[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[September 25, 1996]
[Pages 1670-1676]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1670]]


Remarks at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Dinner
September 25, 1996

    Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, I thought I had had a long day 
in Pennsylvania. [Laughter] I went to Pittsburgh and to Robert Morris 
College. Robert Morris was one of the main financiers of the American 
Revolution, and he quit the Continental Congress in 1778 because he 
thought they were printing too much hot money. I guess he would have 
quit the Congress in the 12 years the other folks were making economic 
policy. [Laughter]
    I announced there, with Secretary Rubin, a new savings instrument 
for the American people, a bond that will appreciate with inflation, an 
inflation-proof savings bond that the American people will be able to 
buy from now on, so that families that are trying to save for their 
children's education or their retirement will always know that inflation 
will not eat up the value of a secure Government investment. I'm very 
proud of that; it was a good day.
    I went then to Philadelphia, and I went down to the south side to 
eat a Philly cheesesteak; a lot of you have done that. And all the 
people were gathering in the neighborhood, and I met a lady who had just 
been in our country for 3 months. She had moved here from Hong Kong and 
she introduced me to her children and she said, ``I can't believe this 
happens in America.'' I said, ``Well, ma'am, that's the way it works 
here. I work for you, not the other way around.'' [Laughter] And she was 
pretty happy about that, and I was glad to see it.
    So then I went to two events there and came home just in time to put 
on my uniform so I could come and be with you. [Laughter] I thank you, 
Ed Pastor, for your leadership. I thank all the members of the 
Congressional Hispanic Caucus for their service to our country. Thank 
you, Rita Elizondo, for your leadership with the Caucus Institute; the 
Institute Fellows, thank you for your support. John Quinones, I wish I 
had heard you; you're probably better at this than I am. To the members 
of my Cabinet who are here and the members of our administration in 
every facet of it, I thank you for your service and for being here.
    I would like to say a special word of thanks to my longtime friend 
Congressman Kika de la Garza. I heard the last of his remarks outside, 
and I loved it. I wish I had heard the whole thing. He is a wonderful 
man, much loved and much respected. He will be much missed, and we wish 
him well and thank him for his remarkable service.
    As Ed said, this is the 4th year you have invited me and the 4th 
year I've showed up. You know, by this time of the year I'm normally 
pretty tired, even when it's not an election year. I come here out of 
purely selfish motives. There is more energy in this room than any other 
place I go all year long and you get me going, you know. As all of you 
know, I have been trying to sort of improve my Spanish as my daughter 
races off into the sunset of increasing fluency, and I try to 
demonstrate that every year. And it was suggested that I try to do 
something different this year, that maybe I should do the macarena, but 
Al Gore has a corner on that. I can't begin to move in the way he does 
doing that. So how about this: Siempre es un placer estar con ustedes.
    Now, tomorrow I will get a grade on this from Bill Richardson. I 
hope the others will be more gracious.
    This is the 19th anniversary of the Caucus Institute. You have 
worked to do some profoundly important things. You have worked to 
demonstrate what I have been working for in America, opportunity for 
all, responsibility from all, and an American community that truly 
includes all of us. For the last few weeks I've had the extraordinary 
opportunity to get out and around our country again. Hillary and Al and 
Tipper and I have traveled by rail, by bus; we've gone all over America. 
We've asked people everywhere to help us build the bridge to the 21st 
century. And frankly, I have been overwhelmed by the hope, the 
conviction, the energy, the determination that I see in the faces of 
people.
    We were in Seattle not very long ago, in the rain. And I know it 
always rains in Washington, but 35,000 people waited, some of them up to 
4 hours, in the rain to say they wanted to build a bridge to the 21st 
century that we could all walk across. They did not think that we should 
walk away from one another, and

