[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 20, 1996]
[Pages 1628-1632]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks on Concluding a Bus Tour in Portland, Oregon
September 20, 1996

    Thank you. Good morning, Portland! Mayor Katz, Congresswoman Furse, 
Tom Bruggere, Darlene Hooley, Mike Dugan. Thank you all for being here 
with us. Madame Mayor and Congresswoman Furse, thank you for making us 
feel so welcome in Portland again. Maybe I come back here so often 
because I like it.
    I must say, I have to hand it to the Vice President. I didn't think 
anyone could keep a secret in Washington. Al Gore cut a book deal with a 
book full of secrets. It never leaked. Now he's telling it all, and he 
wrote the book under his own name. Al Gore is doing for the Federal 
Government what he did for the macarena. He is removing all the 
unnecessary steps. [Laughter] Now, he's got some funny names here. He 
calls for performance-based organizations--that's sort of a boring 
title. I think we ought to scrap that title and substitute something 
more exciting, like ``Trailblazers.'' Would you like that? [Applause]
    I want to thank Tipper Gore and the First Lady, too, for some things 
they've already talked about. You know, we've worked very hard to 
improve the health care of the American people. That's a big part of 
moving into the 21st century, to immunize more children, to increase 
medical research, to speed the movement of drugs to market. In only 4 
years we've more than doubled the life expectancy of people with HIV and 
AIDS in just 4 years, as an example. Finally, we got the Congress to 
pass the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill that says to 25 million Americans, you 
can't lose your health insurance or have it taken away anymore just 
because someone in your family gets sick or because you change jobs.
    And yesterday we had three big victories. Congress did, as Hillary 
said, answer our call to tell the insurance companies that newborns and 
their mothers deserve at least 48 hours in the hospital. They can't be 
kicked out 8 hours after delivery anymore. Congress responded to the 
work that Tipper Gore has been doing for years and years and years in a 
bipartisan fashion that also included Senator Domenici from New Mexico 
in saying that it is time to ensure that people who need treatment for 
mental illness

[[Page 1629]]

get the treatment they need also and without discrimination. And 
finally, I want to say a special word of thanks to the work that the 
Congress did in our continuing efforts to be fair to veterans and their 
families who have served us in foreign theaters and may have been 
exposed to dangerous chemicals, when they provided health benefits to 
veterans whose children are born with spina bifida. Those were three 
great things to do for America yesterday, and I thank the Congress for 
doing it.
    I'm happy to be back in Portland. I'll never forget what I saw here 
last spring when I visited during the floods: the true spirit of 
America. The pioneering spirit is alive and well in Oregon. But I was 
glad to hear the mayor remind me that you have 10 bridges here, and in 
Oregon you want to build a bridge to the 21st century.
    In 1992 the people of Oregon supported the Vice President and me 
when we came here and asked you to help us to put people first and to 
change the direction of our country, to put America on the right track 
and to change the way Government works, to make sure that when we enter 
the 21st century, as I look out at this sea of people, that every one of 
you will enter a century with the American dream alive and well for 
every person who is willing to work for it, that we will enter a century 
in which America is coming together and embracing its diversity, not 
being torn apart by it as so many other nations are all around the 
world, and that we would not run away from our responsibilities to be 
the strongest force for peace and freedom and security in the world.
    The best days of this country are still ahead of us if we build the 
right bridge to the 21st century. Now, in this election season you will 
hear a lot of rhetoric back and forth and maybe a lot of 
characterizations of people's motives. I've tried to stay away from 
that. I don't want to demean anybody. I want this to be an election 
season of ideas, not insults. I want to ask, what are we going to do, 
not who can we blame. How are we going to build this country and move it 
together.
    But I must say, there are some facts that you can't get around. It 
is a fact that we have 10\1/2\ million more jobs; the lowest 
unemployment rate in 7\1/2\ years; almost 4\1/2\ million new homeowners; 
the deficit going down for all 4 years of an administration for the 
first time since before the Civil War, in the 1840's; a record number of 
exports; record small businesses. On October 1st 10 million hard-working 
Americans will get an increase in their minimum wage. Every small 
business in the country has been made eligible for a tax cut when they 
buy health insurance or if they invest more money in their business to 
hire more people and grow and help America grow. The welfare rolls are 
down by 1.8 million. Child support collections are up by 40 percent--$3 
billion. The drinking water is safer. The air is purer. Our food 
standards are much higher. As the Vice President said, just in the last 
week we have reached an agreement to restore the salmon on the Columbia 
River and an agreement to protect the old-growth forest in Oregon and 
Washington. Just a couple of days ago I was honored to proclaim a 1.7-
million-acre national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument 
in southern Utah. We are moving this country in the right direction.
    And now we have to continue to build that bridge to the future, a 
bridge where there is opportunity for all, starting with the best 
education for every single American. We ought to be lifting our teachers 
and our students up, not running our teachers down, as some are doing in 
this election season.
    I ask you to join me in helping every classroom to be connected to 
the information superhighway by the year 2000. If every classroom is 
tied into the Internet and the World Wide Web, we can make sure for the 
first time in history that every child in America, in the poorest rural 
district, in the most devastated economic areas of the country, in 
isolated inner-city districts, in middle class and wealthy districts, 
that all together, at the same time have access to the same information 
in the same way. It's never happened before. Will you help us make it 
happen in the future? [Applause]
    I ask you to help me in opening the doors of college education to 
all Americans who want to go. In the past 4 years, we passed the 
AmeriCorps program, and 50,000 young Americans have built communities 
like Portland and earned their way through college. We've revolutionized 
the student loan program to lower the cost and improve the repayment 
terms so that anybody could borrow the money and know they wouldn't go 
broke trying to pay it back. But now we have to do more. I propose to 
make a college education universal by doing three things.

