    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [November 5, 1999]
    [Pages 1984-1988]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community of Bradley County in Hermitage, Arkansas
    November 5, 1999

        Thank you very much. Well, good morning. Thank you all for coming. I
    want to thank all the folks who are here with me, but especially
    Secretary Glickman and Secretary Slater and our Small Business
    Administrator Aida Alvarez for the work they have done on some of the
    projects we're talking about today.
        I want to thank Congressman Dickey for being here and Congressman
    Kanjorski for coming all the way from Pennsylvania to make this tour
    with me. I want to thank Randy Clanton. Randy gave a good speech, didn't
    he? [Applause] You know, if tomatoes go in the tank again, Randy could
    go into politics. It's amazing; I think he's really got it. [Laughter]
        And I want to thank Jimmie Sue Wade and James Carter, because they
    went on the tour with me today with Randy and all the other co-op
    members. I want to thank all the folks from the Department of
    Agriculture and all the people from Arkansas who work in Washington who
    came home with me and all of the local officials. I look out, and I see
    friends of mine not only from Bradley County, including all the people
    who came down from Warren, but from Calhoun County and Ashley County and
    Desha County and Chicot County and Drew County and Columbia County.
    There's a lot of people here who have been my friends a long time. I
    thank you for coming.
        And Mr. Mayor, I know you've been in office 5 months, and I'm sorry
    it took me so long to get here. But I thought we ought to give you a
    little time to get organized. [Laughter] And I'm glad to be back in
    Hermitage. You know, I know there has been some publicity about how I
    first became associated with your community. But the first thing I want
    to tell you is we came here today not because of my long association
    with this community but because of the success of this co-op and because
    we want every rural community in America to know what you have done and
    to know that they can have a better future. That's the truth.
        Gene Sperling, my National Economic Adviser who has organized all
    these new markets tours to places we're trying to get more investment
    in, he came to see me, and he said we were going to Newark, New Jersey,
    and Hartford, Connecticut. And I said, ``Well, we've got to go someplace
    in rural America.'' ``Oh,'' he said, ``Mr. President, we've got a great
    place. We're going to take you home. We want you to go to someplace
    called Hermitage. Do you know where that is?'' [Laughter] And so then I
    regaled my whole White House staff with the story of how I first came to
    Hermitage over 22 years ago as attorney general. Some of you remember
    that. You were having a labor problem because the people who came here
    to work didn't have adequate housing, and nobody would pay any attention
    to you, and you couldn't get any help from anyplace. I just came down
    here one night and sat and listened for 3 or 4 hours and learned more
    about tomato farming than I had ever known in my life and than I've ever
    heard since.
        And then President Carter was elected, and we got some help, and we
    built the facilities. So a couple years later, I ran for Governor. And
    you've got to understand; I was 32 years old, and I was scared to death.
    But I knew people in Hermitage, so I came down here. And the rest of the
    State didn't know all that much about me. But the day I came down here,
    because of what I had done to help with the housing, the school was shut
    down, the school band played for me, we had a parade down the main
    street. Everybody showed up in the whole town, and I thought it was the
    darndest thing I'd ever seen. And so I'm driving out--it was amazing. I
    went crazy. I called back to Little Rock. I was just euphoric. I still--
    I'm still excited about it 22 years later.
        So then, I'm driving to some other campaign stop, and I'm doing an
    interview--a dumb thing to do, right? I'm doing an interview. And so the
    reporter asked me a pretty good question,

    [[Page 1985]]

