[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[October 25, 1996]
[Pages 1923-1926]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Community in Atlanta, Georgia
October 25, 1996

    The President. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hello, Atlanta! Are 
you feeling good? You made the Sun come out.
    Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to be in Atlanta and in 
Georgia. I thank all of you for being here, but I want to say a special 
word of thanks to those who have helped this be a great youth day for 
our campaign all across America. We're talking to young Americans about 
their future.
    So let's give this great band Cracker another hand. Didn't they do a 
good job? [Applause] And I thank my longtime supporter Michael Stipe 
from R.E.M. for coming here. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Kathleen 
Bertrand, for singing the national anthem so beautifully. And thank you, 
Becky Ahmann, for giving us an example of the future we are trying to 
build in your own life. She gave a good speech, didn't she? She ought to 
do this for a living.
    I thank all the distinguished Georgians who are here, but one 
especially. Thank you, Coretta Scott King, for coming today to be with 
us. Thank you. Mayor Campbell, thank you for your indefatigable 
enthusiasm and for your positive leadership of this great city. Billy 
Payne, thank you for your support and for making the Atlanta games the 
greatest games in the history of the Olympics. You did a brilliant job.
    To all the political leaders who are here, the State elected 
officials, Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and the others who are here--
she's still fighting, and she's going to be rewarded on election day--I 
thank you all.
    Georgia has given many great leaders to America: Martin Luther King; 
President Jimmy Carter; my great friend of many years John Lewis, who 
talked about building his own bridges today; Zell Miller, who has given 
the Nation an idea with the HOPE scholarships in Georgia. But when the 
history of this era is written, there will be few people who have made 
the contribution to our security and our future that Senator Sam Nunn 
has, and we are all in his debt. Sam Nunn was one of the first people 
who convinced me that we ought to have a national service program to 
give young people a chance to serve in their communities and earn their 
way through college, and 60,000 young Americans have been part of 
AmeriCorps. Thank you, Sam Nunn, for that. Sam Nunn led the fight to get 
Congress to appropriate funds to help the Russians pay to tear up their 
nuclear missiles and their nuclear missile sites. And he's one of the 
big reasons that there are no Russian missiles targeted at the young 
people of the United States of America today. Thank you, Senator Sam 
Nunn.
    And Georgia is about to be given a chance to add another person to 
the list of distinguished nationally significant servants of the people 
of this great State and our country. And I hope you will send Max 
Cleland to the United States Senate. You know, every time we have an 
election, someone stands up and starts talking about sacrifice and 
serving your country. I think we all know that Max Cleland knows 
something about sacrifice and serving our country. And yet, he just kept 
on giving. He never quit giving to America. And----

[At this point, there was a disturbance in the audience.]

    The President. You all relax. When people don't have a side of their 
own to make, they try to shout their opponents down. Just relax. Just 
relax.
    Let me tell you, Max Cleland has kept on giving for a lifetime, with 
a smile on his face and a song in his heart, always reaching out his 
hand to other people. Now, the other side, their idea of sacrifice is to 
take Head Start away from 5-year-olds, college loans away from students, 
to take the environment away from all of our people, and to weaken our 
future economy for short-term promises. I think Max Cleland's idea of 
service to America is the right

[[Page 1924]]

