[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 40 (Monday, October 9, 2000)]
[Pages 2304-2308]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Uncommon Women on Common Ground Conference in 
Jacksonville

October 4, 2000

[The President's remarks are joined in progress.]

    The President. ----and when the actors were supposed to get their 
curtain call, they pulled back the curtains and all the real people were 
standing there. It was an amazing thing. But Kerry, you know her 
husband, Andrew, is in my Cabinet, of course. And her mother is a great 
friend of mine, and one of her brothers served in Congress with me 
during my Presidency. But she has done an astonishing thing here, and I 
urge you to look at the book and read it. It's really amazing. There are 
a lot of brave women out there around the world, doing things that 
stiffen the spine when you read about it.
    Let me just say a few words about a couple of women's issues that I 
think are quite important. And I hadn't really prepared anything to say, 
but we're close to an election in which I believe the American people 
will make choices which, whether we consciously are aware of it or not, 
will shape a lot of how we live for the next 20 years. And one of the 
biggest challenges we face, I think, is how to broaden the circle of 
prosperity to include people that aren't part of it and then how to 
figure out how both to continue to open opportunities for women and 
allow people to balance work and family, because the most important work 
of society is still raising children, and so we have to figure out how 
to balance these things.
    And the truth is that our country is better at creating jobs, 
starting businesses, and expanding the economy than nearly any country 
in the world. In the last several years, we've been, by far, better than 
anybody else in the world, but if you look over a long period of time, 
we do pretty well with that. But we lag significantly behind a lot of 
other countries in figuring out how to balance work and family.

[[Page 2305]]

    So I would just like to say that, for whatever it's worth, I think 
the family and medical leave law has now allowed some 25 million people 
to take some time off when a baby is born or a family member is sick 
without losing their jobs. I think it should be expanded. A lot of you 
are small-business people. The big debate that we always have is, how 
burdensome will it be to small business if we expand it? Should we 
exempt smaller businesses? If so, where should the cutoff be at number 
of employees, and what kind of leave should we have?
    But that's something I hope all of you will sort of debate, discuss, 
and go forward with, because when we finally--it was the first bill I 
signed as President and, I think, still one of the finest pieces of 
legislation I've ever been involved in. It's made a huge difference. 
Still, after all these years, it's not unusual at all for me in any 
given crowd of any kind of people to have at least one person come up to 
me and thank me for the family leave law and explain how it's affected 
their lives. It's already happened to me once today, and it happens 
everywhere.
    But it's still rather limited in its reach. And we've got to decide 
what to do about it. But it's important. It's an important part of 
balancing work and family.
    Another, I think, very important thing is strengthening the equal 
pay laws that the country has. I've got some legislation before the 
Congress now I've been trying hard to pass for more than a year to 
strengthen the equal pay laws. And there's an even more extensive bill 
up there that goes beyond what I have proposed, that maybe should be a 
law, but I can't even pass what I've got up there. [Laughter]
    And again, the issue is, how much can we do on this? What kind of 
burden is it? Is it a burden for small businesses? And I think a lot of 
women who are active in business are in a unique position to offer the 
right kind of perspective. But the main thing is, we need to keep taking 
action on this, because there is still, even though we've made dramatic 
progress since President Kennedy signed the first legislation, there's 
still significant differences in providing equal pay for equal work. 
There's still a big gender gap in access to high-tech jobs. There's 
still a significant gender gap in people who hold positions of big 
responsibility in corporate America. Maybe Cathy talked about that a 
little bit; I don't know. But we've got to--there's a lot of these 
challenges that are out there, and I believe the National Government 
does have a responsibility, at least on the equal pay front.
    And for the whole time I've been President, I've had six or seven 
women Cabinet members, including the first female Secretary of State and 
the first female Attorney General, who is from here in Florida. So we've 
tried to set a good example, but I think that these are very important 
issues that we will have to continue to work on.
    Then there's a whole big cluster of health care issues that I think 
need a lot of emphasis. I've got legislation before the Congress now to 
spend a couple of hundred million dollars to provide medical care to 
poor women with breast or cervical cancer who otherwise wouldn't be able 
to access medical care. I think that's important.
    But there are a lot of big issues here that I think need tending to. 
This whole issue of whether we should have a Patients' Bill of Rights or 
not, that essentially says you have a right to see a specialist if your 
doctor says you should; you have a right to keep your treatment if 
you're undergoing chemotherapy or you're pregnant and you change jobs 
and your employer changes health care providers, you should still be 
able to keep the same physician during treatment; and if you get hit and 
you have to go to the emergency room, you get to go to the closest one, 
not the one that is otherwise covered by your HMO; and if you get hurt 
really badly by a bad decision, you can sue. Otherwise, it's a bill of 
suggestions, not a bill of rights. This is a big issue.
    Now, a lot of the HMO's are not for it because they think it will 
add to the cost of health care. And if you provide health care for your 
employees, you've got to be concerned about that. All I can tell you is, 
I have two pieces of evidence that it's affordable. One is, I put it 
into effect for all people covered by Federal health plans--Medicare, 
Medicaid, Federal Employees Health Insurance, military's and the 
military retirees'--and it's cost us a buck a month a premium.

