[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
[January 30, 1998]
[Pages 142-148]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a United States Conference of Mayors Breakfast
January 30, 1998

    Thank you for that wonderful welcome. When Secretary Pena started talking about Mayor Helmke being on ``Jeopardy,'' I thought he was going to say--
and I knew we were getting into this law school business--I thought he 
was going to say, ``Which two politicians in this room went to the 
greatest lengths early in their career to cover up the fact that they 
went to Ivy League schools?'' [Laughter] Once you get gray headed, you 
can fess up to that.
    I'm delighted to be here with you, Paul, and 
I'm very proud of your success and the partnership we've enjoyed. Mayor 
Webb, good job in the Super Bowl. 
[Laughter] I want to say to all of you--my mayor, Jim Dailey, is here. I want to thank Secretary Cuomo and Secretary Pena, Secretary Riley, Secretary Babbitt, Secretary 
Slater, OMB Director Frank Raines, OPM Director Janice Lachance, General McCaffrey, Gene 
Sperling, my National Economic Adviser. And I 
want to thank our whole team. There are others who are here. I also want 
to say a special word of thanks to Mickey Ibarra and Lynn Cutler, who have been 
working with you on this conference. I think they've done a superb job, 
and I hope you are pleased with it.
    And we have a lot of other members of the administration here from 
other departments in the White House. We all like it when the mayors 
come to town; we get to talk about real people, real issues, and 
building a real future for America, because that's what you embody.
    Earlier this week in the State of the Union Address I asked the 
American people to continue working with me to strengthen our Nation for 
the 21st century--just 700 days, more or less, left in this century and 
in this millennium.
    We can be very grateful for the strength that our country enjoys 
today. We got some new evidence, actually, this morning of that strength 
with the new economic report. Our economy continues to grow steadily and 
strongly. In the fourth quarter of last year, our economy expanded at a 
vigorous 4.3 percent rate with continued low inflation. Last year, 
economic growth for the entire year was fueled by strong exports and 
strong business investment. It was 3.8 percent on an annual basis. 
That's the highest growth rate for the United States in a decade, after 
years of economic expansion.
    This economic strategy that we have embraced of fiscal discipline, 
expanded trade, and investment in our people and our future is working. 
What I want to talk to you about today is that we have to continue that 
until every American is a part of this success story.
    The next steps we have to make--in education, in economic 
development, in crime, in partnerships with our cities, in involving all 
of our citizens in the work of our cities and nations--these next steps 
will be critical. Whether we can empower all of our urban areas and our 
urban citizens to make the most of their own lives will be critical to 
determining whether we can, in fact, take all this success that our

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country has had and reach every neighborhood, every block, every family, 
every child.
    Today, thanks to your leadership, there is truly an urban 
renaissance taking place all across America, from New York, where crime 
has dropped to record lows, to Detroit, where the unemployment rate has 
been cut in half, to Long Beach, where the downtown is once again 
bustling with shoppers and students in school uniforms are learning more 
in safer environments.
    The urban revitalization is one of the most extraordinary successes 
of the past 5 years. It is a great achievement of America's mayors and 
the people whom they lead. Our cities are back because so many of you 
rolled up your sleeves and went to work. I thank you for your leadership 
and for the extraordinary opportunity that we have had to work together. 
I can tell you, for me, it's been a lot of fun, and we've done a lot of 
good. And we're going to do even more in the next 3 years. I know we 
can.
    The other night in the State of the Union Address, I tried to 
capture for the American people the different direction in Government 
that our administration has pursued for the last 5 years. I said that 
one of the reasons I came to Washington as the Governor of a small 
State--sort of like being the mayor of a big city--was to break out of 
this old gridlock between those who said Government is the problem and 
those who said Government is the solution. It was obvious that, if for 
no reason than the deficit, Government could not be the solution; plus 
the nature of the problems we have and the nature of the changing 
economy and society that we're living in, and certainly the one toward 
which we are moving, made it impossible to think about the solutions to 
today's problems in sort of 1930's through 1960's terms.
    So what we said is there has got to be a third way here. These two 
extremes won't work. We think Government ought to be a catalyst for new 
ideas to experiment. We think Government ought to be a partner with the 
private sector and community groups. We think the Government ought to 
focus on creating the conditions and giving people the tools so that 
people can solve their own lives and chart their own futures and build 
this country from the ground up. That is what you represent for me. You 
do that all day, every day, sometimes without even thinking about it. 
