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January 18, 2001 My fellow citizens, tonight is my last opportunity to speak to you from the Oval Office as your President. I am profoundly grateful to you for twice giving me the honor to serve, to work for you and with you to prepare our Nation for the 21st century. And I'm grateful to Vice President Gore, to my Cabinet Secretaries, and to all those who have served with me for the last 8 years. This has been a time of dramatic transformation, and you have risen to every new challenge. You have made our social fabric stronger, our families healthier and safer, our people more prosperous. You, the American people, have made our passage into the global information age an era of great American renewal. In all the work I have done as President every decision I have made, every executive action I have taken, every bill I have proposed and signed I've tried to give all Americans the tools and conditions to build the future of our dreams in a good society with a strong economy, a cleaner environment, and a freer, safer, more prosperous world. I have steered my course by our enduring values opportunity for all, responsibility from all, a community of all Americans. I have sought to give America a new kind of Government, smaller, more modern, more effective, full of ideas and policies appropriate to this new time, always putting people first, always focusing on the future. Working together, America has done well. Our economy is breaking records with more than 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the highest homeownership ever, the longest expansion in history. Our families and communities are stronger. Thirty five million Americans have used the family leave law 8 million have moved off welfare. Crime is at a 25 year low. Over 10 million Americans receive more college aid, and more people than ever are going to college. Our schools are better. Higher standards, greater accountability, and larger investments have brought higher test scores and higher graduation rates. More than 3 million children have health insurance now, and more than 7 million Americans have been lifted out of poverty. Incomes are rising across the board. Our air and water are cleaner. Our food and drinking water are safer. And more of our precious land has been preserved in the continental United States than at any time in a 100 years. America has been a force for peace and prosperity in every corner of the globe. I'm very grateful to be able to turn over the reins of leadership to a new President with America in such a strong position to meet the challenges of the future. Tonight I want to leave you with three thoughts about our future. First, America must maintain our record of fiscal responsibility. Through our last four budgets we've turned record deficits to record surpluses, and we've been able to pay down 600 billion of our national debt on track to be debt free by the end of the decade for the first time since 1835. Staying on that course will bring lower interest rates, greater prosperity, and the opportunity to meet our big challenges. If we choose wisely, we can pay down the debt, deal with the retirement of the baby boomers, invest more in our future, and provide tax relief. Second, because the world is more connected every day, in every way, America's security and prosperity require us to continue to lead in the world. At this remarkable moment in history, more people live in freedom than ever before. Our alliances are stronger than ever. People all around the world look to America to be a force for peace and prosperity, freedom and security. The global economy is giving more of our own people and billions around the world the chance to work and live and raise their families with dignity. But the forces of integration that have created these good opportunities also make us more subject to global forces of destruction, to terrorism, organized crime and narcotrafficking, the spread of deadly weapons and disease, the degradation of the global environment. The expansion of trade hasn't fully closed the gap between those of us who live on the cutting edge of the global economy and the billions around the world who live on the knife's edge of survival. This global gap requires more than compassion it requires action. Global poverty is a powder keg that could be ignited by our indifference. In his first Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson warned of entangling alliances. But in our times, America cannot and must not disentangle itself from the world. If we want the world to embody our shared values, then we must assume a shared responsibility. If the wars of the 20th century, especially the recent ones in Kosovo and Bosnia, have taught us anything, it is that we achieve our aims by defending our values and leading the forces of freedom and peace. We must embrace boldly and resolutely that duty to lead to stand with our allies in word and deed and to put a human face on the global economy, so that expanded trade benefits all peoples in all nations, lifting lives and hopes all across the world. Third, we must remember that America cannot lead in the world unless here at home we weave the threads of our coat of many colors into the fabric of one America. As we become ever more diverse, we must work harder to unite around our common values and our common humanity. We must work harder to overcome our differences, in our hearts and in our laws. We must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, and regardless of when they arrived in our country always moving toward the more perfect Union of our Founders' dreams. Hillary, Chelsea, and I join all Americans in wishing our very best to the next President, George W. Bush, to his family and his administration, in meeting these challenges, and in leading freedom's march in this new century. As for me, I'll leave the Presidency more idealistic, more full of hope than the day I arrived, and more confident than ever that America's best days lie ahead. My days in this office are nearly through, but my days of service, I hope, are not. In the years ahead, I will never hold a position higher or a covenant more sacred than that of President of the United States. But there is no title I will wear more proudly than that of citizen. Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America. January 11, 2001 Korean War Incident at No Gun Ri Q. We understand you made a foreign policyrelated call shortly The President. Yes, I just talked to President Kim about the No Gun Ri incident and personally expressed my regret to him. And I thanked him for the work that we had done together in developing our mutual statement. We also set up this scholarship fund and did some other things that we hope will be a genuine gesture of our regret. It was a very you know, I had a good talk with him. Q. Any particular reason why you used the word "regret" instead of "apology" in your statement? The President. I think the findings were I think he knows that "regret" and "apology" both mean the same thing, in terms of being profoundly sorry for what happened. But I believe that the people who looked into it could not conclude that there was a deliberate act, decided at a high enough level in the military hierarchy, to acknowledge that, in effect, the Government had participated in something that was terrible. So I don't think there's any difference in the two words, on a human level, because we are profoundly sorry that it happened and sorry that any Americans were involved in it. But I think that in terms of the kind of responsibility the institution of the military that the facts were sufficiently unclear after all this time that the people who were reviewing it thought it was the appropriate language. And we worked it out with the Koreans and obviously shared whatever we could find with them. These people have been our friends for 50 years. We didn't have I told our guys to play it straight, that we didn't have an interest in trying to cover anything up or sugar coat anything we needed to try to get to the bottom of this. I think that we've done about the best we can do. And I hope that the people of Korea will accept our statement as genuine, and I hope it will bring some solace to the family members and the few people that still survived who were involved in it, who will never get over it. California Electricity Shortages Q. Let me ask you another topical question. California is on the verge of blackouts. Is there anything you can do in your remaining time in office? The President. Well, I'm working at it. We have done some things. Secretary Richardson has worked very hard to make sure that the wholesalers kept selling the power to the utilities. But essentially, what happened was before without any involvement from the Federal Government and before the previous administration in California, the deregulation was done in a way that made them vulnerable not to in essence, to very high prices, maybe prices that aren't justified by market conditions on occasion. They need to get all they can get from out of State generators and in State generators, because they've grown so much. And they still have a regulation of prices to the ultimate consumer. So we've got a situation here which it seems to me might have been predictable at the time the deregulation legislation was done. But I, frankly, until this happened, I didn't know what the nature of the California deregulation law was. I didn't even know when it had been done, until this whole thing arose. So we're dealing with the situation the best we can. But I also think we need to talk to some of the producers, see whether more power can be brought on line at economical rates more quickly. I actually talked to one of them myself just in the last 2 or 3 days. So I'm trying to get all of our options out there, and if there's anything else I can do, I will. I saw Governor Davis about a week ago, and I told him that. But I do believe that the Governor and the people of California know that, through the Energy Department, we've done everything we can so far. 2000 Presidential Election Q. Let me turn you to the election very quickly. You seemed to surprise everybody when you said that the Republicans only that when they stopped the counting, that's the only way that George W. won. What point were you trying to make there? The President. I was actually just having fun with Bill Daley in Chicago. We were home and his brother he had introduced his brother. I think Bill did a very fine job running the Vice President's campaign. I was just having a good time, trying to put them all in a good humor. I wasn't trying to be sarcastic or hateful or even make any kind of deliberate point. I was basically having fun with what I think are the undisputed facts. I don't think there's much dispute about the facts. They didn't finish the vote count. There's really no everybody knows that. Q. Do you have any hard feelings about the election outcome and the way the Court, the conservative majority stepped in to stop the counting? The President. Well, I don't have much to add to what I said. I think the Vice President said it all for us. We accept the principle of judicial review. It's a very important one. It has been since John Marshall wrote the opinion in Marbury v. Madison in the early 19th century. And it has helped us to have some finality in our law. But yes, I disagree with the decision, and I think most constitutional scholars do. I saw a quote in the paper the other day from a man who was a law professor in the Middle West I'm sorry, I don't remember his name but he identified himself as a conservative, pro life Republican. But he said, "I am a constitutional law professor, and I disagree with this decision." But the country has had, periodically thankfully not often, but periodically there's a handful of Supreme Court decisions that I think were unfortunate. But we nearly always straighten it out with time. And in the meanwhile, the election was very close. It was fought nearly to a draw, and the political forces in Florida, the legislature might have done the same thing, and it might have been upheld. I just hated to see the Court involved in this way when there was, you know, 6 days less to count the votes. But I didn't mean to make any big point. I didn't say anything that I and the Vice President and other Democrats had said tons of times. I was just having fun, trying to say something nice, to make people laugh about Bill Daley. It's pretty tough on him, you know, because he really did do a good job. I think they were about 10 points behind or something, and Bill took over, and he really did, I think, a very good job. Q. Can I switch to the Middle East? Everything that's going on right now. Today they had some talks The President. Let me just say one other you shouldn't read anything about that has nothing to do with we have tried to be very supportive of the President elect and his team and the transition. I haven't tried to politicize this. I was strictly having fun with my friends in Chicago and bucking up Bill Daley. That's all. Anyway, go ahead. Middle East Peace Process Q. The Middle East, there were some talks in the Gaza today between Israelis and Palestinians. But Sharon has already said the Oslo deal is dead, basically. What are your thoughts about the next 8 days? Is there any hope for anything to happen or will you The President. I think there is. It depends on what the agreement is and then how the Israeli electorate responds to it. General Sharon has, I think, never liked the Oslo agreement and has been very honest about it. But he did come to Wye River he participated fully. Then Prime Minister Netanyahu had been very critical of Oslo. But they negotiated that agreement at Wye River, and previously to that, I think he was in when they finalized the Hebron agreement. So you have to hope that this process keeps going. The reason we went let me just back up and say, the reason we went to Camp David in the first place is that it was obvious to everybody that just as the Hebron and then especially the Wye River agreement was absolutely essential to keep the peace process alive, because the previous understandings had come to the end of their rope and they had to stay on the process, it was obvious to me that we had come to the end of our capacity to stay in the peace process with just the Wye River agreement. It worked very well for a couple of years, but there had to be some continued movement. Because what happens is, when you reach a stall, then the people that really don't want this to happen, particularly rejectionist elements within the Palestinian community, they can have incidents then they provoke reactions then the borders get closed then the incomes of the Palestinians drop again, and you get in a downward spiral. So I was trying to head off just what we've been through these last 3 months. So I think that they will have to reach some sort of accommodation, unless they really want the thing to spin out of control. And I really don't believe either side wants that, so we'll just have to see. But you know, whatever happens will be the responsibility of the next administration and the winner of the Israeli election, whoever that may be. Q. Do you think it's important for you to set out a list of, maybe, points that have been agreed to so far, so that they don't start from scratch again, that you don't lose what you've already gotten? The President. Well, I think it was quite significant, actually, even though it came 6 days later than I wanted it to, that the Palestinians have now agreed in principle with the parameters. So at least that Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have agreed this Israeli government, excuse me and the Palestinian Authority have agreed to the parameters. Both sides have some concerns and some questions which are, frankly, quite well known to either side. So I think we have narrowed the debate and moved it forward. Now obviously, unless there is an agreement, the United States Government is not bound by the position I took. Any incoming Israeli government would not be bound. For example, when I felt that I had to continue a number of President Bush's policies I didn't particularly disagree with them, either, by the way, in Somalia and one or two other places but I didn't really believe it was an option to reverse them, because our Government was committed. And I think it's very important that we except in the most extreme circumstances maintain some continuity in foreign policy and in our commitments to other countries. But President elect Bush is in no way, shape, or form bound by the positions I've taken on this Middle East agreement, unless there is some agreement. Q. Do you think that'll happen? The President. I just don't know. You know, it's a very difficult to predict situation. All the odds say no, but there are reasons why they are both working to get this done. In all my 8 years of service as President, I've never seen a situation quite like this, where the circumstances, including my short time in office, seemed unfavorable, but the determination of the main players seems strong, in fact, maybe even intensified. So we'll just have to see what happens. I'm trying to keep myself free of expectation one way or the other, and to do whatever I can to try to help end the violence and we had a good day today and just create the conditions in which, if they're willing, they can do as much as they can do. And we'll just have to see what happens. I don't think we can predict it. Q. Do you think the incoming Bush people will be as interested in pursuing this as you have been? The President. Well, I think they will be very interested in stability and peace in the Middle East. Their orientation has been a little more toward, you know, the Gulf, the oil producing states, honoring our historic commitments to Israel to maintain their qualitative military capacity. But to be fair, the previous Bush administration took a pretty strong line on expanded settlements after the Madrid talks started in the hope that they could help to create the conditions in which the Palestinians and the Israelis could move toward peace. So I think that there may be differences in approach and priorities that the President and the Vice President and Secretary Powell will have to work through. But my guess is that their general direction will be the same, because in the end, what happens is let's assume and I'm not saying this, because I don't believe this but listen, even if you had an administration that didn't really care about the Palestinian problem on its own merits and said, "Well, our real interests are in the geopolitics of the oilproducing states and the problems created by the lack of an agreement with Syria." And by the way, I'm fairly optimistic that there will be an agreement between Israel and Syria sometime in the not too distant future, and I don't think there would be much difference in the policy positions taken by Likud or a Labor government on Syria, or by my administration or the incoming administration. We worked this hard, I mean, for years. And I think if the late President Asad hadn't kind of felt he was not in the best of health and was not that they wanted to freeze things in place, and if he can secure his son's accession, we might well have been able to do a peace agreement when I met with him in Switzerland shortly before his death. So I expect that I don't think there will be much difference there. So even if it's not a priority for you because it looks like a morass that can't be solved in a small place with people that don't have a state, don't have nuclear arms, don't have an air force, don't have an army, inevitably what we always get back to is that the absence of an agreement with the Palestinians and the absence of a stable situation between Israel and the Palestinians infects the other countries and their capacity to relate to us over the long run. And particularly as these other countries have more and more young people who are more and more drawn to the sympathetic drawn with a sympathetic ear to the claims of the Palestinians, and they have more demonstrations in these other countries and more unrest in these other countries, I think that our concern for stability in our relations with the Saudis, with the Kuwaitis, with not letting Saddam Hussein develop weapons of mass destruction again, the whole range of concerns that any American administration would have to have leads you back down to the Israeli Palestinian conflict and trying to get to the end of the road there. I mean, I just think you do. I think that that's why I made the speech I did to the Israeli Policy Forum the other night. I waited until the very end, and until, essentially, I had put these parameters out before saying that, because I don't believe an American President should try to impose or create a peace between these two parties. The questions go too much to the heart of their respective sense of national identities, their cultural identity, their whole set of religious convictions. So all I said in these parameters and all I meant to say in the Israel Policy Forum speech is, "Look, I've been listening to these people for 8 years, and I've studied these issues as closely, I believe, as any American President ever has, down to the maps, the settlement locations, the maps of the city of Jerusalem, the whole thing. My best judgment is if there ever is going to be a comprehensive agreement, it will have to look something like this." And you know, that's not the only option. In other words, they could do what they did at Wye River. They could say, "Okay, here's the next chapter, and this is what we're going to do." But the real problem with the sort of sequencing of interim steps is that, at least so far, because of all the other very complex forces going on there, these steps have not brought sufficient stability to the relationship and to the climate within the Palestinian areas or within Israel that there can be a long term sort of set of nonpolitical measures that lead to progress which is exactly the reverse of the Irish situation. And you may have heard me say this before, but the difference is, in Ireland I may have said this in the Israel Policy Forum speech, I can't remember but my physical analogy is, some unsolved problems are like scabs on a wound. If you leave them alone, they'll heal. Some are like an abscessed tooth. If you leave it alone, it will get lots worse. In Ireland, because the underlying economic circumstances are dramatically improved and because there has been a dramatic increase in interpersonal contact which is positive, and because while there is a small terrorist group that is still trying to upset the Irish thing, it's much more contained, the absence of final resolution of the thorny political issues is unlikely to crater the situation. In the Middle East, the per capita income of most Palestinians is the same or lower than it was when we signed the agreement on the White House Lawn, because there are so many different groups that can paralyze the process with acts of terror or violence that close the borders, that stop everything, that wreck the economy, and that kind of burn the bridges of trust that get built up when things are going okay for a year or so. I think it's more like an abscessed tooth. So that's why I decided to make the speech I gave at the Israel Policy Forum. But they don't have to do that. They could reach another accommodation. They could say, "Okay, we can't do this whole thing, but we can't just rest on Oslo plus Wye River, so we have to do this," whatever this is. And they could do that. But I think any Israeli leader would have to see that, and I think in the end, any American government will come back to a concern for it, if for no other reason than a desire to have stability in the region. Tax Cut National Economy Q. Let me turn you quickly to the economy. The Republicans are talking about a retroactive tax cut. You've got an economic statement tomorrow. Are the factors there, is the evidence there strong enough that there's a downturn going on and we need this retroactive tax cut? The President. Well, first of all, the blue chip forecast, I think, is for 2.6 percent growth, which is enough growth to keep the unemployment rate at about 4 percent. And that really doesn't surprise me. When I saw the initial estimates, which were about 3.4 percent, I thought they were a tad high because we've been growing for a couple of years at nearly 5 percent, which is, for an advanced economy of our size, it's just virtually unprecedented. You simply couldn't sustain it at that rate. So I think that the expansion can be continued. On the other hand, there's been a fairly sharp drop in stock values, and that takes a lot of wealth out of the economy, and eventually, that backs down into lower consumption and orders and things like that. So you see, for example, real problems in the steel industry today at a time when steel imports are also dropping. So it's not like the '97 crisis where the crisis in Asia and Russia led people to try to flood the market in America with bargain basement prices. Here, you've got an overall problem. So I think I've always believed that a tax cut should be part of the next budget. I thought it should have been part of the last budget. It can be a little bigger than the one that I proposed, because the surplus has been written up some the estimated surplus. Although I think it's very important that they go back and subtract from the estimated surplus the 10 year costs of the budget we just adopted, because it's the best education budget, for example, that we've had in my 8 years. There's about a 15 percent increase in education. But you have to prorate that out, and President elect Bush has said he's very interested in continuing to support education, even though he wants to kind of rearrange the deck chairs on how we allocated it which is, you know, that's up to him and the Congress. They'll have to work that out. So I think the question is not so much whether one is warranted but what kind of tax cut should it be, and how big should it be? My concern what I have believed in I said this back during the campaign period so I can reiterate it my view is that it should not be so large as to preclude our continued ability to pay down the debt and to stay more or less on the track we're on to get the debt down over the next 10 years, because if the markets perceive that we're going back into deficits, that would lead to an increase in interest rates, which would wipe out the impact of a tax cut for most Americans even wealthy Americans, because it could have a depressing impact on the market, and it certainly would increase the cost of business borrowing and tend to slow down the growth of the economy. So the trick is that also, by the way, would foreclose this is what happened to me when I got in. I didn't have the option to do what Americans would normally the Government would normally do in a recession, which is to have a substantial tax cut and pump the thing back up, because the deficit was so big, it would just have caused interest rates to skyrocket. So the trick for the incoming administration they have lots of options here. They can spend money they can cut taxes they can do more of one or less of the other and less of the other. But the real what I would be thinking about if I were in that position is, what is the aggregate amount we're going to commit here, particularly on the tax cut side, because it's not like you don't have to repeat spending in years 2, 3, and 4. You can cut spending if times are tough. We've proved that. But once the tax money once you cut the taxes, that's normally gone. It's hard to raise taxes when times are tough. So what I hope is, I think they ought to have a tax cut of some magnitude, but I think they ought to save back enough to keep on the track of paying down the debt, which also gives you the protection down the road. Someday, surely, the expansion will come to an end, but I don't think it has to come any time soon. And when it does, the more we pay the debt down, the more free we will be then to have a substantial tax cut to help the country in a recession when that happens sometime in the future without having an adverse impact on interest rates. So I don't think there's any question that they can have a tax cut. It could be fairly sizable. I think it's appropriate. But I just think you don't want it so big that it takes you off the path of getting us out of debt, because the mental knowledge that that's the path we're on keeps interest rates low. The average American family now is saving 2,000 a year on a home mortgage, as compared to where we were back in '93. Long term interest rates are 2 percent lower than when I took office, even though we've had an 8 year expansion, which is unheard of. You normally wouldn't have that. And paying down the debt has a huge impact on that, because it frees up more and more money every year to borrow in the private sector, and interest rates are lower than they would be if the Government were competing. And let me also say there's something else that we should keep in mind. The more you pay down the debt, the lower your interest bill is. I think this year we've got interest payments on the debt down under 12 cents on the dollar. But they were at 13 or something, headed north, when I took office. Let's say we went I'm making this up, of course let's say we went 4 or 5 more years on the same tack, and we got interest on the debt down to 6 cents on the dollar. That's a huge amount of money that is freed up every year for either investment in our future or for tax cuts. And you have more and more and more flexibility. Anyway, that's kind of a long winded answer, but it's a very, very important subject, and I've thought about it a lot. Q. Can I just another foreign policy question one more question. The President. Go ahead. National Missile Defense Q. On NMD, which has become topical now with the Bush administration and Rumsfeld's hearings today, do you regret at all making it a commitment of the United States, since some diplomacy efforts, like with Korea, are working out? And is it just going to create more problems with China, Russia in the future? The President. Well, I think I made the right decision not to deploy. And I think that I made the right decision to continue the research program. And I hope that's what they will do. It's not clear to me exactly how they're going to operationalize their commitment. That is, because in the campaign, the President elect said that he would do this if it could be developed, whether anybody else liked it or not, which bothered some people. But he also the "it" that he was trying to develop was a system that was, in effect, more comprehensive than the more limited one that could have been deployed in the timeframes we were talking about during my tenure. So it may be that what he will decide to do is to intensify research. Look, if we actually knew we had the technology to take missiles out of the sky, even assuming that we get this agreement with North Korea which I think we will get, on freezing the missile production, not selling missiles. I think that will come. That's teed up, and I believe the Bush administration will see it as a great opportunity. And I think it will be one seized within the first few months of the incoming administration. I think it will be one of their first achievements, because it's set, and I think it will happen. But even if that happens, with the proliferation of technology around the world, we can't possibly know who might have missiles in the future. So I think we're almost morally obligated to continue to try to develop this kind of system. However, if we deploy the system in a way that leads to more proliferation and more insecurity, that's very problematic. And it's one of the things that I had to consider, that if we just set it up, even if we were worried about North Korea and the Middle East, if the Chinese interpreted it as a move to try to contain them, even though there's no way we could even if they have just 50 missiles, that's more than or two dozen, whatever they've got two dozen I guess, more or less they might decide that now they need 300. If they did that, the Indians would decide that they needed more, under the present state of play between the two countries. If they did that, the Pakistanis would certainly build more. And circumstances that exist on the Indian Subcontinent are not as stable as those which existed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the cold war, or that exists today between the United States and Russia. And by the way, I expect that there will be a further reduction in nuclear warheads by both countries. That's one thing I think the Bush administration will be in a position to do, because of the development of our relationships, I'll be I expect that President Putin and then President Bush will be successful in continuing to reduce the nuclear arsenals. But you don't want to have all this sort of uncontrolled instability in some other part of the world. But there's a way to continue to work the missile defense issue, and then there would be a way to put it at the service of all countries, the technology, which is what President Reagan used to talk about when he was talking about the Star Wars in the sky and all of that. Philosophically, he had an idea of making it available to all countries so that no one would be any more at risk, including from us. But that technology is not out there now. We're talking about technology to stop the accidental launch or a terrorist or a country with two or three missiles that could lob them at you. Two or three missiles could do a world of damage on the United States or someone else. So I just think I think that I left it with a maximum number of options for the next administration. I've tried to leave the economy with maximum number of options in good shape, and I think this program gives them the maximum number of options. And I think again, you know, we all say things in campaigns, and then you get to be President and it looks a little different. Presidents pretty much do what they promise to do in campaigns, but sometimes when you turn an idea into an operation, when you operationalize your views, the world looks different when you're sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office than it did when you were running for the job. It just does. And that's no criticism of him. They're the same things that looked different to me when I got there. And so I just it's a big issue, but it will be closely covered and widely debated, and I hope it will be resolved in an appropriate way. But I do think that the research should continue. President's Future Plans Q. How are you going to feel on January 21st? You wake up Sunday morning, you won't be President. Q. In Chappaqua. The President. I'm not sure. But I'll say this, right now, I just feel very at peace and very grateful. And I'm going to start thinking about the rest of my life. Every stage of my life has been rewarding and good. And I've been so fortunate, and it's a real challenge. I'm just going to try to imagine how I can make the most of it. I'm kind of looking forward to it. I don't expect that I'll have sort of prolonged periods of semi depression because I'm not President anymore. Q. Withdrawal pains? The President. Yes. I was only halfway kidding when I told the church the other day that I expected to be disoriented when I go into big rooms and nobody plays a song anymore. Laughter I mean, I'm sure there will be somehow some kind of things that will be tough, and I'll have to learn how to be a real citizen all over again, but that's good. The Presidency is what was so well taken care of, and a lot of the cares of normal daily life that I never had to think about when I was in office. It's probably healthy for a person not to have that kind of support for too many years in life. So I'm kind of looking forward to it. President's Pets Q. What about Socks? What's going to happen to Socks? The President. Well, I don't know. You know, I made more progress in the Middle East than I did between Socks and Buddy. Laughter And I don't know that I've got enough space and enough help when I'm gone to keep them both away from one another and keep them both happy. But I still haven't quite resolved what to do. I love that old cat. You know, we picked him up as sort of a half stray in Arkansas, and I hate to give him up. But Betty loves him. Half the White House loves the cat, and the other half loves the dog. Q. You can't break them up into that many pieces. The President. No, no. I'm sure going to take I know I'll take Buddy, because I slept with him for 16 months all during the Senate campaign. He was with me all the time. Laughter I can't live without him. But I really I've even talked to some of the guys, a couple of the guys at the White House are quite good at training pets, and we've all kind of tried to work at this. None of us have been able to figure out how to actually get them in peaceful coexistence. I feel, of all the skills I learned as President in bringing these people together, I didn't do very well with that. Laughter Q. It's been a pleasure, Mr. President. Q. Thank you. The President. Thanks, Steve. Q. Thank you very much, sir. The President. You guys have been great. January 07, 2001 Thank you very much. Thank you. I want to thank all of you for making me feel so welcome tonight and also for making Hillary and Chelsea feel welcome. I thank Michael Sonnenfeldt, who, like me, is going out after 8 years laughter and will doubtless find some other useful activity. But he has done a superb job, and I'm very grateful to him. I thank my friend Jack Bendheim for his many kindnesses to me and to Hillary. Yesterday he had a birthday, and now, like me, he's 54. Unlike me, he has enough children to be elected President of the United States. Laughter And he's had a wonderful family and a wonderful life, and I'm delighted that he's so active in the Israel Policy Forum. I'd like to thank Judith Stern Peck for making me feel so welcome and for her leadership. I thank Lesley Stahl. It's good to see you, and thank you for your kind remarks. I thank the many Members of Congress who are here and also the members of my Middle East peace team. Secretary Albright and Sandy Berger and others have been introduced, but Secretary Dan Glickman is here, and Kerry Kennedy Cuomo is here, and I thank them for being here. I want to thank the New York officials who are here Carl McCall, Mark Green, and any others who may be in the crowd for your many kindnesses to me over the last 8 years. New York has been great to me and Al Gore and even greater to my wife on election day, so I thank you for that. We just reenacted her swearing in at Madison Square Garden. And I was reminded of one of the many advantages of living in New York Jessye Norman sang, Toni Morrison read, and Billy Joel sang. Meanwhile, at least at half time, the Giants were ahead. Laughter And so I said, I felt sort of like Garrison Keillor did about Lake Wobegon. I was glad to be in New York where all the writers, artists, and sports teams were above average laughter and all the votes were always counted. Laughter Let me also say a word of warm welcome and profound respect to the Speaker of the Knesset, Speaker Burg, for his wonderful and kind comments to me, and to Cabinet Secretary Herzog, for his message from the Government of Israel. I want to say a little more about that in a moment. I want to congratulate Dwayne Andreas, my good friend I wish he were here tonight and thank him for his many kindnesses to me. Congratulations, Louis Perlmutter Susan Stern, who has been such a great friend to Hillary, and you gave a good talk tonight. I think you've got a real future in this business. And your mother sat by me, and she gave you a good grade, too. Laughter And Alan Solomont, who has done as much for me as, I suppose, any American, and he and Susan and their children have been great friends, and I thank you for what you've done, sir. I thank all of you. I'd also like to say how much I appreciated and was moved by the words of Prime Minister Barak. He was dealt the hard hand by history. And he came to office with absolute conviction that in the end, Israel could not be secure unless a just and lasting peace could be reached with its neighbors, beginning with the Palestinians that if that turned out not to be possible, then the next best thing was to be as strong as possible and as effective in the use of that strength. But his knowledge of war has fed a passion for peace. And his understanding of the changing technology of war has made him more passionate, not because he thinks the existence of Israel is less secure if anything, it's more secure but because the sophisticated weapons available to terrorists today mean even though they still lose, they can exact a higher price along the way. I've been in enough political fights in my life to know that sometimes you just have to do the right thing, and it may work out, and it may not. Most people thought I had lost my mind when we passed the economic plan to get rid of the deficit in 1993. And no one in the other party voted for it, and they just talked about how it would bring the world to an end and America's economy would be a disaster. I think the only Republican who thought it would work was Alan Greenspan. Laughter He was relieved of the burden of having to say anything about it. But no dilemma I have ever faced approximates in difficulty or comes close to the choice that Prime Minister Barak had to make when he took office. He realized that he couldn't know for sure what the final intentions of the Palestinian leadership were without testing them. He further realized that even if the intentions were there, there was a lot of competition among the Palestinians and from outside forces, from people who are enemies of peace because they don't give a rip how the ordinary Palestinians have to live and they're pursuing a whole different agenda. He knew nine things could go wrong and only one thing could go right. But he promised himself that he would have to try. And as long as he knew Israel in the end could defend itself and maintain its security, he would keep taking risks. And that's what he's done, down to these days. There may be those who disagree with him, but he has demonstrated as much bravery in the office of Prime