[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[October 23, 1996]
[Pages 1904-1907]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Daytona Beach, Florida
October 23, 1996

    The President. Good morning, Daytona Beach, good morning! It is 
great to be here. Thank you very much for turning out in such large 
numbers, for your enthusiasm. We've got the Seminoles and the Gators 
together on something; that's great. Thank you. Congratulations on your 
great seasons.
    Mayor Asher, I am delighted to be back in Daytona Beach, and I must 
say I thought it was beautiful when I was here 4 years ago. We spent the 
night, and we started out one of our bus trips here. But this beautiful 
downtown area is even more beautiful this year. Congratulations. I'm 
glad to be here.
    I want to thank the people who appeared on the pre-program before we 
came: our congressional candidate, George Stuart; Ted Doran, Janet 
Bokum, Susanne Kosmas--Janet Bollum, let me say it right--and Susanne 
Kosmas, who are running for the legislature. I want to thank those who 
came with me here: Insurance Commissioner Bill Nelson and Attorney 
General Bob Butterworth. I want to thank your wonderful Congresswoman, 
Corrine Brown, one of the most energetic people that I have ever worked 
with; your great Senator, Bob Graham, who served with me as Governor and 
is one of the most intelligent and gifted and far-sighted public 
servants I have ever worked with. Thank you, Bob Graham, for being here 
with me. And thank you, Governor Lawton Chiles, for so many things, but 
for proving that we can work together to make Florida and America a 
better place in so many ways. Thank you, sir, for your leadership.
    I want to say more about the other two folks that are up here with 
me in a moment, but let me just say to Brian DeMarco, thank you, sir, 
for taking the time out of a different and busy career as a football 
player to stand up for the responsibility that all fathers have to pay 
child support for their children if they're not supporting them 
directly. You could be doing a lot of other things with your time, and 
you've set a great role model, a great example for America. And I thank 
you and the other athletes that are doing that.
    And thank you, Ana Armstrong. Before I came out here I met with Ana 
and three other young women who are working and educating

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themselves off of welfare so that they could succeed as parents and in 
the work force--Lizette Riveria, Karen Watson, and Joyce Meinert--along 
with Marcia Bush and Gerald Frisby, who work with them. And I want to 
talk more about them in a moment, but I just wanted to thank them for 
the work they have done.
    I'd also like to thank the people who provided our music today: 
Time, the Mark Hobson Band, and the Bethune-Cookman College Gospel Choir 
and Concert Chorale; thank you.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I came here to Florida less than 2 weeks from 
the election which will elect the last President of the 20th century and 
the first President of the 21st century. It is your choice. You have to 
decide whether we're going to build a bridge to the future or try to 
build a bridge to the past. You have to decide whether to tell the 
American people they have to get into that future on their own, or 
whether that bridge is going to be big enough and wide enough for all of 
us to walk across together. You have to decide whether we're going to 
say to folks, ``You're on your own,'' or whether we're going to say, 
``Yes, it does take a village to raise our children and build our 
future.''
    Four years ago I came to Daytona Beach amid a time of high 
unemployment, rising frustration, and increasing division. Compared to 4 
years ago we are better off, and we are on the right track to that 21st 
century. The unemployment rate in Florida has dropped to an 8-year low. 
We have 10\1/2\ million new jobs, a 15-year high in homeownership. We 
have declining crime rates for 4 years in a row and almost 2 million 
people fewer on welfare than there were when I took the oath of office. 
We are moving in the right direction.
    Now it is for you to decide what path we will take to the 21st 
century. I want to ask all of you--there are a lot of young people in 
this audience today, and I thank you for coming. There are a lot of 
parents who brought their children here today and their grandchildren; I 
thank you for doing that. And I ask all of you when you go home tonight 
to take a little time in a quiet moment before you go to bed and see if 
you can answer this question: What do you want your country to look like 
when we start the 21st century, and what do you want your country to be 
like when your children are your age?
    For me, it is a simple but profound issue, and it's a question as 
your President I deal with every day. I know what I want for America. I 
want us to start that new century with the American dream alive and well 
for every person responsible enough to work for it. I want us to keep 
leading the world for peace and freedom and prosperity. And I want us, 
amidst all our diversity, to be coming together, not to be torn apart. I 
want us to have families where people can succeed in raising their 
children and at work. I want us to live in harmony with our natural 
environment. And I want us to live in harmony with each other. I do not 
want America to be torn apart by the racial, the religious, the ethnic, 
the tribal hatreds that are consuming so much of the rest of the world. 
That is what I want for America.
    Now, you'll have to decide what path you want to take. Your vote 
will decide whether we balance the budget while we protect our 
obligations to the future through education and the environment and 
protect our obligations to each other through Medicare and Medicaid, or 
whether we adopt a dangerous scheme that would increase the deficit, 
weaken the economy, and undermine the very values we seek to advance. 
Your vote will decide whether we build on the family and medical leave 
law and our efforts to protect our children from drugs and guns and 
gangs and tobacco, or turn back to a course that has failed in the past.
    Your vote will decide whether we build on our efforts, so far 
successful, to tell people, ``No more can you lose your health insurance 
because somebody in your family has been sick or because you've changed 
jobs. No more can a new mother and a newborn be kicked out of a hospital 
after 24 hours by an insurance company's office.'' Your vote will decide 
whether we continue to add people to the ranks of health insured, 
whether we continue to help people, as I propose, by helping people when 
they are unemployed to keep their health insurance for several months 
more, or whether we stop that.
    Your vote will decide whether we continue to put 100,000 police on 
the street, continue to follow those strategies which have brought the 
crime rate down for 4 years in a row until we bring it down 4 more years 
and everybody feels safe on our streets, in our schools, in our 
neighborhoods again. Your vote will decide.
    Your vote will decide whether we keep on cleaning up the 
environment. We have made

