[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[August 25, 1996]
[Pages 1339-1344]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Ashland, Kentucky
August 25, 1996

    The President. Thank you. Thank you very much.
    Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
    The President. Thank you very much. You have made me very happy 
today. My daughter, Chelsea, and I are delighted to be here. Hillary had 
to leave us in West Virginia to go on to her hometown of Chicago to make 
sure everything was all warmed up for us. We're on the right track to 
Chicago, and we're on the right track to the 21st century.
    I thank Governor Patton for being here. I always enjoy seeing the 
Governor and Mrs. Patton, and I'm glad your mother is here today because 
I want her to hear the President say that if every Governor in America 
had as much energy and drive and determination as Paul Patton we 
wouldn't have the problems we have today. He has really got it.
    I thank Senator Wendell Ford for his words and for being here. I 
also thank the distinguished Congressman from Louisville, Mike Ward, for 
being here. We also have--I know Steve Beshear, the United States Senate 
candidate, and Denny Bowman, a congressional candidate. And I want you 
to send them up there; we need some help. We need some help.
    Wendell Ford was very kind in what he said about me, but let me tell 
you, if it hadn't been for Wendell Ford, if he had gone the other way, 
we would not have voted in 1993 to reduce

[[Page 1340]]

the deficit, get the interest rates down, and get the economy going 
again. The deficit is 60 percent lower than it was when I took office; 
it's gone down 4 years in a row, 4 years in a row, for the first time--
listen to this--the deficit has gone down 4 years in a row for the first 
time since before the Civil War, in the 1840's. A President has done 
that, thanks to Wendell Ford and thanks to Mike Ward. And we did it 
while continuing to invest in education, in environmental protection, 
and protecting Medicare and Medicaid.
    And then, when our friends in the opposition won the Congress, and 
they wanted to remove the guarantee of Medicaid that helps middle class 
people with families in nursing homes, that helps middle class families 
with people with disabilities in them, that helps poor children and 
pregnant women, when they wanted to cut back on education when we should 
be investing more, when they wanted to cut back drastically on our 
ability to protect the environment, when they wanted to give 
corporations permission to take $15 billion out of their workers' 
pension funds, when they wanted to raise taxes on millions of the lowest 
income working people in this country, Wendell Ford and Mike Ward said 
no and made my veto stand up. We said no, and I thank them for it.
    Thank you, Billy Ray Cyrus, for coming. My daughter is glad she made 
the trip now. [Laughter] And so are all the rest of you. When I heard 
you cheering for him when he got off the train, I thought I was just 
sort of the supporting act. I thought I was supposed to go first. 
[Laughter] Happy 35th birthday. I was 35 once. [Laughter] Enjoy it while 
it lasts. We congratulate you on your hard-won success, and we're very 
proud of you. And I know your father, State Senator Ron Cyrus, is here. 
We know he's proud of you, too. Thank you very much for coming to be 
with us.
    I want to thank two of my former colleagues for being here, your 
former Governor, Martha Layne Collins; former Governor John Y. Brown. 
Phyllis George Brown, thank you for being here. I thank the chair of the 
Kentucky Democratic Party, Bob Babbage, and all the other Democrats who 
are here. I thank the bands that played, Unlimited Tradition and the 
Mountain Opry. I wish I had been here. All the band members and the 
cheerleaders from Boyd, Greenup, and Pike Counties, thank you all for 
being here. I thank the folks in West Virginia who came with me and the 
folks from Ohio, including former Congressman and Congressman-to-be, Ted 
Strickland. I'm glad he is here today.
    Folks, most of all, I want to thank Kevin Gunderson. I want to thank 
Kevin Gunderson not only for what he said but, most important, for who 
he is, for not giving up when he was down and out, for refusing to give 
up on a productive life, for being determined to stick up for what is 
good and worthy in all people and to make the most of the abilities God 
has left him, which as you can see here, were many indeed. We thank you, 
sir, and God bless you.
    You know, I was up the road in Huntington, West Virginia, just a 
minute ago, and I was shaking hands with the crowd. And this little girl 
came up to me, and she said, ``Did you really call Kerri Strug at the 
Olympics?'' I said, ``I sure did.'' She said, ``Did she really come to 
the White House?'' I said, ``She sure did.'' I said, ``Not only that, 
she and her family came to New York to my birthday party.'' She said, 
``Really?'' I said, ``You like her, don't you?'' And do you know what 
she said? She said, ``I got it on tape.'' [Laughter] This little girl 
was about 8 or 9 years old. And I said, ``Well, let me tell you 
something. You save that tape for the rest of your life, and every time 
something bad happens to you, every time you feel desperate, every time 
you feel troubled, you put that tape in the television and you watch 
that little girl with her bad ankle do that vault, and you say, `I can 
get up. I can go on. I can do it. I can do it.' ''
    Why? Why do we all love the Olympics so much? Because it's the way 
we think life ought to be. Everybody gets to show up. Nobody cares about 
your race, your religion, where you're from. All you got to do is be 
willing to play by the rules. You can't get ahead by cheating. Nobody 
gets anything by breaking their opponent's ankles or legs. Nobody gets 
anywhere by standing up in front of a microphone and telling you how 
terrible people their opponents are. You've got to reach down deep 
inside and do something good, just as good as you can do. And because of 
that, even the people that don't get medals come out way ahead. That's 
the way life ought to be. We know that's the way life ought to be.
    Folks, 4 years ago I came to Kentucky because I was worried about 
our country. We had the slowest job growth since the Depression.

