[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[August 31, 1996]
[Pages 1447-1452]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Concluding a Bus Tour in Memphis, Tennessee
August 31, 1996

    The President. Thank you. Thank you for waiting. You have made us 
very happy tonight. It's wonderful to see you. I want to thank Mayor 
Herenton and everyone else here in Memphis who worked hard to make this 
night a reality.
    Hillary and Tipper and Al and I, we kind of like doing this. Can you 
tell that? [Applause] And when we look out and see you, the people we've 
been working for and fighting for for the last 4 years, it makes it all 
worth it. We can see what it is we've been doing in the hope, in the 
spirit, in the energy, in the happiness of your reception. Thank you so 
much.
    I want to thank Lois DeBerry and Bill Purcell and Speaker Naifeh and 
all the members of the Tennessee Legislature who are here. Chairman 
Farris, thank you for being here. I want to thank all these Congressmen-
to-be. Congressman Ford, thank you for your friendship and your service 
in the Congress. And about-to-be Congressman Ford, thank you for that 
barn-burning speech and what you want to do.
    Mr. Trotter, thank you, and I want you to help him. Those of you who 
live in his district, he needs your help and he has votes around here. 
We need your help. Houston Gordon, thank you for your speeches and for 
being brave enough and good enough to get out here and make this run for 
the Senate. We need you there.
    Ladies and gentlemen, let me just say one thing before I get into my 
remarks here. You heard the Vice President say what he did. You remember 
the awful budget fight we had. We wanted to balance the budget. We 
brought the deficit down. But we said, we're not going to balance the 
budget on the backs of the people that we depend upon to carry us into 
the future or that got us here. We're not going to cut education. We're 
not going to hurt the environment. We're not going to wreck Medicare and

[[Page 1448]]

Medicaid. We don't have to do it, and we're not going to do it.
    And then they said, ``All right, if you don't do it our way we'll 
shut the Government down, and we'll see how you like that.'' And I said, 
``I don't believe the American people like blackmail. You can shut it 
down, but I'm still going to veto that budget. It's wrong for America.'' 
And I did.
    But folks, you don't want the President just to say no, you want us 
to say yes. I need--but more importantly by far, you need people in the 
Congress who will both balance the budget and keep the economy going and 
protect our values, who will meet our challenges, protect our values, 
and move us forward together. All these people will.
    But I want to introduce one more person who is here today because 
those of you who live in Memphis know that over in Arkansas a bunch of 
us who lived in the eastern part of the State basically believe that 
Memphis is the capital of the Mississippi Delta, and we're sort of a 
part of it. And eastern Arkansas and that congressional district over 
there, we're about to make a change, and 15 to 20 percent of the people 
who vote over there get all their news from over here.
    And we have a Democratic nominee for Congress in eastern Arkansas 
who was an official in our Agriculture Department, who has been a friend 
of mine for 20 years, who is one of the finest people I have ever known. 
And I want to remind the farmers, our administration has been good for 
American agriculture. We've opened more markets. We've had more exports. 
Farm prices are high. And we have supported rural development to help 
people out in the country who can't make a living on the farm anymore. A 
major architect of those policies is now the nominee of our party for 
Congress in eastern Arkansas, Mr. Marion Berry. I'd like to ask him to 
come up here, and you all give him a good Memphis welcome. [Applause] 
Thank you.
    I want him to say just a word. Thank you.

[At this point, Marion Berry, candidate for Arkansas' First 
Congressional District, made brief remarks.]

