America
so that we can create opportunity for people, to give them the
opportunity to raise their children and have their lives and live out
their destinies.
And reconciling those two things has been very difficult indeed.
That's why I fought so hard for the Family and Medical Leave Act. That's
why I fought to give families some tools they might need to help their
childrearing efforts in the V-chip and challenging the entertainment
industry to rate television programs and trying to stop television
advertising or--excuse me--trying to stop advertising across the board
from being aimed at children to get them to buy tobacco products, which
is illegal and the biggest public health problem in the country.
If you look at the problem of community in a microcosm as the
problems of families in neighborhoods trying to succeed at home and
succeed at work, it leads you to the other two issues, opportunity and
responsibility. The first responsibility of Government, after providing
for the security of the country, is to try to create an environment in
which people have the ability to succeed and then give people the tools
they need to succeed, so that when I became President we had to, first
of all, get our economic house in order. We had, 4 years ago, the
slowest job growth since the Great Depression. We had a very stagnant
economy; unemployment was nearly 8 percent. We had quadrupled the debt
in 4 years. The deficit was at $290 billion a year and going higher.
And so we, first of all, said, look, we have to turn this around.
And we had a simple strategy: Get the deficit down to get interest rates
down, so people would invest in America; expand trade to sell more
American products; and invest in the basic things that Americans need to
succeed.
Now, 3\1/2\ years later, the deficit has been cut from $290
billion--this year it's projected to be $117 billion--more than a 60
percent cut in 4 years. This is the first administration in which the
deficit's been cut in all 4 years since the 1840's. And I'm proud of
that.
The interest rates dropped. The economy produced 10 million jobs,
over 300,000 here in Colorado. The unemployment rate has dropped, and
the combined rates of unemployment, inflation, and home mortgages is at
the lowest they've been in almost 30 years. So we have turned the big
economy around. It is the soundest it's been in a generation.
Nothing reflects that more than what happens to homeownership. In
the 12 years before I took office, believe it or not, the rate of
homeownership in America had actually gone down significantly, partly
because of the enormous pressure on interest rates and home mortgage
rates aggravated by our massive debt. We have been determined to give
the American people more chances to live out their dreams. The deficit
cut helped drive interest rates down and the homeownership strategy that
Secretary Cisneros devised in partnership with the homebuilding
interests around our country was designed to broaden and deepen the
ranks of homeowners.
Among other things, one of the things that we did that I'm proudest
of is that we have cut $1,000 off the average closing costs for the
average first-time homebuyers, young couples trying to get into their
homes for the first time. It's made a real difference.
Today we know we've got almost 4 million new homeowners in the last
3\1/2\ years. We've got 8 million homeowners who have refinanced their
mortgages because of lower interest rates. And the Department of
Commerce reported that homeownership is at its highest rate in 15 years.
And over the past 2 years it grew at its fastest rate in 30 years. This
strategy is working for the benefit of ordinary Americans, and we need
to keep on the path we're on. We need to keep working for this.
Now, we certainly have more to do. We need to balance the budget,
but do it in the right way. We don't have to destroy our commitment to
the environment or to education, or wreck the Medicaid program or create
a two-tiered system of Medicare that's unfair to the oldest, the
poorest, and the sickest elderly Americans. We don't have to do that.
But we do have to balance the budget.
We ought to pass the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill to basically guarantee
what you've tried to do here: You don't lose your health insurance if
you have to change jobs or if someone in your family gets sick.

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The minimum wage bill that Mayor Webb mentioned has been passed by
both Houses of Congress, but they haven't both passed the same bill and
sent it to me. So it's not a done deal yet. But you should know that
that bill is important to me for two reasons, not just one. In addition
to the minimum wage, the bill also increases incentives to small
businesses to invest in their business, because that's where most new
jobs are being created, and passes most of the retirement reforms I
asked for to make it easier for people in small businesses or self-
employed people to take out and maintain retirement even when the
business is down or when they have to change jobs.
We have to make available a secure retirement not just for those of
us who are fortunate to work for bigger businesses or for government,
but for people who work in small business as well. So that bill needs to
pass for the minimum wage and the retirement reforms and the investment
incentives for small businesses. These things need to be done and done
now.
