[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 25, 1996]
[Pages 1663-1669]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Democratic National Committee Reception in Philadelphia, 
Pennsylvania
September 25, 1996

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Don Fowler, for your remarks. I was 
standing outside and I heard them. I thank you for what you said, and I 
thank you for your extraordinary hard work, your devotion, and your 
incredible energy. He is probably traveling considerably more than I am. 
He's worked hard to bring our party back and I thank him.
    Thank you, Tom Leonard, for always, always being there for me, for 
our administration, and for our country. And thank you, Mayor Rendell. 
You know, when you started that, I didn't quite know where you were 
going. [Laughter] He said, ``If I had told you in the fall of 1991 that 
all this would happen,'' and he went through all these--I thought he 
said, ``And then I got elected mayor.'' [Laughter] And that's what 
brought it on. And Philadelphia sparked a firestorm of reform and 
investment--[laughter]--all over America, in every State.
    Well, I shook hands with one of your police officers today when we 
were down getting our cheesesteak at Pat's--[laughter]--and the police 
officer said, ``Mr. President, the first time I met you, you were 
Governor, and you and the mayor were shooting baskets not very far from 
here.'' You remember that? And so I looked at the police officer, and I 
said, ``Now, who won that?'' [Laughter] He knew what he was supposed to 
answer. And I assured him that in 1992 and again in 1996, I could take 
it; there was only one contest I was interested in winning. And Mayor 
Rendell won the other one. [Laughter]
    I am delighted to be back in Philadelphia. I've had a wonderful day 
already. I started the day in western Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh. 
I went to Robert Morris College and announced the issuance of our first 
inflation-free bonds to let people save first in denominations of $1,000 
and up, in bonds that will be adjusted in their principal as inflation 
grows so that you will get a real rate of return on investments in 
savings and Government securities from now on. I'm very excited about 
it. It's a way to give families a real protection.
    And I can tell you that if there is a good market--and I think there 
will be--next year we're going to have those bonds come out in 
denominations as low as $50, so that working people can take them in 
their paychecks if they want, and students can buy them in savings 
bonds. And I am very, very hopeful that this will make it easier for 
people of modest means to save more and to know that their savings

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will actually count for them even if we hit another patch of inflation, 
and there's always some inflation in the economy. Now these savings are 
going to be guaranteed with the backing of the United States Treasury. 
So I had a good day there, and I was glad to be there.
    And it was interesting, you know, Robert Morris of Pennsylvania was 
really one of the major financial backers of the Revolutionary War, of 
our side. [Laughter] And he was also the first budget balancer. He 
resigned from the Continental Congress in 1778 because he thought they 
were printing too much money. My kind of Democrat. [Laughter] So, 
anyway, it was a great day.
    Then I came over to Philadelphia and the mayor and I and some other 
folks, we did go down and get a little cheesesteak at Pat's and I 
reminded myself--we had that wonderful rally there, you may remember--
some of you may have been down there 4 years ago. We had a great rally. 
I was giving Pat's equal time; I went to Gino's 4 years ago. [Laughter] 
And I had a picture up there, and I just couldn't stand going to a place 
and not seeing the picture on the other store, so I--[laughter]--it was 
wonderful, we had a great time.
    And I saw a little piece of America there. I shook hands with a 
woman who had just come to live in the United States and her child and 
she said, ``This could only happen in your country.'' She said, ``I've 
only been here 3 months. I've just moved here from Hong Kong.'' I 
thought, what an amazing thing, you know. We sometimes forget what a 
remarkable place the United States is and how real the Statue of Liberty 
is in the lives of so many millions of our people and how the President 
is essentially the Nation's hired hand and is and should be accessible 
to all kinds of people from all walks of life and all stations. So we 
had a nice little visit, and she likes Philadelphia. [Laughter]
    Let me also say that I want to compliment the mayor on pushing so 
many reforms and the city of Philadelphia has really been on the cutting 
edge of change. Philadelphia received one of our empowerment zones. 
We've done a lot of work here in defense conversion. We've done a lot of 
work in other areas. But today the city of Philadelphia did something 
that I think was very important. The board of education today instituted 
a dress code for the schools and authorized schools to adopt school 
uniform policies.
    Let me say, I have been all over this country--the third largest 
school district in the State of California, in Long Beach, has a school 
uniform policy for elementary school students and maybe for junior high 
school students but not for high school. I know of no place that has one 
for high school students. But in a lot of these places, especially for 
the middle school students, it's made the children a lot safer if the 
schools were in dangerous neighborhoods, subject to gangs and battles. 