[[Page 1671]]

they believed it does take a village to raise a child and build a 
country.
    Now, that's a far cry from where we were 4 years ago. We had high 
unemployment, the slowest job growth since the Great Depression, 
stagnant wages, rising crime, increasing cynicism among our people, and 
evidence of division that was truly troubling. Washington had been 
caught up for too long, in my view, in asking who's to blame and too 
shortly--had spent too little time in asking the question that I always 
ask everybody when they bring me a problem. I ask, ``Well, what are we 
going to do about it?'' That's important: What are we going to do? Not 
who can we blame, not how can we divide the American people for our 
political advantage, but how can we come together and meet our 
challenges, advance our values, and give our children a better future.
    Well, we've been working at that for 4 years now, and we've gotten 
some pretty good results. If you look at them, they're hard to dispute. 
In the last 4 years we've got 10\1/2\ million new jobs. In the last 4 
years we have record numbers of new small businesses. We have record 
numbers of new businesses owned by all kinds of minorities and women. We 
have an astonishing growth in homeownership; it's at a 15-year high. The 
combined rates of home mortgages, unemployment, and inflation are at a 
28-year low.
    Of the 10\1/2\ million new jobs, 1\1/2\ million of those jobholders 
were Hispanic-American. Crime has gone down in this country 4 years in a 
row. The welfare rolls are down by nearly 2 million. Child support 
collections are up 40 percent, about $3 billion. Twelve million 
Americans have been able to take some time off under the family and 
medical leave law when a baby is born or a parent is sick.
    Under the increase which the Congress voted in 1993 in the earned-
income tax credit, 15 million working families have been given a tax 
cut. It's worth about $1,000 in lower taxes to a family of four with an 
income of less than $28,000, and that's most Hispanic families in the 
United States. And that's one big reason that the welfare rolls are 
down, because we're making work pay. On October 1st, 10 million more 
Americans will get a pay raise when the minimum wage increase goes into 
effect.
    In addition to that, we have moved hard to help small businesses 
where most of the new jobs are being created. Every small business in 
America is now eligible for a substantial tax cut when they spend more 
money to invest in their business, to become more productive or hire new 
people. People who are self-employed are now getting a bigger tax 
deduction on their health insurance premiums. And we've made it a lot 
easier for people in small business to take out pensions for themselves 
and their employees and then to take those pensions from job to job.
    The Kennedy-Kassebaum bill says to 25 million Americans you can't be 
denied health insurance anymore just because you changed jobs or because 
someone in your family has been sick--a very important advance. And I'm 
very pleased that at the end of this session of Congress we finally were 
able to get an agreement that new mothers and their newborns should not 
be thrown out of the hospital before the doctor says that they are ready 
to leave.
    We're breathing cleaner air. Our food standards have been improved. 
We've shut down more toxic waste dumps in the last 3 years than the 
previous administration did in the last 12--the last two. Our deficit 
has gone down 4 years in a row for the first time since before the Civil 
War. That's the good news. Do you want the bad news? The President who 
did that was John Tyler, and John Tyler did not win reelection. 
[Laughter] But it was still a good thing to do, and it's too bad it's 
been 150 years since it happened. And we're better off because that 
means lower interest rates. It means lower interest rates on your car 
payments, your house payments, your credit card payments, lower interest 
rates for business people who borrow money to invest and grow the 
American economy.
    Clearly, if you look at all the evidence we are moving in the right 
direction, and we need to keep right on going in that direction.
    In addition to the 1\1/2\ million new jobs for Hispanic-Americans, 
more than 220,000 of those new businesses are owned by Hispanics. The 
unemployment rate has gone down to single digits for the first time in a 
long time for Hispanics, wages are on the rise. We are clearly moving in 
the right direction.
    Now, one reason I believe that we've been able to do these things is 
that I have done my best to create, as Ed alluded to, a real partnership 
that includes everybody in America who's willing to work with us for the 
common good. I was rather surprised when I came to Washington that I was 
attacked even by some people who claim to be progressive, for making

