[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 28 (Monday, July 17, 2000)]
[Pages 1610-1618]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the National Governors' Association Meeting in State College, 
Pennsylvania

July 10, 2000

    Thank you very much, Governor Leavitt, Governor Glendening. And 
Governor Ridge, thank you for welcoming me back to Pennsylvania and to 
Penn State. The Governor was kind enough to come to the airport, and we 
were reminiscing about the opportunity I once had to come to Penn State 
to give the commencement address. And we talked about the Creamery, and 
then I learned all the Governors had been given access to the ice cream 
at Penn State. That was the one

[[Page 1611]]

thing I was going to give you today. [Laughter]
    Let me say to all of you, the most important thing I wanted to do 
today is just come here and say thank you for the opportunities that 
we've had to work together over the last 8 years. Some of you--just a 
few now--were Governors when I served. Governor Thompson outlasted me. 
Governor Janklow made a comeback. Governor Hunt made a comeback. But 
it's been a wonderful experience for me. I look forward to your coming 
to the White House every year. And even though we're going to start the 
very important Middle East peace talks tomorrow, I didn't want to miss 
this opportunity to come to say thanks.
    I really treasure the times that I spent--I remember the first time 
you came to the White House in '93, I'd only been President a couple of 
weeks, and they were very busy times. And my staff was all obsessed with 
getting our budget to Congress and all that, and they didn't really 
understand why I wanted to spend 4 or 5 hours with the Governors. And I 
told Governor Kempthorne when he left the Senate that he was going to be 
one happy camper after the next election, and I was right, wasn't I? 
[Laughter] So I thank you.
    If you go back and look at the transcripts and the agenda of the 
1993 NGA meeting and you compare what you discussed then to what we're 
talking about today, it is obvious that our country has come a long way 
in the last 7\1/2\ years. Back then, we were all focused, as we had been 
in a couple of previous years when I was a Governor, on big and 
immediate crises, the enormous deficits, the high unemployment, the 
soaring crime, the rising welfare rolls, the cost of health care, and 
the growing number of uninsured Americans.
    At the time you came to the White House in '93, I pledged to make a 
new partnership between the State and the Federal Governments, to put 
the American people first, and to turn our country around. And we have 
done a lot of things together that you should be very proud of: welfare 
rolls the lowest in over 30 years, cut in half; the crime rate at a 30-
year low; the Children's Health Insurance Program, the largest expansion 
of health insurance for children since the enactment of Medicaid. We've 
slowed the crippling costs of Medicare and Medicaid and extended the 
life of Medicare by a quarter century. We've expanded trade, with over 
300 trade agreements. And the Governors have, without exception, always 
been there in a bipartisan way, and for that I am profoundly grateful.
    And let me thank you, especially, for the work that many of you did 
on permanent normal trading relations with China. Most of our 
constituents who call us about that--in favor, anyway--do so because 
they understand the economics of it. But I have to tell you, after the 
last 7\1/2\ years, I have a different perspective. We fought three wars 
in Asia in the last 50 years, and I believe if we adopt this trade 
agreement, it will dramatically reduce the chances that our children 
will have to fight any wars in Asia in the 21st century. So anything you 
can do to help me get it up in the Senate in the next few days, I'd be 
very grateful for, as well.
    We've worked together on the empowerment zones and other community 
development efforts. And I'd like to thank the Delta Governors here, 
which start with Governor Ryan in Illinois and go south, for the help 
that you have given me for our Delta initiative.
    The size of Government is the smallest it's been in 40 years. We've 
eliminated over 16,000 pages of regulations. The Department of 
Education, as Secretary, Governor Riley never tires of telling me, alone 
has reduced regulations by over 60 percent. And as all of you know, we 
have worked to aggressively grant waivers to States to continue to be 
laboratories of democracy. And I'll say more about that in a few 
moments.
    But finally--and I owe the Governors a lot of thanks for your 
support on this--across all of our partisan differences, you have never 
stopped supporting as a body bringing back commonsense notions of fiscal 
discipline to Washington. By cutting the deficit, expanding trade, and 
investing in our people, we've got the longest economic expansion in 
history.
    People ask me all the time--I brought the Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve, Alan Greenspan, who is here today--there was an

