[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 44 (Monday, November 6, 2000)]
[Pages 2676-2680]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the Congregation of Shiloh Baptist Church

October 29, 2000

    The President. Thank you. Good morning.
    Audience members.  Good morning.
    The President. Reverend Smith, Mrs. Smith, honored guests, members 
of the church family. All I could think about for the first 30 minutes 
is how much I wished I were in the choir today. [Laughter]
    I want to say how honored I am to be here, and to be here with so 
many members of the White House staff, including two ministers--some 
would argue we need more--Zina Pierre, who works in the Office of 
Intergovernmental Affairs, and Kevin Johnson, the Deputy Director of our 
Community Empowerment Board, under the Vice President. We also have a 
lot of other folks, as you know, who are here who wanted me to come 
here, I think, so they could be sure to show up. [Laughter]
    I, too, want to thank Lorraine Miller, one of your members and one 
of my advisors, for all she did to make this possible, and all the 
others who have been mentioned. I want to thank this church for your 
outreach, to love not in word, but, indeed, in truth. I want to say a 
special word of appreciation to my friend, your delegate in Congress, 
Eleanor Holmes Norton, for being here.
    I've known Eleanor a long time, and we have worked closely together 
since I was trying to become President in 1992. We have shared high 
moments and low moments. We shared a disappointment last week when the 
Supreme Court said the people of DC shouldn't have full voting rights--I 
believe you should, and I always have.
    But I think we can take a lot of pride, as your pastor just said, 
about the economic revitalization of the District of Columbia, and I am 
very honored that I could work with Eleanor to alleviate the 
extraordinary financial burdens on this city and have the National 
Government pay for the responsibilities that in any other circumstance 
would

[[Page 2677]]

be done by a State government. And we took that off your shoulders; I 
think it will help.
    I am proud of the DC College Access Act, which now has 3,000 of your 
young people going to college in other places for low in-State tuition. 
And I am still hoping we will succeed in passing our new markets program 
and some extra incentives for people to invest in the District of 
Columbia, to bring it all the way back.
    So, I thank you, Eleanor. I thank you for the work that you've done 
to get Frederick Douglass' home established as a national memorial, and 
the preservation of the Carter G. Woodson home, which is near here, just 
up the street, I think.
    This is a very kind of emotional day for me. I was thinking back--
this is the first time in 26 years I haven't been on the ballot 
somewhere. [Laughter] And so I started kind of visiting around almost 27 
years ago. And when you were singing and having your service, I was both 
here and my mind was wandering back over those 26 years. I thought of a 
time once when I was in an African-American service at night in the 
Mississippi Delta, in 1976, early. And it began to hail. And the 
building I was in was a tin-roof building. And it began to hail just as 
a lady got up to sing ``If I Can Help Somebody''--a cappella. She had 
perfect pitch, and she just kept on singing through the hail.
    And I thought of so many other things that have happened over the 
years, because I have had the opportunity to be blessed in churches like 
this one--to come as a fellow believer and a child of God and a fellow 
sinner, to say, thank you. So, thank you. Thank you very much.
    I don't know what ex-Presidents do exactly. I wonder if anybody will 
ever ask me back when I leave. He finally did--Reverend Smith did. 
[Laughter] One of my predecessors told me that he was lost for the first 
4 months after he left office because when he walked in a room, nobody 
played a song anymore. [Laughter] He was never sure where he was. 
[Laughter] I am quite sure of where I am today. And I thank you.
    I thank you for giving me the chance to serve these last 8 years, to 
give America a government that looks more like America; for working to 
create an economy that helps all Americans. I am very proud that we have 
achieved the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment ever 
recorded since we've been keeping these statistics, and that we have 
record homeownership and that we've tripled the number of small business 
loans to minorities. And we have the lowest crime rate in 27 years, and 
the African-American teen birth rate has dropped one-third since 1991--
one-third.
    We have 2 \1/2\ million children with health insurance who didn't 
have it; over 90 percent of our children immunized against serious 
childhood diseases for the first time in the whole history of the 
country. For the first time ever, African-American children are 
graduating from high school at the same rate as white students; the 
number of African-American children taking advanced placement tests up 
500 percent over the last 6 years, 300 percent in the last 3 years 
alone.
    And all over the country--this relates to something that's in the 
pastor's letter today, which I urge you to read. I'll say more about it 
in a minute, but all over the country one of the most hopeful things is 
that schools where children weren't learning are being turned into 
places where children are learning.
    I was in a little town in western Kentucky the other day where, 3 
years ago, this grade school I visited was one of the worst schools in 
the State--12 percent of the children reading at or above grade level; 5 
percent doing math at or above grade level; none of them doing science, 
not one, at or above grade level. Three years later, 57 percent doing 
reading at or above grade level; 70 percent doing math at or above grade 
level; 63 percent doing science at or above grade level. You can turn 
these things around.
    I was in Harlem the other day in an elementary school where 2 years 
ago, 80 percent of the children were reading and doing math below grade 
level; two years later, 74 percent doing reading and math at or above 
grade level. All children can learn, and we can turn these schools 
around. They can be made to work.
    So I'm grateful. I'm grateful that we've had the longest economic 
expansion in history and that everybody has gone along for the ride. I'm 
grateful that we have the lowest

