[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[October 28, 1996]
[Pages 1956-1961]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Minneapolis, Minnesota
October 28, 1996

    The President. Hello, Minnesota! Thank you. Thank you. Wow! Thank 
you. Let me say, first of all, with 8 days to go in this election, to 
come out here and see this shining sea of enthusiastic, exuberant faces, 
believing in our country and believing in our future, I'd rather hear 
your cheers than my words any day. You have made this the event it is. 
Thank you, thank you.
    I want to thank the Members of Congress who are here, Congressmen 
Martin Sabo and Bruce Vento and Bill Luther. I thank Attorney General 
Skip Humphrey, who has been the chair of my campaign, for all he has 
done, but especially for being one of the first leaders to stand up and 
say it is time to stop the tobacco companies from advertising, marketing 
tobacco to our children. Thank you, Skip Humphrey.
    I thank your State party chair, Mark Andrew, for his leadership. I 
want to thank the Sounds of Blackness. They were wonderful. Thank you.
    I know that Minnesota is a great sports town, and we have two of 
your greatest athletes today here. I want to recognize them. Kevin 
Garnett from the Timberwolves, stand up. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. 
And one of the greatest baseball players in modern history, who just got 
his 3,000th hit this season with the Minnesota Twins, Paul Molitor. 
Paul, stand up. Thank you. They're here because they want to make sure 
you vote on election day. Are you going to do it?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. I thank you, Mary Rieder, for being willing to run 
against what was done in the last Congress by Speaker Gingrich and 
Senator Dole, and for being willing to run for the people of Minnesota. 
Will you help Mary Rieder serve you in the Congress in Minnesota? 
[Applause] I want to say a little more about that in a minute.
    And I want to thank Paul Wellstone. You know, over the last 22 
years, since I first ran for public office as a very young man--I can 
remember when I was a young man--[laughter]--I have had the privilege to 
meet many people in public life, men and women of all backgrounds, 
races, all political philosophies. I have to say, even though it's not 
fashionable in the heat of a campaign, that most of the people I have 
met in both parties and from different philosophies loved our country, 
wanted to do the right thing, and were harder working and more honest 
than they ever got credit for. But if you were to ask me after 22 years, 
here on the verge of my last election, what is the most important 
characteristic a public official can have, day-in and day-out, year-in 
and year-out, I would say it's a good thing to be smart because there 
are complicated problems. It's a good thing if you're physically strong 
because it can be exhausting. And now more than ever you need a thick 
hide; that's a good thing. [Laughter] It's very important to have common 
sense, and it's important to be able to communicate what you feel to 
people so they can understand it. But the most important quality is the 
one that Paul Wellstone has in abundance, a great heart. It is most 
important to have a great heart.
    You know, Hillary and I always love to come to Minnesota. I love 
being here. I thought about this State a lot over the years. Our 
daughter came here to summer camp to the Concordia Language Village for 
many years. So I had a chance to come here many times when I was 
completely anonymous, back when I still had a life. [Laughter] And I 
sort of conducted my own little sociological survey of this remarkable 
place. And I've noticed that Minnesotans are independent; they'll vote 
for Republicans, and they'll vote for Democrats. I've noticed that they

[[Page 1957]]

