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Between Hope and History - Third Revision [Binder] [Folder 1]
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�Michael Waldman Files Box 16
• 1999 Chicago Commencement
• Race book draft
• Between Hope and History draft
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ALSO BY BILL C L I N T O N
Putting People First
(with Al Gore)
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BETWEEN
HOPE AND HISTORY
Meeting America's Challenges
for the 21 st Century
PRESIDENT B I L L C L I N T O N
T
I
M
•
• 111 I I I
B O O K S
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Copyright © 7996 William Jefferson Clinton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in
Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
The epigraph by Scamus Hcancy is a brief extract from
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes
(The Noonday Press, iggi), and is reprinted here
by the kind permission of the author.
ISBN: 0-8129-2913-6
Composed by North Market Street Graphics,
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by R.R. Donnelley & Sons,
Harrisonburg, Virginia
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 7 5 3
FIRST E D I T I O N
^~
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To Hillary, whose hue, support, and example
have made my work possible and life joyful,
and to Chelsea, whose love and life remind me
every day of what all this work is for
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M
History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
SEAMUS HEANEY
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�" • • ^ P M Pa ge
Contents
Preface
Auction
1
2
3
3
^Portuoity
^PonsibiZity
C o
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^unitv
^
11
3
Con
clusio
n
i6g
177
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Preface
I f f l S BOOK CONTINUES THE CONVERSATION I
T
have had with the American people about
our destiny as a nation, our duty to prepare for
the new century, and our need for a shared vision
_^ ^_
of twenty-first century America that will enable
us to grasp the extraordinary opportunities of
this age of possibility.
The Proverbs teach us that "Where there is no
vision, the people perish." I ran for President in
1992 because I thought that our nation lacked a
unifying vision for our future and a strategy to
achieve it, and that we were in danger of just
drifting into the new era.
My vision for America at the dawn of a new
century is of a nation in which the American
Dream is a reality for all who are willing to work
for it; our diverse American community is grow-
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PREFACE
ing stronger together; and our leadership for
peace, freedom, and prosperity continues to
shape the world.
To achieve this vision we must pursue a threepart strategy. First, we must create opportunity
for all Americans. Second, we must demand responsibility from all Americans. And third, we
must forge a stronger American community.
In the three main sections of this book—Opportunity, Responsibility, and Community—I
explore the most important challenges we face
today, the progress we have made in the last four
-e-
years and what still must be done, and what responsibilities individuals and famiHes, businesses
and labor, community leaders and government
have as we move toward the next century. We
know that when we stay true to our values and
work together, America always wins.
I believe this is the path America must take
into the twenty-first century. We have followed
it for the last several years, and clearly it is beginning to work. We have 10 million new jobs;
the deficit is down from $290 billion to $117 billion; our government is smaller by over 225,000
employees but is more effective; the crime rate
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PREFACE
has dropped steadily as we have put more police
on the streets and taken guns away from felons,
fugitives, and stalkers; our environmental and
public-health standards are higher; our families
are healthier and stronger. Still, there is clearly
more to do. That is what much of this book is
about.
But first we must make a choice: shall we live
by our fears and define ourselves by what we are
against, or shall we live by our hopes and define
ourselves by what we are working for, by our v i sion of a better future. This is the choice that each
of us—every individual, every family, every community, every generation—must make every day.
My balance scale tilts heavily in the direction
of hope, just as America's does, and always has.
We must be faithful to that tradition. I f we are
driven by our vision of a better future, we will
achieve it.
xm
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BETWEEN
HOPE AND HISTORY
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Introduction
H
ISTORY HAS A HABIT OF TESTING US
AS INDI-
viduak and as a nation—a habit of demand-
ing that we choose between our hopes and fears,
between our vision of how things ought to be and
an acceptance of things as they are. A t 1:25 A.M. on
Saturday, July 27, a crude pipe bomb shattered
the night in Adanta's Centennial Olympic Park,
killing one person, injuring scores more, and contrasting in an instant the best in the human spirit
with the worst. At a moment when the nations of
the world set aside their differences to celebrate
the Olympians striving for excellence, we were reminded that even then cowardice and viciousness
were alive, an ever-present challenge to our beliefs, our values, even our very lives.
In the hours that followed that tragedy, every
athlete, every team, every official, every individual
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BETWEEN
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attending the Summer Games had to make a
choice about how to respond. And when the sun
came up, we all were witness to the greatest victory
of the Centennial Olympics: the victory of hope
over fears, of the eternal vision of the Olympics
over terror. Every Olympic site was packed—with
athletes ready to demand the best of themselves
and with spectators ready to cheer them on.
The bomb, and the fear it created, did not cripple a people whose values are strong, blind those
whose vision is clear, destroy the will of those
determined to triumph. Instead, adversity reinforced our values, clarified our vision, and stiffened our resolve.
The Olympics presented America at its best,
and the world the way we wish it could be every
day. People from different nations, races, religions, and tribes, accepting the rules of the
Games, respecting their opponents, reaching
deep for the best in themselves. The Olympics
also reminded us that even the best of times are
vulnerable to the forces of destruction, then
showed us how to respond to them.
History has often presented America with the
choices of hope over fear, of lofty vision over ad-
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PRESIDENT B I L L
CLINTON
versity. In every age, Americans are required to
meet the challenges history presents us and, as we
do, to keep faith with both the values upon which
our nation was founded and the hopes and
dreams upon which people build their lives.
In our time, for example, leadership means
standing with our allies to build peace in Bosnia,
even though it places our own soldiers at risk. It
means standing behind the forces o f good will
and peace-making in the Middle East, even after
a brave leader like Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin
is assassinated. It means standing by such strugghng new democracies as those in the former
Soviet Union, even though we know progress
will be uneven. It means standing up to terrorists
and other forces of division and destruction, even
as we mourn our losses and rebuild our lives, as
we have in Oklahoma City. And it means standing firm, together, to ensure that our citizens, our
families, and our children have the tools they
need to make the most of their own lives, even
though some would have us abandon that responsibihty.
Our citizens always held America to the highest standards. And we have been richly rewarded
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B E T W E E N HOPE A N D HISTORY
for it. America is, and must always be, a place
where individual dreams can come true, where
people who work hard can succeed, where people of different points of view and different heritages can not only live together but prosper; a
place where, by respecting our differences and
working together to meet our responsibilities, we
earn the gold medals of freedom and opportunity.
Nearly four years ago, I took the oath of office
determined to ensure that America continued to
meet these high standards. First, and most important, I wanted an America where the American
Dream is alive and attainable for every single
American willing to work for it. Second, I
wanted an America that respects—even
rel-
ishes—our diversity and builds out of it an even
stronger
national community. And third, I
wanted an America that stays secure by remaining the strongest force for peace, freedom, and
prosperity in the world.
For too long, American political debate had
been polarized, stale, and often irrelevant to
meeting our challenges. Citizens too often were
forced to choose between two wrong arguments.
One seemed to argue for the government to
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PRESIDENT B I L L
CLINTON
spend more money on the same bureaucracies
working in the same way. The other argued that
government was inherendy bad and all our problems would be solved i f only we could get government out of the way and leave people to fend
for themselves. For the twelve years before I took
office, this latter view dominated our politics, but
was held pardy in check by those who held the
first view. What had this thinking yielded us? We
were having the slowest j o b growth since the
Great Depression. We had quadrupled our national debt in only twelve years. We were becoming more divided, racially and ethnically.
And there was even some question of whether
we had the will to support America's continued
world leadership after the Cold War.
It was clear to me that i f my vision of twentyfirst century America was to become reality, we
had to break out of yesterday's thinking and embark on a new and bold course for the future,
with a strategy rooted in three fundamental
American values: ensuring that all citizens have
the opportunity to make the most of their own
lives; expecting every citizen to shoulder the responsibility to seize that opportunity; and working
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B E T W E E N HOPE A N D HISTORY
together as a community to live up to all we can be
as a nation. These three values have shaped the
character of our people and ensured our success
as a nation and our leadership in the world. They
are the basic bargain of America.
Most o f us learn these values by living them in
our families, at school, at work, at our places of
worship, in our dealings with our neighbors and
friends. Most every American success story is a
tribute to their universal appeal. M y belief in
them is rooted in what I saw and heard from my
mother, my grandparents, my teachers, pastors,
other caring adults, and friends; and later from
the Americans with whom I have worked and
have tried to serve, beginning in my native state
of Arkansas and continuing to this day.
Everything I have done in the nearly four years
I have been in the White House has been about
applying these three values—opportunity, responsibility, community—to meet the challenges we
face. At times of decision, I always ask myself: Will
this course give people more opportunity to make
the most of their own lives? Will it enable personal
responsibility among our people at home, at work,
as citizens? Will it bring us closer together, across
the lines that too often divide us?
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PRESIDENT B I L L
CLINTON
These values determined my choice on perhaps the most contentious issue o f the last year:
the issue of how to cut the federal deficit and balance the budget. For nearly four years now, I
have worked hard to forge a new consensus on a
broad range of social and economic problems,
including the need to balance the budget so that
we can keep interest rates down and grow the
economy faster, and not leave a legacy of debt
to future generations. But a year ago that consensus was threatened by congressional budget cuts,
which, in the name of balancing the budget,
would have undermined Medicare, Medicaid,
education, environmental protection, and the security of working families' pensions—all of
which reflect the duties we owe to one another.
I am committed to cutting waste in government and balancing the budget. Our administration is the first to cut the deficit in all four years
since the 1840s. We have cut it from $290 billion
to $117 billion, a reduction of 60 percent. But I
did not and will not permit passage of a budget
that turns us into a country where the elderly,
the poor, and the young are left to fend for
themselves; that widens social divisions we have
worked hard to close; or that hurts our people's
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B E T W E E N HOPE A N D H I S T O R Y
ability to compete and succeed i n the new world
economy. In short, I vetoed the budget because it
reduced opportunity, abandoned responsibility,
and weakened our community.
For the same reasons I fought hard to save those
programs, I have fought hard for programs like
the Family Medical Leave Act and the Brady Bill,
and against congressional efforts to repeal the
assault-weapons ban, our program to put 100,000
police on the streets, our school anti-drug programs, our national service program, AmeriCorps, and our environmental enforcement laws.
