[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 10 (Monday, March 11, 1996)]
[Pages 416-423]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the National Association of Counties

March 5, 1996

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Doug Bovin. Thank you, Michael 
Hightower. I have enjoyed working with Doug. I know I will enjoy working 
with Michael, and I enjoy working with all of you.
    I want to talk to you today about our partnership. And we were 
joking outside--I know that in some States, the States may be too big 
for the person running for Governor to basically operate from county 
courthouse to county courthouse, but I never found that an obstacle at 
home. And I feel right at home here, and I thank you for your warm 
welcome.
    Before I begin my remarks to you I feel obliged to say, because this 
is my first public appearance of the day, that I'm sure that all of you 
as Americans share my outrage at the campaign of terror which is being 
directed at the people of Israel. These are desperate and fanatic acts 
aimed not just at killing innocent people, including innocent children, 
but at killing the growing prospects for peace in the Middle East. They 
must not succeed.
    Today I'm announcing a series of steps to support the fight against 
future terrorist attacks, to bring killers to justice, and to rally 
support for peace in the Middle East. These steps include immediate 
emergency transfer to Israel of highly sophisticated detection 
equipment; the dispatch of American specialists to work with their 
Israeli counterparts on strengthening antiterrorism measures; the 
development of a comprehensive package of training, technical 
assistance, and equipment to improve antiterrorism cooperation among 
Israel, the Palestinians, and other governments in the region; and 
contact with foreign governments to ask for their help in the fight for 
peace and against terrorism. The United States has always stood with the 
people of Israel through good times and bad, and we stand with them 
today.
    Let me say that in so many ways your work is the polar opposite of 
the extremism which threatens to tear apart the fabric of so many 
societies in the world today. When you walk out of your office the great 
challenges of our time confront you with human faces. You have no choice 
but to reach out to your fellow citizens and to try to work together to 
meet those challenges. As the great former mayor of New York City, 
Fiorello La Guardia, once said, there is, after all, no Republican or 
Democratic way to clean the streets. You have shown what can be 
accomplished if people put aside their differences and work together. 
And I hope while you're here you'll remind every elected official in 
Washington that we, too, can do our job here if we do it together.
    I came into this community and into my job with a very 
straightforward vision. I wanted to make sure that our country would go 
into the 21st century with the American dream alive and well for every 
single American willing to work for it. I wanted our country to remain 
the strongest force for peace and freedom, for security and prosperity 
in the post-cold-war world. And above all, I wanted to see this country 
come together around our basic values and our mutual respect for one 
another.
    Our strategy started with a commitment to grow the economy to create 
economic opportunity. In the last 3 years, we have worked on getting the 
deficit down, interest rates down, investment in our people up, 
opportunities for Americans to sell their goods and services all across 
the world up; our commitment to technology, to research, to breaking the 
barriers to economic opportunity for all Americans up.
    In the last 3 years we've made some notable progress. Americans have 
created almost 8 million new jobs. We have the lowest combined rates of 
unemployment and inflation in 27 years. Homeownership is at a 15-year 
high. For the first time in many years, average earnings are going up, 
and for the first time in many years our exports are growing faster than 
our imports. Our auto industry leads the world again, and for 2 years in 
a row, after many years on the back benches, an international economic 
forum has said that America is the world's most productive economy.
    For 3 years in a row, our people have set successive records for 
starting new businesses. We're also beginning to come together around 
our basic values. The crime rate, the welfare and food stamp rolls, the

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poverty rate, the teen pregnancy rate are all coming down in America, 
thanks in no small measure to the labors that many of you carry on in 
communities dealing with these challenges every day.
    But if you take a full accounting of America's picture, you have to 
take the challenges along with the successes. We know still, in spite of 
the fact that our economy has produced 8 million new jobs, almost--and I 
might say, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of that 
achievement, the G-7 economies, the world's big seven economies, in the 
last 3 years have created, net, a total of 7.7 million new jobs. And 
America has created 7.7 million new jobs. The other six have created 
some--some have created some, some have lost. Their net is zero.
    It is not easy for wealthy countries to create new jobs. The United 
States has been doing that, and we can be proud of the people who are 
doing it, almost exclusively in the private sector with the environment 
that has been created and the work that they do. Still we know that an 
awful lot of our people are working as hard or harder than they ever 
have without a raise. For about half of Americans their real incomes in 
terms of what it will buy have not gone up in more than a decade. Too 
many of our people have gone nearly two decades. And a lot of parents 
are beginning to wonder whether they'll be able to give their children a 
better standard of living than they enjoyed.
