[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 49 (Monday, December 13, 1999)]
[Pages 2565-2574]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Chamber of Commerce in Little Rock, Arkansas

December 10, 1999

    Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, 
Shelby; and thank you, Joe, for your leadership. They've both been 
friends of mine a long time, and it's good to see this chamber so well 
led. And thank you, Joe, for your pledge of support.
    Congratulations to Bob and to Beverly on the well-deserved award. 
I'm delighted to be up here with Dr. Reed and Jesse and Janet, and to be 
here with all of you. I thank Senator Pryor and Congressman Snyder for 
joining me, and Mayor Dailey. I think our speaker, Bob Johnson, is here, 
and I was accompanied this morning by Secretary Riley, the Secretary of 
Education, from Washington, and Rodney Slater, the Secretary of 
Transportation. I thank them for coming with me.
    I want to thank you for this award. Herschel Friday was a friend of 
mine. I was sitting here, racing through my mind, over all the things he 
asked me to do over the 12 years I was Governor, all the time there was 
one more emergency at Oak Lawn Park, which he and I had a vested 
interest in. I don't know if Beth Friday is here, but I want to thank 
them both for their friendship, and thank you for this award. And Beth, 
if you're here, I love you, and I'm glad to see you. Thank you.
    I also want to thank the Philander Smith choir. You know, whenever I 
have to take a trip, I stay up late the night before, and I try to get 
all the work done that I might have done in the office if I had stayed 
there. I talked to Hillary last night for the last time about 1 o'clock 
in the morning. She said to tell you hello, and she's doing well, and 
Chelsea's doing fine.
    But anyway, when I got up this morning, I was a little tired. I 
walked in here, and I heard the Philander choir singing, and I'm ready 
to speak now. [Laughter]
    Let me say something I'm sure a lot of you know, but this is my 
first opportunity to speak to the press today. I want to express my 
profound sadness for the crash of the
C-130 that flew out of the Little Rock Air Force Base, crashed in Kuwait 
last night with--96 people were on board; 3 were killed; 21 were 
injured. They were trying to land in terrible, terrible weather. And I 
thank them for their service, and I extend my deepest condolences to the 
families of those who were lost.
    We also lost a helicopter off the coast of San Diego yesterday with 
18 people aboard; 11 were recovered safely. We have not recovered the 
other 7, and our thoughts and prayers are with them. I say this just to 
make a simple point, that you might mention the next time you see 
someone in uniform. We do not have to be at war for that to be dangerous 
work. Most people have no earthly idea how dangerous it is to fly those 
fast planes and to fire those powerful weapons and to undergo the 
rigorous training that they have to undergo.
    We are richly repaid for it. We didn't lose a single pilot in combat 
in the action in Kosovo, but it is inherently dangerous work. So when 
you see some people from the air base, thank them for putting their 
lives on the line for the rest of us every day.
    Shelby mentioned a couple of times that I have worked very closely 
with this chamber for a long time. I don't know how many times I went to 
your old building trying to hustle some business for the greater Little 
Rock area or deal with some issue that was before us in common. I think 
you picked the right changes; there are big--I mean, the right theme. 
There are big changes coming. And the pace of change will only 
accelerate in the years ahead. I love the logo. I asked Shelby who 
designed the logo, and he told me, and congratulations to you.
    I think that what I would like to do today is to talk a little about 
the library and, first, a little about the last 7 years and the next 14 
months that I have left to serve as your President. I want to begin by 
thanking the people of Arkansas who gave me the chance to serve for a 
dozen years as Governor, without which I could never have become 
President, who gave me the chance to learn over those dozen years what 
makes things really work, which is very often not what dominates the 
headline, the time, and the energy and the emotions of people in 
Washington.
    I want to thank those who serve in this administration. We have been 
so blessed. I want to begin by mentioning Mack McLarty,

