[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book II)]
[November 4, 1996]
[Pages 2071-2076]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks in Sioux Falls, South Dakota
November 4, 1996

    Thank you very much. Thank you. Well, I didn't expect to see so many 
of you here this late at night. Senator and Mrs. Daschle; Senator-to-be 
and Mrs. Johnson; Congressman-to-be and Mrs. Weiland. And I want us to 
give a real good hand here to Rick Weiland and his fine wife. They've 
done a great job out there campaigning, give them a hand. [Applause] Pam 
Nelson, thank you for your candidacy. Give Pam Nelson a hand. Stand up, 
Pam. She needs your help tomorrow. [Applause] I want to thank CeCe 
Peniston for singing so beautifully; the Bill Gibson Orchestra. Thank 
you, South Dakota State University Marching Band. You were fabulous.
    Now, you know, if the rest of us can maintain that level of energy 
till the polls close tomorrow night, we're going to be just fine, and 
this is great. We're going to be fine. Thank you.
    And I want to thank my longtime friend who was with me 4 years ago 
on this night under similar circumstances. He's going to bring us good 
luck again, Jerry Jeff Walker and his band. Thank you for being here. 
God bless you, friend.
    You know, folks, I appreciate what Tom Daschle said in thanking us 
for our lavish attention to South Dakota and all that. It's not 
complicated. I like it here. I like coming here. I enjoy being here. I 
feel at home here. I feel this is a place where people still know their 
neighbors and where they care about what happens to their neighbors and 
where they understand, in the best sense, as Hillary often says, it does 
take a village for us to raise our children and build our future.
    This is the last election of the 20th century for President, the 
first election of the 21st century, an election occurring against a 
background of almost breathtaking, unimaginable changes in technology 
and science, in the way we are simply organized to work and live and 
relate to each other and the rest of the world. The young people here in 
this audience today, in a few years many will be doing jobs that have 
not been invented yet. Many will be doing jobs that have not been 
imagined yet.
    One little piece of evidence about how much the world is changing: 
When I became President there were 3 million Americans who were living 
and working in their homes, making a living. That was 4 years ago. 
Today, there are 12 million Americans doing that because of technology, 
and 4 years from now there will be 30 million Americans doing that.
    We just signed a contract, the United States did, with IBM to 
develop a supercomputer that will do more calculations in one second 
than you can do at home tonight on your hand-held calculator in 30,000 
years. That is an example of what is happening.
    I say that to make this point: This is an election of enormous 
consequence, not because of Tim Johnson or Bill Clinton but because of 
the sweeping changes going on in our country. And

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the great question is, how shall we respond to those changes?
    There's been a lot of back and forth in this campaign that I think 
is, unfortunately, a byproduct of much of modern politics, a lot of 
negative stuff. My experience has been that most people in public life 
in both parties are good, honest, hard-working people who give their 
lives to their country and love their country. In this case we just have 
different views. And you should be happy about that because in an 
election of great consequence there ought to be a clear choice and you 
ought to have some way of measuring whether the choice you're making is 
right. And I would argue to the people of South Dakota--I know that 
there are more registered Republicans than Democrats here; I know there 
are a lot of registered independents here. This vote tomorrow should be 
the first vote of the 21st century. It ought to be a vote about people 
and progress and hopes and dreams. Party is not nearly as important 
tomorrow as reaching out for our dreams and our deepest hopes for our 
children, and that is what I am asking.
    Now, you know, maybe some of you have noticed this, but I am now 
speaking at the last rally of the last campaign I will ever run. And I'm 
honored to share it with you. It's hard for me to believe that this 
January it will be 23 years ago when, as a young 27-year-old man, I 
asked the people of my rural hill country congressional district in 
Arkansas to send me to Congress. They said no, by the way. [Laughter]
    And everybody thought I was washed up. Then I got to be my State's 
attorney general and Governor, and then in the Reagan landslide of 1980 
they said no again. [Laughter] By the time I was 34 years old, I had 
already been defeated twice. I was in Ripley's already. I was the 
youngest ex-Governor in the history of America. [Laughter] But the 
people of my home State were good to me. We learned a lot together, and 
we did a lot together. And 4 years ago you gave me the chance to be 
President.
