[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[November 2, 1996]
[Pages 2032-2035]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in New Orleans, Louisiana
November 2, 1996

    The President. Can you hear me in the back? [Applause] Wave your 
hands. Look back there. What a great crowd we have tonight. Thank you, 
New Orleans, for coming out. Thank you for your support. Thank you for 
the little song down here. Let's thank these fine young men who sang the 
national anthem again. They were great, the students who are here.
    Reverend Morton, Mr. Mayor, thank you for making me feel so welcome 
here. Thank you for your exceptional leadership. Thank you for taking up 
for the children of New Orleans and trying to make them safer when the 
Sun goes down. I appreciate that.
    My good friend Congressman Jefferson, thank you for being there with 
me in the dark days as well as the bright ones. Representative Cleo 
Fields, thank you for your service in the Congress, your support for me 
and Mary Landrieu and all of our other candidates. And thank you 
especially for going all over America to mobilize young people to vote 
to reelect Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Thank you, sir. My great friend 
John Breaux, to whom I owe so much--if you support John Breaux, as I 
think you do, you will elect Mary Landrieu just to keep a smile on 
John's face. I don't believe I could bear the thought of seeing what 
it's going to be like for John. [Laughter]
    Ladies and gentlemen, I have come here tonight with a heart full of 
gratitude to all of you for giving me the chance to serve as President, 
for giving me the chance to do what has been done in the last 4 years, 
and to ask you to keep America on the right track to the 21st century 
and to help me build that bridge that we can all walk across together. 
Will you do that? [Applause]
    It is hard to believe, on the banks of this great river that has 
seen so much history, that the United States is about to elect the last 
President of the 20th century and the first President of the 21st 
century. But we are. We are about to do something even more important, 
for in this election and the race for the Senate and other races all 
across America we are going to decide just how we're going into that 
21st century: whether there will be a bridge to the future or a bridge 
to the past; whether there will be a bridge that we all walk across 
together, where we try to help each other make the most of our own 
lives, or whether we'll say, ``You're on your own''; whether we will 
rise up as one people seeking common ground, or whether we will give in 
to the old politics of division that has bedeviled people of Louisiana 
and Arkansas and our whole region for too long in the past.
    Now, that is what is really at issue here. We know what works. Four 
years ago, everyone except the people in my own home State and the 
Louisianians that lived near the border took me on faith. I said we 
would create more opportunity and insist on more responsibility, that 
we'd pull closer together in an American community, and everybody would 
have a place and a role to play. But you took me on faith. Now we know 
what works.

[[Page 2033]]