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the air purer, our drinking water and food safer. We've cleaned up more 
toxic waste dumps than any administration before. We have moved to save 
the Florida Everglades and other national precious possessions. Your 
vote will decide whether we can continue to do that, or whether we will 
weaken our commitment to our common environment and our children's 
future.
    Your vote will decide whether we can continue to advance the cause 
of education. Yesterday I was in south Florida at the Miami-Dade 
Community College, where I pointed out that we have just increased Pell 
grants by the largest amount in 20 years. We made 10 million American 
students eligible for lower cost college loans with better repayment 
terms so you can't go broke repaying your loans.
    And your vote will decide which of two competing visions of 
education we adopt. My vision is an America in which every 8-year-old 
can read. We're going to mobilize a million volunteers to help people 
teach their children and to help teachers teach children to read so that 
every 8-year-old in America in the year 2000 can pick up a book and say, 
``I can read this all by myself.''
    Your vote will decide whether the United States, for the first time 
in history, helps desperately overcrowded schools in substandard 
conditions to build new facilities adequate to the 21st century. The 
United States has never helped school districts and States do this. My 
plan will lower the interest rates to save money for taxpayers if you 
make the efforts to meet the needs of your children. Your vote will 
decide whether we do that.
    Your vote will decide whether we connect every classroom and every 
library and every school in America to that information superhighway, to 
the Internet, to the World Wide Web--to give all of our children access 
to it. And to those of you who, like me, didn't grow up in the computer 
age and may not understand what that means, let me tell you in plain 
language. If we can hook up every classroom with good computers, good 
educational materials, trained teachers, and access to the Internet, it 
means for the first time in the entire history of the United States, for 
the first time, every child in every school, public or private, rich, 
middle class, or poor, in every school, will for the first time have 
access to the same world of information in the same time at the same 
level of quality. It will revolutionize opportunity in America. Your 
vote will decide.
    Your vote will decide whether finally we take a step we should have 
taken long ago and open the doors of college education to every single 
American who is willing to work and go. Under my plan, Americans will be 
able to deduct from their tax bill, dollar for dollar, the cost of 
college tuition for the first 2 years of community college after high 
school. I want to make at least 2 years of education after high school 
as universal in 4 years as a high school diploma is today.

[At this point, an audience member required medical assistance.]

