    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [September 26, 1997]
    [Pages 1242-1248]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at San Jacinto Community College in Houston, Texas
    September 26, 1997

        Thank you. Well, Esmerelda may be getting a degree in mathematics,
    but today she got an ``A'' in public speaking. [Laughter] Let's give her
    another hand. I thought she was great. [Applause]
        Mayor and Mrs. Lanier, Mayor Isbell, and Commissioner Mauro,
    Chancellor Horton. I also see out there Mr. George Abbey, the Director
    of the Johnson Space Center, something that's very close to my heart.
    I've tried to promote the space program as President. I think Ellen
    Ochoa may be here as well. But I thank them for their work. And weren't
    you proud when we landed that little vehicle on Mars, and we got to see
    those pictures? I loved it.
        I'd like to say a special word of appreciation, too, to Congressman
    Ken Bentsen. He has done a very, very fine job for you in the United
    States Congress, and he has steadfastly supported our efforts to balance
    the budget, to restore health to the economy, but to do it in a way that
    kept educational opportunities increasing, not decreasing, for the
    people of this country and the people of this district. And I thank him
    for that.
        I'm very excited to be here today for a couple of reasons. First of
    all, I know we're actually close to the place where the battle of San
    Jacinto occurred. Right? And Sam Houston, in addition to having an
    interesting life which was amazing--he lived with the Cherokees; he led
    the Texas army in the battle for independence; he was a president of the
    Republic of Texas and a United States Senator; he also was a teacher.
    And if you have read much about Sam Houston, you may have seen that he--
    and I quote--he said that his time as a classroom teacher was, quote,
    ``the most satisfying time of my life.'' I think that I would be remiss
    if I did not say to all the educators who are here, as I look at this
    sea of young people, I thank you for your devotion to education, and I
    hope that it will always be something that brings you great
    satisfaction.
        Here, so near the site where Texas fought a battle to win its
    political independence, you are all gaining your economic independence
    by being in this marvelous institution. And the way the community
    college system works here in Texas and across America, in my view, is a
    model of the way America ought to work.
        You think about it. This place, first of all, is open to all. Nobody
    gets turned away because they're too old or too young or because of the
    color of their skin or because of their gender or anything else. If
    you're willing to work and take responsibility for yourselves and your
    course of study, it's open to all--first thing.
        Secondly, it very much focuses on results, not rhetoric, because the
    graduates of community colleges, they either succeed--that is, they get
    a job, or they go on further with their education--or they don't get a
    job based on what they studied, and so you have to change the
    curriculum. So there is not much room for a lot of hot air and talk. You
    either produce or you don't.
        The third thing about the community colleges is that they're always
    about change, not the status quo. Because of the way they're hooked into
    the economy of every area in our country, they are--much more than
    educational institutions or institutions of any kind--supersensitive to
    what's going on in people's lives, because otherwise the students
    wouldn't show up after a while if the institution weren't relevant to
    the future, to their future, and to the community's future.
        So, open to all; rhetoric, not results; change, not the status quo;
    and the last thing that I think is very important is, it's much more
    about partnerships than politics. Nobody asks you whether you're a
    Democrat or a Republican. Nobody asks you whether you like or dislike
    some person or thing. The whole thing only

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    works when people are working together to build a community. I say that
    because I really believe, as I have said all over this country, that
    America would be better if we all worked in the way the community
    colleges of our country work, in the way San Jacinto works.
        Almost 6 years ago, I started my candidacy for President with a
    vision for what I wanted America to look like in the 21st century and a
    commitment to prepare us for that. And it's a pretty simple thing. When
    the century turns, when all of you younger people in this audience have
    your own children coming up, I want to know that the American dream is
    still alive for everybody who will work for it. I want to know that our
    country will still be leading the world for peace and freedom and
    prosperity. And I want to know that we are coming together across all
    the lines that divide us into one America. Opportunity for all,
    responsibility from all, a community of all: That's what I believe we
    should be doing.
        I knew then, and now I know even better than I did 6 years ago, that
    that would require both new policies and a new kind of Government.
    Policies that would be focused on the future, not the past; on unity,
    not division; on partnerships more than politics; on people and values,
    not power; on keeping America leading, not following; and that we had to
    start with a good economic policy because in 1991 the economy wasn't
    working for most of the people.
        I also felt then, and I feel more strongly now, that we have to
    change the very way our Government works. We'd have to make it smaller
    and less bureaucratic and more flexible. And therefore, we would have to
    liberate it from the ability of very powerful interests to cripple us
    and keep us from doing things.