    and I gave a fairly careless answer over something, and it wound up
    being somewhat controversial. So the only thing that was on the news
    that night, the only thing that was in the paper the next day was this
    rather careless answer I'd given to this question. And I kept going
    around--I was going up to total strangers saying, ``But you should have
    seen the crowd in Hermitage.'' There was no press out there. [Laughter]
    And finally, my staff got so sick of hearing me saying it--that's a true
    story, 1978--they gave me a T-shirt which said on it, ``You should have
    seen the crowd in Hermitage.'' Over 21 years later, I still have that T-
    shirt, and they made me wear it around, so I wouldn't have to keep
    talking about it.
        But I tell you what. I asked the mayor. There's 639 people who live
    in this community. There are more people than that today. So again I say
    to an unbelieving media: You should see the crowd in Hermitage today. It
    is amazing.
        Let me say one other thing. You know, I used to come to Warren to
    the Pink Tomato Festival every year, and I learned a valuable lesson.
    I'd rather come here and go through and watch you package these tomatoes
    than enter the tomato-eating contest. [Laughter] It was not a good year
    for me. That's the year I got beat for Governor and I lost the tomato-
    eating contest--[laughter]--and I was sick for 3 days. It took me a
    whole week before I wanted to eat tomatoes again. But I got over it, and
    I'm glad to be here.
        Let me tell you why we're here today, and let me just ask you to let
    me be serious for a minute, because this is very important. When we say,
    well, you did great with this co-op, when we say we thank Burger King
    and now Kroger and others for buying your tomatoes, when we say in 2
    years you went from 3,400 to 61,000 cases sold, that's something that
    makes you proud. But remember what Randy said about the quality of rural
    life and the importance of people being able to make a living on the
    land.
        You know, one of the things that bothers me is that in spite of all
    the prosperity we've had, there are still people and places that are
    untouched by it. I am very proud of the fact that I've had a chance to
    serve as President and to bring some commonsense ideas about how to
    build a 21st century economy on the old-fashioned values that Secretary
    Slater mentioned. And we've worked hard at it. And I'm grateful that
    I've had the chance to serve.
        When I look at all these little children here who are going to spend
    most of their life in a new century and a new millennium, when people in
    the smallest American communities can be in touch with people all over
    the world, thanks to the Internet, I am grateful for the fact that in
    the last 7 years, we have, as we learned today from the latest
    unemployment figures, we now have had, in the last 7 years, 19.8 million
    new jobs in America and a 4.1 percent unemployment rate. That's the
    lowest it's been in 30 years. We've got the lowest welfare rolls in 30
    years; the lowest poverty rates in 20 years; over 5 million men, women,
    and children lifted out of poverty by the dignity of work. We have the
    highest homeownership in history, the longest peacetime expansion in
    history, the first back-to-back surpluses in the Federal budget in 42
    years. I am proud we'll have the chance to do that.
        You know, when I went up there, a lot of people deridingly referred
    to me as ``the Governor of a small southern State'' and thought that
    nobody who came from the backwater of America had enough sense to do
    that job. But one thing that I didn't forget, coming from Arkansas, was
    basic arithmetic, and I figured out pretty quick that we couldn't keep
    spending more than we were taking in without continuing to have high
    interest rates, high unemployment, lower incomes, and deep trouble. And
    we turned the country around. And we did it and still continue to invest
    more in education, in rural America, in technology, in the environment.
    It was hard to do, but we did it. We also have the smallest Federal
    Government in 37 years, because we had to stop doing a lot of things to
    keep investing in what matters.
        So the first thing I want to say to you is thank you for giving me
    the chance to be Governor for 12 years, thank you for giving me the
    chance to steer through all the tough economic times we had in the
    eighties, thank you for staying with me as we have turned this country
    around, and it's moving in the right direction. But now, for the first
    time in my lifetime--literally, for the first time in my lifetime, we
    have a chance as a nation--and I would argue, we have the responsibility
    as a nation--to deal with the large, long-term challenges this country
    faces. In my lifetime, the only time the economy has been remotely this
    good was in the 1960's, but we had to deal with the civil rights crisis

    [[Page 1986]]