    The President. Ladies and gentlemen, on Thursday night, from 
Chicago, I had the honor of accepting our party's nomination for 
President for the second time and laying before the American people what 
Al Gore and I will try to do as specifically as I could if you give us 4 
more years. But what the Vice President said is absolutely true. This is 
a choice between building a bridge to the past and building a bridge to 
the future. It's a choice between people who believe we should say 
you're on your own, and those of us who believe, yes, it does take a 
village, we ought to help each other to make the most of our own lives, 
to build strong lives, strong families, strong communities, and a strong 
country.
    I want to build that bridge based on opportunity for all, 
responsibility from all, and an American community that includes 
everybody--everybody. We cannot go forward as Americans unless we're 
willing to go forward together, arm in arm.
    And what I want to say to you tonight is, we've been working on this 
for 4 years, so you don't really have to guess. Four years ago we had 
high unemployment, stagnant wages, rising crime, problems unmet, 
cynicism on the rise, middle class dreams in danger. Four years later, 
because we changed the politics of Washington from the old politics--
which was just pointing fingers at people and saying who is to blame--to 
what I think you want us to do, which is to say, forget about who's to 
blame. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to move 
forward?
    And I appreciated what the Vice President said about Senator Dole. 
We're not interested in a campaign of insults. We want a campaign of 
ideas. We'll put our record and our ideas against their record and their 
ideas, and we trust you to make the decision.
    But look where we are compared to 4 years ago. Let me just give you 
a few things. You just think about this: 10 million more Americans at 
work; 4\1/2\ million Americans moving into their first home; 12 million 
Americans getting family and medical leave so they can take some time 
off when a baby is born or a parent's sick; 1.8 million Americans go 
from welfare to work; child support collections go up $3 billion, by 40 
percent; 40 million working Americans have their pensions protected; 15 
million of our hardest pressed working families get tax cuts; and every 
small business in the country qualifies for a tax cut if they invest 
more in their business to make it more productive or hire somebody else.

[[Page 1449]]

    And in October, 10 million more Americans will get a pay raise when 
the minimum wage goes up on October 1. Twenty-five million Americans 
will be helped, including a lot of people in this audience, because we 
passed the Kennedy-Kassebaum health care reform bill that says you 
cannot be denied health insurance or have it jerked from you just 
because somebody in your family has been sick or you've changed jobs. It 
is a good thing to do.
    Fifty million more Americans are breathing clean air, and we've 
cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than the previous 
administration did in 12.
    And let's talk about some of their issues. Four years in a row, the 
crime rate has come down. We passed the ban on assault weapons. We 
passed the Brady bill. Not a single Tennessee or Arkansas hunter lost 
their rifle, but 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers could not get 
handguns to hurt people in their neighborhoods.
    We have reduced the deficit in every one of our years of this 
administration. And the Clinton/Gore administration is the first 
administration to reduce the deficit in all 4 years since the 1840's, 
before the Civil War. We have the smallest Federal Government since John 
Kennedy was President. And there would be a surplus in the budget today 
if it weren't for the interest payments we're making on the 12 years of 
debt run up before we went to Washington to try to turn this country 
around. I'd say that's a pretty good record. Will you help us build on 
that record?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Folks, we have to do more. We do have to build a 
bridge to the future. The children in this audience will be doing jobs 
that have not been invented yet. Many of them will be working at things 
that have not even been imagined yet. Let me give you just one little 
example. Just a few weeks ago the Vice President and I announced that 
the United States Government was going to do a research project or a 
development project with IBM to build a supercomputer in the next couple 
of years--now listen to this--a supercomputer in the next couple of 
years that will do in one second what it would take you, going home with 
your hand-held pocket calculator, 30,000 years to do. That is an example 
of where we are going and how fast we are going.
    We can create a future in the 21st century where more people have 
more chances to live out their dreams than ever. We can also do 
something with technology we've never done before, which is to give poor 
people and people isolated in our inner cities and our poor rural areas, 
who haven't had a break in 30 years in terms of economic opportunity, a 
chance to fully participate in the American dream for the first time in 
a generation, if we do it right. We can do that.
    But we have to make the right decisions. The first thing we've got 
to do is to make up our mind our bridge is going to be built with the 
finest educational system in the world available to every single person. 
And let me just mention three things. Number one, we have a plan to take 
our AmeriCorps volunteers, 30,000 mentors, and a million more volunteers 
to make sure that by the year 2000 every 8-year-old in America can read 
on his or her own so they can learn the rest of the way through school.
    Number two, we have a plan by the year 2000 to make sure that every 
classroom in America, in the poorest inner city and the most remote 
mountain village, every single solitary one is hooked up, not only with 
computers and trained teachers but hooked up to the information 
superhighway so that, for the first time in the history of America, the 
kids in the poorest districts can get immediately the same quality of 
information and learning that the kids in the wealthiest districts in 
America can get. We're going to do that by the year 2000.
    And finally, we want to make college available to everybody who 
wants to go, and we want to say that by the year 2000, 2 years of 
college in a community college will be as universal in 4 years as a high 
school education is today, because we're going to pay for it by giving 
you a tax credit for the cost of the tuition to a community college for 
2 years. And we want to give every person in college, every person in 
any kind of post-high school education, a tax deduction for tuition up 
to $10,000 a year.
    And we want to give workers who are unemployed or underemployed 
access to a ``GI bill'' that will be worth over $2,000 in educational 
benefits to them so they can get a better job. It's not just young 
people that need an education. Anybody that loses their job in this 
country ought to be able to go back to school and get a better job with 
a better future because they're willing to work.
    Now, that's a strong bridge to the 21st century. We want to build a 
bridge to the 21st

