[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 11, 1996]
[Pages 1543-1551]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Sun City, Arizona
September 11, 1996

    Thank you very, very much. I'll tell you, we're off to a pretty good 
start. Hello, Desi. I'm glad to see you. See that lady right there? She 
used to take care of my daughter right after she was

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born. Her name is Desi Centers. Give her a hand, she did a good job. 
[Applause]
    I'll tell you, all the reporters on the plane wanted to know why I 
was coming to Arizona, and was it about politics and did we really think 
we could win? And I said, ``Look, I just got my AARP card. I thought I'd 
come check it out.'' It looks pretty good to me. It looks pretty good to 
me. [Laughter]
    Well, Rose Mofford did what she usually does, she stole the show 
already. [Laughter] Thank you, Governor. When I saw her backstage, she 
said, ``Well, I'm still your adopted mother.'' [Laughter] She and my 
mother had a lot in common. I have always loved Rose's irrepressible 
optimism and her very straightforward manner. And I can tell you this: 
When we served together as Governors, she loved the State of Arizona, 
and she took care of you. And I'm glad to see her here today.
    I want to thank my good friend Ed Pastor for being here with me 
today. He is a true leader in the Congress, leading for the people of 
Arizona, leading for the Hispanic Caucus, leading for the concerns of 
people all over the United States. And thank you, Dennis Jensen, and 
thank you very much for this beautiful bolo, which I will treasure. I 
collect them. I love to wear them when I have different attire on. 
[Laughter] I did wear my boots. If I'd known I was going to get a bolo, 
I wouldn't have worn a tie. [Laughter] Thank you very, very much. Is the 
gentleman who did that here? Stand up. Give him a hand, he did a 
wonderful job. Thank you very much. [Applause]
    I want to thank a number of others who are here--the chairman of the 
Arizona Democratic Party, Sam Coppersmith, former Member of Congress, a 
very good man; State house minority leader, Art Hamilton; Steve Owens, 
our nominee for Congress in the Sixth Congressional District and a very 
good man; Barbara Sherman, our nominee for corporations commission, 
thank you for being here. Thank you, Mayor Paul Johnson, from Phoenix, 
for being here. Thank you, Vice Mayor Crawford, from Tucson, for being 
here. Thank you, State Senator Sandra Kennedy. And I want to thank the 
labor leaders, the Native American leaders, the county officials who are 
here. All of you who have come out to be here, we are very, very 
grateful to you.
    This is a great day for me to be back in Arizona and to be here with 
all of you. I want to thank the Temptations. The Temptations were 
singing when I came in the back. I heard them, and they were just great, 
weren't they? For a moment I thought I was crashing a dance instead of 
coming to a political meeting. [Laughter]
    I want to echo what has been said already about other distinguished 
Arizonans. I am personally very, very grateful to Bruce Babbitt for his 
willingness to serve in our administration and for the heroic fights he 
has taken on, to preserve our natural resources, to fight back on ill-
advised attempts to sell some of our national parks, to help to save 
Yellowstone from a gold mine, to create in the Mojave Desert the largest 
national park in America south of Alaska, and to be a good steward of 
our national resources.
    I was profoundly honored to present to Mo Udall's son Mark the 
Presidential Medal of Freedom, which I gave him a couple of days ago. 
And no American deserves it more. All of you can be very proud of that.
    And I know I join all Americans in wishing Senator Goldwater well in 
his recovery. And let me tell you--you're probably like me--I first met 
Barry Goldwater 28 years ago when I was 21 years old--almost 29 years 
ago now. And he was giving a speech at the University of Arkansas at the 
invitation of Mack McLarty, who later became my Chief of Staff and is 
now the White House Counselor. And we were there. And I worked at the 
time for Senator Fulbright from Arkansas who, as some of you--maybe most 
of you know, was a Democrat. And he and Senator Goldwater had a great 
difference about the war in Vietnam which was the major issue back then. 
I will never forget how kind Barry Goldwater was to me as a 21-year-old 
college senior, a person he could never have known would amount to a 
hill of beans, and some of his fellow Republicans still think hasn't 
amounted to a hill of beans. [Laughter]
    I'll never forget that. But the thing that means the most to me is 
the incredible kindness and sensitivity he has shown toward the First 
Lady over the last 4 years. It means a great deal. So I wish him well. 
