[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[October 30, 1996]
[Pages 1980-1985]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to Colorado Democrats in Denver, Colorado
October 30, 1996

    Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. Mayor, Mrs. Webb, Governor 
Romer, Congressman Fields, Chairperson Vivian Stovall, and Mike Beatty, 
my old friend Norm Early--I'm glad to see him again. And I want to say a 
special word on behalf of Diana DeGette, who's trying to make sure that 
we have a different leadership in the House of Representatives and for 
the Congress.
    I'd also like to say a word for our Senate nominee, Tom Strickland, 
who is, as you know, going to another one of his debates with Mr. 
Allard. And you have to be thinking about him. You're going to be 
enjoying a dinner, and he won't be able to eat. [Laughter] But I think 
he'll represent us well, and I hope you will help him prevail on 
election day.
    Let me also say, if you have never heard Cleo Fields give a speech, 
when I finish you will have not heard the best speaker tonight on the 
platform. And I want to thank him. He comes from my neighboring State of 
Louisiana; I was elated when he was elected to Congress. I was 
downhearted when he was redistricted by a court. And I think he has a 
brilliant future ahead of him, and I'm glad he's here with you. Ron 
Brown would be glad he is here with you tonight.
    I would like to talk a little history with you tonight, just to 
bring you to this point so soon, so near to our election. First, I thank 
you for

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naming these awards for Ron Brown and Barbara Jordan. They were both 
friends of mine and my relationship with each of them, though different, 
is something I will treasure all of my life.
    I too remember the first time I ever heard Barbara Jordan speak, and 
I thought, maybe God is a woman after all. [Laughter] I always--I got to 
where I wanted to say ``yes, ma'am'' before she ever opened her mouth, 
every time I was ever around her. [Laughter]
    She never lost her love for this country, and the more her body 
became weakened by her condition, the stronger her heart and voice 
became. And in her last year she agreed to chair for me a commission 
looking at what we should do about the issues of immigration in our 
country, how we could remain a nation of immigrants and still take a 
strong stand that people who come here should do so legally. And she did 
it with a grace, a strength, a balance, a fundamental sense of fairness 
and common sense that everyone who worked with her marveled about. And 
that was her last great contribution to our Nation. And I've done my 
best to implement the ideas that Barbara Jordan advanced. And I'll 
always be grateful to her.
    And all of you know, of course, of my relationship with Ron Brown. I 
doubt very seriously that I'd be standing here as President of the 
United States tonight if it hadn't been for Ron Brown. And so I'm going 
to keep him smiling from up there the next week. I'm going to do 
everything I can to keep that big smile on his face.
    I also want to thank you for honoring Wellington and Wilma Webb. I 
not only like them very much, but I admire them very much. And Hillary 
and I identify with them. We love being around them. And I like seeing a 
strong first lady, and I like seeing a mayor who is strong enough to 
want to be married to a strong first lady--[laughter]--and I like that.
    So I thank you for that. And let me say that Colorado has--I've been 
coming here a lot for the last 15 years, a long time before I ever 
thought I'd be here as President. I came every chance I could because it 
represented something very special to me. And I think you've been 
blessed by the quality of your leaders. Roy Romer I think is clearly, 
both in terms of accomplishment and intellect and vision of the future, 
the most gifted Governor in the United States in terms of his 
contribution to our future.
    And he's like all of us aging warriors. He was reluctant to give up 
on his youth, so he broke his leg on a motorcycle and--[laughter]--he's 
left his cane, and he's kind of trading up his shoes gradually, you 
know. [Laughter] But I am delighted to be here with all of them.
    This election we're going to have will elect the last President of 
the 20th century and the first President of the 21st century. Colorado 
sort of embodies both the promise and the struggles of the present and 
the future. And I was thinking when Mayor Webb was talking about Abraham 
Lincoln and the long talks we had about Lincoln when he was staying in 
the White House that the great thing about America is that there's 
always been a relentless quest for a better future in a way that would 
embrace the moment and, in doing so, not abandon our traditional values 
and ideals but instead try to perfect them.
    A lot of people have this idea that, well, if you were really a 
future-oriented person, it means you're too material or you're too 
concerned about ideas, and that's very exciting, but you must be a 
little shy on the traditional ideals and values that have kept our 
country strong. But I don't see it that way at all. I think that our 
expanding abundance only gives us the opportunity which we then have to 
seize to live up more closely to our ideals and our values.
