[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 6, 1996]
[Pages 1497-1501]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at Gulf Coast Community College in Panama City, Florida
September 6, 1996

    The President. Thank you. Wow! Well, on the way up here Governor 
Chiles told me that--can you hear? We lost our sound. Can you hear me in 
the back? I'll just speak up--there it is. On the way up here Governor 
Chiles told me that as nearly as they could determine, I am the first 
sitting President ever to come to Panama City. Based on what I saw along 
the road coming in and the reception you've given us, I'd say the others 
don't know what they were missing. I'm glad to be here. [Applause] Thank 
you.
    I'd like to thank President McSpadden and all the others here at the 
community college for making me feel so welcome. I'd like to thank these 
excellent young musicians who played for us, called the Optimistics. 
They were great, weren't they? Thank you very much.
    Thank you, Dawn, for the power of your example and for your fine 
introduction, but mostly because you embody what the American dream is 
all about and the role of education in the American dream. I know all of 
you here who are students must have been very proud when Dawn Roberts 
was up here speaking, but I was proud just to be an American, to know 
that we have people like this and that there are opportunities like this 
school has given her to make the most of her own life.
    I'd like to thank all the military people who serve our country who 
live in this area. And I'd like to thank all the people who work for 
Sallie Mae here, who have worked so hard to make college education 
affordable.
    I want to thank Governor Lawton Chiles for being my friend of many 
years and for what he said today. A lot of people say, ``Well, why are 
you going up there? They never vote for Democrats.'' And I said, ``Well, 
I remember when Lawton Chiles ran for Governor in 1994, and the 
Republicans said it was their year and that people in Florida would 
never reelect him. He kept coming up here and saying that he was going 
to remind everybody that the `he-coon' walked just before the light of 
dawn. And I figured if I came up here, maybe I could find myself a `he-
coon.''' So I'm looking around trying to find one.
    I thought I had personally used every down-home expression known to 
man until he said that. [Laughter] And I'm still learning things from 
Lawton Chiles after all of these years.
    I want to say a special word of thanks and honor to your retiring 
Congressman, Pete Peterson. He has--as all of you know, he has served 
his country magnificently and at great sacrifice to himself and his 
family for a very long time, and I honor him. And I was honored to be 
able to nominate him to be our Nation's first Ambassador to Vietnam 
since the end of the Vietnam war. He will be terrific at it.
    Now, in order for me to see his nomination through, I have to get my 
contract renewed. But if I do, that's a campaign commitment you can put 
in the bank. He will be the next Ambassador to Vietnam.
    Ladies and gentlemen, it's hot in here, and I'm proud you came to 
see me, and most of what I have to say is preaching to the saved;

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I realize that. But I want to emphasize to you why we are here, not in 
Panama City, but why we are here at this community college, because I 
believe America ought to work the way the community colleges in America 
work. I believe they are the ultimate democratic institution, small 
``d'': open to everybody, where everybody has a chance; results 
oriented; flexible, not bureaucratic; working in partnership with the 
private sector; guaranteeing opportunity for everybody who is 
responsible enough to seek it.
    This is the way America ought to work. And this is what I have tried 
to work on for 4 years as President. I was sick and tired of seeing 
Washington politics dominated by hot air, negative charges. And I sought 
to bring an end to the politics of who's to blame, and to substitute for 
that, what are we going to do to make America a better place?
    I think it's plain that America is on the right track to the 21st 
century. We got some more information today: Last month our economy 
created another 250,000 jobs; our unemployment rate--as a nation our 
unemployment rate dropped to 5.1 percent, the lowest in 7\1/2\ years; 
wages are going up again for the first time in a decade. We have record 
numbers of new small businesses, record numbers of American exports all 
over the world. Our auto production is number one again in the world for 
the first time since the 1970's; homeownership at a 15-year high.
    The minimum wage will go into effect, the increase, in October, and 
it will raise wages for 10 million of the hardest-working working people 
in this country. I think that's a good thing. Twenty-five million 
Americans, including some of you in this audience, I'll bet, will be 
helped by the passage of the Kennedy-Kassebaum health care reform bill, 
which says to Americans, ``You cannot lose your health insurance or be 
denied it if you change jobs or just because someone in your family has 
been sick.'' That's what insurance is for.
    For the first time since before the Civil War, in the 1840's, we 
have reduced the Government's enormous budget deficit in all 4 years, a 
total of 60 percent, for the first time in well over 100 years. We can 
be proud of that. We are moving in the right direction. We're on the 
right track.
    There are 1.8 million fewer people on welfare than there were the 
day I took the oath of office. Child support collections are up 40 
percent and up 48 percent in Florida. Thank you, Governor, and thank 
you, Florida; you're doing a good job.
    We have worked hard to make sure that America would be the strongest 
force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world. We have 
undertaken what anyone would say is the most successful restructuring of 
military forces in history. We have maintained the capabilities, the 
readiness, the qualitative edge of our Armed Forces. You heard Governor 
Chiles say it, but I want to say it again: I'm glad that the F-22's are 
going to be headquartered here, and I know you will do a good job of 
helping to maintain America's defense.
    But we still have more to do if we're going to build a bridge to the 
21st century that everybody can walk across. We've got to keep economic 
growth going, which means we have to balance the budget without unfair 
cuts in education, in environmental protection, in research and 
technology, in Medicare and Medicaid. We've got to go forward together, 
investing in the things that will make us stronger. We have to give the 
right kind of tax cuts to America's families. They ought to be focused 
on raising children, on education, on emergency needs like health care, 
on buying that first home. And we ought to pay for our tax cuts and not 
have to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or education, the environment more.
    And we ought not to let that deficit go up. Last year, before they 
changed their position, our friends in the Republican Party put out one 
piece of paper that I agree with. They said, ``If we get off this plan 
to balance the budget and we send a signal that we don't care about it 
anymore, interest rates will go up 2 percent.'' Now, people always tell 
me, ``Don't ever talk about balancing the budget. When the economy is 
good, people get bored by it. They only care about it when the economy 
is bad.'' You should care about it. If interest rates go up 2 percent 
because the Government is borrowing money when you're trying to borrow 
it, that means 2 percent on a home mortgage, on a car payment, on a 
credit card payment. Even more important than that, it means 2 percent 
for every business person that wants to borrow money to start a new 
business, to expand a business, to become more productive so that more 
people can be hired and more can get a raise. We've got to keep working 
to balance