_^ ^_
The fight over these and other initiatives is fundamentally a fight over whether we will fulfill our
obligations to each other, create more opportunity, and go forward together. These initiatives,
and the commitments they represent, are safe for
now, but they will only stay safe i f we work together and keep faith with those values: opportunity, responsibiHty, community.
We live in an age of enormous possibility. But it
is also a time of difficult transition. As "we move
from the Industrial Age into the Information
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PRESIDENT B I L L
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Age, from the Cold War to the global village,
the pace and scope o f change is immense. Information, money, and services can and do move
around the world in the blink of an eye. There's
more computing power in a Ford Taurus than
there was in Apollo I I when Neil Armstrong
took it to the moon. By the time a child born
today is old enough to read, over 100 million
people will be on the Internet. Even our family
cat, Socks, has his own home page on the World
Wide Web. The opportunities this age presents
us are extraordinary; more of our children will
have the chance to turn their dreams into reality than any previous generation o f Americans
ever had.
But the challenges of this age are also extraordinary and the cost of failing to meet them is
high. The actions we take today will determine
what kinds of jobs Americans will have tomorrow, how competitive our businesses will be in
the global economy, how well prepared our children—especially the poorest among them—will
be to succeed, how secure and healthy our parents and grandparents will be, how safe our
streets will be, how well we protect our land,
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water, and air, and how secure we w i l l be as a nation in an increasingly compUcated world.
These challenges are real and profound. Many
of our cultural traditions seem under attack,
sometimes from the very same sources of entertainment we often enjoy. Too many of our people, children and adults alike, are not getting the
education they need to do well. We have access
to more news and information than ever before
but are often skeptical of whether what we hear is
true, and that skepticism can lead to cynicism
about whether our most basic institutions—espedally our government—can work for us.
And elsewhere in the world, though the threat
of nuclear war recedes, new threats abound. The
very openness of our society makes us vulnerable
to new forces of destruction that cross national
borders: organized crime, drug cartels, the spread
of dangerous weapons, including biological and
chemical ones, and most of all, vicious terrorism.
Though the pace and perhaps even the scope of
change in how we work and live, and how we relate to each other and the world, is unprece-
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dented, our present condition has an instructive
parallel in the not-too-distant past.
Almost exacdy a century ago, America found
itself in a similar period o f profound, sometimes
paradoxical change. As our nation made the transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial
Age, vast numbers of people moved from farms
to factories, from the country to the city, seizing
new opportunities but also experiencing massive
uprooting and dislocation i n their way of life.
The very nature of work changed. People who
had risen, worked, and rested following the cycles o f t h e sun now punched time clocks—often
day and night—and the conditions in many factories were often unsafe. Old work disappeared
and new work emerged. The idea o f community
changed. With the advent of railroads and
telegraphs, the small self-reliant town, often isolated both geographically and socially, found i t self connected to the outside world. As cities
expanded, as whole new urban neighborhoods
grew and old ones were transformed, they
throbbed with life, but many were also crowded,
dirty, and unsafe. People became concerned with
what they saw as the deterioration o f moral stan-
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dards and campaigned to shore up the values they
felt were eroding.
A hundred years ago, the public demanded national action to deal with the challenges rapid
change created. What emerged was the Progressive Movement. It was given voice and direction
by Theodore Roosevelt, a president who was
committed to ensuring that the free market
worked for all Americans, protecting them from
the abuses of the Industrial Age, conserving the
nation's natural resources, reforming government, and asserting America's leadership in the
W O r l d
Theodore Roosevelt, and later Woodrow W i l -
son, went beyond the conventional thinking o f
both their parties. They were determined to use
the power of the United States government to
ensure that America secured the benefits of the
new age so that our identity as a nation, our
character as a people, the ideals expressed in the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would be enhanced in the new era. The
Progressive Movement was about a shared vision
of what America could and should be, about
mending the frayed fabric of family and commu14
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PRESIDENT B I L L
CLINTON
nity, about harnessing the forces of change and
using them to meet bgth individual dreams and
common national goals. That same shared vision
guides us today.
In the face of bewildering, intense, sometimes
overpowering change, people react differendy.
There are those who would try to avoid the f u ture, to turn back the clock, or simply to hold
out for as long as they can. And there are those
who embrace the future with all its changes and
^
challenges and engage in what Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes once called "the action and passion" of our time. The choices we make as individuals and as a nation make all the difference.
After each of the world wars in this century,
our nation faced this choice—whether we would
embrace or reject the future. After the slaughter
of the First World War, we entered a time of
wrenching change and enormous anxiety, a period in which the hottest novelist of the era,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, said we grew up "to find all
gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man
shaken." America withdrew from the world,
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seeking security in isolationism and protectionism. We withdrew here at home too, into the
trenches of racial prejudice and bigotry and away
from protection of our citizens and our economic institutions. Ten years later, in 1929, that
decade of neglect produced the Great Depression. And soon thereafter, we learned we could
not withdraw from a world menaced by dictators
and found ourselves in a Second World War.
At the end of that war, we made a second, but
very different choice. We decided to reach out to
the future together—together here at home and
together with the other nations o f the world. I n
the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson, we embraced a view o f ourselves and
our democracy that Franklin Delano Roosevelt
described as "built on the unhampered initiative
of individual men and women joined together in
a common enterprise." Abroad, we lifted former
allies and former enemies alike from the ashes,
and forged the institutions that enabled us first to
contain communism and eventually to w i n the
Cold War. At home, we invested in the future by
investing in our returning warriors. We passed
the GI Bill to help millions of Americans get
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PRESIDENT B I L L
CLINTON
an education, buy homes, and build the great
American middle class. Those and other wise i n vestments produced four decades of robust economic growth and expanding opportunity.
Today, at the edge of a new century, we face
that critical choice anew: will we embrace the
immense opportunities and difficult challenges
before us or will we try to avoid them? Will we
ensure all Americans have the skills and education they need to make the most of their own
lives? Will we strengthen our famihes, protect
our children, and ensure our parents and grandparents a decent retirement? W i l l we respond to
the commercial forces that threaten the values,
even the health, of our children? Will we leave
future generations an environment cleaner and
safer than it is today, or abuse it further? Will we
continue to stand as the beacon of hope and a
force for peace, or will we turn inward once
again?
I beheve we have learned the lesson of the
past: we must embrace the future. We must meet
the challenges of a new century and, at the same
time, protect the values that have kept us on
course for more than two hundred years.
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It wouldn't hurt for each of us to keep our
Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and
Bill of Rights handy and look them over from
time to time. The promise embedded in our
founding documents is clear: America promises
liberty, but demands civic responsibility. America
promises the opportunity to pursue happiness,
but does not guarantee it. To make good on
those promises, we must provide the conditions
and the tools which give all citizens willing to
work hard and play by the rules the chance to
make the most of their God-given potential.
Q
That is America's promise. Today, as in the
Progressive Era, we can redeem that promise
only by embracing the future together, confronting its challenges together and seizing its opportunities together.
America has always held to a high standard.
Our past was built on it. Our present grows from
it. Our future depends on it. That standard is the
ironclad commitment to three core values—
opportunity,
apply to all.
responsibihty,
community—that
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Opportunity
A
T THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, IMMIGRANTS
used to write to their relatives and friends
back home that in America the streets were
paved with gold. And in a way, they were. The
real "gold" that paved our streets was the golden
opportunity for people from any background
to be able, through hard work and ingenuity, to
make a fresh start in life.
The idea of opportunity has been a unifying
force throughout our history. It draws out our
best efforts. It draws others to our shores. And it
draws all of us together in a common American
Dream. It is the first part of the basic bargain of
America.
Let me begin with a true story. In 1984, tenyear-old Marilyn Concepcion's mother moved
her family from Mayagiiez, Puerto Rico, to
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B E T W E E N HOPE A N D
HISTORY
Providence, Rhode Island, in the hope of a better life for her family. Marilyn did well for a
while, but after a few years of high school she
dropped out. She took jobs in factories, movie
theaters, delis—anything she could find. " I
worked hard," Marilyn says, "but I realized my
opportunities were limited." That's when she
discovered AmeriCorps, the national service
program I fought hard to create in my first year as
President. " I was impressed with what I saw," she
says, "young people taking an active role in their
community." She applied and became an aide in
an elementary school teaching EngUsh as a Second Language.
"Teaching turned me on to learning," Marilyn now says. After a month of studying, she became the first person in her family to earn a high
school equivalency diploma, and today her older
and younger sisters are following her example.
Soon she was asked to join the AmeriCorps staff.
Not long afterward, she was picked to help create a program like Providence's in San Jose, California. And last fall, at the age of twenty-one,
Marilyn Concepcion entered Brown University
as a pre-med student. "Through AmeriCorps, I
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PRESIDENT BILL
CLINTON
was able to help my community, my family, and
myself," Marilyn says. Her hope is to return to
her community as a doctor.
Our job as a nation, and indeed my job as
President, is to blaze a path into the future by
creating the conditions for economic growth that
can benefit all Americans, and by ensuring that
all Americans have the chance to seize the opportunities that growth creates. AmeriCorps, as
Ms. Concepcion's story demonstrates, is a symbol of what we must continue to do to build this
nation: provide people opportunities, demand
that they take responsibility for their own futures,
and strengthen the community to which we all
belong, because when everyone has a chance to
live in dignity and succeed, we all do better.
That has always been the formula for success in
America and embracing that formula has been the
key to turning our country around. Let's recall
where we were back in 1992. Unemployment was
high. The deficit was at $290 billion and headed
higher, and we had quadrupled our national debt
in just twelve years. A rapidly globalizing economy demanded new levels of competitiveness
from our companies, and some industries were
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itruggjing. The march of technology made new
demands on individuals, especiallyforeducation
and ikilb, but not everyone had those opportunities, and those who didn't were being left behind
even when they were working harder and harder.