    The American people 4 years ago took us on faith when I said that I 
hated what had happened in politics in Washington; it was too much hot 
air, too many insults, not enough issues, not enough results, not enough 
people reaching across the partisan divide and working together in a new 
and different time to try and build a new politics for America. I said 
that if you elected me, I would follow a vigorous and disciplined 
approach: more opportunity for everybody, more responsibility from 
everybody, and an American community in which everyone who works hard 
and is responsible has a place at the table and a role to play. We have 
done that for 4 years, and you don't have to guess anymore.
    Our friends on the other side, they honestly believe that we're 
better off when we're on our own. I think we're better off when we work 
together to give each other not a guarantee but a chance to make the 
most of our own lives and our families and our future. And you don't 
have to guess anymore.
    This economy is stronger than it was 4 years ago. The deficit has 
gone down by 63 percent and there are 10.7 million more jobs and the 
lowest rates of unemployment and inflation in 27 years. Something that's 
always been important to hard working families in this part of our 
country is that everybody who works hard ought to have a fair share. 
We've had the biggest decline in inequality of incomes among working 
people in 27 years, the biggest drop in child poverty in 30 years, the 
lowest rate of poverty among seniors in America ever recorded since 
we've been keeping statistics. We are moving in the right direction to 
the 21st century. We are.
    And in our country as a whole the crime rate has gone down to a 10-
year low. The welfare rolls have dropped by nearly 2 million. Child 
support collections, by the way, are up by about 50 percent. And more 
children are getting what they are entitled to. Our economy is in better 
shape than it was 4 years ago, but so is our environment. We've taken 
millions of tons of pollutants out of the atmosphere, raised the 
standards for safe drinking water and the purity of food. And I might 
add, we've done that with the support of the agricultural community. 
We've cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than our opponents 
did in 12.
    So we're moving in the right direction. And you have this clear 
choice. They say all these terrible things they say about all of us, you 
know, but it obscures the fact that we're moving in the right direction, 
that we have now 4 years of evidence that ``you're on your own'' is not 
nearly as good as ``we're working together to build a bridge to the 21st 
century we can all walk across.'' And that's what this is about.
    Now, there is another very important piece of evidence here, and 
that is when our friends

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in the other party were in power and were given the power to enact their 
Contract With America--by the way, how many times has Congressman 
Johnson's opponent mentioned that contract in this election? But anyway, 
they did it, and it wasn't just the House under Newt Gingrich. It was 
the Senate under Senator Dole. They did it together. And they passed 
their version of what they thought America's future ought to be. They 
did it all by themselves. They told us they didn't want our help, they 
didn't want our votes, and they weren't interested in our input. They 
wanted to do it, and they wanted to show America what they wanted to do.
    And we saw. We saw. They passed a budget which cut 3 times as much 
from Medicare as was necessary to save the Trust Fund and divided the 
program so that the oldest, the poorest, and the most ill of our seniors 
ran the risk of being put in a second-class program at a time when it 
wasn't necessary and at a time when we know it's wrong. We've got the 
lowest poverty rate we ever had among seniors. And in America, if you 
live to be 65, you have the highest life expectancy of any group of 
seniors in the world. That's a high-class problem. Why would they mess 
that up? That's what they tried to do.
    They also took the Medicaid program, which has for 30 years provided 
a guarantee of health care to poor women and infant children, to middle 
class families with family members with disabilities so they could take 
care of their family members and still work and maintain their middle 
class lifestyle, to a lot of our seniors in nursing homes and standards 
for those nursing homes and they got rid of all that. And they cut 
education funding from Head Start to college loans for the first time in 
modern history, abolished the Department of Education, abolished the 
program to put 100,000 police on our street, which has played a critical 
role in bringing the crime rate down, and paralyzed environmental 
enforcement and cut it back by 25 to 30 percent. That's what they did. 
They also--oh, by the way--raised taxes on 9 million of our hardest 
pressed working families and gave companies the authority to raid their 
workers' pension funds. We went through that in the 1980's. In 1994, Tom 
Daschle and Tim Johnson and I passed a worker protection pension act to 
protect the pensions of 40 million retired and still working people, and 
they wanted to turn around and undo that. That's what they did.
