[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 23, 2000]
[Pages 2283-2289]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Reception for Representative Maurice D. Hinchey in Kingston, New York
October 23, 2000

    Thank you very much. First of all, thank you for the wonderful 
welcome. I am delighted to be here. You may know that on the way over 
here today, I stopped at your local elementary school and shook hands 
with the principal, the teachers, and as many of the eager students as I 
could reach. [Laughter] And they made a lot of wonderful signs, and I 
signed them, and I'm very grateful for that. I had a great time.
    I also went across the street and shook hands with the kids at the 
pizza place. [Laughter] But because I was a little late, I didn't have 
one. [Laughter] I want to thank Mayor Gallo and 
Assemblyman Cahill and the other local 
officials who are here--John Parete, the Ulster 
County Democratic chairman. And most of all, I want to say I'm honored 
to be here for Maurice Hinchey.
    We came in together, but I want to make absolutely sure he's still 
there when I go. [Laughter] We have fought our fights together. He has 
taken the risks that I have taken to try to turn the economy around and 
pull the country together and move us forward.
    I'm especially grateful for his leadership for the Patients' Bill of 
Rights, to put medical decisions back into the hands of medical 
professionals and their patients; for a Medicare drug program that would 
provide all of our seniors access to affordable prescription drugs; for 
our education initiatives and, especially, our school construction 
initiative, which would give States like New York that have either 
overcrowded or falling down schools the funds they need to help repair 
or build or modernize schools without putting all of the burden on the 
local property tax payers; and for his help for the environment, because 
one of the things I was determined to do when I became President is to 
prove we could grow the economy and improve the environment at the same 
time.
    You know, when things go well, the President tends to get credit, 
and when they don't, well, that's the way it goes. [Laughter] Harry 
Truman said, ``The buck stops here.'' But sometimes I think the credit 
should be more broadly shared, first and foremost with the American 
people. But you need to know that on more than one occasion, the 
critical initiative, beginning with our economic plan in 1993, has 
passed by one vote in Congress. So, if it hadn't been for Maurice and 
people like him, so much of the good things that we have been able to do 
for America over the last 8 years would not have been possible, and you 
need to keep him right where he is.
    I would also like to say a few words about this Senate race, in 
which I have a passing interest. [Laughter] And I would like to say a 
few words about Vice President Gore and 
Senator Lieberman.
    But I want to begin by just making two introductory comments. First 
of all, my heart is filled with gratitude for the people of the United 
States and especially to the people of New York, who have been so 
wonderful to me through two elections, giving me the State's 33 
electoral votes, along with Al Gore. Last time, about 59 percent of the 
vote in 52 of the 62 counties supported our efforts, and you will never 
know how grateful I am.
    Secondly, as Maurice said, for all the celebrations we've had in the 
last few days, our 8-year long effort to stand against ethnic cleansing 
and genocide and abuse in the Balkans, beginning with our efforts to 
stop the war in Bosnia, to roll back the expulsion of the people in 
Kosovo, the embargo on Serbia. Now we have

[[Page 2284]]

