    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [January 28, 1998]
    [Pages 129-131]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 129]]

    Remarks in La Crosse, Wisconsin
    January 28, 1998

        Thank you so much. Thank you for the warm welcome--the ``warm''
    welcome. [Laughter] Thank you for being here in great numbers and with
    great enthusiasm. Thank you for sending Ron Kind to
    Congress. He's a fine man, and he represents you well. Thank you,
    Attorney General Doyle. Thank you, Mayor
    Medinger. Thank you, Secretary Riley, for all you do. Thank you, Mr. Vice
    President, for getting our blood running--
    [laughter]--and for your magnificent leadership. And thank you,
    Lee and Ruth Mathison, for reminding us what's best about the United States of
    America. Didn't they do a good job? Let's give them another hand.
    [Applause]
        Were any of you here back in 1992, when the Vice President and I came on the bus? [Applause] I remember we
    had been on the road 18 hours. We got into the Days Inn about 2 o'clock.
    I could barely speak, and I was bone tired. But the people that were
    there for us on that night, giving us high fives, making us feel at
    home, make it a wonderful memory, and it feels good to be back in God's
    country tonight. And I thank you so much for being here.
        The Vice President and I even got to
    speak on the Clinton Street Bridge. And I remember that.
        You've heard everybody talk already about the blessings our country
    enjoys, and I am grateful for that. I'm grateful for the chance that I
    had last night to outline the state of the Union and to talk about the
    future. I'm grateful that we really have opened the doors of college
    education to all Americans for the first time. And I hope everybody here
    who is a young person knows that because of the tax cuts and the
    scholarships and the grants and the work-study program and the Ameri-
    Corps program, you ought to go out and tell everybody they can go to
    college now, and they never have to worry about that again.
        But I want to thank you for what you're doing here to make America
    work from the ground up, to make America work together to give our kids
    a better future. I can't mention all the local heroes behind me today,
    but I want to mention one, Jerry Freimark,
    who has worked with businesses and students to help students in rural
    areas gain the skills necessary for 21st century careers in banking and
    finance by learning over interactive TV.
        You know, we forget sometimes that people in small towns and rural
    areas have the same right to the 21st century future everybody else
    does. And I want you to know that Al Gore and I will never forget that.
        But tonight I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk very
    briefly about that future, because to me the most important thing we've
    done in the last 5 years is just to try to make America work again for
    ordinary people, so that we can be free to imagine the 21st century and
    we can be free to build it.
        In 1962, President Kennedy said, ``The time to repair the roof is
    when the sun is shining.'' And I couldn't say that any better tonight.
    I'm grateful that we have--almost have a balanced budget. We're going to
    get one this year or next year. I'm proposing one for next year, and I
    think it will be balanced before the year is out.
        Now, let's talk about what we're going to do. And I just want to
    mention two or three things. I want all of you to think about this and
    be involved in it. First of all, it's projected we're going to have a
    big surplus, cumulative, over the next 4 or 5 years; we haven't had one
    in 30 years. Naturally enough, people are thinking, well, let's cut
    taxes or let's spend the money, even though we've still got a debt we've
    piled up that's quite considerable. What I want to do is to say, before
    we spend any of that surplus, let's make sure that we have saved the
    Social Security system so we don't bankrupt our children when the baby
    boomers retire.
        Now, this is a place of community. I can look around--here's a
    couple who have been married 51 years, still working, with kids. I want
    to think about our intergenerational responsibilities. I saw a survey
    the other day that said young people in their twenties thought it was
    more likely that they would see UFO's than that they'd ever get to
    collect Social Security. [Laughter]
        Now, here's what I have to say about that. I don't want to stop
    people from watching the ``X-Files.'' Go on and do that. [Laughter] But

    [[Page 130]]

