    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [June 3, 1998]
    [Pages 877-880]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 877]]

    Remarks at a Reception for Gubernatorial Candidate Lee Fisher in
    Cleveland
    June 3, 1998

        Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen; I am delighted to be
    here. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, and I know it's a little warm.
    If it makes you feel any better, yesterday I was in Dallas. It was 105.
    [Laughter]
        I'd like to begin by thanking Mayor White for his truly outstanding leadership in Cleveland. It's
    been a great pleasure for me to be able to work with the city of
    Cleveland and to support the initiatives that he has done so much to
    implement.
        I thank my good friend Lou Stokes. I will
    miss him terribly, and he has done a magnificent job for this city, for
    all of Ohio, and for the country.
        I thank Congressman Tom Sawyer for
    being here, and I congratulate Stephanie Tubbs Jones, and I wish Mary Boyle well. And
    Hillary is going to be here for her
    in a few weeks, and I hope you will all support her. I'd like to say to
    Michael and Frankie Coleman, I'm glad you're taking this great adventure with Lee
    and Peggy, and I think you'll be proud of the trip when it's over. And
    especially to Lee and Peggy Fisher, I thank
    them for just giving me the opportunity to be here to try to repay in
    some small measure the friendship and support they have always given to
    me.
        This State, as I'm sure most of you in this crowd today know, has
    been very, very good to me. In 1992 I officially got enough votes to be
    nominated on the first ballot of the Democratic Convention when the Ohio
    primary results were announced, and then when we had the convention in
    New York, Ohio's votes put me over the top. And then on election night
    in 92, the election was called after the vote from Ohio came in, and I
    appreciate that. In 1996 we tripled our victory margin here, thanks to a
    lot of you in this room, and I thank you for that.
        People--all kinds of people from Ohio have been critically important
    to the success of our administration. There's a wonderful young woman
    from Cleveland named Capricia Marshall
    who now runs the White House for us. And Mike White mentioned the
    tensions we're having now in the Indian subcontinent in the nuclear
    tests. Dick Celeste is now our Ambassador
    to India, and we couldn't have a better person there to deal with this
    very significant problem, and I appreciate that.
        So I'm glad to be here, and I'm feeling pretty good about things in
    our country and about Ohio. I just came from--Mike and I, as he
    mentioned, were at the national conference of a group called City Year,
    which is one of our AmeriCorps national service projects. And they have
    people here in Cleveland, 200 of them, who do everything from tutor in
    schools to work with seniors to environmental cleanup projects. They
    represent the spirit of citizen service I've tried to spread across this
    country. And the young people are also earning credits for college. They
    can earn money for a year's worth of service to City Year to help them
    pay for their college tuition. One of the lesser known but perhaps, over
    the long run, more important achievements of this administration is that
    now in the last 4 years, 90,000 Americans have given a year or 2 years
    of their lives to serve in our national service program in community
    projects like this all across America. So I'm very, very proud of that.
        Let me say, I'm here partly because I want to help Lee and Peggy and
    Michael and Frankie, but mostly because I'd like to do Ohio a favor. I
    think Lee Fisher becoming the Governor would be doing Ohio as big a
    favor as Ohio would be doing for Lee Fisher. This is a subject on which
    I can speak with some authority, because I was a Governor for 12 years
    before I became President. I had almost gotten the hang of the job
    before I left it. [Laughter] And I can tell you that--the first thing
    I'd like to say is that it's more important now than it used to be, and
    I've worked hard to make it that way because, while I have wanted a more
    aggressive National Government, I've also wanted one that was more
    focused, more centralized, and that left more decisions about how to
    achieve our national objectives to Governors and to mayors.
        The Federal Government is now 310,000 people smaller than it was
    when I took office; it's the smallest since John Kennedy was President.