    We know that our economy is becoming highly competitive, but that 
too many of our people are being downsized in their most productive 
years, and years when their families are most relying on them, when 
their children are being raised or when they're about to go off to 
college. And a lot to these folks have no real idea about how they're 
going to move in a reasonable time to another job doing as well as they 
were before. And we know that even though unemployment is below 6 
percent and below the 25-year average unemployment rate of America, 
there are still too many urban neighborhoods and rural communities where 
there aren't enough jobs for young people to believe that they have a 
bright future.
    If you look at the social front, who would have believed 3 years ago 
that we could bring the crime rate down, but that random violence among 
juveniles, children under 18, would be going up? Who would believe that 
the drug usage among people between the age of 18 and 34 would be going 
down, but that casual drug use among children under 18, including--and 
illegal--tobacco smoking, even though it's illegal in every State in the 
country, would be going up?
    How did this happen? The truth is, no one knows all the answers, but 
it is clear that a big part of it is that you and I are serving in 
public life at a time of very profound change; I would argue the most 
profound period of change in the last 100 years. You have to go back 
about 100 years to the time when Americans moved from living primarily 
in rural areas to living primarily in cities and towns, in the time when 
Americans moved from working primarily on the farm to working primarily 
in the factory or in businesses supporting factories.
    That's what is happening today. We are moving from a national 
economy to a global economy. The nature of work is changing. Even 
manufacturing, which is still very strong--indeed, growing stronger in 
America--is becoming characterized more by information technology than 
by hard work in terms of muscle power.
    Work now in almost every endeavor requires more mind and less 
muscle. More and more workplaces are less hierarchical, less 
bureaucratic, indeed, on average, less big. The average manufacturing 
facility contains 300 or fewer employees. So the work is changing, the 
workplace is changing, the markets are changing, and information is 
changing.
    Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, in his book ``The Road From 
Here'' says that the digital chip is the biggest change in information 
technology in 500 years, since Gutenberg first printed the Bible in 
Europe. But this is the dimension of the change through which we are all 
living.
    Now, on the whole, this change has been good for America. There are 
more possibilities open to young people to live out the future of their 
dreams than at any time in our Nation's history. But as with any time of 
change this profound, there is also a great uprooting, a great 
unsettling, where estab- 

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lished patterns of life and living and working together are disrupted. 
And when that happens, it is imperative that those of us who are charged 
with the public purpose, with bringing people together, with giving 
everybody a chance, work hard to see that we make these changes, that we 
go through this period of change in a way that gives every American the 
chance to be a full citizen living up to his or her full abilities. How 
we will master this moment of change is, therefore, the great question 
not only before the President and the Congress, not only before the 
business leaders of this country, but before every community leader in 
the United States of America.
    In my State of the Union Address I outlined the seven great 
challenges that I think we have to meet as a people if we're going to 
fulfill those objectives that I brought to this office, if we're going 
to guarantee the American dream for all Americans, if we're going to 
maintain our world leadership for peace and freedom, if we're going to 
come back together around our basic values.
    We have to build stronger families and better childhoods for all of 
our children. We have to open educational opportunities so that every 
child and every adult has access to world-class lifelong learning. We 
have to provide economic security for families who are willing to work 
for it. We must take back our streets, all our streets, from crime and 
gangs and drugs. We must provide a healthy and clean environment for 
today and tomorrow. We must maintain our leadership in the fight for 
freedom and democracy, because if we don't do that no one else will. And 
we must reinvent our Government so that it works better and once again 
inspires real trust in the American people. None of these things can be 
done unless we do them together, unless we understand that the old 
categories by which we thought and the old categories by which we 
classified one another have to have enough flexibility in them to allow 
us to reach out across the lines that divide us to meet these common 
challenges.
    One of the things that we must do here in Washington is to 
understand that while we have an obligation to have a clear vision, to 
set clear national goals, to challenge people from every walk of life to 
meet these goals, we cannot solve America's problems for America. We 
have to instead focus on giving individuals and families and 
neighborhoods and communities the tools they need to make the most of 
their own lives and to meet our common challenges. In other words, we 
need to focus as much as possible on the ``what'' America needs to do, 
and do as much as we can to let you and people like you all over America 
determine the ``how''--how it will be done.
