Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33 Issue 6 (Monday, February 10, 1997)

[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 6 (Monday, February 10, 1997)]
[Pages 136-145]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union

February 4, 1997

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of the 105th Congress,
distinguished guests, and my fellow Americans. I think I should start by
saying, thanks for inviting me back. I come before you tonight with a
challenge as great as any in our peacetime history and a plan of action
to meet that challenge, to prepare our people for the bold new world of
the 21st century.
We have much to be thankful for. With 4 years of growth, we have won
back the basic strength of our economy. With crime and welfare rolls
declining, we are winning back our optimism, the enduring faith that we
can master any difficulty. With the cold war receding and global
commerce at record levels, we are helping to win an unrivaled peace and
prosperity all across the world.
My fellow Americans, the state of our Union is strong. But now we
must rise to the decisive moment, to make a nation and a world better
than any we have ever known. The new promise of the global economy, the
information age, unimagined new work, life-enhancing technology, all
these are ours to seize. That is our honor and our challenge. We must be
shapers of events, not observers. For if we do not act, the moment will
pass, and we will lose the best possibilities of our future.
We face no imminent threat, but we do have an enemy. The enemy of
our time is inaction. So tonight I issue a call to action: action by
this Congress, action by our States, by our people, to prepare America
for the 21st century; action to keep our economy and our democracy
strong and working for all our people; action to strengthen education
and harness the forces of technology and science; action to build
stronger families and stronger communities and a safer environment;
action to keep America the world's strongest force for peace, freedom,
and prosperity; and above all, action to build a more perfect Union here
at home.
The spirit we bring to our work will make all the difference. We
must be committed to the pursuit of opportunity for all Americans,
responsibility from all Americans, in a community of all Americans. And
we must be committed to a new kind of Government, not to solve all our
problems for us but to give our people, all our people, the tools they
need to make the most of their own lives.
And we must work together. The people of this Nation elected us all.
They want us to be partners, not partisans. They put us all right here
in the same boat, they gave us all oars, and they told us to row. Now,
here is the direction I believe we should take.
First, we must move quickly to complete the unfinished business of
our country, to balance the budget, renew our democracy, and finish the
job of welfare reform.
Over the last 4 years, we have brought new economic growth by
investing in our people, expanding our exports, cutting our deficits,
creating over 11 million new jobs, a 4-year record. Now we must keep our
economy the strongest in the world. We here tonight have an historic
opportunity. Let this Congress be the Congress that finally balances the
budget. [Applause] Thank you.
In 2 days, I will propose a detailed plan to balance the budget by
2002. This plan will balance the budget and invest in our people while
protecting Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. It will
balance the budget and build on the Vice President's efforts to make our
Government work better, even as it costs less. It will balance the
budget and provide middle class tax relief to pay for education and
health care, to help to raise a child, to buy and sell a home.
Balancing the budget requires only your vote and my signature. It
does not require us to rewrite our Constitution. I believe it is both
unnecessary and unwise to adopt a balanced budget amendment that could
cripple our country in time of economic crisis and force unwanted
results, such as judges halting Social Security checks or increasing
taxes. Let us at least agree, we should not

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pass any measure--no measure should be passed that threatens Social
Security. Whatever your view on that, we all must concede: We don't need
a constitutional amendment; we need action.
Whatever our differences, we should balance the budget now. And
then, for the long-term health of our society, we must agree to a
bipartisan process to preserve Social Security and reform Medicare for
the long run, so that these fundamental programs will be as strong for
our children as they are for our parents.
And let me say something that's not in my script tonight. I know
this is not going to be easy. But I really believe one of the reasons
the American people gave me a second term was to take the tough
decisions in the next 4 years that will carry our country through the
next 50 years. I know it is easier for me than for you to say or do. But
another reason I was elected is to support all of you, without regard to
party, to give you what is necessary to join in these decisions. We owe
it to our country and to our future.
Our second piece of unfinished business requires us to commit
ourselves tonight, before the eyes of America, to finally enacting
bipartisan campaign finance reform. Now, Senators McCain and Feingold,
Representatives Shays and Meehan, have reached across party lines here
to craft tough and fair reform. Their proposal would curb spending,
reduce the role of special interests, create a level playing field
between challengers and incumbents, and ban contributions from
noncitizens, all corporate sources, and the other large soft money
contributions that both parties receive.
