[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 24, 1996]
[Pages 1652-1656]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Freehold Borough, New Jersey
September 24, 1996

    Thank you very much. Thank you, in the back, for being here. Thank 
you, way down under the trees, for being here. Mayor Wilson, it's great 
to be in Freehold. It's great to be in Monmouth County. It's great to be 
here with all of you.
    I want to thank all those officials who are here--Mayor Susan Bass 
Levin, Mayor Cardell Cooper. Governor Florio, it's good to see you. 
State Chairman Tom Byrne, it's good to see you. Senator Ray Lesniak, 
State Senator John Lynch, all the other legislators and local leaders 
who are here.
    Mayor Dave DelVecchio, thank you very much for running for the 
Congress and for making the stakes as clear as you have today. I know 
one thing, if you're representing this district in Congress in January, 
I believe that you will not vote for a Speaker of the House who wants to 
enact a contract on America, I think you will vote for the people of 
this district and their future. And I thank you for running.
    I think we have some students here from the Freehold Borough 
Regional High School; thank you all for coming. You've got a big stake 
in this election, and I'm glad you're here.
    You know, I was told this morning when I got up to come to New 
Jersey, after I went to the United Nations--I'll say more about that in 
a moment--that this magnificent monument commemorates George 
Washington's defeat of a British general in 1778 named Sir Henry 
Clinton. [Laughter] And I thought I would tell you here in the presence 
of these Revolutionary War reenactors who come from the Delaware 
Valley--and they did a great job today, let's give them a hand. 
[Applause] That may have happened in 1778, but in 1996, Clinton is on 
the right side of the battle for America's future.
    And so is Bob Torricelli. You know, I've watched Bob Torricelli in 
Congress for 4 years now. I've watched him fight for legislation. I saw 
him sponsor legislation to require 48 hours as a minimum stay for new 
mothers and their newborns. He and Senator Bradley did that, and it's 
going to be the law of the land within about 48 more hours, I believe, 
when the Congress passes that. It took 4 long years, but I thank him for 
that.
    I saw him sponsor legislation that I have embraced to expand the 
Brady bill. The Brady bill, which was also opposed by the leaders of the 
other party in Congress, basically says you have to wait 5 days while we 
do a background check before you get a handgun. Now, when we passed the 
Brady bill, there was all this screaming and yelling that we would be 
taking people's guns away. And 3 years later every hunter still has the 
same gun, but 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers were not able to 
get handguns. Bob Torricelli was right, and they were wrong. And now, he 
and I believe that the Brady bill ought to be modestly extended to say 
if you have beaten up your spouse or your child you shouldn't get a 
handgun, either. And I think New Jersey agrees with that.
    I understand there's been a little ad running in New Jersey about 
Bob Torricelli's vote for our economic plan in 1993. ``That one vote,'' 
they say, ``was the biggest tax increase in history.'' Of course, it 
wasn't. The biggest one in history was in 1982, under President Reagan, 
and he supported it and signed it. I wasn't around.

[[Page 1653]]

