    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [May 21, 2000]
    [Pages 993-1000]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Democratic Leadership Council in Hyde Park, New York
    May 21, 2000

        Thank you. Bill, thank you for
    welcoming me back to Hyde Park and the Roosevelt Library. I love coming
    here. I'm sorry I've only come three times. And Al,
    thank you for your wonderful introduction, and to you and Ginger, thank you for your years of friendship. He's very good
    at giving the credit to everybody else, but the truth is it would be
    hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen,
    has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the
    last 25 years than Al From.
        I am delighted to see so many Members of Congress here, Members of
    the Senate and the House; the Governor;
    present and former members of the administration. Mack McLarty was Chief of Staff when we did four big DLC
    things. We did the economic plan, the Brady bill, family leave law, and
    NAFTA. Somebody said, Mack, the other day--I saw a commentator; Hillary
    and I were watching the commentators--``You know, if it hadn't been for
    his first 2 years, Bill Clinton's approval ratings would be the highest
    ever recorded.'' And Hillary looked at me, and she said, ``If it hadn't
    been for the first 2 years when you made all the unpopular decisions,
    the next 6 years would not have happened.'' [Laughter]
        Mayor Brown, we're glad to see you here.
    And my Mayor, Mayor Williams, thank you.
    And thank all of you for being here and for what you're about to do.
        Franklin Roosevelt said he often came back to Hyde Park because it
    gave him, quote, ``a chance to think quietly about the country as a
    whole, and to see it in a long-range perspective.'' That's what you're
    being asked to do.
        I've often, in quiet moments at the White House, thought about my
    predecessors, the ones that succeeded, the ones who didn't, why they
    did. Roosevelt had what Justice Holmes called a first-class temperament,
    a lot of personal courage, a good mind, and a great attitude. He had a
    good time being President, even in difficult times. And he learned to
    have a good time in the midst of almost constant personal pain.
        It's worth remembering that life's successes are a curious blend of
    what you make happen and what happens to you, the gifts God gives

    [[Page 994]]

    you and what you do with them. But today I want to focus on the fact
    that he was always interested in ideas.
        I read the other day Frances Perkins' wonderful book about her
    lifetime friendship with Roosevelt. You know she was the first woman in
    the Cabinet; she served as Secretary of Labor the entire time President
    Roosevelt was in office. She kept trying to quit, and he wouldn't let
    her. And if you read this book, at the end you get some sense just in
    the curious, wonderful relationship between these two remarkable people
    that he had some sense of his own mortality. She kept trying to leave,
    and he kept trying to get her to hold on to the end. And then, of
    course, he died shortly after being reelected to his fourth term.
        But through this whole thing, you get this sense that from the time
    she was a young social worker and he was a young State Senator, when he
    still had full use of his physical facilities--and played a pretty good
    game of golf, I might add--that they had this magical chemistry born of
    the fact that even though they were different people from different
    worlds in the beginning, with very different positions on certain
    issues, they both understood that public service was something that you
    weren't supposed to covet for the power but something you wanted to do
    so you could help other people, and that ideas mattered.
        So you come here today to think about where we are and where we
    ought to go and what the long-range challenges are. And Al's already
    said a lot of what I want to say, but I want to say some of the things
    he said and tie it back to what we did in New Orleans in 1990, because I
    believe that thinking is a big and often underutilized part of success
    in public life. [Laughter] And I think ideas matter.
        Let me say that some time into my first term, maybe 1995 or
    something, a distinguished scholar whom I at that time had never met,
    and who at that time was at Syracuse--I believe he's at Harvard now--
    named Thomas North Patterson--no, Thomas Patterson--I can't remember
    what his middle name was. Anyway, he wrote this article, and he said,
    ``Contrary to the popular belief that most politicians are congenitally
    dishonest, most people do what they say they're going to do when they
    get elected.'' And if you look at the history of Presidents, most of
    them do what they say they're going to do. And when they don't, it's
    usually because something has really changed, and we're glad they
    didn't.
        We're glad Franklin Roosevelt didn't balance the budget, because if
    he had, under those circumstances, it would have been worse. Abraham
    Lincoln promised not to free the slaves. We're glad he broke that
    commitment. But, by and large, if you look at the whole history of
    American public life, when a President runs for office and says, ``Vote
    for me; this is what I want to do,'' they pretty well do that. Or they
    at least get caught trying to do it.