[[Page 2678]]

crime rate in 27 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, and the 
environment is cleaner, and we've got more kids with health insurance, 
and the schools are getting better. I'm grateful for all that.
    But in America our public life must always be about tomorrow. It's 
very interesting to go back and study the founding of this country and 
to read very carefully the words of the Founders. Look, these guys 
weren't stupid. They knew God created somebody besides white male 
property owners. [Laughter] They weren't stupid. You ought to read--
Thomas Jefferson just wrote one book, called ``The Notes on The State of 
Virginia.'' I have a copy, original copy, going back to the late 1700's. 
This is before he was ever President. And he has a stunning little, one-
paragraph indictment of slavery. So they weren't fools; they knew what 
they were doing.
    They were creating a system which would force people to slowly give 
up their hypocrisy and, as we broadened our horizons, would force us to 
keep going further and further toward God--toward the good, toward the 
common humanity that is in us all. So what did they pledge their lives, 
their fortunes, and their sacred honor to? To form a more perfect Union. 
Not a perfect Union; we don't get to do that on this Earth. But it would 
always become more perfect.
    Now, that's what this election season is about. I'm now 54 years 
old. In my lifetime, we have never gone to the polls, ever, with so much 
economic prosperity, so much social progress, so little domestic crisis, 
so few foreign threats to our security--ever, not once. Now, I argue 
that that imposes on us a profound responsibility.
    This is more a subject for a preacher than a political leader, but 
it occurs to me that everybody who is over 30 in this congregation today 
can remember at least once in your life when you made a huge mistake, 
not because things were going so badly but because things were going so 
well, you thought you didn't have to concentrate anymore. Right? 
Everybody who has lived a certain length of time has made one of those 
mistakes.
    So I grew up in the civil rights era and the Vietnam war era; I 
remember the energy crisis; I remember the hostages in Iran; I remember 
all the troubles this country has had just in my lifetime. So here we 
are. We went from record deficits to record surpluses. We went from 
quadrupling the debt to paying the debt down. We're all going forward 
together, and here we are--we have the first election of the 21st 
century. And all the evidence is, a lot of people don't think, as the 
pastor's letter said, they don't understand what the differences are, 
and maybe they shouldn't go.
    And I just came here to say, and to say to you and through you to 
the country, in my lifetime we've never had an election like this--not 
one--where there was so much prosperity, so much social progress, so few 
domestic crises and foreign threats. And we have the chance, therefore, 
to think about the big challenges and build the future of our dreams for 
our children; to save Social Security and Medicare, so when the baby 
boomers retire, we don't bankrupt our kids; to give an ever more diverse 
group of children, all of them, an excellent education.
    Now you have over half the married couples with children in America 
now both work, both the husband and wife work; 59 percent of the women 
in America with a baby under one work. We have to do more to balance 
work and family. I sometimes think the best law I signed the whole time 
I was here was the first one, the family and medical leave law, because 
over 20 million people--over 20 million people have taken some time off 
when a baby was born or a parent was sick, without losing their job. We 
have to do more things like this to help people balance work and family.
    The best thing about the welfare reform law was that we spent more 
money on child care and training and transportation to help people 
succeed as parents as well as in the work force.
    The pastor talked about the ozone hole. The world is getting warmer. 
The 1990's were the warmest decade in a thousand years. And that relates 
to this energy crisis we've been toying around with here lately, where 
we're all concerned about. We need to develop a whole different long-
term future.
    General Motors just announced a car getting 80 miles to the gallon; 
we need to get

