[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[November 17, 1997]
[Pages 1592-1595]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to Cessna Employees in Wichita, Kansas
November 17, 1997

    I think we should give them another hand. They were fabulous, 
weren't they? [Applause] Thank you, Tanya and Jodee. Thank you, Russ 
Meyer; thank my friend Eli Segal for doing such a great job in getting 
other companies into this endeavor. Thank you, Michael Starnes, for the 
incredible support that the United States Chamber of Commerce is giving 
to this effort.
    I thank Secretary Glickman and Secretary Herman and Secretary Cuomo, 
who is not here, for the work they have done in supporting this endeavor 
and others like it around America. I'd also like to thank the large 
number, the unusually large number of public officials who are here 
today, proving that we come to celebrate a victory for America, a 
victory of people, not party or politics but an old-fashioned victory 
for American dignity and possibility, for people succeeding at work and 
succeeding in raising their children, an old-fashioned reaffirmation 
that our American dream is still very much alive and well if we all 
pitch in and do our part. So thank you, Governor Graves, and thank you, 
Senator Roberts and Senator Brownback, Congressman Tiahrt, Congressman 
Ryun, Mayor Knight, and the other State officials and legislative 
leaders and council members who are here. I am very grateful to all of 
you for being here.
    The sign says it's all about people, and I would like to suggest 
that you consider renaming the 21st Street Campus to the 21st Century 
Campus, because you really are an embodiment of the future America has 
to make.
    Ladies and gentlemen, before I make the few remarks I'd like to make 
on this issue, I think it is appropriate, since it's my first appearance 
of the week, to just give you a brief update on the situation in Iraq. 
Even when I was walking through here, a number of people asked me about 
it.
    First, it's important that you understand what is at stake here. 
Since the end of the Gulf war, for 6 years, inspectors, under the 
authority of the United Nations, have been trying to find and destroy 
Saddam Hussein's capacity to threaten his neighbors and potentially 
others around the world with nuclear or biological or chemical weapons. 
They have found and destroyed more weapons of mass destruction potential 
in the last 6 years--these quiet inspectors whom no one knows--they have 
destroyed more

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of this potential than was destroyed in the entire Gulf war with all of 
the air attacks.
    What they are doing matters. It matters to you, to your children, 
and to the future, because this is a challenge we must face not just in 
Iraq but throughout the world. We must not allow the 21st century to go 
forward under a cloud of fear that terrorists, organized criminals, drug 
traffickers will terrorize people with chemical and biological weapons 
the way the nuclear threat hung over the heads of the whole world 
through the last half of this century. That is what is at issue.
    In his defiance of the international community, Saddam Hussein has 
forced the withdrawal of the inspectors. Now, I am trying to settle this 
issue peacefully, but our diplomatic efforts must be backed by our 
strong military capability. We cannot rule out any options. But the 
bottom line is, we have to understand this, it is essential that those 
inspectors go back to work. The safety of the children of the world 
depends upon it. And I ask for your support.
    I told Russ Meyer this morning that before I got my present job, I 
spent a lot of time flying around the farmland and the mountains of 
Arkansas in Cessna airplanes. And it occurs to me that for a long time 
now, Cessna has helped a lot of people take to the air in your planes. 
Today we come to celebrate Cessna's efforts to help people fly higher 
all by themselves, and it is a truly remarkable thing.
    This program, the partnership between Cessna and HUD, the Labor 
Department, the city of Wichita, the State of Kansas, provides training 
because people need it to get good jobs, provides child care--and by the 
way, I got to visit the child care facility today, so in addition to my 
model airplane, I have a Lego-constructed giraffe. [Laughter] And I 
think if it's all the same to you, I'll put them both up in the Oval 
Office so people can see what's going on here. It provides temporary 
housing, recognizing that a lot of people who have been poor and who 
have children and don't have transportation to go a long way to work. 
And most important, it provides a job. Every company in America ought to 
take notice of what Cessna is doing. It's a model for the Nation. It 
proves once again that the best social program ever devised is a job, a 
good job with dignity that allows people to support their children.