Minister as he ever did on the field of battle, and no one should ever question that. Now, I imagine this has been a tough time for those of you who have been supporting the IPF out of conviction for a long time. All the dreams we had in '93 that were revived when we had the peace with Jordan, revived again when we had the Wye River accords that was, I think, the most interesting peace talk I was ever involved in. My strategy was the same used to break prisoners of war I just didn't let anybody sleep for 9 days, and finally, out of exhaustion, we made a deal just so people could go home and go to bed. Laughter I've been looking for an opportunity to employ it again, ever since. There have been a lot of positive things, and I think it's worth remembering that there have been positive developments along the way. But this is heartbreaking, what we've been through these last few months, for all of you who have believed for 8 years in the Oslo process, all of you whose hearts soared on September 13, 1993, when Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin signed that agreement. For over 3 months, we have lived through a tragic cycle of violence that has cost hundreds of lives. It has shattered the confidence in the peace process. It has raised questions in some people's minds about whether Palestinians and Israelis could ever really live and work together, support each other's peace and prosperity and security. It's been a heartbreaking time for me, too. But we have done our best to work with the parties to restore calm, to end the bloodshed, and to get back to working on an agreement to address the underlying causes that continuously erupt in conflicts. Whatever happens in the next 2 weeks I've got to serve, I think it's appropriate for me tonight, before a group of Americans and friends from the Middle East who believe profoundly in the peace process and have put their time and heart and money where their words are, to reflect on the lessons I believe we've all learned over the last 8 years and how we can achieve the long sought peace. From my first day as President, we have worked to advance interests in the Middle East that are long standing and historically bipartisan. I was glad to hear of Senator Hagel's recitation of President elect Bush's commitment to peace in the Middle East. Those historic commitments include an ironclad commitment to Israel's security and a just, comprehensive, and lasting agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Along the way, since '93, through the positive agreements that have been reached between those two sides, through the peace between Israel and Jordan, through last summer's withdrawal from Lebanon in which Israel fulfilled its part of implementing U.N. Security Counsel Resolution 425 along this way we have learned some important lessons, not only because of the benchmarks of progress, because of the occasional eruption of terrorism, bombing, death, and then these months of conflict. I think these lessons have to guide any effort, now or in the future, to reach a comprehensive peace. Here's what I think they are. Most of you probably believed in them, up to the last 3 months. I still do. First, the Arab Israeli conflict is not just a morality play between good and evil it is a conflict with a complex history, whose resolution requires balancing the needs of both sides, including respect for their national identities and religious beliefs. Second, there is no place for violence and no military solution to this conflict. The only path to a just and durable resolution is through negotiation. Third, there will be no lasting peace or regional stability without a strong and secure Israel, secure enough to make peace, strong enough to deter the adversaries which will still be there, even if a peace is made in complete good faith. And clearly that is why the United States must maintain its commitment to preserving Israel's qualitative edge in military superiority. Fourth, talks must be accompanied by acts acts which show trust and partnership. For good will at the negotiating table cannot survive forever ill intent on the ground. And it is important that each side understands how the other reads actions. For example, on the one hand, the tolerance of violence and incitement of hatred in classrooms and the media in the Palestinian communities, or on the other hand, humiliating treatment on the streets or at checkpoints by Israelis, are real obstacles to even getting people to talk about building a genuine peace. Fifth, in the resolution of remaining differences, whether they come today or after several years of heartbreak and bloodshed, the fundamental, painful, but necessary choices will almost certainly remain the same whenever the decision is made. The parties will face the same history, the same geography, the same neighbors, the same passions, the same hatreds. This is not a problem time will take care of. And I would just like to go off the script here, because a lot of you have more personal contacts than I do with people that will be dealing with this for a long time to come, whatever happens in the next 2 weeks. Among the really profound and difficult problems of the world that I have dealt with, I find that they tend to fall into two categories. And if I could use sort of a medical analogy, some are like old wounds with scabs on them, and some are like abscessed teeth. What do I mean by that? Old wounds with scabs eventually will heal if you just leave them alone. And if you fool with them too much, you might open the scab and make them worse. Abscessed teeth, however, will only get worse if you leave them alone, and if you wait and wait and wait, they'll just infect the whole rest of your mouth. Northern Ireland, I believe, is becoming more like the scab. There are very difficult things. If you followed my trip over there, you know I was trying to help them resolve some of their outstanding problems, and we didn't get it all done. But what I really wanted to do was to remind people of the benefits of peace and to keep everybody in a good frame of mind and going on so that all the politicians know that if they really let the wheel run off over there, the people will throw them out on their ears. Now, why is that? Because the Irish Republic is now the fastest growing economy in Europe, and Northern Ireland is the fastest growing economy within the United Kingdom. So the people are benefiting from peace, and they can live with the fact that they can't quite figure out what to do about the police force and the reconciliation of the various interests and passions of the Protestants and Catholics, and the other three or four things, because the underlying reality has changed their lives. So even though I wish I could solve it all, eventually it will heal, if it just keeps going in the same direction. The Middle East is not like that. Why? Because there are all these independent actors that is, independent of the Palestinian Authority and not under the direct control of any international legal body who don't want this peace to work. So that even if we can get an agreement and the Palestinian Authority works as hard as they can and the Israelis work as hard as they can, we're all going to have to pitch in, send in an international force like we did in the Sinai, and hang tough, because there are enemies of peace out there, number one. Number two, because the enemies of peace know they can drive the Israelis to close the borders if they can blow up enough bombs. They do it periodically to make sure that the Palestinians in the street cannot enjoy the benefits of peace that have come to the people in Northern Ireland. So as long as they can keep the people miserable and they can keep the fundamental decisions from being made, they still have a hope, the enemies of peace, of derailing the whole thing. That's why it's more like an abscessed tooth. The fundamental realities are not going to be changed by delays. And that's why I said what I did about Ehud Barak. I know that I don't think it's appropriate for the United States to deal with anybody else's politics, but I know why you can't expect poll ratings to be very good when the voters in the moment wonder if they're going to get peace or security and think they can no longer have both and may have to choose one. I understand that. But I'm telling you, the reason he has continued to push ahead on this is that he has figured out, this is one of those political problems that is like the abscessed tooth. The realities are not going to change. We can wait until all these handsome young people at this table are the same age as the honorees tonight, and me. We can wait until they've got kids their age and we've got a whole lot more bodies and a lot more funerals, a lot more crying and a lot more hatred, and I'll swear the decisions will still be the same ones that will have to be made that have to be made today. That's the fundamental deal here. And this is a speech I have given, I might add, to all my Israeli friends who question what we have done, and to the Palestinians, and in private God forgive me, my language is sometimes somewhat more graphic than it has been tonight. But anybody that ever kneeled at the grave of a person who died in the Middle East knows that what we've been through these last 3 months is not what Yitzhak Rabin died for, and not what I went to Gaza 2 years ago to speak to the Palestinian National Council for either, for that matter. So those are the lessons I think are still operative, and I'm a little concerned that we could draw the wrong lessons from this tragic, still relatively brief, chapter in the history of the Middle East. The violence does not demonstrate that the quest for peace has gone too far or too fast. It demonstrates what happens when you've got a problem that is profoundly difficult and you never quite get to the end, so there is no settlement, no resolution, anxiety prevailed, and at least some people never get any concrete benefits out of it. And I believe that the last few months demonstrate the futility of force or terrorism as an ultimate solution. That's what I believe. I think the last few months show that unilateralism will exacerbate, not abate, mutual hostility. I believe that the violence confirms the need to do more to prepare both publics for the requirements of peace, not to condition people for the socalled glory of further conflict. Now, what are we going to do now? The first priority, obviously, has got to be to drastically reduce the current cycle of violence. But beyond that, on the Palestinian side, there must be an end to the culture of violence and the culture of incitement that, since Oslo, has not gone unchecked. Young children still are being educated to believe in confrontation with Israel, and multiple militia like groups carry and use weapons with impunity. Voices of reason in that kind of environment will be drowned out too often by voices of revenge. Such conduct is inconsistent with the Palestinian leadership's commitment to Oslo's nonviolent path to peace, and its persistence sends the wrong message to the Israeli people and makes it much more difficult for them to support their leaders in making the compromises necessary to get a lasting agreement. For their part, the Israeli people also must understand that they're creating a few problems, too that the settlement enterprise and building bypass roads in the heart of what they already know will one day be part of a Palestinian state is inconsistent with the Oslo commitment that both sides negotiate a compromise. And restoring confidence requires the Palestinians being able to lead a normal existence and not be subject to daily, often humiliating reminders that they lack basic freedom and control over their lives. These, too, make it harder for the Palestinians to believe the commitments made to them will be kept. Can two peoples with this kind of present trouble and troubling history still conclude a genuine and lasting peace? I mean, if I gave you this as a soap opera, you would say they're going to divorce court. But they can't, because they share such a small piece of land with such a profound history of importance to more than a billion people around the world. So I believe with all my heart not only that they can, but that they must. At Camp David I saw Israeli and Palestinian negotiators who knew how many children each other had, who knew how many grandchildren each other had, who knew how they met their spouses, who knew what their family tragedies were, who trusted each other in their word. It was almost shocking to see what could happen and how people still felt on the ground when I saw how their leaders felt about each other and the respect and the confidence they had in each other when they were talking. The alternative to getting this peace done is being played out before our very eyes. But amidst the agony, I will say again, there are signs of hope. And let me try to put this into what I think is a realistic context. Camp David was a transformative event, because the two sides faced the core issue of their dispute in a forum that was official for the first time. And they had to debate the tradeoffs required to resolve the issues. Just as Oslo forced Israelis and Palestinians to come to terms with each other's existence, the discussions of the past 6 months have forced them to come to terms with each other's needs and the contours of a peace that ultimately they will have to reach. That's why Prime Minister Barak, I think, has demonstrated real courage and vision in moving toward peace in difficult circumstances while trying to find a way to continue to protect Israel's security and vital interests. So that's a fancy way of saying, we know what we have to do, and we've got a mess on our hands. So where do we go from here? Given the impasse and the tragic deterioration on the ground a couple of weeks ago, both sides asked me to present my ideas. So I put forward parameters that I wanted to be a guide toward a comprehensive agreement, parameters based on 8 years of listening carefully to both sides and hearing them describe with increasing clarity their respective grievances and needs. Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have now accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts, though both have expressed some reservations. At their request, I am using my remaining time in office to narrow the differences between the parties to the greatest degree possible applause for which I deserve no applause. Believe me, it beats packing up all my old books. Laughter The parameters I put forward contemplate a settlement in response to each side's essential needs, if not to their utmost desires a settlement based on sovereign homelands, security, peace, and dignity for both Israelis and Palestinians. These parameters don't begin to answer every question they just narrow the questions that have to be answered. Here they are. First, I think there can be no genuine resolution to the conflict without a sovereign, viable, Palestinian state that accommodates Israeli's security requirements and the demographic realities. That suggests Palestinian sovereignty over Gaza, the vast majority of the West Bank the incorporation into Israel of settlement blocks, with the goal of maximizing the number of settlers in Israel while minimizing the land annexed. For Palestine, to be viable, must be a geographically contiguous state. Now, the land annexed into Israel into settlement blocks should include as few Palestinians as possible, consistent with the logic of two separate homelands. And to make the agreement durable, I think there will have to be some territorial swaps and other arrangements. Second, a solution will have to be found for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered a great deal particularly some of them a solution that allows them to return to a Palestinian state that will provide all Palestinians with a place they can safely and proudly call home. All Palestinian refugees who wish to live in this homeland should have the right to do so. All others who want to find new homes, whether in their current locations or in third countries, should be able to do so, consistent with those countries' sovereign decisions, and that includes Israel. All refugees should receive compensation from the international community for their losses and assistance in building new lives. Now, you all know what the rub is. That was a lot of artful language for saying that you cannot expect Israel to acknowledge an unlimited right of return to present day Israel and, at the same time, to give up Gaza and the West Bank and have the settlement blocks as compact as possible, because of where a lot of these refugees came from. We cannot expect Israel to make a decision that would threaten the very foundations of the state of Israel and would undermine the whole logic of peace. And it shouldn't be done. But I have made it very clear that the refugees will be a high priority, and that the United States will take a lead in raising the money necessary to relocate them in the most appropriate manner, and that if the government of Israel, or a subsequent government of Israel ever there will be in charge of their immigration policy, just as we and the Canadians and the Europeans and others who would offer Palestinians a home would be, they would be obviously free to do that, and I think they've indicated that they would do that, to some extent. But there cannot be an unlimited language in an agreement that would undermine the very foundations of the Israeli state or the whole reason for creating the Palestinian state. So that's what we're working on. Third, there will be no peace and no peace agreement unless the Israeli people have lasting security guarantees. These need not and should not come at the expense of Palestinian sovereignty or interfere with Palestinian territorial integrity. So my parameters rely on an international presence in Palestine to provide border security along the Jordan Valley and to monitor implementation of the final agreement. They rely on a nonmilitarized Palestine, a phased Israeli withdrawal to address Israeli security needs in the Jordan Valley, and other essential arrangements to ensure Israel's ability to defend itself. Fourth, I come to the issue of Jerusalem, perhaps the most emotional and sensitive of all. It is a historic, cultural, and political center for both Israelis and Palestinians, a unique city sacred to all three monotheistic religions. And I believe the parameters I have established flow from four fair and logical propositions. First, Jerusalem should be an open and undivided city with assured freedom of access and worship for all. It should encompass the internationally recognized capitals of two states, Israel and Palestine. Second, what is Arab should be Palestinian, for why would Israel want to govern in perpetuity the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians? Third, what is Jewish should be Israeli. That would give rise to a Jewish Jerusalem larger and more vibrant than any in history. Fourth, what is holy to both requires a special care to meet the needs of all. I was glad to hear what the Speaker said about that. No peace agreement will last if not premised on mutual respect for the religious beliefs and holy shrines of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. I have offered formulations on the Haram al Sharif and the area holy to the Jewish people, an area which for 2,000 years, as I said at Camp David, has been the focus of Jewish yearning, that I believed fairly addressed the concerns of both sides. Fifth and finally, any agreement will have to mark the decision to end the conflict, for neither side can afford to make these painful compromises only to be subjected to further demands. They are both entitled to know that if they take the last drop of blood out of each other's turnip, that's it. It really will have to be the end of the struggle that has pitted Palestinians and Israelis against one another for too long. And the end of the conflict must manifest itself with concrete acts that demonstrate a new attitude and a new approach by Palestinians and Israelis toward each other, and by other states in the region toward Israel, and by the entire region toward Palestine, to help it get off to a good start. The parties' experience with interim accords has not always been happy too many deadlines missed, too many commitments unfulfilled on both sides. So for this to signify a real end of the conflict, there must be effective mechanisms to provide guarantees of implementation. That's a lot of stuff, isn't it? It's what I think is the outline of a fair agreement. Let me say this. I am well aware that it will entail real pain and sacrifices for both sides. I am well aware that I don't even have to run for reelection in the United States on the basis of these ideas. I have worked for 8 years without laying such ideas down. I did it only when both sides asked me to and when it was obvious that we had come to the end of the road, and somebody had to do something to break out of the impasse. Now, I still think the benefits of the agreement, based on these parameters, far outweigh the burdens. For the people of Israel, they are an end to conflict, secure and defensible borders, the incorporation of most of the settlers into Israel, and the Jewish capital of Yerushalayim, recognized by all, not just the United States, by everybody in the world. It's a big deal, and it needs to be done. For the Palestinian people, it means the freedom to determine their own future on their own land, a new life for the refugees, an independent and sovereign state with Al Quds as its capital, recognized by all. And for America, it means that we could have new flags flying over new Embassies in both these capitals. Now that the sides have accepted the parameters with reservations, what's going to happen? Well, each side will try to do a little better than I did. Laughter You know, that's just natural. But a peace viewed as imposed by one party upon the other, that puts one side up and the other down, rather than both ahead, contains the seeds of its own destruction. Let me say, those who believe that my ideas can be altered to one party's exclusive benefit are mistaken. I think to press for more will produce less. There can be no peace without compromise. Now, I don't ask Israelis or Palestinians to agree with everything I said. If they can come up with a completely different agreement, it would suit me just fine. But I doubt it. I have said what I have out of a profound lifetime commitment to and love for the state of Israel out of a conviction that the Palestinian people have been ignored or used as political footballs by others for long enough, and they ought to have a chance to make their own life with dignity and out of a belief that in the homeland of the world's three great religions that believe we are all the creatures of one God, we ought to be able to prove that one person's win is not by definition another's loss, that one person's dignity is not by definition another's humiliation, that one person's worship of God is not by definition another's heresy. There has to be a way for us to find a truth we can share. There has to be a way for us to reach those young Palestinian kids who, unlike the young people in this audience, don't imagine a future in which they would ever put on clothes like this and sit at a dinner like this. There has to be a way for us to say to them, struggle and pain and destruction and self destruction are way overrated and not the only option. There has to be a way for us to reach those people in Israel who have paid such a high price and believe, frankly, that people who embrace the ideas I just outlined are nuts, because Israel is a little country and this agreement would make it smaller to understand that the world in which we live and the technology of modern weaponry no longer make defense primarily a matter of geography and of politics and the human feeling and the interdependence and the cooperation and the shared values and the shared interests are more important and worth the considered risk, especially if the United States remains committed to the military capacity of the state of Israel. So I say to the Palestinians There will always be those who are sitting outside in the peanut gallery of the Middle East, urging you to hold out for more or to plant one more bomb. But all the people who do that, they're not the refugees languishing in those camps you are. They're not the ones with children growing up in poverty, whose income is lower today than it was the day we had the signing on the White House Lawn in 1993 you are. All the people that are saying to the Palestinian people, "Stay on the path of no," are people that have a vested interest in the failure of the peace process that has nothing to do with how those kids in Gaza and the West Bank are going to grow up and live and raise their own children. To the citizens of Israel who have returned to an ancient homeland after 2,000 years, whose hopes and dreams almost vanished in the Holocaust, who have hardly had one day of peace and quiet since the state of Israel was created I understand, I believe, something of the disillusionment, the anger, the frustration that so many feel when, just at the moment peace seemed within reach, all this violence broke out and raised the question of whether it is ever possible. The fact is that the people of Israel dreamed of a homeland. The dream came through, but when they came home, the land was not all vacant. Your land is also their land. It is the homeland of two peoples. And therefore, there is no choice but to create two states and make the best of it. If it happens today, it will be better than if it happens tomorrow, because fewer people will die. And after it happens, the motives of those who continue the violence will be clearer to all than they are today. Today, Israel is closer than ever to ending a 100 year long era of struggle. It could be Israel's finest hour. And I hope and pray that the people of Israel will not give up the hope of peace. Now, I've got 13 days, and I'll do what I can. We're working with Egypt and the parties to try to end the violence. I'm sending Dennis Ross to the region this week. I met with both sides this week. I hope we can really do something. And I appreciate, more than I can say, the kind, personal things that you said about me. But here's what I want you to think about. New York has its own high tech corridor called Silicon Alley. The number one foreign recipient of venture capital from Silicon Alley is Israel. Palestinians who have come to the United States, to Chile, to Canada, to Europe have done fabulously well in business, in the sciences, in academia. If we could ever let a lot of this stuff go and realize that a lot of that the enemies of peace in the Middle East are overlooking not only what the Jewish people have done beyond Israel but what has happened to the state of Israel since its birth, and how fabulously well the people of Palestinian descent have done everywhere else in the world except in their homeland, where they are in the grip of forces that have not permitted them to reconcile with one another and with the people of Israel. Listen, if you guys ever got together, 10 years from now we would all wonder what the heck happened for 30 years before. And the center of energy and creativity and economic power and political influence in the entire region would be with the Israelis and the Palestinians because of their gifts. It could happen. But somebody has got to take the long leap, and they have to be somebodies on both sides. All I can tell you is, whether you do it now or whether you do it later, whether I'm the President or just somebody in the peanut gallery, I'll be there, cheering and praying and working along the way. And I think America will be there. I think America will always be there for Israel's security. But Israel's lasting security rests in a just and lasting peace. I pray that the day will come sooner rather than later, where all the people of the region will see that they can share the wisdom of God in their common humanity and give up their conflict. Thank you, and God bless you. December 14, 2000 The President's remarks are joined in progress European Union The President. Seriously, what we were just talking about maybe I should make the general point I was going to just make. She said it was so interesting to her when she goes to Europe, people are so interested in these decisions, and Americans don't seem to be. But the truth is, this is their lives, you know. I mean, for people in the Republic, they live with sort of an open wound with all this trouble in Northern Ireland. But for people in Northern Ireland, it's just being able to get in your car and not worrying about going down the street and having a bomb go off. It's worth a lot. So, it matters to them that some people, you know, questioned over the last 8 years whether first of all, whether I should have done that, because it made the British mad, eventually. But in the end, they were very glad we did. But when the United States is involved, even in a small place, it has big psychological significance to the entire Continent. It makes a big difference. I mean, it's obvious what was at stake in Bosnia and Kosovo, but in Northern Ireland it said to the rest of Europe that the U.S. still cares about Europe we're still involved with them. So it has an effect in helping us, because we have all kinds of problems with Europe. You know, we have all these tough environmental issues related to the trade issues and then the trade issues themselves and all that, and we will have. And they're going through all their growing pains. You saw they just had this real tough meeting in, I think, Nice, where they were arguing over how to aggregate the votes and whether Germany should have more because they have more people. And they argue they should have more, because they have more people and they have to pay more money. So, if they have to pay more money and have more people, they ought to have money. And then you've got France, Italy, and Britain all at the same population. They're all at 60 million, and then it's a pretty good drop down to Spain. I think Spain has got like 40 million. Q. But no recounts from what I understand. The President. No. They all use hand ballots, pencil ballots. So go ahead, what were you going to say about Ireland? Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. If you wanted to give some advice about Northern Ireland The President. To President elect Bush? Q. Yes, on Ireland. The people there are faced with a significant amount inaudible on Gerry Adams. What was the makeup? How did you come to that? The President. Well, I reached the conclusion that it was worth the risk for two reasons. And the risks were two. One is, would it do irreparable damage to our relationship with Great Britain? And two, would the IRA really declare a cease fire and honor it, or would it look like I gave a visa to him, and they were still getting money out of Boston and New York for bad purposes that were still going on? On the second, I felt based on people we knew in Ireland, starting with the then Taoiseach, Albert Reynolds, that they would honor their word, because it was in their interest to do so, and they had made a decision to try to work out a peace. And on the first, I felt that the relationship between the U.S. and Britain was so strong, and we agreed on so many foreign policy issues related to Europe like the expansion of NATO, the importance of trying to solve the Balkans crisis, just to mention two that if I put a lot of my time and effort into going to the U.K. and working at it, that we could work through it. And it turned out to be a good gamble. And I had actually quite a good relationship with John Major. I mean, the British press just killed us for a while, and they said, "Clinton did this because Major and the Tories supported President Bush, helped look at Clinton's passport file." It was all ridiculous. I didn't give a rip about that. Q. But what finally made you The President. So my advice to the President elect, I think and I really haven't had a chance to talk about it is just sort of stick with the policy and work with the leaders, because now, you know, you have a consensus in Great Britain and in Ireland for continuing to work with the parties in Northern Ireland. And they will have to make there will be specific calls along the way they will have to make. Maybe they will make them the same way I would maybe they wouldn't. But that's not as important as the general trend there, because, you know, there are some problems that are unresolved where time is running against you, so you might as well go ahead and bite the bullet and do it. I feel very strongly about that in the Middle East. They need to reach some sort of new accommodation that is, we have come to the end of the road of the September '93 agreement, plus the Wye accord, plus incremental measures. They need a new understanding. They need to they've got to either resolve it all or at least decide what the next step up is, so they can get back to living in peace and the Palestinian economy can start to grow. With Ireland, the Irish Republic is the fastest growing economy in Europe. Northern Ireland is now the fastest growing part of the U.K. They come in from a low base, but they're catching up in a hurry. There was a big headline, I don't know if you saw it, in one of the papers during our trip that said that there had been 600 million pounds in American investment alone in Northern Ireland, where it only has a million anda half people, in the 5 years since I went there the first time. So, in Ireland, all you got to do is just keep it going because the people will stay a little ahead of the politicians. The people will not let the politicians crater this deal as long as their lives are getting better. Q. Have you heard back from Belfast, sir, and has your trip had its desired effect? The President. Well, they all were happy with it. You know, that is, all the parties that are actually involved in the Government and the peace process support the Good Friday accords, are all happy, and we're inching along. And they may get another breakthrough. The point is that the atmosphere was much better. I saw Sky TV. That's the European the way they played the Northern Ireland event they had a little clip from me they had little deal about my swansong in Ireland and blah, blah, blah and then they have a little clip from me, a little clip from Tony Blair and then they had a great line from David Trimble's speech about how he wouldn't let us go back to the he had that one poetic line about the dark and the hatred. Q. Grudges. The President. All that, that line. They played that on television. Well, that's a huge deal because it reassures the Protestants that they're supported, and it's immensely reassuring to the Catholic community that, you know, he's still even if they disagree with some particular position that he's taking, that he's still on the track. And so my belief is that they will eventually work this out if they just give it enough time, because they're doing better every day. That's the right strategy. So, I don't think this is going to be a difficult challenge for President Bush. Q. Inaudible . The President. That's entirely up to all of them, starting with him. I don't think it's I think the Irish a lot of them asked me about it, but it's only because they know me and they're comfortable. And once he gets in there and has a good policy, they'll be fine. So, if they ever needed me, I would do it. But I think, on balance, it's not going to be essential. They'll do just fine with this. Q. What do you see when people when the Irish, for instance, asked you to stay involved, or in the Middle East, a lot of people have suggested you should stay involved? Is that an apprehension on their part just about the change? I mean, you also have a unique relationship with the people. The President. I think that always happens. And we're going to have a good transition. Al Gore made a fabulous speech last night. The country will get into it. We'll adjust very quickly, and so will all of them. They'll all adjust quickly. So it will be fine. I think, you know, it will just be fine. The essential thing about democracy is that no one is indispensable. That's why you have a system like this. And you know, whenever you're the first person to do something, people have a feeling about you. That's a nice thing for me, personally. And if I can ever be helpful in some you know, if your President asks you to do something, you do it. Bob Dole was on television last night talking about how I had asked him to go to Bosnia and Kosovo and things we had done together. But it's not important. The most important thing is that we have a good transition and that he get off to a good start. The rest of it will take care of itself. Conversation With President Elect Bush Q. Can we ask what you said to the President elect? The President. I congratulated him, and I told him that I thought he made a fine statement last night, and I thought that Al had made a fine statement, and that I look forward to seeing him. He said he was coming early next week, and we would get together. That's all. Conversation With Vice President Gore Q. What about Vice President Gore? Did you have to console him at all? The President. I just called him he was having his Christmas party I called him and told him how proud I was of the statement. I told him that it was I thought it was fabulous. I told him I wasn't sure I could have done it as well as he did. It was just fabulous. And he laughed. Al's got a friend that he went to college with who is a standup comic, and he says his best line now is something like, "Gore got the best of all worlds He won the popular vote and doesn't have to do the job." It's a great line. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. Inaudible where they have to go now a lot of it in our country seems to be reconciliation, reconciliation for the U.S., as is typical in a Presidential race, reconciliation for the issues that you had to face in the last couple of years, reconciliation for Catholics and Protestants, what would you take away from that? What advice would you give to somebody The President. To the Irish? Well, they have to keep working together. For example, it's hard for us as outsiders to appreciate the significance of that event yesterday. But in that event yesterday, you had huge numbers of Catholics and huge numbers of Protestants sitting in a room together, a big room, clapping at the same lines. Now, that seems like self evident, say, "Well, it's almost like the rhetoric of peace, and so what's the deal here?" But I'm not sure even 2 years ago we could have gotten that big a crowd from both communities, from the young to the old the kids would have done it that were there yesterday, but all the adults, I don't know that we could have done it, even 2 years ago. So, I really believe this is largely a question of sustained personal contact. Their interests are clearly far more served by what they have in common than their differences. They just have to continue to build trust. All these issues that they're debating now are basically trust issues. Immigration in Ireland Q. In regard to that, the Celtic Tiger, the economy that's going so strong but a new component in Ireland is the idea of immigration to their country, and the eight people killed in Ireland, immigrants, last year The President. It's going to be a whole new challenge for them because they're it's funny, the Irish have emigrated all over the world, and I don't believe there has been day since the United Nations sent its first peacekeeping force out that there hasn't been an Irish peacekeeper somewhere around the world involved in peacekeeping efforts. It's stunning. So, there is no nation on Earth as small as Ireland that has had the impact and the outreach Ireland has had to the rest of the world, partly because they had to come to America to live, the Potato Famine and later, and significant numbers of them were still coming when I became President. You know, there were an enormous number of nurses in Arkansas from Northern Ireland when I was Governor. Q. Which they'd like back now. The President. Yes, which they would like back now, and they may want to go home because they can make decent money now, but they never had the reverse happen. Saint Patrick was an Englishman. He was practically the last significant immigrant into Ireland, if you think about it. I mean, he was an Englishman. There had never been a huge in migration. So, you know, it's tragic that those people were killed, but they're dealing this is going to be a whole new experience for them. It's not like London. England has had I saw some of this when I was a student in England in the late sixties and 1970. They had what was that guy's name I never thought I would forget that rightwing politician's name that was leading all the anti immigrant stuff? Q. In America? The President. In Great Britain. I can't believe I've forgotten his name. But the point is, there was all this early tension. Now you walk the streets of London, and the immigrants are there. They're all intermarried, but they still have their communities and their traditions. There are movies being made now about kind of like I saw a great movie on the plane about a a British movie about a Pakistani family, about the Pakistani family trying to preserve its traditions and cultures, a Pakistani husband and English wife, but he wants his kids all to have proper Muslim marriages with other Pakistani families. All those things that are they're still playing themselves out. But they're operating at a highly, I think, functional level now compared to 30 years ago. The Irish will work through this. They're basically incredibly generous, spirited people, but they have had a very distinct Irish culture and mentality for hundreds of years. And with the economic success of the Irish Republic now and the romantic appeal of Ireland and the great lifestyle and Dublin is a fabulous city, you know it's big enough to be fascinating and not too big to be overwhelming they're going to have a lot of people who want to live there. Q. Did Chelsea like it? The President. Oh, Chelsea loves Dublin. Chelsea loves Ireland. Chelsea loved Ireland before I ever got involved in all of this. She was reading Irish historical novels when she was a kid. Q. Would she go to grad school there? The President. I don't know. But if she did, it would be fine with me. It would give me an excuse to go back. But I think the Irish will do fine with this. They will just have to work through it. I don't think people should be too judgmental or alarmist because this is an experience they're dealing with that the Americans had to begin dealing with at the turn of the century when we had our big wave of immigrants, or even before, when the Chinese came to build the railroad, and the British dealt with, in the middle of this century, the last century, up through the 1960's and the early seventies. And they're dealing with it. You know, so you will have some of this stuff happen. It's terrible and regrettable, but they will absorb them. And I think it will be quite amazing 10 years from now to go there and see all these people with different colored skin quoting Yeats' poetry. President's Future Plans Q. Mr. President, did this trip, and the fact that there is now a President elect, cement your thoughts about your own future any more? The President. Not really. I'm thinking about it. I need to get a little sleep here. I've worked pretty hard for the last 8 years, for the last 27 years, and I'm going to just I want to try to be a useful citizen. But I will I've got to build that library. I've got a lot of things to do. Q. So, you're tired. Does that mean that this is your last foreign trip? You don't have that look about you, sir? Q. We could do this all the way to North Korea. The President. I don't have anything to say about that now. Laughter I can't comment on that. Q. I do have an example of Irish generosity, if you will hold on for just a second. The President. Do it. President Elect Bush Q. Some people are comparing George Bush to you, saying that he has the same type of inaudible . Do you see that in him? The President. Well, I think he's, you know, trying to build good will, which I think is important. And maybe the last few years have bled enough poison out of the system where it will be possible. And I think the Democrats, anyway, are more generally inclined toward working you know, we basically believe in Government. We believe in the possibility of doing things. And so I think that the Democrats will give him a honeymoon and an opportunity to get his feet on the ground and pass some of his program and do some things. And I think they ought to. Discussions With Queen Elizabeth II Q. Can I ask you about the visit with the Queen? You were saying earlier that you actually discussed a little bit of politics. The President. Yes. She's very careful, you know. She observes strictly the British tradition of not making policy statements. But she's a highly intelligent woman who knows a lot about the world. She has traveled a lot. She has fulfilled her responsibilities, I think, enormously well, and I always marvel, when we meet, at what a keen judge she is of human events. I think she's a very impressive person. I like her very much. Q. Did you have tea? The President. We had tea. We had proper tea, yes. Actually, I had a little coffee, but Hillary had tea. Souvenir Presentation At this point, a reporter presented the President with a box of tea. Q. Last time I went to Ireland with Hillary, she liked that. The President. Yes, we do like this. Q. And because you won't be having this, I think you deserve a little memory of your time. Laughter The President. Believe it or not, I don't have one of these. Q. You can keep the limo and play with that, you know, up on the desk. The President. What I need is an automated tape of "Hail to the Chief" so I know when I'm going into a room that I won't be lost. Laughter This is great. Thank you. Supreme Court Decision on Election Q. Mr. President, you said in your statement this morning that the Vice President spoke for a lot of people who disagreed with the Supreme Court decision. Is there a way The President. But accept it. I agree with both the things he said. He said it just right. Is there a way what? Q. Do you think, though, there is the sense that the Court was political or is and that is bad for the country that the Court ever got involved in deciding the election? The President. I think that the statements of the Vice President and the President elect should stand on their own, and at this time I should not say anything about it. I think it's just I don't think I should comment on it now. Q. You said on Saturday that in order to bestow legitimacy on the President elect, the Supreme Court should allow the vote. Do you not feel that same way now? The President. No, I said I disagree with the Court decision, but I accept it. The right of judicial review established by John Marshall in Marbury against Madison, then involving review of executive actions of the President, has been extended to every other aspect of our law wherever there is a Federal question involved. And somebody has to make the final call. And the American people obviously make their judgments about it. And the Court, as you know, often had different positions than they do now, that we've been through a lot of, you know, a lot of cycles of this. Remember, the Supreme Court struck down all the New Deal legislation until 1937. Then they turned around, and they changed. Plessy v. Ferguson was the law until the Warren Court came along and basically redeemed the promise of the Civil War and the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments. Before Abraham Lincoln and the war and the amendments, the Supreme Court said in the Dred Scott case that even a freed slave that I mean a slave that escaped to a free State was still property. So, the Supreme Court people can make their judgments there. No one looking back on history would say that every decision they have made is right. We could all find ones we agree and disagree with. But the principle of judicial review is very important in this country, and therefore we must all accept the decisions we don't agree with. Q. Justice Stevens, in his dissent, said the one loser here is I'm paraphrasing, obviously the belief of Americans in a nonpolitical unbiased nature of the Court. Inaudible Is that what he said? The President. I just don't want to comment on it. I don't think I can serve no purpose by commenting on it. If I did, I would not be honoring what Vice President Gore said he wanted us to do in his speech and what President elect Bush said he was trying to establish in the country. There will be time enough to comment on it. And a lot of law professors and other people who understand the history of the Constitution will comment on it. And the American people will read it and discuss it. And at some future time, it might be appropriate for me to put down somewhere my thoughts about it. But I don't think it's right, now. I think that this is a period when we ought to let get the country going forward and give the President elect a chance to put his transition in order. That's what's best for the country, and I want to honor that. Visits to Ireland Q. What was your favorite trip to Ireland? The President. My favorite trip to Ireland? It's very hard. But the first time I went I loved '98. I loved Limerick. You know, that was great when we went there. Q. Not to mention Ballybunion? The President. Not to mention Ballybunion, yes, which I missed because of Bosnia. You remember, in '95, I had to go see our troops off in Germany. I think I went to Ramstein in Germany. But in '95 it was like a dam breaking. You know, the emotion, the feeling for peace. Keep in mind, things were much more uncertain then. We had a good cease fire, but we were still 3 years away from the Good Friday accord, or 2 1 2 years. It was the end of '95 when I went, and then the spring of '98 was the Good Friday accord. But you know, I never will forget being in Derry, turning on the Christmas lights in Belfast with who was singing there? Q. Van Morrison. The President. Van Morrison was singing there, and then I went to Derry, and Phil Coulter sang "The Town I Love So Well" in the square with all the people filling the square, and then that street that goes up the hill behind it as far as you could see. I mean, there wasn't a dry eye in the place, you know. I mean, I just can't and then we went to Dublin. There were over 100,000 people in the streets in front of Trinity. We set up on the bank, you know, in front of the Bank of Ireland building it was just amazing there were a lot of interesting people and quoted Seamus Heaney's poem, you know, from the "Cure of Troy," for which the next year I took a phrase and made it the title of the book I put out in '96. And when I got to Dublin, Seamus came over to the Ambassador's residence and had handwritten out the section of the poem that I quoted. It's what the chorus says, "History says don't hope on this side of the grave. But once in a lifetime the longed for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. Believe in miracles and cures and healing wells." I have it on the wall in my private office on the second floor, and I look at it every day. And so he wrote it out in his hand, and then at the end he said, "To President Clinton It was a fortunate wind that blew you here," and that line is also from the "Cure of Troy," which I would have every person involved in any of these kinds of things read. It's only about 90 pages long, and it's a play written in the form of a Greek tragedy so that the chorus speaks for the collective wisdom of the people. It's a play about Philoctetes, who was a Greek warrior with Ulysses. He had the magic bow, and whenever the Greeks have Philoctetes in the Trojan Wars, they always won. They never lost a battle when he was there. And they were in a battle, and he was badly wounded. And they thought he was certain to die. His leg was horribly wounded, and they were afraid to carry him. And they were trying to make a quick getaway. So they dumped him on this tiny island in the Aegean, which was just basically rock and shrub. And he didn't die, and his leg never fully healed. It just sort of became a stump. And for 10 years, he was alone on the island. He became this sort of wild feral creature, just hair everywhere and his stump leg. And Odysseus got a message for the gods Ulysses did that Philoctetes was alive and that he had to have him to win the final battle of the Trojan War with the famous Trojan Horse. So, he Ulysses devised this ruse to try to con him back into the deal. He took a very nice young man with him on a boat, and they found this island, and he sent the young guy up to see him. And he had some line he put on him about he figured out there was something wrong this didn't make sense this guy appears after 10 years. So finally Ulysses kind of fessed up, went up and said, "I left you. I shouldn't have. I'm sorry, but we need you. Will you come?" And he forgives him, and he comes. He gets his magic bow, and he limps down to the boat, and they go off, and they win the Trojan War. So, it's a story about how this guy is living alone on this God forsaken rock while his leg never heals, and yet somehow what happened to him over those 10 years, he just gives it up. And he goes on. And when he is leaving, as he is pulling out of the you know, away from the island, the three of them in the boat Philoctetes looks back at the island and says, "It was a fortunate wind that blew me here." But he somehow, in that 10 years, just purged his soul. I mean, it's really all the things Seamus ever wrote for the peace process in Northern Ireland and for people struggling with tribal wars in Africa or any of these conflicts, or people that are still mad at each other you know, when I got to Washington, there were Members of Congress still mad at each other over things that happened in the 1970's, literally, still mad. And you know, there were times when I felt like a pin ata in somebody else's ballgame. So you know, when I read this I remember I read it one night in the Presidential guest residence in Cairo. I had been carrying it around with me, and you know, my body clock was all messed up, and I couldn't sleep. So Hillary went to sleep, and I just sat up and read it. And I thought, "Wow, this is really I wish I could just get everybody to read this." Q. Cairo was inaudible . The President. Well, whenever one of the times I was in Cairo. The one thing about me, I have a reputation for having a good memory, but it's totally shot. I literally I remember things that we did now, and I can't remember what year we did them. And if I'm going to write my memoirs, I'm going to have to get all these young people that work for me to come in and sort of fill in the blanks. So much has happened in such a compressed way. On a deal like this, you know, maybe I get 3 hours of sleep a night. I just can't remember things, or I remember things, but I don't remember exactly when they happened. Q. Why did an Irish playwright write a Greek tragedy? The President. I think that he believed that it was a simple, clear way to capture some timeless wisdom that would speak to Ireland and maybe to others in the same position. It's really an astonishing work, you know, because if you read it if you didn't know anything about it, you would think, "Is this some play of Aeschylus I missed when I was in Greek Literature 101 or something?" Northern Ireland Middle East Q. Before you leave office, do you think that there will be a sense of permanency inaudible ? The President. That's what I was trying to say in the beginning. I think that it's creeping in. And I think that the psychological impact of this visit, more than anything else, was designed to help create that. But I think there will be rough spots along the road. I think there will be arguments back and forth. Q. Do you think there will be inaudible ? The President. No, I think they will still have arguments. I just don't think they will ever let it slip the tracks. Q. Do you think that the policing and decommissioning inaudible have some kind of common ground inaudible ? The President. I think they're moving on them. Whether they will be resolved or not, I don't know. But the main thing is, I think every time you do something that really builds confidence and mutual trust, at least if they think both sides think that they want to make it, you know, then it's you increase the likelihood of success one way or the other. And the time deadlines don't matter so much. I'm more concerned about, you know, giving that sense again to the Middle East. We had that sense for a while, and then Rabin got killed, and then we had those two terrible terrorist incidents, and the whole Middle East rallied around the Israelis at Sharm al Sheikh, totally unprecedented, never happened before. And then there was this sense of possibility again. And then, even with all the difficulties they had with the Netanyahu government, the differences of opinion wound up producing the Wye accords. It was 9 days and nights, and it was sort of like the last person standing won the argument, but it was they did it. There was a sense of it. That's what they need again. They need a sense that, you know, the direction is right, and it's going to work. Q. Inaudible some Israelis suggest that you will go back there and give it one more shot. The President. I don't want to comment on that either. I don't want to comment on that or North Korea, because all these things are very delicate. The less I say, the better it is for them and for whatever I can do and for the next President. Q. Were you surprised by Prime Minister Barak's resignation inaudible ? The President. Well, sort of, but you know it's it's all been written about. Everybody knows kind of what's going on. I think he decided that he wanted to bring some finality to it. He wanted to have some deadline, some election, whether either his course will be ratified or something will happen. I think it was it's a bold move. We will have to see how it works. Q. Inaudible mentioned that Jim Baker being back on the scene remembered that he was the one that uttered that you were working on "Gulliver's Travels" in 1996, regarding your work in Northern Ireland. Do you think he owes you an apology for that statement? The President. I don't know. I don't make judgments about I think when it comes to apologies, you ought to save your judgments for yourself to whom should you apologize, and let other people make those decisions. I think that, look, nobody is right about everything. He is an immensely talented man. And I think the course is right, now. And I think the fact that I'm leaving the scene is not won't be significant. I just don't think they will let it go. Q. Do you think Hillary will take up where you left off in Washington? The President. Well, she will be a Senator, not President, but I think that she will be passionately interested in the Irish question. And she is kind of like me although, unlike me, she has no Irish relatives. Her people are English and Welsh, but she is very familiar with Great Britain. She made all my trips there, and I think she will be a very positive force. And of course, we've got that huge Irish crowd in New York. They were the people that really introduced me to the Irish issues the New York Irish and Bruce Morrison from New Haven, who had been a friend of Hillary's and mine since we went to law school together, and the late Paul O'Dwyer and his son Niall O'Dowd, that whole crowd. Q. Inaudible the Irish Echo. The President. The Irish Echo, yes. They were there at the beginning, my first meeting in 1991. We had that little meeting, you know. And I thought, you know, it makes a lot of sense to me. I will do something on this. I will pander to her. I don't mind. I will give her the pander. Hey, I'm leaving. I'll pander. Laughter President's Travel Foreign Policy Q. What was your favorite trip outside of Ireland? The President. I don't know. I loved so many of them. I loved that trip to India. I loved my trip to China. I loved the the Africa trip was amazing. There was a Guinean woman you were standing there on the street today you were there with me when we were walking down, you know, on Portobello Road. Did you see that woman come up to me and say, Aproba, aproba, aproba? That's the Guinean word for welcome. I said, "Were you there?" She said, "I was there. I was there in the square." It was so touching. It was wonderful. I think it's really important that the United States have a sort of 21st century view of what really counts in the world. I think that Africa has to count for us. I think that Latin America has to count for us. I think President elect Bush, I think, will be very, very good in Latin America. One of the things that I noticed about him that I liked, during all the years when I fought the Republicans in Congress and in California over immigration issues, he never got over there with them. And it's probably the only issue on which Texas Republicans are more liberal or less conservative than California Republicans. And it's because of the whole history and culture of the Rio Grande Valley, which I love very much. I went down there 30 years ago, and I've always loved it. I think I was the first President in 50 years, almost, to go down there as President. And I have been three times to the Rio Grande Valley. And you can't understand how Texans feel about immigration if you've never spent any time in the Rio Grande Valley and understand how it works for them. It's a whole different deal. And he will be very comfortable. He will be good with Mexico. And I think it will lead him to an interest in not only in the big countries of South America but, I would hope, the small countries of Central America, too. But I expect he will be quite successful in building on the outreach we've done in the Latin American countries. It's going to be important. That's the point I was trying to make today in my speech at Warwick. As the world becomes more interdependent, pursuing our interests involves more than great power politics. It's like in the Middle East. Now, I think pursuing our interests involves having a good relationship with the Saudis and, insofar as we can, the other oil producers, except for Iraq, where I just don't think I think they're still unreconstructed. But it also involves caring about the Palestinians. Life is more than money and power. And ideas are power, and emotions are power. I have tried to reconcile the legitimate desires of both the Israelis and the Palestinians. We didn't succeed yet, but we I think that in the end, if we want Israel to be fully secure and at peace in the Middle East, the Palestinian question has to be resolved in a way that enables them, actually, not only to live but to actually start, you know, having a successful economy and a functioning society. I've got to go. It's been interesting. I can't really say I had a favorite trip because all of them, you know, I can remember too many things about them all. Thank you. December 14, 2000 Thank you very much, Vice Chancellor Follett and Lady Follett, Chancellor Ramphal. Lord Skidelsky, thank you for your biography of Keynes. I wonder what Mr. Keynes would think of us paying down the national debt in America today. Laughter I would like to thank the president of the student union, Caitlin McKenzie, for welcoming me. And I am delighted to be here with all of you. But I'd like to specifically, if I might, acknowledge one more person in the audience, a good friend to Hillary and me, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. Thank you, Stephen, for being here. We're delighted to inaudible . Tony and Cherie Blair and Hillary and Chelsea and I are pleased to be here. I thank the Prime Minister for his kind remarks. It is true that we have all enjoyed an unusual friendship between the two of us and our families. But it is also true that we have honored the deeper and more important friendship between the United States and Great Britain, one that I believe will endure through the ages and be strengthened through changes of party and from election to election. I wanted to have a moment before I left this country for the last time as President just to say a few words about a subject which, as the Prime Minister said, we have discussed a lot, that I believe will shape the lives of the young people in this audience perhaps more than any other, and that is the phenomenon of globalization. We have worked hard in our respective nations and in our multinational memberships to try to develop a response to globalization that we all call by the shorthand term, Third Way. Sometimes I think that term tends to be viewed as more of a political term than one that has actual policy substance, but for us it's a very serious attempt to put a human face on the global economy and to direct the process of globalization in a way that benefits all people. The intensifying process of economic integration and political interdependence that we know as globalization is clearly tearing down barriers and building new networks among nations, peoples, and cultures at an astonishing and historically unprecedented rate. It has been fueled by an explosion of technology that enables information, ideas, and money, people, products, and services to move within and across national borders at increasingly greater speeds and volumes. A particularly significant element of this process is the emergence of a global media village in which what happens anywhere is felt in a flash everywhere from Coventry to Kansas to Cambodia. This process, I believe, is irreversible. In a single hour today, more people and goods move from continent to continent than moved in the entire 19th century. For most people in countries like ours, the United States and Britain, this is helping to create an almost unprecedented prosperity, and along with it, the change to meet some of the long term challenges we face within our nations. I am profoundly grateful that when I leave office, we will still be in the longest economic expansion in our history, that all income levels have benefited, and that we are able to deal with some of our long term challenges. And I have enjoyed immensely the progress of the United Kingdom, the economic progress the low unemployment rate, the high growth rate, the increasing numbers of people moving off public assistance, and young people moving into universities. But I think it's important to point out that globalization need not benefit only the advanced nations. Indeed, in developing countries, too, it brings the promise but not the guarantee of a better future. More people have been lifted out of poverty the last few decades than at any time in history. Life expectancy in developing countries is up. Infant mortality is down. And according to the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures a decent standard of living, a good education, and a long and healthy life, the gap between rich and poor countries actually has declined since 1970. And yet, that is, by far, not the whole story. For, if you took another starting point or just one region of the world, or a set of governments that have had particular vulnerability to developments like the Asian financial crisis, for example, you could make a compelling case that from time to time, people in developing countries and whole countries themselves, if they get caught on the wrong side of a development like the Asian financial crisis, are actually worse off for quite a good while. And we begin the new century and a new millennium with half the world's people struggling to survive on less than 2 a day, nearly one billion living in chronic hunger. Almost a billion of the world's adults cannot read. Half the children in the poorest countries still are not in school. So, while some of us walk on the cutting edge of the new global economy, still, amazing numbers of people live on the bare razor's edge of survival. And these trends and other troubling ones are likely to be exacerbated by a rapidly growing population, expected to increase by 50 percent by the middle of this century, with the increase concentrated almost entirely in nations that today, at least, are the least capable of coping with it. So the great question before us is not whether globalization will proceed, but how. And what is our responsibility in the developed world to try to shape this process so that it lifts people in all nations? First, let me say, I think we have both the ability and the responsibility to make a great deal of difference by promoting development and economic empowerment among the world's poor by bringing solid public health systems, the latest medical advances, and good educational opportunities to them by achieving sustainable development and breaking the iron link between economic growth, resource destruction, and greater pollution, which is driving global warming today and by closing the digital divide. I might say, parenthetically, I believe there are national security and common security aspects to the whole globalization challenge that I really don't have time to go into today, so I'll just steer off the text and say what I think briefly, which is that as we open borders and we increase the freedom of movement of people, information, and ideas, this open society becomes more vulnerable to cross national, multinational, organized forces of destruction terrorists weapons of mass destruction the marriage of technology in these weapons, small scale chemical and biological and maybe even nuclear weapons narcotraffickers and organized criminals and increasingly, all these people sort of working together in lines that are quite blurred. And so that's a whole separate set of questions. But today I prefer to focus on what we have to do to see that this process benefits people in all countries and at all levels of society. At the core of the national character of the British and the American people is the belief in the inherent dignity and equality of all humans. We know perfectly well today how children live and die in the poorest countries and how little it would take to make a difference in their lives. In a global information age, we can no longer have the excuse of ignorance. We can choose not to act, of course, but we can no longer choose not to know. With the cold war over, no overriding struggle for survival diverts us from aiding the survival of the hundreds of millions of people in the developing world struggling just to get by from day to day. Moreover, it is not only the right thing to do it is plainly in our interest to do so. We have seen how abject poverty accelerates turmoil and conflict, how it creates recruits for terrorists and those who incite ethnic and religious hatred, how it fuels a violent rejection of the open economic and social order upon which our future depends. Global poverty is a powder keg, ignitable by our indifference. Prime Minister Blair made the same point in introducing his government's White Paper on international development. Thankfully, he remains among the world's leaders in pressing the commonsense notion that the more we help the rest of the world, the better it will be for us. Every penny we spend on reducing worldwide poverty, improving literacy, wiping out disease will come back to us and our children a hundredfold. With the global Third Way approach that he and I and others have worked on, of more open markets, public investments by wealthy nations in education, health care, and the environment in developing countries, and improved governance in those countries themselves, we can develop a future in which prosperity is shared more widely and potential realized more fully in every corner of the globe. Today I want to briefly discuss our shared responsibility to meet these challenges, and the role of all of us, from the richest to the poorest nations to the multilateral institutions to the business and NGO and religious and civil society communities within and across our borders. First, let me say, I think it's quite important that we unapologetically reaffirm a conviction that open markets and rule based trade are necessary proven engines of economic growth. I have just come from Ireland, where the openness of the economy has made that small country the fastest growing economy in Europe, indeed, for the last few years, in the entire industrialized world. From the early 1970's to the early 1990's, developing countries that chose growth through trade grew at least twice as fast as those who kept their doors closed and their tariffs high. Now what? If the wealthiest countries ended our agricultural subsidies, leveling the playing field for the world's farmers, that alone could increase the income of developing countries by 20 billion a year. Not as simple as it sounds. I come from a farming State, and I live in a country that basically has very low tariffs and protections on agriculture. But I see these beautiful fields in Great Britain I have driven down the highways of France I know there is a cultural, social value to the fabric that has developed here over the centuries. But we cannot avoid the fact that if we say we want these people to have a decent life, and we know this is something they could do for the global economy more cheaply than we, we have to ask ourselves what our relative responsibilities are and if there is some other way we can preserve the fabric of rural life here, the beauty of the fields, and the sustainability of the balanced society that is important for Great Britain, the United States, France, and every other country. The point I wanted to make is a larger one. This is just one thing we could do that would put 20 billion a year in income into developing countries. That's why I disagree with the antiglobalization protesters who suggest that poor countries should somehow be saved from development by keeping their doors closed to trade. I think that is a recipe for continuing their poverty, not erasing it. More open markets would give the world's poorest nations more chances to grow and prosper. Now, I know that many people don't believe that. And I know that inequality, as I said, in the last few years has increased in many nations. But the answer is not to abandon the path of expanded trade but, instead, to do whatever is necessary to build a new consensus on trade. That's easy for me to say you can see how successful I was in Seattle in doing that. Laughter But let me say to all of you, in the last 2 years we not only had this WTO ministerial in Seattle I went to Switzerland three times to speak to the WTO, the International Labor Organization, and the World Economic Forum at Davos, all in an attempt to hammer out what the basic elements of a new consensus on trade, and in a larger sense, on putting a human face on the global economy would be. We do have to answer those who fear that the burden of open markets will fall mainly on them. Whether they're farmers in Europe or textile workers in America, these concerns fuel powerful political resistance to the idea of open trade in the developed countries. We have to do better in making the case not just on how exports create jobs but on how imports are good, because of the competition they provide because they increase innovation and they provide savings for hard pressed working families throughout the world. And we must do more to improve education and job training so that more people have the skills to compete in a world that is changing very rapidly. We must also ask developing countries to be less resistant to concerns for human rights, labor, and the environment so that spirited economic competition does not become a race to the bottom. At the same time, we must make sure that when we say we're concerned about labor and the environment and human rights in the context of trade, it is not a pretext for protectionism. Both the United States and Europe must do more to build a consensus for trade. In America, for example, we devote far, far too little of our wealth to development assistance. But on a per capita basis, we also spend nearly 40 percent more than Europeans on imports from developing countries. Recently, we passed landmark trade agreements with Africa and the Caribbean Basin that will make a real difference to those regions. If America matched Europe's generosity in development assistance and Europe matched our openness in buying products from the developing nations, think how much growth and opportunity we could spur. At the same time, I think it's important that we acknowledge that trade alone cannot lift nations from poverty. Many of the poorest developing countries are crippled by the burden of crushing debt, draining resources that could be used to meet the most basic human needs, from clean water to schools to shelter. For too long, the developed world was divided between those who felt any debt forgiveness would hurt the creditworthiness of developing nations and those who demanded outright cancellation of the debt with no conditions. Last year, at the G 7 Summit in Cologne, we Prime Minister Blair and I and our colleagues began to build a new consensus responding to a remarkable coalition, asking for debt relief for the poorest nations in this millennial year. We have embraced the global social contract debt relief for reform. We pledged enhanced debt relief to poor countries that put forward plans to spend their savings where they ought to be spent, on reducing poverty, developing health systems, improving educational access and quality. This can make a dramatic difference. For example, Uganda has used its savings, already, to double primary school enrollment, a direct consequence of debt relief. Bolivia will now use 77 million on health and education. Honduras will offer its children 9 years of schooling instead of 6, a 50 percent increase. The developed world must build on these efforts, as we did in the United States when we asked for 100 percent bilateral debt relief for the least developed nations. And we must include more and more nations in this initiative. But we should not do it by lowering our standards. Instead, we should help more nations to qualify for the list that is, to come forward with plans to spend the savings on their people and their future. This starts with good governance something that I think has been overlooked. No matter how much we wish to do for the developing world, they need to have the capacity to absorb aid, to absorb assistance, and to do more for themselves. Democracy is not just about elections, even when they seem to go on forever. Laughter Democracy is also about what happens after the election. It's about the capacity to run clean government and root out corruption, to open the budget process, to show people an honest accounting of where their resources are being spent, and to give potential investors an honest accounting of what the risks and rewards might be. We have a moral obligation both to provide debt relief and to make sure these resources reach people who need them most. The poorer these people are, of course, the less healthy they're likely to be. That brings me to the next point. The obstacles to good health in the developing world are many and of great magnitude. There is the obvious fact of malnutrition, the fact that so many women still lack access to family planning and basic health services. Around the world today, one woman dies every minute from complications due to childbirth. There is the fact that 1 1 2 billion people lack access to safe, clean drinking water and the growing danger of a changing climate, about which I will say more in a moment. But let me just mention the health aspects. If temperatures keep rising, developing countries in tropical regions will be hurt the most, as disease spreads and crops are devastated. Already, we see in some African countries malaria occurring at higher altitudes than ever before because of climate change. Today, infectious diseases are responsible for one in four deaths around the world diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS, diarrheal diseases. Just malaria, tuberculosis, and diarrhea kill 8 million people a year under the age of 15. Already, in South Africa, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, half of all the 15 year olds are expected to die of AIDS. In just a few years, there will be three to six African countries where there will be more people in their sixties than in their thirties. This is a staggering human cost. Parenthetically, the economic toll is also breathtaking. AIDS is predicted to cut the GDP of some African countries by 20 percent within 10 years. It is an epidemic with no natural boundary. Indeed, the fastest growing rate of infection today is in Russia and the nations of the former Soviet Union. Why makes the point of what we should do. In no small measure because those nations, in the aftermath of the end of communism, and actually beginning a few years before, have seen a steady erosion in the capacity of their public health systems to do the basic work that must be done. We must attack AIDS, of course, within our countries in the United States and Britain. But we must also do all we can to stop the disease from spreading in places like Russia and India, where the rates of growth are large, but the overall numbers of infected people are still relatively small. But we must not also forget that the number one health crisis in the world today remains AIDS in Africa. We must do more in prevention, care, medications, and the earliest possible development of an affordable vaccine. The developing countries themselves hold a critical part of the answer. However limited their resources, they must make treatment and prevention a priority. Whatever their cultural beliefs, they must be honest about the ways AIDS spreads and how it can be prevented. Talking about AIDS may be difficult in some cultures, but its far easier to tell children the facts of life in any culture than to watch them learn the fact of death. In China, a country with enough resources to teach all its children to read, only 4 percent of the adults know how AIDS is transmitted. Uganda, on the other hand, has cut the rate of infection by half. So there are a lot of things that the developing world will have to do for itself. This, too, is in no small measure an issue of governance and leadership. But the bulk of the new investment will have to come from the developed world. In the last few years, our two nations have gotten off to a very good start. And yet the difference between what the world provides and what the world needs for treatment and prevention of AIDS, malaria, and TB is 6 billion a year. Now that may seem like a great deal of money, but think about this Take America's fair share of closing that gap, 1.5 billion. That is about the same as our Government spends every year on office supplies, or about what the people of Britain spend every year on blue jeans. So I hope that some way will be found for the United States and its allies to close that 6 billion gap. It will be a very good investment, indeed. And the economic and social consequences to our friends in Africa and to other places where the rates of growth is even greater will be quite profound unless we do. The government alone cannot meet the health needs, but thus far, neither has the market. What is the problem? There is a huge demand for an AIDS vaccine, but the problem is, as all the economists here will readily understand, the demand is among people who have no money to pay for it. Therefore, the companies that could be developing the vaccines have virtually no incentive to put in the massive amounts of research money necessary to do the job. Only 10 percent listen to this 10 percent of all biomedical research is devoted to diseases that overwhelmingly affect the poorest countries. Now, we have sharply increased our investment in vaccine research, boosted funding for buying vaccines so that companies know there will be a guaranteed market not just for AIDS but for other infectious diseases, proposed a tax credit to help provide for future vaccines to encourage more companies to invest in trying to find vaccines where there are none presently. I think we should expand that approach to the development of drugs and keep pressing pharmaceutical companies to make lifesaving treatments affordable to all. But we can't ask them to go broke we're going to have to pay them to do it directly or indirectly through tax credits. One of the best health programs, the best economic development programs and the best antipoverty strategies, as the vice chancellor