But I have to tell you, of all the opportunity initiatives we could
take--and I'm betraying my long partnership with your Governor now--the
most important thing we could do is to increase the quality and the
availability of education to all Americans. For as long as we've been
around, educational opportunity has been an advantage to most people.
After World War II, the GI bill literally helped us to build the biggest
middle class in the history of the world. But today--today--education is
critical to the ability of families to keep up, much less to move ahead.
Now, we've made a lot of proposals, but I just want to emphasize two
today. First of all, it is imperative that we give the same standard of
educational opportunity to people in isolated rural areas and inner city
poor schools that others have. And one of the ways to do that is to
connect every classroom in the country to the information superhighway
by the year 2000 and train the teachers to use it, so that all that
information will be available to all of our children.
The other thing I believe we have to do is to continue to break down
the barriers to people going to college and staying there until they get
an education. I believe strongly that one of the most important things
our administration has done is to change the college loan system so that
people can borrow money at lower costs with less hassle and then pay it
back as a percentage of their income. So there is never an incentive not
to borrow money to go to college because you can limit your annual
repayment rates.
But I think we should do more. I have recommended that we give a
deduction of up to $10,000 a year for the cost of college tuition for
people without regard to their age. And I believe we should make
universal--universal--the availability of at least 2 years of community
college to every American, which means a tax credit of $1,500 a year for
2 years.
Now, if we were to put in place that structure of opportunity, it
would be easier for people to succeed at home and at work and for us to
realize our vision of an America with the American dream alive, coming
together instead of being divided, strong and self-confident enough to
lead the world toward peace and freedom.
The other thing we have to do, however, is to put in place a system
in which we get more responsibility from all Americans. We have to
continue to work to take our streets back from guns and gangs and drugs
and violence. We can never eliminate crime and violence altogether. And
sometimes people ask me--they say, well, the crime rate has come down
for 4 years in a row. And I say, that's very good, but it's still too
high. I'm glad it's down 4 years in a row, but it's still too high. And
I'm worried about the fact that violence, random violence among young
people between the ages of 12 and 17, continues to go up. Cocaine use is
down by about a third, but random drug use among people between the ages
of 12 and 17 has been going up since 1991, so that concerns me.
And my test will be--you ought to figure out what your test would
be. I guess your test would be when you feel safe walking on your
streets in your neighborhood. But my test will be, is when we can all go
home at night and turn on the evening news, and if the lead story is a
crime story, we are shocked instead of numbed by it; we're actually
surprised because we've reached a point in our country where it is the
exception, not the rule. And I'm here to tell you we can make violent
crime the exception, not the rule, in America again if we do the right
things. And I am determined to do it.
Our anticrime strategy: Put 100,000 police on the streets in
community policing. Increase neighborhood watch patrols; involve
neighbors

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in their own efforts. Do more things to help people deal with the
problems that juveniles have. Support community curfews. Support
stronger truancy laws. Support summer jobs and activities and drug
education and prevention programs as well as punishment programs.
Support positive things for young people to keep them out of trouble in
the first place. Ban the assault weapons that we banned, and enforce the
Brady bill. And follow a comprehensive strategy against crime that is
tough on crime but tries to prevent young people from becoming
criminals.
That is our strategy. And it is working. The crime rate has come
down for 4 years in a row. We had the awfullest hullabaloo you ever
heard when we passed the assault weapons ban and the Brady bill. And to
hear the folks on the other side tell it, we had brought an end to an
American way of life--never be another hunting season in Colorado or
Arkansas. [Laughter] They had people so lathered up in the election 2
years ago you couldn't talk to them. But you know what? All those same
folks got it figured out now because they've had two more hunting
seasons and nobody lost their rifle. But 60,000 felons, fugitives, and
stalkers could not buy a handgun because of the Brady bill. It was the
right thing to do.
The other day we had an announcement in Washington with the Vice
President and members of the cellular telephone association in which
they committed 50,000 telephones--just the first installment--programmed
to call the local police department, fire department, and hospital, to
give to neighborhood watches. We now have 20,000 neighborhood watch
associations in America. We have millions of people in it. I challenged
another million Americans to join.
We have to do our part, too, as citizens. But I'm telling you, we do
not have to live with intolerable crime levels. We do not have to live
with juvenile crime rates going up. We have to find ways to be very
tough with people who do terrible things, but we also got to give these
kids something to say yes to. We can't let them raise themselves and
then wonder why they turn out to be in trouble.