a genuinely elected President there, 
committed to the rule of law.
    We have the President of South Korea winning 
the Nobel Peace Prize, which he richly deserved, a lifetime of struggle 
for democracy, first in his own country, narrowly escaping death, partly 
thanks to President Jimmy Carter over 20 years ago, and now opening the 
way to North Korea. And the United States supported that policy and, I 
think, had a significant impact on its success. And now Secretary 
Albright is there, and we have some 
hope of resolving our outstanding differences with North Korea and 
looking forward to the day when they will truly close the last chapter 
in the aftermath of the Korean war.
    That's all been very moving, but it is punctuated and overshadowed 
now by the terrible violence in the Middle East, which also occurred at 
the same time that we lost 17 fine young men and women in the United 
States Navy in the terrorist attack on our ship in Aden, Yemen. I don't 
want to say too much about that today except I'm working on it, and my 
experience has been, in these matters, that the less you say publicly, 
the more likely you are to get done.
    The point I want to make is, when I see, around the world, how 
people continue to struggle with their differences--with their 
religious, their racial, their ethnic differences--how people continue 
to misunderstand each other; how after working together for 7 years for 
the cause of peace, with occasional difficulties but never anything like 
this, the thing could get off the tracks like this, it makes me so 
grateful that our country has been so blessed to be the most diverse it 
has ever been and yet to be more united and making more progress and 
moving forward.
    And the main thing I want to say to you today is, I've never thought 
much about the ability of one elected official to influence another 
one's race, so I don't know that I can convince anybody to vote for 
Maurice or Hillary or the Vice 
President. But what I would like to say is, 
I'd like to just share with you from my heart what I think the issues 
are and what I hope you will say to your friends and neighbors, because 
there's no doubt that citizens influence one another's opinions.
    And if you think about--Hillary said this last night, and I had 
never quite thought of it this way, but she said, ``You know, it was 
very hard for us to go down to that memorial service for the sailors and 
their families at the U.S.S. Cole.'' People often ask me what the most 
difficult days of my Presidency are, and bar none, they have been the 
days when I had to go greet the families of people who were killed 
because of their service for the United States in the Embassies in 
Africa, in Ron Brown's plane, Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. It is very 
difficult.
    But what my wife said last night that I would like to echo is, you 
know, the rest of us are not asked to put our lives on the line, and 
most of the people were so young. I think the oldest one was 31, but 
many of them were just 19. Many of them were younger than my daughter. 
And the least we can do is to be grateful for the progress of this 
country, to be proud of it, to show up and vote, and to take the next 2 
weeks to discuss with our friends and neighbors and co-workers and 
family members what we think this is about. And so that's the spirit in 
which I would like to speak to you today.
    Things are going well for this country, and we have--this is the 
first time in my lifetime where we've had at the same time so much 
economic prosperity and social progress, with the absence of domestic 
crisis and foreign threat. And so we have before us the chance to build 
the future of our dreams for our children.
    And this election ought to be a feast for America. People shouldn't 
feel bad about the fact that nothing bad is happening. They should feel 
good about it. [Laughter] But they should understand that sometimes it's 
harder to make a good decision when times are good than when they're 
bad.
    There's not a person in this room over 30 years old that hasn't made 
at least one mistake in their life, not because your life was going so 
badly but because things were going so well, you thought there was no 
penalty for the failure to concentrate. Isn't that right? Isn't that 
right? It's true. [Laughter] And all of the younger people are looking 
at those who are laughing and--[laughter]--time will take care of it. 
You will soon know about that. [Laughter]
    So what I have urged my friends to do in the Democratic House and 
the Senate and in advancing the Vice President's cause and Hillary's 
cause is just to strive for clarity. I really think, you know, the 
American people nearly always make the right decision if they have

[[Page 2285]]