And it's made the schoolyards themselves much safer, because you can 
always tell who doesn't belong there because they're not dressed right. 
In every place, the uniforms have been simple. Most places, the kids get 
to choose the colors. A lot of times, the teachers dress like the 
students do. There's always a fund set up for the children whose parents 
can't afford them.
    But it's one thing that has served to lower crime, violence, and 
increase attendance and increase learning at a lot of schools. And I 
think a dress code is itself an important statement, because we want our 
young children, whether they're poor or rich or middle class, when 
they're in school to define themselves primarily in terms of what's 
going on on the inside, not what they're wearing on the outside. And I 
think it's a very, very good thing.
    So this reflects the sort of thing I think we should be doing in 
America, trying to figure out how to meet our challenges. And one of 
them is to increase learning levels among all of our people and at the 
same time preserve our basic values. And that is really what this 
election is all about.
    The city of Philadelphia had a lot to do with my becoming President. 
We won a bigger victory here in terms of votes than President Kennedy 
did in 1960, even though the population was smaller. And I was very 
grateful to all of you.
    The normally Republican suburban areas near here were unusually good 
to the Clinton/Gore ticket in 1992, and I hope they will be in 1996. The 
mayor told you that the platform we ran on in 1992, ``Putting People 
First,'' with a strategy of opportunity, responsibility, and a stronger 
American community, has brought good results, and I feel very good about 
them. But I can't say that we've done what we need to do to realize what 
my vision is for this country at the dawn of the 21st century. And I've 
been going all across this country, saying to people,

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``I want you to think about this election in a different way, not even 
if you're an ardent Democrat or Republican or independent. I think you 
should think primarily in terms of the Nation. What do you want America 
to be like when we toll the dawn of a new century and a new millennium? 
What do you want America to be like when our children are our age? What 
are our responsibilities to bring about that vision?''
    We are going through a period of enormous change, as all of you 
know, and most of you have experienced in your own lives, in the nature 
of work, the nature of work and family, how we relate to each other, and 
how we relate to people around the world in commercial, political, and 
other ways. A change of this magnitude only occurs rarely, certainly no 
more than a couple of times every 100 years.
    And very often, such disruptive and cataclysmic changes are 
accompanied by wars. Indeed, even though the cold war is over and we 
have succeeded in getting the nuclear threat to recede--I was so proud 
yesterday to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. [Applause] 
Thank you. Even though that threat is receding, not gone but receding, 
we see new threats that we have lived with painfully in the World Trade 
Center bombing or the destruction of the Federal building and all of the 
loss of life in Oklahoma City or the capture and conviction of the 
terrorists who planned to blow up as many as 12 of our airplanes flying 
over the Pacific. And thank God we were able to truncate that plan. They 
saw it in Japan in the sarin gas attack, chemical weapons in the Tokyo 
subway that took the lives of innocent people. And of course, you see it 
all over the world.
    The new security threats we face are different. Terrorism has been 
around a long time, and it's been quite prominent from time to time in 
the last 20 years. But now we see it crossing national boundaries at a 
rapid rate, because the world we're living in has to be more open. We 
can share information and ideas, technology. We can move money around in 
no time at all, and we have more open borders. More people are getting 
on airplanes and moving around. All this is a good thing. But it makes 
us more vulnerable to the forces of destruction that cross national 
lines, the ethnic hatreds, the terrorism, the proliferation of dangerous 
weapons, organized crime, drug trafficking, all these things.
    So we're going through this period of change. What I want to do is I 
want us to be able to say when we start the new century that we are 
confident that the American dream is available for every person, without 
regard to their station in life, who is willing to work for it. I want 
us to be able to say with confidence that even though ethnic, religious, 
racial, tribal divisions are tearing the heart out of lives all over the 
world, in America we relish our diversity, we're proud of it, and we're 
going stronger because of that diversity, because of our shared values 
and our commitment to work together. That's what I want us to be able to 
say. And finally, I want us to be able to say, mean, and believe that 
our country is going to continue to be the strongest force in the world 
for peace and freedom and prosperity, not just for ourselves but for 
others. We have to understand that we are living in a highly 
interdependent world.
    I was in Seattle, Washington, the other day; 35,000 people showed up 
in the rain and waited 4 hours in the rain. I wasn't 4 hours late, but 
they just started gathering. [Laughter] Thirty-five thousand in the 
rain. But no place is probably so attuned to how tied we are to the rest 
of the world. In Washington State already, one in five jobs is directly 
dependent on the global economy, already--in one of our States in the 
United States.