[[Page 1612]]

interesting article in one of the major newspapers referring to us as 
the ``Odd Couple,'' which I took, Mr. Chairman, as a compliment. 
[Laughter] I think it was, ``What's this sophisticated financial genius 
doing working this deal with this,'' as someone used to refer to me, the 
``Governor of a small southern State?'' I was so naive at the time, I 
thought it was a compliment. [Laughter] And I still do.
    But anyway, we've work together. And people ask me all the time, 
``Well, tell me about Bob Rubin or Lloyd Bentsen or Gene Sperling or 
your economic advisers, what new, stunning insight did you bring to 
Washington?'' And I always have a one-word answer, ``arithmetic.'' I 
think we brought arithmetic back. And I hope that, again across party 
lines in the years ahead, you will keep arithmetic as an element in our 
national policymaking.
    We have an enviable but unfamiliar task now. We've got to decide as 
a people, what should we do with the largest surplus in history and a 
very large projected surplus. And if I could just make one point here 
today that to me is more important than anything else I'll say down the 
road in these remarks, I believe dealing with good fortune is just as 
stern a test of a country's judgment, values, and character, as dealing 
with adversity.
    I say this over and over again, but I'll repeat it one more time. 
There's not a person in this room over 30 years of age that cannot 
remember at least one time in your life when you made a personal or a 
business mistake, not because things were going so badly but because 
things were going so well you felt there was no penalty to the failure 
to concentrate. It is just human nature. So this is a big, big moment 
for our country.
    You know what I think we ought to do. I think we ought to do what I 
said in the State of the Union. I think we ought to take on the big 
challenges and big opportunities in a responsible way; to keep the 
economy going and spread its benefits; to deal with the aging of 
America; to deal with the fact that child poverty is twice what it is 
among the elderly people; all of our kids still aren't in the best 
schools; prove that we can beat these big environmental challenges and 
grow the economy; to make America the safest big country in the world; 
to help people balance work and family better; to meet our national 
security and foreign policy challenges; to put a more human face on the 
global economy; to keep bringing people into the circle of our national 
community as we grow more diverse.
    But this election season is very important for making that decision. 
I, frankly, think that Americans should be very upbeat about this, 
because it gives us a chance to have a very positive political season. 
And I think maybe over the last 7 years we've finally purged some of the 
poison out of national politics. And I would really like to just see a 
debate where people get up and say, ``Okay, it's a big election. We have 
honest differences over everything from education and the environment 
and crime and Internet privacy rights and how to build a national 
community and the future of the courts--everything--and let's just talk 
about it and let the voters decide.''
    And let's just assume everybody running is honorable, and just say 
what the differences are and let the people decide. That's what I hope 
will happen in this election, because in our lifetime we may never get 
another chance like this. We have never had a chance like this in my 
lifetime, not ever, not once. The last time we had an economy this 
prosperous was in the 1960's. That was the last longest economic 
expansion in history. And when I graduated from high school in 1964, I 
had the feeling that I think a lot of Americans think today. I thought 
everything was on automatic; nobody could mess it up. I thought all the 
civil rights problems of the country would be solved in the courts and 
the Congress. I thought everything would be hunky-dory.
    Two years later we had riots in the streets. Four years later we had 
Dr. King and Senator Kennedy killed, and we had a President who couldn't 
seek reelection because the country was so divided. And a few months 
later, the last longest economic expansion in American history was 
history.
    So if I could just say anything, I hope when you go home you'll ask 
the American people in your own States to be really good citizens this 
year and concentrate. And just think and decide, because we may never 
have this