    And this period that we're living in now involves such a remarkable 
change in the way people are living and working, relating to each other, 
the way we're relating to the rest of the world, that it has only 
basically one parallel in American history: 100 years ago--very 
interesting--when we moved from the farm to the factory, when we moved 
from the country to the city, when we then had our first big wave of 
immigrants coming in. And because we did not put aside our racial 
bigotry after the Civil War, even though we stayed together as a country 
and we abolished slavery legally and we adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th 
amendments and we began to move forward, we still were a country that 
said one thing and did another.
    All of us are like that still, you know. [Laughter] Every one of us 
had a parent at one moment in a lapse said, ``Well, I still want you to 
do what I say, not what I do.'' But what happened was, those immigrants, 
when they came in here 100 years ago, they felt terrible prejudice, the 
Italians, the Irish, the Poles. And then we had the Red Scare, and then 
we had

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the Ku Klux Klan rise up in America; no more than 50 years after the 
Civil War they were hanging black people again in the South where I grew 
up.
    Because of the civil rights struggle and because of the progress 
which has been made, even though we're a long way from where we ought to 
be in the relationships between African-Americans and the white 
majority, we have a chance to deal with this new infusion of immigrants 
and all the new explosion of diversity of all kinds in our country in a 
different way than we did 100 years ago and to take advantage of all 
these technological and other changes to move closer to our ideals.
    We also have a chance--it's very important to Coloradans--to take 
advantage of these new exploding economic opportunities in a way that 
preserves and indeed enhances our environment instead of undermining it, 
which is what happened 100 years ago.
    So this is a time of enormous possibility. And it's very important 
that we not be distracted from the big issues here. There are two great, 
different philosophies at stake in this election. One of them basically 
says that the main thing about America is that everybody came over here 
to get a good letting-alone, and that's true. Our Constitution was 
constructed to limit the ability of Government to oppress people. But 
one of the things we've learned over the last 100 years is, in the world 
we're living in and in the world we're going to, as Wellington said, 
none of us get there by ourselves.
    You know, I was thinking of Wellington's story--I was raised by--I 
was born to a widowed mother, and my stepfather didn't graduate from 
high school. And it's inconceivable, I think, to a lot of my kinfolks at 
home that I ever turned out to be President. [Laughter] But I know one 
thing: If I had been born black instead of white, I wouldn't be 
President. I know that. But I know we're closer to the time when anybody 
can run for President, fulfilling the Constitution's requirements, and 
be considered on his or her own merits. We're closer.
    And so I still believe that the Government in many areas of private 
life--choice, religion, many other areas--should let people, as long as 
they're not hurting other people, make their own decisions and go 
forward. One of the proudest moments of my Presidency was signing the 
Religious Freedom Restoration Act. And most of you probably don't even 
know I signed it because there was no fight about, and if there's not a 
fight in Washington, it doesn't get on the news in Denver. [Laughter] It 
passed unanimously. And then we have vigorously enforced it, including 
in a controversial case out here in Colorado where--every case I have 
bent over backwards to make sure that we never interfere with any 
person's exercise of his or her religious convictions, whatever they 
are, unless it's really going to threaten to bring the Government down 
or something terrible.
    And so, here we are at this moment, and I think what we've learned 
is, yes, we should guarantee, first and foremost, the individual liberty 
of people; but to guarantee their security and to give them all the same 
chance--not a guarantee but a chance in life--there are some things we 
have to do together. And it is the difference of opinion over how much 
we should do together and what we should do together that this election 
is all about.
    It is not about big Government. Our administration has reduced the 
size of Government, the number of regulations, the number of Government 
programs eliminated, and we have privatized more Government operations 
than the previous two Republican administrations combined. If they had 
this record, they would be saying it's the greatest thing since sliced 
bread.
    But what I have not been willing to do is to see us walk away from 
our common obligations to give all of our people educational 
opportunities; to give health care to poor children, to families with 
disabilities, to the elderly in nursing homes; to preserve the gains of 
Medicare, even as we reform the system; and to protect the environment 
and to continue our investment in research and in technology in our 
endless quest to move into the future so more people can live closer to 
what we all say we believe.
    That's what this election is about, whether you think we're better 
off being told, ``You're on your own, and we hope you make it,'' or 
whether we think it does take a village to raise our children and build 
a country. That's what this election is about.