    For more than 15 years now there has been a raging debate in our 
country about what the role of the Federal Government should be, and 
whether the Government was the problem instead of part of the solution. 
Well, we all know that the era of big Government is over. We're moving 
to a time when large bureaucracies are not only not necessary, they're 
not the most effective way of meeting our common challenges. But I 
submit to you that that does not mean that we can, under the guise of 
saying the Government is the problem, return to a time when all of our 
people were left to fend for themselves. That will not meet the 
challenges of today and tomorrow.
    What works in the global economy is teamwork. What works in the 
global economy is getting diverse people together and finding out who 
has got what skills and figuring out how people can work together for 
their mutual benefit. Individuals can be fulfilled in this kind of world 
only when they are prepared to work with each other to help every one of 
them fulfill their God-given capacities. I believe that more strongly 
than anything else. If you ask me, what is the one most important lesson 
you have learned as President, I would say it is that we must go forward 
together. We cannot go back to the time when people were left to fend 
for themselves under the luxury of believing that anything we do 
together is wrong.
    We do not need a big bureaucracy for every problem, but we don't 
want a weak Government. When I traveled to Washington and Oregon and 
Idaho, to Pennsylvania the other day to see the effects of the terrible 
flooding, no one wanted the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be 
weak; they wanted it to be quick.

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    When I see that for 15 years now, 15 years, the Fortune 500 
companies have been reducing employment--this is not a recent 
development, but small businesses in America have been creating more 
jobs every year than big business is laying off. Indeed, in the last 3 
years, businesses owned by women alone have created more jobs than the 
Fortune 500 have laid off. We do not need a weak Small Business 
Administration. It can be smaller, but it should be strong.
    So what I'd like to do today is to talk about what your role is and 
what our role is and what we have to do together. The idea that 
Washington can actually solve all problems rather than empowering people 
and communities to solve their problem is moving rapidly away.
    Just in the last 3 years, the size of your Federal Government has 
been reduced by 205,000 people. It is now the smallest it's been since 
1965. By the end of this year, the Federal Government will be the 
smallest it's been since 1962. We are getting rid of 16,000 pages of 
Federal regulations. And as I'm sure Carol Browner told you before I 
came, we are trying to find more innovative ways to work in partnership 
not only with local government, but also with the private sector.
    We have approved a record number of welfare reform waivers, 53 
different projects for 37 States. We do need welfare reform legislation, 
but you should know that 10 million people, or almost three-quarters of 
all the people on welfare in the United States of America, are covered 
by welfare reform projects already approved by this administration in 
just the last 3 years.
    I want to pass the right kind of welfare reform bill because I'd 
like to get out of the waiver business altogether. I don't want States 
or counties to have to come to Washington every time they want to try 
some new, innovative approach to moving people from welfare to work. We 
know essentially we're stuck with a system which was designed for a 
population different from the population now on welfare. We know that 
what welfare people want and need is the same thing that all of us are 
living with, which is they need to work, but they need to be successful 
parents. And one of the great challenges for America is how every family 
can be successful in the home and at work.
    Therefore, welfare reform should be tough on work and supportive of 
children, not weak on work to save money in the short run and tough on 
kids, but within those parameters and with the objective of moving 
everybody who can be moved into the workplace who can become 
independent, who can become self-supporting, who can communicate respect 
to their own children and help to raise their own children better. That 
is the kind of welfare reform we ought to have.
    We passed the unfunded mandates law, which I know you all support. 
For years and years and years it was easy for Congress to cut taxes, cut 
spending, and just solve all the public problems by passing a mandate 
along to you. I remember when I was a Governor once I asked a Member of 
Congress in an election season--I said, which one would you rather be, a 
Member of Congress who cut taxes and cut spending, or a Governor who got 
a mandate and had to raise taxes and spending to meet an order from the 
Federal Government so that the responsibility was always different from 
who was actually carrying the burden of public persuasion. That's what 
the unfunded mandate law was all about and we did the right thing to 
pass it.
    We've also given you new flexibility to build roads, to turn public 
housing projects into safe, affordable, mixed-income communities. The 
empowerment zone and enterprise community initiative has given Federal 
support to community-based reform. And I was in Michigan yesterday with 
the county executive there, Ed McNamara, and the mayor of Detroit, 
Dennis Archer, at one of our most successful endeavors. I want a second 
round of empowerment zones and enterprise communities. We need to keep 
doing this to give incentives to local people to work together to build 
their own futures. And we're just getting started.
