[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[August 26, 1996]
[Pages 1364-1368]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1364]]


Remarks in Bowling Green, Ohio
August 26, 1996

    The President. Thank you so much. Thank you for that absolutely 
wonderful welcome. You know, Hillary left us yesterday to go on to 
Chicago, her hometown, to get things ready for us, and we always call--
Chelsea and I do--at night and give a report. I can tell you what our 
report tonight will be: You should have seen the crowd in Bowling Green. 
[Applause] Thank you. Wow!
    I want to thank all of you for being here. I want to say a special 
word of thanks to Representative Marcy Kaptur. There is not a more 
aggressive advocate for the people she represents in the entire United 
States Congress in either party than Marcy Kaptur. She does a great job 
for you.
    I want to thank John Glenn for his many years of service to our 
country in the Marine Corps, in the space program, in the United States 
Senate. I want to thank him for the work he's done on the economy, on 
foreign policy, on defense. I want to thank him for worrying about our 
children being able to grow up in a safe world. And I want to just cite 
two things.
    It is true, as Senator Glenn said, that while some of our friends in 
the other party would criticize Government, they did much to downsize 
it. We have the smallest Federal Government since John Kennedy was 
President. It's very efficient, and we didn't have to throw a lot of 
people in the street to do it. And we saved billions of dollars of your 
tax money, thanks in no small measure because of the leadership of John 
Glenn.
    I will also tell you, when you hear a word like nuclear 
proliferation, it sounds like a big old word and you can't imagine what 
it means. It means, among other things, that tonight and in the last 2 
years, for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there is 
not a single nuclear weapon pointed at the children of the United 
States, thanks in no small measure to John Glenn.
    I've got a few folks I'd like to recognize. I brought a slew of 
Ohioans over here on my right, your left, but one of them, in 
particular, I want to recognize, your former State treasurer and now our 
national Treasurer, Mary Ellen Withrow. She's doing a great job. Thank 
you, Mary Ellen, for coming with us.
    Thank you, Mayor Hoffman, for welcoming me here and for your gift, 
sir. And thank you, City Council President Joyce Kepke, for presenting 
the gift and making me feel so welcome here. Thank you, County Chairman 
Al Baldwin, for your work in getting this magnificent crowd up. I want 
to thank some candidates who are here, beginning with Annie Saunders. 
Thank you for running for Congress. Thank you, Chris Redfern, for 
running for the State senate. Thank you, Alvin Perkins, Wood County 
commissioner candidate. Thank you John Garand, for running for 
prosecuting attorney here.
    And now I want all of you to recognize these young people who are 
here because they won the poster contest. They just came up to see me 
and they're your kids and they're terrific. Let's give them a big hand. 
[Applause] Thank you. I want to say I love all these posters. I like all 
the posters that I see. I thank you for the Hillary poster. And I thank 
you for the poster back there that says, ``The President cares for 
kids.'' Thank you. I like that Bill of Rights poster, but now that I'm 
50 years old, it may not be truth in advertising anymore. [Laughter]
    Yesterday Chelsea and I started out with Hillary in West Virginia. 
We went into Kentucky; then we came into Ohio. We've had a wonderful day 
on this train. I wanted to take this train through the heartland to 
Chicago because I wanted to see people like you, the people I've been 
working for for the last 4 years, on the way to accept, for the second 
time, the nomination of my party for President.
    I also very much wanted you to see us on this train because it's not 
only on the right track to Chicago, this train is on the right track to 
the 21st century, and I want you to keep us on it.
    Folks, 4 years ago I came before the American people--and it is true 
what Senator Glenn said, Ohio put me over the top in the nomination and 
put me over the top in the general election, and I hope you will do it 
again. But when I came before you, I had never before served in office 
in Washington. I spent most of my time in places like Bowling Green. I

[[Page 1365]]

