    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [January 28, 2000]
    [Pages 146-149]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Community in Quincy, Illinois
    January 28, 2000

        Thank you very much. I think I should begin by thanking you all for
    waiting in this cold weather all morning. Your welcome to me has been so
    warm, I don't care what it's doing outside; inside, it still feels like
    Florida to me here. I thank you very much.
        I want to begin by thanking your mayor, who flew in here with me today; and your fine Congressman,
    Lane Evans; our two United States Senators,
    Senator Durbin and Senator
    Fitzgerald; Congressman
    Shimkus; Congressman Hulshof. Thank you all for being here. Let's give them a big hand
    here today. [Applause] Didn't Kayt do a good
    job? [Applause] All I can tell you is that when I was her age, I could
    not have given a speech anywhere near that good; so she's well on her
    way.
        I want to thank all the people that gave us our music: the Quincy
    High School Band, the Quincy Park Band, the Quincy Notre Dame Marching
    Band. Thank you all very much. I want to thank all the people who are
    here today who represent State and local government and the people of
    this community, the police officers, business leaders, day care
    providers, AmeriCorps members, and other public servants, the students,
    the teachers, all represented up on this stage today. And of course,
    ``Mr. Quincy'' there, thank you very much,
    sir, for being here.
        Ladies and gentlemen, last night when I gave the State of the Union
    Address, I was fulfilling a requirement of the United States
    Constitution that requires the President to report every year on the
    state of the Union. Then I wanted to come out today to the heartland of
    America to say what that was all about. Maybe we ought to change the
    Constitution, Senators and Congressmen, to require the President to come
    to Quincy the day after the State of the Union Address every year.
        You know, I never will forget the night I actually did talk to the
    mayor and Senator Paul Simon, who was not pretending to be me, and you were going
    through that horrible flood. And I monitored your progress, and this
    community became a symbol of hope and what people can do when they pull
    together. I loved hearing the mayor today again recount the rich
    heritage of your city, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, the Underground
    Railroad, the sanctuary offered so long ago to those fleeing religious
    persecution.
        I loved driving here from the airport today and remembering the bus
    tour that Vice President Gore and Hillary and Tipper and I took in 1992
    through so much of this part of America, and I saw so many of the same
    pictures all along the way: young children out with their signs; people
    saying, ``My birthday's August the

    [[Page 147]]

    19th, too''; some people like my dog; some people like my cat; some
    people like them and don't like the President very much. The whole day
    was wonderful. It was a wonderful thing.
        And I think that what you show here today and every day is that when
    we join hands and join hearts, we can climb any mountain and turn back
    any tide. That is what our Nation has proved these last 7 years. And as
    I look out here on all of you, I see fresh evidence of what I said last
    night, folks: The state of our Union today is the strongest it has ever
    been, thanks to you.
        If you saw the speech last night, you know that I quoted President
    Theodore Roosevelt, one of my favorite predecessors. He's the last
    sitting President to come to Quincy. I don't know what the others were
    thinking about. [Laughter] But Roosevelt had a great quote at the dawn
    of the last century, which was a time that has a lot of parallels to our
    present-day experience. He reminded us that ``a growing nation with a
    future must always take the long look ahead.'' And what that means is,
    you know, when you folks were worried about the flood taking your town
    away, everybody concentrated and went to work. And then when you had all
    the problems and you needed the ferry and the mayor said the river was 6
    miles wide, everybody concentrated and went to work. Sometimes people
    get in trouble not when times are tough but when times seem to be so
    good people think they don't have to do anything, they don't have to
    worry, they don't have to work together.
        And what I want to tell you is, never in my lifetime have we had the
    combination of economic prosperity and social progress with so little
    internal crisis or external threat. And I know from my experience that
    we should be using this time wisely to deal with the long-term
    challenges and seize the long-term opportunities that the children of
    Kayt's generation will have to deal with in the
    new century, and that's what I want the American people to support.
        I want you to support us in saying we made a mistake to quadruple
    the debt of the country. Now we're paying off the debt. Let's stay at
    the job until America is debt-free for the first time since 1835. The
    number of people over 65 is going to double in 30 years. I hope to be
    one of them. The baby boomers must not--we must not--impose the burden
    of our enormous numbers in retirement on our children. That means we
    need to take the interest savings from paying down the debt, put it in
    the Social Security Trust Fund, take it out to 2050. Then the baby
    boomers' retirement will not impose a burden on our children and our
    children's ability to raise our grandchildren.
        We need to make sure every child in this country starts school ready
    to learn and graduates ready to succeed and has access to a college
    education. Now, I just want to mention one of your schools, because I
    hear people all the time saying, ``Aw, the President acts like we can
    turn schools around; that's not true.'' Well, it is true. I believe all
    children can learn. I believe all schools can work.
        Washington Elementary School, here in Quincy, a few years ago was in
    trouble. Today, it's one of the best performing schools in your school
    district because you've got a good principal, community involvement;
    you've got money from our program to reduce class size with more
    teachers, to expand after-school programs. And now you've got a
    successful situation. I'm telling you, I only wish Washington, DC,
    worked as well as Washington Elementary School. And I want to thank the
    principal, Terry Mickle, for being with us
    today. Let's give her a hand. [Applause]
        So, what I've asked the Congress to do is to invest more in Head
    Start, invest more in these after-school and summer school programs,
    invest more in helping more schools turn themselves around, and to give
    the American people, for the first time, a tax deduction for the cost of
    college tuition, to open the doors of college.
        The other thing that I hope we can do is to give more families the
    tools to succeed at home and work, to lengthen the life of Medicare for
    25 years, to give people on Medicare the right to a voluntary
    prescription drug program. Too many of our senior citizens need this
    medicine and cannot afford it; it's the difference in what kind of life
    they can have. And I hope you will support our efforts to achieve that.
        There's just one other issue I want to mention today, because it
    affects a lot of people in this neighborhood. A few years ago, before I
    ran for President, I had the honor of coming to southern Illinois, to
    Senator Simon's hometown of Makanda, because I
    was head of something called the Lower Mississippi River Delta
    Development Commission. And I found that the counties in southern
    Illinois had unemployment rates as high as they did in the Mississippi
    Delta and the South, where I came from.

