[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 20, 1996]
[Pages 1632-1635]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Tom Bruggere in Portland
September 20, 1996

    The President. Thank you.
    Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
    The President. You know----
    Audience member. Twelve more years!
    The President. When Al Gore and I started out together, he had a 
reputation of being too stiff. [Laughter] If anyone ever had told me 4 
years ago that I would be counseling him about not being too rowdy, I 
never would have believed it. [Laughter]
    We're having a good time here, Hillary and Tipper and Al and I. We 
love Oregon. We love to come here. We love what you're doing and what 
you stand for. I want to say that I'm deeply honored to be here today 
with Tom and Kelley and Maria and T.C. and their friends, with our 
candidates for Congress, Darlene Hooley and Mike Dugan, with the mayor 
and Congresswoman Furse, with all of you. But I want to say to you that 
I do not view, in all candor, this election as primarily a struggle of 
parties. I think, more than that, this election is primarily a 
definition of our country.
    Once in a great while, our country has gone through profound periods 
of change in how we work, how we live, how we relate to one another, how 
we relate to the rest of the world. Everybody who thinks about it knows 
that this is a period like that.
    There have been four or five such periods in our country's history. 
And you make these decisions, and when you make them, they dramatically 
impact 30 or 40 or 50 years and shape the country forever. And I want 
you to think about it like that. I do not want you to vote

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for any of these people because it would be nice if President Clinton 
had a Democratic Congress. It would be nice, but I don't want you to do 
that.
    Instead, I want--to build on what the Vice President said--I want 
you to define what you want your country to look like when we start the 
21st century, what you want your country to look like when these 
children are our age, and then make your decision based on that. Forget 
about the politics of it; think about your country.
    I was listening to Al talk and he did such a good job, I didn't have 
any idea what I was going to say. [Laughter] But I think what he was 
saying and what I would like to say to you is that there are these two 
polar opposite views competing for America's image of itself in this 
time of change. One is a unifying vision; the other is fundamentally a 
divisive vision. One says, ``We're all in this together;'' the other one 
says, ``You're on your own. The Government's the problem.'' One says, 
``Let's build a bridge to the future;'' the other says, ``Let's build a 
bridge to the past, when times were simpler, and we didn't have to worry 
about all this.'' One says, ``We believe you can do well by doing 
good.'' The other says, ``Do-gooders always mess up the private 
economy.'' And you have to think about which you believe. I believe that 
the example of Tom Bruggere's life and success and the results achieved 
by the policies of our administration in the last 4 years make an 
overwhelming case for the unifying vision of our future as opposed to 
the divisive vision of our future.
    Every time we try to do something to sort of spread opportunity and 
let the American people succeed at home and at work and give everybody a 
chance to live up to the fullest of their God-given potential, those who 
opposed it said it was big Government and it would mess up a one-car 
parade; we would weaken the economy; it would be inefficient; it would 
be this, that, and the other thing.
    But 4 years later, yes, we passed family leave, and yes, we continue 
to protect the environment, but we have 10\1/2\ million new jobs, and we 
have--and I might add that the job growth rate is faster than has 
occurred under any Republican administration in 70 years. But this is 
not about party. The things we are debating today don't fit within the 
old party labels. The new competing philosophy abandons a lot of what 
the Republican Party adhered to for 25 years.
    But if you look at it, that's what's going on. They said, ``Oh, if 
you don't let people continue to live on $4.25 an hour minimum wage, you 
will just cost jobs.'' Well, October 1st we'll get a chance to test that 
out, because 10 million people are going to get a pay raise. But in the 
same bill we proved that you could have a unifying vision.
    Do you know what else was in that minimum wage bill? We also, in the 
minimum wage bill, increased the tax deductions that businesses get when 
they invest more in their own business to grow the economy. We have 
improved--we have given more tax relief for self-employed people to get 
health insurance. It wasn't either/or.
    The bill also has a $5,000 tax credit for people who will adopt 
children, because there are still a lot of kids out there that need 
homes. So it was pro-work, pro-business, and pro-family. It was a 
unifying vision.
    When Tom helped his workers be better parents, he increased the 
productivity of his company; he didn't weaken it. That is our argument. 
Our argument is that we have been forced into too many false choices for 
too long by people who were too shortsighted, and the nature of the new 
economy is such that we can do best by doing the right things, that 
there must not be a dichotomy between what people have to do in raising 
up their children and what they have to do in raising up their work 
lives. And if there is, we lose from the beginning. If you have to 
choose one or the other, we're beat from the start. We believe we can do 
both.
    We believe there must not be a dichotomy between preserving and, 
indeed, enhancing the environment and public health and growing the 
economy because if that is true, then that ultimately would spell the 
doom of every civilization, and many have been doomed because of the 
refusal to develop a unifying vision that would permit people to grow 
the economy in ways that are in harmony with their natural surroundings. 
That's a fundamental choice you have to make.
    We believe that the First Lady is right, that it does take a village 
to raise children, to build an economy, to build a country. Therefore, 
unlike the other folks, we don't think it was a waste of money to give 
50,000 young people, like this young woman here, a chance to work