identified with schools like Bowling Green State--and I thank you for 
the music and the cap. And Dr. Ribeau and anyone else who's here from 
the university, I thank you for the music, the cap, the jogging outfit, 
but I thank you most of all for the military aide who's here with me 
tonight. You may know, the President gets a distinguished military aide 
from each branch of the service. My Coast Guard military aide, 
Lieutenant Commander June Ryan, is here with me tonight, a graduate of 
Bowling Green State. She's over there somewhere. Where is she? Come 
here, June. You did a good job, didn't you? Give her a hand. [Applause] 
Thank you. She's an Iowa farm girl. There aren't many oceans bordering 
Iowa, but somehow she made it into the Coast Guard, and I know you all 
gave her a good start here.
    The thing that was bothering me when I ran for President was the 
economy was stagnant. As Marcy Kaptur never fails to remind me, there 
were and there still are too many blue-collar workers, people that work 
hard and never seem to get a raise, never seem to get ahead. 
Unemployment was high. The crime rate was going up. There are a host of 
problems that were going unchallenged. Cynicism was on the rise in the 
country. And I wanted to do something about it.
    I wanted to bring some hope and direction and movement and progress 
back into American life. And I thought we had to change the way people 
were thinking in Washington, away from the kind of intensely partisan 
rhetoric and intensely stale debate. If you listen to things coming out 
of Washington, very often it sounded like it was more about who to blame 
than what to do. I'm more interested in what to do than who to blame, 
and I think you are, too.
    So, for the last 4 years, we've been out there doing. I have a 
vision of the 21st century for America. I believe they'll be our best 
days. I believe the children in this audience will have more chances to 
live their dreams than any generation of Americans in history. The 
global economy, the information explosion, the computer explosion, the 
technology discoveries, the medical discoveries, it is unbelievable. We 
just commissioned--let me give you an example--we just commissioned a 
supercomputer between IBM and the Federal Government. We're going to 
build one that will do more calculations in a second than a person with 
a hand-held calculator can do in 30,000 years. That's how we're growing. 
There is more computer power, more computer power in a Ford Taurus today 
than there was in the first spaceship that went to the moon in 1969. 
That's how fast things are changing.
    But we also know we've got some problems in this country. And what I 
want to do is to build an America for the 21st century where the 
American dream is open to everybody who is responsible enough to work 
for it, an America where we're coming together across the lines that 
divide us, not being torn up by race and religion and other things that 
are just engulfing the world, from Bosnia to the Middle East to Northern 
Ireland to Africa--you name it. All over the world people are fighting 
because of their differences.
    In our country, we're not about race and religion. If you believe in 
the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of 
Independence, and you're willing to show up for work tomorrow, you're 
our kind of person, you're part of our America, and we're going forward 
together. That's what we believe.
    And I wanted our country to continue to be what John Glenn has given 
his life for it to be, the leading force for peace and freedom and 
prosperity in this whole world. And I believe we can achieve that. And I 
want to give you a report compared to 4 years ago: We passed a sweeping 
economic program in 1993 that, as Senator Glenn said, cut the deficit 60 
percent 4 years in a row and every year of this administration. That's 
the first time it's happened since the 1840's. And if it were not for 
the interest we're paying on the debt run up in the 12 years before I 
came here, we'd have a surplus in the budget today, and that's important 
for you to know.
    Now, what does that mean in Bowling Green? It means lower interest 
rates. It means lower home mortgage payments, more homeowners, 4\1/2\ 
million new American homeowners. Ten million Americans have refinanced 
their mortgage at lower interest rates. It means lower car payments. It 
means lower credit card rates. And most important of all, it means new 
investment, new businesses. We've got a record number of new businesses 
started and 10\1/4\ million new jobs in 3\1/2\ years. We're better off 
than we were 4 years ago.
    We have worked to deal with the problems we heard Americans talking 
to us about 4 years ago. Our administration worked hard to try to