And I thank God for his civility and his service to our Nation.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I am glad to be here. I've had an interesting 
couple of weeks. A lot has been going on in the Nation's Capital, and a 
lot has been going on out in the country. We had our great convention in 
Chicago. And before that, I was on the rails, on the track to Chicago. 
And after that, Al and Tipper Gore

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and Hillary and I took a bus trip. And since then, I have been going 
back and forth to work in Washington and then back to the campaign trail 
when I could.
    When I ran for President in 1992, I told the American people I had a 
very straightforward but profoundly important vision for our country in 
the 21st century; that we were going through this huge period of change 
in how we work and how we live and how we relate to each other and the 
rest of the world, a sweeping period of change; and that I wanted to see 
us manage this change into the next century in a way that kept the 
American dream alive for every single person in this country, that kept 
this country coming together as we grow ever more diverse and not being 
driven apart as so many nations are by their diversity, and that kept us 
the strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world.
    I said then, I reiterate today, I thought the only way to do that 
was to find a way to meet our challenges and protect the values that 
have made us the greatest country in history. And that our strategy 
should be simple, straightforward, and profound. We should work for 
opportunity for all, for responsibility from all, and for an American 
community that really is growing stronger together, where we respect 
each other for our shared values and we accept our differences, and 
we're proud of them because we know it makes us stronger and stronger, 
especially in a global society where there are people from all over the 
world with whom we must do business, with whom we must make peace, and 
with whom we must relate if we want to beat back the problems and seize 
the opportunities that the next century is going to offer us.
    And for 4 years, I've worked on that. And I have to tell you that it 
may be a little immodest, but I think the evidence shows that we're 
better off than we were 4 years ago.
    Look at the evidence. The latest evidence we have is that 
unemployment is down to a 7\1/2\ year low--5.1 percent--in the Nation, 
the highest consumer confidence in years, 10\1/2\ million new jobs. The 
economy is on the right track. We have almost 4\1/2\ million new 
homeowners. Another 10 million homeowners have refinanced their 
mortgages at lower rates because we've been able to get those interest 
rates down. I see those folks everywhere. We have record numbers of new 
small businesses formed in each of the last 4 years. Our exports of 
American products and services are at an all-time high.
    Twelve million Americans have been able to take advantage of the 
family and medical leave law to take a little time off for the birth of 
a baby or the illness of a parent without losing their job. Fifteen 
million of our hardest pressed working Americans got tax relief so that 
if you work 40 hours a week with children in the home, you'll never be 
in poverty now. That's very, very important.
    Forty million Americans--and this is something that's important to a 
lot of people in this room--in 1994, we passed a bill to protect the 
pensions of 40 million Americans--40 million Americans.
    Our air is cleaner. Our drinking water is safer. Our food is purer. 
We have closed more toxic waste dumps in the last 3 years than the 
previous administrations did in 12.
    And in the last 2 weeks before Congress left office, we had some 
more good news. On October 1st, 10 million Americans will get an 
increase in the minimum wage. And every single small-business person in 
the country who invests more money in his or her business to make it 
more productive, to hire more people, to grow, will get a tax cut.
    And 25 million Americans, because of the passage of the Kennedy-
Kassebaum bill, will be eligible not to lose their health insurance just 
because they got sick, someone in their family got sick, they had to 
change jobs. The minimum wage bill also made it easier for people in 
small businesses to take out pensions and for the employees in small 
businesses to keep those pensions if they move from job to job. And it 
gave families a $5,000 tax credit if they adopt children. So that bill 
was pro-work, pro-business, and pro-family. The country is moving in the 
right direction. We are moving in the right direction.
    The welfare rolls are down by 1.8 million from the day I took 
office, and child support collections are up by 40 percent, $3 billion. 
The crime rate has dropped in each of the last 4 years, as we are about 
the business of putting 100,000 more police on the street, attacking 
violence against women and children, working for safe and drug-free 
schools. And yes, we passed the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. 
But contrary to all the hysteria that was whipped up in 1994 against the 
people who voted for the crime bill, not a single Arizona hunter or

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sports person, not a single Arkansas hunter or sports person lost their 
weapon. But 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers did lose the right to 
get a handgun because we passed the Brady bill, and we're better off 
because of it.
