    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [January 6, 1997]
    [Pages 5-7]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast
    January 6, 1997

        Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President and Tipper and ladies and
    gentlemen. Hillary and I are delighted to welcome you to the White
    House. We look forward to these breakfasts. As Al said, we have been
    doing them on a regular basis now, normally around--just after Labor Day
    as we sort of rededicate ourselves to the labor of the new year. But
    this year, we are doing it now for two reasons: One is, obviously, this
    is on the brink of the Inauguration and a new 4-year term for the
    President and for our country; the other is, we were otherwise occupied
    last Labor Day. [Laughter]
        This is a wonderful day to be here. We asked Father Stephanopoulos
    to pray today because, as all of you know, this is the celebration of
    Epiphany in the Christian faith, a time of recognizing Christmas in the
    Orthodox tradition. I also wanted you to pray so that I could say that
    we were all very impressed with the size of the book contract that--
    [laughter]--that your son got, and we know we can depend upon you to
    make sure the church gets its 10 percent of that contract. We are very
    proud of him and very grateful to have him here.
        This is the day in the Christian tradition when the wise men came
    bearing gifts for the baby Jesus. And we have much to be thankful for
    and much to pray for, but I think what I would say today is that I asked
    you to come here to share with me your thoughts and to share with you
    some of ours in the hope that we might all become wiser.
        I am very grateful for the progress that our country has made in the
    last 4 years, grateful that we have been given a chance to play a role
    in that progress, and mindful that whatever has been done which is good
    has been done by us together.
        One of my college roommates, who I think is a really smart guy, said
    to me the other day when we were together and joking about our lost
    youth, he said, ``Oh, and one other thing,'' as he was leaving. He said,
    ``Don't ever forget that great Presidents do not do great things. Great
    Presidents get a lot of other people to do great things. And there is
    over 250 million of us now, so that's a lot of greatness if you can get
    us all to do the right thing,'' which I thought was an interesting way
    of saying in part what the magic and genius of democracy is all about.
        So we're thinking a lot now about how we're going to build our
    bridge to the 21st century, what we're going to do in this next term.
    I've listened to all of these experts talk about how hard it is for
    Presidents to be effective in the second term because, after all, they
    just got reelected because things went well in their first term, not
    because they had actually thought through what they were going to do in
    their second term. But we've tried to overcome that disability.
        There are a lot of particulars that we could discuss today, but what
    I'd like for you to think about a little bit, from your perspective and
    what you can do--two things: What are we going to do; and secondly, and
    more importantly I think, how are we going to do it? In what spirit
    shall we proceed?
        In any great democracy there are always differences about what are
    we going to do. There always have been, there always will be, and these
    are altogether healthy. It would be--America wouldn't last very long, I
    think, if 100 percent of the people agreed 100 percent of the time on
    100 percent of the issues. What keeps us going--we all know that none of
    us has perfect and infinite understanding of these complex matters
    facing our country and facing the world. But we have devised a system--
    we have nurtured and maintained it now for over 200 years--in which
    people can reconcile their differences and come to a consensus and an
    agreement which will push the country forward. So we are enlarged when
    we come to agreement after honest debate in the right way; we are
    diminished if, in the way we treat each other, we preclude the
    possibility of resolution and going forward. And at times like this,
    when things are changing so much, we need the right spirit more because
    we have more to decide, more to deal with. And yet, at times like this,
    we are in some ways put at risk by the absence of that spirit of
    reconciliation and respect.
        There are several specific things I hope we can talk about later
    that I think we could reach broad agreement on. For example, some of you