don't like name-calling very much and that, historically, they've been 
quite progressive. And I've noticed also what I think is the most 
important characteristic in terms of the decisions we make about our 
future, which is that, historically at least, across party lines, in 
this State you've had a very strong sense of community, a sense that we 
have to do some things by working together, a sense that, as somebody 
that I know and care a lot about once said, it does take a village to 
raise our children and build our future.
    And 8 days from this election, most of what I guess we need is a lot 
of your enthusiasm and energy and the kind of thing I've already heard 
today. But I hope you will stop and think, too, just a minute. I hope 
tonight before you go to bed you'll do something that I do, I try to do 
every day. I hope you'll ask yourself a simple question: This is the 
last election for President of the 20th century, the first election of 
the 21st century; what do you want your country to look like when we 
start that great new era in 4 years? What do you want your country to be 
like when your children are your age?
    For me, the answer is simple but profound: I want an America where 
the American dream of being able to live out your dreams is alive and 
well for every citizen who is responsible enough to work for it. I want 
an America that is still leading the world for peace and freedom and 
prosperity. And I want an America where, unlike so much of the rest of 
the world, we are coming together with our diversity, making ourselves 
stronger, where everybody has a place and a future in our America.
    And that is the choice you face. For 4 years we have relentlessly 
pursued an aggressive strategy to create opportunity for all, to get 
more responsibility from all of our citizens, and to create an American 
community where everyone has a role to play and a place at the table. 
Four years ago when I came to Minnesota and the people supported Al Gore 
and Bill Clinton, you took us on faith; you couldn't have known. Well, 
now there is a record.
    Today we have even more evidence that we're on the right track to 
the 21st century. Earlier today I announced the official figures for the 
deficit in 1996. When I took office, it was $290 billion; this year, it 
is $107 billion. My fellow Americans, 4 years ago I said if you gave us 
a chance we'd cut that deficit in half to get interest rates down and 
get the economy going again. It's been cut by 63 percent in 4 years. If 
you adjust the dollars for inflation, we have the lowest deficit in 22 
years. It is a smaller percentage of our income than that of any other 
advanced economy in the entire world. And I want to say a special word 
of thanks to one of the chief engineers of the economic plan of 1993 
which made it possible, Congressman Martin Sabo of Minnesota. Thank you, 
sir.
    Now, there's been a lot of name-calling in these races up here. But 
you need to know when we brought the deficit down there was not a single 
member of the other party who voted for it. They said it would wreck the 
economy. They said it would bring us a recession. They said it would 
increase interest rates. They said the deficit would not go down.
    Well, Paul Wellstone said, ``I think we ought to bring the deficit 
down and keep investing in the economy, keep investing in education, 
keep protecting the environment, keep protecting those who depend upon 
Medicare and Medicaid. But we still have to bring the deficit down.'' 
That was the conservative thing to do: to protect our future, to 
conserve our people and our resources, and get our house in order. 
Senator Paul Wellstone said yes, and they said no. Don't forget that at 
election time. Don't forget that at election time.
    I was reading some of the clips about Minnesota, where the 
unemployment rate has dropped to 3.8 or 3.7 or 3.6 percent, and I hear 
now there is a big problem with labor shortages in some places. Listen, 
folks, compared to 4 years ago, that is a high-class problem. Let's have 
more problems like that, labor shortage problems.
    We have the lowest combined rates of unemployment, inflation, and 
home mortgages in 28 years. We've had the biggest drop in income 
inequality among working people in 27 years, the biggest drop in child 
poverty in 20 years, all-time record rates of exports and the formation 
of new businesses. That is the record. That is the direction we're going 
in. Homeownership is at a 15-year high. We are moving in the right 
direction; we need to stay on this track all the way to the 21st 
century.
    We made every small business in America eligible for a tax cut when 
they invest more in their business. We made it easier for people to take 
out pensions when they work for small businesses and move from job to 
job. We made

[[Page 1958]]

