[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[October 8, 1997]
[Pages 1315-1319]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Democratic Gubernatorial Candidate
Jim McGreevey in West Orange, New Jersey
October 8, 1997

    Well, he looks like a Governor. [Laughter] He sounds like a 
Governor. He's got a good plan about what he would do if he were 
Governor. And he's got something else, just magical. We were a couple of 
hours ago in a wonderful Head Start program at a church near here, and 
when McGreevey walked in the room, the fire alarm went off. [Laughter] 
If you've got that kind of heat and electricity, you ought to be 
Governor.
    I am delighted to be here with all of you. I thank the legislative 
leaders who are here: Senator Lynch, Assemblyman Doria, State Democratic 
Party Chair Tom Giblin--if I forget somebody, complain--[laughter]--
Assemblywoman Buono, State Senator Bryant, Hudson County Executive Bob 
Janiszewski, Cherry Hill Mayor Susan Bass Levin, Sheriff Fontoura, 
Mayor-about-to-be Bob Bowser, Mayor Spina, and all other officials who 
are here.
    I'd like to say a special word of thanks to a former colleague of 
mine, Brendan Byrne, who is in the audience. Governor Byrne, thank you. 
I'm glad to see you here. After he left the Governor's office, it was 
never the same at the national Governors meeting. [Laughter] He's been 
gone a long time, and we haven't produced a single Governor who had the 
one-liner gift that Brendan Byrne had. [Laughter] We only laugh about 
half as much. I'm glad to see you all.
    This is perhaps the first opportunity I've had, in this sort of 
setting anyway, to say something I would like to say really to all the 
people of New Jersey, which is, I want to thank you for the enormous 
vote of confidence that was given to me and to Al Gore and to our team 
in the election of 1996. I was overwhelmed by it, and I thank you for 
it. [Applause] Thank you very much.
    I'd like to talk for a few minutes in maybe an almost conversational 
way to try to explain to you what I know, both as President and as 
someone who was a Governor for 12 years before I became President and 
served with 150 other Governors, about the importance of this election 
at this moment in time.
    I'd like to thank the Lieutenant Governor of New York, who's also 
here. Betsy, stand up. Thank you for becoming a Democrat and coming 
across the river to be with us. Thank you.
    I think it's important that you understand because you have to go 
out of here and talk to people about this election, and you want it to 
be fundamentally a positive election of choices about the future. I 
promise you, that's the way the voters will look at it. They'll be 
trying to figure out, ``If I make this choice, what difference will it 
make to my life, my child's life, the future of our State?'' And there 
are some things you need to really focus on about this particular moment 
in our country's history and what the role of a Governor, any Governor, 
would be at this moment in history and therefore what kind of things you 
should be looking for.
    When I ran for President and I announced 6 years ago last week, I 
did it against all the odds, when no one but my mother really thought I 
could win. [Laughter] He said he knows the feeling. [Laughter] I'll tell 
you, there are a lot more who think you can win today, Senator, than 
when you started--a lot more today than when you started.
    I had a very clear reason. I did not think my country was moving in 
the direction that would take it where I thought we ought to go in the 
century that was upon us. And I have

[[Page 1316]]