[[Page 1341]]

We had stagnant wages. We had rising crime. We had neglected challenges. 
And our country seemed to be drifting and dividing toward the 21st 
century. And I had a vision that I thought we owed it to our children to 
pass along, a vision of America in the year 2000 where every child has a 
chance to live out their dreams as long as they're responsible citizens, 
a country where we are bound together across the lines that divide us, 
by our shared values. I don't want us to be divided like these other 
countries, by race and religion and all these other things. I want us to 
say, ``If you believe in the Constitution, the Declaration of 
Independence, the Bill of Rights, and if you show up for work every day, 
you're our kind of person and we're for you and we're going forward 
together.''
    And I wanted our country to be the strongest force for peace and 
freedom and prosperity way into the 21st century. That's what I wanted. 
And 4 years later, I come back to tell you, we are on the right track to 
the 21st century.
    We are on the right track, because Americans from all walks of life 
are doing what you are doing here in Ashland. We are going in the right 
direction because there are people like you everywhere who are working 
at the grassroots level. You have a long history here of helping people 
in your community to build a strong future, from the days when the 
Moonlight School opened the first adult education classes in America to 
the Boyd County School today where Norma Meek runs the Family Resource 
Center, set up by the 1990 Education Reform Act to give our at-risk kids 
not just something to say no to but something to say yes to, positive 
role models, positive alternatives, positive activities, to give our 
kids a future. I want to salute another citizen of this area, Dr. Mary 
Pauline Fox, who has dedicated her entire life to bring health care to 
the people of rural Pike County. That's what we need.
    My strategy for the 21st century is simple: opportunity for all, 
responsibility from all, and a stronger American community where we know 
we have to go forward together and everybody has a role to play. With 
all respect to my opponent, I think it does take a village to raise a 
child, strengthen a family, build a community, and build a country.
    What are the results? Look at the last week. In just the last week, 
over strong opposition, we finally got an increase in the minimum wage 
for 10 million hard-working Americans. And that bill included tax relief 
for 90 percent of the small businesses in this country if they invest 
more in their business. And it made it easier for people in small 
businesses to take out retirement plans for themselves and their 
employees. It was a wonderful bill. It gave a $5,000 tax credit to any 
American family that will adopt a child. It removed the barriers to 
cross-racial adoption. That minimum wage bill was pro-work, pro-
business, pro-family, pro-America. I'm proud we fought for it, and I'm 
proud we won it.
    We signed the Kennedy-Kassebaum health care reform bill that says, 
if you lose your job or somebody in your family gets sick, you can't 
have your health insurance taken away from you anymore. You can't be 
denied the right to health insurance. Twenty-five million Americans can 
be helped by that.
    We passed a welfare reform plan that says we are going to go from 
welfare to work and give people the dignity of work so they can raise 
their children not in dependency but in independence. It was the right 
thing to do.
    But this is the last of the big story. You heard what Senator Ford 
said. In 1993 every single solitary Republican in the Congress voted 
against our economic reform plan. They said it would increase the 
deficit. They said it would cripple the economy. It cut the deficit by 
60 percent. It drove interest rates down. We continued to invest in 
education, the environment, technology, and our future. And guess what? 
Four years later, 10 million new jobs; 4.4 million new homeowners; 10 
million Americans who have refinanced their homes at lower interest 
rates; 12 million Americans who have taken a little time off from work 
when a child was born or a parent was sick under the family leave law 
without losing their jobs; 1.3 million Americans fewer on welfare; a 40 
percent increase in child support enforcement collections. We are moving 
in the right direction, on the right track.
    We protected the pensions of 40 million people. And then when they 
tried to say, ``You can raid the pension funds of workers,'' we said, 
``No, no, no, we've been down that road before. We just protected them. 
You can't have that $15 billion; it belongs to the workers of America 
and to their retirement.'' Fifty million Americans are breathing cleaner 
air. We cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than they did in 
12. We are moving in the right direction, on the right track to the 21st 
century.

