[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 16, 1996]
[Pages 1582-1586]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Cincinnati, Ohio
September 16, 1996

    The President. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mayor Qualls, I am 
delighted to be back in Cincinnati, and I thank you for making me feel 
welcome again. And I thank you for doing such a good job as mayor. And 
Representative Mallory, that's the most unusual welcome I ever had, but 
I liked it. We may have to have a training session to get that down and 
use it in some other places.
    I wonder if you're all in such a good humor today because the 
Bengals won yesterday. I think that may be it.
    Audience member. We love you, Bill!
    The President. Thank you.
    I want to say a special word of thanks to Senator John Glenn for 
flying down here with me and for being an absolutely wonderful United 
States Senator for Ohio and for all the United States. Thank you, John 
Glenn.
    I thank the leaders of the FOP. Thank you, President Gil Gallegos, 
for that wonderful statement. Thank you, Pete Ridder. Thank you, Jim 
Pasco, the executive director of the FOP; Steve Young, the president of 
the Ohio FOP; and Mike Tenore, the trustee of the Ohio FOP. I am very 
proud to have the endorsement of an organization representing 270,000 
rank and file members of law enforcement who put their lives on the line 
every single day for the rest of us. I thank you for it. As Gil said and 
as Pete said, for 4 years I've worked hard to stand with the police 
officers of America, and I am profoundly honored that they decided to 
stand with me for 4 more years. And I thank them very much.
    Folks, I want to talk to you just a moment about what I hope we'll 
do in those next 4 years to make our streets safer and to make our 
children's future brighter. Everybody knows now--I hope they do anyway--
we've been out talking about where we are now compared to where we were 
4 years ago. We pursued a strategy of opportunity for everyone, 
responsibility from everyone, and an American community that includes 
every person without regard to race or gender or income or background. 
Everybody that's willing to work hard and play by the rules should be 
part of our American community.
    This strategy is working. The economy is much stronger. The economy 
in Ohio--the unemployment rate has dropped from 7 percent to 4.8 
percent. It's the lowest in nearly 8 years in the country as a whole. 
Our auto industry is number one in the world again for the first time 
since the 1970's. A lot of people in Ohio are part of that ranking, that 
number one ranking. We have 10\1/2\ million more jobs. Wages are rising 
again for the first time in a decade. On October 1st 10 million American 
workers will get an increase when the minimum wage goes up. And I'm 
happy about that.
    Yesterday I was in Iowa on a farm in Indianola, and I met, as I 
often do when I'm out and around, another of the 12 million American 
working parents who've gotten to take a little time off when a baby was 
born or a parent was sick without losing their job because of the family 
and medical leave law. And that's made us a stronger nation.

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    Twenty-five million Americans--25 million Americans can be helped 
because the Congress finally passed the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill that says 
you can't lose your health insurance just because someone in your 
family's been sick or because you changed your job. Forty million 
Americans--because of the pension protection act of 1994, 40 million 
retired and still working Americans had their pensions protected, and I 
am very proud of that. I remember well when they weren't protected 10 
years ago and how many people lost their retirement.
    So it is clear that we are moving this country on the right track. 
The things--as the Vice President used to say--the things that ought to 
be up are now up, the things that ought to be down are now down; 1.8 
million fewer people on welfare than 4 years ago, child support 
collections up 40 percent. What should be up is up; what should be down 
is down. This is good.
    These things did not happen by accident. These things happened 
because we had a different philosophy of how the White House and 
Washington should work. I had never worked in Washington, except as a 
college student, until I became President. And I didn't like what I saw. 
There were too many people spending their time asking, ``Who can I blame 
for this problem?'' and too few people spending their time asking, 
``What are we going to do about this problem?'' So we asked that 
question: What are we going to do? And then we proceeded to do it.
    And I can tell you that I hope that's what this election will be 
about. I hope we will have 50 days of people putting forth their best 
ideas about what are we going to do--ideas, not insults. How are we 
going to build the country? How are we going to build that bridge to the 
21st century that we can all walk across?
    Mostly I want to talk to you about law enforcement today, but I want 
you to think just briefly about how we're going to keep this economy 
growing until everybody who is willing to work can participate in it. 
And I'll just mention three things.
    Number one, we have to continue the work of balancing the budget, 
but we have to do it in a way that protects Medicare, Medicaid, 
education, the environment, medical research, and other scientific 
research and technology. That is important. John Glenn has devoted an 
entire public career to it, but it's a huge thing.