    [[Page 878]]

    We've eliminated hundreds of programs, thousands of pages of
    regulations, cut two-thirds of the regulations in the Education
    Department alone. We have tried to give more freedom to Governors and to
    mayors. But when you do that, it means the person you elect is more
    important than he or she used to be. Their judgments matter; their
    values matter.
        And I've known Lee Fisher a long time. I associate him with
    children, families, public safety, and the future. I named him to be the
    Chairman of the President's Commission on Crime Control and Prevention.
    And we have worked on a lot of these issues for a long, long time.
        Let me just give you a couple of examples of what I mean. When we
    signed the balanced budget bill last year, which will produce, by the
    way, the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years this year, one of
    the lesser known provisions of the bill provided enough funding to the
    States to extend health insurance coverage to 5 million children who
    don't have it. Almost all these kids are the children of working
    families on modest incomes, where they don't get health insurance at
    work. And we know from painful experience that children who don't have
    access to good health care run far greater risks of having problems in
    childhood and later in life.
        Now, that's the good news. But the second part of the story is it's
    up to the States to design and implement a program that will actually
    work to add 5 million kids to the ranks of the insured and give peace of
    mind to the couple of million families or so who are the parents of
    those children.
        The next Governor of Ohio will have a heavy responsibility there: Is
    this program going to be carried out properly or not; is it going to be
    designed well, or not; what will happen to those children, those
    families? And if you're on the board of a local hospital, what will
    happen to you if you have people in emergency care that ought to be
    getting funded that aren't? Every Ohioan has a stake in this decision.
        Let me give you another example. I'm working very, very hard now to
    pass comprehensive tobacco legislation to protect our children from the
    dangers of tobacco. Three thousand kids a day start smoking, even though
    it's illegal to sell cigarettes to kids; 1,000 will die earlier because
    of it. More people die from tobacco-related illnesses than die from
    cancer, AIDS, murders, accidents, and fires combined every year.
        Now let's assume we pass the legislation. It will, among other
    things, require a substantial increase in the tobacco tax, which all the
    surveys show huge majorities of the American people, including adult
    smokers, support. But the rest of the story is this: A substantial
    portion of that money will be given back to the States, and then there
    will be a laundry list only--not a specific directive but a laundry
    list--of the kinds of things that the States can spend this money. We're
    talking major money to a large State like Ohio. One of the things on
    that list will be to make child care more affordable, one of the most
    significant challenges we face in the country. Now, there will be all
    kinds of other things that deal with trying to help kids stay off
    tobacco or out of trouble and to help build up the quality of health in
    this State. The Governor will have to make recommendations about how
    that's going to be spent. To some extent, the Governor will be able to
    decide, although the legislature will be involved as well. It really
    matters who's going to be the next Governor of Ohio if we pass this,
    because this is a huge set of decisions that will affect your lives.
        I'll give you another example on which there has been a lot of
    publicity in this State, and that's welfare reform. I'm very proud to
    have been involved in now a 6-year effort which has given us, along with
    an improving economy, the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years. But there's
    a twofold objective here. You don't just want to move people off the
    welfare rolls. You want people who used to be on welfare to be
    successful as workers and to be successful as parents.
        We just passed a new transportation bill, by the way. It provides a
    lot of funding to help people who are very poor who don't have cars get
    from their homes to their work. But the States have to decide, how is
    that going to be done, working with the local communities. So it really
    matters who the Governor is and what the Governor's vision is for making
    families succeed at home and at work and building a community which we
    can all pull together.
        One final example: We have a great task in this country today to try
    to continue to lead the world away from this incredible rash of violence
    and potential violence rooted in ethnic, racial, and religious hatred.
    It's the new problem at the end of the cold war. And the prospect that
    that might get mixed with weapons of mass destruction is what troubles
    people about the