    Six years ago when I ran for President, I wanted to restore what I 
always thought was the basic bargain in America that everybody had a 
right to an opportunity in life if they exercised the personal 
responsibility that goes along with it. That is the only way we can keep 
the American dream alive in the 21st century for everyone, and it's the 
only way we can continue to lead the world for peace and freedom. In the 
end, it's the only way we can come together across all the differences 
in our increasingly diverse Nation.
    In the last 5 years, as Secretary Glickman said, the American people 
have made a lot of progress toward restoring that basic bargain. 
Unemployment is the lowest in 24 years. The deficit has been cut by 92 
percent, and now that the balanced budget law is triggering in, it will 
be even-balanced soon, for the first time in a generation. We see the 
lowest crime rate in 24 years, the biggest drop in welfare rolls ever, 
incomes rising and poverty dropping, the environment improving as the 
economy advances, something a lot of people didn't think was possible. 
And families are getting more support not only in work but in raising 
their children and educating them and in meeting all their obligations.
    So there is a sense of confidence in this country that you can feel 
in this room today that we really can make America work for everybody 
again. You have earned that confidence--you and all the American 
people--through hard work, a vision for the future, and a willingness to 
embrace new ideas for new times.
    But I will say again, as many on the program have said before, if 
we're going to make America everything that we want it to be, everybody 
has got to have the chance at the brass ring in life. And we know that 
if our free enterprise system is going to work, we're going to have to 
be able to train people for the areas where there are job shortages, 
which, by and large, there are areas that pay more.
    You already heard our chamber president talk about the shortage of 
truck drivers. Whatever it's worth, when I was Governor, I paid to train 
a bunch of them, and I'm proud of it. And we're going to get on that and 
see what we can do.
    We have literally hundreds of thousands of openings in computer-
related jobs in America--literally. You've got people out here dying to 
go to work and jobs over here and a mix-match between them because they 
haven't done what Cessna has done. Either the training is not there

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or the child care is not there or the transportation is not there. 
There's something keeping people, who are dying to do their part, from 
getting there.
    So that's why we're here to celebrate. The main reason I showed up, 
apart from the sheer satisfaction of it and the joy, is that sometimes 
when I show up it gets enough publicity that people find out what you're 
doing. I don't care if they hear what I say; I want them to see what 
you're doing so other people will do it.
    Now, when I took office I had already been involved with this whole 
issue of welfare reform for a long time. I became seriously concerned 
about this in 1980 when I realized what a problem it was. And over the 
years I served as Governor of my State, I spent quite a bit of time in 
welfare offices. I spent a lot of time talking to people who had been on 
public assistance. I spent a lot of time talking to employers who tried 
to hire people, and when it didn't work out, to try to find out why it 
didn't work out. And I think that I have learned a fair amount about it, 
and every good thing I've learned was confirmed here today.
    It was obvious to me that if we were going to ever break the cycle 
of dependence in America, we had to change our approach and we had to 
change our idea about what the role of Government is. Some people 
thought that it was inevitable that a certain number of people are 
always going to be poor and in difficult circumstances. That may be 
true. Misfortune happens to a certain number of people, and nearly for 
all of us misfortune will happen to us in some way or another over the 
course of our lives. But that doesn't mean that the answer was just to 
keep the status quo, because the status quo wasn't working; giving 
people a check that didn't even keep up with inflation was not working. 
Neither was neglect an option. So our governing philosophy has been to 
try to create the conditions for good economy and then give people the 
tools to make the most of their own lives and, whenever possible, to 
work in partnership with the private sector.
    In the first couple of years I was in office, we did that by giving 
over 40 States permission to try their own hand at moving people from 
welfare to work. Eventually, we were able to agree--the Republicans and 
the Democrats together by an overwhelming majority in the Congress--to 
reform the present welfare system, saying that everybody who can work, 
must work, but also providing support for employers who are willing to 
hire welfare recipients, maintaining Government support for children's 
health care and nutrition where necessary, providing extra help to 
communities with very high unemployment rates, and I think probably most 
important of all, giving the States some more help to provide adequate 
child care when people are working for employers that are much smaller 
than Cessna and perhaps not able to provide that on their own.