        And one of the things that really has meant the most to me, of all
    the things I've read--and I've read a lot a stuff I just as soon not
    have in the last 8 years--[laughter]--was Patterson said that by 1995
    our administration had already kept a higher percentage of its
    commitments to the American people than the previous five Presidents.
    And we had made more commitments.
        And the point I want to make today to emphasize the importance of
    what it is you're about to do is that the reason that was possible is, I
    had thought a lot about that--what I would do. And I had thought with
    many of you--with Bruce and Will and Rob and the whole DLC crowd and a
    lot of you that were going to these meetings back in the eighties and
    the nineties--so that when I announced for President, I did it not
    because I wanted to get out of what I was doing--I was actually happier
    than I had ever been with my work as Governor and with my situation at
    home in Arkansas--but because I thought something needed to be done, and
    I had thought a lot about it. And this New Orleans Declaration had a lot
    to do with it.
        So the first thing I want to say to you is, you cannot possibly
    overestimate the importance of what you're here to do if you do it in
    all seriousness.
        Let's just look at New Orleans. We met in New Orleans in 1990. As Al
    said, the times were different. The economy was bad; the deficit was
    high; the debt had exploded; all the social conditions were worsening.
    And Washington seemed to be stuck in a kind of ideological trench
    warfare, where the Republicans said that Government was the problem, and
    we said that it was the solution. And we always had to have a false
    choice: You had to choose the economy or the environment; you had to
    choose

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    impoverishment or entitlement; you had to choose business or labor.
        And most of us, many of the DLC people--this is one of the reasons
    the DLC succeeded, by the way, is that we had people who were in
    politics in Washington and out in the country, and a lot of our people
    in Washington spent a lot of time in the country. And we realized that
    no one else in the world thought about things or experienced things in
    the way the Washington media and political establishment talked about
    issues, and that we didn't agree with all these false choices.
        And so in New Orleans 10 years ago we set out to say and to outline
    what we believed ought to be done. Our approach came to be known as the
    Third Way. But basically, it was rooted in common sense, a common
    devotion to our party's oldest values, and a common vision of the new
    era in which we were living.
        In 1992 the American people gave us a chance to put our ideas into
    action. And we have done our best to do that, working across party lines
    where possible, and where bitter partisanship forced it, going alone.
        In New Orleans--let's just look at some of the things we said in New
    Orleans, as against some of the things that Al has already mentioned.
    This is what the New Orleans Declaration said: We believe the Democratic
    Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not Government;
    that economic growth is a prerequisite for expanding opportunity for
    everyone; and that the way to build America's economic security is to
    invest in the skills and ingenuity of our people and to expand trade,
    not restrict it.
        Now, these ideas were all turned into action in the '93 economic
    plan, in the '97 Balanced Budget Act, in the Telecommunications Act, in
    our commitment to science and technological research, in our education
    budget. We doubled investment for education and training even as we were
    reducing the deficit, and we emphasized results and proven strategies.
    We very nearly opened the doors of college to all Americans. We had 300
    trade agreements. Those ideas put into action have given us those
    21,615,000 jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the
    highest homeownership ever and the longest economic expansion in
    history. And the Government--Al is
    continuing to shrink it--is now the smallest it has been since 1958.
        We said we believe the purpose of social welfare is to bring the
    poor into the Nation's economic mainstream, not to maintain them in
    dependence. That idea, turned into action through the expansion of the
    earned-income tax credit, the Vice President's empowerment zone program and welfare reform, has given us
    the smallest welfare rolls in absolute numbers in 32 years, a 20-year
    low in the poverty rate, the lowest single-parent household poverty rate
    in 46 years, while we fought and succeeded in maintaining health and
    nutrition benefits for poor children and increasing our investment in
    child care and transportation for lower income workers.
        We said we believed in, quote, ``preventing crime and punishing
    criminals, not explaining away their behavior.'' That idea was turned
    into action through the crime bill, which gave us 100,000 police, an
    assault weapons ban, and through the passage of the Brady law, which has
    kept a half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from getting
    handguns. That's given us the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest
    homicide rate in 30 years, and a 35 percent reduction in gun crime since
    1993.