[[Page 2306]]

    The Congressional Budget Office of the Republican majority 
estimated, even though they won't support it, that it would cost less 
than $2 a month a premium, about $1.80. And their argument is that the 
population as a whole is a little bit higher risk than those that are 
insured by the Federal Government, which may or may not be so, but 
there's an argument for that. But anyway, I'd pay $2 a month so that you 
could go to the nearest emergency room if--God forbid--you got hit by a 
car leaving here. But this is a big family health issue, and there are 
others. So I just would point that out.
    Then, let me say, something else that I think may not be seen as a 
women's issue but I think it's quite important is, what are the 
implications of the human genome project, and how does it relate to the 
explosion in Internet and computer technology? This is going to affect 
all of you. Young women coming home from the hospital within the next 
decade, I predict, will give birth to babies with a life expectancy of 
90 years. I believe we'll move pretty quickly from where we are now, 77, 
to 90.
    Now, secondly--and the reason that will happen is not because 
everybody will start having perfect babies but because you'll get a gene 
map. Mothers and fathers will get gene maps of their kids that will tell 
them what their problems are. And then over the course of their life, a 
lot of those problems will be solved because we'll be doing experiments 
we haven't done and people will know to take their kids in for the 
solution. Or if you have, for example, a 50 percent probability, your 
baby does, of developing some kind of cancer in his or her thirties, 
you'll also learn that there are five or six things you can do that will 
cut the odds of that dramatically. So it will be a good thing.
    Simultaneously, all your health records are going to be on 
somebody's computer, and so are all your finance records. How do we 
enable the people that do business, how do we enable the Internet 
economy to flourish, and protect your rights of privacy? I think you 
ought to be able to say so before somebody gets into the health or 
financial records. And working through that is going to be a big issue, 
and it will affect women, particularly those that are trying to manage a 
home and a work life. And they go to basically the core of family values 
in our society.
    So they will provide a--that will be a big challenge, too. And I've 
sent some legislation up to Congress--I don't think it will pass this 
year because it's controversial, because some of the people involved 
don't think we ought to have as many protections as are in my bill for 
the privacy of medical and financial records. But it's something, no 
matter who the President is, you all have to deal with. And it ought not 
to be a partisan issue. It ought to be something that we deal with 
almost in a family way, as well as a business way. But it's an issue 
that I would think that the women of America who are in the work force 
would have a special concern about. And so I hope you'll think about 
that.
    So those are just some of the things that I wanted to mention. I 
think that we're moving into what should be the most exciting and 
prosperous time in the history of the country, if we make the right 
decisions. And I'll just mention two big ones that I think are 
important.
    I think we ought to keep paying the debt down, because I think one 
of the reasons that we were able to--for example, our Small Business 
Administration in the last 8 years tripled the number of loans to women 
entrepreneurs over the previous 8 years. But one of the reasons we were 
able to do it is, the economy was growing against the backdrop of lower 
interest rates. And it's very significant, because if you pay the debt 
down over the next 12 years--basically, if you keep interest rates a 
percent lower over the next decade--it means lower business loans, more 
business investment, more growth. It also means about $390 billion in 
lower home mortgages, $30 billion in lower car payments, $15 billion in 
lower college loan payments.
    And I would like to see it become an American commitment, not a 
party commitment, because I think it makes sense. In a global economy, 
where all these financial markets are global, fiscal conservatism should 
be embraced by the more liberal and the more conservative party as good 
economics and good social policy, because if you keep interest rates 
lower, obviously you spread the benefits of the economy wider. So I 
think