[[Page 2566]]

who came down with me today. He was my first Chief of Staff; he oversaw 
the passage, by a single vote in both Houses, of the '93 economic plan, 
which was the single most important thing that gave us this economic 
boom, that got rid of that deficit, that drove the interest rates down, 
and got investment up in this country. He also oversaw the passage of 
NAFTA, the Brady bill, the family and medical leave law, and set in 
motion a teamwork that, according to one Harvard scholar, he said I had 
the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second administration. 
That is in no small measure because of the leadership that Mack McLarty 
gave to the White House in those early days. And I thank him for it, and 
equally, for his later work as our Special Envoy to Latin America, where 
we have reestablished ties that had been too long neglected with so many 
countries.
    I want to thank Secretary Slater, who is here with me today; James 
Lee Witt, the most popular FEMA Director in the history of the country; 
Bob Nash; Bruce Lindsey; Nancy Hernreich, who came down with me today; 
Mel French, our Protocol Ambassador; Janis Kearney; Carl Whillock, who 
came with me today, the farmers' advocate in the Department of 
Agriculture; Mike Gaines now runs the Federal Parole Commission; my 
scheduler, Stephanie Streett; Carol Rasco, my former Domestic Policy 
Adviser, now runs the national America Reads program, has over a 
thousand colleges in America with young people volunteering to go into 
the grade schools and make sure every child can read independently by 
the age of 8; Brady Anderson from Helena--a lot of you know him--is now 
the Director of the Agency for International Development, the most 
important agency in the Federal Government in dealing with the poor 
countries of the world. Craig Smith was my political director and had a 
number of other important jobs in the White House--probably the least 
political person to work with us from any State; Hershel Gober, the 
Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs; young Kris Engskov from Berryville 
is here with me today. I first met him when he was 4 years old. Now he's 
my personal aide. So between Kris and Nancy, at least Arkansas still 
runs most of my life.
    There are literally scores of others I might mention from our State 
who have come to Washington, who are never noted in the press but who 
serve with real distinction, and I am grateful for them. And you should 
be proud of them.
    Now let me just take a minute to sort of walk back through memory 
lane. In October of 1991, when I declared for President on the steps of 
the old State House, I did it because I became convinced that there was 
a limit to what Arkansas could do unless America changed direction and 
because I really felt that our country had an enormous potential to make 
the most of these big changes we've been talking about.
    But it was a time of economic distress, social decline, deep 
political division, and the whole enterprise of Government had been 
profoundly discredited. It's almost impossible to remember what it was 
like just a few short years ago.
    I felt, based on what I had learned working with you, that the 
country ought to work more like we tried to work. Yes, we'd have our 
political differences; yes, we'd fight at election time; sometimes, we'd 
fight in-between; but that we ought to have a unifying theory of the 
public's business. And so I asked the American people to give me a 
chance, along with Vice President Gore, to implement a vision of 
opportunity for every responsible American, to challenge every citizen 
to be responsible, and to build a community that involved all of our 
people in a world where America was still the leading force for peace 
and freedom and prosperity.
    And we battled through the politics; we battled through a whole 
flurry of special interests; we battled through our fair share of 
mistakes; but we never forgot who we were working for or what the 
mission was. And I hope that all of you, without whom I would never have 
become President, can take some pride in the results.
    We have the longest peacetime expansion in our history. In February, 
it will become the longest economic expansion ever, including that which 
embraced World War II. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, 
the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years,

[[Page 2567]]