    The President. We need my medical team over here. Hold up your hand, 
folks. I bring a doctor with me wherever I go. The medical team over 
here, right here in front. And one more in the back.
    And let me just say this: I want to give a $10,000 tax deduction per 
year for the cost of any kind of college tuition at any level, 
undergraduate or graduate. Your vote will decide. Your vote will decide.
    Now, let me say your vote will also decide where we go on welfare 
reform. Weren't you proud of Ana Armstrong when she stood up here and 
talked about her future and what she's going to do? [Applause] Folks, 
most people I've met on welfare over the last 20 years--and I've met a 
lot of them--are like Ana Armstrong. They don't want to be on welfare, 
they want to work. And they want their children to be able to look up to 
them and say what they do for living. They want to have a good future. 
But we have been saddled for too long by a system that promotes 
dependence and undermines people's ability to live up to their dreams, 
instead of one that promotes independence.
    I ran for office in 1992, and I told you here in Daytona that I 
would work to end welfare as we know it and to convert it to a system 
that promotes independence, good parenting, and successful work. And 
that's exactly what we're doing. We've moved almost 2 million people 
from welfare to work. In Florida alone the welfare rolls have dropped 25 
percent in the last 4 years, thanks to the leadership of Governor Chiles 
and people like those with whom I met today.
    Brian DeMarco wants people to pay their child support. We launched 
an unprecedented crackdown on child support. We have used

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every resource available to the Federal Government. And today the 
National Government is releasing its statistics. Compared to 4 years 
ago, child support collections are 50 percent higher, almost 4 billion 
more dollars for the children of America--from their parents, not from 
the taxpayers.
    And again, Florida has done even better. Child support collections 
in Florida are up over 60 percent over 4 years ago. Last month, Governor 
Chiles announced a program with the Miami Dolphins, the Tampa Bay 
Buccaneers, and the Jacksonville Jaguars called Don't Drop the Ball. 
Brian DeMarco is saying simply to the fathers of this country, ``If you 
don't live with your children, you still ought to help support them. 
Don't drop the ball.'' We're going to keep going until we raise child 
support more and more and more. We will move hundreds of thousands of 
people off welfare by making sure that the parents do what they ought to 
do, take responsibility for their children and their future. Thank you, 
Brian DeMarco. Thank you, Governor Chiles. Thank you, Florida.
    Now, I signed a new welfare reform bill, and here is what it says. 
It says the National Government will continue to guarantee to poor 
families health care and food for the children and, if they go to work, 
more for child care than ever. But within 2 years people must move to 
turn that welfare check into a paycheck. Florida was one of the first 
three States--one of the first three--to be approved by the National 
Government to go forward with welfare reform.
    Now, you have to decide, what are we going to do? It's fine to tell 
people they have to go to work, but there has to be work there for them 
and education and training. The jobs have got to be there. If you want 
more stories like Ana Armstrong, we have a plan, not rhetoric but a 
plan, to work with the private sector, to work with States, to work with 
communities like Daytona Beach, all over America, to move at least one 
million more people from welfare to work in the next 4 years. Will you 
help us build that bridge to the future? [Applause]
    So there it is. It's your choice. It's your decision. Your vote will 
decide, and whether you vote will decide. Don't let anybody in this 
community, don't let anyone you know anywhere in America believe that 
their vote doesn't make a difference. This is a different country than 
it was 4 years ago. Our country is stronger than it was 4 years ago. And 
4 years from now, on the bills that we're--on that bridge we're all 
going to build together, we will go roaring into the 21st century with 
our best days ahead. Will you help us build that bridge? [Applause]
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:40 p.m. at Beach and Magnolia Streets. 
In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Baron H. Asher of Daytona Beach; 
George Stuart, candidate for Florida's Seventh Congressional District; 
Ted Doran, Janet Bollum, and Susanne Kosmas, candidates for the Florida 
House of Representatives; Brian DeMarco, offensive guard, NFL 
Jacksonville Jaguars; Ana Armstrong, Lizette Riveria, Karen Watson, and 
Joyce Meinert, students, and Gerald Frisby, dean of adult education and 
training, Daytona Beach Community College; and Marcia Bush, program 
administrator, Florida Department of Children and Families.