[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[August 30, 1996]
[Pages 1433-1437]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Paducah, Kentucky
August 30, 1996

    The President. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I'm glad 
to be back in Paducah. Folks, I don't know if you remember this, but on 
the day before the election in 1992, I flew to Paducah and I didn't have 
any voice at all. I've still got a little left now. And I could only get 
up and say to you, ``Folks, I have lost my voice, but if you folks in 
Paducah and Kentucky will vote for me, I'll be your voice for the next 4 
years.''
    Well, folks, I'm here tonight with what the crowd counters tell me 
is 25,000 of our good friends and Americans to tell you I have been your 
voice. Compared to 4 years ago, we are better off. We are on the right 
track, but we still have work to do. And I want you tonight, for the 
next 4 years, to help me build that bridge to the 21st century. Will you 
do it? Will you do it?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. I want to thank Governor Patton and Mrs. Patton for 
being here, for their leadership and their energy. I want to thank our 
good friend Senator Wendell Ford, a great leader in the Senate and an 
immensely respected man. I don't know how many times I've thought to 
myself, if we just had about 10 people like Wendell Ford in the Senate 
we could solve half the country's problems in a month or two.
    I want to thank Lieutenant Governor Steve Henry for being here. I 
want to thank Steve Beshear and join in what has been said about him. 
When I was looking at him speak tonight, I thought, boy, Kentucky would 
be better off if he were the United States Senator, along with Wendell 
Ford.
    You know, it's really too bad that a person like Steve Beshear or 
our fine candidate for Congress, Dennis Null, whom I urge you to help 
elect--it's too bad that they have to get up and give campaign speeches, 
with so much to be done in this country, about what they have to help 
stop. It's too bad that they have to talk about--here it is, 1996--that 
a Congress in 1996 actually tried to break apart Medicare into a two-
tier system; that a leader of the Congress, now a nominee for President, 
actually bragged about--in 1996, not before--actually bragged about 
being one of the only 12 people to vote against Medicare in the House; 
that they tried to take away the guarantee that Medicaid gives not just 
to elderly folks in nursing homes, not just to pregnant women and poor 
little kids

[[Page 1434]]

but also to a lot of middle class families that happen to have a family 
member with a disability.
    A lot of you saw Christopher Reeve and his magnificent speech to the 
convention. But, you know, one of the most moving conversations I've had 
in the last several months was with Mr. Reeve when he said, ``A lot of 
people with my disability don't have the income of movie stars, and even 
movie stars can go broke caring for something like this. Don't ever let 
anything happen to Medicaid, Mr. President.'' We need for working middle 
class families to be able to care for their children, their brothers, 
their parents, their spouses if they have a disability without going 
broke and going to the poorhouse. We ought not to have to defend that 
against these congressional leaders.
    At a time when we know we need to be doing more for education, we 
ought not have to defend our education programs. Why would anybody want 
to make student loans more expensive and have fewer people in Head 
Start? We ought not to have to defend that. At a time when we have 
proved in this administration that you can grow the economy and save the 
environment at the same time, and create more high-wage jobs, we ought 
not have to deal with people coming in and trying to repeal 25 years of 
bipartisan environment protection. We ought not to have to do that.
    Now, if you don't want to have to worry about that anymore, I want 
you to send Steve Beshear and Dennis Null to the Congress to advance 
your interests, and you won't have to worry about those negative things 
happening to you anymore.
    I want to thank my colleagues--former colleagues Martha Layne 
Collins and Julian Carroll for being here. Mayor Jones, I'm delighted to 
be here in your community. I want to thank your county executive, Danny 
Orazine, and J.W. Cleary, the president of the Paducah NAACP; all the 
Kentucky legislators who are here; the chairman of our party, Bob 
Babbage; Sandra Higgins, the vice chair of our party, a native of 
western Kentucky; Glenn Dowdy, the head of the western Kentucky AFL-CIO, 
is here.
    I want to mention one other person here just for personal reasons. 
Nearly 20 years ago, or anyway, more than 15 years ago, I spent the 
night in western Kentucky in a nearby county where I met Mike Miller, 
the Marshall County judge. Now, folks, he kept me up half the night 
talking about western Kentucky. And that's why I got gray so young in my 
life. [Laughter] That's the only reason Al Gore's got dark hair and I've 
got gray hair; I had to stay up half the night with Mike Miller a long 
time ago. [Laughter] And I am here to deliver a report: Governor Patton 
and Senator Ford have made absolutely sure that the administration is 
perfectly aware that we are all for getting your new locks on the 
Kentucky Down, Judge. We are there. I have reported. Now, the next time 
I come to your county, I want to get a good night's sleep. Thank you 
very much.
    Folks, when I asked--oh, one other thing. I'm an old band boy. Let's 
give a hand to the Murray State Band. They were great. They were great. 
[Applause] Thank you.
    Folks, when I asked the American people last night--hello, folks. 
Keep playing; you're great.
    When I asked the American people last night, all of you, to help me 
build a bridge to the 21st century, that's not just a slogan with me. 
The Vice President will tell you that the thing that dominates our 
thinking and has for 4 years is the plain fact that our whole country is 
going through such a period of rapid change, how we work, how we live, 
how we relate to each other, how we're relating to the rest of the 
world. Most of these changes are very good, but not all of them are.
    We have enormous new opportunities and some stiff new challenges. 
And all the time I'm thinking, we're only 4 years from a new century. 
What's this country going to look like when we start that century? 
What's this country going to look like when our children are our age? 
What's it going to look like when our grandchildren are our age?
    This is the greatest country in human history. We've been around 
here for over 220 years now because more than half the time, in times of 
profound change, our people were both good and smart and did the right 
thing. And I'm telling you, the issue now is, are we going to build a 
bridge to the future or a bridge to the past? Do we believe we have to 
go forward together and help each other to make the most of our own 
lives, or would we be better off saying you're on your own?
    I believe the answer is clear. We said in the convention a lot that 
Hillary's book was right, that it does take a village. And I believe 
that is right. We ought to go forward together.