    So we have to fashion a strategy to meet that vision. We're on the 
right track. We're better off than we were 4 years ago. There is more 
opportunity, there is a greater sense of citizen responsibility. And we 
certainly are seeing more community-based efforts to move our country 
forward and make the most of our own lives. That's why, when something 
happens like the decision that the board of education here made, I want 
to highlight it; I want the rest of America to see it. There are still 
too many kids out there raising themselves. They need help. They need 
support. They need to be part of something bigger than themselves. And 
we need to support them, we need to help them.
    So if you look ahead to the future and you ask yourself, look where 
we've come from, the strategy is working, but what else do we need to 
do, that's what I want this election to be about. And I want to ask all 
of you--there are now 5 weeks and 6 days left--[laughter]--and what I 
would ask you to do is to take the time that is left, some time every 
day, and engage someone in a conversation about our national destiny and 
about what kinds of decisions we

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have to make and what will be reflected by the judgments we make on 
election day this November and what impact it will have. Talk to your 
friends and family members, your co-workers, people you run into here 
throughout the State of Pennsylvania and beyond the borders of this 
State; many of you have friends around the country. And every one of you 
has the capacity to influence others. For me, the idea of building a 
bridge to the 21st century is a powerful idea because it implies it's a 
work that we have to do together, that will span the difference between 
here and there in a way that is strong and good and enduring, and when 
we do it, then others will be able to walk across the bridge behind us. 
That's why I talk about it all the time. It captures the image of public 
work at its best. And not just something the President does, not just 
something the mayor does, not just something that Congress does, but 
something that we all do together, where everyone has a role to play, 
and everyone has a right to walk on the bridge.
    I also say that, to me, the idea of what we're trying to do and how 
we're trying to do it is best captured by the title of the First Lady's 
book. I believe it does take a village to raise a child, to build a 
community, and to build a country.
    So if you believe that we're at this unique moment in history as I 
do, and all of these things are changing, we don't have an option to 
recapture a past that's not there. We don't have an option to deny the 
changes. If you believe we can build a bridge and if you believe we have 
do to it together, then we are at truly a unique moment when all of our 
hopes and dreams have a better chance to be realized.
    I believe the best days of this country are still ahead of us. I 
don't just believe, I know that the children of Philadelphia today, 
within 10 years when they're grown, will be doing jobs that have not 
been invented yet. Many of them will be doing work that has not even 
been imagined yet. When I am in my dotage, I expect my grandchildren to 
be making fun of me because I can't even understand half of the ways 
that people are communicating with each other by then. [Laughter] And 
what we have to do is to make sure that we do what still needs to be 
done.
    We know that not every person in this country or every person in 
this city has still had an opportunity to participate in this economic 
revival. We know that. We know that there are neighborhoods and rural 
areas that have not been caught up in this remarkable recovery, even 
though there have been 10\1/2\ million new jobs. We know that even 
though wages are beginning to rise again for the first time in a decade, 
we still haven't had enough growth to overcome two decades of stagnant 
wages and increasing inequality. We know that not everyone has the 
education and skills that they need.
    We know that even though we've fought strongly for environmental 
protection and we have advanced the cause of the environment in many 
ways--the air is cleaner; we have a safe drinking water law; we've 
upgraded the meat inspection laws of the country for the first time in 
70 years, and we've revolutionized, through the pesticide protection 
act, the protection of all kinds of foods from chemicals that might be 
cancer-causing; we've cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than 
have been cleaned up in the 12 previous years--we know there is still 
work to be done there because 10 million kids still live within 4 miles 
of a toxic waste site, and that's pretty frightening when you think of 
it. So we know we've got work to do right across the board.
    And that's what I'd like this campaign to be about. That's why, in 
my speech to the convention, I went through so many specific things that 
I'd like to do in the next 4 years. That's why I wrote that book that 
gentleman's holding there, because I wanted people to know exactly what 
I thought ought to be done, not just vague rhetoric but some clear ideas 
about what we ought to do.
    So I want you to participate in that discussion. I want you to make 
a commitment as citizens that for the next 6 weeks you're going to make 
your investment here good by asking people to think about every election 
they vote in in terms of these issues, not in terms of yesterday's 
categories but in terms of tomorrow's dreams.