    We know that if we're going to continue doing what we've been doing 
and continue making progress, we have got to give more responsibility, 
not just in the State capitals but also in the county seats and the city 
halls of America where the rubber meets the road and the decisions must 
be made.

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    Let me talk just a minute about what I think we should be doing and 
then a little bit about what you and I have to do together for the 
future. First of all, we have to meet the continuing challenges of this 
economy. If I had told anybody 3 years ago that we'd have a 27-year low 
in the combined rates of unemployment and inflation and almost 8 million 
new jobs and a record number of new businesses and a 15-year high in 
homeownership, but half the American people would not have a raise and a 
lot of people would feel very uncertain in the downsizing, and some 
communities would be left out still of the new jobs, you would have 
found that hard to believe. It is because of the nature of the changes 
that are going on.
    The answer is not to try to put a wall around America or turn around 
and run back into a past that we can never achieve again. The answer is 
to keep pushing until we get all the way through this period of change 
in a way that permits all Americans to win. That's exactly what we did 
the last time we went through a period of change like this. It took us 
decades before. I believe we can do it in less time now because the pace 
of change is so great.
    But let's look at what we have to do. We have to have more growth to 
produce more good jobs and to spread that opportunity to more people, 
and to help people who lose their jobs move through the transition more 
quickly so that they can once again become productive and support their 
families and have the kind of self-respect every American deserves who 
is willing to work for it.
    What should we do? Yesterday, I called on Congress to pass a growth 
agenda within 60 days to build on the work of the last 3 years. I won't 
go through it all now, but let me just mention two or three points. 
First of all, we ought to pass the right kind of balanced budget, and we 
ought to do it now.
    The economic plan of 1993, though it was controversial, cut our 
deficit in half in 3 years, drove interest rates way down. What happened 
with low interest rates? That helped to bring about the homebuilding 
boom and the 15-year high in homeownership. That helped to increase 
incomes by cutting the costs Americans have for their car payments, 
their credit card payments, their home mortgage payments. That helped to 
sustain a long period of growth.
    If we can pass a balanced budget plan, we'll get interest rates down 
again, so that we'll not only be lifting the burden of debt off of 
future generations, we'll be giving the present economy the best 
stimulus it can have to grow and grow and grow. And that means people at 
your level will be able to pay tax revenues they get from earning more 
money to fund the county services that you all desperately need to 
provide.
    But there is another issue in the budget that I know has already 
been discussed here. We're not only still negotiating over how to 
balance the budget for the next 7 years, we're still talking about 
finishing the budget work for this year, and that is very hard on you. 
You have to plan, after all, for daycare services, 911 lines, for jail 
cells. You have a road budget to meet. You have all of these things you 
have to do.
    Without a national budget, you can't plan. you can't answer basic 
questions: What kind of resources can I count on to implement this 
initiative or that one? How much flexibility am I going to have to make 
this happen? It is unacceptable for America's counties, for America's 
cities, for America's States not to know what's coming at them. And the 
effects of this uncertainty are not good. I read the survey you released 
on Friday. A good many of you have had to postpone construction 
projects, reduce services, stop hiring. You're looking at higher costs 
across the board for health care, for welfare, for summer jobs programs.
    Enough is enough. We cannot afford to have our counties stuck in 
suspended animation. You deserve to know what to expect. So I ask you to 
join with me in saying to the Congress, you're back in town, we've got 
to stop governing by continuing resolution. It's time to come together 
and pass a budget for this year. But also time to come together and pass 
a budget that will be in balance in 7 years.
    We can do this. I want to make it clear to you that as a result of 
all the negotiations that went on in the previous months between the 
congressional leaders and the White House, we have now identified 
savings that are common to both the Republican plan and

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my plan amounting to $700 billion. That is more than enough to balance 
the budget, and done right, to protect Medicare and Medicaid; to protect 
our investments in the environment; to protect our investments in 
education; to avoid doing away with the summer jobs program, which I 
think would be a terrible mistake. It is also enough to provide a modest 
tax cut to families who have been struggling to stay ahead over the last 
several years, and to give what I think would be the best tax cut of 
all, a tax deduction for the cost of college education and all education 
expenses after high school.
    But also remember it's important to balance the budget, which means 
that all of us, including the President, have to deal with cuts that we 
may not otherwise like to deal with, because if we balance the budget we 
get the interest rates down again, we keep the economy going, we keep 
creating jobs, we give incomes a chance to continue to rise. That is 
very, very important.