[[Page 1613]]

chance again in our lifetime. And it is profoundly important.
    I also believe that it's important what we do in the next 6 months. 
And I know all the press coverage is always on the fights that we have, 
but let me tell you, we actually agree on things every now and then in 
Washington. And there are a lot of things we could do in the next 6 
months that I think are pretty important. Let me just review.
    Already this year the Congress lifted the earnings limit on Social 
Security. I think that's really important. If you live to be 65 today, 
you've got a life expectancy of 82. And if things keep going the way 
they are and there's only two people working for every one person 
drawing Social Security, we ought to want some older people in the work 
force. I hope to be one of them. [Laughter] And it passed almost 
unanimously.
    I signed a bill the other day, the electronic signatures bill, 
necessitated by Article I of the United States Constitution, to make 
sure that there could be a contract using E-commerce. I see where some 
people think there's some problems with it. If there are, we'll fix them 
up. But we don't want to slow down E-commerce; we want to speed it up.
    We had the China bill passing in the House, and in the House and the 
Senate, a remarkable bill to expand our relations, trade relations with 
Africa and our neighbors in the Caribbean. So there's a chance we can 
get a lot done.
    And one of the things that I would like to just say today--and 
again, because of the season we're in, I guess my opinion can't avoid 
having some sort of partisan edge--but I'd just like to tell you where 
things are and where I hope we can go with them in the next few months.
    I think our single most important obligation now, since most 
Americans make good things happen in their own lives apart from 
government, is to try to keep this economic expansion going and to try 
to spread its benefits to people in places that have been left behind.
    Now, let me deal with the latter first. The spreading its benefits, 
for me, means passing the new markets initiative that I presented to the 
Congress, which the Speaker of the House--we've worked together on it, 
and we now have a uniform, unified bill where we took the best ideas of 
the Republicans, the best ideas of the Democrats, and we're going to 
essentially try to give people the same incentives to invest in poor 
areas in the Mississippi Delta or the Indian reservations or the inner 
cities that we now give them to invest in Latin America, Asia, and 
Africa, along with a little extra help. And we've worked very hard on 
this. It was an astonishing announcement at the White House the other 
day, with the broadest ideological spectrum of people I've ever seen in 
the Roosevelt Room at the same time. And I hope you'll help us pass 
that.
    In a larger sense, I think we've got to keep the economy going by 
hewing to the same principles of fiscal discipline that got us where we 
are. That means, I think, whatever combination of spending and tax cuts 
any candidate for any office proposes, there ought to be enough left 
over to get us out of debt over the next dozen years, to pay down the 
public debt.
    Why? Because it will keep interest rates lower. And let me just give 
you one little tax cut factoid. If keeping interest rates a percent 
lower than they otherwise would be for a decade reduces mortgage 
payments alone in the United States by $250 billion, keeping interest 
rates lower than they otherwise would be for a decade by just one 
percent amounts to a $250 billion tax cut on mortgage payments alone. 
That doesn't count car loans, college loans, business loans, which are 
obviously very important because you want the cost of capital for 
borrowing for business expansion to be as low as possible for obvious 
economic reasons. So I think that's very important.
    That's one of the reasons I supported the Vice President when he 
said we ought to lock away the Medicare taxes the way we lock away the 
Social Security taxes. A lot of the surplus has, in effect, been 
overstated, and a lot of our deficits in past years were understated 
because the taxes from Social Security and Medicare were producing more 
money than we were spending every year, as all of you know, and we used 
to talk about around here all the time.
    So now we said, ``Okay, we're not going to spend the Social Security 
tax money.