    Now, along toward the end of this last Congress they adopted our 
program. They said, ``Oh, we've got to go face the voters. We'll give 
the President what he wants.'' And they hope you have this case of 
collective amnesia. [Laughter] The Vice President told a story today in 
Cleveland when we were together--I had forgotten this story; we used to 
tell it at home all the time--but it captures what they're trying to get 
you to think about their budget.
    It's a story about a politician who's out in the country, and he 
sees a farmer. He's running for office, and the farmer is sitting up on 
his porch rocking, and he says, ``I'm going to go talk to this farmer,'' 
but there's a big old dog in the yard that's ferocious looking. So he 
says, ``Sir, I'd like to come visit with you, but does your dog bite?'' 
He said, ``No.'' So he hikes over the fence, goes over on the porch, 
shakes hands with the farmer and tells him he's running for the 
legislature and would like to have his vote. And the dog runs up and 
bites him right in the rear. [Laughter] And he runs back and jumps in 
his car and rolls the window down and said, ``I thought you said your 
dog didn't bite.'' He said, ``Son, that ain't my dog.'' [Laughter]
    And let me tell you something, folks, that budget that I vetoed, it 
is their dog, and it was a mangy old dog, and that's why I vetoed that 
dog. And everybody--and I'll tell you, if you reward them, everybody--
oh, I can see it all now in the columns the next day--well, that budget 
wasn't so unpopular after all. You have to decide.
    They said, ``Well, the Democrats--Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson, people 
like that--they love the Government so much they'll never let us shut it 
down, and we'll just make the President cave. We'll put them all on 
their knees. If they don't take our budget and let us shove it to the 
American people, we'll just shut the Government down, and we'll show 
them who's boss.''
    And they did it, and we didn't cave. And they did it again, and we 
didn't cave. And what I finally told them was, I said, ``Look, I hate to 
see the American people inconvenienced for 30 or 40 days, but that is 
nothing to seeing the American people hurt, divided, and set back for 30 
or 40 years. Shut her down. We are

[[Page 2074]]

not going to cave.'' Thank you, Tim Johnson, for staying there. Thank 
you.
    Now, let me give you an idea of what the practical impact of that 
was on you. I was in Denver the other night and we had a nice little 
indoor rally like this--I think you got more folks here tonight. But 
they were really great, though. We had a great rally, and after the 
rally I did what I always do: I started at one end, went to the other 
end, just shook hands with everybody I could reach. And while I was 
moving in a space about like this, I met the following people: I met a 
young woman who started crying who thanked me for the work we were doing 
in trying to combat domestic violence and violence against women. She 
was obviously a victim. That was in the crime bill that they opposed. So 
if they had had their way, it wouldn't be law.
    Then I met a young woman in a police uniform from a smaller 
community in Colorado thanking me for the five new police officers that 
her community had, and she was going to feel safer on the street and the 
kids were going to be safer in her community. That was in the crime 
bill, and that was in the budget that they tried to do away with. All 
those police officers, they wouldn't have been there.
    Then I met a young man who had dropped out of college and went back 
when we changed the college loan program so you could borrow a lot of 
money and then pay it back as a percentage of your income so young 
people would never be bankrupted by borrowing the money to go to 
college. They did away with that, too. They tried to kill it, and they 
did away with that.
    Then I met a man who told me that he and his wife had just adopted a 
2-month-old baby, and his wife was able to go home and make that child 
more comfortable in their new circumstances without losing her job 
because of the family and medical leave law. And they led the fight 
against that. This happens to me all the time.
    Then I met a young woman who was going to college because she'd 
worked in AmeriCorps, the national service program, serving her 
community, and earned the money to go to college. Seventy thousand young 
people have done that. They are solving problems and helping people all 
across America, and they did away with that in the budget.
    Now, those are just people that I just ran into in a line just like 
this in South Dakota. This has huge consequences for America. Now, I 
know that in Congressman Johnson's race there's a lot of talk about 
clout. And that's an interesting concept, clout. [Laughter] It looks to 
me like you'd have a lot of clout if Tom Daschle were the majority 
leader of the Senate. You would have a lot of clout because everybody in 
the entire United States Congress, in both parties, who knows him 
respects Tim Johnson as one of the most hard-working, effective, 
intelligent, persistent Members of Congress in the entire country.