You do it because it is the only way to proceed, and you do it without 
regard to party. A long time ago, Mayor La Guardia said, ``There's no 
Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. It either gets 
picked up or it doesn't.'' [Laughter]
    Now, I tried to reflect that third way approach in how we have 
related. A lot of you were terrifically understanding when I came into 
office and I said, ``You know, you're my friends, and I care about you, 
but the first thing I've got to do is get this deficit down, otherwise 
the economy will never come back, and you won't have any jobs anyway.'' 
And we found a way to find some more investments, to make some 
innovative partnerships, while we were continuing to follow the 
discipline necessary that has brought us to the point where we are now; 
where the budget deficit was estimated to be $357 billion for this year 
when I took office, now the estimate is $10 billion. That's a pretty big 
difference.
    We know, and I think you can see by the extraordinary presence of 
Cabinet members here today, we know that every single part of this 
Federal Government has a responsibility to work with you and to be a 
good partner. Secretary Cuomo's reinvented 
HUD exemplifies the kind of approach we're trying to take to working 
with the cities all across the Federal Government. We want to be your 
partner, and we want to be a good partner and help you be a good partner 
with the private sector, with community groups, with individual 
citizens.
    Now, on Monday, as a part of my balanced budget, I'll be proposing 
one of the broadest, strongest, and most innovative urban agendas in a 
generation that will focus on three keys to closing the opportunity gaps 
in America and building one America for the 21st century: education, 
economic development, and crime.
    First, as I said the other night, all Americans know, I think, in 
the marrow of their bones that we have the finest system of higher 
education in the world. Therefore, when I was able to announce to the 
American people the other night all the steps we had taken essentially 
to open the doors of college to all Americans, I could hear the cheering 
in living rooms all across this country. You didn't have to say--people 
knew we were giving them a good thing.
    We have to keep working until people have that same level of 
confidence that their elementary and secondary schools will give their 
children the best education in America. And we can do it. If we can 
build an international space

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station in the sky, if we can put all the telephone calls on Mother's 
Day on a single piece of fiber the width of a human hair--which will 
happen in just a couple of years--if our scientists can unlock the 
secrets--the genetic secrets of Parkinson's disease in 9 days, all those 
things I talked about the other night, this is not rocket science. This 
is not rocket science. We can do this. We have never had, in the last 20 
years, when we have known we needed to do it, the kind of systematic, 
disciplined approach to giving our children the education they need that 
we must bring to bear on this problem now. But we can do it.
    One thing I know, there are some cities where the mayors have direct 
jurisdiction over the schools and other cities where the mayors seem to 
have no legal say over the schools, but in every city the mayor should 
be involved in the schools. I am thrilled that you're going to have a 
conference on public schools. I thank you for your invitation, and I 
expect to be there. I want us to continue to work together on this 
important issue.
    I am--as you know, if you heard the speech the other night, I'm very 
excited about what's going on in Chicago with the schools. I have been 
there twice. I have spent a lot of time both in the schools and sitting 
around tables talking to the people who are part of the restructuring of 
the way they're operated, not only from the district down but from the 
school level up, with parental involvement.
    I think it is a good thing to do end social promotion, but I think 
you have to couple that with second chances. And so when they ended 
social promotion, they also had mandatory summer school to give every 
child a second chance. You can stand up and say something like, I'm 
ending social promotion, and it sounds great and everybody will clap and 
your popularity will go up, but in the end, the only thing that really 
matters is, are the children learning or not? And the reason we should 
stop the practice is that it covers up the sins of the system which is 
not producing an educated citizenry among our children and not preparing 
them for the future.
    So it's a good thing to do to end it, but it's not enough, because 
you have to put something in its place. And the thing that's exciting to 
me about Chicago is they have--if these children don't perform at grade 
level, then they have a mandatory summer school program and everybody 
goes. By the way, it cuts down on juvenile disruption problems as well.
    But it's an exciting thing. I went to a school there with a 
principal and a parent, and the parent had a child in the school as a 
student and a child in the school as a teacher. And it was an inner-city 
school, and all of these parent groups showed up. None of them felt 
aggrieved because this school had ended social promotion. They felt 
empowered because it had, because it was done at the grassroots level. 
And they thought it was a fair system because they were involved in it 
and because their kids had a positive alternative. So it wasn't just 
that they were going to be held back. We have to do things like that all 
across the country.
    I am proposing new education opportunity zones to help poor school 
districts close down falling schools, promote public school choice, 
remove bad teachers, follow the model of the Chicago system to try to 
help to stop social promotion, but start learning--an opportunity for 
our kids.
