[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 6 (Monday, February 14, 2000)]
[Pages 261-264]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at a Luncheon Honoring Representative Ruben Hinojosa in McAllen

February 9, 2000

    Thank you so much. Well, Congressman, I'm afraid now that this 
meeting has been opened to the press, if the list you just read is 
widely published, every other Member of Congress will be angry at me for 
not doing as well. [Laughter] I want to say a special thanks to your 
Congressman Ruben Hinojosa and Marty, and a happy birthday to his little 
daughter, Karen. He has really done a wonderful job for you. And he 
makes it easy to be helpful.
    I want to thank Zeke and Livia Reyna for their cohosting this event. 
And I want to thank Alonzo and Yoli for having me back in their 
beautiful little home here. [Laughter] I want you to know I agreed to 
come to south Texas--the first time I wanted to come to the valley 
before I had seen this place. So the first time I came out of the 
goodness of my heart. The second time I came because I wanted to come to 
this place again. [Laughter]
    This is my third trip to the valley as President. And as the 
Congressman said, the Vice President has been here twice; Hillary was 
here recently; for all of you who were here I want to thank you, and 
thank you for giving her such a good hand. We had a great send-off on 
Sunday when she formally declared her campaign. And I think she's doing 
very well. I talked to her today, and if you can measure how well you're 
doing by how hard they attack you, which I've always thought was a 
pretty good measure--[laughter]--she's a cinch.
    So I wanted to say to all of you seriously, there are many friends I 
have in this crowd today--the country judges, Senator Truan, others--
that I have known for a long time. I first came to south Texas and then 
to the Rio Grande Valley, where I literally fell in love with this place 
almost 30 years ago now, before a lot of you in this crowd were even 
born. When I was a very young man, I realized that special quality of 
the people here, the special quality of the community. And I always 
thought if I ever had a chance to help, I would do it. You have given me 
a chance to help, and it's been an honor to do so.
    I just want to say a few words as the only politician you'll hear 
from this year who is not running for anything. [Laughter] I want to 
talk to you not just as a President but as a citizen of this country. 
When I came here to this community on the last night of my campaign in 
1992, some of you were there, and there was a great feeling of 
excitement. And we had a huge voter turnout the next day, and the Vice 
President and I were given a strong victory and a mandate to go in and 
change the direction of our country. We said then, we wanted to put the 
American people first, not Washington politics. We wanted opportunity 
for every responsible citizen. We wanted a community of all Americans, 
and we believed that Government was not the problem or the solution, but 
Government belonged to the people, and it was the job of Government to 
create the conditions and give people the tools that they need to solve 
their own problems and live their own dreams. And we've worked hard on 
that for 7 years now.
    When I was here on that night in 1992, we had a stagnant economy and 
high unemployment. Today, we have the longest economic expansion in 
history, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest Hispanic- 
and African-American unemployment rates ever recorded, and the lowest 
poverty rates in more than 20 years, the lowest female unemployment rate 
in over 40 years. We have tried to do what we said we would do.
    Our society was deeply divided. There was a riot in Los Angeles that 
year and great discontent everywhere. Today, we have the lowest crime 
rates in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, over 2 million 
children lifted out of poverty, almost 7 million people off the welfare 
rolls. We have created empowerment zones around the country in places 
like the Rio Grande Valley to give people the chance to attract economic 
investment. The college-going rate is up by about 10 percent. The 
country is moving in the right direction.
    And as I said, as the person you'll hear from this year who is not 
running for office, the great question that the American people have to 
answer when they vote for Congress,

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for Senator, for President, is: Now, what? Now, what? What are we going 
to do with this truly magic moment? Every person in this audience today 
who is over 30 years old can remember some time in your life when you 
made a mistake because you thought things were going so well, you didn't 
have to think; you didn't have to work; you didn't have to plan; and 
there was no consequence for slacking up.
    Every person here who has lived long enough can remember when you 
made a personal, a family, or a business mistake because things seemed 
to be so good that you really didn't have to do what we should all be 
doing every day with our lives, trying to get better, trying to do more, 
trying always to think about tomorrow.
    Now, what I want to say to you is the last time America had these 
conditions was in the longest economic expansion in history before this 
one, between 1961 and 1969. When I graduated from high school in 1964, 
we had high growth, low unemployment; we were on the way to passing 
civil rights legislation; everybody thought we would be able to resolve 
a lot of those difficult issues in the Congress in debate. The country 
had been heartbroken by President Kennedy's assassination, but we had 
united behind President Johnson, and he had done a masterful job of 
leading us and trying to pass legislation through the Congress, and 
everybody thought it was going to go on forever.
    Within 4 years, we had riots in the streets; the country was deeply 
divided over Vietnam; President Johnson announced he wouldn't run for 
reelection; and Martin 
Luther King and Robert Kennedy were killed. And in the Presidential 
election of 1968, a deeply troubled and divided people voted for someone 
who said he represented the silent majority, which is another way of 
saying, this country is divided between us and them. I'm with us, and 
you don't want them.
    And we have labored under that for 30 years. And for 7 years, I've 
been trying to turn this around. And I feel now, the country is moving 
in the right direction. But I want to tell you this: I'm not running for 
anything. As an American, I have been waiting for more than 30 years for 
my country to have the ability for all of us to join together hand in 
hand and build the future of our dreams for our children. That's what 
this is about. And we dare not blow this opportunity.
    You know, some people in life don't get a second chance, and those 
of us who do have to be grateful for it. Now, our whole country has been 
given a second chance, under even better conditions than existed more 
than 30 years ago before all the wheels ran off.
    So I say to you, when I come down here and talk to people about how 
we can make the Rio Grande Valley an oasis of opportunity, to me that's 
part of the long-term challenge of America. We should look at every 
place in America where there is too much poverty and too much 
unemployment and say, ``If we can't bring economic opportunity to these 
places now, when will we ever be able to do it?''
    So every place in America that has not fully participated in this 
recovery should have dramatic incentives for people to invest there, to 
create jobs there, to put people to work there, to give people a chance 
to live their dreams there. Every place in America and all the people in 
America that don't have access to health care--we should do more to 
provide more people access to health care, until everybody has it.
    That's why I said in the State of the Union I wanted to see another 
3 million children enrolled in our health insurance program and over 5 
million parents included in it. I want people, who are over 55 but not 
old enough to be on Medicare, who lose their health insurance, to be 
able to buy into Medicare. And I think they ought to have a tax credit 
so they can afford to do it, because we have to keep moving forward in 
health care. We have to keep moving forward in education. That's why I 
asked the Congress to put another billion dollars in Head Start and to 
provide enough funds for every troubled school in this country to give 
after-school or summer school programs to the kids who need it. That's 
why I want the Congress to provide enough money to repair 5,000 schools 
a year for the next 5 years and to build and modernize 6,000 more so all 
of our kids will have a chance to get a world-class education.
    And that's why I have worked so hard to help people balance the 
demands of raising their children and doing their work. That's