    [[Page 879]]

    nuclear tests in South Asia. And it's what troubles us when we demanded
    the inspections in Iraq be complied with, because we don't want to see a
    country that might foment trouble build up chemical and biological
    weapons capacity.
        In order to continue to do that work, which sometimes has a happy
    success like the recent vote in Ireland--and I met with a number of
    Irish Ohioans today who thanked me for our administration's efforts
    there; which has ongoing importance in our work in the Middle East;
    which has ongoing importance in our work in the Balkans, where we've got
    the Bosnian peace process working, but new troubles in Kosovo between
    the Serbs and the Albanians; and which has special meaning now in South
    Asia, we have to prove that in America we can set a good example.
        And if you look at Ohio and the heartland of the country, if you
    look at Cleveland, if you look at the diversity of Ohio, if you look at
    the endless fields that I saw in 1992--the best corn crop I ever saw in
    my life I saw on the bus trip across Ohio--and you compare and contrast
    the life that people in small towns and rural areas in Ohio have with
    the bustling, incredible diversity of Cleveland, it matters that there
    is a Governor who is sensitive to the importance of that, that Ohio
    reflect the very best in America, not only the best of our past but the
    best of our future.
        I was talking to some of our folks coming in today about the pivotal
    role that Ohio played in our country's history between the Civil War and
    the turn of the last century, when, frankly, if you were a Republican
    and you fought for the Union Army and you were an officer and you were
    from Ohio, you had about a 50 percent chance of getting elected
    President of the United States. [Laughter] I mean, you had Grant and
    Hayes and Harrison and McKinley. By the time they got around to
    McKinley, I don't think he ever made general, and he still got to be
    President. [Laughter]
        But Ohio had a pivotal role. If you think about the 21st century and
    the fact that your State is generally considered to be a bellwether in
    so many ways, Ohio will play a pivotal role again. Now, who the Governor
    is really matters. What kind of people will be in this government? Well,
    you get a pretty good indication from looking at this team. What will
    the values be? What will the message be? Will everybody feel that they
    have a seat at the table? This is very important.
        Now, I know you were kind of expecting me to give you a stump speech
    today, but I want you to think about this because it's a long time
    between now and the election. And you need to go out and talk to people
    about this. I know Lee Fisher well. And too often, elections get decided
    based on slogans. Well, if somebody wants to talk about being tough on
    crime, he should win that argument. But the thing that I like about him
    is he's also smart about crime. That is, sure, you have to punish people
    who are doing dumb things and bad things and evil things and who
    deliberately hurt other people, but even better is to work with police
    officers and community leaders and concerned parents to keep our
    children out of trouble in the first place. So you want somebody that
    understands these things, that has character, depth, experience.
        And I think--I would just like to ask you--I thank you for
    contributing to this campaign; it makes a big difference. But I think
    there's something going on today in our politics which are very
    important. Yesterday we had a raft of elections in America, and there
    were any number of campaigns where the person who won did not, as it
    happens, spend the most money. They had to have enough money, and that's
    why I'm glad you're here. [Laughter] You have to have enough to be
    heard. But there were many places where the person with the most money
    didn't win yesterday because the people who won were thought to be more
    closely connected, more deeply rooted to the communities, more in tune
    with what people wanted and the better future that we're all trying to
    build. And I make no judgment about the outcome of any of those
    primaries. I just think that's an interesting thing for me to tell you
    because what that means is that voters are taking their responsibility
    seriously in this election. I think that is a good thing for Lee Fisher.
        But you have to go about and talk about these things I shared with
    you. And remember, it will have a lot to do with what 21st century Ohio
    looks like, what your children and your grandchildren have to look
    forward to. And I believe that if you work hard, you're going to win,
    and when you do, you can be very, very proud.
        Thank you. God bless you all.

    [[Page 880]]

    Note: The President spoke at 4:45 p.m. at the Cleveland Playhouse. In
    his remarks, he referred to Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney
    Stephanie Tubbs Jones; Mary Boyle, candidate for U.S. Senate; Michael
    Coleman, candidate for Lieutenant Governor, and his wife, Frankie; and
    Lee Fisher's wife, Peggy.