    We have 10.7 million more jobs than we had 4 years ago. The deficit 
has gone down by 63 percent all 4 years for the first time in the 20th 
century. Our exports out of the Port of New Orleans and elsewhere are at 
an all-time high. More than half the new jobs are in high-wage 
categories. Wages are going up again for the first time in a very long 
time. We've had a 27-year--a 27-year--best combined rates of 
unemployment and inflation. You have to go all the way back to 1968--
that's 28 years, isn't it? You weren't even born. That's the best it's 
been since you've been alive. We had the biggest drop in inequality 
among working people, more people sharing in the bounty of America in 28 
years, the biggest drop in childhood poverty in 20 years, the lowest 
rate in poverty among our senior citizens ever recorded. We are moving 
in the right direction. We don't need a change; we need to bear down.
    We have more children in Head Start. We've got a better college loan 
program that costs students less and gives them more opportunities to 
repay it as a percentage of their income, a 20-year high in Pell grant 
scholarships, the AmeriCorps program giving young people a chance to 
serve and earn money for college. We've got a 10-year low in the crime 
rate. We have 2 million fewer people on welfare and a 50 percent 
increase in child support payments. We are moving in the right direction 
right across the board. We need to bear down and do more.
    Now, in the face of this my opponent would have you believe that the 
world is coming to an end. It was announced yesterday that we had--or 
the day before--we had 210,000 new jobs last month alone. And his 
response was, ``This is the worst economy in 20 years.'' Now, wait a 
minute, it's not all bad. Just 2 weeks ago, he said we had the worst 
economy in 100 years. That's the best argument I've heard for my 
reelection. Who else do you know could make up 80 years in 2 weeks? 
We're moving in the right direction toward the 21st century. But we are 
moving in the right direction because we're doing a lot of things 
together--together.
    I appreciate so many things that have been said tonight, but I come 
here to tell you that I am not solely responsible for the good economic 
news or the declining crime rates or the declining welfare rolls, but we 
have played a role. And that is the issue. So many of our friends on the 
other side, and especially people way on over there like Mary Landrieu's 
opponent, they don't believe there is much of anything we should do 
together. But I believe there are.
    And the great thing about this election for you is that the choice 
is so clear and the consequences are so great. So you have to decide in 
the President's race and in the Senate race, do you want to balance the 
budget and have a targeted tax cut for education and childrearing and 
protect Medicare and Medicaid for folks with disabilities and poor 
children, our seniors in nursing homes? And do you want to protect our 
ability to have clean air and clean water and clean ground and a safe 
future? [Applause] And do you want to protect our investments in 
education and technology and our future? [Applause]
    Well, then you just have one choice, because if you go the other 
way, you'll get a very different future: blowing a hole in the deficit, 
increasing interest rates, weakening the economy, bigger cuts than those 
that I vetoed.
    Audience member. That's why we've got you! [Laughter]
    The President. You're good. Keep going. [Laughter]
    I think one of the most important things we have been able to do is 
to help more people, millions of people, fulfill their obligations to 
their children and to their workplace. When we passed the family and 
medical leave law, my opponent said it would hurt the economy. He said 
it was terrible. He tried to kill it. But we passed it.
    Well, now we know; 3\1/2\ years later, 12 million families have 
taken a little time off for the birth of a baby or the illness of a 
family member, and they didn't lose their jobs. And what have we had: 
10.7 million new jobs and record numbers of new small businesses. We 
were right. Their approach was wrong. We should help each other make the 
most of our own lives. We should help people succeed at home and at 
work. We ought to let people take some time off to go see the teachers 
of their children twice a year and take their kids to the doctor as 
well. When people earn overtime, if somebody in the family is sick, they 
ought to be able to decide whether to take the overtime in money or take 
it in time at home taking care of their families. We have to help people 
succeed at home and at work.

[[Page 2034]]

    We ought to continue to support the safe and drug-free schools 
program so people will be in our schools telling our children early, 
before it's too late, that drugs are wrong, illegal, they can kill you. 
I support that. They tried to cut it in half, and they'll try again 
unless you have somebody like Mary Landrieu who believes our kids are 
entitled to be kept out of trouble in the first place and saved for a 
better, brighter future.
    We are in the middle of a great national effort to try to stop the 
big tobacco companies from marketing and distributing tobacco illegally 
to our children. Three thousand kids start smoking every day illegally, 
and 1,000 will die sooner because of it. We are trying to stop it. That 
is not done yet. My opponent opposes that. The election will determine 
whether we see that through. We are supporting people like your mayor 
all over the country and working to support projects like the curfews 
and school uniform projects and anything else that will help keep our 
kids in a safer way.
    We're trying to put 100,000 police on the street. We've only funded 
half of them. Our opponent opposed that. Then they abolished it in the 
budget that I vetoed. Then they tried to cut it again. Now, the crime 
rate is coming down every year in part because we have more people 
walking the streets in uniforms working with their neighbors, working 
with the kids, preventing crime from happening. Why in the wide world 
anybody would want to stop it is beyond me. I guess that's why every 
major law enforcement organization in America for the first time 
supported Bill Clinton and Al Gore for reelection. If you want to keep 
that going, support people like Mary Landrieu who believe we should have 
community policing and safer streets and futures for all of our 
children.
    We want a future in which we grow the economy and clean the 
environment. We've taken millions of tons of chemicals out of our air, 
set aside unprecedented lands for national preservation, raised the 
standards of food safety, raised the standards for drinking water 
purity, and cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than they did 
in 12. But there's still 10 million kids in this country living within 4 
miles of a toxic waste site, and if you'll help us, we'll clean up 500 
more in the next 4 years so that we'll be living next to parks, not 
poison.
    But your vote will decide, for they had a very different view. They 
wanted to change the law and say the polluters don't have to pay anymore 
for what they do; the taxpayers should pick up the whole tab--never mind 
that all the money wasn't there, we might never get around to cleaning 
up a lot of these dumps. You have to decide.
    And there is no decision more important than the one you'll make 
with regard to the education of our children and our adults in the 
future. I'm glad there are so many young people here, because this 
election is about you. Now, what is their program? Well, when they had a 
chance, they cut Head Start and they cut student loans and they voted to 
eliminate the Department of Education. And when I vetoed their budget, 
they said they believed in it so much they shut the Government down. And 
they said, ``Oh, John Breaux and Cleo Fields and Bill Jefferson and 
President Clinton, they just love the Government; they'd never let it 
get shut down''--all their rhetoric, you know. And you know what I told 
them? ``I hate to see you shut this Government down; I hate to see you 
hurt the Federal employees; I hate to see you interrupt essential 
services. But I would far prefer to see the American people hurt for 20 
or 30 days than to see them hurt for 20 or 30 years. I'm not going to 
sign this budget; it will not be the law of the land, because I don't 
believe families who happen to have family members who are living in 
wheelchairs should be denied Medicaid and the right to have a middle 
class lifestyle and because I don't believe we should cut college 
scholarships and loans.''
    What's our program for the future? What's our program for the 
future? I want to ask you to help me do this. Now, you think about the 
future. We are living in a time where the winds of change are not just 
blowing on the Mississippi, they're blowing everywhere in the world. 
We're having dramatic changes in the way we work and live and relate to 
the rest of the world. That's how New Orleans can increase exports 30 
percent in one year. The world's not growing 30 percent economically in 
a year. New Orleans--the people who work here are taking the work of 
Americans and finding new opportunities exploding all over the world. 
When I became President, 3 million people were making a living by 
working at home every day. Today, 12 million are. By the year 2000, 30 
million will be.
    In the last 4 years, we've discovered two genes that lead to breast 
cancer. We may be