[[Page 1342]]

    And what I want to say to you today is as I make my way to Chicago 
and I go to the towns just like this one in the heartland of America, 
I'm doing this for a reason. I want you to know that every day for 4 
years I have gone to that Oval Office and thought about you and what 
would make it easier for you to have strong families, good jobs, safe 
streets, a clean environment, good schools, and a bright future.
    And I want you to fight our fight for the 21st century. Folks, this 
next several years can be the brightest time in American history. There 
will be more opportunities for our children to live out their dreams and 
adults to live out their dreams than ever before. Our kids in this crowd 
today will be doing jobs within a decade that have not been invented 
yet, that have not even been imagined yet. But we have to be ready for 
that future.
    We have laid the basis. We have got the unemployment rate down. 
We've got our economic house in order. We've got the crime rate coming 
down 4 years in a row. We've got the welfare rolls coming down. We've 
got a more peaceful world where there are no nuclear missiles pointed at 
the people of the United States since the dawn of the nuclear age. We 
are moving in the right direction.
    But we have more to do. You know as well as I do, right here in 
Kentucky there are still people that want to work who don't have jobs. 
And you know as well as I do we cannot afford to let this welfare reform 
bill be just a budget cutting measure that leaves poor folks and their 
kids out on the street. We've got to get them jobs to do. You can't tell 
people to go to work unless there's work to go to.
    And you know as well as I do that there are still people right here 
in Kentucky that are working harder and harder, and they still haven't 
gotten a raise. And we know that part of that is a challenge to the 
business community to share their profits fairly with their employees, 
but part of it is a challenge to working people to upgrade their 
education and skills so they can earn more money in this tough global 
economy.
    And I am committed, I am committed to putting education at the top 
of America's agenda and keeping it there for the next 4 years until 
everybody can benefit from the global economy.
    I want to see every classroom in Kentucky and the United States, 
every single one, hooked up to the information superhighway so every kid 
in the poorest hill and holler of Arkansas or Kentucky can have access 
to the same information as the children in the wealthiest schools in 
America. We can do it in 4 years.
    I want ours to be the first administration ever to help the public 
school districts of this country invest in their school facilities to 
upgrade those facilities to give people good, modern places to go to 
school with all the latest developments. If the poor districts need 
help, they ought to get it. If the overcrowded district needs help, they 
ought to get it. We proposed to increase school construction by 25 
percent over the next 4 years, and we can do it under our program.
    And most important, more important than anything else, I want to 
give you a country in which 2 years of education after high school 
becomes as universal in 4 years as high school is today, by giving every 
American family that needs it a $1,500 refundable tax credit for the 
cost of community college tuition for 2 years and giving those same 
families up to $10,000 in tax deduction for the cost of any kind of 
education after high school and giving unemployed workers a skills grant 
worth over $2,000 to take wherever they need to get the training to go 
back to work at a better wage. This is the America I want to build, and 
I want you to help me build it.
    I want you to support me in helping to create jobs not only for 
people on welfare but for single men and for others who are unemployed 
who need the jobs. I want you to support me in building on health care 
reform and saying, okay, we've now said you can't lose your insurance if 
you have been sick or you changed jobs. Now we have got to say, if 
you're unemployed for a long time, you run out of money, we're going to 
help you. We're going to guarantee people health insurance if they're 
unemployed for 6 months. We need to help more people keep their health, 
not lose it and their bankroll as well.
    Let me just say one other thing. In honor of this fine, fine man 
that introduced me, I want you to help me finish our commitment to 
putting 100,000 police on the street. You know, it wasn't so very long 
ago when it was rare for me to meet anyone--anyone--who thought we could 
lower the crime rate. People just took it for granted that the cities 
were dangerous and the little towns in the country were about to get 
that way. People just took it for