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an honest effort to put together an administration that looked like 
America. I said that I would never sacrifice quality. I said I believe 
we could have excellence and diversity, but I thought it was worth 
taking a little time to have both because I thought we would be more 
effective.
    If you look at our judicial appointments, which includes a record 
number of Hispanics, a record number of women, a record number of other 
minorities, those judicial appointments as a group have the highest 
ratings from the American Bar Association of any Presidencies since they 
have been doing the ratings. You can have excellence and diversity.
    It's also important that we recognize that in our policymaking and 
in our politics we have people involved. You know that this room is full 
of members of my administration. I mentioned them before, but I want you 
to know that I'm proud of each and every one of them. Their voices are 
heard, their work is legendary, and they have made a difference for you 
and for all the American people. I am proud of them.
    I'd also like to thank the Hispanic-Americans who are in our 
campaign--Linda Chavez-Thompson, the highest ranking Hispanic in 
organized labor, our honorary chair; Ray Martinez, who's left the White 
House to go work in our reelection; and Mickey Ibarra, who's serving as 
a senior adviser, my senior Hispanic in the campaign.
    I'd like to make another announcement tonight. Our campaign, as all 
campaigns do, has to have certain funds accumulated which we have to 
save for other purposes later. We have decided to deposit $5 million 
equally among four minority-owned banks, two Hispanic banks and two 
African-American banks. One is the largest Hispanic-owned commercial 
bank in our country, the International Bank of Commerce in Laredo. The 
other is the Banco Popularo of Puerto Rico, which has a branch in New 
York.
    The $1\1/4\ million going to each bank will help them to support 
inner-city development; it will stimulate growth in other investment. It 
means job stability and new life for their communities. This is the 
first time, I was surprised to learn, that any national campaign has 
made this kind of commitment to any minority-owned bank, and I think it 
is a very good thing to do.
    Ed was saying when he introduced me that we've done a lot of good 
things together, but that is in the past. I didn't like quite the tone 
of it, but I don't think he meant it that way, do you? [Laughter] But it 
reminded me of a story once. When I was running for reelection as 
Governor of my home State in 1984, I went through a litany of things 
that I had done as Governor, just kind of like I just did with you. And 
all I said--and frankly, I thought it was a great speech--I was out in 
the country giving this speech on a country crossroads, and there was a 
man in overalls in the mountains of North Arkansas, in the Ozarks, 
leaning up against a tree--he'd always supported me--listening to this 
speech. I mean, I thought it was really great. I thought I was terrific.
    So after it was over I went up to him, and I said, ``Well, what do 
you think.'' He said, ``Well, that's a pretty good speech.'' He said, 
``I heard all that about what a good job you did. But,'' he said, ``now, 
after all, that is what we hired you to do, and you did draw a paycheck 
every 2 weeks.'' [Laughter] He said, ``This election is about what 
you're going to do if we give you a new contract, not what you did 
before.'' And in truth, that is what this election is about. And my 
record and the record of all those others who are running for office is 
really relevant only as an indication of what we will do in the future 
and whether our general view of the direction for our country is right 
or wrong.
    I believe that this is a profoundly important election because we 
will decide whether to validate my view, which is that what we ought to 
be doing is breaking out of the old stale debates that paralyze politics 
up here too long and being really committed to finishing the work of 
building that bridge, so that every American has the opportunity to make 
the most of his or her life; so that we are growing together, instead of 
coming apart, we're beating the odds in the rest of the world consumed 
by ethnic and religious and tribal and racial hatreds. We're going to 
say, ``No, in America we're going to be together. We're going to make a 
virtue of our diversity and wear it like a badge of honor and a cloak of 
pride.''
    But to do that we have to decide: Are we going to build a bridge to 
the future or try to build a bridge to the past? Is it going to be a 
big, wide bridge strong enough for everybody to walk across and strong 
enough to stay up so that all of our kids and grandkids can walk across 
it after us? And are we going to

[[Page 1673]]