said very early on today, is a good education. Each additional year spent in school increases wages by 10 to 20 percent in the developing world. A primary education boosts the farmers' output by about 8 percent. And the education of girls is especially critical. Studies show that literate girls have significantly smaller and healthier families. I want to say just parenthetically here, I'm very grateful for the work that my wife has done over the last 8 years around the world to try to help protect young women and girls, get them in school, keep them in school. And I hope that we will do more on that. That can make a huge difference. And there are still cultures where there is dramatically disparate treatment between girls and boys and whether they go to school and whether they can stay. If all children on every continent had the tools to fulfill their God given potential, the prospect for peace, prosperity, and freedom in the developing world would be far greater. We are making progress. In the past decade, primary enrollments have increased at twice the rate twice the rate of the 1980's. Still, more than 100 million kids get no schooling at all 60 percent of them are girls. Almost half of all African children and a quarter of those in south and west Asia are being denied this fundamental right. Just this year 181 nations joined to set a goal of providing basic education to every child, girls and boys alike, in every country by 2015. Few of our other efforts will be successful if we fail to reach this goal. What it will take is now known to us all. It's going to take a commitment by the developing countries to propose specific strategies and realistic budgets, to get their kids out of the fields and factories, to remove the fees and other obstacles that keep them out of the classroom. And it's going to take an effort by the wealthier countries to invest in things that are working. I hope a promising example is something that we in the United States started in the last year, a 300 million global school lunch initiative, using a nutritious meal as an incentive for parents to send their children to school. I am very hopeful that this will increase enrollment, and I believe it will. And I want to thank the U.K. and other countries that are willing to contribute to and support this. But the main point I want to make is, we can't expect to get all these children in the developing world into schools unless we're willing to help pay. I've been to schools in Africa that have maps that don't have 70 countries that exist today on them. And yet, we know that if they just had one good computer with one good printer, and someone paid for the proper connections, they could get all the information they need in the poorest places in the world to provide good primary education. Should we pay for it? I think it would be a good investment. Let me say just a few words about the digital divide. Today, south Asia is 700 times less likely to have access to the Internet than America. It's estimated that in 2010, in the Asia Pacific region, the top 8 economies will have 72 percent of their people on line, but the bottom 11 will have less than 4 percent. If that happens, the global economy really will resemble a worldwide web, a bunch of interlocking strands with huge holes in between. It's fair to ask, I suppose, are computers really an answer for people who are starving or can't yet read? Is E commerce an answer for villages that don't even have electricity? Of course, I wouldn't say that. We have to begin with the basics. But there should not be a choice between Pentium and penicillin. That's another one of those false choices Prime Minister Blair and I have been trying to throw into the waste bin of history. We should not patronize poor people by saying they don't need 21st century tools and skills. Microcredit loans in Bangladesh by the Grameen Bank to poor village women to buy cell phones has proved out to be one of the most important economic initiatives in one of the poorest countries in the world. I went to a village co op in Nayla, Rajasthan, India, last year, last March, and I was astonished to see the women's milk co op doing all of its billing on computers and marketing on computers. And I saw another computer there that had all the information from the federal and state government, with a wonderful printer, so that all the village women, no matter how poor, could come in. And one woman came in with a 2 week old baby and printed out all the information about what she ought to do with the baby for the next 6 months. So I think it's a copout to say that technology cannot be of immense help to very poor people in remote places. If it's done right, it may be of more help to them than to people who are nearer centers of more traditional, economic and educational and health opportunity. So from my point of view, we have to begin to have more places like those poor villages in India, like the cell phone businesses in Bangladesh, like the city of Hyderabad in India, now being called "Cyberabad." Developing countries have to do their part here, too. They have to have laws and regulations that permit the greatest possible access at the lowest possible cost. And in the developed world, governments have to work with corporations and NGO's to provide equipment and expertise. That's the goal of the digital opportunity task force, which the G 8 has embraced, and I hope we will continue to do that. Let me just say one word about climate change. If you follow this issue, you know we had a fairly contentious meeting recently about climate change, with no resolution about how to implement the Kyoto agreement, which calls for the advanced nations to set targets and for some mechanisms to be devised for the developing nations to participate. There are lots of controversies about to what extent countries should be able to get credit for sinks. Trees do the trees have to be planted? Can they already be up? To what extent the developing countries should agree to follow a path of development that is different from the one that we followed in the United States and the United Kingdom. I don't want to get into all that now, except to say there will be domestic and regional politics everywhere. But let's look at the facts. The facts are that the last decade was the hottest decade in 1,000 years. If the temperature of the Earth continues to warm at this rate, it is unsustainable. Within something like 50 years, in the United States, the Florida Everglades and the sugarcane fields in Louisiana will be under water. Agricultural production will have to be moved north in many places. And the world will be a very different place. There will be more extreme weather events. There will be more people displaced. It will become virtually impossible in some places to have a sustainable economy. This is a big deal. And the only thing I would like to say is that I do not believe that we will ever succeed unless we convince people the interest groups in places like the United States which have been resistant and the driving political forces in countries like India and China who don't want to think that we're using targets in climate change to keep them poor we have to convince them that you can break the link between growing wealth and putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There is ample evidence that this is true, and new discoveries just on the horizon which will make it more true. But it is shocking to me how few people in responsible positions in the public and private sector even know what the present realities are in terms of the relationship in energy use and economic growth. So I think one of the most important things that the developed world ought to be doing is not only making sure we're doing a better job on our own business which is something the United States has to do not only doing more in emissions trading so that we can get more technology out into the developed world but making sure people know that this actually works. An enormous majority of the decisionmakers in the developed and the developing world still don't believe that a country can grow rich and stay rich unless it puts more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere every year. It is not true. And so this is one area where we can make a big contribution to sustainable development and to creating economic opportunities in developing countries, if we can just get people in positions of influence to get rid of a big idea that is no longer true. Was it Victor Hugo who said, "There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come"? The reverse is also true There's no bigger curse than a big idea that hangs on after its time has gone. And so, I hope all of you will think about that. Finally, let me just say that no generation has ever had the opportunity that all of us now have to build a global economy that leaves no one behind and, in the process, to create a new century of peace and prosperity in a world that is more constructively and truly interdependent. It is a wonderful opportunity. It is also a profound responsibility. For 8 years, I have done what I could to lead my country down that path. I think for the rest of our lives, we had all better stay on it. Thank you very much. December 13, 2000 The President. Thank you very much. Let me, first of all, thank Prime Minister Blair, First Minister Trimble, Deputy First Minister Mallon, for their strong leadership and their kind and generous remarks today. I am delighted to be with them, Cherie, Mrs. Trimble, my longtime friend John Hume Senator George Mitchell, who is here the Members of the Parliament in Northern Ireland the Members of the United States Congress and the American delegation over here to my right. I thank Chris Gibson of the Civic Forum and many others who helped to make this day possible. Hillary, Chelsea, and I are delighted to be back in Northern Ireland, and here. I also can't help noting that this magnificent new arena is new since I was last here in '98 a new team, a new sport, a new facility, a new Northern Ireland. I want to thank the Belfast Giants for letting us use the arena tonight. I understand they don't treat their opponents as kindly as me, and I thank them for that. Applause Thank you. Believe it or not, I actually read in the press this reference that said that since I'll be out of work soon laughter that if I can skate and shoot and I'm not very expensive, the Giants would consider offering me a position. Well, I'm used to absorbing blows, but that's about the only qualification I have. Laughter Senator Mitchell, however, comes from Maine, where they play hockey all the time, and I think you should consider offering him a position. He is very well suited for it. Let me say to all of you, I have been honored to be involved in the quest for peace here for almost 8 years now. It has been not a passing interest but a passion for me and my administration and, as many of you know, for my family as well. And I want to say a special word of thanks to my wife and to the women here in Northern Ireland who have worked with her through the Vital Voices program and other things to try to make a contribution to the peace. I came here 5 years ago for the first time. Now I am back on my third visit. No other American President can say that. I want you to know that I'm here not just because I have Irish roots, like millions of Americans, and not simply because I love the land and the people. I believe in the peace you are building. I believe there can be no turning back. I believe you are committed to that. And I think it's very important that people the world over see what you are doing and support you along the way. Some of you may know, I left Dublin yesterday, and I had to drive to Dundalk for this rally we had last night and there were one or two people there. We had this vast crowd of enthusiastic supporters of the peace. And because the weather was too bad for me to helicopter there and I drove, apparently, some people thought I was going to drive from there to Belfast. So I want to give a special word of thanks to the thousands of people in Armagh who waited along the road. I'm sorry I wasn't there. If I'd known you were there, I would have been there. But thank you for supporting the peace process. Let me say to the leaders who are here and the others who were involved with the development of the Good Friday accord back in 1998, I remember it very well. I remember how hard Prime Ministers Blair and Ahern, and George Mitchell, and all the leaders here worked on the Good Friday accord. I remember time and time again being called, saying that this or that problem had arisen and maybe the agreement couldn't be reached. And just before dawn on Good Friday, when the final momentum was building, one of your leaders said to me in a very tired voice I'll never forget it "This is a life and death meeting." And then he added, "But we'll make it happen." When they did, I remember saying to that person, "Go and claim your moment." That is what I have to say today. After the Good Friday accord was reached, the people of Northern Ireland sealed it in an overwhelming vote for peace. And so I say, it is still for you to claim your moment. Look what has happened a local government representing all the people everyday problems addressed by local ministers who answer to local citizens across party lines, I might add, as I have personally witnessed an Executive that has adopted a budget and a program of government and along the way, all the sort of messy squabbles and fights that you expect in a democracy. I mean, look at us we've been doing it in America for 224 years, and as you might have noticed, we still have these minor disagreements from time to time. Laughter I ask you to remember this. The difficulties of sharing power in a free, peaceful democratic system are nothing compared to the difficulties of not having any power at all or of living with constant insecurity and violence. It's easy to overlook that. When people are in war, they measure the progress by counting victims. When people are involved in peaceful endeavors, it's easy to forget to measure, because the measurement is in pain avoided. How many children are alive today in Northern Ireland because deaths from sectarian violence are now a small fraction of what they were before the Good Friday accords? How many precious days of normality have been At this point, there was a disruption in the audience. The President. Tell you what, I'll make you a deal I'll listen to you, if you let me finish. Applause Thank you. Thank you. The audience interruption continued. The President. I think he rejected the deal. Laughter I'll tell you what. I'll make you a deal. I'll ignore him if you will. Applause Thank you. How many days of normality have you gained because the checkpoints on the border aren't there anymore, because honest people can go to a pub or a school or a church without the burden of a search or the threat of a bomb? You have spent so many years mourning your losses. I hope you will now celebrate with pride and defend with passion the progress you have made. Just look at this arena here. Ten years ago I'm not sure you could have gotten the investment necessary to build this arena or to revitalize the entire Laganside area. But over the 5 years just passed, as hopes for peace have grown, the economy has grown, manufacturing up 27 percent, foreign investment almost 70 percent, the number of American firms growing from 40 to 100, 22,000 new jobs there alone, more people coming in than moving out. Once, President Kennedy said that happiness is, I quote, "the full use of your powers along lines of excellence." Today, more and more young people have a chance to fully use their powers along lines of excellence here at home. Of course, there are still challenges, to spread opportunity to the most disadvantaged, to integrate into the mainstream those who have turned their backs on violence. But bitter, old divisions are falling away. A few months ago, students from St. Joseph's College and Knockbreda High School, who study a half mile apart, met for the very first time and toured the sights of Belfast. One of them said, "I always just saw their school badge but never talked to them. But when we met, we got on brilliant." Students from both schools are working with their counterparts from Mullingar Community College in the Republic to promote local recycling efforts. They're all taking part in Civic Link, an initiative supported by the Department of Education in the United States. Give them a hand there. Applause This initiative we have supported through the Department of Education, and under your good friend Secretary Dick Riley, it has already brought together some 2,000 students and over 70 schools to break down barriers, build good will, and live lives based on tolerance and mutual respect. So I thank the ones, the students who are here, and I hope more will participate. Now, amidst all this momentum, why are we having this meeting, and why are all you showing up here? Because we've still got problems and headaches. And I just went through a whole lot of meetings about it. Two years ago George Mitchell said that implementing the Good Friday agreement would be harder than negotiating it. Why? Well, first, because the devil is always in the details, and second, because human nature being what it is, it's always easier to talk about high minded change than it is to pull it off, or even to feel it inside. In spite of the overwhelming support for the Good Friday agreement and the evident progress already brought, opponents of peace still try to exploit the implementation controversies, to rub salt in old wounds, and serve their own ends. And others, for their own purposes, still stand on the sidelines watching and just waiting for something to go wrong. Well, I wanted you all to come together, first to show the world that the great majority of the people of Northern Ireland are still on the side of peace and want it to prevail second, to say again to the proponents of violence that their way is finished and third, to reaffirm, even in this great arena, that peace, unlike hockey, is not a spectator sport. No one can afford to sit on the sidelines. The progress that the leaders have made has only been possible because they knew when they took risks for peace they were acting on the yearning of the people for peace. For years you have made your view clear Violence is not the answer peace is the path to justice. The Good Friday accords define that path. Last week's tragic killings are a brutal reminder of a past we all wish to leave behind, that is not completely gone and a sober reminder that failing to move forward risks slipping backward. As the promises of the Good Friday accords are fulfilled or deferred, trust between the parties will rise or fall. We have seen that when trust rises and people work together, peace grows stronger, and when trust unravels, peace is made more vulnerable. The people of Northern Ireland must be clear and unequivocal about your support for peace. Remember, the enemies of peace don't really need your approval. All they need is your apathy. I do not believe you want Northern Ireland ever again to be a place where tomorrow's dreams are clouded by yesterday's nightmares. The genius of the Good Friday agreement still remains its core principles of consent, equality, justice, respect for each other and for law and order. These ideas are big enough to embody the aspirations, hopes, and needs of all the people of Northern Ireland. As I said before, your progress in putting these principles into practice has truly been remarkable. But again, we all know there is still much to do before the agreement's vision is fully and finally realized. We know, for example, there must be a full and irrevocable commitment to effecting change only through peaceful means, through ballots, not bullets. That means putting all arms fully, finally, and forever beyond use. Last week's IRA statement on this topic was a welcome development the followthrough will be even more so. We welcome the contribution of those paramilitaries observing a cease fire. Those who reject peace should know there is no place for them to hide. Based on my conversations with Prime Minister Ahern in Dublin yesterday and with Prime Minister Blair today, I want to say that the United States will intensify its cooperation with British and Irish authorities on counterterrorism, to combat groups seeking to undermine the Good Friday accords through violence. We are going to get experts from the three nations together in the near future, and the United States will continue to work in a systematic way to do whatever we can to help to root out terrorism and to make this peace agreement take hold. Now, we also know that real respect for human rights must be woven into the fabric of all your institutions. The light this will cast is the best guarantee that political violence will disappear. That's why it is so important to have a police force that inspires pride and confidence in all the people. Just before our gathering here, I met with victims of the violence, quite a large number of them who lost their children, their husbands, their wives, their limbs, their livelihood. Among them was the widow of an RUC officer and the sister of a slain defense attorney. Together, they offer the best testimony to the need to honor those who unjustifiably sacrificed their lives, their health, or their loved ones. We should honor those who have done their duty in the past while making a fresh start toward a police service that will protect, serve, and involve everyone equally in the years to come. Finally, and maybe most important of all, for the vision of the Good Friday agreement to be fully realized, all sides must be fully engaged with each other, understanding that they must move forward together or not at all, that for one community to succeed, the whole community must succeed. Over the last several hours today, I have talked to the parties. I'm convinced they do all genuinely want this peace process to work. They know how far it has come. They know how irresponsible it would be to permit it to fail. On the basis of our discussion, it is clear to me that's what must happen to move the process forward. First, the Patton Report must be implemented, and on that basis leaders from every part of the community must commit to make the new police service work. There must be security normalization, and arms must be put beyond use. This will lead to a reduction of fear and mistrust on all sides. And somehow these processes must take place together, giving practical effect on the ground to the rhetorical promise of peace. I think we can do this. Of course, it will be difficult. But I urge the parties, the political parties here, the British and Irish Governments, the communities themselves, to work out the way forward in the coming days and weeks. And we will do all we can to help. I have said before to all of you I did 2 years ago when I was here how profoundly important peace in Northern Ireland is to the rest of the world. This morning, when I got up, I saw the Prime Minister of Ethiopia on television, discussing the agreement the United States helped to broker there, between Ethiopia and Eritrea. I have been heavily involved in the Middle East for 8 years now and in many of the tribal conflicts in Africa, in a little understood border conflict in the Andes, and many other places. And let me tell you, you cannot imagine the impact of the Good Friday agreement in Northern Ireland on troubled regions of the world in Africa and the Middle East, in Latin America, and, of course, in the Balkans, where the United States has been heavily involved in my time. Peace continues to be challenged all around the world. It is more important than ever to say, but look what they did in Northern Ireland, and look what they are doing in Northern Ireland. In the end, there has to be a belief that you can only go forward together, that you cannot be lifted up by putting your neighbor down. You know, I think and I talk in the United States about this a lot our children will live in a completely different world than the one we have known. Just for example, because of the human genome project, which is going to give us cures for many kinds of cancers Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and more important, will give mothers bringing little babies home from the hospital, roadmaps of their children's genetic makeup and future very soon, life expectancy in places with decent health systems will be over 90 years. And the lives of the young people in this audience, I am convinced, average life expectancy will rise to 100 years. You will see new sources of energy tapped and new conservation technologies developed that will enable human beings for the first time both to increase wealth and to reduce energy use and global warming, ensuring a longer future on this planet for the great grandchildren of the youngest people in this audience today. You will be able to, you young people, travel farther and faster through outer space and cyberspace even than people can today. The world will be so different for you. Now, I think the children of Northern Ireland deserve their fair chance to be a full part of that future. I believe the people of Northern Ireland want that for their children, and that means the leaders of Northern Ireland must find a way to do what is necessary to give that future to your children. You know, this is the last chance I will have as President to speak to the people of Northern Ireland. Let me say to all of you that I have tried to be pretty straightforward today in my remarks and not nearly as emotional as I feel. I think you know that I have loved this land and love the work I have tried to do for peace. But the issue is not how I feel it's how your kids are going to live. I say to all of you, it has been a great honor for me it has been an honor for the United States to be involved in the cause of peace in a land that produced the forbearers of so many of present day America's citizens. I believe that the United States will be with you in the future. I know I will be with you in the future in whatever way I can. But in the end, I will say again, what really matters is not what America does, and what really matters is not even all the encouragement you give to people around the world. What really matters is what you do and whether you decide to give your children not your own yesterdays but their own tomorrows. Thank you, and God bless you. December 08, 2000 Thank you very much. Didn't Casey do a good job? Applause She was great. I'd like to thank Chancellor Johnston for her kind remarks and the honorary degree. And thank you, President Smith, and members of the board of trustees, to both the students and the other members. Thank you, Governor, for your welcome. And I thank the other State officials who are here. I am especially grateful that my long time friend and former colleague as Governor, your retiring Senator, Bob Kerrey, flew down here with me today. Thank you, Bob, for your service, along with our former Nebraska Congressman, Peter Hoagland. Thank you for coming with me. I congratulate Ben Nelson on his election to the United States Senate. Governor Morrison, thank you for being here today. And I want to say a special word of thanks to my great friend, your former Senator, Jim Exon, who persuaded me to come here and to come to Kearney. He said inaudible should be here. When I came in here and I looked at this crowd, one of my staff members joked that we had found a building in Nebraska that would hold every single Democrat laughter and a few charitable Republicans, to boot. Laughter Let me say, I'm glad that I finally made it to Nebraska. There were a lot of signs outside that said, "You saved the best till last." Laughter And I saw the patriotism and the spirit of the people, all the children holding the American flags. It was very, very moving, coming in. All the schools were let out, and there were hundreds and hundreds of people along the way. And it made us a little bit late, and for that, I'm sorry. But I did actually stop, and we got out and shook hands with one group of schoolchildren there just to thank them for being in the cold. So I thank them for that. I was also reminded at the airport that we are literally in the heartland of America. A gentleman at the airport gave me a sweatshirt that had a little map of Nebraska with Kearney, and it had a line and it said, "1,300 miles to New York and 1,300 miles to San Francisco." Most Americans have probably forgotten this, but back in the 1870's, there was actually talk of relocating our Nation's Capital away from Washington, DC, to a more central location. And a local publisher in this community, named Moses Henry Sydenham, launched a national campaign to nominate Kearney for the Nation's Capital. He promised to rename it "New Washington" and to use the real estate profits to pay off the national debt. Laughter Critics of his proposal asked him what in the world he would do with all those big, fancy buildings in old Washington. He said it was simple. He would turn them into asylums. Laughter Well, history took a different course, except for that part about turning those buildings into asylums. Laughter I have occupied one for the last 8 years. And we are finally paying off the national debt, which is good. Applause Thank you. But since half of Washington is in Kearney today, maybe we should think again about moving the Capital. I rather like it here. Laughter I want to say again, I thank the people of this community for a wonderful welcome, and all of you in the university community, especially. I also want to say again how impressed I was by what Casey had to say. Because I came here today not just to keep my promise to visit Nebraska but to keep working on something at the very end of my term I have been trying for 8 years to do, which is to persuade ordinary, hard working American citizens in the heartland of America that you should be concerned about what goes on beyond our Nation's borders and what our role in the rest of the world is, because the world is growing smaller and smaller and more interdependent. Every Nebraska farmer knows that. And indeed, when Senator Kerrey and I visited the units of the Nebraska Air National Guard out there, we asked them where the guardsmen were. We found out that you have some Nebraska guardsman now still in Kosovo. So we are personally affected by it. But I don't think I have still people say I'm a pretty good talker, but I still don't think I've persuaded the American people by big majorities that you really ought to care a lot about foreign policy, about our relationship to the rest of the world, about what we're doing. And the reason is, in an interdependent world, we are all directly affected by what goes on beyond our borders sure, in economics, but in other ways, as well and by what we decide to do or not do about it. This is an immensely patriotic community. That's one thing Bob Kerrey kept saying over and over again, "Look at all those people holding the flag. These people love their country." But what we have to do is be wise patriots. This country is still around after 224 years because our Founders not only loved our country they were smart. They were smart enough to figure out how to give us a system that, as we have seen in the last few weeks, can survive just about anything. Laughter And I want to ask you again today, just give me a few minutes to make the case in the heartland about why there is no longer a clear, bright line dividing America's domestic concerns and America's foreign policy concerns and why every American who wants to be a good citizen, who wants to vote in every election, should know more about the rest of the world and have a clearer idea about what we're supposed to be doing out there and how it affects how you live in Kearney. Because I think it is profoundly important. Let's start with a few basics. Never before have we enjoyed at the same time so much prosperity and social progress with the absence of domestic crisis or overwhelming foreign threats. We're in the midst of the longest economic expansion in our history, with the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, the lowest crime rates in 27 years, 3 years of surpluses in a row, and 3 years of paying down the national debt for the first time in 50 years, the highest homeownership and college going rate in history. Today we learned that the November unemployment rate was 4 percent, staying at that 30year low. Now, this is good news for America. But there is good news beyond our borders for our values and our interests. In the last few years, for the first time in all human history, more than half the people on the face of the Earth live under governments that they voted for, that they chose. And more and more, even in nations that have not yet completely embraced democracy, more and more people, especially young people, see our creative, entrepreneurial society with more and more personal freedom as the model for the success they want. Last month I went to Vietnam, where America fought in a very difficult war for a long time, where Senator Kerrey earned the Medal of Honor and nearly 60,000 Americans died, and 3 million Vietnamese died on both sides of the conflict. So I was interested to see what sort of a reception that I would get and the United States would get, because the Government there remains in the hands of a Communist leadership. And frankly, some of them didn't know what to make about America showing up. But everywhere I went, from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, tens of thousands of people appeared out of nowhere. Not for me, for America for the idea of America. Sixty percent of the people who live in Vietnam are under 30. Because of the tragedy of the war, only 5 percent are over 60. But the ones under 30 like what they know about America. They want to be our partners in the future, and they want to have the chance to build the kind of future they think young people in this country have. That is a priceless gift. So the first thing I want to say, especially to the young people here, is that we should all be grateful that we are so fortunate to be alive at this moment of prosperity, military and political power, social progress, and prestige for America. But the really important question is, what do we intend to make of this moment? Will we be grateful but basically complacent, being the political equivalent of couch potatoes? Will we assume that in this era of the Internet, freedom, peace, and prosperity will just spread? That all we have to do is kind of sit back, hook the world up to AOL, and wait for people to beat their swords into shares on the NASDAQ? Laughter Or will we understand that no change is inevitable change is inevitable, but the particular change is not. And we have to actually make some decisions if we're going to seize the opportunities and meet the challenges before us. To put it in another way, the train of globalization cannot be reversed, but it has more than one possible destination. If we want America to stay on the right track, if we want other people to be on that track and have the chance to enjoy peace and prosperity, we have no choice but to try to lead the train. For example, you all applauded when I said more than half the people in the world live under governments of their own choosing for the first time in history. We'd like to keep that process going. But we know that democracy in some places is fragile, and it could be reversed. We want more nations to see ethnic and religious diversity as a source of strength. You know what the chancellor said when the choir was singing? I said, "Boy, they're good." She said, "They got a lot more rhythm since I came here" we're laughing. Laughter Casey talked about her Hispanic heritage. I was shaking hands with these kids out on the street, and about the third young boy I shook hands with was of Asian descent. This is a more interesting country than it has ever been. Everywhere I go I mean, you can't be President anymore unless you understand the concerns of at least 50 different groups. It's an interesting thing. For us, this is a big plus, even though we still have our problems with hate crimes and racial or religious or other instances. But basically, our diversity has come to be something that makes life more interesting in America, because we realize that what unites us is more important than what divides us, that our common humanity anchors us in a way that allows us to feel secure about our differences, so we can celebrate them. And this is important. I don't like to use the word "tolerance" in this context, because tolerance implies that there's a dominant culture putting up with a subordinate one. I don't really think that's where we're going as America. I think we're going to the point where we say, "Here are our common values, and if you sign on to those, we respect you we treat you as an equal and we celebrate and find interesting the differences." Now, that's what we would like for every place. And we know that if everybody deals that way, that America's going to do very well in the global society of the 21st century, because there's somebody here from everywhere else. And that's good. You know, we're going to do very, very well, as the world becomes more interdependent. So that's the outcome we want. But all we have to do is read the paper everyday to know that old hatreds die hard. And their persistence, from Bosnia and Kosovo to the Middle East to Northern Ireland to the African tribal wars to places like East Timor, have in our time led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and countries being impoverished, for 10 years or more, because people couldn't give up their old hatreds to build a new future together. So how this comes out is not at all inevitable. We want global trade to keep our economy growing. Nebraska farmers like it when people open their markets and the most efficient farmers in the world can sell their food to people who need to buy it. But it is possible that financial crisis abroad could wreck that system, as farmers here found out when the Asian financial crisis hit a couple years ago, or that alienation from global capitalism by people who aren't a part of it will drive whole countries away. We want global trade to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, from India to China to Africa. We know if it happens, it will create a big market for everything American, from corn to cars to computers. And it will give all of us new ideas and new innovation, and we'll all help each other in constructive competition. But the gap between rich and poor nations could continue to widen and bring more misery, more environmental destruction, more health problems, more and more young people in poor countries just checking out of wanting to be part of a global system, because they think there is nothing in it for them. We want advances in technology to keep making our lives better. I went last year to that annual show in Chicago of all the latest hightech gadgets. And I held in my hand, in my palm, a little plastic computer with a complete keyboard that I held in my hand, that also was connected to the Internet. And I was getting CNN on those tiny little I don't see well enough in my old age to even use the thing. It's so small, and my hands were too big to effectively use the keyboard, it was so small. Very exciting. But the same technological breakthroughs that put that computer in the palm of my hand could end up making it possible to create smaller and smaller chemical or biological or nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. And all the things we're learning about computers will be learned by people who, because they belong to organized crime units or narcotraffickers or terrorists, would like to pierce our secure networks and get information or spread viruses that wreck our most vital systems. So I'm a wild eyed optimist. But I've lived long enough to know that things can happen that are not necessarily what you want, and that every opportunity brings with it new responsibilities because the organized forces of destruction can take advantage of them, all these opportunities, too. A long time ago, one of your citizens, William Jennings Bryan, said, "Our destiny is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for. It is a thing to be achieved." We have to continue to achieve America's destiny. And the point I want to make is that it cannot be achieved in the 21st century without American citizens who care about, know about, and understand what is going on beyond our borders and what we're supposed to do about it. Now, for the last 8 years, I've had the honor of working with people in Congress, principled people of both parties, like both your Senators, Bob Kerrey and Chuck Hagel, to try to make a choice for American leadership in the postcold war, global information age. I think it's been good for America and for people around the world. And as I leave office, I think America should continue to build a foreign policy for the global age based on five broad principles, which I would like to briefly state and explain. First, everything we want to achieve in the world, just about, depends upon maintaining strong alliances with people who share our interests and our values and adapting those alliances to meet today's and tomorrow's challenges. For example, our most important alliance with Europe is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. It was organized to defend Europe against the Soviet Union in the cold war. When I became President, the cold war was over, and the alliance was in doubt. What's it for, anyway? Who's going to be in it? What's it supposed to do? But the values that we shared with Europe and the interest we shared were very much threatened when I became President by a vicious, genocidal war in Bosnia. Our European Allies were aiding the victims heroically, but unintentionally shielding the victimizers by not stopping them. And for the first time since World War II, America was refusing to help to defeat a serious threat to peace in Europe. But all that's changed. America decided to lead. Our European Allies decided to work with us. We revitalized the NATO Alliance. We gave it new missions, new members from behind the old Iron Curtain, a new partnership with Russia. We finally ended the war in