    But I'll tell you this--let me tell you about that one vote. The 
next time you watch the ad, you see if you think it's accurate, fair, 
and complete. That one vote cut taxes for 5 times as many families in 
New Jersey as it raised taxes on. That one vote made 90 percent of the 
small businesses in this country eligible for a tax cut when they invest 
more in their business. That one vote gave people in New Jersey who 
wanted to take a chance on investing in a new company a tax break for 
doing it. That one vote cut the deficit more than any one vote in 
history. We've now had 4 years of a declining deficit; it's the first 
time that's happened since the 1840's, before the Civil War. That's what 
that one vote did.
    That one vote--that one vote brought down interest rates for car 
payments, home payments, credit card payments, and business loans. And 
that one vote is a big reason that we have 10\1/2\ million more jobs, 
the lowest unemployment rate in 7\1/2\ years, a 15-year high in 
homeownership, record highs in small business formation and the 
ownership of businesses by women. Yes, that one vote was a pretty big 
vote. It was the right vote for America, and I hope you will remember 
that.
    And I'll tell you something else about that one vote. Because we 
have cut the deficit from $290 billion down to $116 billion, that one 
vote now makes it possible for us to balance the budget without hurting 
Medicare, Medicaid, cutting back on education or environmental 
protection, and to give targeted tax cuts for childrearing, to pay for 
the cost of college education, to pay for health care, to pay for buying 
that first home, and to say to people when you sell your home with a 
reasonable gain, you'll never have to pay taxes on that again. That's 
what that one vote did. Don't forget that one vote.
    So every time you see an ad, ``that one vote'' ought to be a paid 
political commercial for Bob Torricelli and everybody else who had the 
courage to put America's future over short-term demagoguery. We're 
better off today than we were 4 years ago. How could anybody dispute 
that?
    My friends, 4 years ago when I came to New Jersey and asked for your 
support, I said I had a simple vision for our country on the edge of a 
new century. I wanted us to go into the 21st century with the American 
dream alive and well for everyone who was willing to work for it. I 
wanted us to go into the 21st century as a country that respected our 
diversity and relished it, that was coming together more closely as a 
community, not drifting apart as so many other nations of the world are. 
And I wanted us to continue to be the world's strongest nation for peace 
and freedom and prosperity.
    And I say to you today the strategy we adopted, opportunity for all, 
responsibility from all, and a community in which every person has a 
role to play and a part, is working. We not only have a stronger 
economy, the crime rate has gone down for 4 years in a row; the welfare 
rolls are down by nearly 2 million; child support collections are up by 
$3 billion, 40 percent; there are no Russian missiles pointed at the 
children of the United States; and today I became the first head of 
state to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to ban all 
nuclear tests forever.
    Now, this did not happen by accident. These things happened because 
we changed the way Washington works. We got out of who's to blame, and 
we asked, what can we do about our problems? We invited everyone to help 
us. We invited everyone to put aside their partisanship, their 
extremism, to roll up their sleeves and tackle America's problems, seize 
America's opportunities. It worked. That's why we're on the right track.
    Now, you have a great choice to make. And it has been clearly, and I 
must say, candidly articulated, not just by me but also by my opponent: 
Are we going to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past? 
Are we going to say, ``You're on your own out there. We can't afford 
things like family leave,'' or are we going to say, ``The First Lady's 
right. It does take a village to raise our children and to build up our 
country.''
    You have to make this decision. You heard what Meryl said. My 
distinguished opponent voted against the family leave law four times and 
said this year he still did the right thing, said it was bad for 
business. Well, you tell me how it can be bad for business. Since we 
adopted the family leave law, we've had 10\1/2\ million new jobs, a 
record number of new small businesses in each and every year. I think 
it's good for business if people can succeed at home and they're not 
worried sick about their children all day long while they're at work. I 
think it's better for America if people are good parents. I think

[[Page 1654]]