build it together? Do we think it takes a village, or do we think you 
are better off on your own? Is the Government inherently bad and part of 
the problem and totally irrelevant to this modern, high-tech 
entrepreneurial world, or is the Government inherently neither good or 
bad, simply the servant of the people that has a role to play but not 
the only role in the partnerships that we have to create? These are the 
questions we must face in this election.
    I want to build a bridge to the 21st century that will keep this 
economy growing until everybody has a chance to live up to the fullest 
of their abilities. That means a lot of things. It means, yes, we have 
to go on and balance the budget because that will keep interest rates 
down and that will help you to grow, those of you in the private sector 
to grow this country. But it means we have to do it in a way that honors 
our obligations to our parents and our children, to those who through no 
fault of their own need our help and will do better, and so will we, if 
they get a little of our help. We have to honor our obligations to the 
environment and to our future. We have to invest in education and in 
research and technology.
    And if we walk away from those things, we will pay a terrible price, 
and no one will do as well as all of us will if we work together.
    Can we have tax cuts? Yes, we can, but they ought to be targeted to 
the people who need them and to the places that will do the most good, 
to childrearing, to paying for college education, to helping people pay 
for health care or to buy a first-time home or not imposing taxes on the 
gain people have when they sell their homes because that's the only 
savings a lot of families have. We can pay for those things and balance 
the budget and protect Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the 
environment. That's the right direction for the future, and that's the 
way to build a bridge we can all walk across.
    We also have to commit ourselves to the proposition that in the 
modern world education is more important even than it was for us and our 
parents, that our children will be doing jobs that have not been 
invented yet, that many of them will be doing jobs that have not been 
imagined yet. And so it is unacceptable that 40 percent of our third 
graders cannot read on their own. That's why I have a plan to mobilize 
an army, literally an army, of reading tutors to work with teachers and 
schools and with parents so that by the year 2000 every 8-year-old can 
pick up a book and say, ``I can read this all by myself.'' That is 
terribly important.
    We must also understand that technology, if we use it right, offers 
us an opportunity to democratize educational opportunity and educational 
excellence in ways that were never before attainable. If we achieve the 
goal that the Vice President and I have set out, to hook up every 
classroom and every library not only with computers and software and 
trained teachers but to the information superhighway, to the Internet, 
to the World Wide Web, to all these interlocking networks of 
information, if we do that by the year 2000, then for the first time in 
American history the children in the poorest, remotest school district 
in the mountains of my home State of Arkansas, the children in the 
poorest school districts in south Texas, the children in the poorest 
inner-city neighborhood will for the first time ever have access to the 
same information in the same way in the same time as the children in the 
wealthiest districts of the United States. It will explode opportunity 
in the United States if we do it.
    And finally, we ought to build a bridge to the 21st century that 
says we're going to create education for a lifetime for everyone 
beginning with the proposition that everybody who's willing to work hard 
ought to be able to go to college, and we're going to make it available 
to every single person in this country.
    We can do it pretty simply. Almost every American lives within 
driving distance of a community college. I want to say, ``If you'll go 
get 2 years of education after high school, so that we can make that as 
universal in 4 years as a high school education is today, you can take 
the cost of a typical community college tuition right off your tax bill, 
dollar for dollar, a tax credit for 2 years to do that.'' That's paid 
for in our balanced budget plan.
    I want to say you can save in an IRA and withdraw money from that 
IRA with no tax penalty at all if you're paying for a college education. 
And I believe we ought to let people deduct the cost of any education 
after high school for the tuition, up to $10,000 a year, for 
undergraduate school, graduate school, you name it, that money will pay 
itself back many times over.
    I want to build a bridge to the 21st century where everybody has a 
chance to work. And I want to challenge every one of you now to