To restore opportunity, we had toreverseescalating deficits, spur economic growth, create
jobs, and give people a chance to raise their incomes. Since I took office in 1993, I have pursued a strategy for expanding opportunity with
three broad objectives:first,to put the nation's
economic house in order so our businesses can
prosper and create new jobs; second, to expand
trade in American products all around the globe;
and third, to invest in our people so that they all
have the tools they need to succeed in the Information Age. The goal was dear: to prepare
America for a twenty-first century in which we
can compete and 'Vin as a nation, and in which
every child—regar iless of race, class, religion, or
creed—can pursue a future in which the streets
seem every bit as "p*ved with gold" as they were
for generations before them.
To fulfill thefirst;part of this opportunity strategy—putting the nation's economic house in
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order—we focused on cutting the deficit in half,
bringing interest rates down, spurring private i n vestment to fire up the nation's stagnant economy. The strategy succeeded. When I ran for
President, job growth had been at the lowest level
since the Great Depression, unemployment was
nearly 8 percent, and the deficit was soaring out
of control. After I was elected, we waged a brutal
fight in Congress to pass a new economic plan. It
passed by the narrowest margins in both houses,
with no Republican votes for it and with Vice
President A l Gore casting the tie-breaking vote,
0
to get it passed in the Senate. Newt Gingrich,
today the Speaker of the House, said, "This will
lead to a recession." Richard Armey, now Majority Leader of the House of Representatives, said
of our plan, "Clearly, this is a job killer." John
Kasich, now Chairman of the House Budget
Committee, said, "This plan will not work."
Texas Senator Phil Gramm said, " I f we adopt this
bill the American economy is going to get
weaker, not stronger; the deficit four years from
today will be higher than it is today, not lower."
Well, three and a half years later, we didn't raise
the deficit, we cut it by more than half. It was $290
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billion when I took office and heading for $300
billion the next year. This year we will cut it to
8117 billion. In fact, we would have a budget surplus today but for the interest we pay on the debt
run up in the twelve years before I took office.
Cutting the deficit further until we balance the
budget is vital to our future. The burden of this
deficit drags us down today and jeopardizes our
children's future tomorrow. Lowering it brings
interest rates down so more Americans can buy
homes and cars, start businesses, go to college,
and build a better future for themselves and their
families. But we do not have to sacrifice our f u ture to bring it down.
That is what the budget battle of the last year
was all about. At the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I waged a tough batde with
the Republican-controlled Congress over the
federal budget. Both the Congress and my administration had developed budget proposals
with more than enough cuts to bring the budget
into balance. The difference then, as now, is not
in what to do, but how to do it. Their proposal
would have dramatically cut needed investments
in education and the environment and made
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CLINTON
massive cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. I believe,
as I said in my State of the Union address, that
the era of big government is over. But I do not
believe that we can abandon our obligations to
our children, our parents, and grandparents, or
to future generations. That's why my budget
proposal, which also eliminated the deficit entirely by 2002, did not make deep cuts in
Medicare, Medicaid, education, or environmental investments.
The Congress was adamant about making
these cuts, not to balance the budget but to advance their view that the market will solve our
problems i f we get government out of the way
and let people fend for themselves. The market is
a marvelous thing, but especially in a global economy, it won't give us safe streets, a clean environment, equal educational opportunities, a healthy
start for poor babies, or a healthy and secure old
age. The Republicans believed I would give in to
them just to keep government going on a lot less
money. But I wasn't fighting for "government." I
was fighting for the future of America and for a
different, less bureaucratic modern approach to
help people help themselves. When I didn't cave
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in they shut the government down twice, and
they hurt a lot of people. Eventually we got back
to business again, and the debate about how to
balance the budget goes on.
I beheve more strongly than ever that the policy
I have pursued is right for America. Let's look at
the evidence. The fact is that today, as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product, we have the
lowest deficit of any major country in the world.
As I said, had it not been for the interest we have
to pay on the debt that was run up during the
previous two administrations, we would have had
a budget surplus.
And as for the economy, it is the healthiest it
has been in thirty years, with low unemployment,
low interest rates, and low inflation. We have 4.4
million more homeowners, and 10 million Americans have refinanced their mortgages at lower
rates. Women and minorities own more businesses than ever before. And America has become
the world's job-creation champ. From the beginning of my administration in January 1993, to the
middle of 1996, our economy has created over 10
million new jobs, almost all of them in the private
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CLINTON
sector. Corporate downsizing in the last few years
has received a lot of news coverage, and those
who experience downsizing should get the support they need to resume productive careers. But,
thankfully, we are creating millions of new jobs.
Several years ago, a lot of the new jobs being
created paid below-average wages. That's not
true anymore; in the last two years, two thirds of
all the new full-time jobs created in the economy
were in job categories that paid more than the
median wage, and after a decade of stagnation,
average wages finally are beginning to rise again.
With interest rates low and inflation at its
lowest level since the Kennedy administration,
American companies are thriving. In 1994, the
World Economic Forum in Switzerland named
the United States the world's most competitive
economy for the first time in ten years. In 1995
they did it again, and pointed out that our lead
over Japan and Germany was growing. Our exports are growing at record rates. Business i n vestment is at a postwar high, and it shows.
America's steelmakers are back, for example,
with higher exports last year than any time since
1940. And after going for nearly a decade without hiring a single new production worker, Gen27
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eral Motors added 4,000 last year. In fact, the Big
Three
automakers together will hire nearly
170,000 new workers by the year 2003 for good
jobs paying good wages. America is once again
the world's leading car producer.
As a result, for many Americans this is the best
of times. But I am very aware that there are still
too many Americans who are having a tough
time, people for whom the gears of our economic engine don't quite mesh. Part ofthe problem is that what creates jobs and opportunity in
America—at levels unapproached by any other
nation in the world—is an economic dynamism
that is inherently turbulent and disruptive. New
businesses form and old ones die. New occupations appear and old ones disappear. New jobs are
created and old jobs are eliminated.
Still, we have to face the fact that some of our
fellow citizens who are more than willing to work
hard and play by the rules are not being rewarded.
There are basically three groups of Americans in
this position. There are people who live in economically isolated inner-city neighborhoods and
isolated rural communities that have felt no economic recovery because there are no new jobs
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CLINTON
there. There are people, principally the bottom
half of America's hourly wage earners, who are
working hard but aren't getting ahead because
they don't have the kind of skills that are rewarded in this global economy. And there are
people who have been downsized—many of
them middle-aged—and it's taking them a much
longer time to find another job with the same pay
and benefits they were making before.
The answer to their difficulties is to get more
growth, more high-wage jobs, and more education by building on the policies that have
brought our economy back, with innovative, targeted practical efforts, not to abandon what we
have done for a radically different course that will
not help those who need it and will undermine
opportunity for everyone else.
From the end of the Second World War
through the mid-seventies, most Americans prospered. After that, and until two years ago, real
wages dechned or remained stuck in one place for
most working Americans. Other kinds of compensation—health care benefits, company pension
contributions, profit sharing—increased for some,
but for many Americans the paycheck in the en-
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velope at the end of the week didn't grow appreciably. And it didn't stretch as far as it once did, either; real purchasing power—our ability to buy
things compared with what we're paid—eroded.
For many Americans, the American Dream
seemed to be drifting out of reach.
I believe American democracy cannot survive
unless each of us has both the chance and the capacity to prosper. Americans don't resent successful people; we admire them. Resentment
emerges in our society not when people who are
successful have more, but when people who
don't have much don't have a chance to do better. People want their own chance to do better;
that's the core of the American Dream. And we
have an obligation to ensure they have that
chance, and the capacity to seize it.
Putting our economic house in order has gone
a long way toward achieving this goal. So have
responsible and targeted tax cuts in our economic plan, such as those for small business and
the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is designed to cut income taxes for the hardestpressed working families—15 million of them.
It's worth about $1,000 to a family of four earning up to $28,000, and families get that cash even
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CLINTON
if their taxes were less than $1,000. The objective
is to ensure that anyone who works full time and
has children at home will be lifted out of poverty,
not taxed into it.
In addition, we have taken steps to lift whole
neighborhoods out of poverty through our Empowerment Zones and Enterprise Communities
initiative. These efforts have channeled millions
of dollars of new investment into neighborhoods
and communities around the country that had
been bypassed by economic opportunity in the
past.
There is still more we can and must do to
achieve more growth and more economic opportunity for working families. I have a balancedbudget plan with targeted tax cuts for America's
families: a $500 tax credit, above the standard i n come tax deducrion, for each of their children;
more generous Individual Retirement Accounts
with funds that can be used without penalty
for important investments, such as buying a first
home or further education, or even for medical
emergencies; a tax deduction for the cost of college up to $10,000 a year, and a tax credit up to
$1,500 a year for up to two years of community
college.
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If we look further ahead, it becomes clear that
one ofthe key determinants of economic opportunity in the future will be the mastery of technology—by individuals and businesses alike.
That's why I have fought efforts to reduce our
investments in basic scientific research and development. Developing and, even more important,
democratizing advanced technologies are critical
not just to our national interest, but to every citizen of our nation. We cannot let this country be
divided into technological haves and have-nots.
We must make technology a force that serves
rather than harms us, that unites rather than d i vides us as we enter the next century. We must
make it a force that strengthens our ability as i n dividuals and as a nation to adapt, compete, and
succeed in the new era.
I believe that ten years from now, when we
look back on this period, we'll see the passage of
the Telecommunications Act as one of the most
important contributions to democratizing access
to technology in this country's history. It is a
sweeping bill, one that includes not just the wellpublicized V-chip technology to help parents
screen out violent and other inappropriate televi-
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PRESIDENT B I L L C L I N T O N
sion programming, but a wide array of provisions
to extend technology into rural areas, into inner
cities, into hospitals and schools. Even so, it is
only a beginning.
We still have a lot to do before we can say all
Americans have a chance to make the most of
their own lives—but America is in better economic shape today than four years ago.
The second part of my economic opportunity
strategy has been to help Americans take maximum advantage of global trade growth. The
globalization of the world economy has had profound effects on work, on workers, and on wages.
Money, management, and technology are mobile.
Open markets mean products come into America
that are made by people who work for wages
Americans can't live on. This can cost some
American workers their jobs and keep others
from getting a raise.