[[Page 1630]]

    Number one, saying you can save in an IRA for years and years and 
then withdraw from that IRA tax-free if you're using it to pay for a 
college education or a health emergency or buying a first home.
    Number two, saying we're going to make a community college 
education, at least 2 years of education after high school, just as 
common and universal in 4 years as a high school diploma is today. We 
need that to start the new century. And here's how we're going to do it. 
We're going to say to Americans, if you want to go to community college 
for 2 years, all you have to do is work hard, make your grades. You can 
take off your taxes, dollar for dollar, the tuition cost at the typical 
community college in the United States.
    And number three, we want to say to all students of whatever age in 
whatever college in America, undergraduate and graduate, you ought to be 
able to deduct from your taxes the cost of college tuition up to $10,000 
a year.
    I want to build a bridge to the 21st century that keeps this economy 
going strong. That means we have to pay for those tax cuts and the tax 
cuts for childrearing and for buying and selling your home in the 
context of a balanced budget that continues to invest in education, in 
the environment, in research, in technology, and protects our 
obligations through Medicare and Medicaid. We can do that if you will 
help us build that bridge to the 21st century
    The crime rate has come down for 4 years in a row, the juvenile 
crime rate is starting to drop, the juvenile murder rate has come way 
down. We are moving in the right direction, but I want to keep going. I 
want to rebuff those in the Congress who are trying to stop us from 
putting 100,000 police on the street. We're halfway home; I want to 
finish the job.
    I want to see us--we passed the Brady bill. Now we ought to extend 
the Brady bill. Sixty thousand felons, fugitives, and stalkers have not 
gotten handguns because of the Brady bill. I think we ought to extend it 
to people who beat up their spouses and their children. They shouldn't 
have handguns either.
    I want to build a bridge to the 21st century where we have a 
stronger American community. I am very proud that the first bill I 
signed after becoming President was the family and medical leave law. 
Over the strong opposition of the leaders of the other party, we passed 
it. They said it would hurt the economy. They said it would weaken 
business. They said it would burden small business.
    Well, 4 years later, we have 10\1/2\ million new jobs, record 
numbers of new small businesses, record numbers of new businesses owned 
by women and minorities, and 12 million families have taken advantage of 
the family and medical leave law to have a child born, to tend to a sick 
parent, a sick child, a sick spouse. I'm telling you, we're stronger 
because we did that. And I want to see us expand that. I believe we 
ought to expand the family and medical leave law to say that parents 
should be able to go see their children's teachers on a regular basis 
and be able to take their kids and their folks to the doctor without 
losing their jobs. It won't hurt the economy; we'll have a stronger 
economy when people can care for their family members.
    And finally, we have a lot of work to do in the environment to build 
the strong American community. Let me just mention one thing. We have 10 
million children still living within 4 miles of a toxic waste site, even 
though we've cleaned up more of them in 3 years than were cleaned up in 
the 12 years before we took office. If you will give us 4 more years, 
we'll clean up 500 more, so we can say our children are growing up next 
to parks, not poison. Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st 
century? [Applause]
    Now, let me tell you the reason we decided to do this reinventing 
Government announcement here is because Oregon and particularly the city 
of Portland have led the way in proving you can have a Government that 
actually works for people, that inspires confidence, that gets results. 
When we took office, the deficit was $290 billion a year and going 
higher. We had the slowest job growth rate since the Great Depression. 
You have cheered for the achievements of the administration. You have 
cheered for the things we want to do. We cannot do these things and we 
could not have achieved what has been done in the last 4 years had it 
not been for the leadership of the Vice President and our determination 
to give you a Government that costs less and does more. That's what 
reinventing Government does. It makes it possible for us to do the other 
things that you have cheered for, that you are working for here today.
    And so I say to you, this book the Vice President gives me today is 
a book that Americans ought to be interested in. It says we're bringing