    I also proposed the first-ever Federal help to help our local 
schools hire 100,000 more school teachers, so that we can have smaller 
classes in the early grades. We can reduce class sizes in the first, 
second, and third grade to an average of 18 nationwide if my proposal is 
adopted. And because that will create enormous problems--we have both 
more teachers and more students; we have to have more classrooms--I have 
proposed a school construction tax cut to help communities modernize or 
build 5,000 schools. And that will help a lot of you in this room.
    The second thing we have to do is keep working to extend economic 
opportunity to every corner of every community. Over the past 5 years, 
with the leadership of the Vice President, we've created 125 empowerment 
zones and enterprise communities, offered tax cuts to clean up and 
redevelop brownfields, offered a network of community development banks 
to make loans to people in places where they're not normally made, and 
we have dramatically strengthened the Community Reinvestment Act. I 
don't know if anybody has talked about that here yet, but that act has 
been on the book since 1977. Over 80 percent of all the lending done in 
the 20-plus year history of the Community Reinvestment Act has been done 
in the last 5 years, since we've been here. And it's made a big

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difference, in communities all across this country, to grow the economy 
and bring opportunity. And I'm very proud of that.
    Our balanced budget will propose, as I'm sure Secretary Cuomo has 
already said, new housing vouchers to help people stay off welfare and 
move closer to jobs, an expanded low income housing tax credit, new 
opportunities for homeownership, tougher efforts to fight housing 
discrimination.
    We have created 14 million new jobs here in the last 5 years. Just 
13 percent of them, though, have been in the central cities. We have to 
get the message out to our businesses. And that's why I went to Wall 
Street the other day with Jesse Jackson and people from Wall Street to 
say, the most important emerging market for a strong American economy, 
the most important way to continue to grow the economy and keep 
inflation low, is to move into the markets that are right here within 
the borders of the United States, into these neighborhoods that have not 
been developed.
    That's why I am announcing today that my balanced budget will create 
a new $400 million community empowerment fund to be run by HUD that will 
help local governments attract more businesses and jobs to poor and 
underserved neighborhoods. The fund will encourage the standardization 
of economic development lending, a first step in creating a secondary 
market for such loans. It will provide capital to businesses who 
recognize the potential and the possibilities of the inner cities. This 
is the right way to help our cities. It is not a handout. It will bring 
new credit, new jobs, and new hope to the people. I thank Secretary 
Cuomo for developing it, and it's going to 
bring a lot of economic opportunity to many of you.
    Let me also say, though, one of the things I appreciate about the 
mayors is that you not only want me to help you do the things you have 
to do, you understand that some of the things we do create the framework 
within which you proceed. So mayors have been very good about supporting 
my efforts to balance the budget. Mayors have been very good, across 
party lines, in supporting my efforts to expand trade. And I was very 
excited with the focus you put on Africa trade. You know, we've got an 
Africa trade initiative coming up. And I just wanted to say to you, one 
of the things that we have to understand about this new world is that 
the old dividing line in our mind between a domestic issue and a foreign 
policy issue has come crashing down. And increasingly, the dividing 
lines in our mind between what is a national security issue and an 
economic issue is coming crashing down.
    Yesterday I had my annual meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and 
our other commanders in chief of our regions around the world of various 
military functions like space and transportation and other things. And 
what we do every year is we sit around, and basically they go around the 
table and make a report to me about their area of responsibility, and 
then I make a comment, and we talk a little about it. And yesterday at 
the meeting, a big topic of conversation was the financial crisis in 
Asia. Now, you say, ``Well, what are the military people worried about 
that for?'' Well, it affects the ability of those Asian countries to 
modernize their militaries. It affects their capacity to cooperate with 
us. It affects the internal stability of their government. So, all of a 
sudden, if you get to wear four stars around on your shoulder and go to 
the Pacific, you got to become an expert in international finance. And 
you have to care about whether the Congress will vote to have America do 
its part in contributing to the International Monetary Fund and 
rebuilding the economy.
    So, if you're a mayor in Indiana or Wyoming or Wisconsin, why should 
you care about it? Because you know that the overall health of the 
American economy will determine the parameters within which you must 
proceed. Now, you may do a better or worse job on any given day, like 
all of the rest of us, but you know that.
    So I would say to you again, thank you for your concern for and 
support for trade. But I think the mayors, without regard to party and 
without regard to the particular conditions in each city, understand 
that over the long run we are much better off when we continue to expand 
trade and when we build good, constructive economic partnerships with 
free countries who share our values around the world.
    So I ask for your support for the international trade agenda I 
announced, for more open doors to Africa and Latin America, for an 
extension of the fast-track authority, and most immediately, for the 
United States doing its part with the International Monetary Fund to 
stabilize the

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situation in Asia. Those are very important markets for us, and I ask 
you for your help in securing that in Congress.
