    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [February 6, 1997]
    [Pages 125-127]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast
    February 6, 1997

        Thank you very much, Congressman Barrett. I want to thank you for
    making it possible for me to follow Dr. Carson. [Laughter] And that
    business about worrying about whether the Secret Service would take you
    away if you talked too long, if that were true I wouldn't be here today.
    I'd be long gone. [Laughter] That biochemical description of--I got a
    real problem; I can't remember my home phone number anymore. [Laughter]
        Senator Akaka, Mr. Speaker, Congressman Gephardt, to all the Members
    of Congress and the Governors who are here and our leaders and visitors
    from other lands and ministers and citizens from the United States. I've
    had a wonderful day today. I would like not to pour cold water on the
    day, but just as you go through the day I would like to ask all of you
    to remember the heartbreaking loss that our friends in Israel have
    sustained in the last couple of days with 73 of their finest young
    soldiers dying in that horrible accident in the air.
        I would like to also say that, like all of you, I was very elevated
    by this experience, as I always am. I thought Dr. Carson was wonderful.
    I thought the Scriptures were well chosen. I appreciate Doug Coe and all
    the people who work on the prayer breakfast so much.
        I would like to just say a couple of things very briefly. In my
    Inaugural Address and again in my State of the Union, I quoted Isaiah
    58:12, which Reverend Robert Schuller sent to me a few days before I
    started my second term, to remind us that we should all be repairers of
    the breach. And it's a very moving thing. And basically the political
    press here read it in the proper way; they said Clinton wants the
    Republicans and Democrats to make nice to each other and do constructive
    things.
        But then I got to thinking about who is it that's in the breach. Who
    has fallen between the cracks? If we repaired the breach, who would we
    be lifting out of the hole? And very briefly, I'd like to just mention
    three things and to ask you not only to pray for these three groups of
    people but also to do something about it. I don't know about you, but
    whenever I hear somebody like Dr. Carson speak, I can clap better than
    anybody in the audience. Then the next day, when I get up and try to
    live by what he said I was supposed to do, it turned out to be harder
    than it was to clap. So I would like to ask you to think about who is in
    the breach, if we're supposed to be repairers of the breach.
        The first group of people that are in the breach are the poor in
    America, and they're different then they used to be. When I was a boy,
    most poor people were old. In 1995, we learned last year, we had the
    lowest rate of poverty among older Americans in the history of the
    country. We have succeeded in taking them out of poverty, virtually all
    of them. We should be proud of that and grateful. Today, almost all the
    poor are young, very young people without much education, a lot of
    mothers like Dr. Carson's mother, struggling, doing the best they can to
    raise their kids.
        We just passed this welfare reform bill which I signed and voted for
    because I believed it. And we did it because we believed that the
    welfare system had gone from being a system that helped the poor to help
    themselves to move off welfare, to a system that trapped people because
    the family unit has changed and there are so many single parents out
    there having children, and there isn't the stigma on it there used to
    be. And a lot of people now seem to be stuck on that system from
    generation to generation. So we changed it--we didn't change it; we tore
    it down. We threw it away. We said, ``There's no longer a national
    guarantee that you can always get a check from the Government just
    because you're poor and you've got little babies in your home. Now the
    kids can have health care and we'll give them food, but you don't get an
    income check every month. And you've got to go to work if you're able
    to.''
        So the people that are in the breach are the people that we say have
    to go to work, who want to go to work, who can't go to work. And you
    have to help us repair the breach. Two and a quarter million people
    moved off the welfare rolls in the last 4 years. A million of them, more
    or less, were adults who went to work; the others were their children--a
    million out of 11 million new jobs created.