one, and I believe Georgians will agree. [Applause] Thank you.
    Now, you know, I want to talk most, if anything, to the young people 
today. This is your election, and we need you. You have most of your 
tomorrows in front of you, you have your future out there ahead of you, 
and you have to decide about that. I appreciate what Senator Nunn said 
about the last 4 years. It is true that we're better off than we were. 
It is true that we have more jobs, that the other side talked about 
being conservative but our administration is the first one to take the 
deficit down in each of our 4 years in the 20th century. It is true that 
the other guys talked about how bad the big old Federal Government was, 
but it's our administration working with our allies in Congress who has 
cut the size of the Federal Government, the number of regulations, the 
number of Government programs, and we have privatized more Government 
operations than the last two Republican administrations did in 12 years 
combined. That's the truth.
    But there is a difference. We still believe that we have 
responsibilities to move forward together. And that's what you have to 
decide, all you young people, whether you want a future in which you're 
told, ``You're on your own, and we hope you have a nice life,'' or 
whether you believe it does take a village to raise a child, protect the 
environment, and build a future. You have to decide. You have to decide.
    What is this future of yours going to be like? Well, we know it will 
be dominated by information and technology. We know that ideas and 
information and money and technology will move around the world in a 
split second. We know that the borders that divide us will increasingly 
come down and we'll be drawn closer together with people all around the 
world. We know there will be new security threats even as the cold war 
fades away: terrorism, the proliferation of chemical and biological and 
other sophisticated weapons. We know that ethnic and racial and 
religious hatreds can cross national borders. We know all that.
    And we know that there will be new challenges to the way we work and 
live and relate to each other. We know today, already, that most 
parents, even parents with very comfortable incomes, face repeated 
challenges in fulfilling their obligations to their children as parents 
and succeeding in the workplace. We know there will be a lot of changes.
    When Becky Ahmann was up here talking, she told you how she was able 
to leave her business in New York, move to Georgia, and keep working for 
her business in New York by working at home. When I became President, 
there were 3 million Americans doing that; today there are over 12 
million Americans like Becky Ahmann. When we start that new century just 
4 years from now, there will be 30 million Americans like her. That's 
how fast we're changing.
    We know we're pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. We have 
funded a project with IBM to develop a supercomputer in the next couple 
of years that will do more calculations in a second than you can do on 
your hand-held calculator in 30,000 years.
    We have seen for the first time in history laboratory animals with 
their spines completely severed having movement in their lower limbs 
because of nerve transplants from other parts of their body to their 
spines. It's just a matter of time until we can do that for Americans 
and for people all over the world. We have uncovered, in the last 4 
years, two of the genes which cause breast cancer. It's just a matter of 
time until we have the earliest possible detection and eventually 
prevention. Because of the space program, we have developed 
sophisticated imaging technology that soon we can put across human 
bodies and find cancers in their very incipiency so that we'll be able 
to save more lives than ever before. We have more than doubled the life 
expectancy for people who have HIV and AIDS in the last 4 years; it's on 
the verge of becoming a chronic illness.
    These things have happened. That is the world we have to prepare 
for. And that is the world you must decide about. And so I say to you: 
If you want to have a future and a world like that, like I do, where 
everybody has a chance to live up to their God-given capacity, where 
everyone who is responsible should have a chance to live out their 
dreams, where everybody respects everyone else's right to work and live 
and we come together in a community, we're not divided, race against 
race, man against woman, among each other, if that is the America you 
want, then you have some responsibilities, too.
    You must decide whether you want to balance the budget to keep our 
economy growing while we protect our investments in education, the 
environment, Medicare, Medicaid, and research

[[Page 1925]]

or whether you want to adopt a risky scheme that will blow a hole in the 
deficit, require bigger cuts in those things, and take us backward. That 
is your decision. The young people of America must decide that.
    You must decide whether you believe we can improve the environment 
and grow the economy. I know we can. Today, the air is cleaner, your 
drinking water is safer, your food is safer. We have set aside more 
lands for national parks. We are saving the Florida Everglades. We 
protected Yellowstone Park from a gold mine. But we are also making 
America economically healthier. And if you will help me, I'll do 
something I know is close to John Lewis' heart. In the next 4 years 
we're going to clean up 500 more toxic waste sites so our kids will be 
growing up next to parks, not poison.
    This is an important election for young people. You will have to 
decide whether we are going to reform a welfare system in a way that 
gives poor people a real chance. It's one thing to say to people, you 
must go to work if you're able-bodied. It's quite another thing to go to 
work. There has to be a job at the end of that requirement. And I'm 
committed to doing that. You will have to decide.
    More than anything else, you will have to decide if you really 
believe now that we've gotten the crime down to a 10-year low--the crime 
rate has gone down 4 years in a row in America. We can actually make our 
streets safe again if we do more to prevent our kids from getting in 
trouble in the first place, to finish the job of putting 100,000 police 
on the street, to keep the safe and drug-free schools program alive in 
our schools. The other side wants to cut back on all that. It is your 
decision. I think you want safe streets, a drug-free youth, and a safe 
school program. You will have to decide.
    More than anything else, your decision about what kind of 
educational opportunities we offer to the American people will shape the 
future. I want an America in which we have a country where every 
classroom and every library and every school is hooked up to the 
information superhighway. Will you help us do that? [Applause]
    I want an America where, for the first time in history, children in 
the poorest and smallest rural school districts in Georgia and Arkansas 
have access at the same time in the same way at the same level of 
quality to the same information children in the wealthiest, best funded 
school districts in America have. Will you help us do that? [Applause]
    And we can build an America in which for the first time every single 
person who is willing to work for it can go on to college. Under our 
plan, we propose to give people a tax credit, a dollar-for-dollar 
reduction on their taxes to give up to 2 years of college and make it as 
universal as high school is today, an American version of Georgia's HOPE 
scholarship. Will you help us do that? [Applause] We propose in our 
balanced budget plan to give people a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a 
year for any kind of college tuition. Will you help us do that? 
[Applause]
    But we also need your help to do some things. Forty percent of the 
8-year-olds in America today, 40 percent of them can still not read a 
book on their own. All these children I want to go to college, all these 
children we want to fool with the computers, if they can't read, they 
can't succeed. I have proposed to put together one million volunteers so 
that we can help the parents and the schools of this country, so that in 
4 years every 8-year-old in the United States can pick up a book and 
say, ``I can read this all by myself, all by myself.'' And I challenge 
all of you----
    Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
    The President. ----all of you young people to help us do that. I 
challenge you to volunteer in this community, in communities all across 
Georgia to help us do that. We have 60,000 now, people serving in 
AmeriCorps. More of them will do it. Last month, just before the 
Congress adjourned, they approved my request for a huge increase in the 
number of students who can be in work-study programs while working their 
way through college. Today I propose that 100,000 of those work-study 
students join the America Reads initiative and make up 10 percent of 
those million volunteers we need. I want you to support that. I want you 
to tell me that you will help to teach a child to read, to help people 
in this community who need it, to make this community one.
    You know, one of the most impressive things I know about Senator 
Nunn is that his daughter was one of the founders of Hands On Atlanta. 
And a lot of you have probably been part of that, but that's the last 
point I want to make to you today.

