[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 37, Number 2 (Monday, January 15, 2001)]
[Pages 88-93]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts

January 11, 2001

    Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Those are the AmeriCorps 
rowdies over there. Thank you very much.
    Well, President Freeland, let me begin by saying I'm delighted to be 
back at Northeastern. I remember so well when I spoke here to your 
commencement early in my term. I remember the honorary degree I got. Now 
that I have to make a living, maybe I can put it to some use. [Laughter] 
I remember the young man who spoke there, representing the students, all 
the students whose

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hands I shook and whose stories I heard. This is a great American urban 
institution of opportunity, and I am honored to be back. I thank you for 
that.
    Mayor Menino, Mr. Mayor, I thank you for being my friend and for 
proving that the ideas that Al Gore and I brought to the American people 
in 1992 and 1996 would work anywhere because you made them work in 
Boston. Whether it was the economy, crime, welfare, education, you did 
it.
    You might be interested to know, Mr. Mayor, we're still borrowing 
from Boston. Just last week we announced that we're going to give 
Federal employees the same benefit you have given to Boston city 
workers, time off for medical screenings to catch cancer and other 
problems early on. Thank you again, Mr. Mayor.
    And to your Representative, Mr. Capuano, I have never heard you give 
such a vigorous public speech in my life. [Laughter] And you even talked 
about things I'd forgotten I'd done. [Laughter] But your congressional 
district and this State have been wonderful to me. And you have been 
great, and I thank you. And I thank you for what you've done for them in 
Congress. And I want to thank Bill Delahunt, who has been so great on 
many issues but who's been particularly helpful in pushing our criminal 
justice agenda in the United States Congress, giving us the lowest crime 
rate in America in 25 years.
    And I want to thank Jim McGovern for many things, but I think 
everyone in Massachusetts should know that Congressman McGovern was the 
number one advocate in Congress for one of the most recent initiatives 
we announced, which is that the United States of America is going to 
provide a free, hot, nutritious meal to 9 million children in poor 
countries throughout the world if they will come to school in their 
countries. Thank you, Jim McGovern.
    Now finally, let me say, I don't know what to say about Senator 
Kennedy. I met--Ted Kennedy I met in 1978 in Memphis, Tennessee, at the 
midterm convention of the Democratic Party. I was the Governor-elect of 
my State, 32 years old, looked like I was about 20. [Laughter] You all, 
in the last 8 years, have taken care of that. [Laughter] And they said 
to me that President Carter's administration called, and they said, 
``Governor, we want you to moderate this panel in Memphis on health 
care.'' And I had been a big supporter of President Carter, you know. 
They said, ``We think that you can keep everything in a good humor. And 
on our side, we're going to have Joe Califano,'' who was the Secretary 
of Health, Education, and Welfare. He was a very great fellow, by the 
way, and the number one advocate in America for doing something about 
the dangers of tobacco and a lot of other things. He had done a lot of 
great things. ``And on the other side, we're going to have Senator 
Kennedy, who thinks that we're too weak on health care.'' I said, ``You 
want me to bridle Ted Kennedy?'' [Laughter] And I'm 32 years old, and 
I--so I said, ``Okay, I'll do it.'' [Laughter] I just wanted to be on 
the program and see if I could keep up, you know?
    So we had this incredible meeting on health care. And I don't even 
know if I've ever said this to him, but he got up and he talked about 
his beloved son and the health problems he had had, how he had managed 
to survive, and survives to this day, had a magnificent life, and how 
wrong it was that his son had done well because of the good fortunes of 
his family but that other families didn't.
    And he made an impression on me that day that had lasted over these 
22-plus years. And I promised myself that day that if I ever got a 
chance to give health care to more Americans and keep more young 
children like his son alive, I would do it. I owe him that, for 22 
years.
    And I have not had a better friend or stronger advocate in the 
United States Senate these last 8 years. And I can tell you that no 
Member of the Senate is more respected, even by the Republicans. They 
hate to admit it in public, but you get them in private, and they'll 
tell you the same thing. He is the best and most effective Member of the 
United States Senate.
    Now, in these last 8 years, Ted and Vicki and our families have 
become--we've become much closer. And he's taken a lot of risks for his 
friendship with me. I know what you're thinking, but that's not the risk 
you took. [Laughter] He let me sail his boat into the Menemsha Harbor. 
[Laughter] I come