    The Government we have today in Washington is very different from 
the Government we had 4 years ago. It is, first of all, smaller by 
250,000. The Government is now the smallest it's been since John Kennedy 
was the President of the United States in the early sixties. And I might 
say, to give you a better impression of how much we've shrunk the 
Government, it's a bigger country now than it was in 1960, more people 
live here. As a percentage of the civilian work force, the Federal 
Government is today the smallest it's been since Franklin Roosevelt took 
the oath of office for the first time in 1933.
    We have reduced the size and burden of the Federal Government, but 
we still have a Government that is strong enough to help us meet our 
challenges and protect our values. The role of the Government today is 
to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of 
their own lives, and that's what we are attempting to do.
    And finally, let me say, we have plainly maintained our 
responsibility to be a force for peace and freedom and prosperity, with 
200 new trade agreements, 21 with Japan alone--American exports up 85 
percent in the areas covered by our trade agreements with Japan; the 
United States number one again in automobile production and sales around 
the world for the first time since the 1970's; working for peace in the 
Middle East, in Northern Ireland, in Haiti, throughout the world; 
reducing the nuclear threat--for the first time since the dawn of the 
nuclear age in the last 4 years, there's not a single nuclear missile 
pointed at the children of America. And you can be proud of that.
    Just a couple of days ago I had the great honor of supporting and 
then being able to announce that the United Nations voted overwhelmingly 
to ban nuclear testing forever, a huge event. And now the United States 
Senate is considering something called the Chemical Weapons Convention, 
and if we pass it--160 nations have signed it, 60 have ratified it, we 
need to follow suit and ratify it in the Senate because it will enable 
us to reduce the availability of chemical weapons for terrorists, for 
countries that would promote chemical weapons and use them in an 
inhumane way. Nobody is immune from this. You saw from the terrorist 
attack in the Tokyo subway what can happen when innocent people are 
subject to this.
    So I implore the Senate to go on and ratify this. This is a 
bipartisan thing. This treaty was negotiated when President Bush was in 
office, but it has never been ratified. And we must ratify it so we can 
continue the work of making the world a safer place, especially from 
terrorists.
    And finally let me say on that subject, as all of you know, in 
recent days it became necessary for me to order our pilots to take 
certain actions in Iraq, to increase the chances that we could prevent 
Saddam Hussein from threatening his neighbors because of what he was 
doing to his own people. I just want to say, again, that we are going to 
do everything we can to make sure our own pilots are safe, that they can 
fly their missions in safety. We will do whatever is necessary to 
protect them. And the determination of the United States in dealing with 
the problem of Iraq should not be underestimated. We will do what we 
must do to protect our people and our soldiers.
    Now, you heard Rose Mofford say that I called her back in 1988. When 
I was a Governor I was often appalled by what I saw coming out of 
Washington, frankly, because it seemed to me that the further you got 
away from the people and the closer you got to Washington, DC, the more 
our politics became about rhetoric and the less about reality. There was 
more name-calling and less working in ways that would change people's 
lives.
    The things that I have just said to you, it seems to me, document 
beyond question that we are capable of working together in a partnership 
that will have a positive impact on the lives of the people of the 
United States.
    So let me say again, I have tried to change the politics of your 
Capital from who's to blame to what are we going to do? And even though 
we have come a long way in the last 4 years, I think we all know we 
still have a lot of challenges to meet to make sure when we start that 
new century and a new millennium, our country is the kind of country we 
want it to be. We do have to build a bridge to the 21st century, but 
we've got to build it on ideas, not insults. And this campaign ought to 
be a campaign of ideas about what is best for the American people.

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    Now, let me say very briefly where I think we should go and the 
bridge that I hope you will help me build. First of all, if we're going 
to build a bridge to the 21st century of opportunity, we have to make 
sure that every American who is willing to work has a chance to 
participate in that opportunity. In a world dominated increasingly by 
high technology, by rapid movement of information, by global 
competition, education is more important to the well-being not only of 
individual Americans, but to our country than ever before in the history 
of the United States.