[[Page 1631]]

common sense to Government. In everything from hiring people to buying 
things, we've eliminated doubletalk and bureaucracy.
    Do you know when I became President, if you wanted to buy--if a 
Government agency wanted to buy a $4 stapler, they had to do $50 worth 
of paperwork. Now we can buy a $4 stapler for $4. That's $46 we can 
spend on Head Start programs, on environmental protection, on investing 
in medical research.
    The second thing we're doing is serving people better. We have ended 
the era when people could run for office, desperate to be in Government, 
by just bad-mouthing Government. A lot of our friends on the other side 
have amazed me; they bad-mouth and bad-mouth and bad-mouth the 
Government, but they can't bear to live outside of it.
    We have proved that you can make Government work. One woman from 
Sacramento was so overwhelmed by the fast and friendly service she got 
from the Social Security office, she wrote to tell us it left her, and I 
quote, ``dazed and confused.'' She could not believe that her Government 
would do anything that well.
    Well, we're doing a lot of things that well. The direct student loan 
program cuts the cost of college loans but improves the repayment terms, 
says you can only be required to pay it back as a percentage of your 
income. So go on and borrow the money and go to college and give 
yourself a better life.
    The SBA loan program, which has helped us to start a record number 
of small businesses, has been cut down to one page. And we have 
dramatically increased loans to women and minority business owners 
without undermining the quality. We've proved that we can diversify 
educational opportunities and economic opportunities and achieve 
excellence in both.
    At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros 
has managed to cut about $1,000 off the closing costs for the average 
first-time homebuyers and, in a time of budget cuts, to initiate 
programs that decrease homelessness in communities all across America.
    We can make this Government work for you, and we're determined to do 
it. Wherever they have been willing to do it, we've used businesses as 
partners. After all, what we want is cleaner air, cleaner water, safer 
food. We don't want punishment. If Government and business can work as 
partners, we want to do it.
    And we want to be partners with communities. That's what Oregon is 
all about. Let me tell you, as you think about welfare reform, the 
partnership that the United States has had with Oregon and with the city 
of Portland can be a model for how we can make welfare reform work. I 
signed that bill because it has a new bargain for people on welfare. It 
says, we'll continue to have a national guarantee for health care, for 
nutrition for children. If you go to work, we'll spend more than ever on 
child care. But we're going to give the money that used to be in the 
welfare check to the States so they can develop community-based systems, 
not only to give income to people but to move able-bodied people into 
the work force. The only way that can be done is if there is a 
community-based system where people are committed to going out and 
challenging employers and saying, okay, we'll give you some help to do 
it, but you've been cussing the welfare system all these years, now hire 
these people, give them a job. We'll support them with child care and 
education. That has to happen in the communities of America, and we 
trust Portland to do it. We trust Oregon to do it. You can lead 
America's way in doing it.
    So yes, reinventing Government means doing more efficient things. It 
means doing better things. It means doing with less. It also means 
improvements in Medicare and Medicaid, in our educational programs, in 
our support for small business, in our environmental protection. It 
means improvements in our national parks, not selling them off, and it 
means help in emergencies.
    I want to say that one of my proudest achievements as President is 
reforming the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It had become such a 
disaster itself that Congress even considered abolishing it. But as 
Portland, as Oregon, as Washington State saw during the flood, as 
California saw in earthquakes and fires and floods, as we saw in the 
Middle West where they had a 500-year flood and in the hurricanes along 
the eastern coast of America, we have an Emergency Management Agency 
today that works with people on the ground and helps people and helps 
communities to rebuild their lives. That is something that is worth 
fighting for.
    So, I want to ask you to support us in this effort. I want you to 
know that when we balance the budget in 2002, we're still going to be 
spending more money on education and re-


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search and protecting the environment. So we're going to have to have a 
smaller and more productive Government. We're going to have to privatize 
organizations that can now work better in the private sector, like 
Sallie Mae. We've got the direct student loan program. They need to be 
able to do some other things as well.
    We want hundreds of organizations to become performance-based, to be 
trailblazers in increasing productivity and making their customers 
happy. I don't want people to be dazed and confused if they're well-
served by the Government, like that lady in Sacramento was.
    Let me give you one example--very important in Oregon and every 
State with a high-tech base. We want the patent office to become 
performance-based. Today when an inventor applies for a patent, it takes 
almost 600 days for the inventor to get it. When we get done, we'll be 
able to give them those patents in 60 days, one-tenth of the time. That 
means more progress for America, more new jobs, more advances in high 
technology.
    And finally, we want to use technology to open Government to people 
more. Today I want to announce that the White House home page, which 
many of you have already used on the Internet--see that sign ``Portland 
wants Socks''--even my cat has a place on our home page. [Laughter] Now 
we're going to make it a one-stop gateway to Government service. From 
now on, you can use the home page at the White House to apply for a 
passport, ask about veterans' benefits, even to buy postage stamps. 
Transactions, forms, information, it's all there. And it won't be like 
waiting in a line. There are no lines on-line. This is an example of 
what we can do to save money, serve you better, and free up money not 
only to balance the budget but to invest in our children's future.
    If you want to build a bridge to the 21st century with a strong 
economy, good schools, safe streets, a clean environment, healthy 
children, successful families and communities, you must join us in this 
commitment to say we can make our Government work for all the people. 
Will you help us build that bridge in the next 6 weeks and 4 days? 
[Applause]
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 10:10 a.m. at Lownsdale Square. In his 
remarks, he referred to Mayor Vera Katz of Portland; Tom Bruggere, 
Oregon senatorial candidate; and Darlene Hooley and Mike Dugan, 
candidates for Oregon's Fifth and Second Congressional Districts, 
respectively.