But, overall, trade has brought vast benefits to
most Americans. Hundreds of thousands of good
American jobs are being created by the export of
our airplanes, telecommunications equipment,
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food products, movies, and cars. And jobs in exporting companies on average pay considerably
higher wages than jobs in companies that sell only
within the United States.
If you listen to the trade debate that's raged
during the last couple of years, you'd think there
were only two approaches to the globalization of
our economy. On the one hand, you have those
who say we should just build walls around our
country, keep out foreign products, and trade
with ourselves. On the other hand, you have
those who say what we need is pure free trade in
which our markets are wide open to others and
we hope they'll open their markets to us. Both of
these positions are wrong. We don't need to
build walls, we need to build bridges. We don't
need protection, we need opportunity. But in a
world of stiff competition we also need more
than free trade. We need fair trade with fair rules.
That's why I fought so hard for the ratification
of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA), which effectively opened Mexico's
and Canada's markets to American products, and
for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
(GATT), which is helping to level the playing
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PRESIDENT B I L L C L I N T O N
field for American companies abroad. That's
why we have worked hard, through the Summit
ofthe Americas, to strengthen our trade connections in Latin America and to explore enlargement of the NAFTA membership. That's why
we are working so closely with our Pacific R i m
neighbors through the Asia-Pacific Economic
Council (APEC) to make the most of that
booming region of the world. And that's also
why we and the other leading industrial nations
work continuously to update international economic institutions, coordinate our economic and
monetary policies and strike hard but fair bargains on the ground rules for open trade.
In all, during the past three and a half years we
have negotiated more than two hundred trade
agreements—twenty-one with Japan alone. In addition, in 1993 we created America's very first National Export Strategy and, more recendy, a new
agricultural trade strategy. And thanks largely to
the leadership of our late Commerce Secretary,
Ron Brown, we are working hard with American
business leaders to open new markets for our
products and our investments. The results? Exports have soared to an all-time high—indeed, just
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in the areas covered by our twenty-one agreements with Japan, exports have increased 85 percent, including cars, cellular telephones, even rice!
As a result of our efforts to create a new global
trading system, the world isn't just a better place
for Americans to do business, make money, and
create jobs, it's also a safer place. The fact is that
fair trade among free markets does much more
than simply enrich America, it enriches all partners to each transaction. It raises consumer demand for our products worldwide, encourages
investment and growth, lifts people out of poverty and ignorance, increases understanding, and
helps dispel long-held hatreds. That's why we
have worked so hard to help build free-market
institutions in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the
former Soviet republics. That's why we have supported commercial liberalization in China—the
world's fastest-growing market. Just as democracy
helps make the world safe for commerce, commerce helps make the world safe for democracy.
It's a two-way street.
In the coming years, we will have to work
hard to secure these achievements and build on
them. We must continue to negotiate with our
trade partners to lower trade barriers and insist
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PRESIDENT B I L L
CLINTON
that they play by fair trading rules. We must work
to protect the global economy, and our own
businesses, from fraud and instability in the trading system. And as we continue to work to open
new markets, we must ensure the protection of
our workers and our environment, as well as seek
to advance labor and improve environmental
conditions in developing countries. Our economic security depends upon it.
The third part of my opportunity strategy, and in
some respects the most important over the long
haul, has been investing in our people and our
future—in research and technology, in education
and skills, and in strengthening working families.
In the rest of this chapter, I want to talk about
each in turn, but together they really form a
whole—a kind of "career tool kit" every American will need to succeed in the coming century.
The future prospects of average Americans
today are being driven by one central force: rapid
economic change—in what we produce (more
sophisticated goods and services, less of some
basic ones), in how we produce (more technology, less manual labor), in who produces (more
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skilled jobs, fewer unskilled), and in how well we
produce (productivity).
The appropriate response to these changes isn't
to cut investments in our future, as some Republicans in Congress advocate. The appropriate response is to increase investment in people power:
by individuals in themselves, by private industry
in its employees and production technologies,
and by government in the basic building blocks of
economic opportunity—education, training, and
technology—so we can capture and share widely
the benefits of this rapid change.
What kinds of investments? The kinds that help
Americans today to succeed tomorrow. The kinds
that equip our children to compete in the next
century. The kinds that enable working Americans to weather uncertainty and profit from
change. The kinds, in short, that ensure that all
Americans have the capacity to make real choices.
Not long ago, I visited Union City, New Jersey, and saw the future. A city with a high immigrant population and many low-income families,
Union City's schools were performing so poorly
that the state finally threatened to take them over.
But instead of giving up, instead of turning the
task of schooling their children over to the state
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PRESIDENT BILL
CLINTON
or to a private company, as some school systems
have, Union City pulled itself together. The
board of education voted to modernize, the city
raised a new bond issue, and the state kicked in
fresh funding. Teachers and other experts wrote
new curricula for core courses and overhauled
school management, giving schools more control
over their budgets. The regional phone company,
Bell Atlantic, donated computers and created
media resource rooms. They also donated computers for homes and tied them into the school
network. Parents came to school on weekends
Q
for training. Now they can keep in touch with
teachers by e-mail and participate more directly
in their kids' education. The result? Test scores
and graduation rates are way up; truancy and
dropout rates are way down.
Union City is using technology not just
to
strengthen
school
performance,
but
to
strengthen the community as a whole. They are,
in effect, democratizing technology, making it
more readily accessible for children and parents
alike.
But we will have to do more. That's why Vice
President Gore and I are trying to hook up every
classroom and library in the country to the InterBy
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net in the next four years. It's already under way.
On March 9, we participated in a kind of electronic barn-raising in California, as schools
throughout the state connected with the Internet. School systems did the organizing and parents did everything from raising money by selling
cupcakes to painting school rooms after the
wiring was done. More than a hundred hightech companies throughout the state, including
Sun Microsystems, Apple, M C I , AT&T, Netcom, America Online, Scholastic Network,
Netscape, and Microsoft, contributed hardware
and software, and the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers and other labor organizations helped install six million feet of computer
cable. That was only the beginning. In the
months that followed, nearly one fourth of all
schools in the state were wired to the Internet.
And in another national initiative led by our administration, the national PTA, teachers' unions,
and the National School Boards Association are
helping to ensure America's teachers are as comfortable with computers as they are with chalk
boards. In this "Twenty-first Century Teachers"
initiative, 100,000 teachers will train 500,000
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CLINTON
more teachers how to teach with computers,
software, and networks.
But these innovations alone won't get the job
done. At critical stages in our nation's growth we
have had to raise our nation's educational norms
to keep up with the demands of the times. We
did it by making elementary education compulsory in the last century, by making completion of
high school the standard in this century, and by
making college available to returning veterans
through the GI Bill.
Today it's time to raise the norms once again.
We began that process in my home state of
Arkansas in 1983, when I resolved, as governor,
to make my state a leader in education reform. I
created an Education Standards Committee, and
after months of work and dozens of public meetings with parents and teachers who were pleading for help, we announced a comprehensive
education reform program establishing standards
for students, for teachers, and for schools. That
same year the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation at Risk,
which warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" in
the nation's schools and called for our nation's
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public schools to undertake sweeping reforms to
ensure that our children can meet the education
and skill challenges of a new age.
In 1989, I and the rest ofthe nation's governors
held the first education summit with President
Bush. Together, we established broad goals for reforming education. We wanted every child to
show up for school ready to learn, be proficient in
certain core courses, excel in math and science,
and graduate from safe, drug-free schools prepared for the world of work. We were convinced
that the more you expect of students, the more
they expect of themselves and the more they
achieve. And we felt the same way about teachers
and schools. I f we expect more of them, and
equip them to dehver, they will expect more of
themselves and surprise us with their creativity.
This year the governors met again, this time
accompanied by many of the nation's business
leaders, to review progress and renew their commitment. In the seven years since the first
education summit, over 60 percent of all fouryear-olds now attend preschools; the number of
young people taking core courses has jumped
from 14 percent in 1982 to 51 percent in 1994.
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National math and science scores are up a grade.
And 86 percent of all our young people are completing high school.
The effort to create national standards specifying what students should know before they move
on to the next grade, on the other hand, has had
mixed results. Progress has been made with math
and science standards, but efforts to create national history and English standards met with
widespread criticism. This has shifted the focus
of standard-setting to state and local officials,
who, after all, have the primary responsibility for
public education in the United States.
At the federal level, we have worked hard to
help them establish clear standards for what we
expect our teachers to teach and our children to
know, assess their performance in attaining those
standards, and ensure accountability when they
do not. To help, we have marshaled resources, for
example, to expand Head Start so that children
come to elementary school ready and able to
learn. I signed the Goals 2000: Educate America
Act to help empower teachers, principals, and
parents to change the way schools work—with
cutting-edge technology, fewer federal rules, chal-
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lenging academic standards, and increased parental
involvement not just in schools but in their child's
daily learning.
Now we must do more to make sure education meets the needs of our children and the demands of the future. First and foremost, we must
continue to hold students, teachers, and schools
to the highest standards. We must ensure students
can demonstrate competence to be promoted
and to graduate. Teachers must also demonstrate
competence, and we should be prepared to reward the best ones and remove those who don't
measure up fairly and expeditiously. In the same
way we should reward the best schools and shut
down or redesign those that fail, and especially
those that are unsafe. That's one reason why I
have supported expanding school choice and
charter schools—creative new schools started by
parents and teachers and licensed by school systems. And it's why I have announced a new $5
billion program that, together with state and
local investments, will make a total of $20 billion available to renovate and modernize school
buildings badly in need of repair—in inner cities,
suburbs, and one-stoplight towns. We cannot
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CLINTON
build up our students i f their schools are falling
down, or their classes are overcrowded, especially
as the largest class of students ever enters our
schools in the fall of 1996.
We must also continue to rethink the roles
schools can play in our communities. We are helping to expand pioneering "community schools"
that stay open after three o'clock and are a community focal point for young people and adults
alike. We must do more of this too. There will be
fewer young people hurting themselves on the
streets. In most states we are supporting schoolto-work opportunities, designed with the business
community, to create more paths to the future
for young people not bound immediately for
four-year colleges. We must do more of this.