Now, it is in that context I want you to see the welfare reform
debate, because welfare reform is about responsibility, all right, but
it's also about opportunity. What do you want from all these poor folks
that are on welfare? What do you want from them? They all have kids. Ask
yourselves, what do you want? You want them to have kids that turn out
to be the mayor of Denver, right? Isn't that what you want? This is what
I ask Congress to think about when they think about welfare reform. We
want those families to be able to do what we want middle class families
to do and they're struggling to do as well: succeed at home and at work.
That's what we want.
Now, it's true that I have vetoed two previous bills that had the
label ``welfare reform'' on it because I didn't think they were welfare
reform. And it wasn't because they were too tough on work; it was
because they were too tough on kids. And if you don't succeed at home,
whether you're poor or rich or somewhere in the middle, then your
worklife won't compensate for it in terms of the impact on your own
family and on society at large. But if you don't succeed at work, then
it's very difficult to build a network of successful homes.
That's why this is so hard. So we decided we would take a different
tack while trying to work with Congress, and that I would use the power
given to the President under the 1988 welfare reform law to just waive
Federal rules and regulations for States that wanted to find new ways to
move people from welfare to work in a way that helped them raise their
children. Colorado was one of 40 of the 50 States to get welfare reform
experiment waivers. There have been a total of 67 of these issued now,
with more to come.
Now, the results have been pretty impressive. Already--this is
something hardly anybody in America knows--but three-quarters of the
welfare families in America today are under new rules requiring them to
make extra efforts to move from welfare to work. And the results have
been significant. The New York Times said that we had effected a quiet
revolution in welfare. Sometimes I wish it weren't so quiet. I wish more
people knew about it. But the fact is there are 1.3 million fewer people
on the welfare rolls today than there were the day I took the oath of
office and about a million fewer on the food stamp rolls. In Colorado,
the rate has dropped by 18 percent in 3 years. That's astonishing, 18
percent in 3 years.
Now, some of that is due to the improving economy, but that's a good
argument for good economic policy. But some of it is due to our learning
what it takes to move people trapped

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in dependency to independence and interdependence with the rest of us so
they can raise their children and succeed in the workplace.
I do believe we need to finish the job. We can do some things with
waivers. I'll give you some other examples. Oregon, Missouri, and most
recently Wisconsin have asked for permission to take the welfare check--
this is quite interesting--because they know that there's not enough
money to just have the Government pay for jobs for people who can't get
jobs in the private sector, so they've asked for permission to take the
welfare check and actually give it to private employers as a wage
supplement for 8 or 9 months to encourage people to hire folks at a
decent wage and train them. And they figure, and I think they're right,
that even if when the supplement ends, somehow the employers can't
afford to keep folks on the payroll, at least they will have had 9
months of work experience, something on their resume, learning how to
succeed in the workplace. And a lot of people will be kept full time. I
think that's the kind of idea we want.
And Wisconsin has proposed to go further and to give these folks
continuing health care and child care support and actually to extend
child care and health care coverage to low-wage workers who have not
been on welfare, to keep them from falling into welfare. Now, these are
good ideas.
In return for that, the sort of hammer they want, the tough thing
they want, is to require people to enroll and to be available for jobs
from the day they sign up for welfare, not a year or two later. I think
that's fine, if you're going to give somebody a job and health care and
child care. What more can you ask?
But these are the kinds of things we can do with the waiver system.
But it's not enough. We would be better off if we could pass a welfare
reform bill in Congress. And I want to explain why. Number one, it would
be good to end this waiver process and simply set up a framework to the
States and say, here's your money; do these things, and you figure out
how to do them. Don't come to us for permission. You know more about it
than we do. Figure out how to do them. But you ought to require strict
time limits; you ought to require work; you ought to provide child
support; and you ought to enforce the child support laws of your State
better. Now, that's what I think the framework would do.
We are very close to this agreement on these basic elements. And we
shouldn't let the opportunity slip from our grasp. But neither should we
pass a bill that says welfare reform at the top but really winds up
still being very tough on children, including children from already
working families.
