[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 17, 1996]
[Pages 1592-1595]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1592]]


Remarks in Westland, Michigan
September 17, 1996

    The President. Thank you. Well, this is a pretty active crowd, even 
in the back there. Can you hear me? [Applause] Good. Thank you, Brian 
Duka. Now, I think he did a pretty good job. How many of you could stand 
up here in front of 10,000 or 12,000 people and do that? Give him a 
hand. Give him a hand. [Applause] That's great. I want to say thank you 
to the John Glenn choral group and the marching band. Thank you for 
playing and for singing for us.
    Thank you, Congresswoman Lynn Rivers, for the power of your example, 
for fighting for education, including vocational education, for having a 
terrific, positive impact in Congress in such a short time, and for 
helping me to fight against the effort to cut education, the 
environment, Medicare and Medicaid, fighting against the Government 
shutdown, fighting against things that would have divided and weakened 
this country. You stood strong for the people of Michigan and the people 
of the United States. Thank you very much.
    Thank you, Bill Ford, for being here, for all of the work you did in 
the 2 years we shared together to expand Head Start, improve college 
loans, open the doors of opportunity to millions of more young people in 
so many different ways. Thank you, Dr. Moore, Principal Thomas, William 
Ford Career Center Principal Bill Richardson. Thank you, my good friend 
Ed McNamara, the Wayne County executive.
    Thank you, Mayor Thomas. We're glad to be in Westland. I understand 
I am the first President to come to Westland. I'll tell you something, 
folks, they get a good look at you on the evening news tonight, I won't 
be the last President to come to Westland, I can promise you that.
    I'm glad to be joined today by Barbara Levin, the wife of Senator 
Carl Levin, a man I hope you will send back to the Senate to work with 
us. And Representative Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and Eileen DeHart, 
thank you for being here. I want to thank the people who showed me 
around at the William Ford Career Center, Dr. Glen Baracy, Bill 
Richardson--the principal over there. And Todd Hoag and Craig Lindberg, 
an instructor and a student, who were terrific; I thank them.
    I understand that the John Glenn Rockets are 2 and 0. 
Congratulations! I think it is a great thing--let me say, as a man who 
is a friend of Senator John Glenn, I think it's a great thing for me to 
be at this school named after one of the great American heroes of the 
last 50 years. And I want you to know that, by pure coincidence, I was 
in Cincinnati, Ohio, with John Glenn yesterday and believe it or not, 
aboard Air Force One he actually wrote me this letter, which I'm going 
to give to the high school principal for the school's records when I 
finish. But I want you to know what it said. I want to read this letter 
to you, because it starts out in the way I would like to start this 
talk, anyway.
    Here's what John Glenn said. ``I am particularly sorry I could not 
come to Westland today, but I'm sure you will agree the program is in 
good hands with the President. I have been fortunate to receive some 
honors in my life, but none have ever made me more proud than have a 
school bear my name. We've all been lucky to be born in a time in our 
Nation's history when many notable things have happened and will 
continue to happen. I've always been more than grateful that I've been 
able to participate in some of those events on behalf of this great 
country of ours. To your generation, the opportunities are boundless and 
education is your key. What you are learning today will enable you to 
out-distance anything we have ever dreamed of. To every student, good 
luck; I know you will make us proud. Sincerely, John Glenn.''
    A generation ago, Senator Glenn reached for the stars and became the 
first American astronaut to orbit the Earth. Since then, he has shown us 
that the sky is not the limit.
    Audience members. Dole-Kemp! Dole-Kemp!
    The President. I don't blame them for doing this. They don't want 
you to hear the truth. It would bother them.
    Audience members. Boo-o-o!
    The President. Wait, don't boo them. Don't boo them. We're glad to 
have them here, but we recognize free speech. You had your turn; now 
it's mine. And what I want you to think

[[Page 1593]]