[[Page 2679]]

it on the market, all of them. We've got researchers with Department of 
Agriculture grants trying to figure out how to make fuel from biomass--
that's a fancy word for corn or rice hulls or even grasses. You know it 
as ethanol today. And the problem with ethanol is, it takes 7 gallons of 
gas to make 8 gallons of ethanol. But if they get their job done in the 
laboratory, you'll be able to make 8 gallons of ethanol with 1 gallon of 
gas. And that means that, in effect, we'll all be driving around getting 
500 miles to the gallon. But we've got to do it. We've got to do it.
    So you've got all these challenges out there. We've made a lot of 
progress in building one America, but our work is not over. We still 
have racial profiling; we still have debates over affirmative action; we 
still have qualified African-American judges who can't even get a 
hearing before the Senate. We have the lowest childhood poverty in 20 
years, and we had the biggest drop last year since 1966, but it's still 
way too high. We've got poverty among people over 65 below 10 percent 
for the first time in the history of the entire country, but poverty 
among our children is still too high.
    We may have 90 percent of our schools hooked up to the Internet, 
thanks to the E-rate that the Vice President fought so hard for, to give 
a discount to the poorest schools. But there's still a digital divide, 
and it will have a huge impact unless we close it.
    On Friday I signed a bill, H.R. 2879, which authorizes, 
appropriately, the placement of a marker commemorating Dr. King's ``I 
Have a Dream'' speech at the Lincoln Memorial. I say that--if you go 
back and read that speech, part of it was, ``I dream that one day 
certain things will happen and that everything will be all right,'' but 
part of it was a dream that we would just keep on working on our more 
perfect Union.
    Read the pastor's letter. You do not have to become too political to 
say that we're having an election in which there are vast differences 
that will have vast consequences for the way we live together as a 
people. And actually, I think it's something we ought to be celebrating. 
We don't have to say anything bad about anybody running this year. Maybe 
part of the story the last 8 years is that I got to take all the poison 
out of the electorate. [Laughter] I'm just glad you folks were there to 
administer the serum, or I wouldn't be here. [Laughter] But this could 
be a happy time. We ought to get up every day and thank God we're alive 
and all this good stuff is going on. We should be happy, happy about our 
country.
    And then we need to imagine what kind of future we want and figure 
out the choices we have to make and which leaders are most likely to 
take us there. But I promise you, this is an election that is not only 
profoundly important, where we make a terrible mistake thinking because 
things are going well, it's not important--but it is one in which there 
are real choices.
    The pastor's letter mentioned some: the choices on affirmative 
action and education, on appointments to the courts, on the nature of 
tax policy. But there are others. The pastor talked about sacrifice. You 
know, a lot of members of my party sacrificed their seats in Congress in 
1994 because they voted in 1993 to get rid of the deficit, because when 
you have deficits and you have big debt, interest rates are high. The 
interest rates are high because the Government is borrowing money that 
you'd like to borrow, and there's not enough to go around, so the price 
of money goes up. It's not very complicated.
    So now we're paying off the debt, and interest rates are lower. So 
one big decision you have to make is, do you want a bigger tax cut now, 
even if it means we don't get out of debt and interest rates stay high, 
or should we first say we're going to keep getting this country out of 
debt; we'll take what's left, give what we need to to education and 
health care and our children and our future, and take what's left and 
have a tax cut?
    Let's go back to the theme of the sermon today. I think it's better 
to think about the future and keep getting us out of debt and keep the 
interest rates down. It also, by the way, is like a tax cut. If you keep 
interest rates one percent lower every year for 10 years, do you know 
what that's worth to you?--$390 billion in lower home mortgages; $30 
billion in lower car payments; $15 billion in lower college loan 
payments--by thinking about tomorrow.
    But anyway, it's a choice. Some people disagree with that, and they 
make their case.