You know and I know that this can be delayed. And you know and I
know the delay will mean the death of reform. So let's set our own
deadline. Let's work together to write bipartisan campaign finance
reform into law and pass McCain-Feingold by the day we celebrate the
birth of our democracy, July the Fourth.
There is a third piece of unfinished business. Over the last 4
years, we moved a record 2\1/4\ million people off the welfare rolls.
Then last year, Congress enacted landmark welfare reform legislation,
demanding that all able-bodied recipients assume the responsibility of
moving from welfare to work. Now each and every one of us has to fulfill
our responsibility, indeed, our moral obligation, to make sure that
people who now must work, can work.
Now we must act to meet a new goal: 2 million more people off the
welfare rolls by the year 2000. Here is my plan: Tax credits and other
incentives for businesses that hire people off welfare; incentives for
job placement firms and States to create more jobs for welfare
recipients; training, transportation, and child care to help people go
to work.
Now I challenge every State: Turn those welfare checks into private
sector paychecks. I challenge every religious congregation, every
community nonprofit, every business to hire someone off welfare. And I'd
like to say especially to every employer in our country who ever
criticized the old welfare system, you can't blame that old system
anymore. We have torn it down. Now do your part. Give someone on welfare
the chance to go to work.
Tonight I am pleased to announce that five major corporations,
Sprint, Monsanto, UPS, Burger King, and United Airlines, will be the
first to join in a new national effort to marshal America's businesses,
large and small, to create jobs so that people can move from welfare to
work.
We passed welfare reform. All of you know I believe we were right to
do it. But no one can walk out of this Chamber with a clear conscience
unless you are prepared to finish the job.
And we must join together to do something else, too, something both
Republican and Democratic Governors have asked us to do, to restore
basic health and disability benefits when misfortune strikes immigrants
who came to this country legally, who work hard, pay taxes, and obey the
law. To do otherwise is simply unworthy of a great nation of immigrants.
Now, looking ahead, the greatest step of all, the high threshold of
the future we must now cross, and my number one priority for the next 4
years is to ensure that all Americans have the best education in the
world.
Let's work together to meet these three goals: Every 8-year-old must
be able to read;

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every 12-year-old must be able to log on to the Internet; every 18-year-
old must be able to go to college; and every adult American must be able
to keep on learning for a lifetime.
My balanced budget makes an unprecedented commitment to these goals,
$51 billion next year. But far more than money is required. I have a
plan, a call to action for American education, based on these 10
principles:
First, a national crusade for education standards, not Federal
Government standards but national standards, representing what all our
students must know to succeed in the knowledge economy of the 21st
century. Every State and school must shape the curriculum to reflect
these standards and train teachers to lift students up to them. To help
schools meet the standards and measure their progress, we will lead an
effort over the next 2 years to develop national tests of student
achievement in reading and math. Tonight I issue a challenge to the
Nation: Every State should adopt high national standards, and by 1999,
every State should test every fourth grader in reading and every eighth
grader in math to make sure these standards are met.
Raising standards will not be easy, and some of our children will
not be able to meet them at first. The point is not to put our children
down but to lift them up. Good tests will show us who needs help, what
changes in teaching to make, and which schools need to improve. They can
help us end social promotions, for no child should move from grade
school to junior high or junior high to high school until he or she is
ready.
Last month, our Secretary of Education Dick Riley and I visited
Northern Illinois, where eighth grade students from 20 school districts,
in a project aptly called First in the World, took the Third
International Math and Science Study. That's a test that reflects the
world-class standards our children must meet for the new era. And those
students in Illinois tied for first in the world in science and came in
second in math. Two of them, Kristen Tanner and Chris Getsler, are here
tonight, along with their teacher Sue Winski. They're up there with the
First Lady. And they prove that when we aim high and challenge our
students, they will be the best in the world. Let's give them a hand.
Stand up, please. [Applause]
Second, to have the best schools, we must have the best teachers.
Most of us in this Chamber would not be here tonight without the help of
those teachers. I know that I wouldn't be here. For years, many of our
educators, led by North Carolina's Governor Jim Hunt and the National
Board for Professional Teaching Standards, have worked very hard to
establish nationally accepted credentials for excellence in teaching.