        Now, we've made a lot of progress. We passed the first balanced
    budget this year since President Lyndon Johnson's last budget, the first
    balanced budget in a generation. The Federal Government is now smaller
    than it was when Lyndon Johnson took office. It's the smallest it's been
    since John Kennedy was President. We've gotten rid of 16,000 pages of
    Federal regulations and turned over a lot more things to working with
    States and local governments and the private sector. We passed a lobby
    reform bill to at least disclose what the lobbyists in Washington are
    doing and to limit their ability to do certain things with Members of
    Congress and the Government.
        But one of the biggest problems we have with our political system--I
    just want to change the subject just for a moment because I know it's of
    concern to almost all Americans, and it should be--is that, with the
    advent of modern communications and the growth of our country, the costs
    of political campaigns have soared astronomically, and with it, the
    burdens of raising money, and with it, the questions raised about how
    much money has to be raised to run for office and how it's raised.
        And I ask you all to think about your role in this. You might say,
    on the one hand, ``Well, I don't like those people raising all that
    money,'' and then ask yourself, how many times did you vote for a
    candidate who had the best television ads or the candidate whose ads you
    saw the most. Or did you ever vote against someone who was attacked in a
    television ad, and you never saw another television ad responding to the
    attack, so you thought, ``Well, what they said might be true. I don't
    want to take any chances.''
        The point I want to make is, we desperately need to reform the way
    we finance our campaigns, and a part of that has to be changing the cost
    of the campaigns. And I have worked very hard to do that. But we have to
    do both.
        Now, just today the United States Senate began debate on a very
    important bill, the campaign finance reform bill sponsored by Senator
    John McCain of Arizona, a Republican, and Senator Russ Feingold of
    Wisconsin, a Democrat, working together to curb special interest money
    in politics. I called on Congress to stay in session and not go home
    until it acts on reform. And I'm delighted the debate has begun. But I
    want to say to you, we have debated this before, and every time we
    debate it--at least since I have been President--every year we've had a
    good campaign finance reform bill before the Senate, I have supported
    it. And every year it has died under the parliamentary tactic that
    allows one more than 40 Senators to keep any bill from being voted on--
    called the filibuster--so that you never really know.
        Now, maybe this year there will be a different strategy. But I
    pledge to you, you hide and watch, there will be a lot of efforts to
    make it look like we're going to do something and nothing will happen,
    unless we all work hard and demand that something happen.

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        So if you're worried about this and you'd like to see a system where
    you felt greater confidence in the way campaigns are financed, you
    should do two things. One is, you should say to your Congressmen and
    Senators, ``Pass good campaign finance reform this year, and do it, and
    we want it.'' And secondly, you should support our efforts to lower the
    cost of campaigns by saying that people who follow these limits and
    don't abuse the system should be given reduced cost for access to you on
    television, on radio, in the newspapers, and other ways of
    communications. We have to lower the cost if we're going to clean up the
    way it's financed. And I hope you'll support them both.
        I want to go back now to the economy and talk about the role of
    education in it, and especially your role in community colleges. We
    decided that we needed a new economic strategy for the new economy that
    had three components: one, reduce the deficit; two, find a way even
    while you're cutting the deficit to invest more money in people, in
    technology, and the future; and three, expand markets for American
    products and services abroad.
        By removing the deficits, we could free our people of this huge
    deadweight of high interest rates and other problems that have been on
    us since the early 1980's. We did that in 1993 when we passed our first
    deficit reduction plan that had cut the deficit by 87 percent before we
    passed the balanced budget amendment. And I'm very proud of all the
    Members of Congress who supported that.
        By investing in education and health, we knew we would enable more
    Americans to actually win the race over the long run that the global
    economy imposes on all of us. And we did. We've expanded funding for
    Head Start, for public school programs like putting more computers in
    the schools and trying to hook up every classroom and library to the
    Internet by the year 2000, by expanding Pell grants and work-study
    programs, even before this last budget.
        By reducing trade barriers, we thought we could knock down unfairly
    high hurdles that Americans have had to leap for too long. There's a lot
    of big debates about trade in Washington, and out here in the country
    every poll says all Americans always believe we're being treated
    unfairly. And we do have the most open markets in the world, on the
    whole, but you should know that we're now the biggest exporter in the
    world--220 trade agreements in the last 5 years. We're the number one
    exporter in the world. We're the number one producer of automobiles
    again in the world. And we're number one in computers in the world.