Even a first-rate high school education isn't
enough to succeed in today's economy. That's
why I have been committed to carrying out a
major "College Opportunity Strategy." One of
the clearest messages our economy has sent in the
last decade is that the one sure route to higher
wages is higher education. And one ofthe clearest messages America's corporate leaders sent at
the Education Summit this year was that they
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needed new employees with more education and
skills than high schools provide.
I recall, as many of my generation do, how i m portant the GI Bill was to our parents and our
nation in helping create unparalleled prosperity
in the postwar period. That's why, in this new
era of change, I want to throw open the doors of
higher education and opportunity to as many
Americans as possible.
During the last three and a half years we have
taken a number of steps to make college more
accessible and affordable for more Americans.
We have created a direct college loan program
that cuts loan costs and offers students more repayment options, including repayment as a percentage of their income, so that no students will
turn away from college for fear of being unable
to pay the debt. We have tried, every year, to i n crease the Pell Grant program for people from
working families. And of course, we passed the
national service program, AmeriCorps, which
has given nearly 45,000 young people a chance
to work their way through college by serving
their country and their community.
Still, I beheve we must do much more. That's
why I have called for the expansion of the College
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Work Study program from 700,000 to one million
students by the year 2000, and challenged colleges
to use more of this money to put thousands of college students to work in community service. I
have challenged high schools to encourage every
student who can to do some community service
and have offered to create $500 national service
scholarships for high school students who have
done significant work to help their community. In
addition, I have proposed making it possible for
Americans to be able to use their individual retirement accounts to help pay for college, and I want
every student in the top 5 percent of every high
school class to get a $1,000 scholarship.
These are important advances, but I believe
that the facts of our time make it imperative that
our goal must be nothing less than to make college available to all and to make the thirteenth
and fourteenth years of education as universal as
the first twelve are today.
To achieve this goal I have proposed two new
tax cuts for American families. They are fully
paid for by spending cuts in my balanced-budget
plan. First, I have asked the Congress to pass a tax
deduction of up to $10,000 a year to help famihes pay for the costs of all education after high
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school. And second, I have proposed a tax credit
of up to $1,500 a year for the first year of community college or a four-year college, renewable
for the second year i f students maintain a B average or better, so that everybody everywhere can
have access to at least two years of college. I call
this tax credit America's Hope Scholarships.
These new proposals will open the doors of
college opportunity to all Americans willing to
work for it, regardless of their ability to pay, and
make education and training available to every
adult so that nobody will have to be stuck in a
dead-end job. In short, they create opportunity
so long as students take responsibility. These proposals renew the basic bargain that has made us a
great nation and are critical to ensuring that
Americans have the capacity to take advantage of
the opportunities ofthe next century.
A minimum of two years of higher education
will increase working Americans' chances of getting and keeping good-paying jobs. America
cannot guarantee somebody the same job in the
same company for a lifetime. That's not, and
never has been, what our system is all about. But
in today's turbulent economy, people have to
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know that i f they work hard and play by the rules
they will always have access to the training they
need for new work. Thankfully most Americans
live within driving distance of a good community college with an excellent record for placing
its graduates in good jobs.
A short while ago, I got a letter from a man in
his mid-sixties who lost his job four years ago at
an aerospace plant and didn't know where to
turn. But he wrote to us and we connected him
to the kind of training program some in Congress are trying to eliminate and that man started
his life over again, in his sixties. He is working
again, has dignity, and is supporting himself and
his family. This is not about big programs or yesterday's ideas. This is about equipping people to
walk into the future.
I believe there is a national interest, and a national opportunity, in helping current workers
broaden their educational skills and downsized
workers go back to school—just as there was a national interest in sending Second World War veterans to college under the GI Bill. We have moved
into a world where knowledge, which has always
been a key to individual opportunity, is now the
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key to the success ofthe whole society and is literally the dividing line between those who can
continue to do well for a lifetime and those who
risk being left behind. We know today that every
year of job training or further education beyond
high school—whenever it occurs in life—increases a worker's future earnings anywhere from
6 to 12 percent. I f we want Americans to earn
more, we need to help them learn more.
America's best companies already understand
this. Harley-Davidson, the company that brought
the motorcycle industry back to America, understands it. They provide basic and advanced training in math, writing, and reading skills for all
their workers at an on-site training center. M o torola runs its own "university." United Technologies will give its employees time to pursue
another
degree and help pay the tuition—
whether the degree has anything directly to do
with their job or not. They've realized that a better-educated employee is a better employee, period. Many other firms provide extensive and
continuous training so their employees can move
easily from task to task and advance to jobs with
greater responsibility.
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I have encouraged more companies to follow
the example ofthe leaders in American industry.
It's in their own best interest to do so. As Gerald
Greenwald, CEO of United Airlines, said at a
conference on corporate citizenship I called this
year in Washington, "Every CEO in America
says employees are our most important asset.
Well, if that's true, why do we invest more in the
overhaul of our machinery than we do in the
training . . . of our employees?" I know many
firms aren't big enough to afford sophisticated
training programs. But I don't want their workers to be left behind, either, because I don't want
America to be left behind.
That's why, for both downsized workers and
for folks still working who know they need to
strengthen their skills to get ahead, I proposed in
1994 and again in 1996 a new "GI Bill" for America's workers. The proposal was simple. First,
consolidate some seventy overlapping, antiquated
federally sponsored training programs and use the
resources instead to support a simple $2,600 skills
grant that workers can use as they choose for tuition or training. Second, give states greater flexibihty to tailor training to employers' and workers'
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needs. Third, expand the network of One-Stop
Career Centers already being created in the states
to provide both existing workers and young people making the transition from school to work
with information on jobs, careers, and the success
rates of different training institutions.
The great French writer Anatole France once
said the rich and the poor are equally free to sleep
under the bridge at night. Even in a free society
real choices exist only if people have the capacity
to take advantage of them. I beheve our job as a
nation is to make sure Americans have the abihty
to make the most of their lives as individuals, as
workers, as citizens of this great nation. And that
means investing—wisely, but consistently—in education, in expanding college access, and in training and retraining America's workers. We cannot
guarantee every American success, but we can
make sure every American has a chance. Most of
them will take that chance if we do. And if we do,
we will all have more opportunity in twenty-first
century America.
Along with a comprehensive overhaul of educational opportunity at all levels, we need to build
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up the security and safety of working families in
the new economy by protecting their health care
and their pensions. The opportunity to raise a
family, care for your parents, and retire in peace
all depend upon reforms that will ensure that
workers won't lose their health coverage when
they change jobs and that no company will be
able to raid the pension funds of existing employees or limit the pension opportunities of new
ones.
More and more people today are working for
smaller companies that do not offer their employees health insurance, and partly for that reason, a smaller percentage of people in the
workforce have health coverage than ten years
ago. While Medicare takes care of Americans
over the age of sixty-five, we're the only Western
industrial nation that doesn't provide a system of
health insurance for all working people under
sixty-five.
We worked hard to create comprehensive
health care reform early in my administration.
And while that larger challenge remains unmet,
we now have, thanks to bipartisan efforts, a new
law that, among other things, ensures that people
won't automatically lose their health insurance
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when they change jobs or when somebody in the
family gets sick. That's an important new source
of economic security for working famihes.
But we have more to do. First, we should provide assistance to unemployed workers to help
them keep their health insurance until they find a
new job. That reform is a part of my balancedbudget plan, but is not in the Republican one. We
also need to make it easier for small businesses to
buy into insurance risk pools that are large enough
to make it possible for them to offer coverage at
reasonable cost. Starbucks Coffee, for example, is
a big chain today with some 15,000 employees
around the country, but it hasn't always been big.
Still, they've always provided health insurance for
their employees. Why? Well, first, because they
think it's the right thing to do. But it's also because they did a study and discovered that i f they
didn't provide their employees with health insurance the employees would leave within a year.
And since Starbucks spends thousands of dollars to
train every new employee, they simply couldn't
afford that kind of turnover. Health insurance not
only made their workers more secure, it paid for
itself. This can have big benefits—not only for
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employees, but for their employers as well. Sometimes it's possible to do right and do well, and we
should encourage that.
We should also encourage companies to offer
pension and retirement plans for their workers—
and protect the pensions of hard-working Americans from raids by their employers. Nationwide,
only about half of all workers have pension plans.
Three quarters of those working for businesses
with fewer than a hundred employees (the vast
majority of firms) have no pensions. That's not
good enough. We need to make it easier for
workers to set aside enough of their current i n come for retirement.
But that's only part of the problem. We need
to make sure that pensions are not at risk, either
because they are dangerously underfunded or because they are vulnerable to misuse by employers.
In 1994, Congress passed legislation I submitted
to protect the retirement savings of more than
40 million Americans whose pension programs
were underfunded or at risk due to mergers or
acquisitions. Since then, we've moved to protect
workers' pensions from employer fraud and
blocked efforts by the Republican Congress to
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make it easier for employers to "raid" their employees' pension programs. And the minimum
wage bill, which I recently signed into law, contains many of the proposals I made to expand
pension coverage, portability, and security. It creates a voluntary small-business pension plan to
make it easier for such businesses to provide their
workers with pensions.
As with health coverage, when workers change
or lose their jobs, they ought to be able to carry
their retirement savings with them and keep right
on saving. Today, not enough pension plans are
portable and more and more people are changing jobs before they are vested in their pension.
When American workers change jobs or are
downsized out of their old job, they need to be
able to roll over their old pensions into their new
employer's program without a waiting period. So
we're making it easier for employers to accept
rollovers from new employees, and the new law
contains my proposal to help eliminate the waiting period for new employees to start saving in
their new employers' plans.
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Naturally, it has taken time for this three-part
economic
opportunity strategy—putting our
economic house in order, tapping the full potential
of global trade, and investing in the
capacity of our people—to translate into i m provements in the bottom lines of average Americans. But it's happening. In 1994, the first year
after my economic plan was enacted, family i n comes increased across the board for the first
time in years. Every family income group, from
the poorest to the richest, had a real increase.