    If you have any doubt about whether this can be done by Republicans 
and Democrats in this environment in an election year, I ask you just to 
look at what's happening today on Capitol Hill. Members of both parties, 
led by Senator Kassebaum of Kansas and Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts, 
are announcing a bipartisan commitment to pass historic legislation that 
will stop insurance companies from cutting off customers just because 
someone in the family gets sick or they change jobs. It is high time. 
This is something that we can do to increase access to all people to 
health care, a critical component of family security in the modern 
world. I applaud Congress for their commitment here, Republicans and 
Democrats alike. I look forward to signing the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill 
and I hope they will continue.
    We've got 3 weeks until Congress takes a break for Easter. That's 
more than enough time to move ahead on health care reform and to pass 
the balanced budget. There are other things that I think should be done, 
including raising the minimum wage and other aspects of the economic 
growth issue. But just think what would happen if we could do this by 
Easter, just these two things, to pass that health care reform bill and 
to pass the balanced budget plan. Think of the confidence, the spirit, 
the energy it would send throughout America. Think how people would feel 
differently about the ability of the Government to solve problems and 
the ability of the country to move forward and the ability of people in 
Washington to behave in a bipartisan, even a nonpartisan way, in the way 
that so many of you have to do, day-in and day-out.
    We have to do this. But it is not enough. We also have to work with 
you in a partnership to meet the challenges that I outlined in the State 
of the Union. We're working together to strengthen America's families, 
by fighting to end the tragedy of domestic violence. Last month, as a 
part of our continuing effort, we set up a national domestic violence 
hotline. This will help, but it won't work alone.
    Counties have a special role to play in this endeavor. Your police 
officers are the ones who respond to the desperate 911 call. Your judges 
are the ones who have to bring domestic abusers to justice. You have to 
make sure that members of your community and your officers of the law 
understand that this is a serious, serious problem in the United States. 
It can't be solved by simply taking repeated abusers out for a walk 
around the block to cool down. This is a crime where training and 
education that you can provide can truly make a difference, a huge 
difference in the quality of childhood and the quality of life in 
America. So I ask you to stand with hundreds of thousands of women who 
are battered each year, with the thousands and thousands of children 
that are abused, and say, ``No more.'' I salute you for what you're 
doing, and I ask you for more.
    We must bring the same spirit of partnership to our efforts to 
provide all Americans with the educational opportunities they need for 
this new era. Let's take the Goals 2000 education reform, for example. 
It says that we should have nationally competitive standards, standards 
that will stand us in good stead in the world, and that those standards 
are needed in a global economy, in the smallest rural community in my 
home State, and in the biggest cities of America. But it says that 
States and counties and school districts should agree to meet them, but 
should then

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have the ability to decide on how to meet them.
    Our administration is taking the lead in setting higher national 
standards in calling for measurable means for determining whether 
they're being met or not, but in giving more flexibility to local 
schools and local entities than ever before in determining how to 
achieve educational excellence. That is a partnership we must embrace 
with great fervor and with enough dedication that we will keep at it 
until the job is done.
    Let me just give you one example. We're going to have to work 
together with the private sector to meet the important national goal of 
connecting every school and every library, every classroom and every 
library in America to the information superhighway by the year 2000. We 
have to do that. We at the national level can provide some seed money 
and some real influence in terms of reaching out to people everywhere to 
try to help them contribute. But you have to do that as well. People in 
the private sector in every State and county and community in America 
are eager to help.
    Just later this week I am going out to California where, on one day, 
we will connect 20 percent of the classrooms in the State to the 
Internet in 58 separate counties. That's the downpayment on something 
that must sweep America in the next couple of years. We have to work 
together to clean the environment. And I won't repeat anything that 
Carol Browner said, but you and I know we have to be partners, whether 
it's in dealing with the Superfund issue or other challenges facing us.
    I want to thank this group for the work you did in our development 
of a sustainable development plan for the future of America. You were 
consulted, you were involved, and I appreciate it. I was so glad to see 
one of the officers holding the report when I came in the door today. We 
have to do this together. We have to disabuse our people of the notion 
that you have to grow the economy by weakening the environment, and that 
we have to choose a good job over clean air, clean water, and a safe 
future.