the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the highest homeownership in 
history. We have the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment 
rates ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, 
the lowest poverty rate among single-parent households in 46 years, the 
first back-to-back balanced budgets and surpluses in 42 years, and the 
Federal Government is now the smallest it's been in 37 years. It worked, 
and I thank you.
    Along the way, the society got stronger. We have the lowest crime 
rate in 25 years, and I might add the Brady bill background checks 
stopped 470,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers who shouldn't have 
gotten handguns from buying them, and not single Arkansan missed a day 
in the deer woods because of it.
    About 20 million people have taken advantage of the family and 
medical leave law. I meant to ask Secretary Riley and forgot to, how 
many millions, but as many millions of young people are now getting the 
HOPE scholarship, the $1,500 tax credit, which effectively makes 
community college available for 100 percent of the people in America 
today.
    Ninety percent of our kids are immunized against serious childhood 
diseases. In 1994, when the Vice President and I said we wanted to 
connect all our classrooms and schools to the Internet, 3 percent of our 
classrooms and 14 percent of our schools had some Internet connection. 
Today, over 50 percent of our classrooms and over 80 percent of our 
schools are connected, and we'll be over 90 percent in the new 
millennium.
    This is changing the nature of opportunity in America. I also know 
that something that's been very interesting here that the Governor and 
others have been interested in this State is providing health insurance 
to children. There are 2 million more children with health insurance 
under the Child Health Insurance Partnership we formed with the States 
in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, something that's very important to 
Hillary. In the last budget, we provided funds to help the hospitals who 
are unduly burdened by the Medicare cuts and provide special funds to 
train young doctors at children's hospitals throughout America, 
something that will really help the Arkansas Children's Hospital here, 
and we're very proud of that.
    While the economy got better, the air got cleaner; the water got 
cleaner. We set aside more land in protected areas than any 
administration in the entire history of the country except those of 
Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. And here's something you might like to 
know that you deserve more credit for, the people do, than our 
particular administration, although we have accelerated it quite a bit: 
The United States, in the production of the volume of waste of all 
kinds, whether it's what you throw away in the garbage at home or in 
industrial prospects, is at a 20-year low, even though we have 50 
million more people than we had 20 years ago. We are the number one 
recycling nation in the entire world now, and you can be proud of that.
    We've also had 150,000 young people serve our communities in 
AmeriCorps, like those I met just down the block from the Governor's 
mansion when the terrible tornado whipped through Little Rock not very 
long ago.
    America has been able to be a force for peace and prosperity in the 
world. We've had over 270 trade agreements. We just saw another 
successful move in our long efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland. 
I announced a couple of days ago that the Israelis and the Syrians would 
come back to the United States next week after 4 long years of not 
talking, to try to finish the work of making a lasting peace in the 
Middle East. That's a pretty good Christmas legacy to give, and I'm 
thrilled about that.
    We have worked to make our children safer from the kind of problems 
that will dominate the 21st century: the ethnic and racial cleansing and 
religious cleansing you saw in Bosnia and Kosovo; the presence of 
terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. And I can say 
to you today, after 7 years, I am grateful that I've had the chance to 
serve. I am more convinced than I was when I went there that we had the 
right mission with the right ideas. And I am absolutely convinced that I 
never would have been able to do what I have done to play my part in 
this remarkable renaissance if I hadn't had

[[Page 2568]]