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why I want to increase the child care tax credit, why I want to pass an 
increase in the minimum wage, why I want to give families a $3,000 tax 
credit to care for an aging parent or a disabled member of the family--
one of the biggest problems in America today--why I think we ought to be 
proud of the fact that we've opened at least 2 years of college to 
everybody with these HOPE scholarship tax credits. But I have asked the 
Congress to give the American people a tax deduction for college tuition 
at a 28 percent rate, even if you're in the 15 percent income tax 
bracket, up to $10,000. That would guarantee that everybody in America 
could afford to go to 4 years of college if they did the work and 
learned the things they need to learn to go.
    These are important things that will bring us together. Now, let me 
just say one thing in closing. If you asked me to summarize what it is 
we did that was different over the last 7 years that worked, I could 
talk about our economic policy, which was different. We got rid of the 
deficit, and now I want to pay us out of debt for the first time since 
1835, and if we do that, all the kids here will have low interest rates 
and a strong economy. We had a different welfare reform policy. We said, 
``Able-bodied people have to work, but we're going to take care of the 
kids. We're not going to punish them.'' We had a different crime policy. 
We said we ought to take--put more police on the street and take guns 
out of the hands of criminals.
    But the most important thing we did was to say, ``We've got a 
different philosophy. We don't want to divide the American people 
anymore. We believe everybody counts; everybody should have a chance; 
we'll all do better individually if we try to help each other do better 
together.''
    So if someone came to me tonight and said, ``I am the angel sent 
from the good Lord, and even though you're having a good time being 
President, you can't finish your term. This is your last day, but I'll 
be a genie, you can have one wish,'' it would not be for all the things 
I talked to you about. It would be to create one America. It would be to 
create a climate in America where we genuinely respected one another, 
where we were genuinely committed to giving one another a chance.
    I see our former attorney general, Mr. Morales, back there. Is there 
life after politics, Dan? [Laughter] I hope that in my lifetime we will 
see a Hispanic-American Governor of Texas, President of the United 
States, on the Supreme Court, doing all these things. I hope that will 
be true of all the ethnic groups that are coming into our country and 
enriching us.
    But more important than that, even, I hope that all of our children 
will have a chance to define and live their dreams, whatever they are. 
Your Congressman is an unbelievably effective public servant. And it's 
not just because he can worry me to death until I finally say yes; it's 
because he proceeds from the right philosophy. Everybody counts. 
Everybody should have a chance. We'll all do better when we help each 
other. It's worked pretty well for America.
    I just want to ask you from the bottom of my heart--you know how I 
feel about Vice President Gore, you know what he's done here in the 
empowerment zone and other things--but the main thing I want you to 
think about, for all of us, what happens to us individually is not as 
important as the direction the country takes. And I have fought very, 
very hard to keep the poison and the division and the animosity and the 
Washington political games to a minimum in terms of their ability to 
impact you and interfere with what we were all trying to do together.
    Now it's up to you again. And all these elections, from the 
Presidency to the Senate and Congress races, the governorships, all 
these elections, they're like giant job interviews. And you have to 
decide not only who to hire but what are they going to do. And just 
remember, as they used to tell me when I was a kid growing up in 
Arkansas: When you see a turtle on a fencepost, chances are it didn't 
get there by accident. [Laughter]
    Here we are. It didn't happen by accident. And we will never forgive 
ourselves if we blow this opportunity. So instead of relaxing, we should 
bear down and lift our sights and open our hearts and hands and make 
this election a time when we seize our deepest, fondest hopes and our 
biggest dreams for our children.
    Thank you very much.

[[Page 264]]

Note: The President spoke at 2:35 p.m. at a private residence. In his 
remarks, he referred to Representative Hinojosa's wife, Martha Lopez 
Hinojosa, and their daughter Karen; Zeke and Livia Reyna and Alonzo and 
Yoli Cantu, luncheon hosts; Texas State Senator Carlos Truan; and former 
Texas State Attorney General Dan 
Morales.