enough information and enough time. If they didn't, we wouldn't still be 
around here after 224 years.
    So, from my point of view, this is what I would like you to know. 
First, I would like to say about my wife, that for 30 years, as long as I've known her--and I 
met her almost 30 years ago--her obsession has been the welfare of 
children and families. She took an extra year when we were in law school 
to study at the Yale Hospital and Child Study Center, so when she got 
out of law school, she would understand precisely how the law affected 
young children and their parents. And it has been the driving obsession 
of her whole life.
    She has spent most of the last 30 
years working on education, health care, and other children's and 
families' issues, and also working on the relationship between education 
and economic development and, specifically, how to get jobs into places 
that aren't growing as fast as the economy as a whole is growing.
    And she went on corporate boards 
when we lived in Arkansas. She did a lot of work trying to figure out 
how to get investment into areas where it was needed, which is a big 
issue for upstate New York this year. And that's a subject that she's 
worked on for 20 years, so when she talks about it, it's not something 
that just sort of occurred to her when she started coming up here to see 
you.
    The second thing I would like to say is that, for the last 8 years 
in the White House, she has perhaps 
been the most active First Lady in history, certainly had the broadest 
range of interests since Eleanor Roosevelt. She has worked on--the first 
thing she worked on was trying to help pass the first bill I signed, the 
family and medical leave law, which over 20 million Americans have now 
used to take some time off from work when a baby is born or a parent is 
sick, without losing their job. It is a great piece of legislation.
    And she was very active in our 
health care efforts, even though we knew it was controversial, and in 
the end we got a lot done. Medicare was supposed to go broke last year 
when I took office. It now has 26 more years of life, something that you 
should remember when people ask you what we did.
    We passed the bill that says you can keep your health insurance if 
you change jobs or if someone in your family gets sick. That's 
important. And we passed the Children's Health Insurance Program, the 
biggest expansion of child health since Medicaid was enacted in 1965, 
which has now given us a decline in the number of uninsured people for 
the first time in 12 years.
    She worked to find out more about 
the illnesses of veterans in the Gulf war and whether we should be doing 
more to help them, totally an issue that she just got interested in 
because nobody else was working on it. She didn't want those folks 
ignored.
    She thought up the idea of celebrating 
the coming of the millennium by having a project that imagined the 
future and honored our past, and her Millennium Treasures Project is now 
the largest historic preservation project in the history of the United 
States--$100 million in private and public money together. And a lot of 
the places preserved have been in New York, places like George 
Washington's revolutionary headquarters, Harriet Tubman's home, parts of 
the Underground Railroad--things that will go to places, many of them 
not doing so well economically, that will make them much more attractive 
for tourists, build community pride, and change their future.
    So I'm very proud of what she has done 
as First Lady. And I'm especially proud that she's been to more 
countries than any other person in that position, ever. She says I 
shouldn't say that, because there's a lot more countries now than there 
used to be. [Laughter] After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's sort of 
not a fair comparison. But she's spoken out for women's rights, for the 
rights of children, trying to get more kids in school. She's pointed out 
that national security involves more than just military aid, that we 
have to have education and health care and environment partnerships 
around the world.
    We have to work together to roll back the tides of AIDS and TB and 
malaria, which together kill one-fourth of all the people who die every 
year on this Earth. And she's had a special role in the tough spots. She 
was very, very active in bringing women together and working with them 
in the Northern Ireland peace process. She spent a lot of time in Israel 
pursuing our twin goals of the security of Israel and the long-term 
necessity of resolving the matter through peaceful negotiations. And 
she's been to see our soldiers in Kosovo and Bosnia several times. I'm 
very proud of what she has done.
    And what I'd like to say to you is that, of all the people I've 
known in public life, I've

[[Page 2286]]

never known anybody over 30 years--and in spite of the fact that we all 
say harsh things about each other at election time, the truth is that 
most people in public life I've known are honest, work hard, and do what 
they think is right. Otherwise, we wouldn't be around here after over 
200 years. But I've never met anybody that had a better combination of 
brainpower with a great heart and compassion who would just 
consistently, day-in and day-out, work for what she believed in, never get tired. She spent 30 years working 
for other people. As far as I know, this is the first time in 30 years 
she ever asked anybody to do anything for her, and she had a hard time 
doing it. I said, ``You've got to ask people to vote for you. You've got 
to ask people to contribute to you.'' She said, ``I'm used to asking 
them to do that for you. It's hard to ask them to do that for me.''
    I think it's very important, if you're going to elect a Senator to 
succeed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one 
of the most accomplished people to serve in the United States Senate in 
the 20th century, to succeed Robert Kennedy--he held that seat--you need 
a good partner for Senator Schumer. And 
New York has got a lot of big things on the agenda, and there are a lot 
of things that have to be done for America.
    I have never known anybody with the combination of brains, 
compassion, heart, and the ability to get things done that she does. She will be a great Senator if you make 
sure she wins.
    I want to say something about the Vice President. He has been a big part of all the success that we've 
enjoyed in the last 8 years and the decisions we made that were good. 
One of the things that President Kennedy said in more eloquent words--I 
wish I could remember exactly what he said--but he said, the Presidency 
basically is a place of decision; it's important that you work hard. And 
I think I've met that standard. But he has worked as hard as I have. But 
in the end, hard work is not enough. You also have to make good 
decisions, and that requires a certain level of experience, a certain 
level of judgment, a certain instinct.
    And he was right when he supported our 
economic program. Maurice talks about it. He had to cast the tiebreaking 
vote in the Senate, or it would have been defeated. And that's what 
turned this whole budget around, got interest rates down, got investment 
up, and got the economy going. He supported the efforts we made to 
reform the welfare system. We now have cut the welfare rolls in half, 
and families and children are better off, not worse off, as predicted.
    He led our reinventing Government 
program. You know, sometimes our friends in the other party talk about 
how they're against big Government. But the facts are that under Al 
Gore's leadership, we reduced the size of the civil Government to its 
lowest size since 1960, when President Kennedy was running for office 
and Dwight Eisenhower was still President.
    Under Al Gore's leadership, we have 
reduced 16,000 pages of Federal regulations which were on the book in 
the previous administration. We have reduced regulations in the 
Department of Education alone, regulations on States and school 
districts, by two-thirds. You don't have to keep that a secret if you 
don't want to. [Laughter] You can tell people that. I think it's an 
important part of the record.
    He has--I don't know if you saw the 
announcement last week. General Motors announced that they had developed 
a car that will get 80 miles a gallon, which is the target they set in 
the beginning of our administration when we organized something under Al 
Gore's leadership called the Partnership for the Next Generation 
Vehicle.
    You're all worried about the price of home heating oil this winter. 
We're all worried about what happens if there is instability in the 
Middle East with the price of oil. But I'm telling you, the answer is, 
more conservation, alternative sources of energy, free up the oil that 
is there for the things we need, like home heating oil. Now, if we get 
80 miles to the gallon--and when GM made the announcement, they said 
that their participation in this Partnership for the Next Generation 
Vehicles project made it possible.
    Al Gore also led our efforts to adopt a 
telecommunications law, a big bipartisan law that we passed 4 or 5 years 
ago that's created hundreds of thousands of jobs, thousands of new 
businesses, and something called the E-rate, which we fought hard for, 
and he led the fight, which enables every school and hospital to afford 
to hook up to the Internet.
    Now, when we started this project in 1994, trying to get all our 
schools hooked up, we had only--listen to this--we had about 15 percent 
of the schools and only 4 percent of the classrooms in the entire 
country were connected to