said all over America repeatedly, like a broken record, and the poor 
folks that have to follow me around get sick of me saying--I apologize 
to them--but I actually think about it every day: What is it that you 
want? And I said, what I want is an America where everybody who is 
responsible enough to work for it has a shot at the American dream. What 
I want is an America that--[applause]--thank you. What I want is an 
America that is no longer staving off the nuclear threat and the cold 
war and no longer controls 40 percent of the world's wealth like we did 
at the end of World War II but still, because of our values and our 
successes and our willingness to serve, still can lead the world toward 
peace and freedom and security and prosperity and is interested in all 
kinds of people all over the world and what they can do to help us build 
a better future for our children.
    And finally, what I want is an America that embraces all the 
diversities you see if you look around this room and celebrates it and 
says, ``We love all this diversity. It's our meal ticket to the future. 
But the most important thing is we are still bound together as one 
America across all the lines that divide us.''
    Every day I still say to myself, what do you want for America when 
you're gone, and what have you done to advance it today--every single 
day? And then it seemed to me obvious that we had to change course. So I 
made a few notes and I said, ``Well, what kind of policies would you 
change?'' I said, ``I want policies that basically look to the future, 
not to the past; that embrace change, not the status quo; that promote 
unity, not division''--we've got enough of that, goodness knows, in our 
country--``that give everybody a chance, not just a few people; and that 
promote us as leaders, not followers.''
    And I advocated a whole lot of things, and we've done virtually 
everything that I said I wanted to do in '92 and the vast majority of 
things now that I advocated in the '96 election. And what are the 
consequences? The strongest economy in a generation, over 13 million new 
jobs, even a lot of our poorest areas finally beginning to revitalize, a 
declining crime rate, an improving environment. We learned that last 
month another 250,000 people moved from the welfare rolls to families 
that are living off of payrolls. And now we've had a drop of 3.6 million 
people moving from homes living on public assistance to homes living on 
payrolls since I took office. I'm very proud of that. It's the biggest 
drop in the history of the country. I want that.
    But in addition to all the policies, it also was clear to me we 
needed a different kind of Government, not a Government that would do 
everything or a Government that would do nothing but a Government that 
would focus on getting our country in good shape, creating good 
conditions, and then giving people the tools to make the most of their 
own lives.
    So, for example, in the beginning of our term we adopted a budget in 
1993 that helped us to cut thousands of governmental programs out that 
we've eliminated over the last nearly 5 years, 16,000 pages of Federal 
regulation. The Federal Government is 300,000 people smaller than it was 
the day I took office. But we're not doing everything we were doing 
before.
    Neither are we doing nothing. That was my big fight with the 
Republican contract on America. I didn't want to see us walk away from 
our guarantee of health care to the poorest children, of our guarantee 
of a clean environment, of our commitment to giving everybody a chance 
at educational opportunity, and of our obligation to take on new 
challenges as a people through our Government when it was necessary.
    So I think we made the right decision. You can't do everything; you 
can't do nothing. You've got to balance the budget, but you also have to 
invest in our future and our people. That's the path we took. The 
results have been quite good. But there is still an awful lot of work to 
do. We have a lot of work to do at the national level.
    We were talking about the lack of affordable child care just before 
I came over here, and what a terrible problem it is since we know that 
the vast majority of children's mental wiring occurs in their first 4 
years of life. We were talking a couple of days ago in Washington about 
the need to come to grips with the challenge of the climate changing in 
the globe, and how it could change our lives, but how we have to do it 
in a way that doesn't throw large numbers of people out of work or 
disrupt our economic progress. We are working this week on peace in the 
Middle East again, hoping that we're making some progress. And yesterday 
I had a meeting to try to further the peace process in Northern Ireland.

[[Page 1317]]

