    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [January 29, 1999]
    [Pages 123-130]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the United States Conference of Mayors
    January 29, 1999

        Thank you very much for the wonderful welcome. I want to say I'm
    just as glad to see you as you apparently are to be here. [Laughter]
    Just looking at you reminds me of why we do what we do. And I thank you
    so much for your work.
        I'd like to thank Secretary Cuomo for
    his fine remarks, and Secretary Herman, who
    will have remarks in a moment, and Mayor Corradini for your leadership.
        Because this is my only opportunity, I believe, today to see the
    press and to speak with them and with the American people, I hope you
    will forgive me because I need to make a couple of remarks about some
    developments in Kosovo at the beginning.

    Kosovo

        You remember that 2 weeks ago there was a massacre in the village of
    Racak. After that, we insisted that the Serbian authorities stop their
    repression and meet their commitments. Today Secretary
    Albright forged an agreement with our
    Contact Group allies, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and Russia,
    on a common diplomatic strategy to achieve compliance with the rules of
    the international community. With our Allies in NATO, we stand ready to
    back that strategy with the threat of force.
        Our goal is not merely to respond to the recent atrocities in Kosovo
    but to help resolve the conflict so that the violence can end for good.
    The Contact Group has now approved the terms of an interim agreement
    that would do just that, by protecting the rights of all the people of
    Kosovo and giving them the self-government they clearly deserve.
        Both sides now have an opportunity to stop a war that neither side
    can win and to start building a better future for all the people by
    peaceful means. To that end, the international community has sent a
    clear message to the authorities in Belgrade: The time for denial and
    delay is past. NATO is united and ready to act if you don't.

    Domestic Agenda

        I want to thank, again, Mayor Corradini, Mayor Webb, Mayor
    Coles for greeting me. Like Deedee, I want to
    say how much I appreciate the work that Mickey Ibarra and Lynn Cutler do to bring
    the mayors and the White House together to give us, I think, a virtually
    unprecedented working relationship. And I intend to keep it going.
        I want to thank all the members of the Cabinet and the
    administration who are here. There is a stunning array--the whole
    Government is here on the front row. I hope there is no emergency in any
    Department today while we are all here. [Laughter] I feel rather badly
    about this; they've probably heard this speech a hundred times before.
    But I thank them. I think their presence here is evidence of the
    seriousness with which we take our responsibilities to work with you.
        I also want to thank Mayor Corradini
    for her leadership on the census. I know we may have some questions
    about that later, but just let me say the Supreme Court struck down the
    use of sampling for congressional apportionment among the States. It
    reaffirmed our use of these scientific methods for other purposes. We
    remain committed to making the 2000 census both accurate and fair, and
    we are working very hard, as--Secretary Daley is working very hard to try to determine how we can best
    do that and have the most useful and accurate census we can.
        You know, one of the reasons I ran for President 7 years ago is to
    do something about the then-condition of our cities. I also was
    encouraged by what I saw as I visited cities in 1991 and 1992 and I saw,
    even with the country in pretty bad shape, there were places where
    people were actually solving problems, where hope had returned because
    change was occurring. And I believed then, as I said in my first