    We have some people here in their wheelchairs today. For the first 
time because of medical research in the last few weeks, laboratory 
animals that had their spines severed have had nerve transplants that 
gave them movement in their lower limbs for the first time ever. This is 
important. We have to keep investing in this.
    Our space program is helping us to unlock mysteries of the 
environment, mysteries of health care. We're sending two unmanned space 
missions to Mars at the end of this year. We will learn some things 
about Mars but more importantly we'll learn a lot more about Earth, 
because we have continued the space program that John Glenn pioneered. 
We dare not turn our back on research and technology in the future.
    And for all you young people in the audience who really understand 
computers, I'll just give you one more. I'll just give you one more. We 
just joined in a research project with IBM to build, within the next 
couple of years, a supercomputer that will do more calculations in one 
second than you can go home and do on your hand-held calculator in 
30,000 years.
    So we have to balance the budget, but we have to keep investing in 
things that take care of people who need it and that invest in our 
future, that grow our economy, and spread opportunity. We ought to have 
a tax cut, but it ought to be a tax cut that's focused on the needs of 
childrearing and education and health care and buying or selling a home. 
And we ought to pay for it so we can still balance the budget.
    We ought to continue to work until we have the finest educational 
system in the world for everybody. Every 8-year-old should be able to 
read; every 12-year-old should be able to log in on the Internet; and 
every 18-year-old in America ought to be able to go to college. We ought 
to guarantee that 2 years of college are as universal as a high school 
diploma.
    I want to say that again. I want you to understand exactly what I 
propose. I propose to make 2 years of college, a community college 
degree, in 4 years only just as universal as a high school diploma is 
today by giving a tax credit, a dollar-for-dollar reduction on taxes of 
up to $1,500, which will cover the average tuition costs at any 
community college in the country. And then beyond that, saying that if 
you go to college, no matter what your age or what kind of program 
you're in, a 4-year program, a graduate

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program, you name it, you ought to be able to deduct the cost of the 
tuition from your taxes up to $10,000--everybody. That will make a big 
difference to America.
    The third thing we have to do to build this economy is to make sure 
we have enough jobs in the places where there haven't been any jobs yet. 
We now have a welfare reform bill that says to poor people we will take 
care of your children's medical care, nutritional needs, and when you go 
to work we'll give you child care; but now the income check you used to 
get if you're able-bodied, after 2 years you've got to be working for 
that check. That's a good thing if there's a job there. Now we have to 
put the jobs there. That's a big part of building our bridge to the 21st 
century.
    So we have to build a bridge to the 21st century that leaves us a 
stronger community, and I will just, again, mention three things 
briefly. Number one, the family and medical leave law has helped a lot 
of people, but it can only be used in emergencies or for childbirth. I 
favor a narrow expansion of it which says people ought to also not lose 
their jobs if they need a little time off from work to go to a regular 
parent-teacher conference or take their children or their parents to the 
doctor. I think that's important as well.
    John Glenn--we talked a lot about the environment. The air is 
cleaner; our food is safer; we cleaned up more toxic waste sites in 3 
years than were cleaned up in the previous 12. Let me just give you one 
chilling statistic. In spite of all that, 10 million American kids still 
live within 4 miles of a toxic waste dump--10 million. In 4 more years, 
we're going to double the pace at which we're doing the cleanup, clean 
up the 500 worst ones so we can say these children, wherever they live, 
they're growing up next to parks, not poison. That ought to be a part of 
the bridge we build to the 21st century.
    We want to be part of a world that's growing ever more peaceful and 
prosperous, and that means that we have to work hard to face the new 
problems of the 21st century. We have to finish the old problems that 
we've dealt with.
    We have now got all the countries in the world but three agreed to a 
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, no more testing of nuclear 
weapons. But we now have to fight terrorism. We have to fight drug 
running. We have to fight organized crime. We have to fight the 
proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. Senator Glenn and I 
tried to pass the Chemical Weapons Convention to protect our soldiers 
and our people from the kind of attack the Japanese people had in the 
Tokyo subway from a terrorist group. We didn't get it for political 
reasons. But we're going to get it first thing next year to make this a 
safer country in a newer world.
    Now, all that will not make any difference unless we can make our 
streets safer. The children of this country ought to be safe at home, in 
school, on their streets, in their play yards. I get asked all the time, 
``Well, how do you define success in the war against crime? There will 
always be some crime.'' Yes, there will. These folks in uniform, they'll 
always be in some risk. Yes, they will. The crime rate has come down for 
4 years in a row for the first time in a long time. I'm proud of that. 