    In the past 4 years I worked on a broad front to improve education, 
from increasing Head Start to giving our schools funds to raise their 
standards, stay open after school for kids who are in trouble, try 
innovative reform measures that would enable them to achieve higher 
levels of learning. We reformed the student loan program to make the 
loans lower cost and to have better repayment terms so more people could 
go. And we fought back what I considered to be very ill-advised efforts 
to cut back on education funding at a time when education is more 
important to our future than ever before.
    Now, what are we going to do in the future? I think, first of all, 
we should have a clear agenda that includes at a minimum the following 
items: Number one, 40 percent of the 8-year-olds in this country still 
can't read a book on their own. Even though improvement in math and 
science is going up, even though our schools are plainly getting better, 
40 percent of those kids can't. I propose to put together an army of 
30,000 mentors from national service volunteers, from young people on 
work-study in college, from trained reading tutors, to mobilize a 
million true volunteers to go into every high school in this country--I 
mean--excuse me--every grade school in this country where it is needed 
to make sure by the year 2000 every 8-year-old in America can pick up a 
book and say, ``I read this myself.''
    Second, we have an opportunity that is truly revolutionary because 
of technology to do something never before done. We are working hard not 
only to get computers and educational materials and software to go into 
computers in all the classrooms of America, we've also worked to train 
teachers who can at least keep up with all these young kids who are 
computer wizards, something I can't do.
    This summer, the National Education Association, the American 
Federation of Teachers, the school principals, and other education 
groups put together 100,000 teachers who began the work of training 
500,000 more teachers to make sure that the teachers could actually use 
the computers in the classroom to teach the students. And now it is time 
to make sure that we do the last thing. We need to make sure that every 
classroom and every library and every school in America is hooked up to 
the information superhighway, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web, to 
all these networks of information.
    Now, let me just say for a moment what the significance of that is. 
What this means is that for the first time ever in the history of the 
country, if we do it, children in the smallest, most isolated rural 
school districts in America, children in the poorest inner-city school 
districts in America, no matter where these children are, they will have 
access to the same information in the same form in the same time at the 
same level of quality as children in the wealthiest school districts in 
the country. It has never happened before. We can do it in the next 4 
years, and we should--and we should.
    Finally, in the next 4 years we should truly open the doors of 
college education to anyone of any age who needs to go--of any age. And 
I propose to do the following:
    Number one, we ought to set as a national goal in 4 years, we'll 
make at least a community college degree as universal in America as a 
high school diploma is today. How? Almost every American is within 
driving distance of a community college, and those places work. They're 
open; they're flexible; they're results-oriented; they're democratic--
small ``d,'' that is they're open to everybody. They work the way 
America ought to work more. And all we have to do to make community 
college available to everybody is to say to people, ``If you'll go, 
we'll give you a tax credit of up to $1,500 a year for the tuition,'' 
which would cover the typical tuition cost throughout the country.
    Second, we should give a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for 
the cost of any education after high school so we can encourage people 
to go forward, encourage parents and grandparents to help their children 
and grandchildren go to college.
    The third thing I want to so do is to recognize that a lot of adults 
need more education as well, and that we have 70--70 at least--different

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programs in the Federal Government that have developed for the best of 
reasons over time. But you need a slide rule to figure out whether you 
qualify for them. And what I want to do is to say to someone, if you 
qualify for Federal educational help because you have lost your job or 
because you are grossly underemployed, instead of these 70 different 
programs you have to figure out, I want to put all that money in one pot 
and give a skills grant worth up to $2,500 a year to people and say, 
take it to your local community college, take it wherever it's best for 
you. But here it is, go get an education so you can go up not down on 
the job scale if you lose your job. Will you help me build that kind of 
bridge to the 21st century? [Applause] I need your help.
    I think we should promote more homeownership. Our Secretary of 
Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros has worked hard, and we 
have cut the average closing costs for first-time homebuyers by nearly a 
$1,000. We have a 15-year-high in homeownership. But I want this to be 
within reach of every American. We have lots of initiatives to do that. 
But one of the things that I think we should do is to change the law so 
that people simply do not have to pay taxes when they sell their home 
even if it appreciates in value up to a half a million dollars. I think 
we should do that.