[[Page 1614]]

We're going to use it when it comes in to pay the debt down.'' And 
that's what I think we ought to do with Medicare. Now, in addition to 
that, because I think we have a big aging crisis, I believe that we 
ought to take the interest savings from debt reduction by doing that--
something we didn't do before--and put it into Social Security and 
Medicare, and if you did that, you could take them on out beyond the 
life of the baby boom generation.
    And by the way--let's get to the numbers--that's about 20 percent of 
the projected surplus. It's about $400 billion of the $1.9 trillion 
projected on-budget surplus. So it's a great hedge in case the money 
doesn't show up. Now, once we agree to do that, I think we've got a 
great opportunity to decide as a nation how to spend the rest of it, 
whether it should be on tax cuts or investment, or what the mix should 
be.
    The budget I presented for this year has significant new investments 
in education, health care, research and development, and defense and 
foreign policy and the environment, especially meeting the challenge of 
climate change. But it also provides targeted tax relief for long-term 
care, child care, college tuition, retirement savings, and easing the 
marriage penalty. But the main thing is, it leaves $500 billion in a 
fund for America's future that would be completely unencumbered for the 
next President and the next Congress. Because I think it would not be 
responsible for me to propose how to spend all that money--if anybody 
cares what my opinion is, it'll be worth that and a quarter will get you 
half a soda pop after next year, but I will be glad to give it. But I 
don't think it would be responsible to propose it. So I've decided to 
just leave it there.
    But I'm very concerned about the way we're moving in Congress. And I 
just want to point out, the congressional majority, with some support 
from Members of my party, as well, has taken a sort of an incremental 
approach to this, starting with tax cuts. Now, none of the tax cuts 
proposed individually would bust the budget. But if you add them all up 
and you combine that with the proposals that are out there for next 
year, that are, in effect, going to be commitments, since they're part 
of the election contract, it would exhaust every dime of the projected 
surplus and then some. And I believe that would lead to a rise in 
interest rates and a slow-down in the economy and, ultimately, to fewer 
revenues over the long run and less investment for things like adding a 
prescription drug benefit to Medicare. I'll give you an example.
    This week the Senate is going to vote on repealing the estate tax, 
and there is some speculation that it might pass by a veto-proof 
majority. Now, one reason is the full benefit of the estate tax relief 
we provided in 1997 has not been--it was phased-in over a period of 
years, so that hadn't been felt by the taxpayers. We provided some 
estate tax relief in 1997--I really didn't think it was enough; I think 
there should be more, but I don't believe we should completely repeal 
it. It cost $100 billion in the first 10 years, in today's terms, and 
$750 billion in the second 10 years; 100 percent of the benefits go to 2 
percent of the American families; and only a small fraction of those are 
those that really need the help--the farmers, the family farmers, and 
the small business people. You could take them out altogether for much 
less money and do what we say we want to do.
    And I think it's important to point out--one man I know who is a 
billionaire called me the other day and said, ``Why are you doing this 
for me?'' I said, ``I'm not. One-tenth of one percent of the American 
people would get half of the benefits of the bill.'' Now, if you're 
philosophically opposed to the estate tax, then it's just a matter of 
principle. But if it's a matter of economics and you're sympathetic with 
small businesses and family farmers, there is a way to get this done for 
much less money and, by the way, give more relief to others. I mean, you 
could argue that the rates are too high, because they're higher than the 
maximum income tax rates now, something that didn't used to be the case. 
There are lots of options here, but repealing it costs a lot of money.
    So what I asked the Congress to do--and they also want to pass a 
marriage penalty relief bill. But I think for us to repeal the estate 
tax before we raise the minimum wage or give a tax relief to low income 
working families with lots of kids or give a tax deduction for college 
tuition or increase the child care credit or adopt a long-term care tax 
credit