    We have to keep this economic recovery going, and we have to find a 
way to increase our growth and productivity until everyone has a chance 
to be rewarded for their work. That means we have to balance the budget, 
but we have to do it in the right way. We have to continue to invest in 
education and research and technology and environmental protection. We 
have to reform and secure the life of the Trust Fund on Medicare. But we 
don't want to make it into a two-tiered system where we basically

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discriminate against elderly people in this country if they happen to be 
older, poorer, and sicker than most others.
    We want to make sure that we can fund the Medicaid program and that 
we can afford it in the context of a balanced budget. But we shouldn't 
remove our national commitment to poor children and pregnant women and 
the elderly in nursing homes and families with members with 
disabilities. We shouldn't do that. And we can balance the budget and 
keep our common commitments, keep our village responsibilities, if you 
will, and keep on building that bridge. That's what we have to do.
    We ought to give people a tax cut, but it ought to be a tax cut that 
can be afforded, and it ought to be focused on the biggest challenges 
people face, childrearing, education, heath care, homebuying. And when 
people sell their homes they shouldn't have to pay taxes on the gain, 
because often it's the only savings they have in their whole lives. So 
those are the things that we ought to do, and we can afford that. But we 
ought not to have a tax cut we cannot afford and claim we're going to be 
able to pay for it. That's wrong.
    Think how hard we have worked. Do you know when the last time an 
administration reduced the deficit in all 4 years was? John Tyler, in 
the 1840's. [Laughter] Of course, thank goodness most of my predecessors 
didn't have to do it because we didn't have this problem. We would have 
a surplus today in the budget, and we could invest more in education, 
more in technology, more in the future, more in high-speed rail, more in 
all kinds of things that we need to be doing in this country, more in 
helping the cities to rebuild their infrastructure, their water systems, 
their sewer systems, their roads, their streets, their bridges. We could 
do all that if it weren't for the interest we're paying today just on 
the debt run up in the 12 years before I took office. We do not need to 
go back down that road. We need to keep going down the road we're on and 
building this economy and growing it.
    And this must be seen as a mainstream, middle-class, working 
American's issue. It should be seen as a poor person's issue as well as 
an issue for investors. Bringing the deficit down keeps interest rates 
down. Most of us in this room are in an income group where we can make a 
lot of money if interest rates go up. We can figure out how to do it. 
But if interest rates go up, it means higher credit card rates, higher 
car payments, higher house payments. And for small-business people it 
means higher loan rates, which means a lower rate of job creation, less 
productivity, less income, and less ability to raise the wages of 
ordinary Americans. We are better off with low interest rates and high 
growth so that everyone can participate at every income level in the 
growth of the country. And we have to keep fighting for it.
    We have to continue to do a lot of other things. And you've heard me 
outline it all, but I want to hammer home one thing in some detail: We 
have got to continue to work to give every single child a world-class 
education. And we now have the means to do it that we didn't have 
before.
    The first computer was built right here 50 years ago. Now it's 
typical; you find computers in classrooms all over the country. But what 
I want for this country is to have every classroom and every library and 
every school in America, including the poorest inner-city schools, have 
not only computers and good educational software and trained teachers--
we had 100,000 teachers training a half a million more just this past 
summer to make sure that the teachers could keep up with the kids on the 
computers, so I want that. But in addition to that, we've got to hook 
all these computers up to the information superhighway, to the Internet, 
to the World Wide Web.
    Now, what does that mean? That means that we have a chance for the 
first time in the entire history of the United States--this has never 
been true before--in the history of the United States to see that the 
children in the most remote rural schools, in the poorest urban 
classrooms have access to the same information at the same level of 
quality in the same time and the same way as the kids in the wealthiest, 
best schools, public or private, in America do. That will revolutionize 
education if we can do that. That's why it is so important to connect 
our classrooms to the information superhighway to the year 2000. It is 
truly a democratic educational opportunity.
    And it's very important that we make college available to everybody 
that wants to go. Now, we've done a lot on that. We've increased loans 
to needy students. We passed the direct loan program, which cut the cost 
of college loans and improved the repayment terms and said nobody could 
be asked to pay more than a certain

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percentage of their income when they borrow money. So no young person 
should ever be discouraged from going. We've got 50,000 young people who 
served in AmeriCorps and earned money for college. But we can do more.
    And I propose three things: Number one, let families with incomes up 
to $100,000 take out more in IRA's and then take it out tax-free to pay 
for a college education or a first-time home or a medical emergency.
    Number two, let families--try to make community college education, 
at least 2 years of education after high school as universal as high 
school is in the next 4 years by simply saying that you can take off 
your tax bill, dollar for dollar, the average, the typical tuition cost 
at a community college in the United States, just a strict tax credit 
for the cost of tuition for 2 years.