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from a landlocked State, and he still let me sail his boat into Menemsha 
Harbor. I will never forget that. And all I could do in return was help 
send Hillary to the Senate to give him a little support, and I've done 
the best I could. [Applause] Thank you.
    Three former Presidents have spoken in this hall, three Presidents 
in whose tradition and footsteps I have tried to follow: Theodore 
Roosevelt, the last great progressive Republican President; Franklin 
Roosevelt; and your John Kennedy. When Franklin Roosevelt spoke here in 
1932 in the campaign, his first, he said, ``We are through with delay. 
We are through with despair. We are ready for better things.'' That's 
exactly how I felt when I came here in 1992. And Massachusetts and the 
city of Boston, as you have heard, more than any other State in the 
Union, gave me a chance to work hard to bring better things to the 
United States. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
    I am here, more than anything else, just to say thank you. There are 
a few places I felt I had to go in the closing days of my term just to 
thank people. A couple of days ago I went back to Chicago, which is my 
wife's hometown, and to East Lansing, Michigan, where they have a 
basketball team you may have noticed. They come over here sometimes. I 
went there because those two States voted for me on Saint Patrick's Day 
in 1992 and sealed my nomination.
    I went back to New Hampshire today because--anybody here from New 
Hampshire?--because that's where it all started and because I was 
pronounced dead by all the pundits, and the people of New Hampshire 
decided they would lift me up. And since they raised me up, I wanted to 
go back and thank them.
    But as you have heard repeatedly, in election after election and in 
good times and bad, the one place that I knew would always be there to 
stick with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and the direction we were taking 
America, was Boston and the State of Massachusetts. And I could not 
leave office without coming here to say thank you. [Applause] Thank you.
    Now, I mostly want you to think about the future, because most of 
the people in this audience are young and because America is always 
about the future. But I want to take a minute to walk down memory lane.
    Eight years ago, when I came here, 10 million Americans were out of 
work. The deficit was $290 billion and rising. The debt of the country 
had quadrupled in the previous 12 years, imposing a crushing burden on 
our children. Welfare rolls, crime rates, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, 
income inequality all were going up. What a difference 8 years can make.
    The one thing that hasn't been said tonight that I want to say again 
is, I believe politics should be about uniting people, not dividing 
them, should be about ideas, not insults. We had ideas in 1992 that we 
believed could put the American people first and build our bridge to a 
new century and a whole new aspect of human affairs.
    All of you who are students here will live in a time where people 
look, work, live, and relate to one another in ways that are profoundly 
different than the America in which I grew up. And it is important that 
we hold fast to the basic values of this country: opportunity for every 
responsible citizen; a community of all Americans; and that we didn't 
have the courage to implement ideas that will meet the challenges of 
this era. That's what I tried to do. I tried to make politics in 
Washington about you, not about the politicians and the pundits in 
Washington; about ideas, not about insults; about how you were doing, 
not how we were doing.
    In Boston, when I took the oath of office, unemployment was 6.9 
percent. Today, it's 1.9 percent. Poverty is down. Average income is up 
nearly 20 percent. Crime has dropped, as the mayor said, by more than a 
third, and we've been there to help.
    The same thing has happened in the Nation. Unemployment is at a 30-
year low. We have 22\1/2\ million new jobs, the longest economic 
expansion in history, the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded, 
the lowest female unemployment in 40 years.
    Now, because we turned those record deficits into record surpluses 
in this last budget year--it's the last one for which I am responsible--
when it's over, we will have paid down $500 billion on the national 
debt, meaning lower interest rates for college loans, home mortgages, 
car payments, business loans,