    The budget I signed into law last summer includes $3 billion for 
welfare-to-work programs, increased tax incentives for businesses to 
hire people off welfare. So we changed the role of Government. But 
that's only the first step. We also have to change the role of the 
private sector. And again, I cannot say enough about your CEO and all 
the leaders of this company, all up and down, everybody who has been 
involved in this program, because you have shown what has to be done.
    We know that almost all the jobs in America are in the private 
sector. I'm very proud of the fact that way over 90 percent of the new 
jobs created in America in the last 5 years have been in the private 
sector. The capacity to train people for the jobs that are needed in a 
given place is in the private sector. But most of all, the necessary 
vision, mind, and heart to do the job are here. That's why we started 
the Welfare to Work Partnership. And I asked my friend Eli Segal, who 
left a very successful business career first of all to help us start our 
national service program, AmeriCorps, to head up this Welfare to Work 
Partnership.
    Last May, we started with 105 companies at the White House who said 
they would be a part of this. They pledged to enlist 1,000 companies 
between May and November. It's November. Now, how have they done? In 6 
months, more than 2,500 companies in America have pledged to hire 
welfare recipients. These companies have over 5 million employees. Some 
of them are big, like Cessna; 100 of them--or, excuse me, 24 of them are 
in the biggest 100 companies in America. But 75 percent of them are 
small businesses. We need all of these companies.
    In addition to that, Eli's got an advisory board of Governors which 
includes 10 Democratic Governors, 10 Republican Governors. Again, this 
is not about politics or party; this is about people. This has to be an 
American crusade. More

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and more businesses are realizing that this can be a good thing not only 
for our families and our country but for businesses as well.
    And again, let me say, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launching a 
campaign to convince every chamber in the country to join the effort is 
the big next step, because you heard Russ say, we've got 2,500 
companies; when we get 10,000, we'll really be talking turkey, and we'll 
be doing something that will make a big dent in this nationwide.
    I am delighted that we've had almost 2 million people move off the 
welfare rolls since the welfare reform law passed, almost 4 million 
people in the last 5 years. But, you know, there are a lot more folks 
out there, and we have to do it. We are going to strengthen the work 
requirements of welfare reform, but we need to strengthen the support we 
give to people to meet those work requirements.
    Let me just say in closing that I think it was obvious to anybody 
who was here today that the most popular speakers were Tanya and Jodee. 
What I want to say to you is, I've been all over the country, and I've 
met a lot of people who had a setback in life--many of them have 
terribly abusive situations at home, almost every one of them 
passionately devoted to the welfare of their children--who thought they 
would be stuck on welfare forever, and somehow they made it out. And the 
real idea behind all of this is, if some people can make it but 
everybody wants to make it, it's up to those of us who have made it, as 
Russ said, to create a system where everybody who wants to has a shot. 
Because it's important that we understand, while Tanya and Jodee are 
remarkable people--and I might add, such good speakers that they might 
consider public office as a career option in the future--[laughter]--
they are not alone. Their stories are mirrored by--there is a story in 
every one of these graduates who stood up here today. When they all 
stood up and we clapped, every one of them has got a story like their 
two stories. And what you have to know is, every person out there in 
America who is in a difficult situation has also got a story and a heart 
and a mind. And most of them aren't in a program like this now and 
aren't even close to it.
    That's why we're here. If you liked what you saw when they spoke, 
you would love it if everybody with that story could be standing before 
a microphone in the community in which they live making the same speech. 
That is what we're here to ensure. And thanks to Cessna, we've got a lot 
better chance than we had before.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:20 p.m. at the Cessna Campus Building. In 
his remarks, he referred to Tanya Oden and Jodee Bradley, graduates of 
the Cessna welfare-to-work program; Russ Meyer, chief executive officer, 
Cessna; Eli Segal, president and chief executive officer, Welfare to 
Work Partnership; Michael Starnes, president, U.S. Chamber of Commerce; 
Gov. William Graves of Kansas; and Mayor Bob Knight of Wichita.