        We said we believe in the politics of inclusion, in the protection
    of civil rights, and the broad movement of minorities into the American
    economic and cultural mainstream. That idea, turned into action, has
    given us the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates
    ever recorded, record numbers of minority-owned businesses, vigorous
    enforcement of civil rights, and the widest participation of minorities
    in the Federal Government at high levels and in the Federal judiciary in
    American history.
        We said we believe in the imperative of work and the importance of
    family. I could give you lots of examples of that, but if you just take
    the family and medical leave law, the first bill I signed, vetoed by the
    previous administration, 21 million-plus Americans have taken some time
    off when a baby is born or a parent is sick. And they said it would
    wreck the economy. Well, 21 million families are stronger, and so is the
    American economy. The idea was right in the New Orleans Declaration.
        We said we believe American citizenship entails responsibility as
    well as rights, and we mean to ask citizens to give something back to
    their community. That idea, turned into action, has led to a whole
    series of remarkable partnerships.
        The Welfare to Work Partnership, for example, has led to 12,000
    companies to voluntarily

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    commit to hire now something like 400,000 people off the welfare rolls.
    The Vice President's partnership with the
    auto companies and the auto workers has led to this whole effort to
    develop the next generation vehicle, which already has prototypes that
    will be on the market within 2 years--60, 70, 80 miles a gallon. The
    partnership we had with the entertainment industry led to the passage of
    the V-chip requirement and rating systems for movies, television
    programs, and video games.
        And most of all, of course, it led to AmeriCorps, which now has
    permitted over 150,000 young Americans to serve in their communities. We
    had more people in AmeriCorps in 5 years than the Peace Corps did in its
    first 20 years of existence because of the idea that the DLC
    relentlessly advanced.
        We said we believed, quote, ``the U.S. must remain energetically
    engaged in the worldwide struggle for individual liberty, human rights,
    and prosperity, not retreat from the world.'' That idea, turned into
    action, has given us a stronger and expanded NATO, new initiatives
    against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, progress on peace in
    Northern Ireland and the Middle East, forceful stands against ethnic
    cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, and new initiatives to expand trade and
    advance democracy in Africa, the Caribbean Basin, Latin America, and the
    Asian-Pacific region.
        In short, because of the work done in New Orleans and the fact that
    the American people gave us a chance 2 years later to test it, we have
    proven that ideas matter and that for the decade of the nineties our
    ideas were the right ones. They have put the Democratic Party at the
    vital center of American life and inspired the rise of new progressive
    governments throughout Europe and the industrialized world. Indeed, I'm
    going to be meeting with many of these leaders next month in Berlin--
    people all over the world now who have seen what happened here, taken
    ideas seriously, and want to see what they can do to lift their people
    and make them a part of the new information age of globalization.
        And most important of all, these ideas, put into action, have
    brought our country into a moment of unparalleled prosperity and
    promise. Now, I think we have a rare opportunity to identify and move on
    the big, long-term challenges the country faces in the new century. And
    I think the DLC--to borrow a little of your own medicine--has both the
    opportunity and the responsibility to put forth a declaration here which
    will guide our party and should guide our Nation for the next 10 years.
        That's your task: What is the New Democratic agenda for the 21st
    century? Here's what I think it ought to say.
        First, we will keep the economy strong by paying down the debt,
    maintaining our lead in science and technology, and extending our
    economic benefits to people and places left behind, opening new markets
    and closing the investment and digital divide.
        Second, we will lift up all working families out of poverty, ending
    child poverty by increasing the EITC, the minimum wage, our support for
    child care, housing, and transportation, and for responsible fatherhood.
        Third, we will make sure every child starts school ready to learn,
    graduates ready to succeed, has the chance to go to college by investing
    more in education and demanding more of all the participants in our
    education process, and by opening college access to everyone by making
    tuition deductible.
        Fourth, we will enable Americans to succeed at work and at home,
    with more support for child care, expanding opportunity for health care
    coverage, passing a Patients' Bill of Rights, and providing middle class
    families tax relief to educate their kids, take care of them through
    child care, take care of their parents if they need long-term care.