So what I'm doing now is working very hard with the Congress. I hope
and expect to sign legislation that does move people from welfare to
work and does support instead of undermine the raising of our children.
This should not be a party issue. All Americans ought to want this
system changed. And I hope very much that Congress will pass a
bipartisan bill that meets those standards. If it does, I think it would
have almost unanimous support from the American people. And I believe it
can be done before Congress leaves for town for its vacation in August.
So I want you to join me in saying to the Members of Congress,
whether you're a Democrat or Republican, get together, don't be hard on
kids, be tough for work, be good for the kids. Let's try to help all
families succeed at home and at work. We've got enough experiments.
We've moved enough people off welfare. We know what works. Let's pass
this bill and get on with it and do it now. That's what we need to do.
I want to mention one thing that's very important that's often not
talked about in welfare, although the mayor and the Governor talked
about it, and that's child support enforcement. There's no area where we
need more personal responsibility than child support. The best
provisions of the welfare bill moving through Congress are those that
relate to child support because they would give us greater capacity to
collect child support across State lines. About--well, slightly more
than a third of all the child support cases where child support is
delinquent in America today are cases that cross State lines. That's one
of the main reasons we need this national legislation.
This is a big hidden social crisis in America today. If every person
in this country paid the child support they're legally obligated to pay
and that they can pay, we could move 800,000 women and children off the
welfare rolls today. That's what a problem it is.

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So let me just echo what the mayor and the Governor said.
Governments can do a lot of things, but they don't raise children;
people raise children. And if parents don't do it, very often the kids
are left out there on the streets raising themselves with absolutely
horrible consequences.
And there are a lot of single-parent families in this country today
where the single parent's doing a fine job. And since I lived in one for
a time in my life, I'm proud to say that I know that can happen. I also
know that no child gets here with one parent alone. And no one should be
able to escape responsibility for bringing a child into the world. That
is the first and most important responsibility. We cannot talk about how
we need more responsibility from all of our citizens when we've got a
child support collection system that is a national scandal and people
believe they can bring kids in the world and turn around and walk off
from them and never lift a finger to help them make their way through
life. That is wrong, and we have to change that.
And we can change it in the beginning by simply collecting the child
support that is owed, that is payable, that people can pay that they
don't pay. There's a lot more work we need to do with young parents,
principally young fathers, by helping them understand what their
responsibilities are and then structuring opportunities for them to
fulfill it. But we can just begin by collecting the child support.
You cannot imagine how many women and children are thrown into
poverty simply because the responsible parent, usually the father, walks
away and leaves them without any money and won't help. This puts mothers
who are trying to raise their kids under terrible pressure. A lot of
women out there working two jobs, working at night, worried sick about
their kids, can't afford the child support--I mean, excuse me, can't
afford the child care. All of the other problems working families face
are aggravated many times over by families that have a single parent
raising the kids with no help from child support, every other one.
And if you're in a position where you've had these problems, trying
to raise your child and work and do all these things, you know how much
worse it is if child support is owed and not paid. This is a moral
outrage and a social disaster. It is simply--and it's wrong when people
say, well, the taxpayers will pick up the bill. Well, the taxpayers may
pick up the bill to some extent, but it's rarely enough. And secondly,
it is a cold, inadequate substitute for having a parent do the right
thing.
So let me tell you, this legislation would help us to make it easier
to collect child support across national lines. It would require every
State in the country to follow Colorado's lead in the revocation of a
driver's license. It would get us employers' help when people change
jobs and move across State lines because there would be an employer
registry that we could refer to for the collection of child support
that's due across State lines. That's why this legislation is needed.
There are a lot of things that can be done now. We're now tracking
down deadbeat parents so that they can't skip out by crossing the State
line. We're requiring States to establish programs at hospitals to find
out the identity of fathers at the time a baby is born. Two hundred
thousand fathers have been identified through this program. Earlier this
year I took action to require mothers to identify the fathers or risk
losing their welfare benefits.
I signed an Executive order to make sure every employee of the
Federal Government pays his or her child support. We ought to be setting
a good example in the Federal Government before we preach to others to
do the same. We are now a model employer in that regard.
We've been working with States to do more. And one of the reasons I
wanted to make this statement here today is that Colorado has one of the
finest programs in the country to find deadbeat parents and make them
pay. I want every State to do as well. Together, we can all do better.