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    Inaugural, that there is nothing wrong with this country that can't be
    fixed by what is right with our country. I have always believed that,
    and you have proved that that is right.
        Now, since 1993 we have worked together, as I have said thousands of
    times, to create an America in which there is opportunity for all of our
    citizens, responsibility from all our citizens, and a community that
    includes all our citizens. No group of Americans is more committed to
    that than our mayors.
        We've had a strategy for the new economy: to balance the budget, to
    invest in our people, to sell more of our goods and services around the
    world. We balanced the budget for the first time in nearly 30 years and
    still almost doubled our investment in education and training. The
    strategy has helped to steer our Nation through some tough global
    currents. And as you know, our economy is doing very well.
        This morning we received more good news about the American economy.
    I can now report that in the fourth quarter of 1998, our economy grew at
    5.6 percent. For the entire year, the growth rate was 3.9 percent,
    giving us the longest peacetime expansion in the history of the United
    States with the lowest peacetime unemployment rate since 1957.
        I remember after I was elected, we were sitting around the table at
    the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock arguing about our economic
    strategy. And I had all these folks come in from around the country, and
    they said, ``Now, Mr. President, you just cannot grow the economy at
    more than 2\1/2\ percent for more than a year or two without having
    uncontrollable inflation.'' And I said, ``Well, I'm not an economist,
    but I know what technology is doing, and I don't believe that.'' And at
    least for 6 years, it hasn't been so. The American people have proved
    that through productivity and hard work, we can grow the economy, reduce
    unemployment, and if we do the right things, by the way, we can also
    improve the environment, not destroy it. So this is an encouraging
    thing.
        Today we're releasing an interim state of the cities report that
    tells the story of economic growth in the cities. Unemployment in our
    central cities has fallen by 40 percent since 1992; 4 of our largest 10
    cities have cut their unemployment rates in half. We have the highest
    real wage growth in two decades; the lowest African-American and
    Hispanic unemployment rates since such things were first measured in
    1972; average family income up by $3,500; the lowest crime rate in, now,
    about 26 years, and a drop in our cities that averages 27 percent.
        All of you in this room should be proud of what you have done, and
    I'm proud of what we've been able to do together. But I would like to
    reiterate today, in terms specific to the cities and our urban agenda,
    the general point that I made at the State of the Union Address. The
    present prosperity is an opportunity and a responsibility to make sure
    that opportunity and prosperity reaches every person in every corner of
    this country, into every neighborhood in every city of this country.
        If we cannot do this now, with what some people believe is the
    strongest overall economy in our history, believe me, we will never get
    around to doing the job. And so I think we should all be very up front
    and say: This is a dynamic economy; you don't ever stand still in it; if
    you don't keep going in one direction, before you know it you'll be
    going in the other. And so what is our clear responsibility is also in
    the self-interest of all our citizens. And I hope you can talk to people
    about that in all your communities.
        This is not a time to say, isn't this wonderful, and let's take
    another vacation. This is a time to say all these things that I bet you
    everybody in this room has talked about and worried about, wrung your
    hands about, probably for decades before you ever showed up in city
    government. It's finally a time that we can deal with these challenges.
    And that's what I have tried to construct a budget to help you do.
        Secretary Cuomo sort of brushed by the
    remarkable role that HUD has played in the last 6 years, not only in
    helping you to grow the American dream in our cities but also to
    reinvent the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to make it
    smaller and able to invest more and have a bigger impact out there where
    people live.
        David Osborne, the intellectual godfather
    of this whole REGO movement, said that HUD is a model of reinvention in
    the nineties. The balanced budget that I will submit to Congress will
    increase the overall HUD budget by $2\1/2\ billion, to $28 billion. It
    will support HUD's community empowerment fund: 100,000 new vouchers to
    make housing more affordable; dozens of other innovative steps. I want
    you to support this in the Congress. We have to have

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    votes from Members on both sides of the aisle in both Houses to pass the
    HUD budget.
        But if we're going to reach every person in every corner of every
    city, we have to do more, and Mayor Corradini mentioned some of the
    things, but I'd like to run over them with you.
        First, we have to create more economic opportunity. The best poverty
    program, the best anticrime program, the best urban program is still a
    job for every person who will work. We've created now 31 empowerment
    zones to bring the spark of private enterprise to inner cities. The Vice
    President announced the 20 newest zones earlier this month. I will ask
    Congress to fully fund this round to help support another 90,000 jobs.
        We created a network of community development financial
    institutions, and we now propose increasing the investment in that. We
    strengthened and streamlined the Community Reinvestment Act, encouraging
    banks--just since we've been here--to make over $1 trillion in financial
    commitments. Since the CRA became law in 1975, 95 percent of all the
    commitments made under it have been made since 1993.
        And I hope you noticed that during this period our banks have not
    gone broke. [Laughter] I bet the town banker is doing pretty well where
    you live in a big city or a small town. And yet, unbelievably enough,
    when we are proving it is working, the Community Reinvestment Act is
    under fire again.
        Again, this ought not be a political deal. Every American has an
    interest in seeing that every economic opportunity in every community is
    seized. And if it is a good investment, it's a good investment. The
    banks are not going broke; they're doing well. The Community
    Reinvestment Act is a good thing. I hope you will help us protect it and
    support it. Now, even so, capital still bypasses a lot of areas where
    it's most needed.
        I said in the State of the Union, I'd like to say again, today the
    largest pool of ready untapped investment opportunity and new customers
    is not overseas; it's in our backyard, in Harlem or Watts or Appalachia,
    even our Native American reservations. According to a recent Harvard
    Business School study, underdeveloped communities in America still
    control more than $85 billion a year in purchasing power. That's more
    than the entire retail market of Mexico, our second largest trading
    partner.
        So I have proposed an initiative to bring jobs and opportunity to
    the new markets here at home. We should write into law a new markets tax
    credit: $1 billion of tax credits over 5 years, worth 25 percent of the
    amount of equity placed in investment funds, community development
    banks, and other investment vehicles targeted for these untapped
    markets.
        We should create ``American Private Investment Companies,'' modeled
    on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, that would provide for
    guarantees of a portion of private equity investment of up to $1\1/2\
    billion a year over the next 5 years. We should create new market
    venture capital firms to bring capital and technical assistance to small
    businesses in distressed areas.
        Thousands, literally thousands and thousands of opportunities--of
    entrepreneurs in this country just need a little capital and a little
    guidance to expand their businesses and to create new jobs. All told,
    this new markets initiative will bring $15 billion in new private sector
    investment, our most significant opportunity in years to break the cycle
    of poverty and joblessness in the neighborhoods where unemployment is
    still too high, and that 5.6 percent does not mean anything. I ask you
    to help me make sure it means something from now on to every American in
    every community.
        We have to do more. I announced in the State of the Union that
    welfare is at its lowest level in three decades. Caseloads have been cut
    nearly in half. That's the good news. The bad news is that the remaining
    number of people on welfare who are able-bodied and who are required
    under the law to seek work will very often be harder to place, at least
    in terms of either their educational level, their skills level, or their
    difficulty in getting transportation to work, or perhaps they have more
    children, and therefore it's more difficult to support child care.
        And yet we have seen evidence--I think either Secretary Shalala or
    Janet Yellen in one of the weekly economic reports quoted a report to me
    recently which said that we had some evidence now that even hard-to-
    place--people that you would type as hard-to-place welfare recipients--
    are actually being placed, being trained, and doing quite well, thank
    you, where the unemployment rate is low and the markets are so tight
    that employers had to be out and