But it's still too high, and we all know it.
    You know how you'll know that we've whipped this problem? When you 
go home from work in the evening and you flip on the evening news, if 
the first story is a violent crime story, instead of saying ``what else 
is new,'' you are absolutely shocked and appalled. When that happens, 
you will know that we're on the right side of the crime problem.
    But we're moving in the right direction. The 100,000 new police 
officers supporting people in a community working together, they're 
making a difference. Since 1994, we've already funded about half of 
those. We have to finish the job. It's a major point of contention in 
this election. And it's very important.
    We have put tougher penalties on the books for repeat offenders, 
especially, and violent offenders so the police don't do their work and 
see it undone by the laws that are on the books. We don't believe that 
police should be easily outgunned by gangs on the street. That's why we 
took the assault weapons off the street and passed the Brady bill and 
why we're against the cop-killer bullets.
    We passed the ``three strikes and you're out'' law. For people who 
commit three serious crimes, no more parole. It's working. It's working. 
We're indicting people, convicting people under it. And it's working. We 
expanded the death penalty to include drug kingpins and police killers 
because I thought it was important and justified in those circumstances. 
The 19 assault weapons we took off the streets had only one purpose, to 
kill other people.

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    When we passed the assault weapons ban and we passed the Brady bill 
a lot of good people who voted for those bills were defeated in 1994 in 
their race for Congress because the interest group that was against them 
went out and told good, God-fearing people from Ohio and Arkansas and 
other places that the President had gone off the deep end, and he and 
the Congress had voted to take their guns away, put their guns in 
danger. Well, they got a lot of votes with that line in 1994. But they 
got a big problem in 1996.
    Audience member. Yes, they do.
    The President. They got a big problem because, you see, what they 
didn't tell their people was that we also protected 650 different 
hunting and sporting weapons from being regulated or confiscated by 
Government authorities. So now two hunting seasons have come and gone, 
and not a single hunter in Ohio or Arkansas has lost their weapon. They 
did not tell the truth. But a lot of criminals don't have assault 
weapons, and 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers could not get a 
handgun because of the Brady bill. We did the right thing. They were 
right. They're safer. And we need to stay after it.
    And that's why we should ban these cop-killer bullets. The same 
crowd is against banning cop-killer bullets. I don't know why. You know, 
like most people from my home State, I spent a little time when I was a 
boy living on a farm. I lived in a town where you could be in the woods 
within 5 minutes. I've been in the woods in every season you can 
imagine. And I have yet to see a deer, a duck, a quail, a wild turkey 
wearing a bulletproof vest. I do not see it. [Laughter] We ought to ban 
the cop-killer bullets and protect these people.
    We passed the Violence Against Women Act to try to help deal 
especially with problems of domestic violence. All over the country 
police departments like the one here in Cincinnati are training people 
to be sensitive to that. I met a young officer in the Nashville police 
department who grew up in a family with five children where they had a 
lot of problems. And he's devoting his entire life to helping police 
departments all over America deal with this problem as well as his own. 
And after one year of focusing on this problem, they cut the death rate 
in Nashville in half--in one year.
    We now have a hotline, 1-800-799-SAFE--I've got it on my--and we now 
have had over 45,000 calls to that hotline this year from people who are 
asking for information to try to minimize that kind of violence. We can 
turn that around, too, with citizens helping us on the hotline and 
helping their local police departments. We can change the circumstances 
under which too many Americans have lived for too long. You do not have 
to put up with unacceptable rates of crime and violence. That is the 
message of this day.
    But I want to go back to one other thing Gil Gallegos said. This 
administration is not responsible for any of these ideas. We got all 
these ideas from law enforcement people themselves. All we did was 
listen and act. All we did was take what was working and try to go 
national with it. All we did was to try to empower the people who live 
in communities all over America who are sick about crime and violence to 
do something about it. That is all we have done. That was our job. We 
did it. Now you have to help, too.
    But we cannot expect the police officers to do all of this, and we 
cannot expect to jail our way out of this problem. You heard Gil say 
that. We've also supported zero tolerance for guns and drugs in schools. 
We've supported things like school uniforms and tough truancy laws and 
curfews. We've supported an effort to mobilize another one million 
Americans to work in citizens groups, to work with local police 
departments. We got the cellular telephone industry to donate thousands 
and thousands of cellular phones to help these community neighborhood 
watch groups support the police; they cannot do it alone.