Personal income rose 2.6 percent faster than i n flation in 1995, continuing the trend begun in
1994- As I write this, wage growth is the fastest
it's been in five years. Not surprisingly, consumer
confidence has risen and the rate of home ownership has reached its highest level in fifteen
years.
Our opportunity strategy is working. Now we
have to build on it, to produce faster growth, more
high-paying jobs, and more successful businesses.
We can do that by balancing the budget to keep
interest rates down, enhancing health care and retirement options for those who need them, opening more markets to our products, investing more
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in education, new technology and research, and
targeting tax rehef for education, child-rearing,
and places where the economy is still weak. These
measures will help more Americans help themselves, enable the economy to grow faster, and ensure that we will go forward together.
Some are offering a very different strategy, the
same one they have offered before: an across-theboard tax cut bigger than we can afford. If implemented, it will either explode the deficit, raise
interest rates, and slow the economy; or i f it is
paid for, it will require even bigger cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and protection of the
environment than the budget I vetoed. Either
way, it will reduce opportunity, slow the economy, and ultimately hurt hard-working Americans. It is not responsible.
Opportunity is only half of America's basic
bargain. The other half is responsibility.
�3724 Heyday Ch02/cs 8/13/96 9:40 PM Pa
Responsibility
I
N THE AFTERMATH OF THE PLANE CRASH THAT
killed my friend, Secretary of Commerce Ron
Brown, and so many other fine Americans, I met
Ron's longtime friend and neighbor, Kent
Amos, at Ron's house. Let me tell you his story.
A decade and a half ago, Kent Amos was a successful executive in the Xerox Corporation and
the youngest director in its history. His wife, Carmen, also worked at Xerox. They live in Washington, D . C , where they raised their two
children, Wesley and Debbie. They also raised
eighty-seven other kids. The first ones were
friends of their own children—friends from broken homes, homes with a struggling single parent, or no home at all. They hung around the
Amos home after school, sometimes stayed on for
dinner and, after a while, stayed on to live. Many
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of these kids were in trouble or on their way to it.
The Amoses fed them, cared for them, made sure
they studied hard every evening, attended and
cheered at their games, and got most of them into
college on scholarships. Each year the number
grew. Kent and Carmen didn't save them all.
They buried four of "their kids." Another one
went to jail for burglary, joining his real father and
stepfather in the same prison. But Kent made sure
the boy got his GED while he was there and
found work when his sentence was done.
The Amoses guess they've spent $20,000 or
more of their own money every year raising
these kids. Along the way, Kent created a nonprofit organization that corporations like Xerox
have helped support. Today his Urban Family I n stitute aims to reform the way families and communities nurture children so that no at-risk child
grows up without the guidance, discipline, support, and love of a responsible, caring adult. He's
found other famihes to help raise children and
he's currently talking with Housing and Urban
Development Secretary Henry Cisneros about
turning public housing projects into "urban family universities" where parents and children can
learn what they need to know to succeed in life.
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Kent and Carmen Amos are a wonderful example of the American Dream at its best: They
had opportunities that had been denied to earlier
generations
of African Americans, and they
achieved success and prosperity. They exhibited
responsibility in their individual, family, and work
lives. But for them it wasn't enough. As Kent told
me, he came to realize that if he wanted his children to have a positive, safe environment to learn
and grow in, he had to extend his influence and
his parenting to the classmates of his children.
When he reached beyond his own children, Kent
Amos began to build one of those remarkable villages it takes to raise our children as my wife
Hillary said in her book on this subject.
I know we can't all invite a neighborhood full of
troubled children into our homes and help raise
them. But we can, each of us, be responsible first
in our individual, family, and work lives, and
then as citizens who do what they can to make
our communities and nation strong.
Our Founders created a nation, as Lincoln said,
"conceived in liberty." But they understood very
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dom works only when it is exercised with responsibility. For example, we have freedom of
speech but also the responsibility to speak civilly,
freedom of assembly but also the responsibility to
assemble peaceably, freedom of the press but also
the responsibility to be truthful, accurate, and fair.
Without responsibility, no free society can
prosper. In the absence of responsibility, for
example, free-market capitalism veers off into
consumer fraud, insider trading, and abuse of
employees. In the absence of responsibility, a
mentality of entitlement creates narrow interest
group politics, a rhetoric of helplessness, and an
inability to serve the larger public interest. In
the absence of responsibility, individual liberty
is just selfishness. In each case, America's inherent community of purpose is weakened.
America is about more than individuals exercising their rights. Our brand of democracy is
about individuals and families, business and labor,
government and community organizations, all
shouldering responsibility for our children, for
our elders, for each other, and for generations yet
to be born. Our Founding Fathers understood
this. In the Preamble to our Constitution they
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CLINTON
said our objectives were not just to "secure the
blessings of liberty to ourselves," but also "to our
posterity." What's more, they said it was our job
to "promote the general welfare." The former,
they reasoned, would turn our attention away
from immediate gratification and toward our responsibilities to our children. And the latter, they
believed, would turn our attention away from
ourselves and toward our responsibilities to each
other. So from the beginning, opportunity and
responsibility have gone hand in hand.
This political theory, though set out two centuries ago, is powerfully relevant today. When I
was growing up, Americans could pretty much
walk down the street of any city without fear of
violent crime. Having children out of wedlock
was rare and a source of shame. Not as many fathers walked away from their responsibihties to
their children. Welfare was a way station for
people who could work but were temporarily in
a bind. In neighborhoods all across America,
people could say what President Lyndon Johnson said when he left Washington to go back to
his small hometown in Texas, "People know
when you're sick and care when you die." For
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too many young people growing up today, that
world exists only in black-and-white reruns on
television.
People in public life are struggling to find solutions to these and other profound social problems. We all know that many of them are caused
by a lack of personal responsibility, the teen
mother who leaves school for a life on welfare;
the deadbeat dad who walks away from his duty
to his children; the criminal who preys upon the
rest of us; the neighbors who turn their backs on
the children in need; the business executive who
fails to treat his employees right or who buries
toxic wastes.
America was built upon a foundation of mutual responsibility. Strengthening that foundation
is critical i f we want our vision of the twentyfirst century to become real. Since so many of
the answers to our social problems require people
to reassert control over their own lives and to
assume responsibility for their conduct and their
obligations, we have to develop communitybased approaches that respond personally to these
problems, not impersonally through large, outdated bureaucracies. We must be willing to help
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people make decisions that are not destructive to
them and costly for the rest of us. That is a national responsibility.
In the last four years, we have pursued this responsibihty in four broad areas: first, strengthening
individual and community responsibihty through,
among other things, welfare reform and crime
prevenrion; second, meeting public responsibilities better by reinventing the federal government;
third, encouraging businesses to take more responsibihty for the welfare of their workers and
their famihes; and fourth, working at all levels of
society to address our responsibihties to future
generations by improving how we protect our
natural environment.
Government can help lead in each of these
areas, but ultimately we must insist that citizens,
businesses, and communities help themselves and
assume responsibility for making the life of this
great nation better person by person, family by
family, block by block, community by community.
The foundation, however, is individual responsibility. Before government responsibihty, before
corporate responsibihty, before community responsibihty, we must have individual responsibihty.
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Nowhere is the issue of individual responsibility
better illustrated than welfare. For fifteen years—
going back to my service as governor of Arkansas
— I have worked to reform welfare, to make it a
second chance not a way of life. I have talked with
people on welfare, asked them what had happened
to put them there and what it would take to turn
their lives around. As a result of what I learned,
Arkansas became a national leader in reforming a
wide range of family and welfare programs. We
lowered infant mortality by expanding maternal
health services. We enhanced child care through a
voucher system for working parents with modest
incomes. We worked to reduce long-term welfare
dependency by emphasizing education and training, medical coverage, and child care, and then by
requiring parents to take available work. We increased the involvement of even illiterate parents
in the education of their preschool children. We
increased child support enforcement before it became a national priority. And on behalf of the nation's governors, I helped write the 1988 federal
welfare reform bill.
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CLINTON
During the past three and a half years, we
helped states create what The New York Times
called "a quiet revolution on welfare." With little fanfare and no new legislation, we cut welfare
red tape and approved welfare-to-work projects
for some forty states and covering 75 percent of
the people on welfare in this country. We i m posed time limits, required work, required teen
mothers to stay in school, and established much
tougher enforcement of child-support orders, i n cluding enforcement across state lines.
And it has worked. There are 1.3 million fewer
people on welfare today than there were when I
took office. Food stamp rolls are down by more
than 2 million. A few years ago, at a hearing, I
asked a woman from Arkansas who had gotten
off welfare what the best thing was about it. She
looked me in the eye and said, "Now when my
son goes to school and people ask him, 'What
does your mother do for a living?' he can give an
answer." You can't put a dollar figure on the
pride behind that answer, or the positive impact
it has on a child.
The look on that woman's face is one reason
why I worked continuously with the Congress to
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try to reach agreement on legislation that would
completely overhaul welfare nationally. I rejected
two flawed bills Congress brought to my desk
because they did not meet the basic test of responsible welfare reform: to be tough on work
and responsibility, but not tough on children and
parents who are responsible and want to work.
Their willingness to keep working on a bill that
would meet this test is why we have an historic
overhaul of welfare today.
In 1991, I said we needed to end welfare as we
know it. Now, with the passage of new welfare reform legislation, we have a chance to end a system
that undermines the basic values of work, responsibihty, and family that has trapped generation after
generation in dependency and poverty, hurting
the very people the system was designed to help.
In its place, we have an opportunity to establish
a new system that meets the basic principles for reform I made clear from the beginning. First and
foremost, it should be about moving people from
welfare to work. Second, it should impose time
limits of welfare benefits. Third, it should give
people the child care and health care assistance
they need to move from welfare to work without
hurting their children.
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CLINTON
The new law is rooted in these principles. It
gives states and communities the chance to move
people from dependence to independence and
greater dignity. But, the real work is still to be
done. States and communities have to make sure
that jobs and child care are there. They can use
money that used to go to welfare checks to pay
for community service jobs or to give employers
wage supplements for several months to encourage them to hire welfare recipients. They should
also provide education and training when appropriate and must take care of those who, through
no fault of their own, cannot find or do work.