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    train them and provide the kinds of tools necessary to give them a
    chance to go to work.
        So again I say, I think it is very important that no public official
    get up here and disempower hundreds of thousands of Americans by saying,
    ``Well, now we have creamed everybody off the top, and these other
    folks, we'll just have to give up on them.'' If we had time, I'd have my
    mayor here, my new mayor, come up here
    and tell you his life story. Thank God nobody gave up on him.
        So I ask you to help me pass this provision of my budget, which
    would help us to give another 200,000 people the dignity of work, and
    reinforce the new markets initiative by making sure people are actually
    able to work if we can get the investment opportunities to them.
        We have to do more to clean up abandoned industrial sites and
    redevelop them. My balanced budget proposes an abandoned buildings
    initiative that will help you accelerate your efforts to clean up
    brownfields and deal with sites with old and unused buildings and turn
    them into places of opportunity.
        Now, every one of these initiatives will require Democrats and
    Republicans to work together to get through Congress. And every one
    requires Congress to act; I do not write the checks in America.
    [Laughter] So I need your help, across party lines. These things should
    be American initiatives. They relate to human potential and private
    initiative and private sector investment.
        Second, we have to do more to keep our cities safer. I thank the
    mayor for what she said about your position on drug testing. I don't
    think people ought to be paroled in the first place unless they've been
    tested and they're drug-free. And I believe when they're on parole, if
    they had a drug problem in the first place, they should be tested and
    should have to stay drug-free to stay out of prison, because I think it
    will keep your cities safer.
        You look at the numbers that the Attorney General gives me all the
    time, just look at the Federal prison system and the way that it's grown
    and the number of people there who are there because of drug-related
    offenses, and the numbers are bigger and the percentages are worse in
    State facilities. And I despaired for a long time--I ran a big prison
    system when I was a Governor for 12 years, and I dramatically increased
    the size of it. And every year I got sicker and sicker to see great
    world-class facilities being built according to Federal court guidelines
    for my prisoners, while my kids were going to school in second-class
    facilities, many of which were too old even to be hooked up to the
    Internet.
        But the point I want to make is this: I don't favor putting people
    in inhumane conditions, but I think we're wasting our time if we think
    we can keep jailing our way out of this situation in the same old way.
    That's the point I'm trying to make. And we'll have more to say about
    that later. But let's begin with first things first, with this drug
    testing initiative.
        Secondly, with, I think, the superb partnership between the Justice
    Department and the local communities, we're going to achieve our goal
    this year of those 100,000 community police, under budget and ahead of
    schedule. I wish I had a list of everything everybody who ever voted
    against that bill in 1994 said. ``Oh, this will never work.'' ``Oh, what
    will happen?'' ``Oh, the mayors will hate you for doing this.'' ``Oh,
    how can you do this?'' I wish I had a list of all that stuff. [Laughter]
    The people that were opposed to that, they practically swole up and died
    when it was passed. You would have thought it was the worst thing that
    ever happened. [Laughter]
        And I am so grateful to you for what you have done with the police
    program. We worked with you all the way, you and your law enforcement
    officials. I'm going to give a 21st century crime bill to Congress that
    will focus on, now, how we can make our communities even safer.
        It's fine to say that crime is at a 30-year low. If you're a victim,
    it's still too high. And no one really believes that the United States,
    compared to other countries, is a safe country yet. We still have more
    to do. And no one seriously believes that we can really get private
    investment into all those places that have been left behind until we get
    the crime rate down. So part of it involves the drug strategy. Part of
    it involves, I believe, more police resources deployed in the toughest
    areas. And the budget we have will help our communities to hire or
    redeploy somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 police.
        And we had the 100,000 number down quite good, we thought, and we
    were being conservative, and now we know we're going to get there ahead
    of schedule and under budget. The reason I give you this rather flexible
    number--and I said up to 50,000 in the State of the Union--