    And finally, let me say, if we want to have opportunity, we've got 
to keep this economy going. And that means that we have to continue to 
finish the work to balance the budget, but we have to do it in the right 
way. And I want to talk a little about that. There's been a huge debate 
about that, you know, in the last 2 years since our friends in the other 
party won the Congress. And you can see from outside that they're a 
little sensitive about the fact that America didn't like their budget. 
[Laughter]
    But let's talk about it. We do have to balance the budget. Why? 
Well, one thing that our Republican friends said last year that I agree 
with is--they said last year--not this year, but last year--they said, 
``If we're not on a path to balancing the budget, interest rates will be 
2 percent higher.'' I agree with that. Now what does that mean? That 
means--you just figure it out for yourselves--that means 2 percent on 
your car payment, your credit card payment, your home payment. Even more 
important for the overall health of the economy, it means 2 percent on 
those loans that business people need to take out to start those new 
businesses or to expand the businesses. And keep in mind, we've had 4 
years in a row of record formation of small business. But that's where 
most of the new jobs are coming from.
    So we do need to go on and balance the budget. So the question is 
how. And that's what we're revisiting in this election. The budget I 
vetoed that the Congress passed, I vetoed not because I didn't want to 
balance the budget but because I thought it was wrong to basically end 
Medicaid's 30-year guarantee of health care to poor women and little 
babies; to end the 30-year guarantee of health coverage to middle class 
families who had members with disabilities where they were struggling to 
take care of those people in their own homes and go to work every day; 
wrong to end the guarantee of those who had very limited incomes and 
needed that help if they had to be in nursing homes.
    I thought it was wrong to create a two-tier Medicare system which 
said to people, if you're unfortunate enough to be older, poorer, and 
sicker than most other seniors, you could well get second-class care. I 
thought it was wrong not to keep up with inflation and population growth 
in Medicare and instead to have real cuts that were going to force 
people to make payments out of pocket, designed to fund a budget system 
that had an enormous tax cut that went to people like me, and I didn't 
need it. I thought that was wrong. I don't apologize for that. I still 
think it was wrong. I still think it was wrong.
    I thought it was wrong--I thought it was wrong for us to be cutting 
the safe and drug-free schools law, to be abolishing AmeriCorps, to be 
turning our back on our commitment to put 100,000 police on the street, 
to pass a budget that would have raised taxes on 9 million of our 
poorest working people, actually raise taxes on them. I thought it was 
wrong to allow a raid on the pension funds in America of nearly $15 
billion. We went through that pension collapse just a few years ago. Are 
we going to go back and make that mistake all over again? I thought that 
was wrong.
    So I plead guilty. I vetoed it, and I'd do so again because I 
thought it was wrong. But that does not mean--again, that does not mean 
that we should not balance the budget. It does not mean that we don't 
have to have some savings in Medicare to stabilize the program so it's 
going to be there not just next year but

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10 years from now, 15 years from now, 20 years from now for all who need 
it. But the changes should be made by someone who believes in Medicare 
and believes it's served our country well, not someone who doesn't care 
whether it exists or not. Now, that should be done.
    But we have to keep doing the work of balancing the budget. But you 
know, if we turn around and walk away from our obligations to invest in 
environmental protection and new technology and education, we'll hurt 
ourselves. Let me give you one other example. Arizona has become a 
center for precision manufacturing because of the dry air and because of 
the good climate for manufacturing and for working. You have a huge 
stake here in this State in seeing that we continue on the cutting edge 
of manufacturing technology, high technology.
    Whether you do anything that has anything to do with that or not, 
everyone who lives in Arizona has a big stake in seeing that America 
maintains its technological lead. That means that we have to do some 
public investment in research and elemental development. We must do 
that.
    In biomedical research, Government-funded research has led to 
unprecedented gains in many areas in the last 4 years. Public research 
has led to a lot of things that we now take for granted; the Internet--
the Internet is the product of a Federal research project. But as soon 
as it was obvious that it was going to work, the Government did exactly 
what the Government should do. We couldn't run it. We got out of it and 
let the private sector take over.
    Right now we are engaged in a joint venture with IBM to develop a 
supercomputer that will do more calculations in one second than you 
could go home and pick up a pocket--a hand-held calculator and do by 
yourself--listen to this--in 30,000 years.