[[Page 1615]]

is a huge mistake. First of all, I think it reflects a wrong set of 
priorities, but it puts us on a--then people will say, ``Well, we did 
that. Now we've got to do all this,'' and pretty soon, before you know 
it, you've spent more money than you meant to, and we're back in the 
soup again.
    So what we need to do is get everybody together and figure out who 
wants what and what we can afford to do and do it in a way that allows 
us to keep the fiscal discipline, to stay with arithmetic.
    Now, I asked Congress to compromise with me. I basically said, 
``Let's do a Medicare prescription drug benefit for $250 billion and a 
tax reduction package focused on the marriage penalty relief,'' which is 
very important to the Republican majority, ``for the same amount of 
money. Let's set aside the Medicare Trust Fund money, and let's just 
save the rest and adopt a good budget this year.''
    Now, this week Congress is also going to vote on the marriage 
penalty. I hope that they will consider this, because we really have a 
lot to gain here by doing this in a balanced way. The surpluses are 
there because of fiscal discipline. And let me just say, one big thing 
that I want to thank you for, because a lot of you had to bear the 
burden of it, was the reduction in the growth of Medicare and Medicaid. 
Since we made some changes in that--and it was growing at 3 times the 
rate of inflation when I took office--we've reduced projected Federal 
health expenditures by over half a trillion dollars and extended 
Medicare solvency through 2025.
    This is something very few people know. About 30 percent of the 
improved budget outlook included in the midsession review--that is, 
about 30 percent of this extra trillion dollars in surplus that is 
projected--comes from lower spending in Medicare and Medicaid, thanks to 
your efforts and ours to reform the programs and reduce fraud and waste.
    So I think spending these dollars more efficiently is good for the 
economy. But I also want to say, investing more can be good, too, if 
it's done wisely. I recommended that we put $40 billion back into these 
programs, because we actually cut them more than we meant to. Back when 
we did the Balanced Budget Act in '97, we agreed that this is what we 
wanted to save, and we got a list of programs from the Congressional 
Budget Office necessary to save it, and it actually--they saved a lot 
more money than we thought. And it wound up putting undue burdens on the 
providers. So I think we've got to give a little of this money back over 
the next 10 years, and I hope that you will support that.
    But we also know that there's some other needs there. Children 
without health insurance often don't get glasses or treatments for ear 
infections. That limits their ability to learn. We know that adults 
without health insurance are 50 to 70 percent more likely to be 
hospitalized for treatable conditions, running the cost of health care 
up. We know that seniors who can't afford prescription drugs are more 
likely to end up in nursing homes, running their quality of life down 
and their health care costs up. And when that happens, it means the 
States pay Medicaid nursing home bills, because Medicare doesn't pay the 
prescription drug bill in the first place. Now, that's why I proposed 
that we have expansions of the health care program. And that's why I set 
aside over $250 billion over 10 years for this voluntary prescription 
drug benefit.
    If we were starting the Medicare program today, we'd never set it 
up, none of you would, without a drug benefit. Thirty-five years ago, 
when we started Medicare, medicine was about doctors and hospitals. 
Doctors were making house calls still, and hospitals weren't very 
expensive, and the whole thing was different than it is today. And the 
pharmaceutical revolutions that we've seen in our lifetime didn't exist.
    And let me say--let me just tie this again to the aging of America. 
This Medicare prescription drug issue is a big issue today. It will be 
twice the issue in 10 years. The sequencing of the human genome is the 
beginning of a biomedical revolution the extent of which we cannot 
imagine. I believe that those of you who have children who are like my 
child, in college and about to go out and start their lives, I think it 
is almost certain that their children, the children of people in college 
today, will be born with a life expectancy of 90 years. And keep in 
mind, that will

[[Page 1616]]