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    is, obviously, it depends upon where those toughest neighborhoods are,
    and what the cost per police will be in the neighborhoods where they're
    deployed. Obviously, you know from the other program, we'll do our best
    to create the largest number of police possible as quickly as possible
    to do this.
        We also want to enlist probation and parole officers, school
    officials, faith-based organizations in active attempts to prevent crime
    in the first place. We want to give your police more high-tech tools to
    fight crime, from digital mug shots to crime-mapping computers in squad
    cars. For years, we have seen--you can see in any movie, drug dealers
    using pagers, scam artists using the Internet, gangs with high-tech
    weapons. I think the police ought to have access to the same technology
    that their adversaries do.
        I also thank you for what you're doing to take guns out of the hands
    of criminals, and I ask you not to relent. There is still almost--and
    it's still bewildering to me--but there is almost a culture war still
    going on out their over all these issues. I ask for your support as we
    seek to restore the 5-day waiting period for buying a handgun, to extend
    the Brady bill to violent juveniles, to pass legislation to require
    child safety trigger locks. These are three things we can do to save
    lives. No one is trying to stop anybody from their legitimate right to
    hunt or have weapons, but we need to pass these bills. And I ask for
    your support.
        The third thing we need to do is keep working on these schools. Now,
    as all of you know, we not only have the most diverse student population
    in history, with one in five of our children with--I'll say it again--
    one in five of our children in school from immigrant families. We have
    53 million kids in school, the largest number ever. Secretary Riley
    loves to say that number and then to look at me and say, ``Well, you
    baby boomers are not the largest generation.'' [Laughter] And I think
    that's good because when all those kids get out of school, there will be
    more of them than us and they'll be able to support me in my old age
    better. [Laughter] I hope. [Laughter]
        Now, there are a lot of good things going on in our schools. I've
    been in the schools in some of the communities here present. Test scores
    are up across the Nation. But I'll just--I'll give you one--I don't want
    to bore you with statistics, because I could talk about education all
    day long, but I just want you to think about one thing. What does it say
    to you that on these international tests, comparing the performance of
    our children in math and science, our kids--a representative sample of
    our kids, by race, by income, by region--a representative sample rank at
    the top of the world on the 4th grade test, drop to the middle in the
    8th grade, and are near the bottom in the 12th grade?
        These children are not dumb. The system is failing them, not the
    other way around. And I think it's important for us to recognize that.
    Although you've got all of these dedicated teachers out there, you've
    got schools where everyone is succeeding, where they're all doing well
    on these exams, where they're all going to college.
        Dick Riley and I have been working for
    more than 20 years together on education now, and I always told him--I
    always considered--to me the most frustrating thing to me about working
    in education is that every single problem has been solved by somebody
    somewhere. And we have simply got to do a better job of replicating
    success.
        We need to finish the job of hiring 100,000 teachers to have class
    size smaller in the early grades, or we'll start losing the ground we've
    gained, with all these kids coming into school and all the teachers
    retiring. So we made a big downpayment on 100,000 teachers last year. We
    need to continue that. We ought to pass the bill that would enable you
    to build or modernize 5,000 schools. That's very important.
        Again, I say we should--we have to reauthorize the Elementary and
    Secondary Education Act this year. And I'm going to propose a dramatic
    change, and it will be very controversial, maybe right across the
    political spectrum, because I think that we now know what works. We know
    that there are great schools in every State in this country; we know--
    I've been in city after city, including this one, where I have been
    blown away by the performance of some schools, even as I get dismayed by
    the overall numbers. It is time the United States Government started
    investing in what is working and stopped investing in what is not.
        I am quite sure I'll hear the same thing I heard when we passed the
    crime bill, you know, ``You're trying to decide what they do at the
    local level.'' That is not true. The crime bill, as all of you know,
    was, in effect, written by your local police chiefs and prosecutors and
    mayors. They came to us, and they said, ``This