it easier for self-employed people to buy their own health insurance by 
giving them a bigger tax cut when they do so. We cut taxes for 15 
million of the hardest pressed working people in America, and Paul 
Wellstone voted for that.
    You should also know that we have reduced the welfare rolls by 
nearly 2 million starting in January of '93 through policies all of the 
folks in our party, including Senator Wellstone, supported--1.9 million 
fewer people on welfare, 1.9 million more people at work. The crime rate 
has gone down for 4 years in a row; it's at a 10-year low. Child support 
collections in America are up 50 percent compared to 4 years ago and 
almost 70 percent in Minnesota. We're moving in the right direction.
    We raised the minimum wage for 10 million people. Twelve million 
people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law that 
says you can have a little time off from work when a baby is born or a 
family member is sick. We are stronger because of that. Twenty-five 
million people now may be able to save their health insurance because we 
passed a law that says you can't have your insurance jerked just because 
you've moved from job to job or because someone in your family has been 
sick. And we passed another law that says mothers and their newborn 
babies cannot be forced out of the hospital within 24 hours. Thank you, 
Senator Wellstone. Thank you, Members of Congress.
    Now, what you have to decide here in this election is not a matter 
of party. That's an unconventional thing for me to say with all my 
fellow Democrats up here and most of you presumably members of our 
party, but it is not. What you have to decide--what you have to decide 
is what vision, what ideas do you want to shape the direction our 
country takes as we go through this huge time of change. There is a 
dramatic change. You know it here in Minnesota. Here in the Twin Cities 
area you're on the cutting edge of so much change, but let me just tell 
you a couple of things to illustrate how much we're changing the way we 
work and live and relate to each other.
    When I became President, there were 3 million people working at home 
on their computers, away from the office. Today there are over 12 
million people doing that. Four years from now there will be 30 million 
people doing that. That will change everything in the way we work.
    When I became President, most people thought HIV and AIDS was a 
death sentence. We have more than doubled the life expectancy of people 
with HIV and AIDS. We're on the verge of turning it into a chronic 
disease. The medical research we've invested in has given us the first 
treatment ever for strokes. Last year medical researchers in Government-
funded research discovered two genes that cause breast cancer, and we 
may be able now not only to detect it early and avoid radical treatment 
but even to prevent it altogether. I announced 30 million more dollars 
for genetic research and breast cancer yesterday.
    Many of you were moved when Christopher Reeve spoke at the 
Democratic Convention about the importance of medical research. And just 
about the time he spoke, for the first time ever a laboratory animal 
whose spine had been completely severed regained movement in its lower 
limbs by the transfer of nerves to the spine from other parts of the 
body. Think what that could mean. Think what that could mean--
revolutionizing the potential of life in America. We are on the verge of 
an explosion of possibility, where more people than ever before will 
have a chance to live out their dreams. But you have to make the right 
decisions. Are we going to build a bridge to the future or a bridge to 
the past?
    Audience members. The future!
    The President. Is that bridge going to be big enough for all of us 
to walk across together?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. Are we going to tell some people, ``You're on your 
own, have a good time,'' or are we going to say, ``It does take a 
village''?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. That is the issue. When you see Mary Rieder up here 
talking, a person who has been a committed private citizen offering 
herself for Congress, you have to ask yourself, is this the vision I 
believe in, or was Speaker Gingrich right?
    Audience members. No-o-o!
    The President. This is not about party; this is about your life. 
They passed a budget which would have ended the guarantee of medical 
care to our poorest children, to our seniors in nursing homes, to 
families who can maintain middle class lifestyles and still care for 
family members with disabilities. They would have ended that. They would 
have given us the first real cuts in our education investments in modern 
history.

[[Page 1959]]