Just 500 of these teachers have been certified since 1995. My budget
will enable 100,000 more to seek national certification as master
teachers. We should reward and recognize our best teachers. And as we
reward them, we should quickly and fairly remove those few who don't
measure up, and we should challenge more of our finest young people to
consider teaching as a career.
Third, we must do more to help all our children read. Forty
percent--40 percent--of our 8-year-olds cannot read on their own. That's
why we have just launched the America Reads initiative, to build a
citizen army of one million volunteer tutors to make sure every child
can read independently by the end of the third grade. We will use
thousands of AmeriCorps volunteers to mobilize this citizen army. We
want at least 100,000 college students to help. And tonight I am pleased
that 60 college presidents have answered my call, pledging that
thousands of their work-study students will serve for one year as
reading tutors. This is also a challenge to every teacher and every
principal. You must use these tutors to help students read. And it is
especially a challenge to our parents. You must read with your children
every night.
This leads to the fourth principle: Learning begins in the first
days of life. Scientists are now discovering how young children develop
emotionally and intellectually from their very first days and how
important it is for parents to begin immediately talking, singing, even
reading to their infants. The First Lady has spent years writing about
this issue, studying it. And she and I are going to convene a White
House conference on early learning and the brain this spring, to

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explore how parents and educators can best use these startling new
findings.
We already know we should start teaching children before they start
school. That's why this balanced budget expands Head Start to one
million children by 2002. And that is why the Vice President and Mrs.
Gore will host their annual family conference this June on what we can
do to make sure that parents are an active part of their children's
learning all the way through school.
They've done a great deal to highlight the importance of family in
our life, and now they're turning their attention to getting more
parents involved in their children's learning all the way through
school. And I thank you, Mr. Vice President, and I thank you especially,
Tipper, for what you do.
Fifth, every State should give parents the power to choose the right
public school for their children. Their right to choose will foster
competition and innovation that can make public schools better. We
should also make it possible for more parents and teachers to start
charter schools, schools that set and meet the highest standards and
exist only as long as they do. Our plan will help America to create
3,000 of these charter schools by the next century, nearly 7 times as
there are in the country today, so that parents will have even more
choices in sending their children to the best schools.
Sixth, character education must be taught in our schools. We must
teach our children to be good citizens. And we must continue to promote
order and discipline, supporting communities that introduce school
uniforms, impose curfews, enforce truancy laws, remove disruptive
students from the classroom, and have zero tolerance for guns and drugs
in school.
Seventh, we cannot expect our children to raise themselves up in
schools that are literally falling down. With the student population at
an all-time high and record numbers of school buildings falling into
disrepair, this has now become a serious national concern. Therefore, my
budget includes a new initiative, $5 billion to help communities finance
$20 billion in school construction over the next 4 years.
Eighth, we must make the 13th and 14th years of education, at least
2 years of college, just as universal in America by the 21st century as
a high school education is today, and we must open the doors of college
to all Americans. To do that, I propose America's HOPE scholarship,
based on Georgia's pioneering program: 2 years of a $1,500 tax credit
for college tuition, enough to pay for the typical community college. I
also propose a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for all tuition
after high school, an expanded IRA you can withdraw from tax free for
education, and the largest increase in Pell grant scholarships in 20
years. Now, this plan will give most families the ability to pay no
taxes on money they save for college tuition. I ask you to pass it and
give every American who works hard the chance to go to college.
Ninth, in the 21st century, we must expand the frontiers of learning
across a lifetime. All our people, of whatever age, must have the chance
to learn new skills. Most Americans live near a community college. The
roads that take them there can be paths to a better future. My ``GI
bill'' for America's workers will transform the confusing tangle of
Federal training programs into a simple skill grant to go directly into
eligible workers' hands. For too long, this bill has been sitting on
that desk there without action. I ask you to pass it now. Let's give
more of our workers the ability to learn and to earn for a lifetime.
Tenth, we must bring the power of the information age into all our
schools. Last year, I challenged America to connect every classroom and
library to the Internet by the year 2000, so that, for the first time in
our history, children in the most isolated rural towns, the most
comfortable suburbs, the poorest inner-city schools, will have the same
access to the same universe of knowledge.
That is my plan, a call to action for American education. Some may
say that it is unusual for a President to pay this kind of attention to
education. Some may say it is simply because the President and his
wonderful wife have been obsessed with this subject for more years than
they can recall. That is not what is driving these proposals.