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deal with the health care problems of ordinary Americans. We've worked 
to contribute to the decline in the medical inflation rate, so that the 
costs wouldn't keep going through the roof. And I'm proud to say last 
year health care costs increase was the lowest it's been in 23 years, 
and this year it's running under 2 percent. And last week, right before 
I left, I signed a bill the Congress passed, the Kassebaum-Kennedy 
health care bill, that says no longer can you be denied health insurance 
because somebody in your family has been sick or lose it because you 
changed jobs. That's a good thing for America. Twenty-five million 
Americans will be helped by that.
    What else have we done? I knew that there were a lot of people who 
were working hard, raising their kids, and still falling further and 
further behind. In 1993, we tried to create more good jobs by helping 
small businesses. If they invest more in their business, they can get a 
tax cut. And then again in 1996, just before I came here, we did some 
very important things. We raised the minimum wage for 10 million 
American workers. We preserved the tax cut we won in 1993 for the 15 
million Americans working hard with children on the most modest income 
so we could cut their taxes. This year that's worth about $1,000 for a 
family of four with an income below $28,000. When you get down to those 
lower wages and there's still people with kids in the home, we wanted to 
say clearly, ``If you work full time and you've got children in your 
house, the tax system will not put you in poverty, it will lift you out 
of poverty. You're entitled to raise your kids in dignity.''
    That minimum wage bill did some other things, too. It gave another 
tax break to small businesses. So now we have increased by 2\1/2\ times 
the tax relief 90 percent of our small businesses can get if they invest 
more money in their business. I'm proud of that. They're creating most 
of the new jobs. Most of us are going to be working for small 
businesses. We better create a climate in America second to none for 
small businesses to grow and flourish. And I know all of you will 
support that.
    We've tried to help families do a better job in raising their kids 
and working. I think it's fair to say that maybe the number one worry of 
most families in this country is how to raise their kids and do a good 
job of that and still do a good job at work. There's probably not a 
family in this audience tonight that hadn't had some problem at some 
time in juggling the demands of school for your kids or health care for 
your kids or just being with your kids and the responsibility to be at 
work. We passed the family and medical leave law that says you can have 
a little time off without losing your job if there's a baby born or a 
sick child or a sick parent. Marcy Kaptur and John Glenn voted for that 
law and strongly supported it. And in the last 3 years, 12 million 
American families have made use of it, and our economy is stronger, not 
weaker, than it was 3 years ago. It helps to lift up families and 
support children. And people are more productive at work when they can 
do it.
    And last week, in the minimum wage law, we did something else that 
was good for families. I signed a bill that gives a $5,000 tax credit to 
any couple willing to adopt a child and give that child a good home, and 
an even more generous one if the child is disabled. And it removed the 
barriers to cross-racial adoption. So now we can say there are hundreds 
of thousands of kids out there trapped in foster care; they need loving 
homes. We have now made it more economically feasible for people to 
really be pro-family for those kids, too. And I'm proud of that.
    Four years ago, a lot of Americans talked to me about crime. I 
started off this morning at the Ohio police training academy, and I 
talked about the crime problem. Let me just say, I have a simple 
strategy: more police, more punishment, more prevention; take the 
serious offenders and punish them; do what you can to prevent crime from 
occurring; and help to save the kids--give them something to say yes to 
as well as to say no to; and put more police officers on the street to 
catch criminals and prevent crime. That's been our strategy for 4 years 
in a row. The crime rate has been coming down in the United States of 
America, and I'm proud of that.
    There's been a lot of talk in the news in the last few weeks about 
welfare reform because I signed the welfare reform bill. It's a little 
bit longer story than that, and I want to talk to you about it. Nearly 
every American I talked to for years wanted us to do something about 
welfare because they felt that it trapped people in dependency. The 
people I met on welfare wanted me to do something about welfare. They 
wanted a path to independence. Most poor people want what we want for 
everybody else; they

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want to succeed with their kids, and they want to succeed at work. They 
want to be good, productive citizens.
    And so we sat about 3 years ago working with the States to give 
people permission to move people from welfare to work. On the day I 
signed the bill, already three-quarters of the people in America were 
under such experiments. We have reduced the welfare rolls by a million 
and a half since I became President of the United States, moving people 
out there into the work force. And I'm proud of that.
    But I signed this bill because we need to do more. But let me tell 
you, folks, the welfare reform bill is the beginning, not the end. What 
it does is to say nationally, we're going to protect all these families. 
We're going to protect their medical care. We're going to give them 
child care when the parents go to work. We're going to make sure the 
kids are in the school lunch program and can show up and get extra 
nutritional help that they need. But we're going to give the money that 
used to be in the welfare check to the States to devise ways to put 
people to work.
    I want to talk a lot on Thursday night about this. But let me just 
say to you, if you care about this and if you want what I want, you want 
poor people to have the same life that everybody else has, having a 
chance to succeed at home and at work, then let's say to everyone in 
America without regard to party, ``Let's don't let welfare reform be a 
fraud. If you're going to make people go to work, make sure they have 
jobs to find when they go to work.'' We have to create more jobs in this 
country so people can work.
    When I look out at all these children I think about our natural 
environment. And one of the things I think we have to do to be 
responsible to the future is to find a way to grow the economy and 
preserve the environment. Fifty million Americans are breathing cleaner 
air than they were 4 years ago. We have upgraded the standards for meat 
inspections, for putting pesticides on crops that become food. We have 
cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than were cleaned up in the 
previous 12. We created the biggest national park south of Alaska in 
California. We saved Yellowstone Park, our Nation's great treasure, from 
a gold mine. We are pushing forward to preserve the environment and to 
promote the economy.
    Finally, let me say one other thing that I think is important. I 
believe you can have opportunity and responsibility, but it has to be 
for everybody, and then we have to treat everybody the same. That's why 
I've reacted so strongly against the church burnings of black churches 
and the burnings of white churches and the people who have defaced the 
mosques and the synagogues in this country.
    This was a country founded in religious liberty. That's why I was so 
angry the other day when African-American soldiers in the Special Forces 
in North Carolina found swastikas painted on their doors. Let me tell 
you something, folks, the Special Forces are just what they say; they're 
special forces. If I call them at midnight tonight and tell them to be 
halfway around the world by noon tomorrow to defend you and put their 
lives on the line, they'll do it. They don't deserve to be discriminated 
against because of their race. That's not America. That's not America.
    And so I say to you, we have to bring this country together and go 
forward together. The reason I vetoed the budget that passed was not 
because I didn't want a balanced budget. I presented a balanced budget. 
But we can't have a balanced budget if we cut student loans and cut back 
on Head Start and cut back on problems that improve education. We can't 
have a balanced budget if we cripple our ability to protect our 
environment. We can't have a balanced budget if we take unnecessary cuts 
in the Medicare program that aren't necessary to save it. We can't have 
a balanced budget if you walk away from our commitment to guaranteed 
medical care for the elderly, for families with persons with 
disabilities in the family, for pregnant women, and for poor children. 
We've got to go forward together. That's what that whole thing was all 
about.
    And as I go forward into Chicago, I want you to know that's the 
record we've made. But we've made a beginning; we have more to do. What 
is the task of the next 4 years? We have our economic house in order. 
We've got to make sure it's possible for every single solitary American 
to take part in this economic recovery and to live out their dreams and 
to take care of their families. That has to be our task for the next 4 
years. That means to me, among other things--I just want to mention just 
a couple of things that I want to do in the next 4 years.