about today is what was in that letter John Glenn wrote to you. I want 
every American, without regard to age, to have the opportunity to live 
up to his or her potential. To reach that potential, we have to build a 
bridge to the 21st century we can all walk across. And the foundation 
for that bridge has got to be the world's finest education system 
available to all Americans of all ages.
    That is more true today than ever before. As I said when I was 
working on a book I wrote recently, I was trying to think of a title for 
it, and I remembered a poem that was read to me when I was in Ireland 
about magic points when hope and history come together. This is such a 
time.
    The 21st century will give more people more chances to live out 
their dreams than any period in human history. Let me just give you one 
little example. The United States has just contracted with IBM to build 
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.
    The young people in this audience today will not only be doing jobs 
that have not been invented yet, many of you will do work that has not 
been imagined yet. If we want that kind of world to work for all of us, 
we have got to build the right kind of bridge, and the foundation, I say 
again, is education and education for everyone--everyone.
    To me, this is part of a simple but profound strategy: opportunity 
for all Americans; responsibility from all Americans; and a community in 
which every American, without regard to race or gender or income or 
where you start out in life, who works hard and shows up every day has a 
fair chance to live out their dreams. That is the strategy we have 
followed.
    Folks, it's working pretty well. Compared to 4 years ago, we have 
the lowest unemployment rate in 7\1/2\ years and 10\1/2\ million new 
jobs, 4\1/2\ million new homeowners. The deficit has gone down for 4 
years in a row for the first time since before the Civil War. The 
unemployment rate in Michigan has been less than 5 percent every month 
this year for the first time in a generation. And for the first time 
since the 1970's, it is the United States that is producing more cars 
and selling more cars than any other country in the world. Wages are 
going up for the first time in a decade. There are 1.8 million fewer 
people on welfare. Child support collections have gone up 40 percent, 
and on October 1st, 10 million hard-working Americans will get an 
increase in the minimum wage.
    We are on the right track for the 21st century. But if we want to 
get there, we've got to stop asking who is to blame and start asking, 
what are we going to do together to make this the country it ought to be 
for our children and our grandchildren?
    This bridge I want to build has a lot of components. We have to have 
stronger families. That's why I fought for the family and medical leave 
law, so you could take a little time off from work for a baby's birth or 
a parent's illness without losing your job, why I fought to give parents 
the V-chip to control inappropriate television for their younger 
children, why I fought against advertising of tobacco to young people. 
It's illegal in every State in the country, but it happens everywhere.
    It means stronger communities. That's why I fought for the poorest 
communities in this country to have empowerment zones. Detroit got one 
and cut the unemployment by more than half in only 3 years. We can turn 
the cities around with work, work, work, and education.
    I now know some things that I didn't know 4 years ago about the 
American people, and I can tell you I am more optimistic today than I 
was the day I took the oath of office. I am more idealistic today than I 
was the day I took the oath of office because I know today from seeing 
what's happened in the last 4 years there is nothing that you cannot do 
if you're given the tools to do the job, and that's exactly what I 
intend to see done.
    I believed 4 years ago that if we put 100,000 police on the street 
and gave our police the ability to work with people in community 
settings, if we got tougher with serious criminals and gave our young 
people something to say yes to, we could bring the crime rate down. 
Well, for 4 years in a row, the crime rate has dropped in America. And 
now, just today, the Justice Department pointed out that last year the 
crime rate dropped 9 percent, the largest drop in a decade. There are 
one million fewer victims of crime than there were a year ago. That is a 
good sign for America.
    Now, I don't want to hesitate for a minute on this. I'm not 
declaring victory against crime, I'm just saying we're moving in the 
right direction. And what we need to do is not to abandon the present 
course but to bear down and do

[[Page 1594]]