    And number three, give everybody a deduction of up to $10,000 for 
the cost of any college tuition--any kind, undergraduate, postgraduate, 
anything else. Now, we can pay for that. You think, in the 1980's and 
early nineties, college tuition was the only thing in the market basket 
of a family's essential costs that went up more rapidly than health 
care, the only thing. And if you've had more than one kid in college, 
you know that. Maybe if you just had one you know it. [Laughter] So this 
is very important.
    The last one I want to make that's especially relevant to the cities 
is this: This city and this State has new--and all of you as private 
sector people, those of you in the private sector--have new and profound 
responsibilities under the welfare reform law. And let me just state 
again, because there's been a lot of talk about this and a lot of 
confusion: We have reduced the welfare rolls by almost 2 million, 1.8 
million. We did it by basically giving States who often gave cities the 
flexibility to devise new systems to move people from welfare to work. 
We also did it by increasing child support collections by $3 billion, by 
40 percent. So the new bill gives us more authority to collect more 
child support. Eight hundred thousand people could be moved off the 
rolls tomorrow if people just paid the child support they legally owed. 
That's staggering, isn't it? Eight hundred thousand women and children.
    But the new bill says, here's the new deal, the National Government 
will continue to guarantee to poor people and their children health 
care, nutrition, and if they go to work, even more in child care than 
ever before. What used to be the federally guaranteed check for income, 
which was a combination of Federal and State money, will now go to the 
States, and the States have 2 years to convert the income check into a 
paycheck if the welfare recipient is able-bodied. Now, they can do a lot 
of things, but it's going to be a real challenge.
    I was just in Kansas City where I gave them permission 2 years ago 
to try something I've been begging everybody else to try. In Kansas City 
they established a full employment council, the whole business 
community, all the churches, all the social groups, work groups, all the 
adult educators, everybody gets together, they're all represented. And 
let's say you've got 10 employees; if you will hire an 11th one, they'll 
give you the welfare check for 4 years. Therefore, it costs you less to 
hire the employee. But they understand in return for that, you're taking 
responsibility to train, to make sure that the employee is able to 
succeed at home and take care of the kids as well as come to work, and 
to try to end the almost physical isolation of half the welfare 
caseload.
    Half the welfare folks, the system now works fine; they just get off 
as quick as they can and go back to work. But half of these folks have 
been physically isolated in dependence for too long. This will only 
work--I will say it again--this will only work if you believe it takes a 
village, if you think you have got a responsibility.
    Because now, anybody that ever cussed out the present welfare system 
has nothing left to kick around. This is now everybody's problem, and 
everybody's opportunity, and everybody can play a role in it. So every 
community of any size that has any substantial group of children and 
parents on the welfare rolls now has the opportunity, literally, to 
explode the myth of poverty, break the culture of poverty, and bring 
huge numbers of people back into the mainstream. It will only work if 
people say, ``You know, I could do that. I could hire one other person, 
especially if they can give me that, and I can train those folks. And if 
you subsidize the training in that way--well, if there's a few problems 
getting people adjusted to the work force, well, so what, I'm getting a 
little help to do that, so it's not the end of the world.''
    Every one of you needs to think about that. That's a big challenge 
for Philadelphia and a big challenge for America. But if we meet it, if 
we meet it, if we can prove that we've got

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a community-based, caring, work-oriented, child-oriented system for poor 
families, we can take care of our children, liberate their parents from 
their difficulties, and prove that all of the myths that a lot of people 
have used to kick poor people around for years are wrong, by taking 
responsibility for developing a system that is oriented toward success 
at home and success at work. That's what we want for all the rest of us. 
That's what we should want for those folks, too. And I hope you will 
help us build that bridge to the 21st century.
    This is a good time to be an American because we know things are 
going better than they were. We know things are going in the right 
direction. But this is no time for complacency, no time for complacency 
in the political campaign. Believe me, it is not over; in some ways it 
may be just about to begin. It is not over. But most importantly, this 
is no time for complacency for us as Americans. We have work to do. We 
have work to do to get to the 21st century with the American dream alive 
for all, with an America that's coming together, with an America that's 
still able to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity. 
But if we do, our best days are still to come.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 5:21 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom at the 
Warwick Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Donald L. Fowler, national 
chairman, Democratic National Committee; Thomas A. Leonard, fundraiser 
for the Democratic National Committee; and Mayor Edward Rendell of 
Philadelphia.