[[Page 2287]]

the Internet. Today, 95 percent of the schools and 65 percent of the 
total classrooms are connected. And part of the reason is the E-rate; 
people can afford to hook onto the Internet to give kids in the poorest 
schools in this country access to tomorrow's information and tomorrow's 
economy.
    Now, these are big things that he did. 
He also led our efforts on arms control, in many, many important other 
areas. So you cannot cite any person, I believe, in the history of the 
country who, in the position of Vice President, had the impact that he 
had. And I think that's very significant for this election.
    Now, let me just say this. It seems to me there are four things I'd 
like you to consider. Maurice said, ``Tell your weather story.'' I told 
the Congress, our crowd in the Congress, last week that those who were 
on our side needed to think of themselves as America's weather corps in 
the next 2 weeks, because if things were clear to the American people, 
we would win, and if things were cloudy, we might be in trouble. So we 
wanted clear. We need for people to understand clearly what the issues 
are.
    And again I say that in a positive, happy sense. I think this could 
be the most positive election we've had in a month of Sundays. You don't 
have to be mad at anybody. You can posit the fact that your opponents 
are honorable, good people and that they will do what they believe is 
right, and we'll do what we believe is right. So what we need to do is 
make sure the voters know exactly what the differences are and then let 
the voters make up their minds.
    I trust the American people. And I trust the people of New York to 
do the right thing. But I think there are--let me just make these four 
arguments for Al Gore and Joe 
Lieberman and Hillary and Maurice.
    Number one, we've got to keep this prosperity going. You know, just 
looking around upstate New York, there are places and communities that 
still haven't fully participated in this economic recovery. Now, we've 
got a special program we're trying to pass to give extra incentives to 
get people to invest there. But to get there you've got to keep the 
overall prosperity going; you've got to keep unemployment down and labor 
markets tight. If you want investments to flow to inner-city 
neighborhoods, rural towns, Indian reservations, you name it--anybody 
that's been left behind--the economy has got to be strong to get people 
to invest there. This is a huge deal--plus which, it benefits all the 
rest of you if the economy keeps going.
    Now, I believe it is critical to do that, to adopt a policy that our 
side, all of our candidates, have espoused, which is, ``We'll give you a 
tax cut, but it's considerably smaller than the other guy's, even though most middle-class people are better off 
under ours, because we think we've got to save some money for education 
and health care, and we have to get America out of debt. We've got to 
keep paying down the debt until America is debt-free. We can do it in 12 
years and put us out of debt for the first time since 1835, when Andrew 
Jackson was President.''
    Now, why should that be important to you? Why should that be 
important to the young people in the uniforms back there who have been 
serving your meal, besides the fact that it sounds good? Because we live 
in a global economy; a trillion dollars moves around the world every 
day, crossing national borders. And that means if we keep interest rates 
lower by paying down the debt, it means for all of you lower home 
mortgage payments, lower college payments, college loan payments, lower 
car payments, lower credit card payments. It means lower business 
loans--costs, which means more businesses, more jobs, higher incomes, 
and a better stock market.
    So if you keep interest rates down, everybody benefits--all the 
working people, all the business people, all the people on Wall Street, 
everybody else. And that is very, very important. And we have a program 
that will permit the country, under the Vice President's leadership, to do that.
    By contrast, the size of their tax cuts plus the cost of their 
Social Security privatization program plus their spending promises means 
they can't do that. They can't get America out of debt. The numbers 
won't add up. So this is a significant difference. You just have to 
decide whether it's important to you or not.
    But let me just give you an example. If you keep interest rates one 
percent lower a year than they would otherwise be, the American people 
save $390 billion on home mortgages alone, $30 billion dollars on car 
payments, $15 billion on college loans. That's a $400 billion tax cut 
right there, in lower interest rates. But people have to understand. 
That's a big decision you need to make, and you can make it either way. 
We haven't been out of debt since 1835.