the dozen years I had working with all of you as Governor. And I thank 
you for that.
    Now I'd also like to say that I get a little nervous when I get 
awards. Normally, I don't think Presidents should get awards, at least 
when they're alive. [Laughter] I mean, the job is honor enough. 
Although, I must say, I like this one. I'm going to put it up in the 
White House. But I think it's important to remember that a significant 
chunk of the time that I have been given to serve is still out there.
    They said we wouldn't get anything done this year, and then at the 
end of the budget session we had 100,000 more teachers to bring smaller 
classes to the early grades; we had 50,000 more police to keep the crime 
rate coming down; we had 60,000 housing vouchers to help people move 
from welfare to work and find a place to live, to keep the welfare rolls 
coming down; we doubled the amount of funds for after-school programs, 
something that's really important to increase learning and keep our kids 
off the street when they may not have any adult supervision.
    For the first time I got the Congress to give me some money to give 
States to identify schools that are failing and turn them around or shut 
them down, something I think is very important.
    There are a lot of things I tried to do I didn't pass, the Patients' 
Bill of Rights, the minimum wage, the hate crimes legislation, aid for 
school construction. I'll try to get them next year.
    I think Arkansas has done well in these last 7 years. You know, the 
whole time I was Governor, we went through that terrible time in the 
eighties when we had a bicoastal economy and the country looked like it 
was doing well, but the middle of the country wasn't. And then we had 
the recession that everybody suffered through. Not a single month--I had 
one month the whole time I was Governor, until 1992 when I ran for 
President--only one month when our unemployment rate was below the 
national average. Then it got down below the national average in 1992 
because I think of the accumulated efforts that a lot of us made over 
many years. In 1992 we ranked first or second--I never saw the final 
figures--in job growth in the entire country.
    But the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent when I took office, and 
it's 4.3 percent today here. And in many other ways I think you've done 
well. I could mention some specific things, but I'd like to talk about 
the general things.
    The average Arkansas family now has $25,000 less Federal debt than 
you would have had if we hadn't passed the economic plan in '93 and the 
Balanced Budget Act in '97. The average family in this State and 
throughout the country, paying a home mortgage, has interest costs that 
are about $2,000 a year lower. The average car payment or college loan 
payment is about $200 a year lower. This had made a difference in real 
people's lives.
    And as I look at the next 14 months, and as you as citizens look at 
the coming election season, I just want to ask you, without regard to 
your party, to think about this: What are we going to do with our 
prosperity?
    Over Thanksgiving, Hillary and I gathered up everybody in our flung 
families we could; we brought them all in, and then after Thanksgiving, 
we had some more friends come in to Camp David and had a bunch of little 
kids there. I just love having them all around, my two nephews and a 
bunch of other little kids. And this 6-year-old girl looked at me--on 
Saturday after Thanksgiving--she looked at me and she said, ``Now, Mr. 
President, how old are you, really?'' [Laughter] And I said, ``I'm 53.'' 
And she said, ``That's a lot.'' [Laughter] And regrettably, I had to 
agree with her.
    Here's what I want to say about that. In my lifetime, in those 53 
years, there has never been another time, not one, when our country had 
this level of economic prosperity, this level of social progress, this 
level of national self-confidence, with the absence of a crisis at home 
or a threat from abroad. Never.
    Now, a lot of us who are old enough to remember the 1960's, remember 
how good the economy was in the early sixties in the country, and how it 
was torn apart because of our inability to fully integrate the civil

[[Page 2569]]

rights challenge at home and deal with Vietnam abroad. This has never 
happened before.
    So the question before us is, what are we going to do with it? And 
as a citizen, I care about that as well as a President. I think there is 
a heavy responsibility on us, not just the President and the Congress 
and not just people in Government but the whole country. We have never 
had this happen, and you know as well as I do that nothing lasts 
forever. It keeps you going through the tough times, but it's important 
to remember in the good times.
    Here we are, on the edge of a new millennium with the first 
opportunity in our lifetime as a country to really shape the future of 
our dreams for our children. And I hope and pray that I can devote every 
waking minute of the last 14 months of my Presidency and that the 
American people will devote their energies and concentration in their 
own lives and their vote as citizens to making a decision based on 
shouldering the responsibility to shape that future for our children. 
And that means big changes. What are they? I'll just mention three of 
four, and end with what I'm going to do when I leave you today.
    Number one, we've got to deal with the aging of America. The number 
of people over 65 is going to double in the next 30 years. I hope to be 
one of them. It's going to double in the next 30 years. That will be two 
people working for every one person drawing Social Security. Social 
Security Trust Fund is projected to run out of money in 2034.
    The Medicare Trust Fund, when I took office, was scheduled to run 
out of money this year. We've pushed it back to 2015 now. We've got to 
do something about this. Now, let me say there is a big difference of 
opinion about whether--between the two parties about whether Medicare--I 
mean Social Security should have individual accounts, and if so, how 
should they be designed, and should we partially or completely privatize 
the system. And most Republicans think we should do some of that, and 
most Democrats think we shouldn't.
    But let me just tell you one little simple thing: If we took the 
interest savings we have from paying down the national debt because 
we're not spending the Social Security surplus anymore, if we just took 
the interest savings and put it back in the Trust Fund, we could put 
that Trust Fund out to 2050, which would take us out beyond the life 
expectancy of almost 100 percent of the baby boomers, after which the 
demographics start to get better again.
    Now, we've got the money to do that now. We don't have to raise your 
taxes. We don't have to stop spending money on anything else. We don't 
have to do anything. It'll never be this easy again. And believe me, it 
hasn't been this easy for our predecessors, and we ought to do this.
    On Medicare, we ought to make some structural reforms that will put 
some more life into the Medicare Trust Fund, take it out over 20 years. 
We ought to let people over 55 and under 65 buy into it. It doesn't cost 
the Treasury any money, and you know, there's tons of people in this 
country who retire at 55 now, and then something happens to them; 
they're not covered by a health insurance policy at work anymore; and 
they can't get any health insurance. It's a huge problem.
    And we ought to provide a voluntary prescription drug benefit, 
because 75 percent of the seniors in this country cannot afford the drug 
regimen their doctors say they need. So I think we ought to do that.
    Now, number two, we ought to recognize that more and more parents 
are working and do more to help balance work and family. I gave the 
States the option to use their workers' compensation and their 
unemployment compensation funds if they wanted to, to experiment with 
paid family leave. There are lots of other things that can be done, but 
you know, only 10 percent of the people in the country eligible for 
Federal assistance for child care are getting it, and I've increased 
child care funding by 70 percent. And a lot of people go to work every 
day, really worrying about whether their kids are in quality child care 
facilities. And it's a big problem.
    The family and medical leave law has been a Godsend, but I think we 
ought to broaden it some. And of course, we have to be sensitive not to 
hurt the economy. But if you want people to succeed at work, they can't 
be eaten up inside worrying about their kids, whether they're all right.