    So there are a lot of things to do, but what I want to tell you is, 
this new approach to Government and this new way of doing business has 
made the Governor's office even more important today and looking to the 
21st century than it has ever been before. And it's very important that 
everybody understands that.
    We have given huge new responsibilities to the State. For example, 
all the States now have to move a lot more people from welfare to work. 
But I promise you, the easiest work has already been done. It's not that 
the people are still on welfare don't want to go to work, but the ones 
that are still there may have more difficulty going to work, may need 
more training, may need more work.
    In this budget, we gave the private sector incentives--tax 
incentives to hire people. We've provided $3 billion more to flow into 
States and local communities to help create jobs for people for whom the 
market did not produce jobs. But this is something you have to have a 
Governor to tend to. And you want people to succeed at home and at work, 
which means you don't want to take a poor person and say, ``I'm going to 
feel better about you when you're drawing a payroll,'' and then said, 
``but I feel worse about your child because you can't afford child 
care,'' which means that, if New Jersey has reduced its welfare rolls 
and you've got a surplus in the welfare account, you ought to, first of 
all, make sure that those people that are going to work can take care of 
their children with affordable child care, they can get a good Head 
Start program or some other program.
    That's a big deal. We said in Washington, we can't micromanage this; 
you've got to figure it out. But it makes the Governor more important. 
There are a lot of big environmental issues we're trying to face. Our 
budget now should allow us to clean up another 500 toxic waste dumps in 
the next 4 years. Remember, I came to New Jersey in 1996 and pledged to 
support just that. And we got it into the budget, and we're going to do 
it. But there are all kinds of other issues that have to be dealt with 
by you here.
    The whole issue of fiscal responsibility is very important. When I 
became President the deficit was $290 billion, projected to go higher. 
Now it's going to be under $30 billion this year, and 85 percent of it 
was cut even before we passed the last balanced budget bill. We haven't 
balanced the budget since 1969, and don't--let me just say, everybody 
who works for a living, who pays a home mortgage or a car payment or 
makes any kind of payment on credit, is better off because we've reduced 
this deficit because the interest rates are lower because of it. Every 
single person who makes any kind of payment any month on interest is 
better off. And the whole country is better off because the private 
sector has had more money to invest. And that's why we've got over 13 
million more jobs.
    Now, I've got people in Washington now, including our friends in the 
Republican Party who said they were fiscal conservatives, they're all 
talking about how they're going to spend the surplus. [Laughter] We 
still have a deficit--most people think $30 billion is real money, or 
$28 billion--[laughter]--where I come from that's still a nickel or two.
    I'm just saying, Jim McGreevey has a record here. He's got a record 
of proving that he cares about people, he's concerned about people. But 
in every job he's ever held he's shown discipline and fiscal 
responsibility and the willingness to resist the sort of siren song of 
the easy moment, to look down the road to make sure that, first of all, 
the ship of state is being run in a responsible manner. Every person--
liberal or conservative, black, white, brown or whatever, Republican or 
Democrat--every person has a vested interest in that in New Jersey. It's 
part of what enables us to be a community, knowing that our fundamental 
institutions are properly run with real discipline. It's a big issue. 
And sometimes when you're the guy making the decision, you have to make 
decisions that make people mad if you do it. But it's important.
    There are lots of other examples I could give, but let me just give 
you one that to me dwarfs all the others. The insurance plan, by the 
way, I think is important because one of the problems that people--that 
we have with the legitimacy of public officials is that most people 
think that they don't count. They think in the end the big guys always 
win. And I've done everything I could to try to change that perception.
    In 1993, we cut income taxes on the poorest working people, and now 
it's worth about $30,000 a year to a family of four with an income of 
$26,000-$28,000 or less. And we raised the minimum wage, and we passed 
the family leave law, and we passed the TV rating system.

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We've done these things, trying to make ordinary people think that they 
were being given more authority.
    But this insurance thing, this auto insurance thing is a big issue 
because it relates not only to how much money is going out of people's 
pockets, it's their feeling that, something has gone wrong, and they 
don't have any power to do anything about it. And if you're going to 
bring people together, people have to believe that you're on their side 
and that when the chips are down something can be done to put things 
right and make things better. So this is about more than money.
    The last thing I want to say to you that I think is terribly 
important is, I cannot tell you how important I believe it is that every 
single Governor have a passionate, uncompromising commitment to 
excellence in education for every single person in the State. Now, part 
of this is a money problem, but a lot of it is not.
    We've worked hard to promote all kinds of reforms to sort of shake 
things up in stodgy bureaucracies and put more power down to parents and 
teachers and principals at the school level and at the same time to 
raise standards. We're supporting programs to put computers and to hook 
up computers to the Internet, every classroom and library in the entire 
United States by the year 2000.
    We are--I think perhaps most importantly, this budget, I believe, 
that we just passed, this balanced budget, 30 years from now people will 
look back on it and say there were two things that were interesting 
about it and profoundly important. One is they balanced the budget for 
the first time in a generation. The second is America finally opened the 
doors of college to every person who will work for a college education. 
That is in this budget.
    Through the tax credits, the Pell grants, the work-study 
provisions--all of these things are going to literally make it possible 
so that no one can say, ``I can't go to college because of the money'' 
anymore--no one of any age. Even when older people have to go back and 
get retraining, there are tax benefits available.
    But in the end, we all know something that we ought to face. The 
United States has the best system of higher education in the world. No 
one believes we have the best system of kindergarten through 12th grade 
education in the world. We have been challenged--I want to just state 
some facts--we've been challenged. We have far more diversity by income, 
by race, by culture than any other country trying to do what we're 
doing, number one. Number two, you need to know that on the whole 
American education is better than it was a decade ago. Our educators 
have made it better. Our parents have made it better. It's getting 
better, but it's nowhere near where it needs to be.
    We are the only major country in the world that does not have 
national education standards and some way of measuring whether our 
children are meeting them, not to punish the children but so the parents 
and the taxpayers in every school district can know how the schools, how 
the district, and how the children are doing.
    And I can't do this alone. This is not something I'm trying to 
impose on people. My proposal, which many Governors in the other party 
now oppose--although when I wrote it back in 1989 all the Governors but 
one were for it--my proposal is very simple: that the Federal Government 
should pay for but not develop--should pay for the development of 
national exams that reflect the standards that every child should meet 
in language in the fourth grade and math in the eighth grade. Start 
there. And then make it voluntarily available to every State and school 
district. And they then can give it to the children. But the tests 
cannot be used to punish the children, to hold them back, to put them 
down, to do anything. It is a measurement so we can finally know the 
truth.
    Now, I believe all our kids can learn. I could take you into schools 
in every State in this country that, against all the odds, are proving 
that all children can learn. Therefore, it is unacceptable for us to 
continue to tolerate a system under the guise of local control or State 
responsibility or anything else that hides from the clear light of day 
to do better. We're not trying to punish anybody; we're trying to get 
better.
    Every weekend, tens of millions of Americans are glued to the 
television set watching football games. Now, we're all glued to the TV 
set watching the pennant race. Suppose someone came on television and 
said, ``I'm sorry, but due to the sensitivities of the players we're not 
going to keep score tonight.'' [Laughter] ``We're going to play for 3 
hours, and every now and then we'll change sides and let somebody else 
bat, and I hope you all enjoy it.'' [Laughter]
    The only difference is, the game I'm trying to play in education, 
there doesn't have to be any losers. No one has to lose. The difference