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in AmeriCorps to serve their communities and earn some money to go to 
college while they were doing it. We think that's a good thing to do.
    They believe there's two kinds of money, the Government's money and 
your money, and the Government's money is money they've stole from you, 
and the more they give back to you, the better off you are, because the 
Government would mess up a one-car parade. We believe it's all your 
money.
    And the question is, are there things we can do together that we 
cannot do alone? And that is the question. We cannot, by ourselves, 
guarantee equal access to college education. We cannot, by ourselves, 
guarantee more equal opportunities for children in the schools. We 
cannot, by ourselves, guarantee what the Vice President and Tom have 
worked for, which is to make sure there is equal access to technology, 
including access to the information superhighway, to all the children in 
all the schools of America. That's something we have to do together--
together.
    We cannot--let me just give you three examples. Christopher Reeve 
talked about this at our convention. We cannot, by ourselves, fund the 
research necessary to push back the barriers that are destructive of 
human existence. Just in the last few weeks, for the first time in 
history, laboratory animals with severed spines have shown movement in 
their lower limbs because of nerve transplants. It never happened 
before. You cannot afford to get that done by yourself. Together, we can 
fund that kind of research. We have doubled the life expectancy of 
people with HIV and AIDS in 4 years because of the more rapid--
[inaudible]--you cannot afford to do that on your own. We just entered a 
partnership, the United States did with IBM--even IBM did not want to do 
it on its own--we're going to build a supercomputer that will do more 
calculations in a second than you can do on your hand-held calculator at 
home in 30,000 years. We have to do that together.
    But as we do these things, we change the whole nature of the future. 
The children in this audience will be doing jobs that have not been 
invented yet, many will be doing work that has not been imagined yet 
because of what we do together as well as what we do on our own.
    So you have to decide that. You look around this room. Look at all 
this diversity in this room. Look how different we all are. Do you know 
how much of your time I spend as President, trying to get people around 
the world not to do destructive things because they can't live with even 
a limited amount of diversity, because they literally cannot exist, 
because they have to have a divisive vision of themselves and their 
lives, they've got to be thinking they're important because they're not 
someone else? That's what the deal in Bosnia is all about. That's what 
Northern Ireland's about. That's what the Middle East is about. That's 
what the slaughter between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Burundi and 
Rwanda was all about. All over the world.
    That's what the church burnings are all about. When a synagogue is 
defaced or an Islamic center is burned, that's what it's all about. 
There are lots of folks that just can't get up in the morning and go 
through the day unless they've got somebody to look down on to make 
themselves feel bigger, a divisive view of the world.
    Now, I am not being naive here. I don't pretend for a moment that 
there aren't tough decisions that have to be made, that there are lots 
of moments when there is no 100 percent perfect answer. But I'm telling 
you, where you go in life depends not only on all the details in dealing 
with the tough decisions, it depends on what your view is, how you look 
at this. And that's why I tell you, if you look at how the world is 
changing, going from the cold war to a global economy, if you look at 
the new security threats of the 21st century, terrorism, ethnic strife, 
the proliferation of dangerous weapons, organized crime, and drug 
smuggling, they all cross national boundaries. We have to be unified in 
dealing with that. I asked the Vice President to head that commission to 
figure out how we could make our airports and our airlines safer. We're 
dealing with a problem that every country has to deal with, so we have 
to work together on that.
    If you look at the way the economy's going and the competition that 
we're in with people all around the world, we have to hold ourselves to 
international standards and then we have to work together to make sure 
we all do it.
    If you think about all of us in this room, most of us would do well 
if there were no Government efforts of any kind. We would do okay. But 
we're doing a lot better because everybody else has a chance to make the 
most of their lives as well.
    So I say to you, you're going to have 6 weeks and 4 days of 
television wars here in Oregon,

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and half of what's on there may be irrelevant. But this is a big deal. 
This is a huge deal. This is the last major election of the 20th century 
and the first election of the 21st century. Things have changed. We have 
to change. And America is going to go into that next century with either 
the unifying vision dominant or the divisive vision dominant.
    That's what I want you to think about, not Democrats or Republicans 
or any of that. I want you to think about your country. And if you look 
at the life and career and work of this man, it would be hard to think 
of someone who could be a better poster boy for a unifying vision of 
America's future in the 21st century than Tom Bruggere.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 11:46 a.m. at the Oregon Museum of Science 
and Industry. In his remarks, he referred to Oregon senatorial candidate 
Tom Bruggere, his wife, Kelley, and their children Maria and T.C.; Mayor 
Vera Katz of Portland; and actor Christopher Reeve.