Bosnia. We negotiated a peace that grows stronger, steadily. When ethnic cleansing erupted in Kosovo, we acted decisively to stop that and send almost a million people back home. Today, the Serbian leader who began the Balkan wars, Slobodan Milosevic, has been deposed by his own people. And instead of fighting something bad, we're trying to finish something worthy, a Europe that is united, democratic, and peaceful, completely for the first time in all human history. That takes a big burden off America in the future and give us a big, big set of economic and political partners to deal with the world's challenges. Now, here's the decision for today. Do we believe that we did the right thing or not? If we do, we have to stay the course, keep expanding NATO, keep working with the Russians, keep burdensharing to do what needs to be done. I don't think most people know this, but in Kosovo today, we provide less than 20 percent of the troops and the funds. But we would not be there as an alliance if the United States had not agreed to do its part. America cannot lead if we walk away from our friends and our neighbors. The same thing is true in Asia. We fought three wars in Asia in the 20th century. Huge numbers of Americans died there, from World War II through Korea, through Vietnam. What should we do now that the cold war is over, but the future is uncertain? What we have done is to decide to keep our troops in the Pacific, to renew our alliance with Japan. We sent ships to keep tensions from escalating between China and Taiwan. We stood by South Korea and diminished the nuclear threat from North Korea, and we supported the South Korean President's decision to seek to end 50 years of tension on the Korean Peninsula, for which he justifiably won the Nobel Peace Prize. Should we withdraw from Asia? I don't think so. I think we ought to stay there, modernize our alliances, and keep the peace so we don't have to fight any more wars in the 21st century. The third thing I want to say about the alliances is that the 21st century world is going to be about more than great power politics, which means we can't just think about East Asia and Europe. We need a systematic, committed, long term relationship with our neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, with South Asia next to China, the most populous place on Earth and with Africa, where 800 million people live. One of the most applause yes, you can clap for that. That's all right. So I think that's important. We've been estranged from India for 50 years. Do you know how many people live in India? Nine hundred and eighty million. In 30 years India will be more populous than China. In Silicon Valley today, there are 700 hightech companies headed by Indians 700, in one place. This is totally off the radar screen of American policy during the cold war. So I would encourage all of you who, like Casey, are involved in some sort of international studies, not to just think about America's traditional concerns but to think about what we're going to do with Latin America and the Caribbean, with sub Saharan Africa and with south Asia, because a lot of our future will be there. So beyond alliances, the second principle is that we have to build, if we can, constructive relationships with our former adversaries Russia and China. One of the big questions that will define the world for the next 10 years is, how will Russia and China define their greatness in the 21st century? Will they define it as their ability to dominate their neighbors or to control their own people? Or will they define it in a more modern sense, in their ability to develop their people's capacity to cooperate with their neighbors, to compete and win in a global economy and a global society? What decision they make will have a huge impact on how every young person in this audience lives. It will define what kind of defense budget we have to have, how many folks we have to enroll in the armed services, where we have to send them, what we have to do. It's huge. Now, we cannot make that decision for Russia or for China. They'll make that decision for themselves. But we can control what we do, and what we do will have some impact on what they decide. So we should say to them what we've been trying to say for 8 years If you will accept the rules and the responsibilities of membership in the world community, we want to make sure you get the full benefits and be a full partner, not a junior partner. We also have to say, we have to feel free to speak firmly and honestly when we think what you do is wrong by international standards. When we've worked together with Russia in a positive way, we've made real progress. Russia took its troops out of Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia and put them in joint missions with NATO, something nobody ever thought would happen. We're serving together in Bosnia and Kosovo. Russia helped us find a just end to the war in Kosovo. They worked with us to eliminate 5,000 nuclear warheads from the old Soviet Union and safeguard those that are still there. Now, do we agree with everything in Russia? No. We think there has been too much corruption at times. We don't agree with wars in Chechnya we think were cruel and self defeating. We don't agree with backsliding on the free press that we see. But we need a little perspective here. When I went to Moscow for the first time as President, in 1993, people were still lining up for bread, recovering from inflation that got to 2,500 percent. Many people were predicting that an impoverished Russia would go back to communism or turn to fascism. Since then, Russia has had five five free elections. And every time, people have voted to deepen democracy, not to weaken it. The economy is growing. Now, are the positive trends inevitable? No, but they are more than possible. And it's in our interests to encourage them. The same thing is true in China. We have tried to encourage change by bringing China into international systems, where there are rules and responsibilities, from nonproliferation to trade. That's what I think will happen with China coming into the World Trade Organization. It is a statement by them, by agreeing to the conditions of membership, that they can't succeed over the long run without opening to the world. It is a declaration of interdependence. It increases the chance that they'll make a good decision, rather than a negative one, about what they're going to do in the 21st century world. And if China goes on and follows through with this, they'll have to dismantle a lot of their old command and control economy, which gave the Communist Party so much power. They'll open their doors to more foreign investment and more foreign information and the Internet revolution. Will it inevitably bring freedom? No, but it will increase the chances of China taking the right course. So I believe if we stay with this course, one of the most profoundly positive changes the generation of young people in this audience will see could be the change that ultimately comes to China. And I told you the Vietnam story. I felt the same thing in Shanghai. I felt the same thing walking in little villages and talking to people who were electing their mayors for the first time in China, where there are, at least now, a million local villages electing their local officials. So, alliances, constructive relations with Russia and China. The third thing we have to recognize is that local conflicts can become worldwide headaches if they're allowed to fester. Therefore, whenever possible, we should stop them before they get out of hand. That's why we've worked for peace in the Balkans, between Greece and Turkey on Cyprus, between India and Pakistan, Ethiopia and Eritrea. That's why I'm going back to Northern Ireland next week, the land of my ancestors. And it's why we've worked so hard to make America a force for peace in the Middle East, the home of the world's three great monotheistic religions, where God is reminding us every day that we are not in control. But we have made a lot of progress. We've seen a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. We saw a sweeping agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians and progress toward implementing it over the last 8 years. But what's happened is, they're down to the hedgerows now and the hard decisions, and they've gotten to those fundamental identity questions, where they have to decide what I was talking about earlier. Is it possible for them to look at each other and see their common humanity and find a solution in which neither side can say, "I have vanquished the other," or have there been so many years of history welling up inside them that neither side can let go? That is the issue, and we will continue to work on it. But the main point I want to make to you is, you should want your President and your Government involved in these things, and you should support your Congress if they invest some of your money in the cause of peace and development in these hotspots in the world. And let me say again This is not inconsistent with saying that people ought to take the lead in their own backyard. I think most Americans feel if the Europeans can take the lead in Europe, they ought to do it. The same thing with the Asians in Asia and the Africans in Africa. What I want you to understand is that we have unique capabilities and unique confidencebuilding capacity in so many parts of the world that if we're just involved a little bit, we can make a huge difference. Our role was critical in the Balkans, but it was also critical in East Timor. Do you remember when all those people were getting killed in East Timor? You saw it on television every night. And people that couldn't find it on a map, all of a sudden were living with it every single night. We provided about 500 troops to provide support for the international operations the Australians led there. But it made all the difference. We're training peacekeepers in Sierra Leone. They don't want us to go there and fight, but they want us to train the peacekeepers. We've been involved in trying to settle a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that has claimed over 60,000 lives, that most people don't know much about, but could cause us a world of trouble. And besides, it's just tragic. We had 10 people 10, total in the jungle when we settled the conflict between East Ecuador and Peru and got them to agree but they couldn't agree to let it go unless we, America, agreed to send 10 people into a remote place on the border of these two countries, because they knew we could be trusted to do what they had agreed ought to be done. Now, you ought to be proud of that for your country. But the only point I want to make is, we should do things with other people, and they ought to do their part in their own backyard. But we're in a unique position in history now. There is no other military superpower or economic superpower. And we can do some things, because we've maintained a strong military, nobody else can do. And I'll be gone in a few weeks, and America will have a new President and a new Congress, but you ought to support them when they want to do these things, because it's very, very important to the stability and future of the world. One other thing I want to say. We ought to pay our U.N. dues and pay our fair share of peacekeeping operations. Now, nobody in the world benefits from stability more than we do. Nobody. Nobody makes more money out of it. Just think about pure, naked self interest. Nobody. And when we pay for this peacekeeping I'll say more about it in a minute but we get more than our money's worth out of it. And when we walk away from our responsibilities, people resent us. They resent our prosperity they resent our power and, in the end, when a whole lot of people resent you, sooner or later they find some way to manifest it. When we work with each other and do things that we don't just have to do in the moment, we build a common future. The fourth point I would like to make to you is that this growing openness of borders and technology is changing our national security priorities. People, information, ideas, and goods move around more freely and faster than ever before. That makes us more vulnerable first to the organized forces of destruction, narcotraffickers, terrorists, organized criminals they are going to work more and more together, with growing access to more and more sophisticated technology. Part of the challenge is just to get rid of as many weapons of mass destruction as possible. That's why we got the states of the former Soviet Union outside Russia to give up their nuclear arsenals, and we negotiated a worldwide treaty to ban chemical weapons. That's why we forced Iraq to sell its oil for money that can go to food and medicine, but not to rebuilding its weapons. And I think the other countries of the world that are willing to let them spend that money rebuilding their weapons systems are wrong. And I hope that we can strengthen the resolve of the world not to let Saddam Hussein rebuild the chemical weapons network and other weapons systems that are bad. It's why we negotiated a freeze on plutonium production with North Korea. Now, dealing with terrorists is harder, as we have seen in the tragedy of the U.S.S. Cole. Why? Because terrorists, unlike countries, cannot be contained as easily, and it's harder to deter them through threats of retaliation. They operate across borders, so we have got to strengthen our cooperation across borders. We have succeeded in preventing a lot of terrorist attacks. There were many planned during the millennium celebration that we prevented. We have arrested a lot of terrorists, including those who bombed the World Trade Center and those who were involved in several other killings in this country. And make no mistake about it We will do the same for those who killed our brave Navy personnel on the U.S.S. Cole. But the most important thing is to prevent bad things from happening. And one of the biggest threats to the future is going to be cyberterrorism people fooling with your computer networks, trying to shut down your phones, erase bank records, mess up airline schedules, do things to interrupt the fabric of life. Now, we have the first national strategy to protect America's computer systems and critical infrastructure against that kind of sabotage. It includes, interestingly enough, a scholarship forservice program to help students who are studying information security and technology, pay for their education if they will give us a couple of years' service in the Government. It's really hard to get talented people in the Government, because we can't pay them enough. You've got 27 year old young people worth 200 or 300 million if they start the right kind of dot com company. It's pretty hard to say, "Come be a GS 13," you know? Laughter But if we can educate enough people, we can at least get them in their early years, and that's important. We funded this program for the very first time this year, thanks to bipartisan support. And let me say, I'd also like to congratulate the University of Nebraska some of you perhaps know this, but Nebraska has set up a new information assurance center which is dedicated to the same exact goal. We need more universities to follow your lead. This is going to be a big deal in the future, a big deal. There are other new things you need to think about in national security terms. Climate change could become a national security issue. The last decade was the warmest in a thousand years. If the next 50 years are as warm as the last decade, you will see the beginning of flooding of the sugarcane fields in Louisiana and the Florida Everglades you will see the patterns of agricultural production in America begin to shift. It's still cold enough in Nebraska you'll probably be all right for another 50 years. Laughter I mean, we laugh about this this is a serious thing. Already, in Africa, we see malaria at higher and higher levels than ever before, where it used to be too cool for the mosquitoes. This is a serious problem. And the only way to fix it is to figure out a way for people to get rich without putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In other words, we have to change the rules that governed the industrial revolution. And you can play a big role in that, too. Why? Because scientists today are researching more efficient ways of making ethanol and other biomass fuels. I always supported that, but the real problem with ethanol, you should know, is, is that the conversion ratio is pretty low. It takes about 7 gallons of gasoline to make about 8 gallons of ethanol. But scientific research now is very close to the equivalent of what happened when we turned crude oil into refined gasoline, when we cracked the petroleum molecule. In other words, they're very close to figuring out how to change the conversion ratio from 7 gallons of gasoline to 8 gallons of ethanol to one gallon of gasoline per 8 gallons of ethanol. When that happens, everybody is all of a sudden getting 500 miles to the gallon, and the whole future of the world is different. And you don't have to use corn, either. You can use rice hulls you can use grasses on range land. You can do anything. You can do this. This is going to be a big deal. If I were no offense, Mr. President if I were the president of the University of Nebraska, whatever I was spending on that, I'd double it. Laughter Because if we can do this one thing, if we can do or you could ask the Department of Agriculture to give you some more money, because we've got some more laughter because the Congress gave us a lot more money this year. We're all laughing about this, but you think about it. One third of this problem is transportation. It's an issue. Some people made fun of us a few months ago when we said we considered AIDS a national security issue. You know why? In some southern African countries, it is estimated that half of all the 15 year olds will die of AIDS. There are four African countries which, within a couple of a few years, there will be more people over 60 than people under 30. It is estimated that AIDS will keep South Africa's GDP income 17 percent lower than it otherwise would have been 10 years from now. That obviously makes it harder for them to preserve their democracy, doesn't it, and to give jobs to their children. So that's why we're involved in this international AIDS effort for a vaccine, for more affordable medicines, for better care. It's an important foreign policy issue. Our effort to relieve the debt of the world's poorest countries is a very important foreign policy issue. Our efforts to help people rebuild their public health systems they all collapsed, and a lot of the countries of the former Soviet Union, they now have the highest AIDS growth rates in the world because they don't have any public health systems anymore. And all these things will affect whether these countries are breeding grounds for terrorists, whether the narcotraffickers in the places where drugs can be grown will get a foothold, whether we can build a different future. So I hope you will think about that. The last thing I want to say is that the final principle ought to be, we should be for more open trade, but we have to build a global economy with a more human face. We win in the trade wars, or the trade not wars, the trade competition. And I know that Nebraska is more I have not persuaded my fellow Americans of that either, entirely, but in Nebraska, because of the agricultural presence here, has been generally more pro free trade. But these 300 trade agreements, from NASA to the World Trade Organization and many others that we negotiated, 300 of them, have given us the longest economic expansion in history. Over 25 percent of our growth is tied to trade now. Here's the problem The benefits have not been felt in much of the rest of the world. Eight hundred million people still go hungry every day. More than a billion people have no access to clean water. More than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Every year 6 million undernourished boys and girls under the age of 5 die. So if the next President and the next Congress want to spend some of your money to relieve the burden of the world's poorest countries and debt, if they'll put the money into education and health care and development, if they want to spend some money fighting AIDS, if they want to expand a program that we have done a lot with the microcredit program, which loans money to entrepreneurs in poor countries we made 2 million of those loans last year if they want to double, triple, or quadruple it, I hope you will support that. If they want to close the digital divide so that people in, let's say, a mountain village in Bolivia can be hooked up to the Internet to sell their rugs that they knit to Bloomingdale's in New York, I hope you will support that. You know why? Bolivia is the poorest country in the Andes, but they've done the best job of getting rid of the narcotraffickers. And so far, they don't have a lot to show for it, because they're still the poorest country. And it would cost us a pittance of what it cost to deal with the drug problem once these drugs show up in America to help those good, honest poor people who are so proud and honorable that they do not want to tolerate the narcotraffickers to make a decent living from their efforts. Anyway, that's what I want to say. We've got to keep building these alliances we've got to try to have constructive relationships with Russia and China. We've got to realize there are other places in the world that we haven't fooled with enough. We have to understand the new security challenges of the 21st century. We have to keep building a global economy, because it's the engine of the global society, but we have to do more to put a human face on it. Fifty years ago Harry Truman said something that's more true today than it was when he said it. Listen to this "We are in the position now of making the world safe for democracy if we don't crawl in the shell and act selfish and foolish." We still haven't fully you probably all say you agree with that, but there are practical consequences. For example, Congress agreed this fall to fund our obligations to the U.N. But because Congress hasn't finished the overall Federal budget, the agreement is at risk, and Congress has got to send me the money pretty soon, or if it doesn't, literally, the very future of the United Nations will be in jeopardy. How would you feel if you picked up the paper and the Secretary General of the United Nations said, "I'm sorry, we're going to have to close down for a few weeks because the United States won't pay its dues"? What will that do to us? They share the burden with us of keeping the peace, fighting hunger, protecting the environment, advancing human rights. Listen to this. When you hear people say America spends too much, just listen to this Right now, at a time when we are the world's only superpower with the strongest economy in the world, less than one in every 800 United Nations peacekeepers is an American less than one in 800. Less than 2 percent of our men and women in uniform are involved in ongoing military operations abroad of any kind. Our annual global budget for everything from diminishing the nuclear threat to preventing conflict to advancing democracy to fighting AIDS is no more than what Americans spend each year on dietary supplements in my case with mixed results. Laughter I want you to laugh about it, because I want you to remember that this is a big deal. We must not squander the best moment in our history on smallmindedness. We don't have to be fearful. We've got the strongest military in the world, and in history, and we're going to keep it that way. We don't have to be cheap. Our economy is the envy of the world. We don't have to swim against the currents of the world. The momentum of history is on our side, on the side of freedom and openness and competition. And we don't have the excuse of ignorance, because we've got a 24 hour global news cycle. So we know what's going on out there. We can no longer separate America's fate from the world any more than you could celebrate Nebraska's fate from America's, or Kearney's fate from Nebraska's. So that's what I came here to say. I hope that in the years ahead the heartland of America will say, America chooses to be a part of the world, with a clear head and a strong heart to share the risks and the opportunities of the world to work with others until ultimately there is a global community of free nations, working with us, for peace and security, where everybody counts and everybody has got a chance. If we will do that, America's best days, and the world's finest hours, lie ahead. Thank you very much. November 19, 2000 New Vietnam U.S. Relationship Mr. King. Thank you for joining us. We're here in Ho Chi Minh City with the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, this, the last day of his landmark trip here to Vietnam. First, sir, thank you for joining us. The facts speak for themselves. The first U.S. President to visit Vietnam since the end of the war, the first ever to set foot in Hanoi, the Capital. Interested in your thoughts. You've called this a new chapter, turning the page in the relationship. What is it do you think it will mean, first for the people of Vietnam, and also for the people of the United States? The President. Well, of course, I hope it means for the people of Vietnam continued openness and continued prosperity. This country has made a lot of progress in the last few years. The economy is diversifying. It's becoming more open to the rest of the world. Sixty percent of the people are under 30 years old. Most of them have no memory at all of the war, and they are very much oriented toward the future. They are asking themselves all kinds of fundamental questions about what the world is like now, how they're going to relate to it, what their country should be. So I hope that we have opened a new chapter, and I hope it will be good for them and good for us. Mr. King. Now obviously, part of the new chapter is a widely expanded economic relationship. Do you have much confidence it will go beyond that, at least in the short term? After your meeting yesterday with the leader of the Communist Party here, he referred to the United States in a daily newspaper as imperialists, said that he hoped there would be respect for the different way of doing things here. You mentioned in your speech, nationally televised here to university students, the examples of the United States in the areas of individual freedom, religious freedom, political freedom. Do you have much confidence that the Government here, as it accepts and embraces a wider economic relationship with the West, will do anything to bring progress on those other fronts? The President. Well, I think there will be more personal freedoms. You know, I had a roundtable this morning with a lot of young people, and they were asking themselves these same questions. And I believe that as we implement this trade agreement, and then Vietnam moves toward membership in the World Trade Organization, the rule of law will become more important openness will become more important there will be a lot more access to the Internet and information of all kinds and so there will be more freedom. And the question then becomes, when does it become political freedom, or will the political system try to restrict them more, as has been the case in one or two other countries? The truthful answer is, we don't know where it's going. But I think that the trend toward freedom is virtually irreversible, and these folks are too young they're too vigorous. And as you can see in the streets, there is a lot of good will toward America here. There's a lot of interest in our country and how we're dealing with a lot of the challenges of the new century. So I believe that the trend is positive. Now, of course, the political leaders will have their debates, and I had a nice little debate with the General Secretary of the Communist Party here about our country, and I stoutly disputed that we were an imperialist country. We had never had any imperialist designs here. The conflict here was over what self determination for the Vietnamese people really meant and what freedom and independence really meant. But we have a chance to continue that debate now in a more peaceful and more constructive way. And I think the fact that they feel free to engage us in it and then have publicity about it they did, after all, allow my speech to the country to be televised, which I think is a good sign. And the people came out in Hanoi and here in Ho Chi Minh City to see me. So and it wasn't me it was the United States. There's a lot of interest and support for the United States here. So I think we're on the right direction. MIA's POW's Mr. King. I want to ask you about some of the remarkable moments on this trip. If you're sitting back in the United States watching this, we see this only by the numbers nearly 300 sets of remains returned to the United States during your Presidency the money put into the excavation efforts. But it is numbers until you have the opportunity to see what you did yesterday, to actually go out into the field. The President. It was overwhelming. It's very important for the American people to understand that what has made the progress in our relationship with Vietnam possible over these last 8 years has been their cooperation in our efforts to identify and recover and return home our MIA's and to resolve the POW and MIA cases. And we have resolved hundreds of them. And in the cases where we think someone's remains are located, like the site we visited we believe a plane crashed there 33 years ago we believe a pilot's remains are there. His two sons came with me over here. And we watched all those Vietnamese people working with the American people, up to their hips in mud, digging in the ground and taking these big chunks of mud over to sifters, and watching other Vietnamese sift through the mud for any kind of metal object or any cloth object, anything that would give us a clue to whether this was, in fact, a crash site, and whether there's something more down there. It was profoundly moving to me. And it is that good faith effort that they have made with us and by the way, we've made with them. They have 300,000 cases still unresolved. And I brought over about 350,000 pages of documents. We have another million pages of documents we can give them so they can do their own resolution of these cases. That's what's made possible this whole focus on the future and the commercial relations and the educational and health care efforts, all the other things we're doing. Visit to the Joint Task Force Full Accounting Excavation Site Mr. King. What were your personal thoughts? You're standing there holding pieces of the aircraft, a label from a part of the aircraft, your daughter standing next to you, crying. It didn't look like you were terribly far from that yourself. And you're with these two big, grown men who last saw their father when I believe they were 6 and 8. What goes through your mind at a moment like that? The President. Well, first, I was glad we were doing it. I think it made me very proud to be an American and proud that we had made these efforts and made this progress. I was very grateful for the cooperation we've received from the Vietnamese Government and the individual villages. You know, there were just people out there, stomping around in the mud, trying to find some trace of those boys' father. And I think, for me, it symbolized what was best about our country and what was possible in terms of the reconciliation of people who have been so bitterly divided such a long time ago. It's not done yet, you know. We still have a lot of work to do to work through all these cases. I still hope and believe that there should be more freedom within Vietnam and recognition of the courage of the people who fought in the South Vietnamese Army, as well as for the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. And I hope and believe that the American Vietnamese community, over a million strong, can make an even greater contribution. Now, today we were at that port, and we talked about a big pharmaceutical facility owned by two Vietnamese American women, sisters, and their presence here in the country. But there are a lot more things that the Vietnamese have to give. But again, to go back to your question, everything begins with what we saw yesterday, the attempt to identify and bring home the remains of everybody who's still here. It was an overwhelming moment, but it should make every American proud. Mr. King. Thank you. We need to take a quick break. But we'll be back in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in just a moment to continue our interview with the President of the United States. At this point, CNN took a commercial break. Veterans, the President, and Vietnam Mr. King. I want to ask you a little bit about your personal thoughts and how your personal journey here and your thoughts on it. As a young man, you opposed the war, once wrote that you despised it. Yet as President, with the support of Vietnam veterans, you have led the effort, first to lift the trade embargo, then to normalize relations. As you come here, how do you think this visit will be viewed back in the United States, not just among the veterans' community but especially among the Vietnam veterans' community, and your own personal thoughts on sort of bridging your youth with your role now in trying to create this new relationship? The President. Well, let me answer the two questions separately. First of all, I hope the veterans' community will view it with pride, because nothing that we have done in the last 8 years would have been possible without the support of the Vietnam veterans in the Congress and in the various veterans' organizations Senator John Kerry Senator Bob Kerrey Senator John McCain Senator Chuck Robb Pete Peterson, our Ambassador, who was a POW for 6 1 2 years. The first 3 years, his wife didn't even know he was alive. He never saw his third child until the boy was 6 years old. Pete was in Congress for a lot of this period before I named him to be the Ambassador. So I would think that the veterans' community would be very proud of this. And also, I will reiterate, none of this would have happened if it hadn't been for the cooperation of the Vietnamese with our attempts to resolve our outstanding POW and MIA cases. There's never been anything like it in the entire history of warfare, where two countries worked this hard, this long, invested this kind of money and effort to resolve the POW MIA issues. So I would think, for most of our people who understand that, the central role of the American veterans in the Congress and the country had, this would be a source of great pride. For me, personally, it was interesting my overwhelming feeling when I first got here was thinking about the boys I grew up with who died in Vietnam, four of my high school classmates. And I asked Pete Peterson, when he came back, how long it took him to get beyond thinking about how it was before. And he said, "Well, about an hour," he said. Then he had to deal with the challenges of being Ambassador, and he went on with life. And that's kind of what happened to me. I was the I had a few moments there where I felt I was thinking about the personal tragedies that I had been in contact with when I was a boy. And then the moment intervened, and we went on with the future. Closure on the Vietnam War Mr. King. Do you think the country is at peace with this now? Even some Democrats late in the Presidential campaign this past year tried to raise questions about Governor Bush's service. Do you think the country is ready, and should this trip maybe be the final impetus for the country to move on? The President. I hope it will be. I hope it will be. Because the war divided the Vietnamese from the Americans, but it also divided the Vietnamese one from another and still does which is why, as I said, I went out of my way to praise the heroism of the South Vietnamese soldiers, too, and the importance of the Vietnamese Americans who supported the position we had in Vietnam so long ago and have done so well because of freedom. So we need to heal the rift within the Vietnamese community, and it divided Americans one from another. And I hope that the last 8 years and the journey we've made together in moving forward with Vietnam has helped to put an end to that. My sense is that it did, that we're that at least the rifts are nowhere near what they were 8 years ago, not to mention 10 or 20 years ago. North Korea Mr. King. Let's move around the world quickly. In a matter of weeks, you will hand off to the man who will succeed you, a man as yet unknown and we'll get to that the portfolio on some of the most important strategic relationships in the world. I want to start first with North Korea. You had, at one point, hoped perhaps to follow Secretary Albright and visit North Korea as part of this trip, then decided in the end not enough progress was being made to justify that. Can you be as specific as possible in saying what it is you're looking for from the North Koreans in terms of the missile program and any other steps, and whether you believe it is conceivable that you still might get there before you leave office? The President. Well, I haven't made a decision about whether to go, so I'll answer that first. Specifically, what we seek with the missile program is an end to the long range missile program and an end to the exports of missiles. North Korea needs the foreign exchange money. I understand that they need the funds, and they're very good at making missiles, but the people who are most likely to buy them are those that are most likely to misuse them down the road. So that's what we're trying to do. We also want to ensure the continued vitality of this North South dialog for which President Kim of South Korea won the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize, and he certainly deserved it. We want that to go on. And we want to have a sense about what the way forward is with regard to North Korea's relations with us, as well as the South Koreans and the Japanese. So it's conceivable that there could still be a trip, but I just haven't made a decision. The main thing is, I will hand off to my successor a much better situation than I found, because we, first of all, had to end North Korea's nuclear program, and that's what we did and worked on in '93 and '94. And we've been implementing the agreement we made with them then for the last 6 years. Now we're working on the missile program. And it appears that North Korea has made a decision that Kim Chongil has made a decision to have a more positive and open relationship with the rest of the world. And I think that's a very good thing. I think the reconciliation and the family reunifications between North and South Korea are profoundly important. Russia Mr. King. Russia. You met with President Putin during the APEC meeting in Brunei. Your successor, I assume, relatively shortly after he takes office, will receive a proposal from the Russians to go even beyond anything you and the Russians have discussed. Mr. Putin, because of the obvious budget constraints in his country, wants to go to roughly 1,000 strategic warheads. Is that in the interests of the United States national security? And do you see any potential to get to that level, and also, perhaps as part of that deal, get a compromise on the ABM Treaty that would allow the missile defense program to go forward? The President. Well, first of all, I don't want to say anything that will compromise my successor's options. I think that's important. Now, I think it is quite possible that we could agree to go down to fewer missiles in our nuclear arsenal and theirs. I think that it's important that there also be fewer warheads. That is, there's a difference between missiles and warheads. I don't think we ought to go back to highly dangerous, richly armed MIRV missiles, multiple warhead missiles. But what we have to do is to have a target design that we believe is adequate to protect the United States and that our missile component will serve. And if we do that, then we could agree with them to reduce the number of missiles. And I'd hoped that we could get that done even beforehand. So I'm encouraged by that. Now, on the missile defense, I think the trick there will be somehow having the Russians and others with equity interests here believe that we all have a vested interest in trying to develop enough missile defense to stop the rogue states and terrorists from piercing the barriers not only of the United States but of Russia, China, of any other country that might want to participate. And there is a way, I think, to get this done, but it will require a lot of joint research and a lot of trust and a lot of understanding about what the problem is and how we're going to develop it. If the technology existed which would give us high levels of confidence that one or 2 or 5 or 10 missiles could be stopped from coming into the country, it would be hard to justify not putting it up. On the other hand, the reason I didn't go forward is, I think it's very hard to justify wrecking the existing treaty system which has served us so well for so long, in effect, gambling that somehow, some day, some way, the technology will be there. We don't want to do that. The best way to proceed is to do the research and try to find a way to bring these other countries into this. Because, really, if you think about it, everyone should have an interest in the capacity of a country to resist the errant missile or the missile that would be fired by a rogue state or a terrorist. And they can do this together. What I tried to do was to buy some time so my successor could sit down with the Russians, with the Chinese, with any others who are parties and interests and our European allies, of course and try to plot out a future that would leave us safer than we are today. The whole point is to keep getting safer, not to do different things but to have a system which leads to a safer world. And we have to consider what the impact of all these things are on the Indian subcontinent, where there are nuclear missiles on the Chinese who might decide to build acquire a lot more missiles or develop them or not. And so my successor will have time to do all that. And I hope