    I hope you'll also next year participate in the discussions we're going
    to have all across America--nonpartisan, across party lines, across age
    lines--about the Social Security system and what we need to do to make
    sure that when the baby boomers--and I'm the oldest baby boomer at 51--
    when people my age and 18 years younger, when we retire--and there's so
    many of us that there will be more than ever before, more people retired
    compared to people working--how are we going to save the system in a way
    that doesn't put undue burdens on our children and, therefore, undue
    burdens on our children when they're raising their children? I think
    that's something we all want.
        And let me tell you something. We can do it. It won't be too
    difficult. But we have to do it in a nonpolitical way, and we have to do
    it as friends and neighbors and family members. La Crosse can be the
    model for how we save Social Security for the 21st century, and I hope
    you'll support us in that.
        The second thing I want to say is, we've got to save our education
    system for the 21st century. I could just feel it last night at the
    State of the Union. I was talking about all the things we had done to
    open the doors of college, and people were cheering all over America.
    They thought, ``Oh, my goodness, that's something I won't have to
    sweat.'' Why were we cheering? Why? Because we know we have the best
    system of higher education in the entire world. No one questions that. I
    want, in the 21st century, people to be able to say with the absolute
    same conviction, we have the best system of elementary and secondary
    education in the entire world.
        The third thing I want you to think about is what we can do--and I
    talked a little about it last night--to bring more investment into the
    inner-city areas and into the small towns and rural areas that have been
    left behind in this recovery. You know as well as I do, we still have a
    lot of people leaving the farm. The average farmer in America is 59
    years old today.
        Now, I don't have all the answers, but I come from a rural State
    that had tough inner-city areas. And I'm proud of the fact that we've
    got the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, and I'm glad we've got the
    highest percentage of people in the work force in history. But you know
    and I know that there are still people who are working hard and don't
    have enough to live on, and there are still people who would like to
    work who don't have jobs. And you know and I know that the prosperity we
    have seen has still not swept into every neighborhood in America.
        So I ask you, let's find a way in the 21st century to make free
    enterprise reach every rural community and every inner-city
    neighborhood. We can do it if we'll do it together.
        The next thing I'd like to mention that I think is very important,
    and the Vice President talked about it a little bit, is the environment.
    We have a lot of environmental challenges. I'm very proud of the fact
    that, compared to 5 years ago, the air is cleaner; the water is cleaner;
    we have fewer toxic waste dumps; our food supply is safer. I am proud of
    that. But we do have--the Secretary made that joke about El Nino, and I
    loved it because I was shaking up here, too, but the truth is that the
    scientific opinion in the world is virtually unanimous that the climate
    of the Earth is warming at an unsustainable pace--even on this cold
    night. And we know that just small changes in temperature can affect
    great changes in the surface of the Earth and the way we live.
        We know what's mainly causing it: It's greenhouse gases, the stuff
    we put out in the air from powerplants, from homes, from factories, from
    farms, from cars, from trucks, you name it. We also know that without a
    lot of effort, if we really put our mind to it, we can reduce greenhouse
    gas emissions and grow the economy.
        Now, every time we have faced a new environmental challenge,
    pessimists have said, ``Oh, goodness, if we do that, maybe we can clean
    the environment, but it will shut our economy down.'' It has never
    happened. We have the cleanest environment in history and the strongest
    economy we've ever had. And I want you to make a commitment here that
    places like the University of Wisconsin can figure out how to find the
    technological ways to have the efficient cars, the efficient trucks, the
    efficient homes, the efficient office buildings, the efficient
    factories, the efficient electricity generators to make sure we save
    this planet for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We can do
    that in the 21st century.
        Finally, I want us to really tap the full measure of the scientific
    and technological potential of this country. Ron Kind said he hoped that
    his child and the child he's about to have might be two of those that I
    talked about last night

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    when I said children born in the next couple of years might well live to
    see the 22d century. That is literally true. We have proposed, the Vice
    President and I and our administration, to create a research fund for
    the 21st century to make an unprecedented effort in the National
    Institute of Health, the National Cancer Institute, the National Science
    Foundation. I hope you will support that.
        I hope you will support something that may seem a long way from La
    Crosse. I hope you will support our mission in space and the
    international space station. Why? Because when John Glenn, at 77 years old, goes up into space, we're going to
    learn something about how people's bodies work down here on Earth. A lot
    of our space research is helping us not only to find out what's in the
    heavens and to protect ourselves in the future but also to find out
    what's going on here on Earth, how to preserve our environment, how to
    improve our health. It may seem a long way from La Crosse, but we have
    learned that we dare not turn away from the frontiers of knowledge. We
    need to embrace them and make them work for the good of humanity, and we
    can do it, and I hope you will support that.
        The last thing that I want you to think about for the 21st century
    is how we can make all of America work the way these local community
    heroes work in their communities. How can we reach across the lines that
    divide us?
        I know that in La Crosse you had a conference on race last month,
    with the leadership of Thai Vue and June
    Kjome and Roy Heath and
    other citizen heroes that are here today. I want to thank them for that.
    And I thank all of you who participated.
        Let me say to you--I said last night to the American people, we are
    more interdependent on each other and on the rest of the world than ever
    before. I mean, whether we like it or not, a third of our economic
    growth that we all celebrate came because we're selling things to people
    around the world. We represent 4 percent of the world's population and,
    thanks to our hard work and God's good fortune to us, we have about 20
    percent of the world's wealth. So we have to work with others around the
    world.
        And when you do business with people, you also have to be good
    partners, good neighbors, good friends. You have to care about them, and
    you have to get them to kind of reach out of their own prejudices and
    problems. I spent a lot of time working on getting people to stop
    behaving like fools, frankly, and hating each other because they have
    different races or different ethnic backgrounds or different religious
    backgrounds, whether it's in Bosnia or Northern Ireland or the Middle
    East or in Africa--around the world, the whole world is tormented by
    that. Now, here in America, we're becoming more and more and more
    diverse. And if we can prove to the world that we can live together,
    work together, learn together, and serve in our communities together,
    you can bet your bottom dollar we'll get along together. And America
    will still be the shining light of freedom and hope in the world well
    into the 21st century. And that's what we have to do.
        I thank you again for having us here, for waiting in the cold--or
    the warm--[laughter]--and I don't know how many of you were at the
    Packers' welcome home party, but I thank them for showing up. [Laughter]
    Hang in there. There's always next year.
        I will never forget looking out on this sea of people tonight, this
    beautiful old restored street, all the American flags, reading the
    stories of the American heroes. This is the best of America. This is the
    best of our past and the hope of our future. And together, we can make
    America's best days ahead.
        Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 5:31 p.m. at the La Crosse Convention
    Center. In his remarks, he referred to Wisconsin Attorney General Jim
    Doyle; Mayor John Medinger of La Crosse; Lee and Ruth Mathison, who
    introduced the President; and Thai Vue, June Kjome, and Roy Heath,
    community service volunteers.