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more jobs, higher incomes, a brighter future for all Americans.
    But there were ideas behind this. There were ideas behind getting 
the crime rate down, ideas practiced in Boston. You know, before I 
became President, I noticed out there in the country, looking at 
Washington, that most politicians thought the only way to be safe on 
crime was just to talk tough. And if you were just for catching whoever 
you could catch and putting them in jail and throwing the key away, you 
would never get in trouble on crime. On the other hand, you'd never 
lower the crime rate either.
    So we said, ``No, let's put 100,000 police on the street. Let's do 
more to keep guns out of the hands of children and criminals.'' The 
Brady bill kept 600,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers from getting 
hand guns. We put 130,000 police on the street.
    On welfare, the Democrats defended the programs that supported the 
poor, as we should. Many in the other party said, ``Oh, they don't want 
to work. We ought to cut them off.'' I thought that was nuts. I had 
spent enough time in welfare offices to know that people did want to 
work, but you couldn't expect people to go to work if they were going to 
have to hurt their kids. So we said, ``Okay, require able-bodied people 
to work but train them. Give them child care, give them transportation, 
and don't take the food and the medicine away from the kids and the 
parents if they go to work.'' And it worked.
    There were people who said, ``Well, the cities are economic basket 
cases, and nobody wants to put their money there.'' I thought that was 
not true. And we revitalized the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that 
basically says banks have to put money back into their communities. It 
seems reasonable, but it had been on the books since the 1970's, and 
hardly any money had been put back into poor communities. In the 8 years 
we've been in--now, this law's been on the books for over 22 years--95 
percent of all the money, $15 billion or more have been put back into 
communities under the Community Reinvestment Act.
    We created this empowerment zone program that the Vice President 
ran. We created community development banks solely to loan money to 
people who couldn't get money otherwise. We did a lot of other things to 
put more housing in, to let poor people who were working have houses in 
different kinds of neighborhoods. The economic justice issue that your 
Congressman mentioned was very important, the environmental justice, 
because we found that we couldn't get people to invest unless we cleaned 
up urban brownfields, for example, and we stopped people from being 
exposed to various kinds of pollution just because they happened to be 
poor. All over the country, poverty in the inner cities has fallen by 23 
percent, and wages have grown even faster than in the country as a 
whole.
    In education, with the leadership of Senator Kennedy, we have 
reduced the size of the Federal Government to its smallest size since 
his brother was President. We got rid of the deficit and turned 
surpluses, but we more than doubled our investment in education in these 
last 8 years. Thank you, Ted Kennedy, for that.
    Just this year--when we took office, only 3 percent of the 
classrooms and 35 percent of the schools in this country had an Internet 
connection. Today, 65 percent of the classrooms and 95 percent of the 
schools are connected to the Internet, and thanks to the Vice 
President's E-rate program, they can afford to log on and to use it for 
their students.
    We never gave any money to cities for after-school and summer school 
programs. Thanks to the leadership of Senator Kennedy, this year in the 
budget we just signed, there's money to keep 1.3 million kids in the 
United States of America in after-school programs so they don't get in 
trouble, and they do learn their lessons.
    President Freeland talked about the college aid program. The Pell 
grant this year will be $3,750, a huge increase. Thirteen million 
families are taking advantage of the HOPE scholarship tax credit and the 
lifetime learning tax credit. The direct loan program has saved students 
$9 billion in college loan costs. If your school is in it anywhere in 
America, the average $10,000 loan is $1,300 cheaper for an American 
student to pay off than it was when we took office. We are moving this 
country toward a more educated society and a more united one.