we've given the next President and our partners the maximum number of options. Mr. King. We need to take another short break, but when we come back, we'll ask the President about his thoughts on the crisis in the Middle East, as well as the contested Presidential election back home in the United States. At this point, CNN took a commercial break. Situation in the Middle East Mr. King. I want to ask you, lastly, before asking you about the domestic political situation, I want to ask you lastly about the Middle East. You met separately with Mr. Arafat and Prime Minister Barak before you came on this trip. It has to be a source of enormous personal frustration to you, because of all the time you have put into this. Do you have any reasonable hopes that you can bring the two of them together anytime soon and that we will get anywhere beyond perhaps even just calming the violence before you leave office, and anywhere back toward formal peace negotiations? Is that completely unrealistic at this time? The President. The honest answer is, I don't know, for this reason I don't think they can start negotiating again until we can dramatically reduce the level of violence. It's not clear to me that that's going to happen right now, although I'm working very hard on it, and we've been working hard on it since I've been here. And I wouldn't rule it out. But the tragic thing is that they're not all that far apart on a lot of these big issues and that what we have seen is a sober reminder that the old status quo was not an option. You either have to keep making things better in the Middle East, or eventually they'll get worse. Mr. King. Is the burden on one side or the other? You came away from Sharm al Sheikh cautiously optimistic you would stop the violence, have a cooling off period, and then bring them back together. Obviously, they have not even been able to stop the violence. The President. Well, believe it or not, I still think Sharm al Sheikh was very much worth doing, because, first of all, the agreement that we reached there is pretty much what they'd have to do to get the violence back and set in motion conditions which would lead to a resumption of the peace talks. And I felt before Sharm al Sheikh that we were slipping into a very dangerous situation regionally. And now I think that a lot of the really responsible actors in the region are also trying to get this thing shut down. But I can't really say more than that it's a troubling, difficult, and painful situation, and we've got to find a way to end the violence. You don't have to end every single instance of it, but there has to be a dramatic reduction in the violence before the parties can talk again and make commitments again that could constitute a peace agreement. Is it possible? Yes, it's possible. It's possible because they're not that far apart. But they might as well be on the other side of the globe, as long as all the shooting is going on. So that's what we're working on, and I hope that a way can be found to bring it to an end. 2000 Presidential Election Mr. King. Let me bring your thoughts back home to the United States. When you left on this trip, there was a dispute about who the next President would be. When you made your courtesy call on the Vietnamese President last night, you had to joke that you were hurrying home to see if the country had a Presidentelect. The recount continues, and along with it, the partisan rhetoric escalates. You have people on the Republican side speaking for Governor Bush saying the Democrats are trying to steal the election Democrats on the other hand, saying that the Republicans are trying to deny the people a fair count of the vote and shut down democracy. Is this helpful, in your view? The process is obviously not pretty. Is it helpful what we're hearing from both sides? The President. Well, first of all, I don't know that that's a particularly useful question, with all respect. You can't, as close as this is now it appears that, when all the votes are counted, that Vice President Gore will have won a plurality of the popular vote. It appears that unless he wins Florida, he'll be three votes short in the electoral college. Therefore, everything is on Florida. And Mr. Bush has the narrowest of leads out of 6 million votes, far less than a tenth of a percent, one sixth of one tenth of one percent, or something like that. Now, in an environment like that, you have to assume that either side will try to make the best argument they can, because you only have a whisker of difference. I think the important thing is that there is a process underway, and it is being shepherded by the parties they're both very well represented by articulate, able people and they have recourse to the courts in Florida and the Supreme Court seems to have been willing to be prompt in its decisionmaking. So I think the American people should just let it play out, and they should understand that, with so much at stake, both sides are going to make the strongest case they can. And the only thing that I hope that all of us will keep in mind here is that we don't know who won, but we do know that when people vote, they deserve to have their votes counted, if they can be. So we ought to just respect the process and respect the fact that the advocacy will take place, and it should take place. You can't blame either one of them for making the strongest case they can. This is not a crisis in the American system of government, because it will come to an end. It will come to an end in plenty of time for the new President to take the oath of office. There is a way of resolving these things. All these cases are in the courts, and as I said, it appears to me that they're being handled in a fairly prompt way. Some of the decisions have gone one way, some have gone another way, and we'll just have to see what happens. But I think the American people ought to let this it seems to me the American people are letting this play out in an appropriate way, and that's what I think should be done. Mr. King. Look around the corner, though. You have considerable experience in your own right trying to govern in a very difficult environment, relations with the Republican Congress not terribly good during most of the latter half of your administrations. And now you have research being done on both sides about, well, maybe this will get thrown to the Congress, and can we disqualify electors. Do you see, A, with the election being so close, and then, B, with the very difficult fight over who wins, can whoever gets this job reasonably govern, in your view? The President. Well, I would make two points. First of all, it is true that I faced an unusually partisan group of Republicans. But it's also true that we got a lot done. I mean, I've noticed with some pleasure, I confess, that students of American history, several of them have come out in the last few weeks saying that I had kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than any President in modern history. And we've gotten a lot done with this Republican Congress, in spite of all the partisanship in the last 6 years. We got a balanced budget agreement. We got welfare reform. We got just this year a sweeping measure on debt relief for the world's poorest nations and any number of other things. I don't want to go through all that, but the point I want to make is that even in a difficult atmosphere, where the Congress is closely divided, and the President is elected by a narrow margin, we should not assume that they won't be able to get something done. If they're willing to work hard, fight for their positions, and then in the end, make principled compromises, quite a lot can be done. That's the first thing I want to say. The second thing is, if you look at American history, it is not inevitable that the person who wins the White House under these circumstances will have a deeply divided country. Now, in 1876, when President Hayes won, he promised to only serve one term. So we don't know whether he could have been reelected or not, when he lost the popular vote and won the electoral college. In 1824 John Quincy Adams won in the House of Representatives when he lost the popular vote, and he was voted out, although he came back and had a wonderful career opposing slavery. But when Thomas Jefferson was forced to go for many, many ballots into the House of Representatives, he came out of it as a more unifying figure, with a commitment to be more unifying. And in effect, he was so successful that he got two terms, and the opposition party, the Federalist Party, disappeared. And then two members of his party, James Madison and James Monroe, succeeded him, and they both had two terms. And arguably, that 24 year period was the biggest period of political stability in the whole history of the republic, until you had the dominance of the Republicans after the Civil War, and then Roosevelt Truman years and the Depression and World War II. So I think you I wouldn't I don't think we should have all these hand wringing, dire predictions. We've got a system. It's underway, and yes, these guys are the advocates for either side are under enormous pressure. And of course, they're being pretty snippy with each other from time to time. But look, you'd expect it. I mean, 100 million people voted, and there's 1,000 votes, more or less, at stake in Florida. So everybody ought to just relax, let the process play out. But don't assume that no matter who wins and no matter what happens, it's going to be bad for America. It might be quite good, because it might be sobering for the country to realize we're in a completely new era. Nobody's got a lock on the truth. We're all trying to understand the future. It's still clear that about two thirds of the American people want a dynamic center that pulls the people together and moves us forward. And I think we still have a fair chance to achieve that. Perspective on the Presidency Mr. King. We're short on time, indeed, out of time, but just in a sentence or two, you've been at this 8 years, and I think you have 8 weeks. What runs through your head when you get up to go to the office every day? The President. I want to get everything done I can possibly do while I'm here. And for the rest, I just feel grateful. America is in much better shape then it was 8 years ago. We got to implement the ideas and the policies that I ran on in '92 and '96. I didn't do everything I wanted to do, but the overwhelming majority of things I wanted to do I was able to accomplish, and I'm grateful that it worked out for the country. And then a lot of other things came up along the way which were good for the country. So I'm happy now, and I'm grateful. And of course, I'm thrilled about Hillary's election to the Senate. And I just feel enormous gratitude. But there's still a lot of things I'd like to do, and so I'll work right up to the end. Mr. King. Mr. President, we thank you very much for your time. The President. Thank you. November 14, 2000 2000 Presidential Election Q. Why don't we start with the election? Do you think either Vice President Gore or Governor Bush is going to be able to govern effectively in a situation as divided and increasingly embittered as it is now? The President. I think it's too soon to draw that conclusion. I think the American people are pretty good about uniting around a President, particularly if the President gets a certain grace period. And I don't think that the circumstances are as rife, or ripe, for discord as they were in '93, where Newt Gingrich was in control and the Republican apparatus in the Congress and had a certain theory about what he was trying to do. I think now the country may be quite sobered by this, and the Congress may be somewhat sobered by it. You might well find that there is a real willingness to work together. The fact that the American people were closely divided on the candidates for President, and would have been closely divided even if Ralph Nader weren't in here, the Vice President would have won the election probably, what, 51.5 to 48.5 or something. That indicates that the American people I don't think that means that they don't believe there's a dynamic center that can be achieved. And I think that's what they will want from the next President and from the next Congress. So I think it's too soon to say that bitterness and partisanship will paralyze the next President. We don't know that, and I hope it won't be the case. This is actually, if you think about it, while it was a hard fought campaign, there wasn't a lot of personal criticism in it some from the Republican side against the Vice President but not nearly as harsh as we've seen in some campaigns of the past and even less from the Democratic side against Governor Bush. There was some, but not much. I think, on balance, it was an election fought out over two different approaches to the country's challenges and opportunities and different positions on specific issues. So I don't think we are necessarily doomed to 4 years of stalemate and partisanship, and I hope that won't be the case. Q. People are talking about the some people were even saying the election is being stolen, and there's all this bitterness, suits. You don't think that that poisons the atmosphere? The President. Well, I think that depends on what happens in the next few days. And so far what I've tried to tell the American people is, they have spoken, and we're trying to determine what they said. I think there's another million or so votes to be counted in California, New York, and Washington State, maybe even a little more. I guess still the some prospect of asking for a recount in Iowa and Wisconsin by the Bush people. And then there's the attempt to resolve all the questions that are out there about the Florida vote. And I think we just you know, the process is underway. Both sides are clearly very equally represented. And I just think we ought to let the thing play out. It will work itself out in some way or another. We've had this happen before. In 1800 Thomas Jefferson was elected in a very divisive, highly partisan election and went into the House of Representatives. I think he even had to vote on the fitness of the electors. He was a sitting Vice President. You know, he gave a very conciliatory Inaugural Address, saying, "We are all Federalists we're all Republicans," and led to a whole new era in American politics, out of what was an exceedingly divisive election. He was reelected, and Mr. Madison was elected, served two terms Mr. Monroe was elected, served two terms. It was actually probably the most stable period in our country's history, in terms of leadership, born out of an exceedingly divisive election in 1800. So I think it depends upon whether the people believe that this whole thing plays out in a fair way. So that's why I've encouraged the American people to just relax, take a deep breath, recognize that a result of this kind is always possible in a democratic election that's hard fought, and that the most important thing is that, when it's all said and done, that people believe that all the issues were resolved in a fair way and that the people franchise was protected and the integrity of the process was. It's unfolding. We just and I think as long as it I just think that's what we ought to keep in mind here. There's lots of time, you know. The Electoral College is not supposed to meet until December 18th Inauguration is January 21st. It's a very stable country, and they're working through it, and we'll see what happens. Q. Are you comfortable with the courts being as heavily involved as they're becoming? Should a judge decide whose vote counts and whose doesn't? The President. I think, in some of these cases, there may not be any alternative, because the right to vote is protected and defined in both State and Federal law. There's probably no alternative here. Now, in the first case, I understand today the judge actually declined to get involved. Isn't that right? Q. Yes, she would not stay the hand counting. The President. I think that the courts probably will be reluctant to be involved as long as they believe that nothing there's been no legal or constitutional infringement on the franchise. We'll just see what happens. Q. The Vice President has gone back to court against the secretary of state's ruling that it has to be done by 5 p.m. tomorrow. The President. Like I said, I've done my best not to comment on the process but just to say it's unfolding both sides are well represented they're arguing their points strongly. We should not expect either side to do anything less than to make their strongest case. That's what they're supposed to do. Electoral College Q. Do you agree with Senator elect Clinton that the Electoral College should be abolished? The President. Well, I have mixed feelings about it. I think the idea first of all, it was established to some extent for practical reasons, as you know, in the 18th century, and the practical reasons are no longer relevant. You know, we know how people voted when they vote. So nobody has to come tell us. The other argument is that it gives some more weight to the small States, because the votes are not proportional to the House of Representatives every State gets the two Senate votes, too, in the Electoral College. And arguably, it gets more attention from the candidates to the small States. Now, I think that ought to be examined. I'm not necessarily sure that's so. For example, if you're a Democrat and you know you're going to lose every State that's not on the Mississippi River, until you get to California, Washington, Oregon, and maybe Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, would you not go there? Would you be any less likely to go there if there were no Electoral College? Or might you take a run through the high plains and stop in Denver and think that it matters what margin you lose by? Because what happens is, when these candidates have public funds they have limited funds and limited time it affects not only their advertising budget but their travel budget. If you're a Republican and you know you can't win New York, you don't go there. But if you knew that it might make the difference in whether you got 35 or 42 percent of the vote in this case, if you're Al Gore and you don't think you're going to win Ohio, it might make the difference in 46 and 49 percent of the vote might you go? So I don't I'm not quite sure. Again, I believe how this plays out will determine it not only my opinion about it but maybe a lot of people's opinion about it. Q. Do you expect there to be a serious move? I mean, do you think that there is The President. I don't have any idea. I know that Hillary feels strongly about it, and it has really nothing to do with the fact that she's a Senator elect from New York now. But you can ask her why she feels that way. I have mixed feelings. I think that, you know, certainty and clarity of outcome is important, so I think it depends on I think that a lot of people's views will be determined by the sense they have about the fairness and adequacy of this process over the next however long it takes to resolve. And we'll just have to see. Presidential Transition Q. Do you think it's appropriate at this point for either Governor Bush or the Vice President to be planning a transition? The President. I don't think I should comment on what they do. I don't think it's appropriate for me to comment on that. 2000 Presidential Election Q. Do you think that this is going to be resolved by the time you get back to Washington next Monday? Do you think it should be resolved by then? And at what point do you think Americans begin to lose faith in the outcome? The President. I don't know whether it will be resolved when I get back. I don't have an opinion about that. I think the important thing is that the process be resolved in a way that is as fair as possible, meaning that the American people on both sides of this have the highest possible level of confidence that the people who went to the polls and voted that the totals reflect, as far as possible, a fair assessment of the people who went to the polls and voted. And I think that, you know, there are lots of questions out there, and I don't think I should comment on it. There is a process in place. They are both arguing their points strongly, as they both should. And I think that's the most important thing, more than whether it's one week or 8 days or 6 days or 12 days or whatever. Q. Given how far we've come, do you think it's possible that we're going to come out of this and people are going to think it was fair, with all the angry charges that are going back and forth and the court challenges? The President. First of all, this is not just a matter of charges there are certain facts. And I think the facts will come out and be established, and then the disputes about how the factual situation should be handled will be resolved, and people will reach a conclusion about whether they believe that or not. I think it's quite possible that people will think in the end that the matter has been fairly resolved. They may or may not. I certainly hope that they will. But I think it depends upon what the facts are and then how the facts are resolved. But again I say, this process is still in play. I don't think the American people should and I don't think the press should rush to judgment here and just conclude that no matter who is declared the winner that the people who voted for the other candidate will think that something wrong was done. I think it depends on how it is handled and what the facts are. Q. Sir, what's your outside timetable, and what's a reasonable amount of time? The President. I just don't want to comment on it because I don't want to prejudice the process. That would be unfair to both candidates for me to say. I think my role now is to uphold the basic principles of democracy and the integrity of the vote and to ask the American people to give this process a chance to play itself out. Vietnam Q. Moving on to your major stop on this trip, Vietnam. In 1969, which was the last year an American President went to Vietnam, you wrote a letter saying you hated and despised the war and had worked and demonstrated against it. Now that you've been in the position of making decisions of war and peace, do you still feel that way about Vietnam? The President. What I feel about Vietnam is that, thanks in large measure to the bipartisan leadership of Vietnam veterans in the Congress Bob Kerrey, John Kerry, John McCain, Chuck Robb, and Pete Peterson, when he was there, now is our Ambassador the American people have been able to look to the future and hope that a future can be built which opens a new page in our relations with Vietnam, and hopefully one that will put an end to the divisions between the Vietnamese people and the American people and between the American within America and within Vietnam and within the Vietnamese people, including the Vietnamese who are in America, who believed in what we were doing. That's what I think. Now, when we look back on it, the most important thing is that a lot of brave people fought and died in the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong and the South Vietnamese Army and the United States Army our allies, the Republic of Korea and other allies who were there. A lot of people still bear the wounds of war in this country and in Vietnam. And the best thing that we can do to honor the sacrifice and service of those who believed on both sides that what they were doing is right, is to find a way to build a different future, and that's what we're trying to do. Everything I have done for the last 8 years has been premised on that, starting with trying to obtain the fullest possible accounting for the POW's and the MIA's. And none of what I have done, as I say, would have been remotely possible if it hadn't been for John McCain and Chuck Robb and Senator Bob Kerrey and Senator John Kerry and Pete Peterson. They literally made this possible, they and the veterans groups and the Vietnamese living in America who all supported the American position in the war. So I think I don't see this so much as coming to terms with the past as moving forward into the future. Q. Were there ever points when you were grappling with some of these questions in the past 8 years, when you thought about Lyndon Johnson facing those things in that very troubled period and having to make those decisions which, at the time, you very much disagreed with? The President. I see now how hard it was for him. I believe he did what he thought was right under the circumstances. Let me just say parenthetically, I'm glad to see that there is a reassessment going on about the historic importance of President Johnson's term of office, the work he did for the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Some people are even beginning to acknowledge that his war on poverty was not a total failure, that in fact poverty was reduced. In fact, we just this year finally had the biggest drop in child poverty since 1966, since Lyndon Johnson was President. And I believe that you know, these decisions are hard. And one of the things that I have learned, too, is when you decide to employ force, there will always be unintended consequences. Q. You talked about all the losses on both sides, 3 million Vietnamese losses, 58,000 Americans. Were all those lives wasted? The President. Well, first of all, I don't think that any person is fit to make that judgment. People fight honorably for what they believe in, and they lose their lives. No one has a right to say that those lives were wasted. I think that would be a travesty. Every war is unfortunate, and when it's over, you always wish it could have been avoided. But I think it's a real mistake to look at it in that way. I think what we have to do is to think about what we can do today and tomorrow and in the years ahead to honor the sacrifice of the people who believed in what they were doing. And I think that for 8 years that's been the policy of this country. And as I said, it had bipartisan support and absolutely critical support from leading veterans in the country in the Congress and in the country. Q. Do you think the United States owes Vietnam an apology for its involvement in the war? The President. No, I don't. MIA's POW's Q. The MIA POW question is very crucial to us and obviously has been through these 8 years. Do you have any feeling about the Vietnamese, who have many, many more people never accounted for after this year is there anything we can do to help them come to terms? The President. I think if there is anything that we can do to help them, we ought to do it. Of course, their people mostly died there, in their country. I think that we should always be in a position of doing whatever we can to help them get whatever information or records we might have to resolve anything on their front. They have let us look at tens of thousands of pages of archives and other pieces of evidence which have helped us to identify hundreds of remains and return them, and we're still working on it. And I think this is something we ought to keep doing together. I think this effort we have undertaken is what made it possible for the veterans groups and the families of the people who are still missing to support this step by step advancement in our relationship. And I think it ought to be a two way street. Q. Do you have any reason to believe that any Americans remain in captivity in Vietnam, after the last American POW's were released in 1973? The President. We have no evidence of it. I know there are people who still believe that may be the case. And all I can say is that every time we've gotten any lead, we've done our best to run it down completely, and we will continue to do that. Q. Nothing has panned out in any of these reported The President. Nothing has panned out. You know, I'm like every other American, I think. I've always hoped against hope that a few of them were still there and still alive and that somehow we could find them. But so far all the rumors and all the leads have turned up dead ends. But I would never close the door on that. If there is ever any indication of anything else, I'd be glad to look into it, and I think any subsequent American Government would. Vietnam U.S. Relations Q. How would you describe Vietnam, in terms of its relationship with the United States? Where are we now? Friend? Partner? How would you describe the relationship? The President. I would say that our relationship is evolving. I think our work on the POW MIA issue has been quite positive and has improved. I think the interviews that they have done of the people we've asked to be approved for relocation to the United States, they've improved that quite a bit in the last couple of years. I would say that the trade agreement is a very good thing, for the same reason I thought it was a good thing for us to make the trade agreement with China. It's not as extensive, and it requires year by year renewal, and will do so until they meet all the terms of becoming members of the World Trade Organization. But it's a very positive thing. I hope that we will continue to see some progress there on the human rights issues. There are still political prisoners, religious prisoners that we feel should be released. And I hope they will continue to do that. We've had some seen some movement there in the last year of the release of some of the Protestants and some Catholics from prison. And I think we have to just keep working on that. And then I hope there will be an opportunity for some educational exchanges. And eventually, I hope that some of the Vietnamese living in America will become part of our ongoing development of relationship, because I think that's kind of the next big step, I think, from our point of view. Q. What do you mean, that the Vietnamese community would become a bridge to their original home or what do you mean? The President. I think that a lot of the Vietnamese living in America, as you know, or as I said, were basically people who were strongly supportive of the position the United States took in the Vietnam war, or their children. But the younger people also want to build a new relationship with Vietnam. They want to see Vietnam modernized. They want to be, I think, eventually reconciled with their relatives or the people that lived in their villages. And I think that over time, we'll see some more contacts there, and that will be positive. Q. Do you ever reflect on what it means for an American President now to go to the place that symbolized and distorted our politics? You know, for much of a generation I mean, if you look at Watergate, Watergate could almost be traced to Vietnam. So much happened because of Vietnam. Is this a new chapter? Is this a closing of that door, do you think, in any way? The President. Well, I think it's a new chapter. The thing that makes America work over time is our ability to visualize new futures and achieve them. We don't need rose colored glasses here. We still have differences with the Vietnamese about the form of government they have. But we've decided to approach them the same way we've approached China, the same way we deal with other countries with whom we have continuing differences. But I think there's a strong sense that it's time to write a new chapter here. This is, after all, this country, the 12th or 13th biggest country in the world. They have about nearly 80 million people, and 60 percent of them are under 30, an enormous percentage of them under 18. Q. So they know of the war, but they didn't experience it the way we did. The President. What they know of the war is what they hear their parents talk about or what they'll learn in history books, the same way that our children do, those of us that are of that age. I think that what we want to do is give them a chance to the Vietnamese a chance to find some greater prosperity, the global economy, and we believe it will bring greater openness to their society and a whole different future for them a different relationship and a different relationship that will involve the Vietnamese who've come to our county and, on the whole, have done so very well in America and enriched our Nation. Situation in the Middle East Q. I was going to ask you if there really is anything left to be done in the Middle East, whether diplomats can now cause what's happening in the streets to stop happening? The President. I think it depends on whether we can reduce the violence to the point where it's possible to resume negotiations. Q. Can you do that? The President. The unbelievable irony of the present situation is, with this level of violence is unfolding in the aftermath of the first serious discussion, official discussion that the Israelis and the Palestinians had, which occurred at Camp David on the serious, difficult final status issues of the Oslo agreement. And I might add, after Camp David, they continued to talk in informal ways. And they know that while there are still differences between them, they are agonizingly close to a resolution of these fundamental issues. I think they also know that violence begets violence and that in the end they're still going to be neighbors. So they're either going to keep killing each other at varying rates with one side feeling beleaguered, the Israelis, and the others feeling oppressed, the Palestinians, or they're going to come to grips with this and complete the process they agreed to complete when they signed the agreement on the White House Lawn in September of 1993. So that's the frustration. The answer to your question is, yes, there's more that can be done, but I do not believe it can be done with this level of violence going on. I just don't think that's possible. Q. How do you get control of that Sharm al Sheikh, you weren't able to do it there. You've had these The President. The Sharm al Sheikh agreement was perfectly fine. It just hasn't been implemented. So that's why I saw Arafat and Barak this week, and I think within in this coming week you'll see whether there is going to be any kind of effort to change course. You know, somebody has got to quit shooting. And I think the demonstrations in the daytime have gone down among the Palestinians, but the nighttime shooting hasn't. I think everyone understands now that it may not be possible for Chairman Arafat to control everything every Palestinian does, immediately. It may not be possible for Prime Minister Barak to control everything every Israeli does, immediately. But this thing can be reduced dramatically if they want to get back to the negotiating table. I think the Israelis will respond in kind if the Palestinian shootings will diminish now. You know, we had a rough day today, and the Palestinians said it was in retaliation for the shooting of the resistance leader the other day. We'll just have to see what happens. But the ironic answer to your question is, every time I talk to them, I come away more convinced that we could actually have an agreement if they could free themselves of this cycle of violence and get back to the negotiating table. And I think if they I think there's a way to do it, and I'm going to try to see what we can do this week. That's all I can say. I'll do my best. Q. A secret plan? A Clinton secret plan? The President. No, I don't have a secret plan. I just think the more I talk about this sort of thing, the harder it is to do. North Korea Q. We wanted to ask you about also North Korea. Did the missile talks fail in Malaysia did they fail to give you what you wanted to hear? How far apart is that, and what's the prospect of a trip there? The President. Well, we're making some progress, but we haven't resolved it all. We think it's quite important to work out an arrangement with them in which, one, we stop the missile development they stop the missile development and the sales of missiles. Now, they obviously need to earn some funds from some other places, and we think there are ways they can do that. Secondly, we want to keep the North South dialog going. We strongly support what President Kim Dae jung did with Chairman Chongil. We think that was a good thing to do, and we think it ought to continue. And we want to also continue the agreement we made with them early in my term, which ended the nuclear development program, which when I became President, I was told by my predecessors that it was the most serious national security problem we were facing at the time. So I wouldn't rule out or in a trip, if that's where you're going on this. I just think the most important thing is that we're engaged with them and we're making constructive progress. And I hope we can make more before my tenure is over, because I think it will leave my successor an easier time. President's Accomplishments and Regrets Q. What's your greatest personal satisfaction of your 8 years, as you near the end of them? And what's your greatest personal disappointment? The President. Oh, that's hard to say it's hard to say on both counts. My greatest personal satisfaction, I think, is that our country is in so much better shape than it was 8 years ago and not just economically. I think it's economically probably the strongest it has ever been, but it's also a more equal society. We have incomes rising at all levels for the first time in three decades. We have a big drop in poverty. We have a big drop in crime. We have the welfare rolls cut in half. We have fewer people without health insurance, for the first time in a dozen years. Performance of our students in the schools is getting better. We have more minority kids taking advanced placement courses and going on to college. And I think in each of these areas we've had policies which have contributed to this. We also have a real I think there is more social cohesion, notwithstanding the division of this vote. We've got 150,000 kids serving in AmeriCorps, more than served in the Peace Corps in the first 20 years. We've had, I think, a real attempt to try to bridge the racial divide in this country and deal with those issues and confront a lot of the problems that still exist in America. So I feel good about both the fact that the country is in better shape and, I think, there is a lot of self confidence, a sense of possibility in this country. I think in part that explains how free people felt to debate the issues in the last campaign and to make their choices. I'm very, very grateful for that. And I will leave office with that sense of gratitude, because I think that's what every President wants to do. Every President wants to feel that during his tenure of service, America grew stronger and healthier and better. I feel good about where we are in our relations with the rest of the world. I think we've basically been a force for peace and prosperity. What is my greatest regret? I may not be able to say yet. I really wanted, with all my heart, to finish the Oslo peace process, because I believe that if Israel and the Palestinians could be reconciled, first the State of Israel would be secure, which is very important to me personally and, I think, to the American people secondly, the Palestinians would be in control of their own destiny third, a peace with Syria would follow shortly and fourth, the Middle East would not only be stable, which is good for America's interests, and not just because of the oil but the forces of progress and prosperity progress and reconciliation, excuse me would be stronger in all countries, including Iran. And I felt that I really think this is a sort of linchpin which could lead to a wave of positive developments all across the region. And I think that's very important. Most of the people in the Middle East are young there are all these kids out there. What are they going to are they going to be raised to believe their faith requires them to hate the Israelis and the Americans and anybody else that's not part of their faith and politics? Are they going to be perpetually poor, even if they have a fairly decent education? Are we going to see that whole region being integrated into a global system and these children having a whole different future, in which they're reconciled with their neighbors in Israel and deeply involved in the world in a positive way? Are they going to be using the Internet to talk to terrorist cells about chemical and biological weapons, or are they going to be using the Internet to figure out how to grow new businesses and have new opportunities and build new futures for their families and their children? So if it doesn't happen, I'll be profoundly disappointed, but I'll never regret a minute I spent on it because I think it's very important for the future. I have never bought the thesis on an inevitable collision course with the Islamic societies, or that the 21st century had to be dominated by terrorists with highly sophisticated weapons, fueled by broad popular resentment from people who are both disenfranchised and poor. I don't think it has to be that way, and I think if we could really make a big dent in this problem, it would give confidence to the forces of reason and progress throughout the region. November 11, 2000 Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you, Secretary Gober, for your many, many years of friendship and your service to our country. Thank you, Mr. Duggins, for the remarks you made today and your leadership of the Vietnam veterans. General Jackson, Superintendent Metzler, Chaplain Cooke. I think we ought to give a special applause to Lee Thornton for being with us all these years and all the work he's done. Applause Thank you so much. Thank you. What a faithful friend to America's veterans you have been. I thank our Defense Secretary, Bill Cohen, and his wife, Janet, for being here. And Secretary Slater, General McCaffrey, the service Secretaries, other members of the Cabinet and the administration, and former Cabinet members who are here, General Myers and other members of the Joint Chiefs. To the Medal of Honor recipients, the leaders of our veterans organizations who have been introduced and who do such a fine job. To the veterans and family members, members of the Armed Services, my fellow Americans. I welcome you all to this sacred place as we again pay tribute to the men and women who have stood at the barricades so that we may enjoy the blessings of liberty. Here we are, surrounded by the white markers that measure the last full measure of their devotion. Many veterans died in now historic places the Battle of the Wilderness, Belleau Wood, Normandy, Iwo