    And you'd have a lot of clout because the President likes 
Congressman Johnson and listens to him. And when he says, ``Mr. 
President, you're wrong; you shouldn't do this. This, this is what's in 
the best interest of the people of South Dakota,'' I would be highly 
likely to listen to Tim Johnson if he said this.
    So it makes a difference. You know, the title is not enough. There's 
a difference. You have to draw these distinctions. It reminds me of my 
other favorite dog story. [Laughter] You know about--this guy is going 
down the highway, and he sees this sign that says, ``George Jones, 
Veterinarian/Taxidermist. Either way you get your dog back.'' [Laughter]
    It makes a difference. Tim Johnson will have good clout. He'll be 
very, very good, and he won't be using a committee chairmanship to 
saddle the American people or the people of South Dakota with the kind 
of budget that I had to veto that would have divided this country and 
set us back. He'll be building a bridge to the future.
    So you ought to go to the polls tomorrow happy and upbeat and 
feeling good about your country. You ought to go to the polls tomorrow 
with absolutely no doubt in your mind that the best days of America lie 
ahead. But you should be heavily aware of the responsibility you and all 
Americans bear to seize this opportunity to say, if we're going to meet 
the challenges we face, if we're going to seize the opportunities we 
have, we have to do this together. There are some things we must do 
together. I talked about that supercomputer. The richest person in this 
audience tonight cannot afford to build that.
    Every American who won a Nobel Prize this year in physics and 
chemistry started with a public research grant. The Internet, which is

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going to be the salvation of so many people in rural areas, allowing 
them access to things they would never have otherwise, started as a 
Government research project. It's now in the private sector where it 
belongs, but I just announced another investment of $100 million to 
modernize and expand it because when we all get on we don't want it to 
break down. We want it to take us out to the rest of the world.
    Now, we have to do some things together. So your vote is going to 
decide whether we go on and balance this budget, have a targeted tax cut 
for education, childrearing, health care, and homebuying that we can 
afford in a balanced budget, protect Medicare, Medicaid, education, and 
the environment; or whether we go back and replay what happened before 
with their big, risky tax scheme that still raises taxes on the hardest 
pressed working people, will require bigger cuts in those things than 
the ones I vetoed, will blow a hole in the deficit, and violates every 
fiscal principle that I know that the people of South Dakota, 
Republican, Democrat, or independent, all believe in. You have to 
decide. Let's go on and balance the budget and build that bridge to the 
21st century. You will have to decide. You have to decide.
    You have to decide whether we're going to finish the work of the 
crime bill and put a whole 100,000 police on the street; whether we're 
going to continue to support the safe and drug-free schools program 
which we have doubled so that more people will be out there telling 
these young people drugs are wrong, illegal, they can kill you. This is 
not the time to turn back on that problem. There's still too many kids 
out there raising themselves. They need a strong hand and guidance, and 
I want to give it to them. We dare not cut back on that program and walk 
away from it. You have to decide.
    I say let's keep bringing the crime rate down. In 4 more years we 
might actually feel safe in this country again if we can do it. You have 
to decide.
    You have to decide whether you really believe, not just something to 
cheer about on the eve of an election but whether deep inside you 
believe that America will never be what it ought to be until we give all 
of our children and all of our adults now access to world-class 
educational opportunities with high standards, accountability, 
technology, and all the benefits that the best schools have. You have to 
decide.