[[Page 1435]]

    And so tonight I say to you again, I want to build a bridge to the 
future with a strong economy. That means that we have to keep these 
interest rates down, investment going, keep the wages rising. That means 
we do have to balance the budget. But don't let anybody tell you any 
different, we do not have to balance the budget by breaking Medicare, 
turning away from our commitments in Medicaid, undermining our 
investments in our children's future, wrecking the environment, allowing 
$15 billion to be taken out of worker's pension funds, turning our backs 
on the research and development that is critical to our future here in 
western Kentucky. I got asked--I heard it tonight from the platform--
what we want for the Technology Center in western Kentucky. We have to 
invest in these things, folks. So I say again, yes, balance the budget, 
but, no, don't compromise our future or divide our people. Do it 
consistent with our values. We'll grow the economy.
    And should we have a tax cut? Yes, we should. But it ought to be the 
right kind. It ought to be a tax cut we can afford. It ought to be 
targeted to people who need it. And it ought to be targeted to things 
that will grow the economy, educating our children and caring for our 
children, helping people to buy that first home, helping them get in 
another home, helping them to save for health care costs. That is what 
this tax cut ought to be.
    And I want to say again to you, any tax cut I propose to you in the 
election will be paid for line by line, dime by dime. I am not going to 
let this country go back to exploding the debt. I learned what happened. 
We quadrupled the debt of this country in 12 years before we took 
office, and today your budget would be in surplus--in surplus--and we 
could have a bigger tax cut but for the interest we are still paying on 
the debt we ran up in the 12 years before Bill Clinton and Al Gore took 
over the White House. That is a fact. We cannot go back.
    Now, our opponents say the way to go to the 21st century is to have 
a tax cut that's 5 times that big, that's undifferentiated, that can't 
be paid for. Well, I want to tell you something, if they got their way 
there would be even bigger cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and 
the environment than the ones I vetoed that Steve talked about, number 
one. And still it wouldn't cover it, so we would blow up the deficit 
anyway.
    Now, what does that mean? Who cares what happens to the deficit? You 
should. Why? Because if the Government borrows more money, then your 
interest rates will go up: what you paid for your home mortgage, your 
car payment, your credit card payment, what every small-business person 
in Paducah and all over western Kentucky has to pay to borrow money to 
start a new business or expand a business and hire new people.
    So I am telling you, let's keep the economy going and growing and 
wages rising and jobs coming in with the right kind of tax cut targeted 
to educating our people, raising our families, meeting their health care 
costs, and fully paid for in a balanced budget. That's my part of the 
bridge to the 21st century.
    I want you to help me build a bridge to the 21st century where we've 
got the best educated people in the world; where every person, no matter 
where they live, because of technology now has a chance, now has a 
chance to get a world-class education. I want you to support my 
initiative to make sure every third grader in this country can read on 
his or her own by the year 2000, with more tutors, support for teachers, 
support for parents.
    I want you to support our idea which will have phenomenal 
consequences in places like Kentucky and rural Tennessee and my native 
State of Arkansas. We are going to see, by the year 2000, that every 
classroom and every library in every school in this country not only has 
computers, not only has the teachers trained to teach the students how 
to use the computers but is hooked up to the information superhighway, 
so that for the first time in history, in the poorest hill and hollow in 
Appalachia, in the poorest inner-city school district in any city in 
this country, they have access at the same time to the same information 
children in the wealthiest school districts in America do. It has never 
happened before. We're going to make it happen if you help us. Will you 
help us do that?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Will you help us build that bridge?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. By the year 2000, I want us to make sure that 2 years 
of college education, at least a community college education, is just as 
universal in America as a high school education is today, by giving 
people a tax credit