    It's about whether we're going to build a bridge to the 21st century 
that's big enough and wide enough for all of us to walk across, and then 
whether we're going to have in our hearts the capacity to say, ``If you 
believe in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the 
Constitution and you're willing

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to show up for work tomorrow--or, if you're of that age, to show up for 
school tomorrow--if you're willing to do your job as an American, we 
don't need to know anything else about you, nothing. Nothing else 
matters. You're part of our America, and we're willing to walk hand in 
hand with you across that bridge into the future.''
    Now, that is what the election is about. I was reading today an 
amusing--I thought it was amusing--an article in a magazine about my 
judicial appointments, because they pointed out that one of the things 
that has not been discussed much in the election is the fact that the 
next President may well get to make a couple more appointments to the 
Supreme Court. And they were saying that the previous administration 
imposed--two administrations--imposed strict ideological litmus tests on 
a lot of judges and that a lot of my supporters were disappointed that I 
didn't turn around and do exactly the same thing on the other end, but 
instead I had insisted on two things, excellence and diversity.
    And they pointed out that I had appointed more African-Americans, 
more Hispanics, more Asian-Americans, and more women to the Federal 
bench than any President in history and that, in spite of that, we had 
the highest ratings from the American Bar Association for excellence of 
any judicial selections in the history of the country since they've been 
doing that.
    I think if you have a Federal bench that reflects the vast 
experiences of America, with people that are smart enough to figure out 
the issues that are put before them and they share the experiences of 
America in all of its permutations, chances are pretty good that they'll 
do what they ought to do. And judges aren't like Presidents or 
Congressmen, but they should reflect America.
    I say all that to make this point. Every election time the election 
is always decided by those who vote and by those who don't. And the 
people that have the biggest stake in whether we build a bridge that we 
can all walk across together--in whether we adopt my education agenda, 
which is to expand Head Start; to teach every 8-year-old to read a book 
independently; to have every classroom in the country, even in the 
poorest school districts, in the most remote rural districts, hooked up 
to the information superhighway by the year 2000; to make 2 years of 
college as universal as high school is today by giving people a tax 
credit, a dollar-for-dollar reduction on their tax bill of up to $1,500 
a year, the cost of a typical community college education; to give every 
family a tax deduction of up to $10,000 for any college tuition, 
undergraduate or graduate, for people of any age; to let families save 
in an IRA and withdraw from it tax-free if the money is used for 
education or buying a first home or a medical emergency--that agenda, if 
you embrace that, it means that you think we have a common obligation to 
help each other live up to the fullest of our abilities and that we'll 
all be better off if we all have a chance to do well.
    If you support my agenda--that I think we have a common obligation 
to eliminate discrimination of all kinds in the workplace; to protect 
the environment; to continue to try to expand coverage of health care 
step by step to people, so that people who work have a chance to buy 
health care--you have to believe that it's because we're all going to be 
better off if we live closer to what we say we believe and we give 
everybody else a chance to do the same. That's what the election is 
about.
    And the people that have the most at stake are the ones that will 
have the best excuse not to vote. How many mothers do we know out there 
raising two or three kids, working two jobs, having to figure out, 
``I've got to figure out how to vote on a workday, and I've got to get 
my kids somewhere before I go to work, and what's going to happen to 
them after school, and I don't have enough money for child care, and 
what have I got to do tonight?'' All the people that may have the 
biggest stake in this election may have the best excuse--not a reason 
but it's a pretty good excuse--because their lives will be crowded with 
other things.
    And maybe they have or haven't felt it, but it makes a difference. 
Ten million more Americans got an increase in the minimum wage. The 
average income is up $1,600 for the typical family in the last 2 years 
after 20 years of wage stagnation. Last month we found out--or just 2 
weeks ago we found out that we had the biggest decline in income 
inequality among working people in 27 years, since this administration 
came in; the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years; the biggest 
drop in poverty in female-headed households in 30 years; the lowest 
recorded poverty levels ever for senior citizens and African-Americans; 
the largest number of new businesses owned by minorities and

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women in the history of the country; the largest number of new small 
businesses owned by anybody in the history of the country. It makes a 
difference. It makes a difference.