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    The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. The drinking water is 
safer. The food is safer. We've cleaned up twice as many toxic waste 
dumps in 8 years as the previous two administrations did in 12. And 
we've set aside more land in perpetuity than any administration since 
Theodore Roosevelt 100 years ago. And all the way, people said, ``This 
is bad for the economy.'' It turned out not to be so.
    We also have tried to help people balance work and family, raising 
the minimum wage, raising the earned-income tax credit for lower wage 
workers. One of the things I'm proudest of about this economic recovery 
is that, yes, we made more billionaires and millionaires, and that's 
good, but we also had everybody doing better. And in the last 3 years, 
working families in the lowest 20 percent of the income group had the 
highest percentage increase in income. This program is raising all of 
them.
    I remember when Senator Kennedy and Senator Dodd and some others 
were pushing the family medical leave law. It had already been vetoed 
once before I became President because everybody said, ``This is bad for 
business. You know, it's a nice idea, letting somebody off for work when 
a baby's born or a baby's sick or the parent's sick or the wheels have 
totally run off in the family, but it just is something we can't 
possibly afford.'' I thought that was crazy, because I can tell you, 
once you become a parent--everything else in life can be going right for 
you, and if your kid's having trouble, nothing works. Nothing else 
matters. Nothing in the world matters if something's wrong with your 
family, all the success in the world, all the wealth in the world--
nothing matters.
    And I don't know anybody my age or younger that hasn't had some 
conflict between work and patenting, even upper income people. This is a 
big challenge for all of you, by the way, in the future. So the first 
law I signed was the family and medical leave law. And I heard all that 
going on about how terrible it was going to be. Well, let me tell you 
something. We've had the law on the books now for 7\1/2\ years. You know 
what's happened? Thirty-five million people have taken advantage of it, 
and 22\1/2\ million new jobs have been created. We were right, and they 
were wrong about that. You have to balance work and family.
    The most important thing I worked on is embodied by the kids in 
AmeriCorps, our national service program. Senator Kennedy and I were 
together when we signed the bill on the South Lawn, and I signed it with 
the same pen John Kennedy used to sign the bill creating the Peace 
Corps. In the last 6\1/2\ years we've had over 150,000 young people 
working in community service and earning some money to go to college.
    It's not all we did. We also fought for stronger civil rights 
enforcement. We sought to reduce discrimination against gays in the 
Federal workplace and throughout the country. And I hope, by the way, 
Senator, now that we've got a little bit better Congress, I hope we will 
pass the hate crimes bill and the employment nondiscrimination bill and 
the equal pay laws in this session of Congress.
    But in just the last year of my service, at a time when most people 
say we couldn't get anything done because it was my last year, and 
besides, they were having a Presidential race and the congressional 
races, and everything seemed so divided in Congress, thanks to the 
support of the people on this platform and people like them throughout 
the country, we've passed the biggest and best education budget ever, 
the biggest increase in head start ever.
    We set aside for the first time, in the lands legacy program, a 
permanent fund to buy precious lands and green spaces in cities from now 
on, all over America, to protect land--never happened before. We got the 
first money ever from the Federal Government since World War II to help 
repair schools that are in trouble, because we've got so many kids in 
schools that are so old, they're falling down or so overcrowded, half 
the kids are in trailers. We passed legislation designed to get new 
investment in the cities, the new markets initiative, a completely 
bipartisan initiative.
    We did what I said. With Congressman McGovern's plan, we're going to 
provide over the next several years--if we keep working at it, we'll be 
able to offer every poor child in every poor country in the world a 
good, nutritious meal if they come to school. Sixty percent of the kids 
in this world who

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are not in school are girls. This is a huge problem all over the world, 
and just by feeding them we'll be able to get them to school. That will 
change the whole future of the world the young people will be able to 
live in.
    And that's just part of what we did. What's the point of all this? 
Here's the point I want to make for you, for you young people here. 
Eight and a half days from now, when I walk out of the White House at 
high noon on January 20th, I want you to know something: I will leave 
more optimistic than I entered. I will be more idealistic than I was the 
day I first took the oath of office as President.
    This country can do whatever we have to do. We can meet any 
challenge. We can seize any opportunity. But we have to remember basic 
things. We really do have to put people first, and you really do have to 
believe that we all are part of one community. Politics is about 
addition and multiplication, not subtraction and division. It's about 
teamwork. It's about working together. And there are so many things out 
there for you. The best days in this country are still out there, but 
there are some big challenges out there. And I hope you will never 
forget these 8 years. I hope you will always be proud of the support you 
gave to me and to Al Gore and what we did.
    But believe me, the greatest gift you could ever give me is to never 
lose the fervor I sense in this room tonight. Never lose your belief in 
your country. Never lose your belief in your capacity to change it for 
the better. And never get tired when you don't win every election. Bear 
down. Look forward. The best is still out there. I will always love 
Massachusetts.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 8:10 p.m. in Matthews Arena. In his 
remarks, he referred to Richard M. Freeland, president, Northeastern 
University; Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston; and Vicki Kennedy, wife of 
Senator Edward M. Kennedy. A tape was not available for verification of 
the content of these remarks.