    [[Page 148]]

        One of the things that really bothers me about this astonishing
    economic recovery of ours is that not everybody has participated in it.
    And I think all Americans will support us in saying that this is the
    best time we'll ever have--with unemployment low and growth high--to go
    into these inner cities, into these small rural towns, into these Native
    American reservations and help turn their economies around and give
    people who are doing well incentives to invest there, to start
    businesses there, to put people to work there. If we don't do this now,
    we will never get around to it. We can bring free enterprise and hope to
    people who have never had it.

        We also have to recognize, as I said last night--and I want to
    emphasize here, in this part of America--that the farmers of this
    country by and large have not participated in this economic recovery,
    because they've had floods, they've had droughts, and after the
    economies in Asia collapsed, farm prices went in the cellar. And for the
    last 2 years, we have seen in Washington, at the end of every
    congressional session, everybody scurrying around trying to come up with
    enough money to give to the farmers to keep thousands upon thousands
    upon thousands from going out of business.

        The freedom to farm bill, in bad times--the so-called freedom to
    farm bill could become a freedom to fail bill if we don't make some
    changes in it. And so I say here, in a town where most people are not
    farmers but where we're in a part of America where most people come from
    farming stock, I want you to support us in trying to change the farm law
    in Washington so that farmers in America who work hard and are the most
    efficient in the world can make a decent living out here. And I hope
    you'll help us.

        We have to provide income assistance when farm prices and farm
    incomes fall. We have to stay, and keep, with the same loan rates for
    the USDA commodities at the 1999 levels, so we won't drive them down
    even lower. We've got to make it easier for farmers to help build up our
    environment. You know, if they conserve land, we ought to help them do
    that. And when prices are low, that's a good, cheap way to guarantee
    they can make a decent living and we don't drive them even lower with
    overproduction.

        We ought to give them a better crop insurance program, which
    increases the subsidy we give to help people buy crop insurance. You
    know, a lot of times when you see at the end of the year, and Congress
    has to give a lot of money to farmers, it's because they can't buy
    insurance the same way businesspeople up and down this street can buy
    insurance against theft, or the building burning down. And we need to
    help farmers with that.

        So I want to ask you to support our efforts to help the farmers. If
    we're going to be one community here, we have to reach across--racial
    lines, yes, and religious lines, yes, but also to people who don't do
    what we do for a living, don't live like we do every day--they live in
    rural areas; we live in towns; they live in big cities. We've got to
    understand that we're a strong country when we all work together and we
    give everybody a chance to rise.

        I remember when you were going through this flood here. I would go
    to big cities on the east coast or the west coast, and I would say,
    ``They need your help. It's going to cost a lot of money. It's going to
    be partly your money; they're part of your country.'' And people in
    cities that couldn't find Quincy on a map would cheer, because they knew
    they were part of your American family. If we can keep that attitude in
    good times, America is going to do fine.

        But I ask you--it's getting cold, and I want to let you go, but you
    just remember--if you don't remember anything else I said today, you
    remember how you were in the flood. And remember that when you have the
    chance of a lifetime to do good, you cannot be lulled into complacency.

        You have a chance--we all do--to give our children a debt-free
    America, with world-class education, that takes care of our seniors,
    that brings opportunity to people who haven't had it, that seizes the
    challenges of a new era. And we ought to take that opportunity. We owe
    it to children who will follow us 50 years from now. And I will do all I
    can to honor the spirit, the values that I have seen in this wonderful
    park today.

        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:55 p.m. in Washington Park. In his
    remarks, he referred to Mayor

    [[Page 149]]

    Charles W. Scholz of Quincy; Quincy Junior High School freshman class
    president Kayt Norris, who introduced the President; community activist
    and philanthropist Joe Bonansinga, known as ``Mr. Quincy''; and former
    Senator Paul Simon.