they're better workers, they're more productive workers, and this is a 
stronger country.
    But to believe that, you have to believe that we have common 
responsibilities to give each other the conditions and the tools we need 
to make the most of our own lives. It is the big question in this 
election. And we have to come to grips with that. We're celebrating 
family leave today because 12 million times, families in America have 
said to their employers: I'm sorry, but I'm about to have a baby; my 
wife's about to have a baby; my children are sick; my parents are 
desperately ill; I've got to have just a little time off; I'll be back 
to work as quick as I can. And they didn't lose their jobs for that. Is 
that so bad? I think that makes us a better, stronger, more powerful 
country.
    You hear people talking all the time about family values. Well, if 
we're going to talk about family values, shouldn't we value families? Is 
there anything more important in life than doing a good job of raising 
our children? I never go anywhere in America--never--that I don't meet 
families who have at least one or two examples in their own lives where 
they have felt the wrenching conflict between their responsibilities to 
their children or their parents and their responsibilities at work.
    This is just a small step to say, in America we want people to 
succeed at home and at work. In America we know most parents work and 
most parents have to work. In single-parent or two-parent households, we 
just want them to be winners with their kids and winners at work. And if 
you give us 4 more years I'd like to see the family leave law modestly 
expanded. I think it would be a very good thing if parents could also 
take a little time off from work to go to regular meetings with their 
children's teachers and make regular doctor appointments with their 
children or their sick parents. It would make us stronger and our 
economy stronger.
    All across the spectrum, if you look at what is at stake here, I 
offer you a bridge to the 21st century that you have to help build--no 
guarantees but opportunity and the challenge of responsibility and the 
reminder that we have to do it together. Think about our economy. If I 
had told you 4 years ago we'd have 10\1/2\ million new jobs, a 7\1/2\-
year low in unemployment, virtually no inflation, the lowest combined 
rates of unemployment, inflation, and home mortgages in 28 years, you'd 
have said that's pretty good, bring it on.
    But we can do better. We can grow the economy faster. We can offer 
opportunity to those who have still not participated in the economic 
recovery. And now that we have passed a welfare reform law that says to 
poor families we'll keep guaranteeing health care and nutrition, and 
child care if you go to work, but now the check itself goes to the 
State, and communities have to devise a way to move able-bodied people 
to work, we have to create jobs for those people. We cannot permit the 
children to be hurt. We have to give their parents a chance to go to 
work, the same chance that all the rest of us want in life. That is what 
we must do. And I hope you'll help me build that bridge to the 21st 
century.
    We can--let me say again--we can balance the budget, and we must. 
That keeps the interest rates down. That keeps your home mortgage rates, 
your car payments, your credit card payments, your business loan rates 
down. But we have to do it in a way that does not divide this country or 
compromise our future. That means protecting Medicare and Medicaid. It 
means investing in education. It means investing in environmental 
protection. It means investing in research and technology.
    Let me just tell you, just in the last couple of years there have 
been breathtaking advances in medical research, in the treatment of 
people with spinal cord injuries, in breast cancer, in dealing with 
AIDS. The life expectancy of people with HIV has more than doubled in 
the last 4 years, thanks to medical research and the rapid movement of 
drugs to the market. Just recently, for the first time ever, a 
laboratory animal with a severed spinal cord had movement in its lower 
limbs because of nerve transplants.
    We have got to keep investing in these things. In the nonmedical 
area we are about to build a supercomputer with IBM, the United States 
and IBM--listen to this--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 world is changing. And we owe it to the future to continue to 
invest in making sure that America stays at the head of the pack in new 
technologies, new opportunities, and new jobs for the American people 
and new adventures for our children. And we must do that.

[[Page 1655]]