    The truth is, over the long run we cannot grow the economy unless we 
preserve the environment. And you and I have to take the lead in doing 
that. We have to help working Americans become winners in this time of 
economic change. I suppose I've spent more time in community colleges 
than any President in history. I've done it because I believe that they 
symbolize the kind of institutions that America needs more of if we're 
going to solve our problems: community placed, driven by the needs of 
the moment, susceptible and flexible to the personal needs and desires 
of the individual students; not political in a negative sense, but 
political in a positive sense, in the sense that most of them are highly 
influential in terms of getting the resources and the support they need 
from the public and private sector to drive on into a better future. 
That's what we need more of.
    And that's why I've challenged Congress to collapse 70 separate 
overlapping training programs into a single voucher worth $2,600 a year 
that we can just mail to anyone as soon as they lose their job, and say, 
here, take this to your local educational institution and get back to 
work by learning and moving to a better future, not a darker one. That 
is the sort of support that we all need to give.
    And, finally, let me say that we have had a remarkable partnership 
through the crime bill, a crime bill that was written after 6 years of 
haggling, and passed in 1994 largely through the influence of local law 
enforcement officials; a bill that provides funds for police, for 
punishment, and for prevention; a bill that is helping to move 100,000 
police officers on the street. We are ahead of schedule and under budget 
in that endeavor because local law enforcement officials know how badly 
we need more police officers in community policing settings.
    I am proud to say that this approach is working all over the 
country. I see rates of crime coming down: violent crime, property 
crimes, all kinds of crimes. But we have not succeeded and we cannot 
believe we have succeeded just because the crime rate is going down, 
first, because the crime rate among juveniles is going up; and, 
secondly, because we all know this country still has too many streets, 
too many neighborhoods, too many schools that are too dangerous and too 
violent. And we have to keep at it.

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    We cannot tolerate any attempt to repeal the crime bill and to move 
away from strategies that we know are working to lower the crime rate. I 
ask for your support to put more police officers on the street, to keep 
those prevention programs, and to stand up for giving America a future 
when we will once again be surprised when we turn on the television and 
see that a terrible crime has been committed. You want to know when 
we'll win the battle against crime? When you're surprised when you turn 
on the evening news and you read about some violent, outrageous, 
unforgivable act.
    Sustained growth, a balanced budget, stronger families, safer 
streets, a cleaner environment, better education, welfare reform, health 
care for those who need it most; we can do all these things if we will 
do them together. You know, I know that a lot of people are so 
bewildered by the things that are going on in the world today, and I 
know that it is easy to get disheartened. And I read from time to time 
about how people have gone from being skeptical to being cynical. But I 
say to you, my fellow Americans, that is a luxury we cannot afford. If 
you went to work cynical every day it would be an excuse for you to do 
nothing, and soon you would be out of a job.
    The only people in this country who can't be fired in their roles 
are citizens. The Constitution gives our citizens the right to vote or 
the right not to vote; the right to say what they believe or the right 
to keep silent. And, therefore, they ultimately have the right, if they 
choose, to be cynical. But I want to tell you something: This is a very 
great country. Most people in the world would still give anything to 
have the opportunities Americans have. Most wealthy countries in the 
world would give anything to be able to see a private sector vital 
enough to create the kind of jobs that have been created in this 
economy. And all the problems we have are simply because we are 
fortunate enough to be living at the time of most profound change this 
country has endured in 100 years.
    Now, there are problems associated with that change. There is no 
change that is painless, ever. There never has been and there never will 
be. There is no such thing as a painless, consequence-free period of 
change. But we should rejoice that we have been given the opportunity to 
serve the public at this moment in our history. And one of the things 
that you can do, because you are so close to the people, is to go back 
home and say, look, there is nothing facing this country we can't handle 
if we'll work together; and cynicism is a poor excuse for inaction and 
is the only thing that will determine our failure.
    All my life I have believed it was wrong, fundamentally wrong, for 
any human being to be denied the opportunity to make the most of his or 
her own life. That is fundamentally what public life is all about. That 
is what your work is all about; that is what my work is all about. And a 
big part of that is involving our citizens in the process of getting 
through this period of change and transformation.
    I believe if we do that the years ahead of us will be America's best 
years. And if we do it, you can take a full measure of pride and credit 
in that magnificent endeavor.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 11:05 a.m. at the Washington Hilton and 
Towers Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Douglas Bovin, president, 
and Michael Hightower, president-elect, National Association of 
Counties; and Carol M. Browner, Administrator, Environmental Protection 
Agency.