These are important, new responsibilities not just
for welfare recipients, but for states, communities,
and businesses. But i f welfare reform is to work,
all must shoulder their responsibilities.
I should also note that the welfare reform legislation is far from perfect, largely because of
non-welfare provisions which contain excessive
cuts designed to pay for excessive tax cuts in the
Republican budget plan for high-income Americans who don't need them. There are parts of
the legislation that are just plain wrong. We must
work hard in the coming months and years to
make them right. For example, the bill makes
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new cuts in child nutrition assistance that mostly
hurt not welfare families, but our most hardpressed working families who are already struggling to work themselves out of poverty. It also
cuts off assistance to legal immigrants and their
children. This is deeply unfair to legal immigrants who work hard and pay their taxes. The
Republicans insisted on saying to those famihes,
"You can work and pay taxes for three or four
years, but i f you or your children get into a car
accident, develop a serious illness, or become
a crime-victim, we won't help you." That is
wrong, and we must make it right.
It is important to remember that this reform is
just a beginning and that we must approach this
historic moment with some humility. While we
have learned much from the most successful state
welfare reform initiatives, there is much we still
do not know. We must implement this legislation
in a way that truly moves people from welfare to
work, and that is good for our children. We will
be refining this reform for some time to come.
One thing we do know, however, is that just
reforming welfare won't change the underlying
social problems that have often led to welfare de-
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CLINTON
pendency. One of the most important of these
problems is teenage pregnancy. Every year about
a million teenagers become pregnant. In fact,
nearly a third of all the babies born each year are
to women under the age of eighteen, and not surprisingly, nearly 70 percent of these teens are unmarried. Teen pregnancy is not simply foolish
and costly, it is destructive to children, to families,
to our society. It is wrong. It is also an express
ticket to poverty for the teenage mother. Nearly
half of today's long-term welfare caseload are
women who had their first child before the age of
seventeen.
We cannot end the related cycles of welfare
dependency and teen pregnancy unless we confront the issue of responsibility—the responsibility of young women not to get pregnant, the
responsibility of men not to get them pregnant,
the responsibihty of fathers to support their
children, the responsibility of parents to provide
their children a safe home and teach them responsible sexual behavior and encourage abstinence, the responsibility of churches to support
those teachings, the responsibility of community
organizations to develop programs to help teen
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mothers and their children get a start in life, and
the responsibility of public officials to understand
that teen pregnancy is part of a complex web of
social issues.
In the last three and a half years, we have done
our part. I have chaUenged the states to require
teen mothers to live at home or with a responsible
adult. We now require teen mothers to stay in
school and sign a personal responsibihty contract
to continue living at home—unless, of course,
their home environment is abusive. For teens who
can't go home, I have proposed seed money for
"Second-Chance Homes," like those already estabhshed in several American communities, that
provide safe and supportive community-organized
and -operated residences for teen mothers and
their children.
For the first time in years, teen pregnancy has
leveled off and begun to drop. But this is a national problem and it needs national attention.
That's why I challenged community, religious,
and business leaders to shoulder more responsibility, and it is why I support the efforts of the National Campaign to Reduce Teen Pregnancy. To
make sure that this issue is a top priority in the
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minds of our people, we are doing everything we
can to spread the influence of community-based
approaches that instill a sense of responsibihty
among our young people. And my administration
is also funding abstinence-based programs to educate teenagers in our schools.
"We need to tell children who have children:
we care about you, but you have to care about
yourself, too. Don't get pregnant or father a child
until you are ready to shoulder that immense responsibility. I f you do, we will help you only as
long as you help yourself. And you can't walk
away from that responsibility. I f you do, we will
make you assume it.
Our
success on the child-support issue has
demonstrated our resolve. In 1995, we collected a
record $11 billion in child support, almost a 40
percent increase over 1992; since then I have directed states to require mothers to help identify
and find absent fathers so we can make them support their children.
But we can and must do better. I f all the people who owed child support paid it, 800,000
mothers and children would immediately leave
the welfare rohs. The new welfare reform law
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gives us strong new tools to go after delinquent
child support cases that cross state lines.
My message to deadbeat parents is simple: i f
you neglect your responsibilities, we will track
you down, garnish your wages, suspend your l i censes, and make you pay. It's not government's
responsibility to support your children; it's yours.
Responsibility—individual and community—is
also the key to America's crime problem. Only i f
we take greater responsibility for our own communities can we really achieve our objective of
making the recent historic drop in the crime rate
a long-term trend.
Ten days before the 1992 New Hampshire primary, I was in New York City to give a speech to
a crowd gathered at a major hotel. As I made my
way through the kitchen ofthe hotel, a worker in
a hotel uniform came up and grabbed me. "Governor," he said in a thick immigrant's accent, " I
want to talk to you." So I stopped and listened.
"My ten-year-old boy," the man said, "he studies
this election in school, and he has decided I should
vote for you. But if 1 vote for you, I want you to
do something for me.
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"In the country where I come from," he went
on, "we were very poor, but we were free. Here
we have a park across the street from our apartment house, but my boy cannot play in it unless
I am there with him, because he would be in
danger. We have a school, a good school, only
two blocks from our home, but my boy cannot
walk to school unless I go with him.
"So i f I vote for you," he said, looking me
straight in the eye, "will you make my boy free?"
The most fundamental responsibihty of any
government is to protect the safety of its citizens.
All of the other things government does on our
behalf amount to very little i f it fails in this task.
If you can't walk down your street without looking over your shoulder, then this is not a free
country and you are not a free person. We can't
be as free as that hard-working immigrant's
child—and every child—deserves to be, unless
crime is brought under control.
I took office determined to take a new approach to fighting crime. Let's remember what
things were like then. Violent crime had been rising for four straight years. Convicted felons could
walk into any gun shop and buy a handgun. Assault weapons with no purpose other than to kill
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people were sold as freely as hunting rifles and
shotguns. Ordinary, law-abiding Americans were
afraid to walk the streets of their own neighborhoods, even afraid of sending their children to
school. Blocked by the gun lobby's alhes in Congress, efforts to bring some sanity to the situation
had been stalled for years.
I was determined to change all this. Determined to punish criminals, not make excuses for
their behavior. Determined to keep guns out of
the wrong hands. Determined to prevent crime
before it happens by, among other things, giving
young people something to say yes to. And above
all, determined to restore the role of police at the
center of every neighborhood in America.
Much of law enforcement is a local and state
responsibility, but the federal government can
help, and I was determined to find the resources
to provide that help. That's what my 1994 Crime
Bill did.
But I also knew that the federal government
alone couldn't solve the crime problem; ulrimately
it has to be solved on the streets of American
neighborhoods every day, by individuals acting responsibly and by communities working together to
enforce responsible behavior.
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That's what we have been doing, and we are
making progress. In 1995, for the fourth year in a
row, the rate of serious crimes dropped. Murder
dropped 8 percent, robberies 7 percent, rape 6
percent and burglary 5 percent. New York City
has had the biggest crime drop since 1972. Houston, one of the leaders in the community policing movement, has the lowest murder rate it has
had in nineteen years.
Because we will never eliminate the darkness
that lurks in human nature, there will never be a
time when there is no crime, no violence in
America. But we can make it the exception, not
the rule. My goal is to create an America where
when people turn on the evening news and the
lead story is a serious crime, they are surprised
and shocked, instead of just accepting it as news
as usual and inevitable.
To reach that goal, I believe we needed a new
approach—one that combined all the tools available to us: police, punishment, and prevention. And
to wield these tools, we need not just the government, not just the criminal justice system, but
every American in every community in the nation to take responsibility for winning back our
streets and our children's future.
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My 1994 Crime Bill is fulfilling a commitment
I made to the American people to put 100,000
new police officers on the street to strengthen
community policing. It's an old idea, really. It
means getting police out of the police station,
out of the squad cars, and back on the street,
back in the neighborhood where they can work
with neighbors to spot criminals, shut down
crack houses, prevent domestic violence, get to
know children on the block, and stop crime before it happens.
Community policing works not just because
more officers are on the streets, but because
neighbors get involved. The federal government
can put 100,000 new officers in police departments around the country, but i f we don't have
citizens in neighborhoods, schools, and businesses
who are prepared to support those police, i f we
don't have parents who will shoulder their responsibility to teach kids right from wrong, then
we won't succeed. When pohce are walking
down the street, they ought to feel like every lawabiding citizen is walking with them. Neighbors
helping neighbors, friends sticking up for friends,
parents teaching children the difference between
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right and wrong, residents establishing bonds of
trust with police officers—that's what community policing is all about.
Fighting crime is every American's responsibility. It's not just a public issue; it's a personal
matter. It's picking up a phone and calling for
help when you see somebody in trouble. It's
been more than thirty years since Kitty Genovese
was left to die on a street in New York City by
neighbors who closed their windows and drew
their shades when they heard her screams. We
cannot let that era return. That's why I have
called on i million Americans to volunteer to
participate in neighborhood watch activities in
their communities helping our police to keep
our streets and our neighborhoods safe. And
that's why I asked the cellular phone industry to
provide free airtime and 50,000 cellular phones
to those neighborhood watch groups across the
country. The industry has responded with enthusiasm and generosity, and I hope the American
people will answer the challenge as well.
We each have responsibilities and there are almost unlimited opportunities by which we can
meet them. We can join a neighborhood watch
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group or help form one. We can spend a few
hours a week helping young people in a boys'
or girls' club or a D.A.R.E. anti-drug program.
That's how crime gets fought: citizen by citizen,
block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Good policing, however, needs to be matched
with tough punishment. Our Crime Bill and,
more recently, our Anti-Terrorism Bill, did just
that. We have pushed states to adopt the rule the
government uses on federal prisoners that requires them to serve 85 percent of their sentence,
without parole. For those who commit violent
crimes repeatedly, we have made "three strikes
and you're out" the law of the land. We expanded the application of the death penalty for
nearly sixty violent crimes, including murder of a
federal law enforcement officer, and limited excessive death row appeals. And we have stiffened
sentences for drug offenders and told those i n volved in drug activities in public housing projects they only get one strike. Public housing is a
privilege; abuse it and you're out.