[[Page 1450]]

century with a growing economy. That means that we have to continue to 
balance the budget.
    I don't know how many times I've been told, ``Mr. President, don't 
go to a good old-fashioned Democratic crowd and talk to them about 
balancing the budget. It bores them to death.'' What's that got to do 
with Memphis? Who cares? I'll tell you why you should care. If we have 
to go start borrowing more money and you're trying to borrow money, what 
happens? Interest rates go up. What does that mean? Your car payment, 
your credit card payment, your home mortgage payment goes up. Even more 
important for your future, it means that business people have to pay 
more to borrow money, which means they don't create as many new 
businesses and they don't start as many and they don't hire as many.
    One of the things that I am proudest of in the last 4 years is that 
in each year we have had a record number of new businesses start, 
including now, in America, a record number of businesses owned and 
operated by minorities and women. I'm proud of that. We need more of it. 
That's why we need to keep these interest rates down.
    That means that our tax cut proposal is better than theirs, because 
ours is targeted. It's targeted to raising your children. It's targeted 
to education. It says you can take out an IRA and then you can withdraw 
from it without penalty for a medical emergency, to buy a first home, to 
educate your family; says you shouldn't pay any taxes on the gain from 
the home you sell. But we can pay for it. Every bit of it is paid for.
    Now, they're saying, ``But we'll give you more money. Oh, yes, we'll 
give you more money.'' Well, how are you going to pay for it? ``Well, 
we're going to cut Medicare and Medicaid, education and the environment 
even more than we did in that budget the President vetoed.'' Do you want 
that?
    Audience members. No-o-o!
    The President. And then they still won't be able to pay for it so 
then they'll have to increase the deficit, which means higher interest 
rates and a weaker economy. So we get the worst of both worlds.
    So I say, I want you to help us build a bridge to the 21st century 
with more economic growth, not less, and economic growth which comes 
here to help you. Will you do that?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Now, there has been a lot of talk about 
responsibility and a lot of debate about welfare. Let me tell you what 
this new welfare law does. First of all, I'll say again, we have 1.8 
million fewer people on welfare than we did when I took office. What 
does that mean? If you give people a job, they will take it. People 
don't want to be on welfare. They want to go to work. They want to go to 
work.
    So here is what the new law says. It says we're going to keep giving 
children and their parents health care, nutrition through food stamps, 
the guaranteed school lunch program, and child care if they get a job. 
But what used to be in the check can now be sent to the State and they 
can use the money to create jobs.
    Now, what I say to you is, we talked a lot about responsibility. The 
State of Tennessee, the State of Arkansas, and all the rest of us, we 
now have a responsibility to create those jobs in the inner cities and 
in those poor delta towns and in other places where people are on 
welfare because there aren't any jobs. And I have a plan to let us all 
be responsible by investing in these places to create new jobs where 
there have not been any. Will you help me build that kind of bridge to 
the future?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. We can't be responsible unless our streets are safe. 
I have fought against the efforts by my opponent and Mr. Gingrich to cut 
back on the safe and drug-free schools money, to cut back on the funds 
we give to schools to stay open later because our kids need something to 
say yes to, not just something to say no to. We shouldn't leave children 
out here on the street raising themselves. If we need to keep the 
schools open, we need more funds to keep them open, not less. We need to 
be supporting our teachers, not tearing them down. We need to be 
bringing them in here.
    Well, I'll tell you something, folks, one big reason--you can ask 
the mayor here, you can ask any mayor in America--one big reason this 
crime rate has come down for 4 years is that we're putting more 
policemen back in the neighborhoods where they can know the folks, they 
can know the children, they can be partners. They can not only catch 
criminals, but they can stop crime from happening in the first place.
    Now, they all voted against, the other folks did, including my 
opponent--they all voted against creating 100,000 policemen. Then they