    Let me just give you an example. I want to do three things. Number 
one, you know 40 percent of the 8-year-olds in this country still can't 
read a book on their own. A lot of them come from places where their 
first language is not English. That will be cold comfort to them when 
they can't learn later on because they didn't learn to read when they 
were young. We have a plan to mobilize a million volunteers. We have 
100,000 more work-study slots that we'll make available to college 
students if they'll teach 8-year-olds to read. I want to go into the 
schools and work with the parents so that by the year 2000 every 8-year-
old in this country can pick up a book and say, ``I can read this all by 
myself.'' Will you help me do that? Will you help us do that? [Applause]
    The second thing I want to do--we had an event about this in South 
Dakota not very long ago. I think the Vice President was here. We are 
working hard to connect every classroom and every library in every 
school in America to the information superhighway by the year 2000. And 
here's what it means. It means that children in every American tribe in 
America, children in the poorest rural school districts, children in the 
most remote districts in Alaska, children in the biggest--poor inner-
city school districts in our biggest cities; children in urban, 
suburban, and rural districts; rich, poor, middle class--for the first 
time in the history of America, because of these connections we can make 
available the same learning from all over the world at the same level of 
quality in the same time to all of our children. It will revolutionize 
education. Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century? 
[Applause]
    And finally, when you look at these college students, let me say 
that we must--we must--open the doors of college to all Americans. And 
we can do this, number one, by making 2 years of college as universal as 
a high school diploma is today. In 4 years we can do it by simply saying 
you can deduct from your tax bill, dollar for dollar, the cost of the 
typical community college tuition. All you have to do is go and make 
your grades and do your business.
    Number two, I want to make it possible for more people to save in an 
individual retirement account, but withdraw from it tax-free if the 
money is used for education or homebuying or health care.
    And finally, something that would help virtually every person in 
that band up there. I

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think the people ought to be able to deduct up to $10,000 per year for 
the cost of tuition at any college or university in any place in the 
United States. Now, will you help us do that? [Applause]
    But again, I say, all these issues, all these divisions, they're not 
a matter of party. Every time we go through a period of big change, we 
are given an opportunity not only to increase our prosperity, not only 
to make our lives more interesting but to build stronger families and 
stronger communities and to live closer to our values. That is what this 
election is about.
    This is the last speech of my last campaign. If you came up to me 
and said, ``What have you learned in 23 years that never changes?'' I 
would say, when people look into their hearts and they ask, ``What is 
the right thing for my children and for my family and for America's 
future,'' when they set aside their prejudices and embrace people of 
different racial and religious and ethnic groups who share their values 
of work and family and belief in the Constitution, when they roll up 
their sleeves and work together, America always wins.
    This is the greatest country in human history because we have 
created a system in which you are the boss. Tomorrow you will be the 
boss, and you will go in there, and you will be asked, will we renew 
President Clinton's contract? You will be asked--you're going to be 
asked, should we hire Tim Johnson to be our Senator? Should we hire Rick 
Weiland to be our Congressman? Should we hire Pam Nelson to be our 
corporation commissioner? You're going to be asked these questions. But 
the real question is, are we going to do it together? That's what I've 
learned. I have learned that when we are divided, when we look down on 
each other, when we look for what these politicians call wedge issues to 
divide each other, to win a campaign because we get people in a lather 
so there's more heat than light in our debates and discussions, we 
always get hurt.
    But when we join hands and run our country the way you try to run 
your families, your churches, your farms, your factories, your 
businesses, your communities, your charities, when we do that, we always 
win. There is no person living in this country today who knows that 
better than I do. There is no person living in this country today who 
has been given more gifts, who feels more humble on this night than I 
do. Fifty years ago, when I was born in a summer storm to a widowed 
mother in a little town in Arkansas, it was unthinkable that I might 
have ever become President. I'd like for you to believe I did it because 
I always worked 60 or 70 hours a week, I had an understanding and 
supportive and wonderful family, and I just did it. But it isn't true. I 
did it because at every step along the way for 23 years and long before, 
there was a Sunday school teacher, a teacher in school, a doctor, the 
guy running the Red Roof in my hometown who always stopped and talked to 
me and tried to give me encouragement when I was despondent, over and 
over and over. We just need to run our country the way we want to run 
our lives. That is what I have learned in 23 years, and that is what I 
ask you to vote for tomorrow as we build our bridge to the 21st century.
    Thank you, God bless you, and good night. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:40 p.m. in the Sioux Falls Arena and 
Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Linda Daschle, wife of 
Senator Tom Daschle; Tim Johnson, South Dakota senatorial candidate, and 
his wife, Barb; Pam Nelson, candidate for public utilities commission; 
singer CeCe Peniston; and musician Jerry Jeff Walker.