    So it makes a difference what policies we pursue, and it will change 
people's lives here. And so I ask you to go out and help our Senate 
candidate, help Diana DeGette, help Bill Clinton and Al Gore, not as a 
matter of party, now, but because it has fallen to our party to embrace 
a philosophy that the other party embraced briefly under Abraham 
Lincoln, that they embraced briefly under Theodore Roosevelt, but that 
they have abandoned. And so it has fallen to us to carry this banner, 
not as a matter of party but as a matter of carrying on the great 
American experiment in a way that will truly realize the era of greatest 
possibility ever known.
    I honestly believe these kids here in this audience, they'll be 
doing things in 10 or 15 years we couldn't even dream of. They'll be 
doing jobs that haven't been invented; some of them will be doing jobs 
that haven't been imagined. It's all out there. But we have to make the 
right decisions. And as much as anything else, that's why I have fought 
so hard not only to make the right governmental decisions but to say the 
right things as your President when the hatred of the Government led a 
demented person to blow up a Federal building in Oklahoma City--
allegedly; they haven't been tried yet, and we can't presume anybody's 
guilt. But we know that Government hatred has led people into bands of 
folks that are paranoid that terrible things are going to happen to 
them. I had to speak against that.
    When the black churches are being burned or white churches are being 
burned or synagogues are being defaced or Islamic centers are being 
defaced, that's not our America. But that is the dominant theme of life 
that caused people to slaughter each other's children in Bosnia. And it 
still bedevils Northern Ireland; they're still arguing over things--
they're my ancestors, you know, and they're my relatives now, so I can 
talk about them. They're still fighting over things that happened 300 
years ago and battles that occurred 600 years ago, when all the kids 
want to do is to let it go and go on into the future. In the Middle 
East, where I have worked so hard, the Holy Land for the three great 
monotheistic religions in the world--if anyplace in the world ought to 
be a peaceful sanctuary for Jews and Muslims and Christians, it ought to 
be the Holy Land. But so many of them just can't let it go.
    And we're going to beat all that if we do the right things. When 
Hillary and Chelsea and I went to open the Olympics and I looked at 
those people--we had people from 197 different racial and ethnic groups. 
Almost every single one of them had people in America. And that's 
because we're not about race or religion or anything else. We're about 
these ideas and trying every, every, every age to live up closer to 
them.
    This is a very historic election, not because of me but because of 
what's happening to us. And we go through periods of huge change like 
this only rarely. And that's a good thing, because nobody can change--
you know, any of us can just stand so much change at once. One of my 
laws of politics: We're all for change in general, but we're against it 
in particular. [Laughter] Or as one of my friends said, ``Yes, I agree 
with you, we ought to change. You go first.'' [Laughter]
    So this is our responsibility. Now, you know what to do, and you 
know how to do it. And if Ron Brown were here giving a speech tonight, 
that's all he'd be talking about. That's all he'd be talking about. And 
Barbara Jordan, if she were here, she'd make you feel so guilty you 
wouldn't sleep between now and Tuesday--[laughter]--until you dragged 
every human being you knew to the polls. Now, you know that.
    So I want you to think about that. And I want you to understand that 
you carry with you the great burden and opportunity of American history. 
Every one of us should be grateful to be alive at this time, should be 
grateful to have this moment in which we have a chance to further break 
down the walls of discrimination in our minds and hearts, explode 
opportunity for all Americans, and that these changes that are going on 
give us this incredible opportunity to really actually enhance the 
natural environment God has given us and leave it stronger and better 
for our children and grandchildren, even as we prosper.
    That's what I want you to think about. I want you to think about, 
Tuesday morning when you get up, that bridge to tomorrow, and how you 
wouldn't let your child have to go down deep valleys and cross rushing 
rivers and climb big mountains if they could just get on a bridge and 
walk straight across. And that's what I want for everybody. And in order 
to do it, we've

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got to show up. You know what to do. You know how to do it. Your country 
needs you. I know you'll be there.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 7:20 p.m. at the Red Lion Inn to the 
Colorado Democratic Coordinated Campaign and the African-American 
Initiative of Colorado Democrats. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor 
Wellington Webb of Denver and his wife, Wilma; Representative Cleo 
Fields of Louisiana; Gov. Roy Romer of Colorado; Vivian Stovall, chair, 
African-American Initiative of the Colorado Democrats; Mike Beatty, 
chair, Colorado Democratic Party; Norm Early, former Denver district 
attorney; Diana DeGette, candidate for Colorado's First Congressional 
District; Colorado senatorial candidate Tom Strickland; and 
Representative Wayne Allard of Colorado.