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is, in the exam we're trying to--we're trying to say, ``This is the 
threshold. This is what everybody should know. But this is a fence over 
which everyone can jump.'' We're not trying to rank people first to 
last. We're trying to say 100 percent of the people need to be over this 
threshold so they can have the kind of future for themselves, their own 
families, and this country that we need.
    That is a huge issue, and the Governors will determine whether it's 
done. And this man is for the proposition that all our children can 
learn and that every child is entitled to high national standards and an 
adequate measurement of them. And on that issue alone he has the right 
to claim your support for Governor of New Jersey.
    The point is, when I became President I said, ``We ought to give 
more power to State government, more power to local government. We ought 
to do more things with the private sector.'' We even privatized some 
Government operations I think had been in the Federal sector too long. 
But when we do these things, and if you like having a smaller, leaner, 
more focused National Government and you like the results we've 
achieved, you have to understand it makes everybody else more important. 
It makes all the mayors here more important. And it means when you elect 
a county official or a local official, and especially when you elect a 
Governor, you are voting--whether people know it or not, they are voting 
to give them a wider range of decisionmaking and a bigger impact over 
their lives than was the case 4 or 8 or 12 years ago. And it's very 
important.
    And I want you to go out there and talk to the people in New Jersey 
about this. You don't have to be intensely partisan. You can just take 
these issues, one after the other, and ask people what they want for the 
future of their families and their State. And conduct your own little 
mini-townhall meeting. And tell people, first of all, they've got to 
vote, and here's why you are for Senator McGreevey and what you think 
the issues are. I believe you can have a huge impact.
    But I'm just telling you, it is a big deal. Don't be under any 
illusion. This is not just about who gets this appointment or that 
appointment or who gets along with whom in the legislature. This is huge 
now, and we have been given very much more responsibility. And your 
future is on the line.
    This is a magnificent State with unbelievable assets and challenges 
that are well within the ability of the people of New Jersey to confront 
them. But it matters who the leader is and what the direction is.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:15 p.m. in the Mayfair Room at Mayfair 
Farms. In his remarks, he referred to State Senator John A. Lynch; 
Assemblyman Joseph V. Doria, Jr.; Assemblywoman Barbara Buono; State 
Senator Wayne R. Bryant; Sheriff Armando B. Fontoura of Essex County; 
Robert Bowser, member, Newark Board of Education; Mayor Samuel A. Spina 
of West Orange; Brendan Byrne, former New Jersey Governor; and Lt. Gov. 
Betsy McCaughey Ross of New York.