        And I'm in a big struggle now to try to get Congress to renew my
    authority to make these kind of trade agreements because we have 4
    percent of the world's population and 22 percent of the world's income.
    And one more fact, every expert says that in the next 10 years the
    developing economies in Asia and Latin America will grow at 3 times the
    rate--now they're much poorer, but they'll grow at 3 times the rate of
    Europe, Japan, and the United States.
        Now, if we have 4 percent of the population and 22 percent of the
    income and other economies are going to grow 3 times as fast as we are,
    is there any way that you can think of for us to maintain our standard
    of living and improve it if we don't sell more to the other 96 percent
    of the people in the world? I think not. That's my simple case, and I
    hope you will support my continuing to be able to make these kinds of
    trade agreements to raise our incomes and give us a better future.
        You know that this strategy has worked, that the American people
    have produced 13 million jobs almost--just under 13 million jobs in the
    last 4\1/2\ years. Unemployment is below 5 percent. We've had the
    largest drop in welfare in our history. We now have the smallest
    percentage of people living on welfare in America we've had since 1970,
    after two decades of immigration, bringing a lot of people in from
    around the world. A lot of our poorest communities are experiencing a
    renewal.
        We also have seen dramatic drops in the crime rate, nationally, in
    no small measure because we adopted a strategy pioneered in Houston by
    Mayor Lanier of putting more police on the streets, putting them on the
    streets in the areas where they are most needed, supporting their
    communities. We've done that now for 100,000 police. We need to do it
    until every American community is safe for children to play in and walk
    the streets in and be in school in again.
        The balanced budget adopted in July reflects these priorities: cut
    the deficit, balance the budget, expand investment in people. It has,
    for example, enough funds--$24 billion--to insure half the kids in this
    country who don't have health insurance. Almost all of them are

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    in working families where the mother or the father or both can't get
    health insurance on the job. It provides tax relief for working
    families, $500 tax credit a child. It's worth about $1,000 in income to
    the typical family with two children.
        It also has some other important programs. The America Reads
    program--we're going to try to mobilize one million volunteers--I hope
    some of them will be here at this community college--organized by
    AmeriCorps, our national service program, which has been very active in
    Texas, and others to get a million volunteers to make sure every 8-year-
    old can read independently in this country. That's very important with
    all the diversity we have.
        But the most important part of the budget, in my judgment, over the
    long run, will be the work we did so that we could finally say, for the
    first time in history, we have opened the doors of college to all
    Americans who are willing to work for it.
        After all, the new economy is a knowledge economy. In the 19th
    century, opportunity came from access to a land grant, like one that
    gave many of your ancestors here in Texas a little bit of land to start
    their homes. In the 21st century, instead of a land grant, people will
    want a Pell grant, because they know that what they know is their key to
    the future, not what they own but what they know and what they can
    learn.
        Our goal is simple. By the end of this century, we want education in
    a community college like this, the 13th and 14th years of education, to
    be as universal when we start the new century as a high school diploma
    is today. That is a simple goal, and if we achieve it, it will explode
    opportunity in the United States and change the future of every young
    person in this room and in this country. And I hope you'll support us in
    achieving it.
        Now, let me just briefly explain how this budget supports that goal.
    We issued a report from the Department of Education today explaining it,
    but let me just go through it. First and foremost, this balanced budget
    gives nearly 6 million students a $1,500 a year HOPE scholarship. That's
    a tax cut for the first 2 years of college. Here at San Jacinto and
    community colleges across Texas and in six other States, that means that
    your tuition and your fees will be completely covered by the tax cut you
    will get because of this program. But in fact, all across America, those
    who get the maximum HOPE scholarship will find that it covers about 90
    percent of the national average, not only of full-time tuition but also
    of fee costs for community colleges. It is a great thing.
        Now, the budget also gives further higher education and training tax
    cuts after the first 2 years to 7 million Americans who are juniors and
    seniors in college, who are graduate students, or who are older workers
    who went back to school to take classes to upgrade their skills, because
    we want to continue education for a lifetime.
        What my objectives are here are number one, open the doors of
    college to all; number two, make the first 2 years of college as
    universal as high school is today; number three, make it possible for
    everybody to keep on learning for a lifetime, so they never have to
    stop. That's what we're trying to do.