We must understand the significance of this endeavor: One of the
greatest sources of our strength throughout the cold war was a
bipartisan foreign policy; because our future was at stake, politics
stopped at the wa

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ter's edge. Now I ask you and I ask all our Nation's Governors; I ask
parents, teachers, and citizens all across America for a new nonpartisan
commitment to education because education is a critical national
security issue for our future, and politics must stop at the schoolhouse
door.
To prepare America for the 21st century, we must harness the
powerful forces of science and technology to benefit all Americans. This
is the first State of the Union carried live in video over the Internet.
But we've only begun to spread the benefits of a technology revolution
that should become the modern birthright of every citizen.
Our effort to connect every classroom is just the beginning. Now we
should connect every hospital to the Internet, so that doctors can
instantly share data about their patients with the best specialists in
the field. And I challenge the private sector tonight to start by
connecting every children's hospital as soon as possible, so that a
child in bed can stay in touch with school, family, and friends. A sick
child need no longer be a child alone.
We must build the second generation of the Internet so that our
leading universities and national laboratories can communicate in speeds
1,000 times faster than today, to develop new medical treatments, new
sources of energy, new ways of working together.
But we cannot stop there. As the Internet becomes our new town
square, a computer in every home, a teacher of all subjects, a
connection to all cultures, this will no longer be a dream but a
necessity. And over the next decade, that must be our goal.
We must continue to explore the heavens, pressing on with the Mars
probes and the international space station, both of which will have
practical applications for our everyday living.
We must speed the remarkable advances in medical science. The human
genome project is now decoding the genetic mysteries of life. American
scientists have discovered genes linked to breast cancer and ovarian
cancer and medication that stops a stroke in progress and begins to
reverse its effects and treatments that dramatically lengthen the lives
of people with HIV and AIDS.
Since I took office, funding for AIDS research at the National
Institutes of Health has increased dramatically to $1.5 billion. With
new resources, NIH will now become the most powerful discovery engine
for an AIDS vaccine, working with other scientists to finally end the
threat of AIDS. Remember that every year--every year we move up the
discovery of an AIDS vaccine will save millions of lives around the
world. We must reinforce our commitment to medical science.
To prepare America for the 21st century, we must build stronger
families. Over the past 4 years, the family and medical leave law has
helped millions of Americans to take time off to be with their families.
With new pressures on people in the way they work and live, I believe we
must expand family leave so that workers can take time off for teacher
conferences and a child's medical checkup. We should pass flex-time, so
workers can choose to be paid for overtime in income or trade it in for
time off to be with their families.
We must continue, step by step, to give more families access to
affordable, quality health care. Forty million Americans still lack
health insurance. Ten million children still lack health insurance; 80
percent of them have working parents who pay taxes. That is wrong. My
balanced budget will extend health coverage to up to 5 million of those
children. Since nearly half of all children who lose their insurance do
so because their parents lose or change a job, my budget will also
ensure that people who temporarily lose their jobs can still afford to
keep their health insurance. No child should be without a doctor just
because a parent is without a job.
My Medicare plan modernizes Medicare, increases the life of the
Trust Fund to 10 years, provides support for respite care for the many
families with loved ones afflicted with Alzheimer's, and for the first
time, it would fully pay for annual mammograms.
Just as we ended drive-through deliveries of babies last year, we
must now end the dangerous and demeaning practice of forcing women home
from the hospital only hours after a mastectomy. I ask your support for
bipartisan legislation to guarantee that a woman can stay in the
hospital for 48 hours after a mastectomy. With us tonight is Dr.

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Kristen Zarfos, a Connecticut surgeon whose outrage at this practice
spurred a national movement and inspired this legislation. I'd like her
to stand so we can thank her for her efforts. Dr. Zarfos, thank you.
[Applause]
In the last 4 years, we have increased child support collections by
50 percent. Now we should go further and do better by making it a felony
for any parent to cross a State line in an attempt to flee from this,
his or her most sacred obligation.
Finally, we must also protect our children by standing firm in our
determination to ban the advertising and marketing of cigarettes that
endanger their lives.