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examine what your own responsibilities are under this new welfare reform 
law. Let me explain to you exactly what it says, and imagine what it 
means in a community where you live. The law says that the United States 
will continue to guarantee to poor families eligible for welfare health 
care, nutrition, and if the parent goes to work, more child care by far 
than ever before. But the monthly welfare check which used to go--which 
is part Federal money, part State money--which used to go direct to the 
recipient may still continue to do that, but now the States have to come 
up with a plan that will be community-based to move people who are able-
bodied from the welfare check into a paycheck within 2 years.
    Now, the only way this will work is if in every community in the 
country, employers and churches and nonprofits and educational 
institutions, as well as people involved in social work are actively 
involved in this.
    I was just in Kansas City--let me just give you this example, 
because it's important, anybody can do this. Two years ago our 
administration gave the State of Missouri a waiver to try an experiment 
in Kansas City that I have been begging for years every place in America 
to do. Here's what they do in Kansas City. They say, ``If you will hire 
a new employee--not a replacement but a new employee--from the welfare 
rolls, we'll give you the welfare check for up to 4 years as a wage 
supplement. And if you're a small-business person and you don't have a 
health care policy, we'll cover them with Medicaid for 4 years. And in 
that 4 years you have to pay them at least $6 an hour above the minimum 
wage, but let's say the welfare check is worth $2 an hour, or $2.50, you 
keep that, and that's what we pay you for helping us give those folks a 
new life, for training them, for investing in them, for dealing with 
people who may have never been in the workforce before and all the 
little problems that may mean, but we want you to give them a new 
chance.''
    I met a man running a business with 25 employees, 5 of his employees 
are people who came from the welfare rolls. He says they're all doing 
great. And when they leave, if they leave early, he can keep that 
position for up to 10 years if he'll keep bringing people onto the 
welfare rolls. Folks, if we do that in every community in the country 
and people like you sign up and say, ``What can I do? This is now my 
problem. I'm tired of complaining about it. We have a responsibility to 
give people a future and the ability to support their children, and I 
will participate.'' We can solve this problem, and we'll have a 
community-based support system for poor families that is work-oriented 
and that does not isolate people. But we have to do it, and I am 
committed to helping the States and the cities create a million new jobs 
to solve that problem in the next 4 years, and I want to ask you to 
help.
    Let me say, there's a lot more things that I could talk about. There 
are things we have to do in crime, things we have to do in the 
environment. We have health care challenges still to go. Our balanced 
budget plan helps people keep their health insurance when they're 
between jobs for 6 months--5 million people a year change jobs and are 
without health insurance for some time just because they're changing 
jobs and they're unemployed for several months. We have a lot more to 
do.
    But the main thing I want to say to you is we have to decide whether 
we believe we have an obligation to work toward this future together. 
This is not about big Government. We have the smallest Government in 
Washington we've had since President Kennedy was here. And as a 
percentage of our workforce, it's the smallest it's been since Franklin 
Roosevelt took the oath of office in 1933. That is a red herring. But we 
do need--we do need--a Government that can bring us together and help us 
to go forward together.
    There are some things we cannot do on our own. We're building a 
supercomputer with IBM, and IBM is no tiny company, they needed us to 
help. It's a research project that will give us a supercomputer that--
listen to this--will do more calculations in one second than you can go 
home and do on your hand-held calculator in 30,000 years. Now, I don't 
know about you, but I think it's worth it, I want America to have the 
first one of those. And it means more jobs and more discoveries.
    Every time we send a mission into space we learn something else 
about how the human body works and we learn something else about the 
Earth's environment that will help our children and our grandchildren 
create opportunity and live in a better world. The investments we have 
made in the last few years have reaped untold benefits. The average life 
expectancy of people with AIDS and HIV has more than doubled

[[Page 1675]]