    Now, we have to make those kinds of investments because the private 
sector can't afford to do it, it's too problematical. You have to break 
through these barriers, but this will make a huge difference in the 
future of our country.
    So I say to you, go out and tell your fellow Arizonans, whether 
they're Republicans, Democrats, independents, you name it, ``Yes, 
balance the budget, but do it in a way that brings us together instead 
of drives us apart. Do it in a way that honors our obligations. And do 
it in a way that builds that bridge to the 21st century.'' That's what 
we have to do.
    Folks, let me just make a couple of other points more briefly. We 
have to build a bridge to the 21st century that honors responsibility. 
And I just mentioned two points there. I just signed a welfare reform 
bill that was fairly controversial, and I didn't think it was perfect. 
But I did it because I think it is imperative to end the isolation of 
those people who are trapped on welfare generation after generation. I 
think it is imperative to bring people into the world of work, to bring 
those families into contact with other families, to make them believe 
that they can change their lives.
    And now the challenge is to take this new system and make it work. 
The new system says, if you're poor, we will still give you health care 
for your children, we will still give you nutrition, and now we will 
give you more in child care if you go to work. But now the income check 
will go to the State, and they must find a way to move able-bodied 
people from welfare to work within 2 years.
    My challenge is to every Governor in this country and every private 
business person: now we have to create the jobs, a million more jobs at 
least, in the next 4 years for people who have been trapped on welfare. 
We have reduced the welfare rolls by 1.8 million. If we can do a million 
more with the hardest-to-place cases, you will see that we can end 
welfare as we know it and bring people back into mainstream America and 
make poverty a temporary, not a permanent, condition for a whole 
generation of young people. We have to do that and I want you to help me 
do that.
    The second thing I want to talk about briefly is the crime problem. 
Crime is still a big problem in America. Yes, the crime rate in the 
country has dropped for 4 years. Yes, in most major cities it's going 
down. But it's still going up in some suburbs and small towns. It's 
still a problem. And it will be a problem until you can go home at night 
and turn on the evening news and the first story is not a crime story. 
Or if it is a crime story, you're absolutely shocked, instead of saying, 
what else is new. That's how you will know. We'll always have some 
crime. You'll know when we've got this thing whipped when you're shocked 
when you see a crime story leading the evening news at night instead of 
saying, what else is new.
    Now, instead of 4 years of a declining crime rate, we need 8 years 
of a declining crime rate. That's what we have to do. We have to finish

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putting those police on the street. We ought to take the cop-killer 
bullets off the street; they have no hunting or sporting purpose. We 
ought to extend the Brady bill. The Brady bill has worked well. It now 
applies to any felons. I think the Brady bill ought to apply to anyone 
who abuses a child or a spouse in the home, as well. We should try to 
reduce that.
    The last thing we have to do is build a bridge to the 21st century 
that strengthens our American community. And I want to mention some 
things real quickly. The problem I hear young people talk most about, 
and even people that aren't so young, who may still have children in the 
home, is that they are constantly finding examples where they feel torn 
between their obligations to spend time with their children and do 
things with their children, and their obligations at work. That's why I 
fought for the family and medical leave law. I didn't want to interrupt 
the free enterprise system, but it seemed to me that if you had people 
all torn up and upset at work because their kids were in trouble at home 
and they couldn't take care of them, that wasn't going to be very good 
for the economy.
    It also seems to me that if we make Americans make a choice between 
succeeding at work and succeeding at home, we are defeated before we 
start. Whichever choice they have to make--whichever choice they have to 
make, we lose, because most parents are working and most parents have to 
work. Whether it's a single-parent household or two parents in the 
household, it's not as if it's an option for most people.
    So if we want to come together as a community, we have to begin with 
the building block of our community, the family. That's why I thought 
family and medical leave was important. That's why I thought more Head 
Start and more immunizations for kids was important. That's why I 
thought it was important to try to protect children against the dangers 
of marketing and selling tobacco, which is illegal in every State in the 
country, but it happens everywhere. That's why we fought for the V-chip 
and the television rating system, so parents could have some control 
over the programming their young children see. If it's inappropriate, 
they'd have some control over that. Because I think we have to struggle 
to help people succeed at work and at home. And that will be a 
continuing challenge for us.