more of it, more police on the street, more criminals and guns and drugs 
off the street. We can do that if you will stay the course.
    We've got to keep this economy growing and strong. That means we 
have to balance the budget all right, because that keeps interest rates 
down. That means lower car payments. That means lower home mortgage 
payments. That means lower credit card payments. That means businesses 
can borrow money at lower rates to hire more people and raise wages and 
improve productivity. That's important. But we have to do it in the 
right way. We don't have to wreck Medicare or Medicaid or turn our backs 
on education or the environment.
    We need to invest more money in research and technology to create 
those high-wage jobs for the future, not less. And we need an aggressive 
trade policy that opens new markets. One of the proudest moments I've 
had as President of the United States was going to an automobile 
showroom in Tokyo and sitting in a car made in the United States of 
America for sale.
    But let me say again, my friends, we cannot build that bridge with 
any of those components unless the foundation is world-class education. 
We've already done a lot to lower the costs of college loans, create the 
AmeriCorps program, which has allowed 50,000 young people to go to 
college and serve in their communities, raising standards, supporting 
improved Head Start programs and other things, but there is more we have 
to do.
    Forty percent of the children in this country can still not read on 
their own when they are in the third grade. I want to mobilize an army 
of mentors and reading teachers to work with our schools and our 
teachers and our parents to make sure that by the year 2000 every 8-
year-old can look at a book and say, ``I can read it all by myself.''
    I want to make sure that every classroom in this country in every 
school not only has computers and teachers trained to help the students 
use them but is actually hooked up to the information superhighway, to 
the Internet, to the World Wide Web. For those of you like me who don't 
know a lot about computers, that may not mean much, so let me put it in 
plain language. Let me tell you what that means. If we hook up every 
classroom in America to the information superhighway, what it means is 
this: that in the poorest inner-city classrooms, in the most remote 
rural classrooms and all the classrooms in between, for the first time 
in the history of our country, all of our schoolchildren will have 
access to the same learning at the same level of quality in the same way 
in the same time as the students in the richest schools in America. That 
is achievable, and we must do it.
    I want to make sure that we make at least 2 years of education after 
high school, in a vocational center, a community college, in a college--
at least 2 years after high school--just as universal in 4 years as a 
high school diploma is today. And we can do that by giving the American 
people a $1,500 tax credit for the typical cost of community college 
education, a dollar-for-dollar reduction for the cost of the tuition, 
and we ought to do it.
    I believe that we should give families a deduction for the cost of 
college tuition up to $10,000 for the cost of any education after high 
school for people of any age--yes, the children but their parents, too, 
if they need it. We ought to do that.
    How has the auto industry come back--with greater productivity, 
smarter technology, and people who are trained to do it. Technology, 
education, training, hard work, and smart work; it all begins with 
education.
    And let me say one of the most important parts of education is 
making sure that we tear down the artificial wall in every school system 
in America between what is academic and what is vocational. I just was 
in that Bill Ford Center and I saw those young students, those young men 
and women working on those machines. That's vocational work. I wasn't 
smart enough to do it. I didn't know how to program those machines. It 
was academic work as well as vocational work. It was mindwork. It was 
smart work. And that is the work of the 21st century. And we have to 
support that work in manufacturing, in services, in agriculture, in all 
forms of endeavor.
    When I became President, one of the things that really bothered me 
was that our country was the only advanced economy in the world that 
didn't have an organized system to make sure that every student--like 
Lynn Rivers 21 years ago or Brian today--that every student who didn't 
go on to a college at least had a chance to continue their education by 
blending school and work. We call it now school-to-work opportunities. 
And when I was a Governor, I worked hard to improve those opportunities, 
and

[[Page 1595]]

as President, we have worked hard to give 26 States, including Michigan, 
the opportunity to put employers and educators together to build a 
seamless web of people moving from school to work in the high-wage, 
high-skilled jobs that can earn them good incomes.
    This is school-to-work week in America. And today, there are 500,000 
students and 105,000 employers and 1,800 schools, including both John 
Glenn and William Ford schools, that have embraced the school-to-work 
opportunities our Nation now offers. We have to keep going until every 
school system in America and every student in America has the 
opportunities I saw your people having today. They deserve it, and it 
will build our economy.
    Brian Duka has a bright future today because of the education he 
received here and because of the work he's doing now. And we have to 
blend education and work for a lifetime. One of the most important 
proposals I had that I regret this Congress didn't pass that I hope the 
next one will is to take all these little training programs the 
Government has and take all the money and put it in a big block, and 
when someone is unemployed or underemployed, if they're qualified for 
Federal training help, send them a check for $2,500 and say, ``You know 
where the nearest good training program is. Take your money there, get 
the training, find yourself a job so that if you lose your job, you can 
get a better one instead of a worse one.''
    If we do that for everybody--give everybody a ``GI bill,'' a skills 
grant that will give them a chance to move from job to job by going up, 
not going down--we will strengthen America's families and strengthen 
America's economy. Education is for everyone of every age who needs it, 
and we have to give them that.
    My friends, in 7 weeks from today, you'll get to make a decision 
about whether to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past, 
about whether you believe we're all in this together or to use my wife's 
term, it takes a village, or whether you think we're on our own. This 
country always, always, always wins when we put down the things that 
divide us, when we stop fighting, when we stop being small and we think 
big and we work together.
    We have got to build a bridge to the 21st century that every single 
American can walk across. There is no nation as well-positioned for that 
century as we are. And all of our diversity--I look out in this crowd 
today, there are people here today from--I can see at least seven 
different ethnic groups just looking out here and I'll bet many more. 
That is a strength for the United States. There is no country as well-
positioned as we are for this global economy if we will lay the 
foundation, and it starts with building that bridge on the finest 
educational system in the world.
    Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:36 p.m. on the athletic field at John 
Glenn High School. In his remarks, he referred to Brian Duka, former 
student, and Bill Richardson, principal, William D. Ford Career 
Technical Center; former Representative William D. Ford; Dwayne H. 
Moore, superintendent, and Gregory J. Baracy, assistant superintendent 
for general administration, Wayne-Westland Community Schools; Neil 
Thomas, principal, John Glenn High School; Edward H. McNamara, Wayne 
County executive; Mayor Robert J. Thomas of Westland; and State 
Representatives Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick and Eileen DeHart.