We've also cracked down on men who stalk,
threaten, or abuse women and children by establishing tough new penalties to enforce protection
orders, by connecting domestic abuse files to the
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system we use for firearm background checks, and
by establishing a national Domestic Violence Hotline. Through that Hodine (1-800-799-SAFE),
some 7,000 women a month who are in trouble
now are able to get help quickly, find shelter, and
report abuse to authorities.
Though tough punishment is important, every
police officer wiD tell you we can't jail our way
out of our crime problem; we must do more to
prevent crime before it happens. Today, after
years of fighting special interests, America finally
has the Brady Bill, a commonsense law that estabhshes a five-day waiting period and a background check that has already kept handguns out
ofthe hands of some 60,000 felons, fugitives, and
other criminals.
We also have a law that bans the sale of nineteen
assault weapons—guns made expressly for killing
people. What's more, not a single hunter in America has lost a weapon or missed a season as a result
of either the assault weapons ban or the Brady Bill.
Furthermore, we have new tools to fight terrorism
at home and abroad, and a new National Drug
Control Strategy that targets young people for education and prevention, pulls drug users off the
streets and puts them in treatment, aims to reduce
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the cost of drug abuse to our health and welfare
systems, and seeks to block drugs at the border and
cut off drugs at their source.
Prevention is the strategy that holds the best
hope—indeed, the only real hope—for breaking
the crime cycle. I f you don't believe it, ask the
police officers on the beat in any city in America.
They will tell you that stopping drugs, stopping
gangs, stopping handguns and assault weapons,
and stopping the conditions that breed criminal
behavior are what stops crime.
The combination of police, punishment, and
prevention has brought the crime rate down. But
we have much more work to do and many of the
very initiatives that have produced these improvements are at risk. Funding has been made available
so far for about 44,000 ofthe 100,000 new pohce
officers we need for community pohcing; we're
ahead of schedule but the congressional Republicans have tried repeatedly to repeal the law. The
gun lobby and its alhes in Congress are working
hard to repeal the assault weapons ban and prevent
measures to make it easier to track the origin of
explosives or ban cop-killer bullets. Most, but not
all, congressional Republicans continue to reject
prevention programs, preferring more jails to in82
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CLINTON
carcerate criminals after they commit crimes, i n stead of community efforts to stop crime before it
happens. We must fight to preserve these reforms,
fully implement them, and keep reducing crime.
And we should have a constitutional amendment
to give crime victims the right to be involved, and
to be informed about and make statements at
court proceedings such as bail setting, plea bargaining, sentencing, and parole.
Finally, there is one looming crime issue that is
of deep and growing concern to parents, and i n deed all Americans, an issue we are only beginning to bring under control. It is the issue of
youth crime—or more accurately, the twin issues
of crimes committed by youths and crimes committed against youths. Murders of teenagers rose
82 percent from 1984 to 1994. Gun violence is
now the second leading cause of death among
young people between the ages o f t e n and nineteen. Much of this violence is by young people
against young people. It often arises out of alcohol or drug abuse or drug dealing, and often it is
organized—by gangs.
A big part ofthe problem is that so many young
people entering their teens are children who were
born out of wedlock, have grown up without the
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guidance of both parents, have lived in difficult
and even dangerous family situations, and have
been out there essentially raising themselves.
Many of these children turn their lives around,
but many others don't, slipping into a shadowy
world of crime, drugs, gangs, and violence.
All Americans should care about these children. Their futures will be ours. And even if we
can't do what Kent and Carmen Amos are doing,
we have to be willing to do our part to build the
village it will take to raise them into successful
adults, to teach them right from wrong, to give
them a future to look forward to, to pass on the
character and values they need to reach that f u ture. A lot of Americans are already doing so.
At the same time, we need to protect ourselves
and our children from violent youthful offenders.
Since I took office, we've made it a federal crime
for any person under the age of eighteen to carry
a handgun unless supervised by an adult, and
have required schools to expel for one year any
student who brings a gun to school. We've encouraged schools to get tough on school violence and to adopt uniform policies like the one
they have in Long Beach, California, to help re-
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CLINTON
duce violence while promoting dignity and respect. We've endorsed curfew policies like the
one they have in New Orleans, which reduces
children's exposure to danger. We've supported
one of the most effective steps we can take,
which is also one of the most old-fashioned:
making sure we enforce truancy laws so that our
children are learning in the classroom and not
on our streets. And I supported and signed
"Megan's Law," named after seven-year-old
Megan Kanka, who was raped and murdered
two years ago by a twice-convicted child molester who lived on her block. The new law requires states to notify communities of released or
paroled child molesters and sex offenders.
Finally, we have established a National Gang
Tracking Network and sent a clear message to
the gangs that are at the root of today's drug culture and youth violence: we mean to put you out
of business, to break the backs of your organizations, to stop you from terrorizing our neighborhoods and our children, and to put you away for
a very long time.
But we still have work to do. This year I submitted legislation to further toughen treatment of
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violent youth offenders, and a few months ago I
announced the creation of a new computer system to reverse the rise in gun violence by tracking guns to their source. In Boston, a pilot version
of this initiative has been so successful that no j u veniles have been killed by handguns so far this
year. All our efforts are designed to rescue kids in
trouble. At night children belong at home, under
a curfew, if necessary. During the day they belong
in school, not on the street. At any time, our children are our responsibility.
Cutting crime off at its roots is a task that belongs to every citizen in America. This summer
we got some good news. The violent crime arrest rate for juveniles dropped for the first time in
seven years. And the juvenile murder arrest rate
dropped by 15 percent, the largest one-year decrease in more than a decade. But the problem is
still profound. It will take all our efforts, community by community, to keep our teenagers away
from drugs and violence.
In dealing with our welfare and crime problems
it's clear that the federal government alone cannot begin to provide the solutions. Responsibil86
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ity must be borne more broadly by all regions of
our national community—business, labor, religious, community, and local government groups.
Still, the federal government can play an important role in meeting these challenges, as this
chapter illustrates.
Exacdy what the federal government should
do, and how it should do it, are especially critical
questions as we deal with the dramatic changes in
work and family life and the other new challenges ofthe twenty-first century. That's why rethinking and reinventing government has been a
priority in the last several years.
The Founders created the federal government
to do what only a national government could do.
It started with the basics that remain critical
today: national defense, foreign affairs, our financial system, and, of course, the protection of our
constitutional rights and enforcement of federal
laws. It grew to include protection and management of our national lands, agriculture, and commerce. Then it encompassed an increasingly
broad range of social concerns as the problems
and the successes of our Industrial Age mounted.
Later, the Cold War and America's social and
economic challenges led both Republican and
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Democratic administrations to work to limit
abuse in the workplace and the market system, to
protect those in need, advance the course of education and the environment, deal with atomic energy, expand civil rights, and more. We have been
expanding our vision of a "united states" ever
since the failure of the Articles of Confederation
caused the states to agree on a national Constitution, with a federal government to help achieve
important pubhc purposes that could not be
achieved by citizens, the free-market system, or
state and local governments acting on their own.
That is how government grew—with the consent of the governed. But America has always
been skeptical of "big government." As has often
been noted, during most of our history, we have
remained philosophically conservative about the
role of government even when we have favored
specific activist measures because the problems of
the time required them.
Our age-old debate about the role of the federal government has acquired a new energy and
urgency in our time for these reasons: first, none
of the old approaches to our social problems
seem to have worked very well; second, in a
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world of intense global competition, we can't
afford a government that is wasteful and too bureaucratic; and third, the revolution in information technology, and the organization of work,
makes it important that government learn to do
more with less, to be more entrepreneurial and
more effective.
Has our government grown too big? In significant ways, yes. Many of today's operations still
run like monopolistic, big industrial corporations,
with top-down, command-and-control management, lots of micro-management through rules
and regulations, and a mass-production, one-sizefits-all approach to both service and regulation.
That model doesn't work in industry anymore;
that's why there has been such an intense effort in
the private sector to increase productivity and
flexibility. Government, however, was slow to
recognize this and even slower to respond.
The question now is, how should we change
government? Ever since the Reagan Revolution
of 1980, the dominant Republican argument has
shifted from "less government is almost always
better than more of it" to "government is always
the problem." That argument reached its peak in
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�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Michael Waldman
Description
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<p>Michael Waldman was Assistant to the President and Director of Speechwriting from 1995-1999. His responsibilities were writing and editing nearly 2,000 speeches, which included four State of the Union speeches and two Inaugural Addresses. From 1993 -1995 he served as Special Assistant to the President for Policy Coordination.</p>
<p>The collection generally consists of copies of speeches and speech drafts, talking points, memoranda, background material, correspondence, reports, handwritten notes, articles, clippings, and presidential schedules. A large volume of this collection was for the State of the Union speeches. Many of the speech drafts are heavily annotated with additions or deletions. There are a lot of articles and clippings in this collection.</p>
<p>Due to the size of this collection it has been divided into two segments. Use links below for access to the individual segments:<br /><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0469-F+Segment+1">Segment One</a><br /><a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/browse?advanced%5B0%5D%5Belement_id%5D=43&advanced%5B0%5D%5Btype%5D=is+exactly&advanced%5B0%5D%5Bterms%5D=2006-0469-F+Segment+2">Segment Two</a></p>
Creator
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Michael Waldman
Office of Speechwriting
Date
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1993-1999
Identifier
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2006-0469-F
Extent
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Segment One contains 1071 folders in 72 boxes.
Segment Two contains 868 folders in 66 boxes.
Provenance
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Clinton Presidential Records: White House Staff and Office Files
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
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Adobe Acrobat Document
Text
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paper
Dublin Core
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Title
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Between Hope and History - Third Revision [Binder] [1]
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Office of Speechwriting
Michael Waldman
Is Part Of
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Box 26
<a href="http://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36404"> Collection Finding Aid</a>
<a href="https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7763296">National Archives Catalog Description</a>
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2006-0469-F Segment 2
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White House Staff and Office Files
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William J. Clinton Presidential Library & Museum
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Adobe Acrobat Document
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6/3/2015
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7763296
42-t-7763296-20060469F-Seg2-026-005-2015