    The third thing that we have to do, if we really want to bring all 
the cities back and all the neighborhoods back, is make the streets 
safe. People are not going to invest money, they're not going to open 
businesses, they're not going to stake their future on the schools of a 
place where they don't feel safe. The greatest thing that's happened in 
some ways to all of our cities is the capacity that you have developed 
to dramatically lower crime rates.
    Now, we have worked with you to empower that strategy, to make it 
work more. The crime bill we passed in '94, with the strong support of 
many of the mayors here, was written, in effect, by local law 
enforcement officials, local elected officials like mayors, and local 
community group leaders who were concerned about making our streets 
safe. You know, I wasn't Einstein up here coming up with a bunch of 
ideas; I just took what I knew would work based on the experience that 
was sweeping the country. And it has been working. More police, tougher 
punishment, better prevention: those things work, working at a 
neighborhood level where everybody works together to try to keep crime 
from happening in the first place. Now, crime is down now for 5 years in 
a row in this country.
    So even though we have to balance the budget, we have to do more to 
invest in the fight, for two reasons: One, we have to finish what we 
started in '94 and finish the work of putting all 100,000 police on the 
street. Second, we have to recognize that we still have some issues out 
there that we have to face. Particularly, as all of you know, the 
juvenile crime rate has not dropped as much as the overall crime rate 
has. We have the biggest group of young people in our schools in 
history. Finally, we've got a group of kids in our schools more numerous 
than the baby boom generation. And by the time they all start turning 
12, 13, 14 years old, we'd better have found a solution to the juvenile 
crime problem, or we will not be able to continue to say, we're lowering 
the crime rate. It will become a new, horrible problem for the cities.
    Now, we have seen from what many of you have done that there are 
ways to dramatically lower the juvenile crime rate. So all we're trying 
to do here is basically to do a step two in the fight against crime that 
reflects a national effort to give you the tools to do with juvenile 
crime what you have already done with the overall crime rate.
    I have proposed a Federal effort to help to hire as many as 1,000 
neighborhood prosecutors across our country to work closely with police 
and residents to prevent crime as well as prosecute criminals. They'll 
try to prevent crime with a lot of tools like injunctions to clear 
playgrounds of drug dealers and other legal strategies to rid 
neighborhoods of troubled spots.
    You know, I've seen what has happened when we have more prosecutors 
and more probation officers and they're working in a systematic way. 
I've seen--I see Mayor Menino back there--the 
experience of Boston has become legendary, but it is not unique now 
because so many others are doing this. We have to do this everywhere.
    I remember one day I spent with Mayor Menino in Boston, my jaw 
dropped when the people that were sitting at our roundtable said that 
the young people on probation--they had a 70 percent compliance rate 
with probation orders. And I figured that's probably about double what 
the national average is for any city of any size in America, because 
they were going in the homes, working the streets, bringing the 
neighborhoods back into the real life of the community. So that's what 
this juvenile initiative to have more community prosecutors and more 
probation officers is all about.
    We also are going to strengthen our efforts against illegal gun-
trafficking, helping local police departments and the ATF to trace all 
guns discovered at crime scenes. I want to hire over 160 new ATF agents 
to investigate and arrest gun traffickers who sell guns illegally to 
gangs and to juveniles. That's our responsibility. We need to do more to 
help you with that.
    Finally, on the domestic front here, in addition to the prosecutors 
and the probation officers and the gun efforts, I think it's important 
that the mayors sent a loud and clear, nonpartisan message to the 
Congress and to the country that most juvenile crime is not committed by 
people who don't have anybody in their family who cares about them. Most 
juvenile crime is committed by young people who get in trouble when the 
school is out and mama or daddy aren't home from work; between 3 and 8 
at night is when most juvenile crime is committed. So we've got to do 
more to have after-school programs either in the schools or

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in community centers. That would do more than anything else.
    Now, we have some money coming through the Justice Department for 
this; we have some money coming through the Education Department for 
this, for community-based learning centers. I think Secretary 
Riley's initiative is called 21st Century 
Community Learning Centers or something like that. We need your help. We 
really need your help to tell the Congress that this is not a political 
issue; this is not a partisan issue; and this is not shoveling some old-
fashioned grant to the cities that some of the Members of Congress may 
not want. This is children's lives. And this is whether you can succeed 
or not in really building the kind of cities you want for the 21st 
century.
