[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[August 8, 1996]
[Pages 1285-1288]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Saxophone Club in Santa Monica, California
August 8, 1996

    Thank you very much. I am delighted to be here. I want to thank all 
of you for coming. I want to thank the cochairs of this event and Hannah 
Bond, the director of the Saxophone

[[Page 1286]]

Club. Thank you all very much. I want to thank Dave Koz and his band, 
and B.J. and the Boys. And I want to say to my good friend Whoopi 
Goldberg--she is a national marvel, isn't she? And here she was tonight 
actually playing it straight. And that just shows you how serious she is 
about winning this election. If you're as serious as she is, we're going 
to be okay in November. I also saw Magic Johnson over there. I thank him 
for being here tonight. Thank you, Magic.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I want to be brief tonight so I can get out 
and shake hands and say hello to you, but I want to say just a couple of 
things--just bear with me for a moment in all your exuberance and 
let's--just be serious with me just for a minute.
    I want to tell you a couple of stories. One is that yesterday 
Hillary and Chelsea and I had the privilege of welcoming the Olympic 
team to the White House. And we're real proud of them. And the day 
before, we saw the Paralympic team off to Atlanta to do their thing, and 
it was an incredible event. And of course, we had a chance to go down 
and speak to our Olympic team and visit the Olympics right before the 
games began.
    And so I've been thinking a lot during this whole period and that 
long night when I stayed up all night after the bomb blew up in the park 
and we didn't quite know what had happened for a while, what is it that 
makes people love the Olympics so much, besides the fact that we all 
love sports? And I think that there are two or three things that make us 
love it even if we don't like sports so much. You know, we had 77,000 
people who saw the women's soccer final. I mean, people really got into 
this.
    Now, what is it that we like about it? Well, first of all, you've 
got people from 197 different countries, and they're all getting along 
for a change. They're all getting along for a change. Right before I 
went to the dining hall, the North Korean and South Korean teams had sat 
at adjoining tables and had talked. I've been trying to get them to talk 
for 3\1/2\ years with no luck. [Laughter]
    Secondly, they work the way we think the world ought to work. I 
mean, there's a set of rules and people follow them. And as long as 
you're following rules, the other people all respect you, even if you're 
different from them. And you can't win any medals if you sneak into your 
opponent's room at night and break his legs or if you stand up at a 
microphone like this and talk about what a terrible person your opponent 
is, how they're no good and corrupt and dishonest. You've just got to 
reach down deep inside and do your best, and everybody gets a chance, 
but nobody gets a guarantee. And most people don't win medals, but 
everybody is better off when it's all over. And we all feel good.
    And in America we especially feel good because there were 197 
different nations represented; there are representatives from 150 of 
those different countries in Los Angeles County tonight as we speak. So 
we identify with that, and we like it.
    Now, I'll tell you a second story. I was up in Salinas today, and we 
were celebrating this remarkable effort they've made with all their 
community organizations to reach out to all the children in trouble and 
break this epidemic of gangs they have there and dramatically lower the 
murder rate among young people. And I went there to celebrate what 
they've done and also to point out that we announced today that for the 
first time in 7 long years the crime rate is going down among people 
under 18--for the first time in 7 years.
    But it turns out that there was a gold medal winner from Salinas who 
was a member of our 4 by 400 relay team, a very handsome young man who 
showed up and got a bigger hand than the President did. It was terrific. 
And he has a twin brother who came within less than a second of making 
the Olympic team himself. And it turns out that at one point when these 
kids were very young they were so poor they were living in a car. But 
the fellow has an Olympic Gold Medal, an American dream story.
    Now, what's all that got to do with this election? This election, in 
my opinion, is about what this country is going to look like when we 
start the new century and the new millennium and, for those of you young 
people who are in the Saxophone Club, what it's going to look like when 
you're my age and you have children. And what I want it to look like is 
a country where everybody, wherever they start out in life, no matter 
how poor they are, what their race is, what their station in life is, 
has a chance to live out their dreams if they're willing to be 
responsible and work for it. I want this to be a country where we relish 
our diversity, where we celebrate our differences and say, ``We're not 
bound by any race or region or creed. We're