[[Page 2288]]

You can say we'll just go on and have higher interest rates; take the 
money now and leave. But people need to understand what the decision is, 
and then we'll trust the American people to make the right decision. I 
think I know what they will decide if they clearly understand it.
    The second decision I think is very important is whether we're going 
to build on the progress that we've made in other areas over the last 8 
years or reverse that. Now, let's just look at some of those areas, if I 
could. In welfare, I've already said, welfare rolls are half what they 
were. The crime rate has dropped every year. It's now at a 26-year low; 
murder rate at a 33-year low; gun violence down 35 percent. In health 
care, we finally got the number of uninsured people going down because 
we're insuring more children.
    In the environment, compared to 8 years ago, the air is cleaner; the 
water is cleaner; the drinking water is safer; the food is safer. We've 
cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps, and we've set aside more 
land in perpetuity for all time than any administration since Theodore 
Roosevelt a hundred years ago.
    Now, I don't--and in education, let me just say something about 
that, that I think is very important for the American people to know. 
The dropout rate is down. Test scores in math, science, and reading are 
going up. The college-going rate is at an all-time high. There's been 
over a 50 percent increase in the number of our kids taking advanced 
placement courses and, among Hispanic kids, a 300 percent increase, 
among African-American kids, a 500 percent increase. And perhaps most 
important to me, more important than anything else, we have evidence in 
every State in the country that schools that were once thought to be 
failing inevitably are turning around.
    I was in a school in Harlem the other day where, 2 years ago, a 
grade school--listen to this--2 years ago, 80 percent of the kids were 
doing reading and math below grade level. Today, just 2 years later--new 
principal, school uniform policy, high standards, accountability--74 
percent of the kids' reading and math at or above grade level in 2 
years--2 years.
    So are we going to keep building on this or not? So in this 
election, we believe that our program put 100,000 police on the street, 
and now to add 50,000 more in high crime areas, had a lot to do with 
bringing the crime rate down. So does every policeman in America. They 
believe that's not a Federal responsibility, and they want to get rid of 
it. You have to decide, but it will make a difference.
    In education, we believe that education is a constitutional 
responsibility of the States and an operational responsibility of the 
local districts but a national priority. And we think there's a limit to 
how much money local property tax payers can come up with. So we've been 
paying for 100,000 teachers to make sure we have certified, well-trained 
teachers in the early grades to lower average class size to the point 
where the teachers can teach, and kids aren't sent to the fourth grade 
without the requisite reading and math and other skills they need.
    We think this is important. We're about a third of the way through 
that program. Al Gore will continue it and 
build on it. So will Hillary. So will 
Maurice. They believe that is not a national decision, that we shouldn't 
have made that, and they ought to just block-grant the money, give it to 
the States, and see what happens. You can decide what you think, but 
people should know.
    In the environment, we believe we've proved you can clean up the 
environment and grow the economy. They believe the air pollution laws 
are too tough and I went too far in protecting 43 million roadless acres 
in the national forests, even though the Audubon Society said it was the 
most significant conservation move in 40 years in the United States. 
They don't agree with that.
    You get the drift here. It's not like there are no decisions. And I 
can make their argument. But you have to decide, and your friends and 
neighbors have to decide. So A, do you want to keep the prosperity 
going; B, do you want to build on the social progress of the last 8 
years, or do you want to reverse course; C, who's the best qualified to 
meet the new challenges?
    This is going to be a very new era. We have to close the digital 
divide. You know, we could create a new, gaping chasm in America and 
throughout the world if people everywhere don't have access to 
computers, know how to use them, can afford to log on to the Internet, 
and can get this information and know what it means.
    We have to make the most of this new biotech revolution, which is 
one of the reasons I want to get medicine covered by seniors, because 
within the matter of a few years, you