[[Page 2680]]

But don't pretend there's no difference, that it won't have any impact 
on you. It will have a huge impact, which decision we make.
    There are differences in education policy, in health care policy, 
and environmental policy, and crime policy, and our foreign policy--arms 
control, and how we relate to Africa and the rest of the world. Just a 
ton of things here that you need to know--and you need to show--on 
election day.
    The pastor mentioned Congressman John Lewis and what a great leader 
he was for civil rights, and how he came a long way from his little 
Alabama farm and a childhood when he stuttered so bad, he could hardly 
speak; and now he bellows his speeches in the Congress, and America 
listens. One of the greatest honors of my Presidency was walking across 
the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis and Josea Williams and Coretta 
Scott King and Jesse Jackson on the 35th anniversary of the Selma march. 
And on that day, I gave a little talk which basically said, we still 
have bridges to cross.
    Now, we're going to cross some bridges. The questions are, are we 
going to be walking in the right direction? Are we all going to walk 
across, or just a few of us? And if we all walk across, are we going to 
walk arm-in-arm, with outstretched hands instead of clenched fists?
    I tell you, I look at the young children in this audience--the young 
girls in this audience that still have the time of giving birth to their 
own children ahead of them, because of this human genome project, a lot 
of these children will have--they'll be having babies within 5 or 10 
years that have a life expectancy of 90 years. A lot of us that are 
moving into our later years, if we're lucky, the human genome project 
will give us a cure for Parkinson's, cancer, even the ability to reverse 
Alzheimer's before our time is done.
    But, as I was reminded the other day when I met with the bishops of 
the Church of God in Christ, and I thought I was being kind of cute when 
I said to the head bishop, ``You know, I wanted to come here and meet 
with some leaders who aren't term-limited''--I thought that was pretty 
funny. [Laughter] And the bishop looked at me and said, ``Mr. President, 
we're all term-limited.'' [Laughter]
    So I say to you, we're all just here for a little while. We've got 
to decide how we spend our time and what we care about. We're supposed 
to live with troubles, as well as good times. For whatever reason, God 
has blessed us all--me, most of all--to make this a good time. And now 
we're going to be judged on what we do with the good time.
    We still have bridges to cross; we still have dreams to build for 
our children. The choices are stark and clear and will have great 
consequences. And we can say that with a happy heart today, honoring our 
opponents, not condemning them or criticizing them, or saying anything 
bad about them, but just going out like America was supposed to work all 
the time and making our choice.
    But I am pleading with you--I have done everything I know to do to 
turn this country around, to pull this country together, to move us 
forward. I have done everything I know to do. But, you remember this, 
the best things are still out there; it's still out there. And as long 
as we keep striving for that more perfect Union, tomorrow will always be 
out there. But in order to do it, you have to show.
    So talk to your friends, talk to your neighbors, talk to your family 
members, talk to your co-workers, and make sure nobody takes a pass on 
November 7th. Learn, decide, and choose.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

 Note:  The President spoke at 9:40 a.m. In his remarks, he referred to 
Rev. Wallace Charles Smith, Shiloh Baptist Church, and his wife, G. 
Elaine; Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King; and civil 
rights activists Rev. Jesse Jackson and Josea Williams.