They would have paralyzed the ability of the Environmental Protection 
Agency to protect the quality of our environment. They would have 
allowed employers to raid their employees' pension funds, even to raise 
their own pay, if that's what they wanted.
    And when I vetoed that budget, they shut the Government down and 
said, ``Oh, those Democrats, they love the Government so much they'll 
give us what we want just to get it open.'' And I said, ``I'd a lot 
rather see you hurt people for 3 months than 30 years. No, thank you 
very much. We are going to stand up.''
    Now, these things have significance. This is not about the old-
fashioned political debates: should this be done at the national and 
local level. This is really about how you think we're going forward into 
the future. That's what's at stake in Mary Rieder's race. And all these 
talks about, you know, liberal and conservative--let me just give you an 
example of some of the choices before us. This will happen; your vote 
will decide how this comes out.
    Your vote in the Presidential race and in other races will decide 
whether now that we've cut the deficit from $209 billion to $107 
billion, whether we go on and balance the budget and still protect 
Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment, and have targeted 
tax cuts that help people raise their children, have access to college, 
buy a first-time home, and pay for health insurance, all paid for 
already in our balanced budget plan; or whether we embrace this huge, 
$550 billion tax scheme which raises taxes on 9 million of our hardest 
working people, will blow a hole in the deficit, raise your interest 
rates, raise the cost of student loans, car payments, house payments, 
and business loans, and require bigger cuts than the ones I vetoed. 
That's the decision. Forget about party; ask yourself, do you want that 
for your future?
    Audience members. No-o-o!
    The President. Don't you think we ought to balance the budget and 
protect our values and our future?
    Audience members. Yes!
    The President. That's what Paul Wellstone voted to do, and that's 
what we'll do in the future. Your vote will decide. We passed the family 
and medical leave law. The leaders of the other party said it was a bad 
thing, it would hurt the economy. Twelve million families took advantage 
of it, and we have record numbers of new businesses. They were wrong.
    Now, I want to expand the family leave law and say people ought to 
be able to get a little time off to go see their children's teacher 
twice a year and take their kids to regular doctor's appointments. And I 
believe when workers earn overtime--I'm going to tell you, everywhere I 
go, people tell me the biggest challenge they're facing in their lives 
if they're parents and workers is trying to balance the demand of being 
parents and workers. So I'd like to see us change the overtime law to 
give the worker the option when they run up overtime of taking the money 
for overtime or taking time with their children or sick parents or their 
sick spouses, if that's what they want to do. You will decide. You will 
decide.
    You will decide whether we finish this work we are doing to stop the 
advertising, marketing, and sales, illegally, of tobacco to children. 
They are against it. Paul Wellstone is for it. You will decide in the 
Presidential race and in other races.
    You will decide whether we continue to support the safe and drug-
free schools program. Let me say this: There has been a lot of talk 
about the drug issue. This is a difficult thing for America now. We've 
had a big decline in drug use in America, a big decline overall, but 
drug use is still going up among people under 18. And we now know from 
surveys that somewhere around 1990 large numbers of young people decided 
it wasn't dangerous anymore, even though, if you take marijuana, all the 
medical studies now show that the toxicity of marijuana available today 
breaks up the concentration patterns of young people, can threaten the 
ability of young women to give birth to normal children, can undermine 
the whole future of people, not to mention what all the other drugs will 
do. It's a problem. We all have to do more.
    We increased border patrols. We increased penalties on drug kingpins 
and others. And we put more people in the schools, early, to give the 
kids something to say yes to, those D.A.R.E. officers and others. They 
tried to cut the safe and drug-free schools program in half. That's 
their program for our kids--cut the safe and drug-free schools program 
in half. Paul Wellstone and I said, no thank you. We want more people 
out there trying to keep our kids out of trouble and giving them a 
future. And I think that's what you ought to support. I don't think it 
is conservative to want to cut the safe and drug-free schools program in 
half.

[[Page 1960]]

    Look at the crime rate. The crime rate's gone down now for 4 years 
in a row. Is it still too high? You bet it is. But we know what works. 
All these folks up here in the Congress, they stood with me and helped 
me to pass the toughest crime bill in history. The leaders of the other 
party, they all fought it. And they went around and made a lot of hay in 
a lot of rural congressional districts, including in this part of our 
country, by telling people that ``the President and his party, they're 
trying to take your guns away from you. That's what the Brady bill is 
all about; that's what the assault weapons ban is all about.''
    Well, they did that in '94, but now we know, we've got a record now. 
Two years later, not a single hunter in Minnesota has lost a rifle. But 
60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers did not get handguns because of 
the Brady bill. We were right, and they were wrong. They were wrong. And 
we just voted to extend the Brady bill to say if you beat up your spouse 
or your child, you can't get a gun either. And I think we were right 
again.
    So now, when you think about the President or the Senator or Mary 
Rieder, you have to think about what's still out there. Let me tell you 
what's still out there. Are we going to finish the job of putting 
100,000 police on the street, or shall we do it their way and walk away 
from it? Why would we abandon a strategy that is working, that is not 
only catching criminals but is preventing crime and giving our kids some 
role models in their neighborhoods and people to work with and something 
to say yes to? I think I know your answer. We need to build communities 
from the grassroots up, and we need to continue until we finish the job 
of putting these 100,000 police on the street and making all of our 
neighborhoods safe in America again. Will you help us? Will you help us? 
[Applause]
    The same thing is true in the environment. We fought, we fought, we 
fought, and finally we prevailed. And so we have taken millions of tons 
of poisonous chemicals out of our air. We've lifted the quality of 
drinking water and the safety of our foods, and we've closed more toxic 
waste sites in 3 years than the previous administrations did in 12. And 
we saved the parks from an ill-advised attempt to sell off some of our 
national parks. But we have a lot to do. Ten million children still live 
within 4 miles of toxic waste sites. If you give us a chance to move 
forward, we'll close 500 more and say our children are growing up next 
to parks, not poison. I want you to help us build that future. Will you 
do that? [Applause]
    But let me say this: Far and away the most important distinction 
between us, and far and away the most important decision you have to 
make in terms of how we'll be living 20 or 30 years from now involves 
education. You've heard Mary talk about it. You heard Senator Wellstone 
talk about it. The truth is that even in a State like Minnesota, with a 
well-deserved reputation for having one of the finest educational 
systems in the world, we have to do better. We have to do better. The 
truth is that with our increasing diversity, 40 percent of our 8-year-
olds still cannot read a book independently. And so I have proposed that 
we marshal 30,000 reading specialists and AmeriCorps volunteers and that 
we go out and ask for a million more volunteers. And let me say, in the 
budget I just signed we got 200,000 more positions in work-study for 
college students. And I want half of them to go to teaching kids to read 
because I know if we all work on it, by the year 2000 we can have a 
country where every 8-year-old in American can hold up a book and say, 
``I can read this all by myself.'' That's what I'm trying to get done.
    And I want us to build an America in the year 2000 where every 
classroom and every library and every school is hooked up to the 
information superhighway, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web. What 
is the significance of that? Well, here in the Twin Cities there are a 
lot of you in this audience today that know more about computers now 
than I'll ever know. But I know this: There are still people in isolated 
inner cities and in remote rural areas that do not have the educational 
opportunities they need and deserve, and they are not learning as much 
as they should, and the rest of us will pay for it unless we do better. 
If we hook up every classroom and every library to the information 
superhighway, for the very first time in the history of the United 
States all of our children in the rich, the middle class, and the poor 
districts will have access to the same information in the same way in 
the same time. It will revolutionize education, and we can do it 
together. We can do it together.
    And the last thing I would say to you is, we must open the doors of 
college education to every single American of any age who needs