        Fifth, we will make America the safest big Nation on Earth, with
    more police, more prevention, more prosecutors, and more effective
    measures to keep guns away from children and criminals.
        Sixth, we will meet the challenge of the aging of America by
    extending the life of Social Security, strengthening and modernizing
    Medicare with a prescription drug benefit, and providing a tax cut for
    long-term care, and helping working families to establish their own
    retirement accounts so that more Americans have a chance to create
    wealth.
        Next, we will reverse the course of climate change while enhancing
    rather than eroding economic growth with new technologies and new
    sources of alternative energy.
        Let me just say, when I went back and read the New Orleans
    Declaration, the one thing I wish we'd made more of is the environment,
    because we have now proved you can grow the

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    economy and improve the environment. And this is a much more important
    issue now than it was 10 years ago because of the global impacts of
    climate change. We must address this.
        Every Member of Congress here will tell you that a huge portion of
    decisionmakers in our country and throughout the world--and most
    troubling, in some of the biggest developing nations--still believe you
    cannot have economic growth unless you pour more greenhouse gases into
    the atmosphere. Just like these big ideas helped us back in 1990, there
    is nothing so dangerous as for a people to be in the grip of a big idea
    that is no longer true. It was once true that you had to put more
    greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to grow the economy, to build a
    middle class, to make a country rich. It is not true anymore.
        And there are all kinds of manifestations of this: the assault that
    the other party is making on my decision to set aside the roadless acres
    in the national forests--the Audubon Society says it's the most
    important conservation measure in the last 50 years. It's just a--
    [applause].
        I say that not--the applause is nice, but that's not the point I'm
    trying to make here. The point I'm trying to make is that good people
    will continue to make bad decisions if they're in the grip of a wrong
    idea. This is not simply a case of interest groups fighting each other.
    This is really a question of whether we have honestly come to terms with
    what the facts are, what the evidence shows about the way economies can
    and, indeed, should work.
        And there's no way in the world we'll be able to convince our
    friends in India or China, which over the next 30 years will become
    bigger emitters of greenhouse gases than we are, that they can take a
    different path to development and that we're not trying to keep them
    poor, unless we can demonstrate that we have let this idea go and that
    we have evidence that a different way will work.
        You can't expect any of these Members of Congress who come from
    rural districts that have a lot of poor people or that rely on
    agriculture to take different approaches unless there is a specific,
    clear, meaningful alternative that they can embrace.
        So I'm sort of off the script here, but this is a big deal. We need
    more of our people--every one of our people--we need to know what the
    facts are here. We need to know what can we really get out of automobile
    and truck mileage; how realistic is it to have alternative sources of
    fuel; what can you get if you build all new houses and office buildings
    with glass that lets in more heat and light--lets in more light and
    keeps out more heat and cold. We need to know these things.
        This is something that most of you normally wouldn't think of as
    something that an elected official needs to know. We need to know this.
    This is a huge, huge issue. And we will not be able to convince either
    our own people or, even more importantly, developing countries who are
    our partners around the world, unless we have the evidence in hand and
    we understand the argument.
        Next, we will keep working to build one America at home, to make a
    strength of our diversity so that other nations can be inspired to
    overcome their own ethnic and religious tensions. For me, that means
    passing the ``Employment Non-Discrimination Act,'' the hate crimes bill,
    and expanding national service. I meet with these AmeriCorps kids
    everywhere I go, and the thing they say over and over and over again is
    that ``this gave me a chance to see how different people live, to see
    how much we have in common as human beings, and understand just what it
    means to be an American citizen at the dawn of a new century.''
        And last, we will continue to lead the world away from terror,
    weapons of mass destruction, and destructive ethnic, racial, and
    religious conflicts, toward greater cooperation and shared peace and
    prosperity.
        That's what this vote about China is all about. Yes, it's a good
    economic deal. China has agreed to open its markets. I just stopped,
    when I got out of the airplane here, before I drove up here, there were
    a few hundred people at the airport. So I went over and shook hands and
    said hello to all the children. And this guy says, ``You really think
    this China thing is a good deal?'' I said, ``Yes, it is; I do.''