    And most of all, we have to realize that we have to give our 
children some things to say yes to as well as some things to say no to. 
They're entitled to schools that are open after hours. They're entitled 
to recreation opportunities. They need those summer jobs. They need 
opportunities like AmeriCorps. They need those good, positive things. 
That's why we fought for the drug education, the gang prevention 
programs, all of these other things.
    You know, I don't know how many little kids have told me what an 
impression their D.A.R.E. officer made on them at the school. We know 
now that one of the reasons we've got a real problem with youth drug 
abuse is that, going way back to 1990, young people began to get the 
idea again that this was not dangerous. Well, that's wrong. It's not 
just illegal, it is dangerous. They can kill children. They can destroy 
their

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ability to concentrate. For young women, they can undermine their 
ability to bear healthy children. And we need everyone in the community 
supporting law enforcement officers, getting that message out to our 
children, to every child, no matter where he or she lives. It is 
important.
    General Barry McCaffrey, a four-star general, was appointed to lead 
our war on drugs after he led our troops south of the border and did so 
much to keep drugs from coming into America. His strategy is targeted at 
doing those things which will keep drugs away from our children. We've 
proposed the largest antidrug effort in history, and I hope Congress 
will give us the extra $700 million we asked for, so that we can do 
everything possible to really, effectively turn these trends around and 
make sure that we have drug use going down, not just among adults, which 
it is--cocaine use has dropped by a third among adults in the last 4 
years--we have got to get drug use going down among our children. We 
can't have these kids out there believing they are not in danger when 
they are, and you have to help.
    Let me say that in the next 4 years one thing we have to focus more 
on is the violence caused by gangs, which is also often related to drug 
dealing. Over and over and over again, we hear stories of totally 
innocent children who just happened to be standing on the wrong street 
corner, happened to be walking in the wrong neighborhood, happened to be 
going home from school at a bad time, totally innocent children killed 
because of gang wars. We see kids going into gangs just to protect 
themselves because they're afraid if they don't they won't be safe on 
the street and in their neighborhood. And we have got to break this.
    We have on the books an antiracketeering statute that had a lot to 
do with breaking the Mafia. It's called the RICO law. This morning I met 
with Attorney General Reno at the White House, and she reported that we 
have more than doubled the number of gang-related prosecutions to nearly 
40 percent of all the prosecutions brought under this RICO law this 
year. These are making a big difference, but they're complicated cases. 
They take a long time. We're going to have to extend the statute of 
limitation, to make maximum use of it, from 5 to 10 years. But you know, 
we give the Government 10 years to make a bank fraud case, it seems to 
me they ought to have at least that long if an innocent child is gunned 
down on the street by a gang.
    Let me just say one other thing. Last week in Colorado I announced a 
program I'd like to reiterate. I believe it is very important that we 
get more States to test prisoners and parolees for drug use and to 
provide more drug treatment in prisons and to revoke parole if people 
violate it by using drugs. We have a law on the books which says we will 
help States build prisons if they promise not to let violent criminals 
out too soon. I propose to amend it to say, you also have to give drug 
testing to parolees. That will keep them straight and keep them from 
returning. Sixty percent of all the heroin and cocaine used in this 
country--60 percent of all of it--is used by people who are involved 
with a criminal justice process right now. We need to help them. But 
more important, we need to protect the rest of our kids and our 
communities by saying, ``Parole is a privilege, and you can't have it if 
you go back to drugs.'' And I hope you will support us in doing that.
    So that's my program for the future: Do more to break the gangs; ban 
those cop-killer bullets; drug testing for parolees; improve the 
opportunities for community-based strategies that lower crime and give 
our kids something to say yes to. There are a lot of things to do.
    The final point I want to leave with you is this: These people up 
here are doing everything they can. And unlike a lot of folks, we have 
shown--or rather, they have shown, we know how to bring the crime rate 
down. But they can't do it all by themselves. They need us to support 
them. I am honored by their support today. And all I can say is, go back 
to what Senator Glenn said: If you will give us 50 more days, we'll give 
you 4 more years of making our streets, our homes, our schools safer.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:45 p.m. at the Cincinnati Music Hall. In 
his remarks, he referred to Mayor Roxanne Qualls of Cincinnati; State 
Representative Mark L. Mallory; and Pete Ridder, president, Fraternal 
Order of Police Queens City Lodge #69.