[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

[[Page 1987]]

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

[[Page 1988]]

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.