Now, all these efforts are making a difference. Compared to 4 years
ago, child support collections are up 40 percent, from $8 billion a year
to $11 billion a year. That's the good news. Paternity identification is
up 40 percent. That's the good news. The bad news is we could double
that increase again and still be under what is strictly legally owed.
We've got to keep going on this issue.
I'm pleased to announce today that the Postal Service is going to
work with States to post wanted lists of parents who owe support. I
challenge every State to develop such a list if they don't have one
already. That may seem cruel to you, but think of it this way: Keep in
mind, if there's an order outstanding, a judge has made

[[Page 1174]]

a determination that the payment can be made, that is, that the parent
can actually physically afford to make the payment. Now, that may seem
cruel to you, but people take it as routine to walk in a post office and
see somebody who robs a bank or a 7-Eleven. As bad as that is, if
nobody's hurt it's not as bad as robbing our children of their future.
That's the biggest robbery of all.
I've also directed the Justice Department to work with States to
strengthen their own penalties and prosecutions for those who don't pay
child support. I want the prosecutors to be able to track down these
parents and tell the courts to make them pay and if necessary, even to
be able to send them to jail if they refuse.
The third thing we're doing is to harness the potential of the
Internet. This is amazing; 19 States--19 States--have websites whereby
just literally clicking with your mouse, families can find out how to
collect and look for the most wanted deadbeat parents. Today, the State
of Colorado is announcing that it will start a web page. This page will
be connected like the others are to the computer site that's run by the
National Government.
There's a lot of things the Internet can be used for, and they're
not all good. This is a good thing we can use technology for, to
instantaneously get this information out all across America and make it
available to anybody who can access a computer.
And finally, let me say I want to renew my challenge to every State
to follow the lead of Colorado with the driver's license revocation. The
statute we're working for, if we get welfare reform, will require it
anyway, but the States ought to do it because it's right.
Now, we are saying by these strong actions and our efforts to pass
welfare reform, you have to behave responsibly. And if you owe child
support, you better pay it. If you deliberately refuse to pay it, you
can find your face posted in the post office. We'll track you down with
computers. We'll track you down with law enforcement. We'll find you
through the Internet, not because anybody has a particular interest in
humiliating someone but because we have got to find a way if we want to
go into the 21st century as a great nation to succeed at work and at
home. And it has to begin with parents doing their part. The Government
can never substitute for that.
The last thing I'd like to say about this whole thing is that, as
you know, there are limits to how much all these enforcement mechanisms
can do. We need to find a way to move into the modern world taking
maximum advantage of all the changes that our age offers and still
getting back to the basic sense of right and wrong that we know about
our obligations to our children and to our future.
In the 1830's when Alexis de Tocqueville came here, he said,
``America is great because America is good. If America ever stops being
good, she will no longer be great.'' That is still true.
When I visited our Olympians with Hillary a couple of days ago and
we met young people from other countries, all they wanted to talk to me
about was what they thought about America--an Irish athlete thanking me
for our efforts to end the violence in Northern Ireland; a Croatian
athlete thanking me for Secretary Brown's trade mission that ended so
tragically just because he and these business people were trying to help
those folks put their lives back together and thanking me that Secretary
Kantor had finished the mission; a Palestinian athlete saying that his
people were an old people, but they never had an Olympic team until they
made peace with Israel, and saying that a lot of them wanted to keep
that peace and keep it going.
These are things that we represent to other people, things that are
good, things that make people whole, things that enable people to live
out their dreams. And somehow with all this excitement of the modern
world and all these personal choices and all these personal challenges,
we have to find a way to remember that in the end what makes us great is
living out our dreams in a way that builds strong families, strong
neighborhoods, strong communities, and a strong country.
And if we could just keep in mind every day that the choices we make
as citizens and as workers and as parents will affect what this country
looks like when our children are our age, I think we'd make the right
decisions. And America's best days, therefore, are still before us.
Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 9:35 a.m. in Buell Theater at the Denver
Center for the Performing Arts. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor
Wellington E. Webb of Denver and Gov. Roy Romer

[[Page 1175]]

of Colorado. He also referred to his memorandums of June 18 and July 21
on child support enforcement. A portion of these remarks could not be
verified because the tape was incomplete.