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bound by the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of 
Independence. If you'll sign onto that, you're fine by me, and we like 
it.''
    And I want this to be a country that stands up for peace and freedom 
around the world and tells people that it's wrong to have a situation 
you've got in Bosnia, Burundi, the Middle East, or Ireland or anyplace 
where people are killed or persecuted because they're different from 
somebody else, from religion or race or ethnicity.
    And if we do that, the next century is going to be the greatest era 
of human possibility that has ever existed. There are children in school 
today that within 10 years will be doing jobs that have not been 
invented yet, that have not been imagined yet. And more people will have 
more chances to live out their dreams than ever before. That's what I'm 
working for.
    I was so elated yesterday that I got to participate in a comment 
about our space scientists discovering this piece of meteorite from Mars 
that took 16 million years to get here and has been hanging around in 
Antarctica for Lord knows how many thousands of years but seems to have 
evidence of a fossilized micro-organism--incredible thing. But whether 
it's--whatever pans out of it, what it shows is that there is a 
magnificent world out there of things we still don't know. And the 
explosion of knowledge and technology, if we can make sure everybody has 
a fair chance and if we can learn to live together amidst all our 
differences and if we can keep moving the world forward in a more 
peaceful way, it's going to be an incredible time out there.
    Now, that is what this election is all about. And I want you to make 
just three simple arguments to people in the next 88 days. Number one, 
take President Reagan's test: Are we better off than we were 4 years 
ago? Well, if the test is the first time the deficit has gone down in 
all 4 years of a President's term since the 1840's, 10 million more 
jobs, 4.4 million more homeowners, 10 million people refinance their 
mortgages, a record number of new small businesses, a record number of 
new businesses owned by women and minorities--if that's the test--record 
exports--we're better off than we were. If the test is 4 years in a row 
of a declining crime rate, 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers that 
don't have handguns because of the Brady bill, then we're better off. If 
the test is 12 million Americans who got to take some time off from work 
when there was a baby born or a sick parent without losing their job, 
we're better off. If the test is no nuclear missiles pointed at the 
American people for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, 
we're better off. So are we better off? Yes, we are.
    Second question: What is the alternative? [Laughter] The answer is, 
you don't have to guess; you know what they will do, too. They've 
already done it once; I just vetoed it the first time. And I don't 
believe we can become a greater, stronger nation by saying we're going 
to balance the budget and using that as an excuse to wreck our ability 
to protect the environment for future generations or cutting back on 
education at a time when we need to be spending more for education--we 
ought to make sure that nobody who needs to go is ever deprived of the 
right to go to college, and everybody ought to get 2 more years of 
education--or running away from our obligations to provide health care 
to poor children and pregnant women and families with someone in it with 
a disability or seniors.
    So there's a big difference here in what we think our obligations 
are. I believe the role of Government is not to be a bureaucratic pain 
in the neck. We have reduced the size of Government. We have put it on 
the side of creating jobs and promoting the economy. But I believe this: 
I think we have an obligation to protect the environment, to hold people 
together, and to give people the tools they need to make the most of 
their own lives. That is what we have to be doing, and that's what I'm 
committed to.
    And the last thing I want to say to you is it's a big, bright world 
out there, but it matters what decisions people make. Don't let anybody 
tell you this is an election without consequences. This is an election 
of massive consequence in every single policy area you can think of.
    You know, we've got 1.3 million fewer people on welfare than we had 
4 years ago. We've got 1\1/2\ million fewer people on food stamps. I'm 
all for looking for new and innovative ways to move people from welfare 
to work. That's why I signed that welfare bill. But it was wrong of the 
Congress to deny any access to benefits to legal immigrants who work 
here and pay taxes and through no fault of their own get in trouble. You 
know, you think about it Monday when you go to work. How many people 
come here

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and they work hard and they pay their taxes and through no fault of 
their own they get in a car wreck or they develop a serious illness. And 
this Congress wants to say to people they shouldn't even be entitled to 
a little help even if they've been paying their taxes, even if they've 
been in the military, legal immigrants that join the military.
    Don't let this election become an excuse to divide us from anybody 
who is here lawfully, obeying the law, paying their taxes, doing their 
part; we ought to go and grow together. We shouldn't be divided on this. 
Don't do that.
    If you want to know what we're going to do in the next 4 years, I'll 
tell you what we're going to do. We've gotten our house in order in the 
first 4 years. In the second 4 years, we're going to be dedicated to 
giving every single American the chance to participate in the economy 
that is emerging, to participate in the society that is emerging, and to 
know that we can grow the economy and preserve the environment and to 
know that we can be fair to our children and our parents and still have 
enough left for ourselves. We, in short, are going to go forward 
together. We are not going to be divided. And that is the central 
decision facing the American people.
    There is too much out there for all of us if we'll just keep our 
heads on straight, listen to our heart, and say we're going to do it 
together. That's the spirit that we celebrated in the Olympics, and we 
need to make American life more that way.
    Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:04 p.m. at the Armand Hammer Museum of 
Art. In his remarks, he referred to comedienne Whoopi Goldberg and 
former NBA basketball player Earvin (Magic) Johnson.