    We have to build a bridge to the 21st century that does more of what 
I saw in Uniontown when I visited the school there not very long ago, 
right here in New Jersey. I want to build a bridge to the 21st century 
that gives all of our children the best educational opportunities in the 
world. We want to hook up every classroom and every library in America 
to the information superhighway, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web.
    Let me tell you what that means. It means for the first time in 
history, the children in the most remote rural districts and in the 
poorest urban districts will have access to the same information in the 
same way at the same quality in the same time as every other child in 
America. It will revolutionize education. And we intend to do it if you 
will help us build that bridge to the 21st century.
    We want to build a bridge to the 21st century in which every 
American can go to college, every American of any age. And we propose to 
do it in the following way:
    Number one, more people than ever will be able to save through an 
IRA and withdraw from that IRA tax-free if the savings are used to pay 
for college, medical care, a first-time home.
    Number two, we're going to say in the next 4 years we want a 
community college education to be just as universal in the United States 
as a high school diploma is today. Everybody needs more than a high 
school diploma today and here's how we're going to pay for it. We want 
to say to working Americans, ``If you go to a community college, you can 
deduct from your taxes dollar for dollar the cost of tuition at a 
typical community college in the United States.'' We can do that--no 
bureaucracy, no extra hassle. And we can pay for it in the balanced 
budget amendment.
    And finally, we want to permit every family to deduct the cost of 
college tuition, any kind of college, undergraduate or graduate school, 
up to $10,000 a year from their taxes so that we can educate our people. 
Will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century? [Applause]
    We want to build a bridge to the 21st century of responsibility, 
which means that we have to continue to resist the efforts to stop our 
anticrime program. You want to know what a big issue is in the Senate 
race here and in this Congress race? For reasons that absolutely elude 
me, after 4 years of a declining crime rate, when our strategy embodied 
in the 1994 crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street, have ``three 
strikes and you're out'' and other tough penalties, ban the assault 
weapons, and give our kids some prevention programs--that strategy was 
written by law enforcement officers all over America--for reasons that 
elude me, for the last 2 years the leaders of the other party in 
Congress have done everything they can to repeal it, to stop the 100,000 
police program in its tracks. I do not understand that.
    But if you want a reason to support these two men, that's a good 
one. We've got the crime rate coming down 4 years in a row. If we can 
bring it down 4 more years in a row, it might just be bearable for 
Americans. I think we should finish the job of putting 100,000 more 
police officers on our street. And I hope you'll help me build that 
bridge to the 21st century.
    I hope you'll help Bob Torricelli expand the Brady bill to cover 
those people who abuse their spouses and their children. They should not 
have guns. Torricelli was right: 4 more years, and we'll get that done. 
I hope that you will help us to do things, in short, that will say to 
the American people, we want everybody to be more responsible.
    Finally, let me say we need to prove that we can go forward together 
as one community. A big part of that is the family support system we 
talked about, family and medical leave. Something else I'd like to see 
done--a lot of our people today have to work and want to work to get 
overtime. A lot of people have to do it just to keep their jobs. I'd 
like to see more options for the workers to take some of that overtime 
if they want to, and it's best for the family, in time at home with 
their kids and their parents instead of pay if they decide that's what 
they need to keep their families together.
    We have to look for new and exciting and innovative and different 
ways to grow this economy and support families as they meet the 
struggles and the challenges of the 21st century.
    The last point I want to make about that is that perhaps nothing 
defines us so clearly in terms of our commitment to going forward 
together as whether we're committed to a clean environment for all of 
our people. I'm proud of the fact that since this administration has 
been in office, millions of people are breathing cleaner air; we passed 
a safe drinking water bill; we passed a pesticide protection act; we 
modernized the meat inspection standards for the first time in seven 
decades.

[[Page 1656]]

    We have added to the national park system and protected our most 
precious national treasures, and we cleaned up more toxic waste sites in 
3 years than the previous administrations did in 12. But I am not proud 
of the fact that there are still 10 million American children living 
within 4 miles of a toxic waste site. That is wrong. And if you give us 
4 more years, we intend to clean up the 500 worst sites so we can say 
America's children are growing up next to parks, not poison. Every child 
in America is entitled to that, and I want you to help us build that 
bridge to the 21st century.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I have loved being here today. I'm sorry that 
some distant ancestor of mine strayed in the Revolutionary War, probably 
was just being loyal to where he was born. But 200 years later, I'm 
mighty proud to be here with you, proud to be representing the people of 
New Jersey, grateful for the support you have given me, and asking you 
to think among yourselves not about party, not about politics, but about 
what you want our country to look like when we start a new century in a 
new millennium, and what you want America to be like when your children 
are your age. That is all that matters.
    I believe, as strongly as I can say, that if you want the kind of 
America I believe you do, we've got to build a bridge to the future. We 
can revere our past, but we can't recapture it. The best days of America 
are still ahead.
    The children in this audience today, many of them will do jobs that 
have not been invented yet. Some of them will do work that has not been 
imagined yet. All we have to do is to build the right kind of bridge 
that's broad enough, big enough, and strong enough for all of us to walk 
across. I hope you will help me build it.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 3:25 p.m. at the Battlefield Monument at 
the Monmouth County Courthouse. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor 
Michael Wilson of Freehold Borough; Mayor Susan Bass Levin of Cherry 
Hill Township; Mayor Cardell Cooper of East Orange; Mayor David M. 
DelVecchio of Lambertville City; James J. Florio, former New Jersey 
Governor; Brendan (Tom) Byrne, Jr., chair, New Jersey Democratic Party; 
and Meryl Frank, who introduced the President. A portion of these 
remarks could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.