    at home and the Vietnam war abroad, and eventually we lost our economic
    prosperity. These things don't last forever. But now we have a chance to
    deal with those challenges.
        What are they? I'll just mention a few: The aging of America. We're
    going to have twice as many people over 65 in 30 years. I hope to be one
    of them. [Laughter] But there will only be two people working for every
    one person drawing Social Security. So I have asked the Congress to
    adopt my plan to lengthen the life of Social Security to 2050, so it
    takes into account all the baby boomers and doesn't bankrupt their
    children and grandchildren, and to lengthen the life of Medicare and add
    prescription drug coverage for all these seniors who can't afford to buy
    their medicine anymore. I think that's important.
        Challenge number two: to deal with the education of the children of
    America. Finally we have a number of schoolchildren in our schools
    larger than the baby boom generation and, by far, the most ethnically
    and racially and culturally diverse group of kids in our history. Look
    at all the Hispanic kids that are in Arkansas today, all the Hispanics
    in this crowd today. When I came down here last time as Governor, these
    folks weren't here. I'm glad they're here. They're adding to our State;
    they're strengthening our communities; they're making life more
    interesting. But it's more challenging. The school district across the
    river from where I live now, in Arlington, Virginia, has children from--
    listen to this--180 different national and ethnic groups, speaking--
    their parents speak over 100 different languages, in one school
    district. And I tell you, in a global economy, that's a good deal, not a
    bad deal. But we've got to give every child a world-class education,
    whether they live in a rural area or an urban area, whether they're poor
    or rich or middle class. And we've got a chance to do it now.
        The third thing I think we ought to do to keep our prosperity going
    is to keep paying down the debt. Do you know, in 15 years, this country
    could be out of debt for the first time since 1835, when Andrew Jackson
    was President? That's a good thing to do. We ought to do that. We ought
    to do that, because it means lower interest rates, more jobs, higher
    incomes, a more stable future.
        There are many other challenges. We've got the lowest crime rate in
    30 years; we can make America the safest big country in the world if we
    keep doing what works. We've got cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food.
    We've protected more land in this 7 years than any administration except
    those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. We've got some big
    environmental challenges, and we've got to prove we can do it and grow
    the economy, not shut the economy down. It's a big challenge, but we can
    do it.
        But let me tell you what I came here to talk about, because to me it
    is a huge challenge. It bothers me that we've got 4.1 percent
    unemployment and the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, and there are
    still whole communities that have been completely left behind by this
    recovery. You know it, and I know it. There are people in places whose
    lives have not been positively changed. They're in the Mississippi
    Delta; they're in Appalachia; they're in the inner cities; they're on
    the Indian reservations. Reverend Jackson and I went to Pine Ridge
    Indian Reservation in South Dakota. People are dying to go to work.
    They're good people, just like you are. You know what the unemployment
    rate is there? Seventy-three percent. There are people and places that
    are left behind. And there are small towns and rural areas, in places
    you wouldn't imagine. When I was in upstate New York recently and all
    these little towns there that look a lot like rural Arkansas or rural
    Pennsylvania, I discovered that if you just had the upper part of New
    York as a separate State, it would be 49th in job growth since I've
    become President. This is a problem everywhere; in every region of our
    country, there are small towns and rural areas where agriculture can't
    sustain the economy anymore under the old rules where the economy is in
    trouble.
        And that's what we're doing here, because you have done this co-op,
    because the government made a contribution, because the bankers made a
    contribution, because the business people buying the tomatoes made a
    contribution, and because now you can have a life here in this part of
    our State, and you can prove that people can make a living in rural
    America and do something good. And I believe that we need more of these
    kinds of co-ops throughout our country.
        You know, when Congress passed the farm bill back in '95, I had to
    sign it; otherwise, we'd have gone back to one that was 40 years old.
    And I said then I thought the row crop farmers were going to be in
    terrible trouble the first time crop prices dropped, because it