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    Number one, I want to make at least 2 years of college as universal 
for Americans as a high school education is today. Now, how do we 
propose to do that? By giving a $10,000 tax deduction to families for 
the cost of college tuition for any kind of education after high school 
and a $1,500 refundable tax credit for the first 2 years of college, if 
that helps you more. That will get everybody through a community college 
in any State in the country just about. That's a good thing to do, and 
we ought to do it.
    Number two, I want to make sure that every child in every school in 
America has the same chance everybody else does to grow and learn, which 
means we not only need computers in every school and classroom, and also 
trained teachers, but all those classrooms need to be connected to this 
vast information superhighway, that will give any child anywhere in 
America, in the poorest inner-city neighborhood, in the most remote 
mountain village, access to the same information that any other child 
has anywhere in the world. We're going to connect all those classrooms 
by the year 2000, if you'll let us do it.
    And finally let me just say one word about health care. We have done 
a good thing by saying you can't have your health insurance taken away 
from you if you change jobs, and you can't be denied if you've got 
somebody in your family who is sick, but we still have good, hard-
working people who are unemployed for longer periods than they used to 
be. I want to see us also help those people who are unemployed, who are 
dying to get back in the work force, keep their families in health 
insurance for at least 6 more months. And that's a noble and good thing 
to do. The kids need it. It will help them perform in school. It will 
help the families stay together. It will make America stronger. I hope 
you'll support it.
    And all these things--the last thing I want to say is, we can afford 
a tax cut, but we ought to only have the tax cut we can afford--remember 
what I said--because we're bringing the deficit down, because everybody 
knows we're going toward a balanced budget, your interest rates are 
lower. That's lower mortgage payments, lower car payments, lower credit 
card payments, more business investment, and more jobs.
    And finally, for the first time in a decade, for the last 2 years 
average wages are rising again. We can't jeopardize that, but we can 
afford a family-friendly tax cut, a $500 tax credit for children under 
13, the education tax deductions that I just mentioned, and an IRA 
available to families making up to $80,000, moving up to $100,000 a 
year, that you can withdraw from without any penalty to buy the first 
home, to deal with a medical emergency, and to educate your kids or 
yourselves. That is a program we can afford, and that's what we ought to 
have. It will build America and balance the budget.
    Well, that's the America I want to build for the 21st century. Will 
you help?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Will you help for 70 more days?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Will you help for 4 more years?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Thank you, and God bless you. Hang in there! Let's 
go!

Note: The President spoke at 8 p.m. on the rear platform of the 21st 
Century Express. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Wesley K. Hoffman 
of Bowling Green, and Sidney A. Ribeau, president, Bowling Green State 
University.