include those who die of violence, accident, and things of that kind.
    And we're going to have to just think about getting older in a whole 
different way. And we'll never be able to have the kind of society we 
want unless we can have shared and equal benefits and access to the 
biomedical revolution manifested in the development of these new drugs.
    Now, what I recommended was a voluntary program; the prices would be 
set by competition, not by Government price controls. But I think it is 
the only thing that will work if, like me, you believe everybody who 
needs it ought to have access to it.
    The Congress passed a bill that would set up a private insurance 
plan and basically covered the cost of people up to 150 percent of the 
poverty line, but that's only $12,600 for an individual and $16,500 for 
a couple. And it leaves out over half the people who need drugs today 
who can't afford them.
    And in addition to that, the health insurance companies--and all of 
you know they haven't always been my biggest advocates; I mean, we've 
fought about everything--but the health insurance companies say the 
thing won't fly, that they cannot put together insurance policies that 
will work that will be affordable. And there was an article in one of 
the newspapers within the last 48 hours that said that one of our States 
has a program like the one that the House passed, and not a single 
insurance company has offered a policy under it, because they don't want 
to participate in something that's not real.
    So I want to make these two points. I hope I can make an agreement, 
an honorable agreement, an honorable compromise--like the Balanced 
Budget Act of '97, like the Welfare Reform Act in '96--on tax relief and 
the Medicare drug program. But I think we ought to leave a huge chunk of 
this money to the next President and the next Congress. And I think we 
ought to commit ourselves to saving another big chunk of it, no matter 
what. For us to commit all the projected income of the country over the 
next 10 years is a mistake.
    If I asked you, every one of you in this room, ``What's your 
projected income over the next 10 years, and how comfortable are you 
that you're going to have that money,'' and you just think about it 
right now and settle on something you've got 80 percent confidence in, 
and I asked you to come up here right now and sign a contract committing 
every penny of your projected income for the next 10 years, would you do 
it?
    Now, this ought not to be a partisan issue. We shouldn't do this. 
And everybody who--people in my party, everybody that proposes a 
spending program, everybody that proposes a tax cut program, whatever 
they're proposing, it all ought to add up, and there ought to be a good 
chunk of safety net left in there, because that money may or may not be 
there.
    And the number one thing we've got to do is keep this engine going, 
because most Americans do most of what they do without direct contact 
with the Government, and we want them to be able to succeed.
    So I've got a lot of hope that we can still get something good done 
in this last session of Congress. I have a lot of hope that we can pass 
the drug program. I think we ought to increase the health care coverage 
under the Children's Health Insurance Program to cover the parents of 
the CHIP kid. I think that we ought to make sure, however, that we don't 
see a revival of the idea of shifting the cost of uncompensated care to 
the States, and I think that's what a prescription drug block grant 
would do.
    So you all have to weigh in on this. You can do what you think, but 
you just think about what we could do for health care if we had a 
Medicare prescription drug program, if the parents of CHIP kids could 
buy into CHIP. And if people between the ages of 55 and 65, with a 
modest tax credit, could buy into Medicare, we could cover the 25 
percent of the uninsured people in America, the ones who need it most, 
and we could increase the length and quality of life of our seniors. So 
I hope we can do that.
    Now, let me just say a few words about a couple of specific issues 
of concern to you. I want to thank you for the work you've done with the 
CHIP program. We've now got over 2 million kids enrolled. I'm especially 
proud of the States that have found innovative ways to overcome the 
problems of signing kids up. And I always hate to mention some, for 
failure of not mentioning others, but I would like to acknowledge, for 
example, that Ohio

[[Page 1617]]