    You cannot make it unless we can do something about the problem of 
juvenile crime. And we're not going to do it, with all those kids, when 
all their juices are flowing and they're out there vulnerable to get in 
all kinds of trouble, unless you give them something positive to do when 
the schoolhouse door is open for the last time in the day until they can 
go home and be under proper supervision at night. We have got to do 
this. And we need your help to do it. And we can do it.
    Let me also say that there is something else we have to do more of--
and General McCaffrey is here; I want to 
mention this. We want to do a better job of keeping drugs from coming 
into this country in the first place. Not long ago I went to Miami with 
General McCaffrey, and we saw the work that the Coast Guard is doing 
there to try to interdict drugs. The problem is that the better job we 
do in stopping drugs from coming in in the water and through the air, 
the more pressure it puts on land through Mexico.
    I mean, these people didn't get rich being stupid. They are a very 
powerful, well-organized, violent, and phenomenally wealthy enemy of the 
children and the future of the United States. What we want to try to do 
is to dramatically increase our capacity to deal with border imports. 
And we proposed to hire another 1,000 border patrol agents, to continue 
our antidrug media campaign, which is important, to crack down on heroin 
and methamphetamine trade, to boost drug abuse treatment and 
prevention--also very important. We're also going--and Secretary 
Slater is here--we're also going to try to 
bring to bear the latest technologies and really spend some money. And 
we've reauthorized this new transportation bill. And I want all of you 
to support us, whether you live near the border or not, because it 
affects you. We need to spend some serious money on the border to have 
the best available technology to do everything we can to find drugs.
    Now, it is not possible yet with technology, but if I could paint a 
picture of the future and I could have any technological breakthrough--
if a genie came down the aisle here and said, ``In the next 3 months, 
you could have any technological breakthrough you want for your country. 
What would you do?'' I think that if I could pick one for the next 3 
months, I would say I would like to have a border patrol system for 
picking drugs that is as effective as airport metal detectors are from 
getting weapons away from people. I mean that should be our model. 
That's what we should be imagining.
    Why? Because it not only is effective, we don't hold up everybody 
else very long. You never hear anybody griping about going through an 
airport metal detector anymore. And every now and then you've got a 
money clip in your pocket or something, you've got to go back around and 
go through again, but it's not any kind of a big deal. That should be 
what we are working for. We should be working and working and working; 
we shouldn't stop until we basically have the capacity to check every 
vehicle that crosses our border in a way that doesn't shut commerce down 
and unduly burden totally innocent people who are just going about their 
lives.
    And I want you to help us when this transportation bill comes up, 
and I want you to help us when the drug budget comes up to get that kind 
of structure, because you have got to have more help in trying to cut 
off the drugs at the source in the first place. And we're going to do 
our best to give it to you.
    The last point I want to make is I believe that our cities can 
embody the image that I have for America in the 21st century because 
they are the most diverse places in America. And as we become more 
diverse, in a funny way we've got to become more united. As we become 
more diverse, we have to learn to celebrate what's different about 
ourselves, but we have to hold even tighter to the things that bind us 
together at the family and the neighborhood and the community level.

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    We're going to reauthorize the national service program, AmeriCorps, 
this year. I hope all of you will support it because you have really 
used it a lot. I know General Powell is going to speak to you before you 
end your conference, and I hope all of you will support what he's doing. 
That Presidents' Summit on Service in Philadelphia last April was a 
remarkable thing. The idea that we ought to mobilize hundreds of 
thousands of volunteers, maybe millions of them, to give every child a 
safe street to grow up on, a good school to attend, a good health care 
system so that the child is healthy, a mentor, and the chance to serve--
those are five laudable goals.
    And if you think about it, in terms of what I just said, about the 
economy and education and crime, if we have a country in which in every 
city, across the lines of race, people have an equal chance to work 
together, to learn together, to serve together, we're going to get along 
together just fine. You all show that every day. And most of you have a 
good time doing it. I think it's fun to be a mayor these days, isn't it? 
[Laughter] I think you're having a good time doing it.
    When I think of one America, I think of all the places I've been in 
all of your communities, where people are living together, learning 
together, working together, serving together, closing those opportunity 
gaps, building one country. The best days of this country are ahead of 
us. All we have to do is to bear down and do more of what you have been 
doing these last few years.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:57 a.m. in the State Dining Room at the 
White House. In his remarks he referred to Mayor Paul Helmke of Fort 
Wayne, IN; Mayor Wellington E. Webb of Denver, CO; Mayor Jim Dailey of 
Little Rock, AR; Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston, MA; and former Joint 
Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Colin Powell, USA, (Ret.), chairman, 
America's Promise--The Alliance For Youth.