[[Page 1451]]

tried to take it away. Now they're trying to restrict it again. I say to 
you, why would we stop something that's working? We've got the crime 
rate coming down for 4 years. We need it coming down for 4 more years 
and it might be low enough to be tolerable. Will you help me stay with 
100,000 police on the street? [Applause]
    The last thing I want to say is we've got to go forward as one 
community. And that starts with strong families. A lot of people talk 
about family values, but as the First Lady said in our convention, it's 
time we advocated things that show we value family. We've got to help 
people succeed, raising their children and going to work.
    I propose to expand the family and medical leave law so that you can 
take a little time off without losing your job to go to a parent-teacher 
conference or take your kid to the doctor. I propose letting people 
choose how to take their overtime. If they've got problems at home, if a 
child needs some care, if the parent has Alzheimer's, if there's some 
other trouble, I think people who earn overtime ought to have a choice 
to take it in money or time with their families, depending on what they 
need. Will you help me build that kind of pro-family policy as a bridge 
to the future? [Applause]
    Finally, let me say this: The Vice President and I have worked as 
hard as we know how to prove you can protect the environment and grow 
the economy. And I can't thank Al Gore enough for all the things he's 
taught me about how to protect the environment and grow the economy. But 
we passed the Safe Drinking Water Act. We passed an act to purify our 
food from pesticides that every farm organization in America supported. 
We have upgraded the meat standards of this country. We improved the 
clean air laws. We cleaned up all these toxic waste dumps.
    We've still got a lot to do. You want to know one way you can grow 
Memphis' economy and every other city? If we cleaned up every 
environment problem in every city in this country, we would make those 
places prime targets for new investments and new jobs. We're going to 
clean up the environment of the cities and grow the economy.
    We're going to clean up--there are 10 million kids in this country 
that live within 4 miles of a toxic waste dump. We're going to clean up 
the two-thirds worst ones if you'll help us so that our children can 
grow up next to parks, not poison. Will you help us build that bridge to 
the future? [Applause]
    Finally, let me say again, you think about the bridge that connects 
Memphis and West Memphis, Arkansas. You imagine that being a bridge to 
the future. That bridge has got to be strong enough and wide enough for 
all of us to walk across. That's why, when Tipper and I celebrated our 
birthdays, Al and Hillary and the two of us came out here to Tennessee 
to try to rebuild that church that had been burned. Every time somebody 
burns a church or defaces a synagogue or a mosque, they deface the idea 
of America. And as I said Thursday night, the real flame that embodies 
America is the flame on the Statue of Liberty, the flame that the 
Olympic torch--carried by citizens, heroes all across America--embodied.
    You've got this Olympic Gold Medal winner. Why do we love the 
Olympics? I'll tell you why. Because everybody has got to play by the 
rules. You can't get a gold medal by breaking in your opponent's room 
the night before and breaking their legs. [Laughter] Nobody brags on you 
if you stand up behind a microphone and bad-mouth your opponent. You can 
only win if you reach down deep inside and do your best and give your 
all. And then if you do that, even if you don't get a medal you're 
better off. And we think the world ought to work that way. That's why we 
liked the Olympics. That's why we liked the Olympics.
    So I tell you, my friends, you just think about that. The United 
States cannot afford to let racial bigotry get back into our lives. We 
cannot afford to let religious bigotry back into our lives. We cannot 
afford any kind of discrimination. We need to say to the whole world--
and most important, in the privacy of our own rooms at night as we say 
our prayers to God, we need it to be true in our hearts--if you believe 
in the Declaration of Independence, if you believe in the Constitution, 
if you believe in the Bill of Rights, if you get up tomorrow and do your 
work and you obey the law and you play by the rules, you're my kind of 
American. I don't care what else there is about you. We're going to 
cross that bridge together. Will you help me build that kind of bridge 
to the future?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Will you help us for 68 more days?
    Audience members. Yes!

[[Page 1452]]

    The President. Will you help us for 4 more years?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. We need you. We love you. Thank you, and God bless 
you. Let's go get it. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:53 p.m. at City Hall Plaza. In his 
remarks, he referred to Mayor Willie W. Herenton of Memphis; Lois 
DeBerry, speaker pro tempore, Bill Purcell, majority leader, and Jimmy 
Naifeh, speaker, Tennessee House of Representatives; Bill Farris, Shelby 
County Democratic Party chair; and Harold E. Ford, Jr., and Don Trotter, 
candidates for Tennessee's Ninth and Seventh Congressional Districts, 
respectively. A tape was not available for verification of the content 
of these remarks.