To prepare America for the 21st century, we must build stronger
communities. We should start with safe streets. Serious crime has
dropped 5 years in a row. The key has been community policing. We must
finish the job of putting 100,000 community police on the streets of the
United States. We should pass the victims' rights amendment to the
Constitution. And I ask you to mount a full-scale assault on juvenile
crime, with legislation that declares war on gangs, with new prosecutors
and tougher penalties; extends the Brady bill so violent teen criminals
will not be able to buy handguns; requires child safety locks on
handguns to prevent unauthorized use; and helps to keep our schools open
after hours, on weekends, and in the summer, so our young people will
have someplace to go and something to say yes to.
This balanced budget includes the largest antidrug effort ever, to
stop drugs at their source, punish those who push them, and teach our
young people that drugs are wrong, drugs are illegal, and drugs will
kill them. I hope you will support it.
Our growing economy has helped to revive poor urban and rural
neighborhoods. But we must do more to empower them to create the
conditions in which all families can flourish and to create jobs through
investment by business and loans by banks. We should double the number
of empowerment zones. They've already brought so much hope to
communities like Detroit, where the unemployment rate has been cut in
half in 4 years. We should restore contaminated urban land and buildings
to productive use. We should expand the network of community development
banks. And together we must pledge tonight that we will use this
empowerment approach, including private-sector tax incentives, to renew
our Capital City, so that Washington is a great place to work and live
and once again the proud face America shows the world.
We must protect our environment in every community. In the last 4
years, we cleaned up 250 toxic waste sites, as many as in the previous
12. Now we should clean up 500 more, so that our children grow up next
to parks, not poison. I urge you to pass my proposal to make big
polluters live by a simple rule: If you pollute our environment, you
should pay to clean it up.
In the last 4 years, we strengthened our Nation's safe food and
clean drinking water laws; we protected some of America's rarest, most
beautiful land in Utah's Red Rocks region, created three new national
parks in the California desert, and began to restore the Florida
Everglades. Now we must be as vigilant with our rivers as we are with
our lands. Tonight, I announce that this year I will designate 10
American Heritage Rivers, to help communities alongside them revitalize
their waterfronts and clean up pollution in the rivers, proving once
again that we can grow the economy as we protect the environment.
We must also protect our global environment, working to ban the
worst toxic chemicals and to reduce the greenhouse gases that challenge
our health even as they change our climate.
Now, we all know that in all of our communities, some of our
children simply don't have what they need to grow and learn in their own
homes or schools or neighborhoods. And that means the rest of us must do
more, for they are our children, too. That's why President Bush, General
Colin Powell, former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros will join the Vice
President and me to lead the President's summit of service in
Philadelphia in April.
Our national service program, AmeriCorps, has already helped 70,000
young people to work their way through college as they serve America.
Now we intend to mobilize millions of Americans to serve in thousands of
ways. Citizen service is an

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American responsibility which all Americans should embrace, and I ask
your support for that endeavor.
I'd like to make just one last point about our national community.
Our economy is measured in numbers and statistics, and it's very
important. But the enduring worth of our Nation lies in our shared
values and our soaring spirit. So instead of cutting back on our modest
efforts to support the arts and humanities, I believe we should stand by
them and challenge our artists, musicians, and writers, challenge our
museums, libraries, and theaters. We should challenge all Americans in
the arts and humanities to join with our fellow citizens to make the
year 2000 a national celebration of the American spirit in every
community, a celebration of our common culture in the century that has
passed and in the new one to come in the new millennium, so that we can
remain in the world's beacon not only of liberty but of creativity, long
after the fireworks have faded.
To prepare America for the 21st century, we must master the forces
of change in the world and keep American leadership strong and sure for
an uncharted time.
Fifty years ago, a farsighted America led in creating the
institutions that secured victory in the cold war and built a growing
world economy. As a result, today more people than ever embrace our
ideals and share our interests. Already we have dismantled many of the
blocs and barriers that divided our parents' world. For the first time,
more people live under democracy than dictatorship, including every
nation in our own hemisphere but one, and its day, too, will come.