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    wasn't a good system, because there was no safety net. So now, we spent
    the last 2 years appropriating huge sums of money because we didn't
    build a safety net in in '95. And I think it was a mistake, and I hope
    we will.
        But we also need to look to the people that are growing our
    vegetables, growing our fruits. All over the country there's people like
    this who are having the same problems you've had who haven't organized
    themselves as you have. So let me say, I want to help you do more, but
    the main thing I want America to do today is, every little old rural
    community where people are about to give up and they think their kids
    are going to have to leave home to find work, I want them to see this on
    television tonight and say, if we get our act together, if we work
    together, if we have a partnership between the local community, the
    people who are producing food, the people who can buy it and the
    government and the bankers, we can make it. We can turn our community
    around. We can create a new market.
        Now, we're trying to do our part. And I know all you ever read about
    in the papers is when the Republicans and Democrats are fighting in
    Washington, but we don't really fight over everything. And one of the
    things that we're working on is to try to get a common approach to
    bringing economic opportunity to poor communities. And the Congress has
    already adopted a part of what I asked for in this so-called new markets
    initiative.
        Let me explain what I mean by that. Randy did a good job of talking
    about how you made a new market here. But we came to this new markets
    term because we were trying to answer two questions. One is the one I've
    been talking about. Don't we have a moral obligation to give the people
    who haven't participated in this recovery who are dying to work a chance
    to succeed? That's the first question.
        But let me tell you. There's another question which you may hold the
    answer to, which is a far more complicated one. If we've got the longest
    peacetime economic expansion in history, and we keep growing, in
    February we'll have the longest expansion in American history, including
    those that occurred in the world wars--the longest economic expansion in
    history. How do we keep it going? How do we continue to find new jobs
    and new opportunities with no inflation? The answer is new markets. So
    the same people that we ought to be helping morally, because they
    haven't participated in our recovery, we also ought to help because it's
    in the self-interest of everybody else in America, whether they're in
    the inner cities or the Mississippi Delta or South Arkansas or
    Appalachia or on an Indian reservation.
        So what we're trying to do here is to highlight what we can do with
    existing government programs, like the ones we've celebrated here. We
    also are asking Congress to pass a package of tax incentives and loan
    guarantees that quite simply will give investors who want to invest in
    south Bradley County or any other place that's got a high unemployment
    rate the same incentives to invest in developing markets in America that
    they get today to invest in developing markets in Latin America or Asia
    or Africa or anyplace else. We ought to take care of the American needs
    and give people those same incentives right here at home, and that's
    what we're trying to do.
        Now, meanwhile, there's more practical things we can do here. And I
    want to just mention a couple. Farmer's Bank is just finalizing a loan
    of almost $5 million, that will be guaranteed by Secretary Glickman's
    Department of Agriculture, for this co-op, which will enable the farmers
    to do even more to boost the value of their crop and do business year
    round. Now you can build that repackaging facility and farm supply store
    you've been talking about and spend more of Bradley County dollars here.
        Second thing I want you to know is you're already being copied, and
    I want--by your neighbors. We are building on the success of this co-op
    by strengthening others. RSI, which buys supplies for Burger King, has
    committed to purchase up to 200 acres of cucumbers in the Mississippi
    Delta. I don't know how many pickle slices that is, but it's 3.2 million
    pounds of cucumbers. That's a lot of pickles, and it's a lot of new
    business for the Mississippi Association of Co-operatives, a group of
    co-ops of farmers not far from here.
        I also want to compliment something that was done by the Small
    Business Administration, in working with the Heartland Community Bank in
    southeast Arkansas with Georgia Pacific and International Paper, to work
    with small minority-owned businesses who will help to hire 60 more
    people to work in the woods there, to help during the harvesting season
    and pruning season. These are the kind of cooperative efforts that I
    think offer the best promise to turn

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    around the situation in rural America, over and above what we've got to
    do to fix the farming bill.
        So again I say, I remember the first time I came to Hermitage. I'll
    remember the parade all my life. But I think in many ways I'll remember
    this best of all. In many ways, the people here got me started. In 1978,
    I think I got over 90 percent of the vote in Hermitage the first time I
    ran, and I'm grateful for that. It's been a long time since then, and
    it's been 92 years since the Rock Island Railroad built a depot here, on
    the old road between Tinsman and Crossett. But now, thanks to you,
    thanks to what you've done, you've made a new beginning for the 21st
    century.
        And what I want to come out of this, let me say again, for farmers
    everywhere, for people in rural America and small towns everywhere, when
    they look at your face, when they see your pride, when they hear your
    results, they need to know we can make a new beginning everywhere, and
    the rest of us need to be committed to making a new market everywhere in
    this country people haven't had their fair chance at the American dream.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:45 a.m. in the courtyard at the
    Hermitage Tomato Cooperative. In his remarks, he referred to Randy
    Clanton, director, Hermitage Tomato Cooperative Association; farmers
    Jimmie Sue Wade and James Carter; Mayor Mike Colvin of Hermitage; and
    civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.