[[Page 2570]]

    If you have to make a choice, we lose before we start, because the 
most important job of any society is raising children. It is still the 
most important job of any society, including ours, and we forget that at 
our peril. So we've got to find a way, since all parents either want to 
work or have to work, just about, at least the majority, we've got to 
find the way to balance these things better.
    The third thing we have to do, I think, is to work even harder to 
give every child a world-class education. We have the largest and most 
diverse student body in history--the first time in the last 2 years 
we've got a student body bigger than the baby boom generation. And they 
are going to do great if we give them the tools to do it. I don't want 
to keep you here all morning, and you know how I like to pontificate 
about education, so I won't do that. But you need to make that a factor 
in your decisions, just as I make it a factor in mine.
    The next thing we need to do is to find better ways to balance the 
preservation of the economy and the preservation of the environment. A 
big thing has happened in the last 5 to 10 years that most people don't 
believe has happened. It is now possible to grow the economy and reduce 
the emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That's a fancy 
way of saying you don't necessarily have to burn more coal and oil and 
put it out in the atmosphere to get rich. Most people don't believe it, 
but it's true.
    The Agriculture Department had a seminar the other day on biomass 
fuels, ethanol being the most prominent one now. Right now, it's a 
problem. It takes seven gallons of gasoline to make eight gallons of 
ethanol, so the conversion ratio is not too good. They're very, very 
close to coming up with the technology to make eight gallons of ethanol 
with one gallon of gasoline. When that happens, it will change the 
future of America.
    In the next year or so, you're going to be able to buy cars that get 
70 to 80 miles a gallon with fuel injection engines, some that are 
blended. They start off on electricity, then go to gasoline, then go 
back to electricity, and it's just the beginning. You can get windows in 
houses now that keep out 5 times as much heat or cold and let in 5 times 
as much light. You can buy lamps that just in the life of the lamp, will 
save one ton of greenhouse gas emissions.
    With the changes in the White House we have made in the last 6 
years, just in the White House, we've taken the equivalent of 700 cars 
off the highways. This is a big deal, and it is not a question of, in 
the popular vernacular, hugging trees or growing the economy; it's a 
question of how to do the self-interested thing, which is to improve the 
environment and the economy at the same time, and I predict to you it 
will be a major, major focus for the next 20 years.
    The last thing I'd like to mention very briefly is this--because it 
really applies to Arkansas. We have to find a way to keep the economy 
going and then to bring the benefits of the economy to the people in 
places who haven't been a part of this prosperity. And I just want to 
mention three things. Number one, first things first; we've got to keep 
paying down this debt. If we stay on the track we're on now, just on the 
budget path that came out of this last budget session, this country will 
be out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835.
    Now, what does that mean? What does that mean? Well, let's take 
ALLTEL--doing reasonably well. We passed the telecommunications act. 
It's led already to hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs at great, 
high-tech companies. If the country's out of debt and we're not 
borrowing money, that means there's more money for everybody else to 
borrow. That means lower interest rates for business loans, faster 
expansion, more jobs, higher incomes. It means the average family pays 
less for home mortgages and car payments and college loans. This is a 
big deal. It's a progressive thing to do.
    The second thing we ought to do is work through and keep working at 
it until we reach a national consensus on this trade issue. If you 
watched the so-called battle in Seattle, you know that I said I 
understood why some of the people in the streets wanted to make sure the 
concerns of working people and the environment were taken account of in 
trade. But I think they're dead wrong to believe that you can walk away 
from trade.
    Let me tell you, this country is better off today because for 50 
years we have worked

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harder and harder and harder to integrate the global economy. And yes, 
if we buy stuff that's made somewhere else, it's very sensitive in 
Arkansas, because we were--50 years ago our per capita income was only 
56 percent of the national average. So we had a lot of low-wage workers. 
And sure, if we buy stuff made somewhere else, where people don't have 
the incomes we do, it puts more pressure on our low-wage workers. But it 
also creates a lot more high-wage jobs.
    And the answer is to give everybody lifetime training and to have 
the kind of environment where you can get the kind of investments to 
give good jobs to everybody. But we are better off both economically and 
in terms of our security because, for 50 years, we have continued to 
expand trade.
    And if you don't believe it, just look at all the places in the 
world that are in trouble. You know that problem we've had in Bosnia and 
Kosovo I had to send the military to solve. Do you seriously believe we 
would have had to go to war in the Balkans if their per capita income 
were not the lowest in Europe? If it were the highest in Europe, would 
they be fooling around with each other; would they care whether they 
were Muslims or Orthodox Christians or Roman Catholics if they were all 
well-educated and they were used to working together and they had more 
in common than driving them apart?
    Or in the Middle East, one of the problems is the abject poverty of 
the Palestinians. And one of the problems for the Israelis is the limits 
on their growth because they've got to spend so much on defense. If we 
were in better shape there economically and everybody were more 
integrated, don't you think we'd be closer to peace? Do you think people 
would still be fighting there?
    And I'm very proud of the role that I played in the Irish peace 
process and the role America played and the role George Mitchell played. 
But let me tell you something. One big reason they made peace in Ireland 
is that the Republic of Ireland had the fastest growing economy in 
Europe. A lot of American companies were shipping data processing--raw 
files to be processed over to Northern Ireland every day and flying them 
back, and all these kids were growing up saying, ``Hey, that's the 
future we want. We've got to let this other stuff go.''
    So we have got to--you've got to help me on this. As Americans, we 
have got to form a new consensus between business and labor and the 
environmental community and everybody else that allows us to continue to 
expand trade. And we ought to put China in the World Trade Organization. 
It's good for our farmers, good for our manufacturers, good for our 
investors, and it will make a safer world for our children and our 
grandchildren. It's a big deal. And I hope you will help me do that as 
well.
    Finally, we ought to give people the same incentives to invest in 
poor areas in America, like the Arkansas Delta, we give them to invest 
in poor areas in Latin America or Asia or Africa. And I'm very proud of 
the fact that this Congress supported my position to relieve the debt of 
world's poorest nations. I want Americans to invest in poor countries. I 
believe if you lift people out of poverty, you minimize their profound 
and primitive racial and ethnic and religious hatreds, and you give them 
something to live for and look forward to when they get up in the 
morning. But our people deserve the same thing.
    Let me ask you this, again: If we don't do this now, if we can't 
bring more entrepreneurs and more investment and more jobs to the 
poorest counties in this State and in our neighboring States and in 
Appalachia and in upstate New York and rural New England, which is 
pretty depressed, or on the Indian reservations--the Pine Ridge Indian 
Reservation in South Dakota, the unemployment today is 73 percent--and 
if we can't figure out something to do about this now, when in the world 
will we ever get around to it?
    And when I leave you, I'm going over to West Memphis and to Earle 
and announce that I'm going to propose in my new budget more than $110 
million to create a Delta regional authority. This will be new 
investment to fund a bill sponsored by Representative Blanche Lambert 
Lincoln and--Senator Lincoln and Representative Marion Berry, supported 
by Congressman Snyder and the entire Arkansas delegation. I think we'll 
have big bipartisan support for this. We've got to do something about 
this.

[[Page 2572]]

    I headed that Delta Commission more than a decade ago. Maybe the 
time wasn't right; maybe the economy was too tough. We're in good shape 
now. If we can't bring opportunity to these people in our State and 
Nation--I'm telling you I've been there. People are dying to go to work. 
And intelligence is evenly distributed; education is not, but 
intelligence is. We can get this done now. And I ask for your support 
for that.
    Now because I believe this is a time of big changes, to use your 
theme, and because I believe these big questions can't possibly be 
resolved, when I come home to build the library and my policy center, I 
want to deal with a lot of these big questions: How do you close the 
digital divide and use these high-tech advances to benefit every 
American? How do you create good jobs and a clean environment? How do 
you leave behind the ethnic and religious hatreds, the other kind of 
hatred that is manifested in hate crimes in America and the tribal 
slaughters in Africa and all the wars in between? How do you create 
genuine economic opportunity and empowerment for people who have been 
poor a very long time?
    These are the questions, the kinds of questions that I intend to 
work on down to the last hour of the last day of my Presidency, and the 
kind of questions that will be central to me when I come home to build 
the library and the policy center.
    I'd like to begin by just thanking all of you who have supported 
this. I thank the mayor, the city board of directors and staff, and I'm 
sorry for the heat you've taken, but it will be a good investment. I 
thank Paul Harvel and the Greater Little Rock Chamber. I thank Shelby 
and Joe and the Downtown Partnership. I thank Dr. Alan Sugg and the 
university system. I thank Skip Rutherford for being my point person 
down here; all of you who have worked on this.
    From the day I was elected President, I was determined that when it 
was over, I would try to use this library and policy center not only to 
continue my own interests and passions but to give something back to 
this State and this community that have given so much to me. Like I said 
over and over again, if it hadn't been for you, I never would have had 
the chance to serve. And if it hadn't been for the experiences you gave 
me and the lessons I learned, I wouldn't have been prepared to serve at 
this moment in our history.
    So I want to make some dreams come true here in Little Rock. This 
library can be an energizing force in the life of the city and the 
broader community. It will attract people from all across the Nation and 
all across the world. Lots of visitors and lots of people from business 
and labor and the nonprofit groups in government and journalism.
    It can play an important role in the growth and development of 
Greater Little Rock and all of central Arkansas. I am determined that it 
will be, first, a beautiful place. The site is wonderful, and so will 
the building be. It will be architecturally important, and it will be 
state of the art, environmentally and technologically.
    I've talked to Dr. Sugg and the university about starting a graduate 
program in public policy--that's what they want to do--to prepare more 
of our young people for careers in public service. And I also want to 
develop partnerships with corporations all across America to bring their 
young executives here, to get them to agree to let their young people 
take a little time off to be in public service without being prejudiced 
in their rise up the corporate hierarchy.
    Let me tell you, there is a program called the White House 
Fellowships--you may know about it--and we just give a few every year, 
enough for all the Cabinet Secretaries and one for me, one for a couple 
of other people in the White House. Hundreds of people apply for them--
hundreds. And hundreds get turned down who would be about as good as the 
handful, the less than 20 we select every year. And so I got this idea.
    Now, I realized how dependent we were on the White House Fellows, 
what fabulous work they did, what great ideas they gave. And think of 
it, if every company of any size would establish a policy that every 
year, one or two or three people, depending on the size of the company, 
could take a year off to serve in State Government, to serve in local 
government, to serve in the Federal Government, in Washington or at the 
regional level, to have the experience of government and then come back 
to the company and continue that career, we could change

[[Page 2573]]

the nature of government, the quality of the ideas, the quality of the 
work, and the quality of the partnership.
    And we could end a lot of the kind of battles that we've seen here 
over too many decades. So this is one of the things that I hope we can 
do, thanks to Dr. Sugg and his leadership on the education issue.
    I want to try to find some ways to, as I said over and over, to help 
to bridge the racial and other divides in our society and throughout the 
world. I want to bring here people from Northern Ireland and the Middle 
East and Bosnia and Kosovo. I want people to see members of these 
different African tribes. I'll never forget being in Rwanda after they 
killed over three-quarters of a million people in a 100 days with 
machetes in a tribal war, and Rwanda had been a coherent country for 
about 500 years.
    I talked to a woman, a beautiful woman--Hillary and I were sitting 
there talking to her--all dressed up in her fine native dress. And I 
listened to this wonderful woman, who was still a young woman, talk to 
me about how her neighbors had turned her in as a member of the other 
ethnic group, along with her husband and her six children, and how they 
had come after them with these machetes, and how she was convinced she 
was going to die. And she woke up covered in blood, and saw her husband 
and her six children dead around her, all because they were from another 
tribe. And that would be enough to break most of us, but this woman was 
devoting her life to trying to help other people let it go and get 
beyond it.
    We could, in this State, in this place, become a beacon of hope for 
those kind of people. We could train people in societies where these 
problems exist to get rid of them.
    I think it is truly amazing, at a time when we're talking about 
uncovering the mysteries of the human genome, when a lot of my friends 
in the profession believe that sometime early in the next century 
newborn babies will come home from the hospital with a life expectancy 
of 100 years, when we'll probably find out what's in the black holes in 
the universe, and we're talking about all this stuff, you know, that the 
biggest problem of human society is the oldest one: We're still scared 
of people that are different from us, and we've got to find a way to let 
it go.
    I want to do more on education. I want to do more on all these 
issues I mentioned. I also want this library to be a great place of 
history, and I want to make it interactive, especially for our children, 
with the latest technologies. I want to help our children and our 
grandchildren understand the times and the forces that took me to the 
White House and that I tried to shape and move forward, and then I want 
them to understand how that relates to tomorrow.
    I want this to be a museum but not a mausoleum. I want it to be a 
place with a lot of touch and involvement and learning. I want to give 
our young people a window on the new millennium. And I want them to 
believe when they walk out of there, based on the story of my life and 
the people we tried to help, that every one of them also has a chance to 
make their own history.
    These are the things I want to do with the library here in Little 
Rock, not only to glimpse the future but to shape it and share it with 
our neighbors and our families.
    So I say to all of you, again, thanks for helping me get here; 
thanks for giving us a great 7 years, and thanks for your support of the 
future. But remember, the most important thing of all is your theme is 
right: Big changes are coming. It's the only time in our lifetimes we've 
ever had a chance to make the most of them, and we'd better do it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:15 a.m. in Governors Halls 2 and 3 at 
the Statehouse Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Shelby 
Woods, outgoing chairman of the board, Joe Ford, incoming chairman of 
the board, Paul Harvel, president, Jesse Mason, education chairman, and 
Janet Jones, former chairman of the board, Greater Little Rock Chamber 
of Commerce; Bob Russell, winner of the chamber's Pinnacle Award, and 
his wife, Beverly; Mayor Jim Dailey of Little Rock; Speaker Bob Johnson, 
Arkansas House of Representatives; Trudy Reed, president, Philander 
Smith College; former Senator David H. Pryor; Carl Whillock, Special 
Assistant to the President, Department of Agriculture; Carol Rasco, 
Director, America Reads Challenge, Department of

[[Page 2574]]

Education; Beth Friday, widow of Herschel Friday, former chairman of the 
board, Greater Little Rock Chamber of Commerce; former Senator George J. 
Mitchell, who chaired the multiparty talks in Northern Ireland; Alan 
Sugg, president, University of Arkansas; and Skip Rutherford, executive 
vice president and director of public policy, Cranford Johnson Robinson 
Woods. Prior to his remarks, the President received the Herschel H. 
Friday Award.