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        In the next 4 years, there's about, more or less, 10 million more
    people left on welfare, about 3\1/2\ million adults, maybe 4, most of
    them able-bodied. And all of them are supposed to lose their benefits if
    they're able-bodied after 2 years unless they go to work. Where are they
    going to get the jobs? You're going to have to give them--private
    employers, churches, community nonprofits. I see the Governor of
    Michigan, the Governor of North Dakota here. They can actually take the
    welfare check and give it to you now as an employment or a training
    subsidy or to help you deal with transportation or child care or
    whatever.
        But you better hire them. And if you don't, this whole thing will be
    a fraud, and we will not have repaired the breach. And all that we
    dreamed of doing, which is to create more Dr. Carsons out of those
    children of welfare recipients, will go down the drain because we come
    to places like this and clap for people like him and then we get up
    tomorrow morning and we don't repair the breach and do what we're
    supposed to do. And I need you to help.
        The second people who have fallen between the cracks are people
    around the world who are in trouble that we could help without troubling
    ourselves very much. I'm proud of what our country has done in Bosnia
    and the Balkans--you should be too--in the Middle East, in Haiti, to
    help our neighbors in Mexico. Impulses--the American people are
    generous. I want to thank the Speaker for supporting me when only 15
    percent of the American people thought we were right when we tried to
    help our friends in Mexico. Thank goodness they proved us right, Mr.
    Speaker, otherwise we might be out in the south 40 somewhere today.
        But still our country has this idea that somehow it demeans us to
    pay our dues to the United Nations or to participate in the World Bank
    or--there's lots of things more important than that--or just to give
    Secretary Albright, who's here, the basic tools of diplomacy. This is an
    interdependent world. We can get a long way with having the finest
    defense in the world, but we also have to help people become what they
    can be.
        So I ask you to think about that. We're not talking about spending a
    lot of money here. It's only one percent of our budget. But we can't
    walk away from our obligations to the rest of the world. We can be a
    model for the rest of the world, but we also know that we have to model
    the behavior we advocate, which is to give a helping hand when we can.
        The third people who are in the breach and are in a deep hole and
    need to be lifted up are the politicians. And we need your help. We need
    your help. And some members of the press, they're in that breach with
    us, too, and they need your help. [Laughter]
        This is funny, but I'm serious now. And tomorrow, I want you to
    wake--I want you to laugh today and wake up and be serious tomorrow.
    This town is gripped with people who are self-righteous, sanctimonious,
    and hypocritical; all of us are that way sometimes. I plead guilty, from
    time to time. We also tend to get--we spend an enormous amount of time
    here in Washington trying to get even. And it doesn't matter who started
    it.
        I remember when I came here one time, I got so mad at our friends in
    the Congress and the Republican Party because they were real mean to me
    over something. I went back to the White House, and I asked somebody who
    had been there a while in Washington, and I said, ``Now, why in the
    world did they do that?'' They said, ``It's payback time.'' I said,
    ``What do you mean?'' They said, ``Well, they think the Democrats in
    Congress did this to Republican Presidents.'' I said, ``I didn't even
    live here then. Why are they paying me back?'' They said, ``Oh, you
    don't understand. You've just got to pay back.''
        So then, pretty soon I was behaving that way. I'd wake up in the
    morning, and my heart was getting a little harder. ``Now, who can I get
    even with?'' You think--this happens to you, doesn't it? ``Who can I get
    even with?'' And sometimes you can't get even with the person that
    really did it to you, so you just go find somebody else, because you've
    got to get even with somebody. Pretty soon, everybody's involved in this
    great act.
        You know how cynical the press is about the politicians, you know.
    They think we're all whatever they think. What you should know is that
    the politicians have now become just as cynical about the press, because
    cynicism breeds cynicism.
        We're in a world of hurt. We need help. We are in the breach. We are
    in the hole here. This country has the most astonishing opportunity we
    have ever had. We happen to be faced with this time of great change and
    challenge. We're going into this enormous new world. And

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    instead of going into it hobbled with economic distress or foreign
    pressures, we are free of any threat to our existence and our economy is
    booming. And it's like somebody said, ``Here's this brave new world, and
    I'm going to let you prepare for it and walk into it in the best shape
    you've ever been in.'' And instead of doing that, half of us want to sit
    down, and the other half of us want to get in a fight with each other.
    We are in the breach. And we need you to help us get out of it.
        The United States is better than that. We owe more than that to our
    people, to our future, and to the world. We owe more than that to our
    heritage, to everybody from George Washington on, that made us what we
    are today. And cynicism and all this negative stuff is just sort of a
    cheap excuse for not doing your best with your life. And it's not a very
    pleasant way to live, frankly--not even any fun.
        I try to tell everybody around the White House all the time, I have
    concluded a few things in my life, and one of them is that you don't
    ever get even. The harder you try, the more frustrated you're going to
    be, because nobody ever gets even. And when you do, you're not really
    happy. You don't feel fulfilled.
        So I ask you to pray for us. I went to church last Sunday where
    Hillary and I always go, at the Foundry Methodist Church, and the pastor
    gave a sermon on Romans 12:16 through 21 and a few other verses. But I'm
    going to quote the relevant chapters. ``Do not be wise in your own
    estimation.'' It's hard to find anybody here that can fit that. ``Never
    pay back evil for evil to anyone.'' ``If possible, so far as it depends
    upon you, be at peace with all men.'' ``Never take your own vengeance.''
    ``If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him a
    drink.'' ``Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.''
        Pray for the people in public office that we can rid ourselves of
    this toxic atmosphere of cynicism and embrace with joy and gratitude
    this phenomenal opportunity and responsibility before us. Do not forget
    people in the rest of the world who depend upon the United States for
    more than exhortation. And most of all, remember that in every Scripture
    of every faith, there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
    admonitions not to forget those among us who are poor. They are no
    longer entitled to a handout, but they surely deserve, and we are
    ordered to give them, a hand up.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:28 a.m. at the Washington Hilton Hotel.
    In his remarks, he referred to Representative Bill Barrett, chairman,
    1997 National Prayer Breakfast; Dr. Ben Carson, director of pediatric
    neurosurgery, Johns Hopkins Hospital; Doug Coe, who helped organize the
    event; and Governors John Engler of Michigan and Edward T. Schafer of
    North Dakota.