        Now, in addition to the tax cuts, because not everybody has enough
    income to pay income tax, we also had the biggest increase in Pell
    grants in 20 years. The average Pell grant will be about $2,000 a year
    for 1.4 million community college students. We created another 100,000
    work-study positions. We created 200,000 more last year. So in 2 years,
    we will have gone from 700,000 to a million work-study positions. All
    these things are very, very important.
        In addition to that, we have created an IRA, individual retirement
    account, that you can put money in every year, and then you can withdraw
    from it tax-free, penalty-free, if the money is being used for
    education, health care, or to buy a first-time home. So these are the
    options that are there.
        So I say to you, this, I think--when people look back on this budget
    30, 40, 50 years from now, if they can say about it, ``This is the first
    time they opened the doors of college to all. They made the first 2
    years of college as universal as a high school diploma. They created a
    system where people could keep on learning for a lifetime,'' that is a
    legacy that Congressman Bentsen and everybody in the United States
    Congress who supported this can be proud of, because they are giving you
    the tools you need to make the most of your own lives and your future.
    And I think they did a great job, and I'm very proud of them.

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        Let me also make one other point about education. Everyone now
    accepts--you can go anywhere in the world and people would accept the
    fact that America has the finest system of higher education in the
    world, the community colleges, the universities, the graduate work,
    research institutions--people would say that. Also, people would say
    their education, kindergarten through 12, is not as good as it ought to
    be. Now, they would admit that we have more challenges than most people.
    We have more racial and ethnic diversity. We have more income diversity.
    We have more challenges. But that cannot be an excuse for us not to
    achieve high standards. In fact, the poorer the children are, the more
    they need high academic standards in the early years--the more they need
    that.
        And so I advocated in my State of the Union Address something I have
    been out there advocating for a decade now, which is that we ought to
    have national academic standards, at least in the basic courses. What
    should a fourth grader be able to know in reading? What should an eighth
    grader be able to know in math? Those are two places to start. And I
    have advocated that we set up these voluntary standards and have
    voluntary exams and give them to the students and not have anybody
    punished who doesn't do well but at least give every school, every
    district, and every parent some idea about whether their children know
    what they're supposed to know at an early time so if something needs to
    be done they can do something about it.
        Now, the community colleges--think about how they work. You know if
    what you're doing doesn't work--why?--because your graduates won't get
    jobs. If either you don't give them a good education, they won't be able
    to produce, that reputation will get out, and people won't hire you, or
    if you get trained in the wrong things, then you will be a mismatch so
    you won't get hired. So you have a check, right? We need a check for our
    children.
        The United States is the only major country in the world without a
    set of national academic standards. Now, because virtually all of our
    teachers and principals are dedicated, because virtually all of our
    parents care, a lot of people get a good education anyway, but it is
    very uneven. So I hope you will support that.
        Earlier today I learned that 43 Democratic Senators have signed a
    letter supporting my standards and saying that they would either stop or
    vote to uphold a veto if there was a bill passed in Congress to keep us
    from participating. But the House of Representatives last week passed a
    bill saying the Federal Government can't have any funding of these
    exams. I think that's a mistake.
        So I hope--most of you--you're up on--in community college now, a
    lot of you here are out of that. But don't forget those kids coming
    behind. And don't forget what a challenge it's going to be. And having
    high expectations of people does not put them down; it lifts them up. It
    does not put people down; it lifts them up. So I ask you to help.
        Here's the last point I want to make, and some of you may think I'm
    meddling here, but I plead guilty. [Laughter] We need an economy that
    works for everybody. We need an educational system that works for all.
    We still have to make sure our country works for everybody. Texas knows
    all about diversity. This has always been a diverse place. After all, it
    was Mexico first. So we know about this here. And I might say, I really
    have appreciated the fact that attitudes toward immigration in Texas,
    among both Democrats and Republicans, generally have been more
    constructive here than in many other places in the country.
        But even you may not have any idea about just how diverse this
    country is becoming. In the Fairfax County school district, just across
    the river from Washington, DC, in one public school district there are
    students from 182 nations whose native languages number more than 100.
        Now, because of all the upheavals in the world and because of what
    America means, more than ever people seek to come here to redeem the
    promise of this country. We need to find a way to say we value all this
    diversity. In a global economy--in a global economy--two things will pay
    off like crazy: one, high levels of education and skills; and two, being
    able to relate to everybody else. You know, you can go to any continent,
    and you will find people who are eager to do business with America and
    have closer ties with America, for one thing because they have kinfolks
    in America. You can go to any country and find that.