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    Senator Nunn brushed over it, but you think about how much time as 
your President I spend dealing with people around the world who are 
killing each other and killing each other's children because they refuse 
to get along, because they think they have to hate each other, because 
they have religious or ethnic or racial or tribal differences, people in 
Rwanda, in Burundi, people in Bosnia, people in Northern Ireland, people 
in the Middle East, people in Haiti. Why can't people get along? Why do 
they have to look down on each other? Why do they have to think they're 
good because someone else is bad?
    The part of America that will carry us into the 21st century, more 
than scientific discovery, more than computers, more than anything else 
is--look around this crowd. We've got people here from everywhere. And 
we learned an important lesson in the civil rights struggle that we can 
now take into a much more diverse country than we were in the fifties 
and sixties.
    When I was with Billy Payne and Governor Miller and Mayor Campbell 
and we opened the Olympics and Hillary and Chelsea came with me, there 
were people from 192 different racial, national, and ethnic groups here 
for the Olympics. Our biggest county, Los Angeles County, has people 
from over 150 of those places in one American county--one.
    So I say to you, the most important thing is that we have to prove 
we're not going to be like all those other countries. That's why I stood 
up against those church burnings. That's why, after the terrible tragedy 
of Oklahoma City, I asked the American people to stop hating public 
servants who happen to work for their Federal Government because we have 
to say in America, ``Hey, we're all in this together. If you believe in 
the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, if you're willing to show up 
tomorrow and do your job, you're a part of our America. We don't need to 
know anything else about you. We don't need to know anything else about 
you.''
    I want all of us to be able to say, ``We don't need to look down on 
anybody else to feel good about ourselves and our families and our 
future.'' And I want all of us to say, ``We believe that we have an 
obligation to serve as citizens to help our children to read, to deal 
with the other problems in our community, to save the generation of our 
young people who are in trouble still today because they're more 
vulnerable to gangs and guns and drugs and other problems that threaten 
their future. We're going to help them, and we're going to do it 
together.''
    That's the big question in this election. Do you believe we ought to 
build a bridge to the future we can all walk across? [Applause] Do you 
want that to be the future for you and your children in the 21st 
century? [Applause] Are you prepared to do what it takes to help us 
build that bridge? [Applause] You be there on November 5th, and we'll 
build it together.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:50 p.m. in Woodruff Park. In his 
remarks, he referred to musician Michael Stipe; Becky Ahmann, who spoke 
prior to the President; civil rights activist Coretta Scott King; Mayor 
Bill Campbell of Atlanta; William P. Payne, president and chief 
executive officer, Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games; 
Representative John Lewis; and Gov. Zell Miller of Georgia.