[[Page 1961]]

to go. And in our balanced budget plan--in our balanced budget plan, 
paid for, every dime of it--are three proposals: One, more people can 
save in IRA's for years and years and then take the money out without 
any penalty if the money is being used to pay for a college education or 
health care or to buy a first home. Two, we want to make 2 years of 
education in a community college as universal in 4 years as a high 
school diploma is today. And here's how we're going to do it--no 
program, no bureaucracy--just simply to say we will give you a 
deduction, dollar for dollar. You can take, dollar for dollar, off your 
tax bill the cost of a typical community college tuition for 2 years if 
you will just go, make your grades, and do a good job. That will 
revolutionize opportunity in America. And finally, I believe we should 
offer a tax deduction every year of up to $10,000 a year for the cost of 
college tuition at any institution at any level. That will revolutionize 
American education.
    Now, if we do these things, we will create an America in which 
everybody has a chance to live out their dreams. We will create an 
America that is still leading the world economically and politically and 
militarily for peace and prosperity and freedom.
    And finally, and maybe most important, we have to commit ourselves 
not to falling prey to the demonic divisions that are hurting so many 
people elsewhere in the world. How much time have I spent as your 
President in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, in Bosnia, sending 
troops to Rwanda to save hundreds of thousands of lives, where people 
are fighting all over the world because they're of different races, 
religions, tribes, creeds. How many people are there in the world who 
get up every day, and the only way they can get through the day is to 
say, ``Well, whatever you think about me, at least I'm not them.'' They 
look down on them.
    How much hatred will we have to endure before we finally say, 
``Enough''? That is what I have worked for in Bosnia, what I worked for 
in Haiti, what we're working for in the Middle East at this very moment. 
In America, that is why I've fought those church burnings and the 
desecration of the synagogues and the Islamic centers. That is why.
    Now, in Minnesota, I want you all to say this election is also about 
whether we're going to treat each other with respect, because I want to 
be able to say we're going to build this bridge, and it's going to walk 
across to the 21st century, to the era of greatest possibility ever 
known. And all I need to know about you is whether you believe in the 
Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and 
whether you're willing to show up and do your job tomorrow. If you are, 
I don't want to know anything else about you. You're part of my America.
    Let's join hands and walk into a bright new future. Will you help us 
build that bridge? Will you help us? Will you be there on Tuesday? 
[Applause]
    God bless you, Minnesota. Thank you. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:40 p.m. at the Target Center. In his 
remarks, he referred to Hubert H. Humphrey III, Minnesota attorney 
general, and Mary Rieder, candidate for Minnesota's First Congressional 
District. A portion of these remarks could not be verified because the 
tape was incomplete.