        So we have to ask ourselves, are we going to be united or divided in
    this? Yesterday--you may have seen the news--we celebrated the 40th
    anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School
    yesterday. It was a

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    wonderful day. Nine children, 40 years ago, put their necks on the line
    to do this and really were in danger. Their parents had to undergo the
    agony of sending their children out the door armed only with their
    schoolbooks, and they were all threatened with the loss of their jobs.
    It was a difficult time, but it helped to make us more one America.
        Look around the world today. When you see--just pick up the paper on
    any given day and see what kind of foreign policy problem I'm dealing
    with. Is it Bosnia? Is it Northern Ireland? Is it the Middle East? Is it
    tribal slaughter in Rwanda or Burundi? You will be amazed the number of
    foreign policy problems your President is called upon to deal with
    because people in other parts of the world insist upon killing each
    other or hating each other because of their racial, their ethnic, or
    their religious differences. It is stunning.
        There is something almost endemic to human nature which makes people
    want to be at odds with folks who are different from them, just like
    there is something in the human heart that causes people to reach beyond
    that and want to embrace people who are different once you realize that
    down deep we're all the same. So this is a huge thing.
        I want to start with a story to get to where I may be meddling. A
    half a century ago--a half a century ago--Mayor Bob Lanier was a law
    student at the University of Texas. The school then still denied
    admission to African-Americans. So he volunteered to go over to a tiny
    one-room classroom that had been set up for black law students in a
    basement several blocks from the law school and teach constitutional law
    to students who had been unconstitutionally barred from the university.
        One of his students was a man named Heman Sweatt, who went on to
    become the first African-American admitted to the University of Texas
    law school, after the Supreme Court decision of Sweatt v. Painter. Then
    the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, which basically
    said that the schools of this country, the public schools, had to be
    integrated. It was that case that gave the basic power to those nine
    children who walked up the steps at Little Rock Central High School 40
    years ago yesterday.
        Well, 50 years later, Bob Lanier, who is about to end his service as
    the mayor of Houston, continues to open doors, reaches out to everybody
    in the community. Businesses that were run by minorities and women that
    were once shut out of city hall now have an opportunity to compete for
    the city's business. And I just want to say that I'd hate to see Houston
    turn back the clock on the progress of the last 50 years and the
    progress that Mayor Lanier has made in the last few years.
        I'd also like to compliment the work of a group called Houston
    Together that includes a number of citizens, but including Congresswoman
    Sheila Jackson Lee and Phil Carroll of Shell and Ken Lay of Enron. By
    drawing strength and diversity, this whole area is on a remarkable track
    to the 21st century. Again, the city and the county should work the way
    San Jac does. That's what you've got to do. You've got to have--
    everybody has got to feel like they've got a part in this, a voice that
    will be heard, an interest that will be taken account of, and then in
    the end, a way of coming to a unified decision. I think that is terribly
    important.
        Now, let me just close with this thought. A lot of you clapped when
    I mentioned the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock Central High School.
    Those little children had a simple vision; they just wanted a decent
    education. And they literally were able to imagine that they ought to
    get one in spite of the fact that they were black--simple vision that
    required all of us to move mountains and requires things of us, still.
    But because they imagined it, it happened for millions of people who
    otherwise it would not have happened for--in all probability, including
    some people who are in this room today.
        Now, what you have to do, all of you who are students at this
    college, you've got to imagine what you would like your country to look
    like 30 or 40 years from now. And there is a very good chance that if
    you have the right imagination, and then you live according to the
    vision you are trying to achieve, that you will get there. And things
    that may seem impossible today might wind up being much easier than you
    ever imagined just by the dint of continuous daily effort.
        It all begins with having the economy work for people, making sure
    everybody's got a chance to get the kind of education you're getting,
    and never forgetting that we have to go forward as one America.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

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    Note: The President spoke at 2 p.m. in the auditorium. In his remarks,
    he referred to Esmerelda Hernandez, San Jacinto Community College
    student who introduced the President; Mayor Bob Lanier of Houston and
    his wife, Elyse; Mayor Johnny Isbell of Pasadena, TX; Garry Mauro, Texas
    State land commissioner; Chancellor James F. Horton, Jr., San Jacinto
    College District; and astronaut Ellen Ochoa. A portion of these remarks
    could not be verified because the tape was incomplete.