Jima, Inchon, Vietnam, Kuwait. Many others fought bravely and, thankfully, returned home to live out happy, accomplished lives among friends, families, and loved ones. Still others remind us that even when America is not at war, the men and women of our military risk and sometimes give their lives for peace. Three such heroes were interred here just in the past few weeks. They were members of the United States Ship Cole, working to preserve peace and stability in a region vital to our interests, their lives taken on October 12th by a brutal act of terrorism. They are Hull Maintenance Technician Second Class Kenneth Clodfelter, Electronics Technician Chief Petty Officer Richard Costelow, and Signalman Seaman Cheron Gunn. Let us say to their families and to all the families who lost their loved ones on the Cole, we are grateful for the quiet, heroic service of your loved ones. Now they are in God's care. We mourn their loss, and we shall not rest until those who carried out this cruel act are held to account. We all saw the TV images of the Cole and the massive hole in its side right at the waterline. But what many Americans still don't know about is the heroism that took place after the attack. What we couldn't see was that entire compartments were flooded, hatches blown open, doorways bent, parts of the top deck buckled. So, in addition to finding and bringing home the dead and the wounded, the surviving crew had to save their ship. They worked around the clock, some in 22hour shifts, amid smoke, seawater, and twisted steel, with no respite from the desert heat. They used their ingenuity to restore the ship's electrical power so they would no longer have to bail water by hand, bucket by bucket. Some even slept on the deck because the air below was too foul. In these incredibly difficult circumstances, one helicopter pilot from a ship assisting the Cole wrote these words home "I wish I had the power to relay what I have seen," he said, "but words just won't do it. I do want to tell you the first thing that jumped out at me the Stars and Stripes flying. Our flag was more beautiful than words can describe. I have never been so proud of what I do or of the men and women I serve with." Soon the Cole will be back home in America for repairs, and soon thereafter, she will be back on the seas, serving America those Stars and Stripes still flying. We are greatly honored to be joined here today by the commander of the Cole the captain of the Cole, Commander Kirk Lippold his executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Chris Peterschmidt the Command Master Chief, James Parlier and some 20 members of their crew. I was honored to welcome them at the White House this morning. I would like to ask them now to stand and have you welcome them. Applause There are many appropriate ways to honor not just the crew of the Cole but all the men and women who have defended liberty in our military service. We honor them first of all, of course, by remembering them and their accomplishments, as we do here. Later today I will go to the groundbreaking of the World War II memorial to honor the service and sacrifice of the greatest generation, those who fought and died to free the world from tyranny, totalitarianism, and hate. And we will pledge there never to stop trying to build the world for which they sacrificed so much. We also honor our veterans by cherishing with all our hearts the freedoms they paid such a price to defend. If ever there was a doubt about the value of citizenship and each individual's exercise of the freedom of citizenship to vote, this week's election certainly put it to rest. Laughter And if ever there was a question about the strength of our democratic institutions in the face of healthy and natural political argument, it has been answered by the measured response of the American people to these extraordinary events. We have a Constitution. We have a rule of law. We voted, and now the system is trying to figure out exactly what we said. Laughter Eventually, they will the system will do that, according to the Constitution and laws, and America will be just fine. We honor Vice President Gore and Governor Bush. We honor all those who participated and all those who voted. And I hope they will remind us that the next time the polls are open, without regard to our party, our philosophy, we should show up because we certainly do count. We honor our veterans as well, in Abraham Lincoln's words, by caring for him who should have borne the battle and for his widow and orphans. Just a few days ago I proudly signed legislation increasing funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs by 1.5 billion. These additional resources will help our Nation's 24 million veterans, serving more patients, ensuring high quality and timely medical care, improving the delivery of benefit payments for veterans, increasing compensation for disabilities, meeting our national shrine commitment to veteran cemeteries. We also recently provided a 3.7 across theboard increase in basic pay for the members of our Armed Forces provided military retirees access to prescription drugs with low out ofpocket costs and provided lifetime health care coverage that will allow military retirees over 65 to receive affordable, high quality health care across our Nation. Finally, we honor our veterans by meeting our part of the solemn compact we have with each and every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, and coastguardsman, regardless of the conflict in which they fought, that we will do all in our power to find them and bring them home if they are captured, missing in action, or fallen on the battlefield. Today I am proud to announce that we are bringing home another 15 sets of remains, heroes from the Korean war. They are en route right now from Pyongyang to Hawaii for identification, and we praise God for this event. Tomorrow I will begin a trip to Asia that will end in Vietnam, and I will be the first President to visit that country since 1969. Over the past decade we have moved, step by step, toward normalized relations with Vietnam, based on one central priority gaining the fullest possible accounting of American prisoners of war and Americans missing in action in Southeast Asia. Continuing cooperation on these issues is on the top of my agenda for this trip, even as we open a new chapter in our relations with Vietnam. Our Nation has sought to move forward in developing those relations in a way that both honors those who fought and suffered there and does right by the missing and their families. We have done so with the constant involvement and support of Members of Congress who served in Vietnam, America's Vietnam veterans, and their families. The result has been tremendous progress, and today, full cooperation from the Vietnamese in repatriating remains, accounting for missing Americans, obtaining documents, and conducting over 60 joint field activities with the Vietnamese to search for our MIA's. As a result of that increased cooperation, the remains of 283 Americans have been repatriated since 1993. On my second day in Vietnam, I will visit a site where Americans and Vietnamese have been searching for the remains of an American serviceman. We believe it to be the place where Air Force Captain Lawrence Evert was downed on November 8, 1967. I am pleased that I will be joined at the site by two of Captain Evert's sons, Dan and David. We are honored to have them and their sisters, Elizabeth and Tamra, with us here today. We thank them, the members of the Evert family, for their devotion. When Captain Evert's plane was shot down 33 years ago, an airman on another flight heard a voice on a radio transmission calling out, "I'm hit hard." That hit his loved ones' lives just as hard. Again I say, we thank them for their sacrifice, and we thank them for joining us here today. Where are the Everts? Would you ask them to stand, please? There they are. Applause Thank you very much. Bless you. The presence of these two fine men on our trip will help us all to make it clear, in Vietnam, that our work is not yet finished and that progress in our relations depends upon continued cooperation. We will always keep faith with these families and do our duty to the past, for we must never forget. In our national memory, Vietnam was a war. But Vietnam is also a country a country emerging from almost 50 years of conflict, upheaval, and isolation, and turning its face to a very different world, a country that can succeed in this new global age only if it becomes more interdependent and open to the world. This is something we should encourage. We should always remember something a great American Vietnam veteran and former POW, Pete Peterson, said when he went to Vietnam as our Ambassador "We cannot change the past. What we can change is the future." The future belongs to veterans and their families who deserve all the support and answers a grateful nation can provide. It belongs to the thousands of ordinary Vietnamese citizens who have helped them in this process. It belongs to the Vietnamese Americans who have come to live among us, including right here in Arlington, and who now can finally travel home to reunite with their families. It belongs to all the good people who have gone to Vietnam to help clear landmines and aid the victims of flooding. It belongs to the next generation of Vietnamese who want to live in a normal, prosperous country, and to be free to shape their destinies and live their faith. It belongs to all those Americans and Vietnamese who want to build a common future. On this first Veterans Day of the 21st century, the eighth and last in which I will have the honor to address you and the people of our Nation as President in this sacred place, let us resolve never to stop trying to build that better world for which our veterans have sacrificed. Let us all draw strength from the long legacy of service. When history looks back upon the records of our age and our Nation centuries from now, I believe it will be written that once there was a great nation of free people who sent their very best young men and women out to serve on the frontiers of freedom in uniform. They went forth to defend their Nation and its ideals, giving up the comforts and conveniences of home. Too many never returned to their families, but none who served ever sacrificed in vain. They led lives of great consequence, for they kept the torch of liberty burning in the oldest democracy on Earth. Each and every one of them were heroes and gave to every child born thereafter a precious and irreplaceable gift. And their Nation remained eternally grateful. Thank you, and God bless America. November 02, 2000 Q. Four more years! Four more years! Laughter Morning Show Commercials The President. What I want to know is, where did you make that ad where you walk in the White House and the house comes down? Q. This is an ad that runs in Washington for our radio station. The President. Do your listeners know that you actually tore the White House down? Do they know that? Laughter Have you concealed that from them? Laughter Q. You watched that, huh? The President. I do. Q. We have a commercial that runs in the Washington area where anyway. Laughter The President. He walks into a mockup of the White House and it comes down. Laughter Q. I'm glad you watched that. I'm glad to know that you listen to the show. The President. I keep up with you. Q. Thank you, sir. And we keep up with you, too, and sincerely, it would be nice if we could get 4 more years from you. It's been a good 8 years for us. 2000 Election The President. But you can get the next best thing. I'll tell you, we've got to win this election, and I feel very strongly that we're going to win it if our folks vote. All these polls that show it close and show Governor Bush a point or two ahead, all those polls are premised on an assumption that African American and Hispanic voters and first generation immigrants will not vote in the same percentages that the Republican base will vote. That's what they're premised on. I remember in Mississippi last year, where the African American vote equaled the white vote, for the first time ever, a Democratic candidate for Governor was elected by 6,300 votes. And he was six points behind in the polls. So that's what the power here is with the young people and with the folks that have done well in these last 8 years. One of the things that I want to point out that I'm proudest of is that we fought for policies and Al Gore fought for policies that would guarantee that when this economy came back, for the first time in 30 years, it wouldn't just be the wealthiest Americans who would do well. They would do well, but everybody else would do well, too. Average income has gone up by over 5,000 in this country, and African American unemployment is at the lowest point in history. And I think that alone is a good argument to stick with this economic policy, especially when the alternative is going back to deficits and underinvesting in education. Q. And Mr. President, history has shown that with the votes that have or with the election such as 1960 and even '68, how just one vote in maybe a ward or two would have made a difference and turned history around then, too. The President. Oh, absolutely. John Kennedy won by four tenths of one percent. Hubert Humphrey lost by a percent. Jimmy Carter won by a percent, one vote out of 100. And this race could well be that close. And I can tell you there are at least five States today that are within one percent. There are another five States that are within 2 percent. That's how close this election is. Ralph Nader Youth Vote Q. And the Republicans are buying spots for Ralph Nader in some of these States. The President. They are buying spots for Nader? What does that tell you? Q. Yeah. The President. You know, one of the things that bothers me is that I think young people have the biggest stake in this election and may feel alienated from it because so much of the debate has been about Social Security and Medicare drug programs for seniors. But I'd like to make a couple of points about that for young people. First of all, I'm the oldest of the baby boomers. I'm 54 years old. And one of the reasons that the young people should care about this debate is all the people my age are very worried that when we retire that is, people between the ages of 36 and 54, that's the baby boom when we retire we don't want to impose a burden on our children and on our grandchildren. So that's a big issue. So when Al Gore says, "I'll put 20 years on the life of Social Security," and his opponent says, "I'll take a trillion dollars out of the Social Security Trust Fund," that's a big difference there. And it's important. But also, our administration has a good environmental record. That's going to be more important for the future. Al Gore knows more about technology, how to maximize the benefits of the Internet, how to close the digital divide, how to create new economic opportunities in underserved areas, areas that still haven't fully felt the prosperity, which is a big issue. He's worked on that for 8 years now through our empowerment zones, and we've got a plan to get billions and billions of dollars in investment in new businesses and new jobs in the areas that still have unemployment that is too high or income that's too low. So I think the young people have the biggest stake of all in this election. Supreme Court Republican Congress Q. And also, when you think about the Supreme Court, sir, and what Q. Huge issue. Q. you've done with the Supreme Court and the ability to carry on into the next The President. Yes. I only got two appointments, I regret to say, but they have upheld civil rights, and they've upheld a woman's right to choose, and they've upheld the right of the National Government to protect the interest of the American people. But there are we're one vote away from reversing Roe v. Wade, and we are dangerously close to something that could be even more severe. We're dangerously close to a permanent majority on this Court that will restrict the ability of the United States Government, both the President and the Congress, to protect the American people in fundamental ways. This Court had five votes to invalidate a provision of the Brady bill, which is the background check law on handguns, because it required the States to help. They invalidated a section of the violence against women law because it required the States to help. They invalidated a provision of a law against age discrimination. I mean, so I cannot the American people have probably no idea how important that is. And one other thing I'd like to say We've got a chance to win the House and the Senate. But if we don't, there needs to be somebody here in the White House to restrain this Republican Congress. Let's not forget all the things they've tried to do that I stopped. They tried to shut down the Department of Education. They had the biggest education cuts in history, the biggest environmental cuts in history. They've tried to pass all kinds of restrictions on our ability to protect the health and safety of people in the workplace. So that's another big point. Q. They turned your hair from black to white. The President. They turned my hair from black to white. I earned every one of these gray hairs. Laughter First Lady's Senate Campaign Q. And wouldn't it be nice to have two Democratic Senators from the great State of New York? The President. Oh, that would be really nice. You know, I'm really proud of Hillary, and I knew that she was doing well when her opponent made 500,000 phone calls accusing her of being tied to terrorists. That was really sinking to the bottom of the barrel. Laughter And I think she's got that turned around. She's up there trying to run on the issues. I mean, I think that if people care about education, if they care about child care, if they think about balancing work and family, if they want younger people, as well as older people, to have access to health insurance, people like Hillary and Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, those are the kind of people we need to be promoting, because this country is in great shape. But we need to build on what we've got, not reverse it. President's Future Plans Q. That's right, sir. And sir, I'm going to say it now because I probably won't get a chance to say it before you leave office. We're going to really miss you. Q. Thank you so much, sir. The President. Well, I hope you'll you know, call me now and then. We'll still talk on the radio. Laughter You may be the only guy who wants to talk to me when I'm not President anymore. Laughter Q. I know, because now the Republicans don't even want you to practice law. They've tried to hold that up on you, too. The President. I know. Well, they tell me that after the for 3 or 4 months I'll be lost when I leave office because when I walk in a room, nobody will play a song anymore. Laughter Q. We'll play a song for you. Q. We'll play some old school yeah. The President. one of your songs for "Hail To The Chief" how's that? Q. There you go. Q. Because we know what you like. Laughter The President. You've got a deal. Q. All right, President Clinton. 2000 Election The President. Again, I just want to say I hope everybody listens you've got to show up Tuesday. You've got to be there. I mean, this election is every bit as important as the one that elected me in 1992. We've turned the country around. The last thing we need to do is go in reverse. Q. All right. The President. Thank you. Q. Thank you, sir. The President. Bye bye. November 02, 2000 Mr. Wenner. Thank you for your time I appreciate it. It takes time to do something like this. The President. Good. 2000 Presidential Election Mr. Wenner. Why do you think the race is so tight, given the economy, the issues, the incumbency? How could it get to be this close? The President. Well, I think for one thing, things have been good for a long time, and I think a lot of people may take it for granted and may not have they may not be as clear as they should be, which I hope we can use the last week to do, on what specific policies contributed to it and what could undermine it. I think that's one issue. I also think that, you know, there's not as much general awareness as there might be about the differences between the two parties on health care, education, the environment, and crime, where I believe that the things we've done over the last 8 years had a measurable impact on all those things going in the right direction. And a lot of most Presidential races are fairly close, you know, because a lot of Presidential voting is cultural. Mr. Wenner. The way you were raised. The President. Well, the way you were raised and sort of the neighborhood you live in, your socioeconomic and ethnic background. I mean, a lot of it's cultural. So I think there are a lot of reasons it's close. Also, keep in mind, in the history of our Republic, only two Vice Presidents have ever been directly elected President. One of them when Martin Van Buren succeeded Andrew Jackson, we were effectively a one party country then. And the other, when George Bush defeated Michael Dukakis, the country was not in as good a shape as it is now, but it was in pretty good shape, and Bush basically destroyed Dukakis. It was a hugely negative campaign with a lot of charges that were never effectively rebutted. So this has been a much more positive race. There have been differences on the issues, but neither one of them has called each other's patriotism into question or whether they're normal Americans. Basically, the rap that was put on Dukakis was like reverse plastic surgery. So I think that that explains it largely. Demands of the Presidency Mr. Wenner. At the end of the interview, I'm going to ask you to make a bet with me. What physical change in you says that you've served 8 years and it's a job that really takes a toll? The President. Well, I think I'm in better shape, better health than I was 8 years ago, in a lot of ways. My hair is gray. I think that's about it. I've got a few wrinkles I didn't have 8 years ago. But I've held up pretty well. I've had a good time. I've enjoyed it. I couldn't help my hair going gray. It would probably have gone gray if I hadn't become President. Oklahoma City and Columbine Mr. Wenner. One of the most important jobs that you, as a President, have is to talk to the country in the wake of national tragedies, frame the issues for the American people. I'm going to ask you about two of the things that happened during your two terms the Oklahoma City bombing and the Columbine shootings. Where were you when you first heard about the Oklahoma City bombing, and what was your first reaction, personally? And then how did you think you should frame that to the American people, to help them understand what's really a national trauma? And where were you when you heard it? The President. I was in the White House. I believe I was in the White House, because I remember making a statement at the beginning, right in the Rose Garden, saying what you would expect me to say, expressing the Nation's sympathy for the loss but also urging the American people not to jump to conclusions about who had done it. Remember in the beginning, there were a lot of people saying it was obviously some sort of act of foreign terrorism. There was one man that was brought back on an airplane. He was flying out of the country through to London, and he was brought back, suspected of maybe being involved, and he wasn't. And of course, subsequently, it was a domestic terrorist act. But then when I went to Oklahoma, at the memorial service, what I tried to do was to elevate what the people who had been working in that building were doing. They were all public servants, and it was at a time when it was quite fashionable to bash the Government. And I told myself, even, that I would never refer to people who worked for the Government even in agencies I thought weren't performing well as bureaucrats again, because this whole we have gotten, for more than a dozen years, a sort of demeaning rhetoric about the nature of Government and the nature of public service. And I tried to point out that these people were our friends and our neighbors and our relatives, and they were an important part of America's family and that their service ought to be honored in that way. And also, obviously, I took a strong stand against terrorism. And I was able later I went to Michigan State and gave a commencement speech and tried to amplify on that. But I really believe that was the turning of the tide in the venom of anti Government feeling. Mr. Wenner. Did you see was it a conscience thought to you that this could be the turning of the tide, and if you focused it correctly, if you said, "You know, you can't love your country if you hate your Government," that this would crystallize that feeling? The President. I think I felt that after I had some time to think about it. In the beginning I was just horrified about all those people dying, all those little kids killed and hurt. Mr. Wenner. What I'm trying to get at is, once beyond that obvious first reaction The President. Yes. I mean, it occurred to me that, you know, the American people are fundamentally decent, and they've got a lot of sense. And I thought that this might break a fever that had been gripping us for too long. And I think it did. Mr. Wenner. And you thought, if I can take advantage of this opportunity I mean, to have this tragedy in every tragedy comes an opportunity, so is this an opportunity where I can make people rethink that idea. The President. I think in a way, at least at some maybe not even at a conscious level, the American people were rethinking it. And I think maybe that's why what I said at the memorial service struck a responsive chord in the country. Mr. Wenner. What I'm trying to get at is, was that a deliberate thought on your part? That I have an opportunity as President to The President. Well, I thought that yes, I was conscious of what I was saying. Mr. Wenner. Did you connect it in some way to a kind of metaphorical bomb throwing of Newt Gingrich, of the real anti Government stance that he was taking at the time? The President. I was careful not to do that. I wanted it to change the American peoples' attitude toward public servants and their Government. But to do it, you had to focus on what happened. One of the things that I didn't like about Newt and he certainly wasn't responsible in any way for the Oklahoma City bombing because one of the things I didn't like about him is, he was always blaming the 1960's or liberals for everything that went wrong. When that woman, Susan Smith, drove her kids into the lake in South Carolina, he blamed the 1960's, and it turned out that the poor woman had been sexually abused by her father, her stepfather, who was on the local board of the Christian Coalition or something. And when that woman dropped her kid out of the window in Chicago, he blamed the welfare culture. He was always blaming. So I didn't want to get into where I was doing reverse blame. I just wanted to try to make it clear to the American people that we shouldn't have a presumption against Government in general or public servants in particular. Mr. Wenner. What about Columbine? Where did you first hear the news about that? And again, what was your reaction to that? The President. I believe I was in the White House when I heard that, but I'm not sure. But I know that I called the local officials and the school officials from the Oval Office. You know, that was only the most recent and the most grotesque of a whole series of highly visible school shootings that we've had a number of them in the South, one of them in Jonesboro, Arkansas. That was in my home State, and I knew some of the people who were involved, who run the school and in the county and in the city. There was one in Pearl, Mississippi, and there was Mr. Wenner. One in Oregon. The President. The one in Springfield, Oregon. What I thought there was that I thought a lot of things. I thought, number one, how did those kids get all those guns, and how could they have had that kind of arsenal without their parents knowing? And I thought, after I read a little about it, how did they get so lost without anybody finding them before they went over the edge? We had a spate of before all these killings associated with that kind of darkness on the net, network Mr. Wenner. What do you mean, darkness on the net? The President. Well, those kids were apparently into some sort of a weren't they into some sort of satanic like thing? Mr. Wenner. No, they had their websites and The President. Their websites, yes. There were, earlier, a number of kids who killed themselves who were into talking to each other about destruction, but they weren't killing other people. And I just kept I worry that I worried then I worry now about the people in our society, particularly children, that just drift off, and no one knows, or people feel helpless to do anything about it. You know, I couldn't help thinking, wondering whether those kids could have been saved if somebody got to them, and then whether all those other children would still be alive. Gun Safety Legislation Mr. Wenner. It seemed shocking to me and a lot of other people that after that there was no we didn't get any new gun control legislation after an event like that. The President. It's going to be interesting to see what the voters in Colorado do. They have a provision on the ballot now in Colorado to close the gun show loophole. And it's a heavily Republican State, and I think it's going to pass. Mr. Wenner. Right. The President. I think what happened is that well, first of all, you can't say nothing came out of it, because there was an organization of young people in Colorado that then organized kids all over the country for commonsense gun legislation. They got about 10,000 kids involved. Now we have the Million Mom March, and they're very active. But the truth is that when legislation time comes that a lot of the people in Congress are still frightened of the NRA, because even though there is broad public support for these measures, they are still not primary voting issues for a lot of the people who are for them. Whereas, the NRA can muster an enormous percentage of the vote maybe 15 percent, maybe even 20 sometimes for whom that's a primary voting issue. So if you've got an issue where you're ahead 60 30 but in your 60 it's a primary voting issue for 10 percent of the people, and in their 30 it's a primary voting issue for 20 percent of the people, the truth is, you're a net loser by 10 percent. That's the way that's what happens in Congress and State legislatures. They're genuinely afraid. Mr. Wenner. They know they could lose their seats. The President. You see the tirade that Charlton Heston has carried on against Al Gore and me, before saying that I was glad some of these people were killed because it gave me an excuse to take people's guns away. We never proposed anything that would take anybody's guns away. I saw a special you may have seen it on television the other night on ABC. Peter Jennings actually went out and went to some of these gun shows. And he was talking to all these people who were absolutely convinced that we wanted to take their guns away. The NRA is great at raising money and building their organizational power by terrifying people with inflammatory rhetoric. I guess that's why, since LBJ passed the first law after Bobby Kennedy was killed, I was the first President to take him on. Mr. Wenner. You got Brady and assault through, but why didn't you take the opportunity with this post Columbine atmosphere? I mean, you called the White House Conference on Violence immediately The President. Well, I did. I tried Mr. Wenner. But it focused on, like, violence in the media The President. Yes, but we also did lots and lots and lots of events Mr. Wenner. and then you thought you could reason with the NRA. The President. No, I didn't think I could reason with the NRA. I thought Congress would be so shocked and the public was so galvanized that we had a window of opportunity. Mr. Wenner. Right. And what happened to that, is my question. The President. The Republican leadership just delayed until the fever went down. That's what happened. They knew that they couldn't afford to have their Members voting wrong on closing the gun show loophole or banning the importation of large capacity ammunition clips, which allows people to get around the assault weapons ban. Mr. Wenner. Were you powerless to do something about that? The President. No, we had tons of events. And we got a vote if you'll remember, we finally got a vote in the Senate, where you can bring things up, where we got a majority vote for it. Al Gore broke the tie another reason he ought to be President, he broke the tie. But we couldn't get a bill out of a conference committee, that had it in there. If we could ever have gotten a clean vote Mr. Wenner. You would have won that vote. The President. Oh, absolutely. Mr. Wenner. And beat that The President. Absolutely. We could win the vote today if you could get a vote. But the leadership of the Republican Party, as long as they're in the majority in both Houses, they can control things, especially in the House. You can write the rules so that you can just keep stuff from coming up. Mr. Wenner. So despite your power, despite that event The President. Yes. And we had lots and lots and lots of events at the White House, not just one. We had a ton of events. We brought people in. We talked about it. We pushed and pushed. We finally got the vote in the Senate. We got 50 votes. Then Al broke the tie. We got 51. And there's no question that we could pass it. But I'll remind you that one of reasons that Democrats are in the minority today in the House is because of the Brady law and the assault weapons ban. And interestingly enough, we didn't there is not a single hunter has missed an hour not a single sport shooter has missed an event an hour hunting I should have finished the sentence or a single sport shooter has missed an event. But they acted like the end of the world, but a half million felons, fugitives, and stalkers haven't gotten handguns because of the Brady law. The ironic thing is, there's no reason here when we tried to pass the Brady law they said, "Well, this won't do any good because all these criminals get their guns either one on one or at gun shows or urban flea markets." Mr. Wenner. Let me change the subject. This is absolutely amazing The President. I feel passionately about this, and I'm glad I took them on. I'm just sorry I couldn't win more. There are a lot of good people out there in America who work hard their only recreation is hunting and fishing they don't follow politics all that closely they get these NRA mailings. They're good people, but they think they can believe these folks. And they know that if they can stir them up, they can raise more money and increase their membership. And they do it by basically terrifying Congress. Race Relations Mr. Wenner. How would you characterize race relations today, as compared to when you took office? The President. I think they're considerably better. Mr. Wenner. In what ways? The President. Well, I think, first of all, the country is changing. It's growing ever more diverse and, therefore, more and more people are having more contacts across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. And I think that, ultimately, the more people relate to each other, the more they come to not just tolerate I don't like the word "tolerance" in this context because it implies that one group is superior, putting up with an inferior group and tolerating them. I think the more they come to genuinely appreciate each other's heritage, find it interesting, and find a fundamental common humanity I think a lot of it is just systematic human contact. And beyond the human contact, I think that the race initiative we started led to hundreds of efforts all over the country to have honest conversations. You know, sometimes people work around each other for years and they don't know the first thing about one another. Forget about race. I mean, there are people who probably work in the White House who see each other every day that don't know the first thing about one another. So I think that the one thing we did was to spark all these conversations and also to highlight systematic efforts that were working in local communities and try to get them replicated around the country in communities, in workplaces, in schools. I think that there was a genuine effort to deal with that. I think the third thing is that we may have had some impact on it, I and my administration, because we were so much more diverse than any other administration in history. And I think people felt, who had never felt that way before, that the White House was their house, too the Government was their Government, too. So I think the climate in the country was positive for that. Mr. Wenner. And you sense that change in climate from those factors in The President. Absolutely. Look at the difference Mr. Wenner. Because this is one of your main priorities? The President. Yes. And look at the difference in the rhetoric in the Presidential campaign this year. All the rhetoric is about racial inclusion. Now you know, we could argue about the policies. I think that the Republican policies are still divisive, but the rhetoric is about inclusion. And even they a number of their members have taken a different tack on immigration. Advice for Youth Mr. Wenner. Do you have any special message to young people, any sort of valedictorian thoughts to the kids in school right now, as you leave office? The President. Yes, I do. First of all, I think that they should realize that they're very fortunate to be living in this country at this time, fortunate because of our economic prosperity, fortunate because of our enormous diversity, and fortunate because of the permeation of technology in our society, all of which enables us to relate to the rest of the world and to one another in different and better ways. Secondly, I think they should understand that our future success is not guaranteed and depends upon their interest in public affairs, as well as their private lives and their participation. One of the things that's really concerned me about this election is all these articles that say that young people think there is not much in it for them. I think maybe that's because there has been a lot of debate about Social Security and Medicare in the debate. They think that's an old folks' issue. But it's actually not just an old folks' issue, because when all of us baby boomers retire and I'm the oldest of the baby boomers the baby boomers are people that are between the ages now of 54 and 36. So when we retire, unless everybody starts having babies at a much more rapid rate, or we have hugely greater immigration, there will only be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. Now, more of us are going to have to work into our later years. And more of us have a choice now because one of the good things that Congress did unanimously was to lift the earnings limit on Social Security. But anyway, even the Social Security issue is a youth issue. Why? Because the baby boomers, most of them, I know, are obsessed with our retirement not imposing an undue burden on our children and our grandchildren. But there are all these other issues. We have to build a clean energy future to avoid global warming. Two stunning studies have come out in the last month, and because of the Presidential campaign, they've not been much noticed. One analysis of a polar icecap says that the 1990's were the warmest decade in a thousand years. The other projecting study estimates that if we don't change our greenhouse gas emissions, the climate could warm between 2.4 and 10 degrees over the next century 2.4 is too much. Ten degrees would literally flood a lot of Louisiana and Florida. This is a very serious thing. Then you've got this incredible scientific and technological revolution that will lead to, among other things if you just take the human genome alone, a lot of the young people in America today, when they have their children, they'll get a little gene card to take home with them from the hospital, and their children will be born with a life expectancy of 90 years, because they'll be able to avoid so many of the illnesses and problems that they have a biological propensity to. So this is a fascinating time to be alive, but it's not free of challenges. So I would say to the young people, you ought to be grateful you're alive at this time. You'll probably live in the most prosperous, interesting time in human history, but there are a lot of big challenges out there, and you have to be public citizens as well as private people. Drugs and the Legal System Mr. Wenner. Do you think that people should go to jail for possessing or using or even selling small amounts of marijuana? The President. I think, first of all Mr. Wenner. This is after we're not publishing until after the election. The President. I think that most small amounts of marijuana have been decriminalized in most places and should be. I think that what we really need one of the things that I ran out of time before I could do is a reexamination of our entire policy on imprisonment. Some people deliberately hurt other people. And if they get out of prison if they get in prison and they get out, they'll hurt them again. And they ought to be in jail because they can't be trusted to be on the streets. Some people do things that are so serious, they have to be put in jail to discourage other people from doing similar things. But a lot of people are in prison today because they, themselves, have drug problems or alcohol problems. And too many of them are getting out particularly out of the State systems without treatment, without education, without skills, without serious effort at job placement. Mr. Wenner. You're talking about any offender? The President. Yes. But there are tons of people in prison who are nonviolent offenders, who have drug related charges that are directly related to their own drug problems. Mr. Wenner. Don't you think those people should we be putting nonviolent drug offenders in jail at all, or should we put them in treatment programs that are more fitting and not The President. I think it depends on what they did. You know, I have some experience with this. Let me just say