in the last 4 years alone because of medical research and moving drugs 
to market faster.
    A lot of you were very moved, as I was, I'm sure, by Christopher 
Reeve's wonderful speech at the Democratic Convention. At about the time 
he made that speech, just a few days before, for the first time in 
history laboratory animals whose spines had been severed had movement in 
their lower limbs because of nerve transplants. That's what research 
brings you.
    So it is simply not true that we do not need to invest in our common 
future--whether it's education, the environment, health care, research, 
or technology. We do. It does take a village and we do have to build a 
bridge and that is the decision before the American people that I know 
you, the most family-oriented group in the United States, will help to 
make the right decision.
    Let me also say a strong word of thanks to every Member of Congress 
here today that helped us to get that Gallegly provision out of the 
immigration bill. It was a great victory.
    For the life of me, I could never understand why the leaders of the 
other party wanted to put that provision in and try to turn teachers 
into people who would be putting kids on the street--when every law 
enforcement agency, every education agency in the world said so. So we 
got it out of there. Oh, if it comes to my desk, it's history. But I 
don't think the Gallegly amendment will even pass now. I don't believe 
the Senate will vote for it. I believe when it's put up there, I doubt 
very seriously that the Senate will do that. But, anyway, for those of 
you that helped to get it out, I thank you.
    Let me also say that I do believe we should have a tough, strong 
defense against people who violate our immigration laws, because it's 
unfair to people who wait in line to be legal immigrants. But I'm proud 
of the fact that this year, by the end of 1996, more than one million 
people will have become citizens by naturalization in one year. That is 
more than twice as many as last year. And I think one of the things 
that's happened here in this very ill-advised assault on legal 
immigrants, the people who have carried it on have made a lot more 
people interested in becoming citizens and exercising their right to 
vote and being heard and saying we don't appreciate people who try to 
divide the American people. And that is a very positive thing.
    Let me just close with this thought: There's no country in the world 
better positioned for the 21st century than we are, in no small measure 
because of you. Our neighbors to the south, all the way to the tip of 
South America, are the second fastest growing region in the world. 
They're our trading partners, our friends, all but one of their 
countries is a democracy. If you think about how well America is 
positioned, what we have to do is to create the conditions in which we 
have opportunity and responsibility so we're making progress on our own 
challenges here at home. And then we have to beat this terrible thing 
that has bedeviled the rest of the world, this curse of the human spirit 
which makes whole groups of people believe that the only way they can 
exist and feel important is if they have some other group of people to 
look down on, to hate, to fight, to shoot.
    Look at Bosnia, a small country where biologically the Croats, the 
Serbs, and the Muslims are indistinguishable. There is no true ethnic 
difference. They are in different groups because of accidents of 
political history. They lived together in peace and harmony for decades, 
and in no time at all they were killing each other's children. Now we've 
had peace for several months, nearly a year; now we've had elections. 
It's going to be a long road back for people that had, among other 
things, one of the most beautiful cities in the world in Sarajevo and 
were willing to throw it all away just so they could feel superior to 
somebody else.
    Look at Northern Ireland, where they had a cease-fire for 15 months, 
and Hillary and I went over there and the Catholics and the Protestants 
lined the streets together and cheered. And people who did not have the 
patience for peace broke the cease-fire. Then others did things that 
were foolish. Now they're back to arguing about battles that occurred 
600 years ago, that have nothing to do with the future of any Catholic 
or Protestant child in Northern Ireland.
    Look at the Middle East, where every day we see both the 
exhilaration and the heartbreak that comes from the progress of peace 
and the shattering of hopes because they cannot lay down the things 
which have driven stakes in too many hearts. Some people say I overreact 
when a church is burned or a synagogue is defaced or an Islamic center 
is destroyed in this country. But what makes this country work is you 
don't have to be in any ethnic or racial

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or religious group; all you have to do is say I believe in the 
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, show 
up tomorrow, do the right thing, raise your kids, and you're part of our 
country. That is what is special about America.
    And so, I understand there are difficult issues, and I understand 
when people are having a hard time economically they get frustrated. But 
that's why I fought to mend affirmative action instead of destroy it. 
That's why I stood against Proposition 187 in California and the CPRI, 
because I think we have to prove that America is different. And we're 
going to be given a chance to prove it.
    Think how tragic it would be if having won the cold war for freedom, 
seeing the nuclear threat recede--I was so proud that America was the 
first country to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty 
yesterday at the United Nations, banning all nuclear testing forever. 
Think how tragic it would be if we did all that and then we saw the 
world consumed by terrorism, by weapons of mass destruction like 
biological and chemical weapons, by organized crime and drug gangs and 
all that, but all of it rooted in nations consumed by tribal, racial, 
ethnic, and religious hatred.
    It does not have to be that way. We know better. We know better.
    So all of us, but especially you, who have succeeded, who are 
articulate, who can pierce people's heart and get people's reasoning 
going, you've got to say one of the things that we have to say to 
ourselves and to the world in this season of democratic choosing is this 
is one country, we like our diversity, we are proud of it, and we are 
going to take it into the next century. All of us are going across that 
bridge because we know if we do that our best days are still ahead.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:50 p.m. at the Washington Hilton Hotel. 
In his remarks, he referred to Representative Ed Pastor, chair, Rita 
Elizondo, executive director, and Representative Bill Richardson, board 
of directors, Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute; ABC newsman John 
Quinones, master of ceremonies; and actor Christopher Reeve.