[[Page 2289]]

are going to see cures for Parkinson's, for Alzheimer's, for two or 
three different kinds of cancers. It's going to be amazing.
    With the human genome coming out, new mothers will soon begin to 
come home with genetic maps of their babies, and it will rather quickly 
take average life expectancy from where it is now, at about 77, up to 90 
years. There are young women in this room that will have babies that 
will be born with a life expectancy of 90 years. You mark my words.
    Now, what does that mean? It means, among other things, we've got to 
figure out how to make sure these benefits are broadly shared, and it 
means that once all your medical and financial information is on 
somebody's computer, we've got to figure out how to protect your privacy 
rights, even as we make the most of this information. That's a big deal.
    And I'd like to have somebody that really understands that. I mean, 
the other day, 425 high-tech executives including Vint Cerf, who really 
is one of the fathers of the Internet and sent the first E-mail ever 
sent, 18 years ago, to his then profoundly deaf wife, who now can hear 
for the first time since she was 3 because of a computer chip implanted 
in her ear.
    They came out for Al Gore. Why? Because 
they know he understands the future, that he has thought about these 
things, that he cares about them. He understands the energy future and 
what kind of changes we're going to have to make, and that's very 
important.
    So how are you going to keep the prosperity going? Are you going to 
build on the progress or reverse course? Who understands the future 
best? And last, and maybe most important, how are we going to continue 
to build one America? The main reason I'm a Democrat is that we believe 
everybody counts; everybody ought to have a chance; everybody has a role 
to play; and we all do better when we help each other. That's what we 
believe.
    Now, what does that mean? I believe--that's why we are for the 
minimum wage. That's why we're for stronger enforcement of equal pay 
laws to make sure women who do equal work get equal pay. That's why 
we're for hate crimes legislation. That's why we're for the 
deductibility of college tax tuition, because we think the people who 
serve this meal ought to have the same chance to send their kids to 
college as those of us who could afford to pay for it. That's what we 
believe.
    So sometime between now and the next 2 weeks, I hope every day you 
will have some chance to talk about this election. And if somebody says, 
``Well, why are you for Hillary for 
Senator? Why are you for Al Gore and Joe 
Lieberman? What's Maurice Hinchey so 
great anyway about?'' you need to say, ``Look, there's four big things 
you've got to decide in this election. Number one, do you want to keep 
this prosperity going or not? If you do, you better pay down the debt 
and keep interest rates down, have a tax cut we can afford, and save 
some money to invest in education and our future.
    ``Number two, do you want to build on the progress of the last 8 
years or not? If you do, we better stay with the crime program, the 
education program, the health care program, the environmental program 
that have worked, that are moving this country in the right direction, 
not change course.
    ``Number three, we need people in office that think about the future 
and understand it.
    ``And number four and most important, we need people who really 
believe that we have to be one America across all the lines that divide 
us.''
    If people think about these issues in that way, we're going to have 
a great celebration November 7th.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 1:42 p.m. at the Hillside Manor Restaurant. 
In his remarks, he referred to Mayor T.R. Gallo of Kingston; New York 
State Assemblyman Kevin Cahill; President Vojislav Kostunica of the 
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro); President Kim 
Dae-jung of South Korea; and Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president of 
Internet architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom, and his wife, 
Sigrid.