[[Page 1499]]

the budget in the right way to grow the economy.
    We passed a welfare reform bill that says to everybody on welfare 
now, ``We'll take care of your children with health care, with 
nutrition, with child care. But if you're able-bodied, you have to go to 
work.'' We've got to make sure there's work to do for those people. We 
have to create those jobs so they can go to work.
    The crime rate has come down in America for 4 years in a row. But we 
have to finish the work of putting 100,000 police on the street, and we 
have to continue to work to protect those who are trying to protect us. 
You know, in places like this part of Florida and nearly every place in 
my home State of Arkansas, when we passed the Brady bill and the assault 
weapons ban, the awfullest hue and cry you ever heard went up, and all 
of these hunters were told that we were coming after their rifles. The 
truth is, for the first time in American history, we've protected 650 
hunting and sporting weapons from any infringement by the Government. 
They neglected to say that in the political rhetoric 2 years ago. But 
here we are, 2 years later, and every hunting season every hunter in 
Florida and Arkansas is still using the same rifle unless they chose to 
get another one.
    But to be fair and completely honest, there were some people who 
couldn't get guns anymore: 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers could 
not get them because of the Brady bill. We were right, and they were 
wrong.
    Now, for reasons I will never understand, our friends in the 
opposition not only oppose us on that, they oppose putting 100,000 
police officers on the street. Folks, when Hillary and I and Al and 
Tipper Gore took our bus trip after the convention through all of those 
little towns in Missouri, in Illinois, in Kentucky, in Tennessee, I went 
to some little towns where the police chief came up to me and said, 
``Mr. President, because of that 100,000 police program, in our little 
town we've doubled the size of our police department, and we cut the 
crime rate in half. Don't let them stop this program.'' This is 
something that's protecting all Americans, from the biggest cities to 
the smallest towns. So if you want to build a bridge to the 21st century 
for everybody, then our children have a right to be safe in their homes, 
on their streets, in their schools, in their future.
    We've got to build a bridge to the 21st century that enables us to 
grow the economy and protect the environment at the same time. Ten 
million American children still live within 4 miles of a toxic waste 
site; that's wrong. We've cleaned up more in 3 years than the previous 
administrations did in 12, but if you'll give me 4 more years, we'll 
clean up two-thirds of the rest, the worst, so that our kids will be 
growing up next to parks, not poison. And let me say this----
    Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
    The President. This is so important to Florida. You're growing so 
fast, but people come here because it's a beautiful place, because they 
love it. You have to find a way to grow and preserve the environment. 
Whether it's the quality of water, the Florida Everglades, all of the 
resources you have, Florida has as big a stake in America finding a way 
to balance environmental preservation and restoration and economic 
growth as any other State in America. And that is my solemn commitment 
to you. That's what we've done, and we're going to do more of it to 
build that bridge to the 21st century.
    Let me just mention something else. When Dawn introduced me and 
talked a little bit about herself, I thought to myself: I wonder how 
many nontraditional students there are who have to balance work and 
school and taking care of kids. I bet a lot of you do. I never go into a 
crowd of ordinary Americans that I don't hear somebody talk to me about 
how one of their biggest concerns is how they can succeed in their work 
life and succeed in raising their children, in their home life.
    Since most American parents, whether they're single parents or in 
two-parent households, are both working and parenting, I think you can 
make a compelling case that our country has no more important 
responsibility than doing everything in our power to help the American 
people succeed with their first and most important job, raising their 
children, and at work--both of them.
    Now, when we pass--when the first bill I signed was the family and 
medical leave law, our friends in the other party, the leader said, 
``Oh, this is terrible for the economy. You will bankrupt the economy. 
This is awful. There won't be any small businesses can live with this.''
    Well, 4 years later, 12 million American families have been able to 
take a little time off for the birth of a child or a parent's illness