    [Laughter] And he said, ``Why?'' And I said, ``Well, in the first place,
    we've been calling it a trade agreement, and it isn't.'' I said, ``You
    know, when I made the agreement with Mexico and Canada, it was a trade
    agreement. So I got a few things, and I had to give up a few things.'' I
    said, ``This is a membership agreement. All we give them is membership,
    and they do all the market opening. And that's their dues for membership
    in this world organization.''

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        That's why, in narrow self-interested terms, it's a 100-to-nothing
    deal not only for the United States but for anybody else who lets the
    Chinese--votes to let the Chinese into the WTO. But even though, for me,
    the economic choice is clear, I have to tell you, far, far more
    important to me are the moral and national security arguments. I looked
    at all those kids in that crowd today I was shaking hands with, and I
    was reminded again that we fought three wars in Asia in the last half of
    the 20th century and that we have a chance to build a different future--
    not a guarantee but a chance.
        Yes, China is still a one-party state, restricting rights of free
    speech and religious expression, doing things from time to time that
    frustrate us and even anger us. But by forcing China to slash subsidies
    and tariffs that protect inefficient industries, which the Communist
    Party has long used to exercise day-to-day control, by letting our high-
    tech companies in to bring the Internet and the information revolution
    to China, we will be unleashing forces that no totalitarian operation
    rooted in the last century's industrial society can control.
        Two years ago there were 2 million Internet users in China; last
    year there were 9 million; this year there are something over 20
    million. At some point there will be over 100 million, and at some
    point, some threshold that no one can identify with precision will be
    crossed, and it will be a very different world.
        And I think it is worth also pointing out that the more China
    operates within rule-based systems, with us and with other countries,
    the more likely they are to see the benefit of the rule of law and the
    more likely that benefit is to flow down to ordinary people in those
    900,000 villages where they're already electing their mayors and in
    other places. So this is very important.
        I think it is quite interesting that the people who hope we will
    beat this next week in China are the ultraconservatives in the military
    and the state-owned industries--and quite interesting that people who
    have been persecuted in China and other places, by and large, want us to
    adopt this, want us to vote yes on PNTR.
        Martin Lee, the head of the democracy
    movement in Hong Kong, came all the way over here to ask the Congress to
    vote for this. This is a man who cannot, himself, go to China; a man who
    has never met Zhu Rongji; a man who is still
    considered persona non grata. But he said to me, he said, ``You know,
    we've got to back the reformers in China. We've got to get them into a
    system where there is rule of law. We have got to move this way. This is
    the next big step. All the human rights activists in America are, I
    think,'' he said, ``blinded by their opposition to things that have
    happened in the past, that may be happening now, instead of thinking
    about what is most likely to change China in the future.''
        The new President of Taiwan supports us
    letting China into the WTO and America extending PNTR. And yesterday the
    Dalai Lama, a man who has undergone literally decades of frustration in
    his dealings with China, strongly endorsed PNTR with China.
        So this is a big deal to me, beyond the obvious economic benefits
    which make it easier for some Members and others to vote for because of
    the economic makeup of their districts. You have to understand that by
    far the bigger issue is, what can we do to promote human rights; what
    can we do to promote the rule of law; what can we do to minimize the
    chances that there will be another war in Asia in our lifetime or in our
    children's lifetime? To me, that is what is at issue.
        So that's my pitch here. What you're about to do is really
    important. I've told you the kinds of things that I hope you'll do. But
    those of you out here listening to me will have a bigger role than me in
    the next 10 years of America if you just remember what I did with that
    New Orleans Declaration today and every specific thing that I could cite
    to you that grew right out of that. It really matters whether you think
    and whether you put your feelings into organized fashion and whether
    that then organizes the process for developing specific policies.
        The New Orleans Declaration is largely responsible for the success
    we have enjoyed in the last 8 years, because it gave us a platform on
    which to stand and a framework from which to work.
        You've got a lot of really creative people here. I could cite a
    thousand examples, but I want to just mention two or three to give you
    an illustration of how we got started, partly on what we did. You
    remember Franklin Roosevelt; one of the greatest successes of his New
    Deal was that he essentially took social welfare progress that had been
    made in various States and went national with it, especially in New
    York, which

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    is one way Frances Perkins got to be Secretary of Labor.