[[Page 2035]]

able not only to cure but to prevent breast cancer because of the 
research that we're doing there. In the past few months, for the first 
time, laboratory animals with their spines severed have had movement in 
their lower legs by nerve transplants to their spine from other parts of 
their bodies. We may be able to see people get up and walk that thought 
they'd never be able to do it again. We are literally bursting the 
frontiers of knowledge.
    Their education program is to abolish the Department of Education--
--
    Audience members. Boo-o-o!
    The President. ----and cut funding to our public schools. My 
education program: 200,000 more work-study places for young people in 
college; get a million volunteers, including 100,000 college students on 
work-study, to teach every young person in this country to read a book 
by the time that he or she is 8 years old; hook up every classroom in a 
Louisiana school, no matter how poor the district is, to the information 
superhighway so all our kids can get access to world-class learning for 
the first time in history; and open the doors of college education to 
all Americans. Will you help us do that? Will you help Mary Landrieu 
have a vote in the Senate to do that? [Applause]
    Think of it, folks, in just 4 years, we can make 2 years of 
education after high school as universal as a high school diploma is 
today simply by saying you can deduct, dollar for dollar, on your taxes 
the cost of a typical community college tuition; all you have to do is 
show up and make your grades and do your work. I want to give a $10,000 
tax deduction per year for the cost of any college tuition after high 
school for people of any age. Will you help us do that? [Applause]
    Now, again I say, you want to know what the differences are between 
the efforts I'm making and the efforts that Senator Dole is earnestly 
and honestly pursuing? I don't like all these personal attacks. I think 
it's just kind of a political deal. We just honestly disagree. The 
difference in my position and his, the difference in Mary Landrieu's and 
her opponent is that if you look at the family leave law; if you look at 
the 100,000 police on the street; if you look at the Brady bill, which 
kept 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers and now will keep people who 
beat up their spouses and their kids from getting handguns; if you look 
at our new college loan program; if you look at the targeted tax cuts 
for college, we believe that we're a better, stronger country when we 
work together to help each other have not a guarantee but the tools to 
make the most of their own lives. They believe you're better off on your 
own. You have to decide. Will you stand with us? Will you fight with us? 
Will you build that bridge to the 21st century with us? [Applause] We 
need you, Louisiana.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:08 p.m. at Woldenberg Park. In his 
remarks, he referred to vocal group As Yet; Bishop Paul Morton of St. 
Stephen's Full Gospel Baptist Church, who gave the invocation; Mayor 
Marc H. Morial of New Orleans; and Mary Landrieu, Louisiana senatorial 
candidate.