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    think I made a mistake when I signed the welfare reform bill, and I
    don't. But one thing that we all ought to be able to agree on is, the
    bill will not succeed--the bill does nothing, it just changes the rules.
    It doesn't put anybody to work. In 4 years we have reduced by 2.1
    million the number of people on welfare, the biggest reduction in
    history, by doing the kinds of things that now this bill requires every
    State to do. We just went out and worked with the States and came up
    with innovative ways to get around old rules and regulations and do them
    anyway. Now every State has got to try to do that for every person.
        My objective here is, once and for all, to take the politics out of
    poverty and to treat all able-bodied people the same at the community
    level. What I long for is a system of community-based support for people
    who are out of work through no fault of their own but a system of
    community-based norms that require people who can work to work when
    there is work. Now, if you say that everybody who is able-bodied can
    only stay on welfare 2 years continuously unless the State decides to
    continue to support them for some other reason--and we did give a fund
    so that hardship cases could be treated in that way--then every
    community has to have a system for putting those people to work.
        Now, let me pause at this; you can all think about this. This new
    law gives every State the right to give the welfare check to any
    employer, including a church, as an employment and training subsidy, who
    will hire someone from welfare. If every church in America just hired
    one family, the welfare problem would go way down. If every church in
    America challenged every member of that church who had 25 or more
    employees to hire another family, the problem would go away, and we
    would really have a system in which in times of recession we'd have more
    people unemployed at the community level. In good times we'd have fewer
    people, but we would always have a community-based commitment that
    crossed party lines and religious lines and every other line to give
    able-bodied people the dignity of work and support them in the most
    important work they do, which is raising their children.
        The second thing I wanted to talk about a little bit is this whole
    business of immigration. The things I don't like about the welfare law
    have nothing to do with welfare and everything to do with the way we
    tried to save money, I thought unfairly, on legal immigrants. Our
    administration has done a lot to cut down on illegal immigration, but we
    believe that legal immigration has served our country well. It has,
    however, made us more diverse. And so immigration is really the
    touchstone where we deal with not only what are we going to do but how
    are we going to do it.
        I believe that we have learned a lot in 220 years--really more than
    300 years--about how hard it is for people of different races to get
    along. We know that that is difficult in all societies and all times,
    and it's something you just have to keep working at. But now America is
    not a white and black America. America is a country with scores,
    hundreds of different racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Our biggest
    county, Los Angeles County, now has over 160 different racial and ethnic
    groups within one county. But it's all over America. Wayne County, where
    Detroit, Michigan, is, has now over 140 different racial and ethnic
    groups. Detroit was a place where we used to think of where you
    basically had white ethnics who immigrated from Central and Eastern
    Europe and African-Americans and white Southerners who immigrated out of
    the South because they couldn't make a living in places like my home
    State in the Depression and later--now, 140 different racial and ethnic
    groups.
        How are we going to deal with that? Against the background of what
    you see in Bosnia, Rwanda, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, all of
    these things, these destructive impulses people have, how can we prove
    in America that we can all get along, not without giving up our basic
    beliefs but in finding a ground of mutual respect? It seems to me that
    that may be the single most significant decision facing the United
    States. We have a lot of other things we have to deal with in the next 4
    years, the whole question of the entitlements burden when the baby
    boomers retire and education initiatives that I intend to push and
    finishing the work of balancing the budget and all that. That's fine,
    but if we can all find a way to hold up to the world not only the
    example of our freedom but the example of our freedom in the 21st
    century global interdependent world in which anybody from anywhere can
    live here, and if you show up for work or you show up for school and you
    do what you're supposed to do and you're a good citizen, you can be part
    of our

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    country, and we'll respect your faith, we'll respect your differences,
    and we'll find a way to work together, then I believe the preeminence of
    the United States will be assured throughout the next century. And I
    think you have to think about it in long terms like that.
        What causes a society to rise and fall? We clearly are proving that
    we're getting back to our basic values. The crime rate is going down.
    You saw the--has gone down now for several years in a row for the first
    time in 25 years. We have inequality among working people going down--
    and I'm very proud of that--for the first time in 20 years. We have a
    lot of our other social problems being ameliorated, the teen pregnancy
    rate dropping substantially for the first time in a good while. Drugs,
    alcohol, tobacco are still a problem for very young people. Drug use is
    going down in society as a whole but still going up among young people.
        So we're on the cusp here, maybe, of turning a lot of our social
    problems around. We know what we ought to do. Can we do it in the right
    way, in a spirit of reconciliation? And can we recognize that in this
    exciting new world there's no way in the world for us to know the answer
    to all these questions that are out there before us?
        And that's the last point I'd like to make. If we do things in the
    right way, we'll get enough of the right answers to keep moving our
    country forward and to keep doing the right thing for the rest of the
    world. And we won't be right all the time, but that's just because we're
    human. So that's the last thought I would like to leave with you.
        The beginning of wisdom, I think, is humility and respect for what
    you may not know. Now, we were talking around the table here about the
    last speech Cardinal Bernardin gave in which he said that the precious
    gift of time should not be wasted on acrimony and division. And he said
    that knowing he just had a little bit of time left. The truth is, all of
    us just have a little bit of time left. He just knew it, and we don't.
    And 3 weeks or 30 years, it's a little bit of time in the life of a
    country, the life of the world.
        So I say to you--I ask for your guidance, for your prayers for our
    country, for the efforts that all of us are making. I ask for your
    specific involvement, particularly in the two issues I've mentioned, on
    the welfare and immigration issues. But most important of all, I ask for
    your help in creating a sense of reconciliation, the right sort of
    spirit in which we can deal with these issues. As people of faith on
    this Epiphany, I think we should all ask that that be made evident to
    us.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:59 a.m. in the State Dining Room at the
    White House. In his remarks, he referred to Rev. Robert G.
    Stephanopoulos, Holy Trinity Cathedral, New York, NY, who gave the
    invocation, and the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, former Archbishop of
    Chicago.