[[Page 1500]]

without losing their jobs, and we have in every single one of these 4 
years started a record number of new small businesses in America. And 
the job growth rate in these 4 years has been faster than in any 
Republican administration in over 70 years. I think that we were right 
about that.
    So I'd like to see us expand the family leave law just a little so 
that parents could have a little time off to go to regular parent-
teacher conferences and regular doctor's appointments with their 
children. I think it would be a good thing to do. I'd like to see 
parents who have to work and get overtime have the choice of taking that 
overtime in cash, if that's what's best in their family, or in time, if 
that's what's best for their family, to support work and family.
    And finally, let me say the most important thing and the reason I'm 
here today is that we've got to build a bridge to the 21st century that 
everyone can walk across, to a century where everybody who is 
responsible and willing to work has a chance to live their own version 
of the American dream and live up to their God-given capacities. And 
there is no way to do it unless we provide in this tough, competitive 
global economy the finest educational opportunities of any nation in the 
world to every single person who lives in the United States.
    Now, as Lawton Chiles will tell you, I could keep you here until 
dawn--and then we'd see that ``he-coon''--talking about education. I 
don't want to do that. But I want to tell you just three or four things 
that I think it's important that we do. Some of them affect you 
directly; some of them affect you indirectly.
    Forty percent of the 8-year-olds in this country cannot read a book 
on their own--40 percent. Every child needs to be able to read a book by 
the time they're 8 and in the third grade. I propose--I propose to 
support our schools with 30,000 more mentors, AmeriCorps volunteers, 
college students on work study, other volunteers, to mobilize a million 
citizens to help children learn to read one-on-one so that by the year 
2000 we can say, ``We built a bridge to the future. Every 8-year-old can 
read a book. Every 8-year-old, by himself.''
    I believe--I bet a lot of you are a lot more proficient on your 
computer than I am and hook into the Internet all the time. We're 
working hard not only to provide every classroom and library in America 
with adequate computers, adequate educational programming, and properly 
trained teachers--this summer we started a program with 100,000 teachers 
to train 500,000 more, to make sure the teachers could actually teach 
the kids--and a little bit of it will be the other way around--in how to 
make the most of computers for educational purposes.
    But the real key is hooking all these computers up to the 
information superhighway, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web. You 
think about it. This is the first time in the history of the country 
when kids in the smallest towns in Florida and in the poorest inner-city 
neighborhoods anywhere in America can be able to get the same 
information at the same quality in the same time in the same way as 
children in the wealthiest school districts in this country. It will 
revolutionize education and lift our entire country. And we have to 
build that bridge to the 21st century.
    And finally, I believe we have to make it possible for every single 
American of any age to go back to school at any time when they need to 
go back to school, starting with making 2 years of college, a community 
college degree, just as universal in 4 years as a high school diploma is 
today. And we can do that. We can do that. Because, thank goodness, 
almost every American is within driving distance of a community college, 
it won't be that hard. What we ought to do is to give every family up to 
2 years of a $1,500 refundable tax credit which will cover the typical 
tuition cost at any community college in the country. And that will help 
us to say to everybody, ``It doesn't matter what age you are. It doesn't 
matter whether other people in your family are going to college, doesn't 
matter what your other problems are. Through the tax system, we'll pay 
you to go back to a community college if you'll do a good job while 
you're there, work hard, learn, and go forward.''
    And for people that go further, I think we ought to give families a 
tax deduction worth up to $10,000 a year for the cost of tuition at any 
form of higher education, undergraduate, graduate, you name it. We ought 
to do that as well and encourage people to go forward.
    Again I say, you can only believe in this if you really believe not 
only in your own potential but the potential of every other American. 
This is a great country not because we are committed to one particular 
religious view, one particular racial view, one particular ethnic group. 
This is a country now where everybody can come,

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and we say, ``If you believe in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, 
the Declaration of Independence, if you're willing to work hard and show 
up tomorrow and play by the rules, you're our kind of American. You're 
part of our future.'' We want to build a bridge that you can walk across 
because we'll be stronger, too. We'll be stronger, too.
    So I want to ask you--that's what this election is all about: a 
bridge to the future or a bridge to the past; a bridge to the future 
wide enough that we can all walk across or everybody trying to build 
their own little bridge and say we're on our own. I believe that my wife 
was right; I think it does take a village. We're better off when we help 
each other.
    I believe that there is no country in the world--I don't just 
believe it, I know this-- there is no country in the world as well-
positioned for the 21st century as the United States. But we have to 
make some fundamental decisions. Do we really believe in opportunity for 
all, responsibility from all? Do we really believe that everybody who is 
willing to work hard has a part in our American community? If we believe 
that, and we're willing to build that bridge, America's greatest days 
are still ahead.
    Will you help me build that bridge?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Thank you, and God bless you. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:26 p.m. in the college gymnasium. In his 
remarks, he referred to Robert L. McSpadden, president, and Dawn 
Roberts, student activities board president, Gulf Coast Community 
College.