        But Marc Pacheco back there from
    Massachusetts, the State senator, sponsored a program to give medical
    students and other health professionals academic credit for providing
    primary and preventive health services to underserved people. Should we
    do more in our public health clinics like that? Mayor Webb negotiated a contract with the teachers unions
    in his city to give an incentive to teachers to improve academic
    performance. Michael Thurmond, his
    Georgia labor commission has taken absent fathers who weren't supporting
    their children and given them training and jobs and values of
    responsible fatherhood. And now 84 percent of those fathers are working
    and supporting their children. That's a huge deal. Shouldn't we go
    national with that? These are the kinds of things that I hope you will
    think about.
        There's just one other thing I want to say. I didn't do this by
    myself. If it hadn't been for the Members of Congress here who have
    helped me, I couldn't have done it. If it hadn't been for the members of
    the administration, past and present, I couldn't have done it. If it
    hadn't been for the DLC, with its constant idea machine and Al
    From constantly harping on me not to abandon the
    reformist path--[laughter]--I couldn't have done it. If it hadn't been
    for Al Gore, I couldn't have done it.
        And I just want to--I have said this in other places, but I have--I
    believe I have a good grasp on the institution of the Vice Presidency,
    and I can tell you it is my judgment that he has had far more positive
    impact in practical ways on the way the American people live as Vice
    President than any other person as Vice President in the history of the
    Nation, by a good long ways.
        He managed the empowerment zones
    program. He managed our administration's position on the
    Telecommunications Act, which had two important features. One, it was
    pro-competition; we didn't give in to the monopoly forces, and there are
    now hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been created, mostly in
    companies that didn't even exist in 1996, because we stood firm for
    competition. And we got the E-rate, which is now providing $2.2 billion
    a year so that poor schools and libraries and hospitals can hook up to
    the Internet.
        Second, he managed our positions, many
    of them, on the environment, including the partnership for new
    generation vehicles, which I mentioned, and the climate change.
        Third, he ran the RIGO program, which
    many of you were involved in, which in addition to reducing the size of
    Government, has dramatically improved the performance of many agencies,
    expanding health care for children and parents of working families, and
    the mental health parity issue, and the fatherhood initiative.
        He cast the deciding vote on the
    economic plan and on the gun safety legislation in the Senate. And on
    every tough decision I had to make, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo to
    loaning money to Mexico--now, there was a winner; the day I made that
    decision, there was a poll that said, by 81-15, the people didn't want
    me to do it--to taking on the gun issue and tobacco issue, to lobbying
    for NASA at the beginning and now all the calls he's made on China PNTR
    at the end, he's been there.
        So I wanted to say that because we did this together. And that's the
    last thought I'll leave you with. Roosevelt loved ideas, had good ideas,
    but he had a first-class temperament, and he had a good time, and he
    enjoyed working with people. So you guys have got to keep working
    together. We've got to get behind all of our crowd; we've got to work to
    win elections. But afterward, remember, this document is a big deal.
        Some day somebody will write a whole book on how this New Orleans
    Declaration was the foundation of the success of the last 8 years.
    That's what what you do at Hyde Park ought to be. And if you do it, you
    will change America forever for the better. And what happens in 2000
    fundamentally is just as important as what happened in '92 and '96,
    because what a country does with its prosperity is just as stern a test
    of its character and vision and wisdom as what it does when its back is
    against the wall.
        I've done everything I could to turn the ship of state around. Now
    you've got to make sure that it keeps sailing in the right direction.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt
    Presidential Library. In his remarks, he referred to former Ambassador
    William J. vanden Heuvel, president, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt
    Institute; Al From, president, Democratic Leadership Council, and his
    wife, Ginger; Gov. George E. Pataki of New York;

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    Mayor Lee P. Brown of Houston, TX; Mayor Anthony A. Williams of
    Washington, DC; Hong Kong Democratic Party Chair Martin Lee; Prime
    Minister Zhu Rongji of China; President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan; Mayor
    Wellington E. Webb of Denver, CO; and Georgia Department of Labor
    Commissioner Michael L. Thurmond.