[[Page 1436]]

for the cost of that community college tuition for 2 years. We ought to 
do that.
    I want us to make sure that every student in this country who wants 
to go to college, whether they're young, middle-aged, or older, who 
needs to do it can do it. I want to preserve our good student loan 
program, and I want to give people a $10,000 deduction for the cost of 
college tuition every year they're in school.
    I want us to make sure that we don't short-change education, as our 
friends in the opposition tried to do in the budget I vetoed. I want us 
to do more with education. You know as well as I do, we will never, 
never, never give every American a chance to participate in tomorrow's 
economy unless we give every American a chance to get a world-class 
education. And I want you to help me.
    And I might say, the Vice President talked about how we're going to 
run a civil campaign and just talk about our disagreements. I disagree 
with the condemnation of teachers which I heard at their convention. I 
think we ought to be lifting our teachers up and supporting them and 
supporting their efforts with our children and helping them to do a 
better job.
    I want us to build a bridge to the future that breaks the cycle of 
welfare dependency. I am proud of the fact that there are 1.8 million 
fewer people on welfare today than on the day I took the oath of office 
as President of the United States. I am proud of the fact that child 
support collections have increased by $3 billion, 40 percent, since we 
took office. We're supporting more children. But I'm telling you, we can 
do more. If everybody paid the child support they owed, 800,000 women 
and children would leave welfare tomorrow.
    It's all very well for us to sign a welfare reform bill, and I was 
glad to do it, but you cannot make people go to work unless there is a 
job for them to take. So in the next 4 years let us resolve that we are 
not only going to tell people who are poor but able-bodied on welfare, 
``We'll support your children with health care and child care and 
nutrition, but you have to go to work.'' Let's resolve to make sure we 
do everything we can to create the jobs wherever they're needed so 
people have the jobs to work at. That's a Democratic idea, and we owe it 
to them.
    Let me say just one other thing. We can't build a bridge to the 
future unless we go there together. More than any other issues, the 
things that symbolize what we have to do as a community to me are, 
first, helping families to make the most of their own lives and to 
succeed at home and at work. Of the many achievements of our 
administration, I am perhaps most proud, among the top two or three, 
certainly, of the family and medical leave law because it has enabled 12 
million--think about this--12 million American working folks to take a 
little time off when their babies were born or their parents were sick 
without losing their jobs. And it hasn't hurt our economy a bit. We are 
a stronger economy today because we're standing up for families and 
working people.
    So I want to expand the family and medical leave law a little bit to 
say to these same working people, you can take a little time off to go 
to regular parent-teacher conferences, because that's important to our 
future, and to take your kids to the doctor or your parents to the 
doctor. And I want to say to people, if you earn overtime you ought to 
have the option--not anybody else--you ought to have the option to take 
that overtime in money or in extra time with your family, with your 
children, with your sick parents, with an uncle or an aunt with 
Alzheimer's, whatever you need, whatever is best for the family. We need 
to do what we can to make sure every single American can succeed as a 
parent and as a worker. That's important.
    Last thing I want to say is, we can protect the environment and grow 
the economy. We still have 10 million kids living within 4 miles of 
toxic waste dumps. If you give Bill Clinton and Al Gore 4 more years, 
one of the ways we're going to build that bridge to the future is to 
clean up two-thirds of those dumps, the two-thirds worst of them. We 
want our kids to be living next to parks, not poison. And that will 
create jobs, not cost them. Will you help us build that bridge?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Will you help us do that?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Folks, on this beautiful, soft summer night, where 
there are more people than I ever dreamed I'd see--and I'm sorry you had 
to wait so long, but a lot of your fellow Kentuckians and folks from 
Illinois and folks from Missouri were waiting along the side of the 
road, too--I just want you to think about what kind of world our 
children can live in.
    The children in this audience today, many of them will be doing jobs 
that have not been

[[Page 1437]]

invented yet. Some of them will be doing jobs that no one has imagined 
yet. Right now, not sometime in the future, right now we are involved in 
a project with IBM--now, listen to this--to create a supercomputer 
within the next couple of years that will be able to do as many 
calculations in one second as you could do with a hand-held calculator 
in 30,000 years.
    No one knows how many opportunities are going to explode for our 
people. But if we want the kind of America I believe we do, we have to 
say, we can't make it unless we've got opportunity for everybody. We 
can't make it until everyone is responsible. And we can't make it unless 
we recognize we have an obligation to help all of our people make the 
most of their own lives to build strong families and strong communities 
so we can go forward together.
    Now, I want you to go home and think about that tonight. Our 
children are going to live in the age of greatest possibility in human 
history if we simply have the courage to meet our challenges and protect 
our values. It's going to be a wonderful ride. And I just want, in this 
last campaign of my life, to do whatever I can to make sure that we 
build that bridge to the future sturdy, strong, beautiful, and straight, 
and wide enough for everybody to walk across. Will you help me?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. For 68 more days will you help?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. And 4 years after that will you help?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. I need you, and we'll do it for America. Thank you, 
and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 10:50 p.m. at Harbor Plaza. In his remarks, 
he referred to Gov. Paul E. Patton of Kentucky and his wife, Judi; 
Steven Beshear, Kentucky senatorial candidate; Dennis Null, candidate 
for Kentucky's First Congressional District; Martha Layne Collins and 
Julian Carroll, former Governors of Kentucky; and Mayor Albert Jones of 
Paducah.