has changed its system to make it easier for CHIP parents to mail in 
forms that are simpler. Indiana has actually gone out to schools and 
child care centers and had a remarkable amount of success in signing 
people up. Virtually every State has done something innovative.
    But the money is there to sign the rest of the kids up. There's 
another 2 million or 3 million kids we could get signed up. Some people 
in Congress think that, because it's been out there and not spent, it 
should be taken away. This is another version of what happened when 
there was a proposal to take back billions of TANF dollars from welfare 
reform. Now, the money is the direct result of the success we've had in 
the TANF case of moving people from welfare to work. I think it ought to 
be left with the States.
    I think States should use it to finish the job of welfare reform, 
making sure families don't lose Medicaid when they leave welfare for 
work, making sure the dollars help families still on the rolls move into 
the work force. But welfare reform's success, it seems to me, shouldn't 
be turned against the States. It should be used to make sure that people 
that are still falling through the cracks have a chance to make it, as 
well.
    And I want to thank those of you that are responding to this. I 
mention, in particular, Washington State did something that I read about 
that impressed me. They found that they had cut a lot of families off 
Medicaid erroneously when they returned to work, and they actually 
chased them all down to sign them up again, individually. And that's the 
sort of thing that I think the Congress should be reminded of, people in 
either party who think that this money should be taken back.
    So I hope we can do more with CHIP and do more with welfare reform. 
And I know one of the things you've been waiting for us to do--and 
Secretary Shalala has already mentioned this, I think--is to send out 
the guidance on applying for CHIP waivers. A lot of you have innovative 
ideas to use this Children's Health Insurance Program to cover more 
people. And that guidance will come out before the end of the month, and 
I just want to urge you to make the most of it.
    The one area in terms of social indicators where our country cannot 
claim to be better off today than it was 8 years ago--and the only one, 
as far as I know--is that a higher percentage of our people are without 
health insurance. And the only way I can figure out to do anything about 
it is to make the CHIP program work better, ultimately cover the parents 
of the CHIP kids, and do something about the people who are not old 
enough for Medicare but have lost their health insurance at work.
    We need more waivers, but we also will have to provide more 
resources. The Governors have advocated building on CHIP, a lot of you 
have. And I have strongly supported it. My 2001 budget sets aside $110 
billion over the next 10 years for health insurance for those parents 
and their kids and others. And as I said, if we do this, we can cover 
another quarter of the uninsured people in America.
    Now, this doesn't have anything to do with the surplus. This is in 
the regular budget. This is what I proposed in the beginning, so I'm not 
double-counting any of this money I just told you. And again, it's 
something that I hope we can do in a bipartisan way. I hope we can pass 
a good education budget for you, in a bipartisan way.
    But I'd like to end where I began. I thank you for the last 8 years. 
I thank you for the role you played in turning this country around. I 
ask you to help ensure an election season which is positive, open, and 
vigorous about the real and honest differences, but devoid of the poison 
that has too often clouded the judgment of everybody involved in the 
public process. I think we can have that kind of an election. And it 
would be good for America.
    I ask you to help me make the most of this next 6 months, make the 
progress we can make but do nothing--nothing--that would undermine the 
fiscal discipline that got us to this remarkable dance. And if we can do 
that, I think that we will be unbelievably well-positioned. I think the 
greatest days of this country are still ahead; I think all the stuff 
that's happened in the last 8 years is just a prelude. I think that what 
will happen in information technology, what will happen positively in 
globalization--I think we'll see

[[Page 1618]]

a digital bridge instead of a digital divide--I think that all these 
things will happen if we don't forget our fundamental responsibilities.
    And I'm looking forward to observing and to being a responsible 
citizen after the next 6 months. And meanwhile, I will do everything I 
can to get everything I can done in the time we have remaining.
    The only other thing I would say to all of you is, we have some 
Congressmen in both parties that are afraid if we don't have everything 
left to fight about, we won't have anything left to fight about, and 
that's not true. Now, we could pass everything I proposed today and 
still have plenty left to fight about in the election.
    So I ask everybody to take a deep breath, be grateful for the 
prosperity we have, understand the enormous responsibility it puts on 
us, and let's do what we can to make the most of it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 2:20 p.m. in President's Hall at the Penn 
Stater Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to the following Governors: 
Michael O. Leavitt of Utah, NGA chairman; Parris N. Glendening of 
Maryland, NGA vice chairman; Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania; Tommy G. 
Thompson of Wisconsin; William J. Janklow of South Dakota; James B. 
Hunt, Jr., of North Carolina; Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho; and George H. 
Ryan of Illinois. The President also referred to former Secretaries of 
the Treasury Robert E. Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen; TANF, Temporary 
Assistance for Needy Families; and the Electronic Signatures in Global 
and National Commerce Act, Public Law 106-299.