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granted that we were going to have rising crime rates from now on.
    We have had 4 years with the crime rate going down. And it's not a 
mystery: more police in community policing, more police officers in our 
safe and drug-free schools program in the school, telling these kids 
that drugs are dangerous; we don't care what you hear, what you see in 
the movies, what you hear anywhere else, they are dangerous. They're not 
just illegal; they will kill you.
    We have taken those assault weapons off the street, and we've passed 
the Brady bill. And not a single hunter in Kentucky or Arkansas has 
missed a deer season or any other kind of season. Not anybody lost a 
gun. Not anybody. So all that stuff they told you back in '94 when they 
were winning the Congress, saying we were going to get your rifle and 
all that, it was a big load of bull then, and it's a big load of bull 
now. The difference is now you know it because you have had 2 years, and 
you still got your gun. But I'll tell you who doesn't have a gun: 60,000 
felons, fugitives, and stalkers could not buy a handgun because of the 
Brady bill, and we're safer because of it.
    But our friends in the other party, they don't like this 100,000 
police program, and they don't like the safe and drug-free schools 
program. She's talking about one over there--they voted against the safe 
and drug-free school program; then they tried to get rid of it. They 
voted against the 100,000 police program, and then they tried to get rid 
of it. And they're still trying to do away with it. I tell you, this is 
crazy. If the crime rate's going down, we need to put more police 
officers on the street, not back up and undo what we've done to get it 
down. It's not low enough yet. Do you think it's low enough?
    Audience members. No-o-o!
    The President. Then I say, finish the job and stop those that want 
to turn it around. Let's go.
    And the last thing I want to say is this, folks. We have a lot of 
other challenges--I'll talk more about them at the convention--
challenges at home, challenges abroad. I've got a lot of other ideas 
about what to do in the next 4 years. But let's look at the big picture. 
We've got to keep this economy going until everybody has a chance to 
benefit from it.
    Now, we've proved that we can get the deficit down and grow the 
economy. I told you this would produce 8 million jobs; it produced 10. I 
told you we'd cut the deficit in half; we cut it by more than 60 
percent. We're doing the right thing.
    Now, we ought to give Americans a tax cut who need it, and it ought 
to be targeted to childrearing and child care and education and to 
expanded IRA's that you can withdraw from for a first-time homebuying or 
health insurance policy or to pay for education. I'm for all that. We 
can afford that kind of tax cut. And it'd be worth a lot to middle 
class, hard-working families. But we cannot afford to go right back 
around and take a U-turn and make the same mistake we made before. And 
that's what the other side is proposing, a tax cut 5 times as big as 
mine that they don't know how they're going to pay for. And you know 
what will happen; it will blow a hole in the deficit. That means higher 
interest rates. That means whatever you get in the tax cut, you'll pay 
right back in your mortgage payment, your car payment, your credit card 
payment. It also means even bigger cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, 
education, and the environment than I vetoed when they shut the 
Government down. I didn't put up with it before; I won't put up with it 
again. It is not the right thing for America.
    Now, you look at that train there. If you were on that train going 
to your destination, which is the 21st century, the last thing in the 
wide world you'd want to do is to make a U-turn just because you heard a 
pretty song somewhere along the way. [Laughter] That's a pretty song, 
that big old tax cut. But it's like that contract. Do you remember their 
contract? They never did say word one about it in San Diego, did they? I 
didn't watch it, but somebody told me they listened intently for 4 days 
for their record, and they never talked about their record and their 
contract. Do you remember, it sounded so pretty in 1994? And then the 
consequences came in in '95 and '96. And thank goodness for America, 
Wendell Ford and his friends were there to stand up and say no. But if 
you give them the White House and the Congress, there won't be anybody 
to say no. And they'll get to do their U-turn, and it will sound pretty. 
And then you'll have to deal with the consequences: high interest rates, 
slow growth, and exploding debt.
    Let me just tell you one other thing. The budget of the United 
States of America would be in surplus today--this day--if it were not

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for the interest we're paying on the debt run up in the 12 years before 
I took office when they quadrupled the debt with all those tax cut 
promises. You wouldn't yourself, in this beautiful town of Ashland--you 
wouldn't yourself go down to the local bank and borrow money to give 
yourself a tax cut, would you? You wouldn't do it. Why would you hire 
somebody else to do something you wouldn't do for yourself?We cannot 
blow up the debt. We can give you a tax cut. It will help you raise your 
kids. It will help you get an education. It will help you with health 
care and homebuying. And we can afford it and still balance the budget 
and protect our priorities and build on the future.
    And the last thing I want to say is this: All this comes down to 
whether we're going to meet our challenges and protect our values, 
whether you believe we can create opportunity and have more 
responsibility, and whether we can go forward together, or whether 
you're better off with somebody telling you, ``The Government's the 
problem. It's not yours. You're on your own. Have a nice life. Here's a 
little money.''
    I believe you know from your life in this great, grassroots, God-
fearing American community that we are all in this together, we had 
better lock arms and go forward together, and that when America is 
together and we're positive and we act like this fine police officer and 
local government official and we act like that wonderful young girl in 
her Olympic championship, America always wins. Let's stay on the right 
track for the 21st century.
    God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 4:05 p.m. at Riverfront Park. In his 
remarks, he referred to Gov. Paul E. Patton of Kentucky, his wife, Judi, 
and his mother, Irene; musician Billy Ray Cyrus; Ashland City Councilman 
Kevin Gunderson, a former police officer disabled in the line of duty, 
who introduced the President; and U.S. Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug.