[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 5 (Monday, February 7, 2000)]
[Pages 181-184]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Community
in Quincy, Illinois

January 28, 2000

    Thank you very much. I think I should begin by thanking you all for 
waiting in this cold weather all morning. Your welcome to me has been so 
warm, I don't care what it's doing outside; inside, it still feels like 
Florida to me here. I thank you very much.
    I want to begin by thanking your mayor, who flew in here with me 
today; and your fine Congressman, Lane Evans; our two United States 
Senators, Senator Durbin and Senator Fitzgerald; Congressman Shimkus; 
Congressman Hulshof; thank you all for being here. Let's give them a big 
hand here today. [Applause] Didn't Kayt do a good job? [Applause] All I 
can tell you is that when I was her age, I could not have given a speech 
anywhere near that good; so she's well on her way.
    I want to thank all the people that gave us our music: the Quincy 
High School Band, the Quincy Park Band, the Quincy Notre Dame Marching 
Band. Thank you all very much. I want to thank all the people who are 
here today who represent State and local government and the people of 
this community, the police officers, business leaders, day care 
providers, AmeriCorps members, and other public servants, the students, 
the teachers, all represented up on this stage today. And, of course, 
``Mr. Quincy'' there. Thank you very much, sir, for being here.
    Ladies and gentlemen, last night when I gave the State of the Union 
Address, I was fulfilling a requirement of the United States 
Constitution that requires the President to report every year on the 
state of the Union. Then, I wanted to come out today to the heartland of 
America to say what that was all about. Maybe we ought to change the 
Constitution, Senators and Congressmen, to require the President to come 
to Quincy the day after the State of the Union Address every year.
    You know, I never will forget the night I actually did talk to the 
mayor and Senator Paul Simon, who was not pretending to be me, and you 
were going through that horrible flood, and I monitored your progress, 
and this community became a symbol of hope and what people can do when 
they pull together. I loved hearing the mayor today again recount the 
rich heritage of your city, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, the Underground 
Railroad, the sanctuary offered so long ago to those fleeing religious 
persecution.
    I loved driving here from the airport today and remembering the bus 
tour that Vice President Gore and Hillary and Tipper and I took in 1992 
through so much of this part of America, and I saw so many of the same 
pictures all along the way: young children out with their signs; people 
saying, ``My birthday's August the 19th, too''; some people like my dog; 
some people like my cat; some people like them and don't like the 
President very much. The whole day was wonderful. It was a wonderful 
thing.
    And I think that what you show here today and every day is that when 
we join hands and join hearts, we can climb any mountain and turn back 
any tide. That is what our Nation has proved these last 7 years. And as 
I look out here on all of you, I see fresh evidence of what I said last 
night, folks: The state of our Union today is the strongest it has ever 
been, thanks to you.
    If you saw the speech last night, you know that I quoted President 
Theodore Roosevelt, one of my favorite predecessors. He's the last 
sitting President to come to Quincy. I don't know what the others were 
thinking about. [Laughter] But Roosevelt had a great quote at the dawn 
of the last century, which was a time that has a lot of parallels to our 
present-day experience. He reminded us that ``a growing nation with a 
future must always take the long look ahead.'' And what that

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means is, you know, when you folks were worried about the flood taking 
your town away, everybody concentrated and went to work. And then when 
you had all the problems and you needed the ferry and the mayor said the 
river was 6 miles wide, everybody concentrated and went to work. 
Sometimes people get in trouble not when times are tough, but when times 
seem to be so good people think they don't have to do anything, they 
don't have to worry, they don't have to work together.
    And what I want to tell you is, never in my lifetime have we had the 
combination of economic prosperity and social progress with so little 
internal crisis or external threat, and I know from my experience that 
we should be using this time wisely to deal with the long-term 
challenges and seize the long-term opportunities that the children of 
Kayt's generation will have to deal with in the new century; and that's 
what I want the American people to support.
    I want you to support us in saying we made a mistake to quadruple 
the debt of the country. Now we're paying off the debt; let's stay at 
the job until America is debt-free for the first time since 1835. The 
number of people over 65 is going to double in 30 years. I hope to be 
one of them. The baby boomers must not--we must not--impose the burden 
of our enormous numbers in retirement on our children. That means we 
need to take the interest savings from paying down the debt, put it in 
the Social Security Trust Fund, take it out to 2050, then the baby 
boomers' retirement will not impose a burden on our children and our 
children's ability to raise our grandchildren.
    We need to make sure every child in this country starts school ready 
to learn and graduates ready to succeed and has access to a college 
education. Now, I just want to mention one of your schools, because I 
hear people all the time saying, ``Aw, the President acts like we can 
turn schools around; that's not true.'' Well, it is true. I believe all 
children can learn. I believe all schools can work.
    Washington Elementary School, here in Quincy, a few years ago was in 
trouble; today, it's one of the best-performing schools in your school 
district because you've got a good principal, community involvement; 
you've got money from our program to reduce class size with more 
teachers, to expand after-school programs, and now you've got a 
successful situation. I'm telling you, I only wish Washington, DC, 
worked as well as Washington Elementary School. And I want to thank the 
principal, Terry Mickle, for being with us today. Let's give her a hand. 

[Applause]
    So, what I've asked the Congress to do is to invest more in Head 
Start, invest more in these after-school and summer school programs, 
invest more in helping more schools turn themselves around, and to give 
the American people, for the first time, a tax deduction for the cost of 
college tuition, to open the doors of college.
    The other thing that I hope we can do is to give more families the 
tools to succeed at home and work--to lengthen the life of Medicare for 
25 years; to give people on Medicare the right to a voluntary 
prescription drug program--too many of our senior citizens need this 
medicine and cannot afford it; it's the difference in what kind of life 
they can have. And I hope you will support our efforts to achieve that.
    There's just one other issue I want to mention today, because it 
affects a lot of people in this neighborhood. A few years ago, before I 
ran for President, I had the honor of coming to southern Illinois, to 
Senator Simon's hometown of Makanda, because I was head of something 
called the Lower Mississippi River Delta Development Commission. And I 
found that the counties in southern Illinois had unemployment rates as 
high as they did in the Mississippi Delta and the South, where I came 
from.
    One of the things that really bothers me about this astonishing 
economic recovery of ours is that not everybody has participated in it. 
And I think all Americans will support us in saying that this is the 
best time we'll ever have--with unemployment low and growth high--to go 
into these inner cities, into these small rural towns, into these Native 
American reservations, and help turn their economies around, and give 
people who are doing well incentives to invest there, to start 
businesses there, to put people to work there. If we don't do this now, 
we will never

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get around to it. We can bring free enterprise and hope to people who 
have never had it.
    We also have to recognize, as I said last night--and I want to 
emphasize here, in this part of America--that the farmers of this 
country by and large have not participated in this economic recovery, 
because they've had floods, they've had droughts, and after the 
economies in Asia collapsed, farm prices went in the cellar. And for the 
last 2 years, we have seen in Washington at the end of every 
congressional session, everybody scurrying around trying to come up with 
enough money to give to the farmers to keep thousands upon thousands 
upon thousands from going out of business.
    The freedom to farm bill, in bad times--the so-called freedom to 
farm bill could become a freedom to fail bill if we don't make some 
changes in it. And so I say here, in a town where most people are not 
farmers, but where we're in a part of America where most people come 
from farming stock, I want you to support us in trying to change the 
farm law in Washington so that farmers in America who work hard and are 
the most efficient in the world can make a decent living out here. And I 
hope you'll help us.
    We have to provide income assistance when farm prices and farm 
incomes fall. We have to stay, and keep, with the same loan rates for 
the USDA commodities at the 1999 levels, so we won't drive them down 
even lower. We've got to make it easier for farmers to help build up our 
environment. You know, if they conserve land, we ought to help them do 
that. And when prices are low, that's a good, cheap way to guarantee 
they can make a decent living, and we don't drive them even lower with 
overproduction.
    We ought to give them a better crop insurance program, which 
increases the subsidy we give to help people buy crop insurance. You 
know, a lot of times when you see at the end of the year, and Congress 
has to give a lot of money to farmers, it's because they can't buy 
insurance the same way businesspeople up and down this street can buy 
insurance against theft, or the building burning down. And we need to 
help farmers with that.
    So I want to ask you to support our efforts to help the farmers. If 
we're going to be one community here, we have to reach across--racial 
lines, yes, and religious lines, yes, but also to people who don't do 
what we do for a living, don't live like we do every day--they live in 
rural areas; we live in towns; they live in big cities. We've got to 
understand that we're a strong country when we all work together and we 
give everybody a chance to rise.
    I remember when you were going through this flood here. I would go 
to big cities on the east coast or the west coast, and I would say, 
``They need your help. It's going to cost a lot of money. It's going to 
be partly your money; they're part of your country.'' And people in 
cities that couldn't find Quincy on a map would cheer, because they knew 
they were part of your American family. If we can keep that attitude in 
good times, America is going to do fine.
    But I ask you--it's getting cold, and I want to let you go, but you 
just remember--if you don't remember anything else I said today, you 
remember how you were in the flood. And remember that when you have the 
chance of a lifetime to do good, you cannot be lulled into complacency.
    You have a chance--we all do--to give our children a debt-free 
America, with world-class education, that takes care of our seniors, 
that brings opportunity to people who haven't had it, that seizes the 
challenges of a new era. And we ought to take that opportunity. We owe 
it to children who will follow us 50 years from now. And I will do all I 
can to honor the spirit, the values that I have seen in this wonderful 
park today.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 2:55 p.m. in Washington Park. In his 
remarks, he referred to Mayor Charles W. Scholz of Quincy; Quincy Junior 
High School freshman class president Kayt Norris, who introduced the 
President; community activist/philanthropist Joe Bonansinga, known as 
``Mr. Quincy''; and former Senator Paul Simon. This item was not 
received in time for publication in the appropriate issue.

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