[[Page 2307]]

that is very, very important, and I would hope that everybody would 
agree.
    The other thing that I think is hopeful is that we are engaged in a 
massive national debate now about how we can go about providing world-
class education to all of our children. The only thing I can tell you is 
this: In 1979 Hillary and I started working on these issues when Bob 
Graham was the Governor of Florida. We did a lot of work together. And 
then when Lawton Chiles became Governor, he and I were very close, and 
we worked on these things. We didn't really know 20 years ago what we 
know now about how to have uniformity of excellence in education and 
whether every failing school could be turned around. We now know that 
they can be turned around and that all children can learn. It's not just 
a slogan.
    And it's actually happening out there. In the last--in the decade of 
the nineties, reading and test scores went up. The dropout rate went 
down. The college-going rate is at an all-time high. The number of kids 
taking advance placement increased by two-thirds. The number of Hispanic 
kids taking advanced placement increased by 300 percent. The number of 
African-American kids increased by 500 percent, taking advanced 
placement tests.
    I was in a school in Harlem the other day where 2 years ago--a grade 
school--2 years ago, 80 percent of the kids were doing reading and math 
below grade level--2 years ago. Today, 74 percent of the kids are doing 
reading and math at or above grade level--in only 2 years. They've got a 
new principal. They adopted a school uniform policy. They adopted a high 
expectations/high accountability policy. They lowered the class sizes. 
They cleaned up the school, and they turned it around in 2 years.
    I was in a poor school in western Kentucky a couple months ago, that 
4 years ago was one of the worst schools in Kentucky. Over half the kids 
were on school lunch programs. They were desperately poor. And in 4 
years they went from--listen to this--12 percent of the kids doing 
reading at or above grade level to almost 60 percent; 5 percent of the 
kids doing math at or above grade level to 70 percent; zero percent of 
the kids doing science at or above grade level to 63 percent.
    And the trick for America is not--this is not rocket science now. 
People know how to do this. This is happening. It happens in Florida. It 
happens in every State in the country. And what we have not learned how 
to do is how to do it on a uniform basis.
    And so I hope that one of the things that will be debated--I spent--
both Hillary and I probably spent more time in the 12 years before we 
came here working in schools than anything else we did. And I still 
think it's the key to the future of the country. You've got the largest 
and most diverse student population in the history of America, the first 
time we've had more kids in school than we did in the baby boom 
generation after World War II. And the good news is the schools are 
getting better, and the real good news is we actually know how to turn 
them all around. But it requires more than even a debate in the 
Presidential election. It requires much more than legislation from 
Congress. It also requires people's involvement.
    But for whatever it's worth to those of you that are involved in the 
schools, we're now awash in evidence that this is a problem we can 
solve, and therefore, when you have that, there's no excuse for not 
solving it. So I urge all of you, in whatever way you can, to make your 
contribution to that.
    I've already talked longer than I meant to. And I didn't have any 
idea what I was going to say when I got here. [Laughter] But I'm glad I 
got invited. There is one thing I'd like to say officially--I don't know 
how many of you are here from Dade County in south Florida, but they had 
the worst weather down there yesterday that I have seen in the 17 years 
I've been going down there. And there's still a lot of serious flooding. 
The Governor has asked for an emergency declaration, and we're reviewing 
it now, and I hope to have it issued shortly. But we're going to do what 
we can to help. But for those of you who have friends and neighbors down 
there who don't know, it was really bad--I mean, really bad.
    And among other things, for all us political junkies, the flood, 
lightning and wind knocked out the cable system last night, and

[[Page 2308]]

we had to race to another place that had satellite TV so I could see the 
debate. [Laughter] But there are a lot more serious problems down there, 
and we're going to do what we can to help them.
    I want to thank all the people here on the platform for putting this 
together. And I want to thank you for meeting here. Thank you for having 
me. Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. at the Prime Osborne Convention 
Center. In his remarks, he referred to author Kerry Kennedy Cuomo and 
her husband, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew M. Cuomo, 
her mother, Ethel Kennedy, and her brother, Joseph P. Kennedy II; Cathy 
Bessant, president, Bank of America (Florida); and Gov. Jeb Bush of 
Florida. The transcript released by the Office of the Press Secretary 
did not include the complete opening remarks of the President. A tape 
was not available for verification of the content of these remarks.