    I'd like to see a very limited amendment in the family leave law 
which says you can also have a little time off without losing your job 
to take your children or your parents to regular doctor's appointments, 
and to go to parent-teacher conferences at school. I think that would be 
a good thing. It would be very limited. I might say to you that there 
has been a study on the family leave law in which almost all the 
businesses in the country say that it hasn't cost them any money to 
comply with. And it obviously hasn't hurt the economy, since we're 
growing like crazy. So I think we ought to do that.
    The second thing I'd like to say is, we can't preserve our sense of 
community unless we're committed to growing the economy while preserving 
our natural environment. I am very proud of the things we've done to 
make drinking water and food safer, to set aside more national parks, to 
make the air cleaner, to expand community right-to-know. This is going 
to be a challenge that every one of us has to face. But let me just 
point out, there are still 10 million children in this country--10 
million children living within 4 miles of a toxic waste dump. And that's 
in spite of the fact that we closed down more in 3 years than were 
closed down in the 12 years before I came here to Washington.
    I propose to close 500 more, two-thirds of them, the two-thirds 
worst, in the next 4 years so I can go to a crowd like this, and I can 
look in the eyes of these children, and I can say, the children of this 
country should grow up next to parks, not poison. And I want you to help 
me do that. It's very, very important.
    The last point I want to make is this: This country has come a long 
way in its relationships with each other across racial and ethnic lines 
and religious lines since I was a boy. But we're having even more 
challenges. You know, when I had the honor of representing you at the 
Olympics it was thrilling to me to see teams there from 197 different 
nations. And when I was watching all the teams go in carrying their 
flags, it all of the sudden struck me that the biggest county in 
America, Los Angeles County, has people in one county in America from 
150 of those 197 places. That's a stunning insight.
    Then I looked at the American Olympic team, and it struck me that if 
they didn't have American jackets on, they wouldn't have a clue which 
country they were from. These are from the Middle East. And those are 
from Asia somewhere. And those folks are from Latin America.

[[Page 1551]]

And these are from the Caribbean. And those are from Africa. And well, 
those folks are from Scandinavia. I mean, you get the picture.
    And really, if you look at the Olympics, I think one reason we like 
it is we think that we ought to live that way all the time. Everybody 
agrees to the rules. Most people don't win medals, but even the ones 
that don't win are better off, because they try in an honorable way and 
they do their very best. Nobody disqualifies you because of what your 
religious faith is or what your race or your ethnic group is. You can't 
get ahead--you can't break in your opponent's room the night before and 
break his legs and get a medal for it. [Laughter] Nobody admires you if 
you stand up behind a microphone and tell everybody how terrible the 
person you're racing against is. We sort of like the way the Olympics 
work. We think the world ought to work that way.
    And so that's the last thing I leave you with. We have to stand--
when you see these church burnings or these synagogues being defaced or 
these Islamic centers being burned, you have to stand against that.
    Remember how much of your time as President--because all my time 
belongs to you--you think about how much time, your time, I've had to 
spend dealing with places where people insisted on killing each other 
because of their religious, their racial, their ethnic, or their tribal 
differences. You just think about it: Rwanda, Burundi, the Middle East, 
Haiti, you name it. Any of these countries. We're trying to hold 
elections in Bosnia where they lived in peace for decades, where there 
is biologically no difference between the Muslims, the Croats, and the 
Serbs. They belonged to different religious groups because of historical 
developments, and they started killing each other in the flash of an 
eye, and did it with abandon for 4 years.
    And so when we see the slightest evidence of that in this country we 
have to say, no, no, no, no, no. America is a place where, if you 
believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the Declaration 
of Independence, and you're willing to show up tomorrow, you're our kind 
of person and we're going to walk across that bridge to the 21st century 
with you, too.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:05 p.m. at the Sun Dial Recreation 
Center. In his remarks, he referred to Rose Mofford, former Arizona 
Governor; Dennis Jensen, chair, Sun City Democrats; Paul Johnson, former 
Phoenix mayor; Vice Mayor Michael J. Crawford of Tucson; former 
Representative Morris K. Udall; former Senator Barry M. Goldwater; and 
President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.