Now, we stand at another moment of change and choice and another
time to be farsighted, to bring America 50 more years of security and
prosperity. In this endeavor, our first task is to help to build, for
the very first time, an undivided, democratic Europe. When Europe is
stable, prosperous, and at peace, America is more secure. To that end,
we must expand NATO by 1999, so that countries that were once our
adversaries can become our allies. At the special NATO summit this
summer, that is what we will begin to do. We must strengthen NATO's
Partnership For Peace with non-member allies. And we must build a stable
partnership between NATO and a democratic Russia. An expanded NATO is
good for America; and a Europe in which all democracies define their
future not in terms of what they can do to each other but in terms of
what they can do together for the good of all--that kind of Europe is
good for America.
Second, America must look to the East no less than to the West. Our
security demands it. Americans fought three wars in Asia in this
century. Our prosperity requires it. More than 2 million American jobs
depend upon trade with Asia.
There, too, we are helping to shape an Asia-Pacific community of
cooperation, not conflict. Let our progress there not mask the peril
that remains. Together with South Korea, we must advance peace talks
with North Korea and bridge the cold war's last divide. And I call on
Congress to fund our share of the agreement under which North Korea must
continue to freeze and then dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
We must pursue a deeper dialog with China for the sake of our
interests and our ideals. An isolated China is not good for America; a
China playing its proper role in the world is. I will go to China, and I
have invited China's President to come here, not because we agree on
everything but because engaging China is the best way to work on our
common challenges like ending nuclear testing and to deal frankly with
our fundamental differences like human rights.
The American people must prosper in the global economy. We've worked
hard to tear down trade barriers abroad so that we can create good jobs
at home. I am proud to say that today America is once again the most
competitive nation and the number one exporter in the world.
Now we must act to expand our exports, especially to Asia and Latin
America, two of the fastest growing regions on Earth, or be left behind
as these emerging economies forge new ties with other nations. That is
why we need the authority now to conclude new trade agreements that open
markets to our goods and services even as we preserve our values.
We need not shrink from the challenge of the global economy. After
all, we have the

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best workers and the best products. In a truly open market, we can out-
compete anyone, anywhere on Earth.
But this is about more than economics. By expanding trade, we can
advance the cause of freedom and democracy around the world. There is no
better example of this truth than Latin America where democracy and open
markets are on the march together. That is why I will visit there in the
spring to reinforce our important tie.
We should all be proud that America led the effort to rescue our
neighbor Mexico from its economic crises. And we should all be proud
that last month Mexico repaid the United States, 3 full years ahead of
schedule, with half a billion dollar profit to us.
America must continue to be an unrelenting force for peace from the
Middle East to Haiti, from Northern Ireland to Africa. Taking reasonable
risks for peace keeps us from being drawn into far more costly conflicts
later.
With American leadership, the killing has stopped in Bosnia. Now the
habits of peace must take hold. The new NATO force will allow
reconstruction and reconciliation to accelerate. Tonight I ask Congress
to continue its strong support of our troops. They are doing a
remarkable job there for America, and America must do right by them.
Fifth, we must move strongly against new threats to our security. In
the past 4 years, we agreed to ban--we led the way to a worldwide
agreement to ban nuclear testing. With Russia, we dramatically cut
nuclear arsenals, and we stopped targeting each others citizens. We are
acting to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the wrong hands
and to rid the world of landmines. We are working with other nations
with renewed intensity to fight drug traffickers and to stop terrorists
before they act and hold them fully accountable if they do.
Now we must rise to a new test of leadership, ratifying the Chemical
Weapons Convention. Make no mistake about it, it will make our troops
safer from chemical attack; it will help us to fight terrorism. We have
no more important obligations, especially in the wake of what we now
know about the Gulf war. This treaty has been bipartisan from the
beginning, supported by Republican and Democratic administrations and
Republican and Democratic Members of Congress and already approved by 68
nations.
But if we do not act by April 29th, when this convention goes into
force with or without us, we will lose the chance to have Americans
leading and enforcing this effort. Together we must make the Chemical
Weapons Convention law, so that at last we can begin to outlaw poison
gas from the Earth.
Finally, we must have the tools to meet all these challenges. We
must maintain a strong and ready military. We must increase funding for
weapons modernization by the year 2000, and we must take good care of
our men and women in uniform. They are the world's finest.
We must also renew our commitment to America's diplomacy and pay our
debts and dues to international financial institutions like the World
Bank and to a reforming United Nations. Every dollar we devote to
preventing conflicts, to promoting democracy, to stopping the spread of
disease and starvation, brings a sure return in security and savings.