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    is what works.'' And Senator Biden and
    others put together a bill that reflected what you were telling us.
        There is nothing in this ``Educational Accountability Act'' that we
    have not been told at high decibel levels by local educational leaders
    over and over and over again. And I ask you, if you know--and every one
    of you know this is true--if you know that every problem in American
    education has been solved by somebody somewhere, and you know there are
    certain common elements to the solution, just as there have to be--and
    you when you run your cities--a tailor-made construction of it,
    depending on the facts--but if you know there are common elements, how
    in the world can you keep giving people a check whether those elements
    are there or not? If you know that we're not spending as much money as
    we should in education, how in the world can you justify not spending
    the money we are spending as well as possible? This is very serious.
        Now, you can help us to pass this. But I think it is absolutely
    imperative that we say: no social promotion; quick action to turn around
    failing schools; qualified teachers; report cards on schools; discipline
    codes; don't say that kids are failures, fix the system. That's why--
    Deedee mentioned this--we want to triple the funds that you get for the
    after-school programs, more investment for the summer school programs.
        We know these things work. We know they work. We know they work in
    the poorest neighborhoods. We know they work in circumstances where
    people say that you can never turn these schools around. We know they
    work. We have no conceivable excuse for continuing to invest in what
    doesn't work and for not investing in what does. I implore you to help
    me pass a different way of sending Federal funds to invest in our
    children's future that will work.
        I also ask you to help me pass the rest of the budget so we can hook
    up every classroom and library to the Internet. We're going to start
    getting the E-rate that we fought so hard for, so our classrooms, even
    in the poor neighborhoods, and libraries can afford to hook up to the
    Internet; to support the America Reads program--we now have 1,000
    colleges with young people out in our grade schools helping kids learn
    to read; to support our GEAR UP program--we've got mentors now going
    into middle schools not only to tutor and mentor our children but to get
    them to start thinking about going to college and to start telling them
    when they're in middle school, ``Look, here's what the law is. Here's
    what aid you can get. Here's what the scholarships are. Here's what the
    Pell grants are. You've got to start thinking about going to college.''
        I see Mayor Rendell back there; this
    whole thing was the brainchild of Congressman Chaka Fattah from Philadelphia. And he and I were together with
    Chaka and a bunch of young kids from the inner city not very long ago,
    just sitting around drinking a Coke with them. Every single one of these
    kids wanted to go to college, every one of them, and intended to go and
    believe they could go. And we need to do that everywhere in America.
        Fourth, I'd like to talk just briefly about the preservation
    challenge you all face. I talked about this at some length in the State
    of the Union, but we're losing 7,000 acres of green space and farmland
    every single day. So I have proposed this billion-dollar livability
    agenda to help you save open space, ease traffic congestion, grow in
    ways that enhance the quality of lives of your citizens, including the
    Better America bonds. Carol Browner was telling me yesterday you kind of
    like those Better America bonds; it's a tax cut to leverage $9\1/2\
    billion in private investment to clean up brownfields, to have clean
    air, and to do some other things that I think you know will be very
    important. So I hope you'll help us to pass it. I hope you'll support
    our billion-dollar lands legacy initiative, to preserve places of
    natural beauty all across this country, from the most remote wilderness
    to the nearest city park.
        Now, if we can continue in this direction, in expanding economic
    opportunity and improving education and fighting crime, in making our
    communities more livable, we can do better. Even though times are good,
    we can do better. We can do much better. And we can reach all those
    neighborhoods and all those people to whom these statistics don't mean a
    thing because they haven't felt them. And it's in everyone else's
    interest because that's how we'll keep the overall American economy
    growing.
        Let me just say, parenthetically, I hope you will all support my
    proposal to set aside the surplus till we fix Social Security and
    Medicare at the same time, not all of it but most of it--and to do
    something that we never think about in America, which is paying down
    some