Yet international-affairs spending today is just one percent of the
Federal budget, a small fraction of what America invested in diplomacy
to choose leadership over escapism at the start of the cold war. If
America is to continue to lead the world, we here who lead America
simply must find the will to pay our way.
A farsighted America moved the world to a better place over these
last 50 years. And so it can be for another 50 years. But a shortsighted
America will soon find its words falling on deaf ears all around the
world.
Almost exactly 50 years ago, in the first winter of the cold war,
President Truman stood before a Republican Congress and called upon our
country to meet its responsibilities of leadership. This was his
warning; he said, ``If we falter, we may endanger the peace of the
world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this Nation.'' That
Congress, led by Republicans like Senator Arthur Vandenberg, answered
President Truman's call. Together, they made the commitments that
strengthened our country for 50 years. Now let us do the same. Let us do
what it takes to remain the indispensable nation, to

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keep America strong, secure, and prosperous for another 50 years.
In the end, more than anything else, our world leadership grows out
of the power of our example here at home, out of our ability to remain
strong as one America.
All over the world, people are being torn asunder by racial, ethnic,
and religious conflicts that fuel fanaticism and terror. We are the
world's most diverse democracy, and the world looks to us to show that
it is possible to live and advance together across those kinds of
differences.
America has always been a nation of immigrants. From the start, a
steady stream of people in search of freedom and opportunity have left
their own lands to make this land their home. We started as an
experiment in democracy fueled by Europeans. We have grown into an
experiment in democratic diversity fueled by openness and promise.
My fellow Americans, we must never, ever believe that our diversity
is a weakness. It is our greatest strength. Americans speak every
language, know every country. People on every continent can look to us
and see the reflection of their own great potential, and they always
will, as long as we strive to give all of our citizens, whatever their
background, an opportunity to achieve their own greatness.
We're not there yet. We still see evidence of abiding bigotry and
intolerance in ugly words and awful violence, in burned churches and
bombed buildings. We must fight against this, in our country and in our
hearts.
Just a few days before my second Inauguration, one of our country's
best known pastors, Reverend Robert Schuller, suggested that I read
Isaiah 58:12. Here's what it says: ``Thou shalt raise up the foundations
of many generations, and thou shalt be called the repairer of the
breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in.'' I placed my hand on that
verse when I took the oath of office, on behalf of all Americans, for no
matter what our differences in our faiths, our backgrounds, our
politics, we must all be repairers of the breach.
I want to say a word about two other Americans who show us how.
Congressman Frank Tejeda was buried yesterday, a proud American whose
family came from Mexico. He was only 51 years old. He was awarded the
Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart fighting for his
country in Vietnam. And he went on to serve Texas and America fighting
for our future here in this Chamber. We are grateful for his service and
honored that his mother, Lillie Tejeda, and his sister, Mary Alice, have
come from Texas to be with us here tonight. And we welcome you.
Gary Locke, the newly elected Governor of Washington State, is the
first Chinese-American Governor in the history of our country. He's the
proud son of two of the millions of Asian-American immigrants who have
strengthened America with their hard work, family values, and good
citizenship. He represents the future we can all achieve. Thank you,
Governor, for being here. Please stand up. [Applause]
Reverend Schuller, Congressman Tejeda, Governor Locke, along with
Kristen Tanner and Chris Getsler, Sue Winski and Dr. Kristen Zarfos,
they're all Americans from different roots whose lives reflect the best
of what we can become when we are one America. We may not share a common
past, but we surely do share a common future. Building one America is
our most important mission, the foundation for many generations of every
other strength we must build for this new century. Money cannot buy it.
Power cannot compel it. Technology cannot create it. It can only come
from the human spirit.
America is far more than a place. It is an idea, the most powerful
idea in the history of nations. And all of us in this Chamber, we are
now the bearers of that idea, leading a great people into a new world. A
child born tonight will have almost no memory of the 20th century.
Everything that child will know about America will be because of what we
do now to build a new century.
We don't have a moment to waste. Tomorrow there will be just over
1,000 days until the year 2000; 1,000 days to prepare our people; 1,000
days to work together; 1,000 days to build a bridge to a land of new
promise. My fellow Americans, we have work to do. Let us seize those
days and the century.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

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Note: The President spoke at 9:15 p.m. in the House Chamber of the
Capitol.