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    of the debt. The reason I want to do that, especially now, is, you know
    about all this turmoil overseas; you know how a lot of countries are
    being punished for having big deficits; you know what will happen if we
    have to have--either they start having terrible inflation problems or
    have to have astronomical interest rates. They won't be able to buy as
    many of our products, and we'll have to develop more within our country.
        If we fix Social Security and Medicare and do it by actually saving
    money until we need it, so while we're saving it, we're paying down the
    debt, that will keep our interest rates low, and it will free up money
    that people in the private sector would otherwise spend buying
    Government debt, to invest in your cities and in your neighborhoods.
        So this is a very important part of this whole economic strategy. If
    the world economy resumes growing, we'll grow even faster. If the world
    economy--and about half the world is in a recession now--if the world
    economy stays in trouble, we have to find ways to keep growing, and one
    of the ways we can do it is to free up more private sector money for
    private sector investment to create jobs. So I hope you will support
    that as well. It will have a direct impact on your economic well-being,
    as well as, obviously, it is of concern because you want your seniors to
    do well and to be--this generation of seniors is fine, but you want them
    to do well in the future also.
        Let me just make one last point. I know the First Lady is coming over here to talk later today about
    the millennium. We established this White House Millennium Council as an
    inspiration for communities and individuals. We've done a lot of things
    here. We've helped to save the Star-Spangled Banner and Thomas Edison's
    home and other things around the country.
        We've had these White House Millennium Evenings; they've been
    utterly fascinating. The famous physicist Stephen Hawking came over from
    England and talked to us about the nature of time and black holes in the
    universe and all these things we'd find out in the 21st century that I
    could barely understand. It was fascinating. We had, early this week, we
    had two historians of religion come and talk about what the millennium
    meant to people from a philosophical and religious sense 1,000 years ago
    and what it might mean today. Wynton Marsalis came and conducted a
    seminar on the history of jazz and how it embodied this last century and
    what it might mean for the next century. These things have been
    fascinating. But the millennium will never have its full meaning to us
    unless it is played out in every single community.
        Now, I know most of you are planning to do something, but I would
    urge you to plan more than a celebration on New Year's Eve. You will all
    be invited by her to receive national
    designation as millennium communities by launching projects to save your
    history, honor your arts and humanities, prepare your children for the
    new century. I hope you will do that.
        Often, when a century turns, it marks a turning point in how people
    see themselves in the world. Maybe all we do is catch up to what's
    already going on, but it gives us a chance to sort of stop and think and
    try to see patterns in our existence. If you look at the turn of the
    last century, we now see that it was a time of enormous creation and
    identification by cities: the world's first Columbian Exposition in
    Chicago; the unification of the five boroughs of New York; the
    rebuilding of San Francisco after the earthquake. In the early years of
    the 20th century, America really became a melting pot.
        I heard a fascinating story with a friend of mine the other day.
    Both his sets of grandparents were Italian immigrants, and his
    grandfather died right after he came over here, leaving his grandmother
    homeless with five children, including his mother, the youngest of the
    children. And we were talking about this incredible dilemma his mother
    faced because there were homes for orphans but no places for five kids
    with a single mother, and how at the last moment, when they were
    destitute, she was rescued by this community church in Philadelphia. It
    was a very moving story.
        But we now have this in our consciousness, and we know that the 20th
    century basically was the urbanizing, the industrializing of America, a
    new wave of immigrants coming in, and how we had to meet those
    challenges. And this time gives us a time to think again. We can create
    the community of our dreams in this country at the turn of this century.
    And the magnitude of the moment is heightened by the fact that it is
    also the turn of a millennium.
        But we must not see our present prosperity from the perspective of
    self-satisfaction. We should say, thank goodness we happen to be in
    positions of responsibility, when we have an

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    opportunity the people who came before us never had.
        Do you know how many people were mayors of your cities or who held
    the office of President, in this century, who would have given
    anything--anything--to have had the chance to do what is right before
    our eyes? I think we ought to do it.
        Thank you very much.

    Note. The President spoke at 9:50 a.m. in the East Room at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Deedee Corradini of Salt
    Lake City, UT; Mayor Wellington E. Webb of Denver, CO; Mayor Brent Coles
    of Boise, ID; Mayor Edward G. Rendell of Philadelphia, PA; author and
    public management consultant David Osborne; and Mayor Anthony A.
    Williams of Washington, DC.