Mr. Wenner. Well, I remember your experience is based on your brother's The President. Well, let me just say about my brother whom I love and am immensely proud of, because he kicked a big cocaine habit I mean, his habit got up to 4 grams a day. He had a serious, serious habit. He was lucky to live through that. But if he hadn't had the constitution of an ox, he might not have. I think if he hadn't gone to prison, actually been put away forcibly somewhere, I think his problem was so serious, it is doubtful that he would have come to grips with it. I mean, he was still denying that he was addicted right up until the time that he was sentenced. So I'm not so sure that incarceration is all bad, even for drug offenders, depending on the facts. I think there are some Mr. Wenner. I meant The President. Let me finish. I think the sentences in many cases are too long for non violent offenders. I think the sentences are too long, and the facilities are not structured to maximize success when the people get out. Keep in mind, 90 percent of the people that are in the penitentiary are going to get out. So society's real interest is seeing that we maximize the chance that when they get out, that they can go back to being productive citizens, that they'll get jobs, they'll pay taxes, they'll be good fathers and mothers, that they'll do good things. I think this whole thing needs to be re examined. Even in the Federal system, these sentencing guidelines Mr. Wenner. You've got mandatory minimums. Would you do away with those? The President. Well, most judges think we should. I certainly think they should be reexamined and the disparities are unconscionable between crack and powdered cocaine. I tried to change the disparities, and the Republican Congress was willing to narrow, but not eliminate, them on the theory that people who use crack are more violent than people who use cocaine. Well, what they really meant was that people who use crack are more likely to be poor and, coincidentally, black or brown and, therefore, not have money. Whereas, people who use cocaine were more likely to be rich, pay for it, and therefore be peaceable. But my own view is, if you do something violent, it's appropriate to have an incarceration. But I think we need a serious re examination in the view toward what would make us a more peaceful, more productive society. I think some of this, our imprisonment policies, are counterproductive. And now, you know, you have in a lot of places where, before the economy picked up, prison building was a main source of economic activity, and prison employment was one of the big areas of job growth. Mr. Wenner. Do you think people should lose access to college loans because they've been convicted of smoking pot which is now law? The President. No. I think that, first of all Mr. Wenner. I mean, those are people that seem to need a loan the most. The President. First of all, I don't believe, by and large, in permanent lifetime penalties. There is a bill in Congress today that has bipartisan support that I was hoping would pass before I left office, but I feel confident it will in the next year or 2 which would restore voting rights to people after their full sentences have been discharged, and they wouldn't have to apply for a Federal pardon to get it. I changed the law in Arkansas. When I was attorney general I changed the voting rights law in 1977, to restore voting rights to people when they had discharged their sentence. And my State is one of the relatively few States in the country where you do not have to get a pardon from the Governor to register to vote again or from the Federal Government, for that matter. Look, it depends on what your theory is. But I don't believe in making people wear a chain for life. If they get a sentence from a jury, if they serve it under the law, if they discharge their sentence, the rest of us have an interest in a safe society, in a successful society, and seeing that these folks go back to productive lives. You know, keeping them with a scarlet letter on their forehead for the rest of their lives and a chain around their neck is not very productive. Mr. Wenner. Just to wrap this up, do you think that we need a major rethink of what these drug sentencing laws are? The President. Not just drugs. I think we need to look at who's in prison, what are the facts Mr. Wenner. Well, they're filled with drug prisoners, these jails. The President. most of them are related to drug or alcohol abuse, but there are some non violent offenders unrelated to drug or alcohol abuse, which is not to say that I don't think white collar criminals should ever go to jail. But I think we need to examine the natural tendency of the American people, because most of us are law abiding, is to think when somebody does something bad, we ought to put them in jail and throw the key away. And what I think is, we need a discriminating view. There are some people who should be put in jail and throw the key away, because they can't help hurting other people. And I believe that one of the reasons for the declining crime rate is that we have a higher percentage of the people in jail who commit a lot of the crimes a very small percentage of the people are multiple, habitual criminals. And if you could get a significant percentage of them in jail, the crime rate goes way down. Now, on the other hand, there are a whole lot of other people in jail who will never commit another crime, particularly if they have if they get free of drugs or free of their alcohol abuse and if they get education and training and if somebody will give them a job and give them another chance. And what I think we need is a serious reexamination of what we've done, because we've done a lot of good in identifying people who are habitual criminals and keeping them in prison longer, and that's one of the reasons that the crime rate has gone down, along with community policing and improving the economy. But we also have just captured a whole lot of people who are in jail, I think, longer than they need to be in prison and then get out without adequate drug treatment, job training, or job placement. But the society is moving on this. I notice now back in Washington, there is a really good program where maybe two, that I know where they try to keep people who go to prison in touch with their children, and they use the Internet so they can E mail back and forth. They try to, in other words, not cut people off so completely that they lose all hope and all incentive of returning to normal life, and they try not to damage these kids so badly, to reduce the chances that the kids will follow in their parents' footsteps. Mr. Wenner. Let me change the subject. The President. I think we need a whole new look at that. The sentencing guidelines, the disparities, are only a part of it. We have to look at how long should certain people go to prison from the point of view of what's good for society. We need to completely rethink it, because criminal laws and sentencing tend to be passed sort of seriatim in response to social problems at the moment. Mr. Wenner. You, in general, restored judicial discretion and replace the kind of panic legislation that was passed about crack or The President. The reasons for the sentencing guidelines in the first place was to try to reduce the arbitrary harshness. It wasn't because they wanted to make sure everybody went to jail for a while it was because the citizen guidelines tended to be abusive on the other end of the spectrum. I think we may need some sentencing guidelines, but I think the impact, the practical impact of the ones we have has led to some people going to prison for longer than they should and longer than they would have under the old system. So there should be some more flexibility than there is. Military Action in the Balkans Mr. Wenner. I'm going to change the subject. The Balkans was your only major military engagement. What was it like to run a war night after night? I mean, was it your mentality in feeling that as all of that was going on as you go to sleep every night? The President. Well, I went to sleep every night praying that it would end that night and that Milosevic would give in, praying that no other Mr. Wenner. You were literally praying? The President. Yes. Praying that nobody would die, no American would die, and hoping that no innocent civilians would die but knowing that they would. You know, it's easy for people to talk about war when it's appropriate to use military force, but you have to know that once human beings start using big, powerful weapons, there will be unintended consequences. We wound up bombing the Chinese Embassy. Innocent people died. We hit a schoolbus. And we have the most skilled Air Force and the most sophisticated weapons in all human history. In the Gulf war, which is normally thought of as a 100 hour war and a model of sort of technical proficiency, we had 4 1 2 months to settle in and prepare there, and still a lot of the American casualties were from friendly fire. The same thing happened even in the small engagement in Grenada and President Reagan. These things happen. There are once you start killing people, there will be unintended consequences. Mr. Wenner. How do you get yourself personally comfortable I mean, how do you get yourself, as a person and as a politician, ready to make that decision with a level of comfort you're now going to go ahead and do this? The President. You have to be convinced that the consequences of inaction would be more damaging to more people and to your country. And in the case of Kosovo, I didn't think it was a close case. They had already killed several thousand Kosovars, and they were running a million of them out of their homes, 800,000. It was a clean case of ethnic cleansing. And I thought the United States and our European Allies had to stand up against it. We couldn't let it happen in the heart of Europe. If we did that, we would lose the ability to stop it anywhere else. Mr. Wenner. And wouldn't it be on your conscience in some way, for having failed to stop it? The President. Absolutely. Look, it took us one of the things that just tore at me and in the end it didn't require much military engagement, although it required some was how long it took me to build a consensus. It took me 2 years to build a consensus among our Allies for military action in Bosnia. And you know, what happened there was, after the slaughter at Srebrenica we finally got you know, everybody said, "Okay, let's go" we did a few air strikes, and all of a sudden we were at Dayton and the peace talks. And for all the raggedness of it, the Bosnian peace has held, and it's better now because we turned back the tide of ethnic cleansing. But over 200,000 people died there. And I just knew, you know, there is no point in letting it happen again in Kosovo. Rwanda Mr. Wenner. How do you feel, then, about Rwanda? I mean, clearly it's a difference. You didn't have the allies you didn't have intelligence, all kinds of things. Is there anything that we could have done to prevent it? And whether there was or not, it happened while you were President. Do you feel any responsibility in that, personally? The President. I feel terrible about it. One of the reasons that I went to Tanzania to be with Mandela and try to talk to the Burundians into the peace agreement because before my time, over 200,000 people were killed in Burundi. Same deal the Hutus and the Tutsis, same tribes, fighting the same battles. In Rwanda the thing that was shocking about Rwanda was that it happened so fast, and it happened with almost no guns. The idea that 700,000 people could be killed in 100 days, mostly with machetes, is hard to believe. It was an alien territory we weren't familiar. After that, we began working very earnestly in Africa to train troops to be able to go in and prevent such things. We worked very hard with something called the Africa Crisis Response Initiative. And when I was in Senegal, I actually went out of Dakar to another city to watch a training exercise at least a parade exercise and talk to the troops from Senegal that our American soldiers were working with. We are now working with the Ghanaian forces and Nigerian forces to give them the training and the capacity to prevent the resumption of the slaughter of Sierra Leone. So I think that I hope the United States will be much, much more involved in Africa from now on, and everywhere. In economic development, we passed the Africa trade bill this year in fighting AIDS, TB, malaria in Africa in debt relief, we passed a big debt relief legislation this year and in helping them to develop the mechanisms to do this. The African countries have leaders who are willing to go in and take their responsibility in these areas if we'll give them the logistical and other support necessary to do it, if they're trained to do it. That's what happened in East Timor, where we didn't have to put troops on the ground, but we sent 500 people over there and provided vital airlift and logistical and other support, so that the Australians and New Zealanders and the other troops that came in could bring an end to the slaughter there. So I think that there is there is sort of a sliding scale here. In Europe it had to be done by NATO, and the scale of it and the power of the Serbian Government was such that if we hadn't been directly involved with our NATO Allies, we never could have turned it back and Milosevic never would have fallen. If we hadn't stopped him in Bosnia and Kosovo and kept the sanctions on, the people would never have had the chance to vote him out. So I feel good about that. I wish we had been Rwanda, if we had done all the things we've done since Rwanda and Africa training the troops, supporting them, working with them what I think would have happened is, the African troops would have moved in they would have stopped it and we could have given them the logistical support they needed to stop it. Now, there are other problems that may develop Mr. Wenner. Another reason to vote for Gore. The President. Another huge reason to vote for Gore, because, you know, Governor Bush has said that he doesn't think that's the business of the American military. We're only supposed to fight and win wars and let everybody else do this. He kept talking about Kosovo, I noticed, in a way as if we were the only forces in Kosovo. We were only 15 percent of the soldiers in Kosovo. Presidential Politics Mr. Wenner. Let me change the subject, back to Washington. Why do you think you were such a lightning rod for partisanship and bitterness and so much hatred during your term now? The President. I think there were a lot of reasons. I think mostly it's just because I won. The Republicans really didn't they believe the only reason they lost in '76 to Jimmy Carter was because of Watergate. They believe that, from the time Mr. Nixon won in '68, they had found a fool proof formula to hold the White House forever, until some third party came on. That's what they believe. Mr. Wenner. Did you ever hear anybody articulate that, the Republicans The President. Well, in so many words. I had a very candid relationship with a lot of those guys. They would tell me what was going on. I think they really believed that America saw Republicans as the guarantor of the country's security and values and prudence in financial matters, and that they could always turn Democrats into cardboard cutouts of what they really were they could sort of caricature them as almost un American and that basically the Congress might be Democratic most of the time because the Congress would give things to the American people. But the Republicans embodied the values, the strength, the heritage of the country, and they could always sort of do, as I said about Dukakis, reverse plastic surgery any Democrat. So I came along, and I had ideas on crime and welfare and economic management and foreign policy that were difficult for them to characterize in that way. And we won. And they were really mad. I think I was the first President in a long time that never got a day's honeymoon. I mean, they started on me the next day. I think that was one thing. I think, secondly, I was the first baby boomer President, not a perfect person, never planned to be I mean, never claimed to be and had opposed the Vietnam war. So I think that made them doubly angry because they thought I was a cultural alien, and I made it anyway. Mr. Wenner. Do you think that the cultural The President. Southern Baptist, because the dominant culture of the Republican Party President Reagan put a nicer image on it. But the dominant culture were basically white southern Protestant men who led the surge of the new Republican Party, first under President Nixon and the silent majority and, you know, blue collar people, and then it came to an apotheosis under President Reagan. So I think that, you know, they didn't like losing the White House, and they didn't like me, and they didn't like what they thought I represented. And that all happened at the time you had this huge growth in conservative talk shows and these you know, sort of associated think tanks and groups and networks that grew up in Washington from the time of Nixon through the time of Bush. And I think they had sort of a permanent alternative Government set up by that time. And they went to war the first day of my Presidency. Mr. Wenner. Because you were the most threatening politically, and they despised what you represented culturally, age wise and The President. think they honestly disagreed with me on a lot of the issues as well, but a lot of it was, they were mad they weren't in, which is one of the reasons they're working so hard now. And one of the big challenges that we face in the closing days of this election is to motivate the people that agree with us to the level that they're motivated. Just because they've been out a long time, they want back in really badly. Early Democratic Policy Differences Mr. Wenner. Were you surprised about the difficulties you had in your own party with Sam Nunn on the gays thing and Moynihan on health care and Kerrey on the economic plan? The President. Not particularly, because I'll come back to the gays in the military. Mr. Wenner. Don't, because we've run through that. But just insofar as Nunn? The President. No. And the answer to that is, no, because a lot of the Democrats who were culturally conservative and pro military thought that gays in the military coming up so early was inconsistent with the whole New Democratic approach we were taking. Plus which, they thought I was wrong. But as I explained to you, I think when we talked last, I didn't bring it up first. Bob Dole did. Now, on the other issues, the fundamental problems there was that there were no easy answers. I mean, Bob Kerrey comes from Nebraska. He and Jim Exon were Democrats, but Nebraska is one of the most Republican States in the country, and I think, you know, he thought we should have maybe cut spending a little more or raised taxes a little less, or cut taxes a little less on lower income working people so we wouldn't have to raise it as much, you know. And I think and we'd been through that tough Presidential campaign. Mr. Wenner. These guys were like, you know, the party elders. The President. Well, Moynihan believed Mr. Wenner. Generally, they should like say, "Well, he's our new President." That's The President. But I didn't take offense to that. Moynihan believed, first of all, with some justification, that he knew more about most areas of social policy than anybody else did. I think he thought we were making a political mistake not to do welfare reform first, which turned out to be right. We did make a political mistake not to do welfare reform first. And secondly, I think he felt that the system in Washington could not absorb in a 2 year period the economic plan which he strongly supported. He was terrific. The NAFTA trade agreement, which he strongly supported, which was controversial within our party, and then this major health care thing. He really didn't believe and he's told me that, you know, he said, you know, "We just don't have time to do these." He said, "The system cannot absorb this much change in this short a time." And you know, that was a mistake I made. Hillary gets a bum rap for that. That was basically my fault, because I knew that basically there's only two ways to get to universal coverage. You either have to have a taxpayer subsidy, which is what we've done now with the Children's Health Insurance Program, because now we've got the number of uninsured people going down in America for the first time in a dozen years, primarily because in the Balanced Budget Act, we insisted the Democrats did on getting the Children's Health Insurance Program, which is the biggest expansion of Government financed health care since Medicaid. You either have to do it that way or you have to have an employer mandate where the employers have to provide the health insurance, and then you exempt smaller businesses and subsidize that somewhat. Mr. Wenner. You The President. I didn't take offense at it. You know, they thought I was being bullheaded, and I think, in retrospect, they were probably right. Newt Gingrich Mr. Wenner. What was your relationship with Newt like? The President. I had an unusual relationship with him. First of all Mr. Wenner. Was it The President. It depended on which Newt showed up. But I thought the good Newt, I found engaging, intelligent, and that we were surprisingly in agreement in the way we viewed the world. Mr. Wenner. similar The President. Partly. But you know, Newt supported me in virtually all of my foreign policy initiatives. And after he got his Congress, he realized that a hundred of them had never had a passport. I remember him calling me once, wanting me to get them to go on foreign missions. He said, "If you ask them, then they can't be attacked back home for boondoggle trips." So we actually had a very cordial relationship. He was also very candid with me about his political objectives. And he, in turn, from time to time, would get in trouble with the rightwing of his own caucus because they said I could talk him into too much. We had a pretty good relationship. You know, on the other hand, as I told you, when he did things like blaming every bad thing that happened in America on Democrats in the 1960's and all that, I thought it was highly destructive. Mr. Wenner. How did he make you feel, personally? The President. At some point, probably around 1996, I got to the point where I no longer had personal feelings about those things. But you know, things like the Whitewater investigation and the Travel Office investigation he was smart. He knew there was nothing in that stuff. It was all politics to him. It was about power. But he really did believe that the object of politics was to destroy your opponent. And you know, he ran Jim Wright out of the Congress on account of that. That's what he thought he was doing. And he had an enormous amount of success in the beginning, and he won the Congress basically by having that take no prisoners, be against everything approach. Mr. Wenner. Didn't he tell you once on the phone that he was planning to lead a revolution against you? The President. Well, he thought he was leading a revolution, and I was in the way. And I think he really believed, after '94 Mr. Wenner. What did you think when he says this to you? "I'm out there to destroy I'm going to take you on. You're through." The President. I thought he was a worthy adversary, and I thought I would defeat him, because I thought the American people would stick with me. But I thought he was a very worthy adversary. I think he thought that he could create, for the rest of my Presidency, a sort of an almost a parliamentary system where he would be the prime minister and make the policy, and I'd be in charge of foreign policy, and he'd help me. Mr. Wenner. I mean, historically, the Newt versus Bill, I was just trying to think back, there hasn't been as powerful I mean, powerful and as antagonistic a Speaker to the President, not in modern times. You had an actual enemy. You had somebody actually out there daily fighting you, not a not a Lyndon, not a McCormack. Everybody went with Reagan and gave him what he wanted. The President. That's what they decided to do. And you know, now I have a Speaker in Hastert I can really work with. We've got a lot done. But he still has the dominant power in the caucus is Tom DeLay and Dick Armey. And if they had their druthers, you know, they'd still follow that approach. But the balance of authority is so power is so close in the House that more often than not, we work things out. But in the Senate, you've got the same thing with Lott. You know, Lott I have a very cordial personal relationship with. I have a lot in common with Lott in terms of our background and childhood and, you know, that whole thing. His daddy was a laboring person. He could have well been a Democrat. Mr. Wenner. How did you develop your strategy in sort of dealing with Newt and outflanking him? Just wait him out? Give him enough rope? The President. Well, that's part of it. You know, I felt after they won that when the people actually saw the fine print on their contract, they would think that there was a contract on America instead of a contract with America. And then I felt that I had to oppose them when I thought they were wrong. But I couldn't let them push me back into the old confrontation where they could say, "Clinton's an old Democrat. He's defending everything, even the indefensible, so you may think we're going too far, but America has to change," because this is a country in constant change. So that was for example, instead of just fighting them on the budget, I offered my own balanced budget. Mr. Wenner. I mean, everybody I think Democrats really wanted to attack him back as quickly as possible, and you took a much more conciliatory The President. That's because I felt they had to have a chance to run their and then when we got to the Government shutdown, I wasn't just against what they were doing I had an alternative. See, I believe and I think it's more important, I think it's easier for Republicans to be against everything than Democrats because people view us as the party of affirmative Government. And since I believed in balancing the budget, I just didn't want to do it the way they wanted to. Mr. Wenner. What's your bottom line on Newt, historically? I mean, what's your if you were an historian, what would you say about Gingrich? The President. That he was immensely successful in, first of all, consolidating the power of the Republican Party and its rightwing and then in winning the Congress, winning the historic struggle for Congress in '94 by opposing me right down the line. And in '94, the people the economy was getting better, but people didn't feel it yet. The budget we passed did not impose great tax burdens on ordinary Americans, but they didn't know it yet. And the crime bill we passed was going to help bring the crime rate down without interfering with people's gun rights, but they didn't know it yet. So you had the best of all times to run through a gaping hole. And then I had made the mistake of trying to do both, trying to do the economic plan and NAFTA, which dispirited some of our base supporters. And then I tried to do health care under circumstances that were literally impossible. You could not get a universal coverage plan passed through Congress. So I made a lot of errors, and he ran through them, and he therefore changed the Congress. Then I think people will say that we had one of these historic battles that periodically happens in America about the role of the National Government and, indeed, what the meaning of the Nation is. And I think he thought he could actually carry out the revolution that President Reagan talked about, you know, drastically shrinking the Federal Government, drastically limiting its ability to act in the social sphere and moving it to the right. And to me, we had a series of battles that were really the latest incarnation of this ageold battle of what does it mean to be an American, what is the idea of America, what is the purpose of a nation? And there was a Government shutdown. There was an impeachment. There was my veto of the Newt tax bill after Newt was gone. All these were ongoing battles. The battle over the same thing is now happening, shaping up over the courts. The most important issue in this election may well be what happens to the courts. Because there is now already we are one vote away from having enough votes that would repeal Roe v.Wade. But there is this other issue in the courts which I think is quite profound, which is, there are five votes right now to restrict the ability of Congress to require the States to participate in protecting the American people in a lot of fundamental ways. So I think this is an ongoing battle. But it's the same battle that we had between George Washington and John Adams and Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall on the one side and Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Payne, and a lot of other people on the other in the beginning the same battle Abraham Lincoln had around the time of the Civil War. Could the States secede? Did the Federal Government have the power to enslave them? The same battle we had at the dawn of the industrial revolution when Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson asserted the authority of the Nation to proscribe basic conditions in the workplace and protection. And it was the same battle that Franklin Roosevelt fought. That was the fourth time it was fought. Now we're in the fifth battle over how to define America. And in the first three skirmishes, we won. But I see that as a big issue in this election, a huge issue. Impeachment Mr. Wenner. Let's talk about impeachment a little. You're going to in the history books, it's going to say, of course, that you were the second President ever to be impeached. How does that make you feel? Do you feel that that will cloud your real accomplishments? The President. Well, that's for the historians to determine. The history books will also record, I think, that both impeachments were wrong, and that's when they failed. And I'm just grateful that, unlike Andrew Johnson, I was less embittered by it and I had more support from the public and in the Congress, so I was able to resume my duties and actually get a lot done for the American people in the aftermath. Mr. Wenner. Was there ever a point where you wanted to give up or it just became too hard? The President. Never. Mr. Wenner. Did you ever get so angry during it that you think it clouded your judgment? The President. I got angry, but I always was alone or with friends who would deflate me, so I don't think it ever clouded my judgment on any official thing I took. You know, I realized that when it was all over, I would have the responsibility to work with the Republicans, as well as the Democrats. One of the things I had to learn as I said, it took me almost my whole first term to learn it is that at some point Presidents are not permitted to have personal feelings. When you manifest your anger in public, it should be on behalf of the American people and the values that they believe and the things they do. You just can't a lot of this stuff you can't take personally and especially when I realized that for the people that were directing it, it was just politics. You know, it was about power and politics. So I was largely able to purge myself of it. And I had very strong personal feelings about it, but I tried never to talk about it. I tried to get up every day and just do my job and let others defend me publicly and go on with the work of the country, because Mr. Wenner. in private? The President. Yes, because Presidents will always be under siege in some way or another. And if you don't want the job and the attendant heat, you shouldn't ask for it. Mr. Wenner. Does it make you uncomfortable to talk about this episode now? The President. I just think the less I say about it right now, the better. I think the more time passes, the more people will see what happens, and the more it will come out. There have been some pretty good books written about it. Mr. Wenner. What do you think of Ken Starr now? The President. I think he did what he was hired to do. Mr. Wenner. You told me you never really met him and had no ill feelings. The President. I met him. You know, I met him once when he interviewed me. He was hired to keep the impeachment thing I mean, to keep the inquiry going past the '96 election and to do whatever damage he could. That's why he was put in, and he did what they asked him to do. Mr. Wenner. What's your take on Henry Hyde, who was supposedly "Mr. Reasonable," and then he seemed to defy the will of the people after the '98 elections, where he kind of got repudiated? The President. Well, he did what he was hired to do, too. I mean, the rightwing was in control of the Congress, and they thought they had paid in '98, and they thought they would never have to pay again. They thought it was a free shot to put a hit on me, and so they did. I don't think it's complicated. Mr. Wenner. Once the elections were done, I remember seeing you a week before, and clearly Democrats were going to take the House in a way they had never taken it before in an off election. And it was a referendum on this issue, and then they went ahead him and the Republican leadership went ahead despite that. What does that tell you about them? The President. That they wanted to they stayed with their rightwing, and they thought they would pay no price in 2000, because they thought, whatever happened, it would all be over by now. And they thought they could put a black mark on me in history, and that was really important to them. They were really angry. They got beat. They were just angry, and they thought they had paid once, and they wouldn't have to pay this time, because the American people would move on to other things as they always do. And so they did it. Mr. Wenner. It's not an issue now in this election, really. The President. It is in three or four House seats, but not many. Mr. Wenner. It's an issue to me. The President. But it shouldn't be. I've tried the only way it should be an issue in the election is that it indicates how important it is, if they should maintain their majority, they have somebody in the White House that can restrain them. Because it's just an example of other things they were doing to the environmental laws of the country, to the education laws, to the health care system. That's the only way it should be an issue. It's over. The American people shouldn't be expected to dwell on it. They shouldn't have to deal with it. Mr. Wenner. Who do you think really came through for you and got up and defended you? The President. Oh, tons of people. The House judiciary committee Democrats were really good. There were 800 people, including a lot of Republicans who didn't even like me, who filed testimony talking about how inappropriate it was. Then there was that bipartisan panel of career prosecutors who said that no one would bring any criminal charges on this. So a lot of people who came forward who had no particular reason to do it but who cared about their country and were offended by what was going on. Mr. Wenner. Do you think in some way this is sort of a referendum on sort of the nature of morality or the character of America in some way? The President. Not really. No, I think people strongly disagree with what I did. I did, too. I think the I don't think the I think that they just were able to discriminate between a bad personal mistake and the justification for a Constitutional crisis. I think I don't think that it I think it said more about their ability to discriminate between two different kinds of problems than any changed moral standards. Mr. Wenner. In the sixties we always talked still they talk about karma, you know, your karma? Did you ever look at it in terms of what's in my karma that I got this shit hammer dropped on me? The President. No. Like I said no, I don't. If I hadn't made a personal mistake, they wouldn't have the pretext to do what they did, even though what they did was wrong. So no, I don't. Mr. Wenner. Do you think it benefited us, that process, that we learned from all that, from the impeachment process? The President. Well, the one thing it did was it pointed out all the other excesses. You know that there was a bogus Whitewater investigation. It was totally bogus and wasted money and Mr. Wenner. What was that? The President. The Whitewater investigation. That civil lawsuit against me was bogus. Even the judge, who was famous for disliking me personally, threw it out as having no merit. So I think that what it did was, at least for the time being, it took a lot of the venom out of our public life. You know, even as hard as George Bush and Al Gore are hitting each other now in this election, they are by and large hitting at each other over the issues. I mean, Bush has got some ad up now questioning Gore's integrity, which is amazing that Bush would question Gore's integrity, but anyway. But he knows that there's a certain number of voters who vote for Republicans because they're convinced that they're morally superior to Democrats, not withstanding the fact that we're awash in evidence now that they're not. And so he's doing that, but there has been very little of that, even from him. They're basically the level of venom is lower than it was. And maybe I absorbed enough for several years. And if so, then that alone might make it worth doing. Because I think it's just crazy for America with all these fabulous opportunities and some pretty stiff challenges out there to waste our elections and our public officials' time with things that we know are bogus or trivial and cost the taxpayers a fortune, for no other purpose than for one side to pursue political advantage over another. There will always be some of that, but my instinct is that in the next 4 years, we'll have a lot less of it. Relations With the Media Mr. Wenner. The press as President, you have a relationship with the press that is unique to anybody in the world. You, as an individual, there's certainly more scrutiny or criticism or attention, more everything. What's your take on the press in America? The President. Well, I think that, first of all, it's very difficult to generalize. I think that on the balance, it's a great advantage for the President to have a bully pulpit that can reach everyone in America and everyone in the world instantaneously. And any criticisms that a President has about negative press or incessant carping or whatever you've got to temper that with the fact that they make it possible for you to do your job in a communications age. And they work especially the working press, I have an enormous amount of respect for them. I mean these people that are on this airplane, because I've worked hard and I keep long hours, it's a hard job for them, because they have to they go around in the vans, not in Air Force One or the helicopters. They have a lot of hard work to do, and I think by and large, most of them do it as well as they can and as honestly as they can. I have an enormous amount of respect for them. Now, there's another part of the press that are kind of part of almost a celebrity political press that are that go all the way from the columnists to the people that are on all these talk shows all the time. And they have in order for them to be successful, their comments have to have edge. They tend to be more negative and more dogmatic in their attempts to be and sometimes there is more heat than light in a lot of what's said in a lot of those forums formats. But that's part of the new age we're living in. And also they're sort of on the cutting edge between the serious press, the tabloid press, and pure political advocacy and entertainment. You've got all these segments now that are kind of blurred together, compounded by a 24 hour news cycle, and the fact that there are umptydump channels people can watch, some of which are news channels that know they have to go after narrowly segmented markets, and they're targeting certain audiences. So it's a very different press environment, and if you took it all seriously, it would run you nuts. But you can't once you realize kind of what the environment is, you just learn to deal with it. I think the important thing is to for Presidents, especially to try to hear the criticism, because it's not always wrong. Sometimes it's right. I find it easier, really, when it comes from thoughtful columnists who are really trying to make a serious contribution to the national debate. Even in some other forums it's important. Mr. Wenner. Which columnists or reporters do you think have been particularly good or particularly smart in their coverage of you in the last 8 years? The President. Well, I think just in terms of columnists, I think Tom Friedman is the best foreign policy writer we have today, by a long stretch. I think he understands the world we're living in and the one toward which we're moving. Therefore, whether he's criticizing me or analyzing an issue or whatever he's doing, he's trying to do it from a completely honest point of view of trying to say, here's where the world is here's where we're going. I think Ron Brownstein is one of the best political columnists in America today, one of the two or three best. He's truly extraordinary. And you know, he understands this whole New Democrat movement that I have been a part of. He understood the ideas that underlay the '92 campaign and the whole Democratic Leadership Council effort, everything we're trying to do. And he made it his business to study that. I think he's very good. I think E.J. Dionne is good. I regret that his other responsibilities at the Post don't give him time to write more columns, because I think he's very good. Mr. Wenner. Inaudible towards the Times for their role in Whitewater? The President. No, I think that it was sort of like this Wen Ho Lee deal in a way. I mean, the same guy got a story, and it was kind of overwritten, and dire things were predicted. But I think whatever I feel about that, it has to be tempered by the fact that the Times has a serious conscience when it comes to the national issues. I don't think the I think they had a they really have tried consistently to think on the public issues, I think they really have done an excellent job of analysis and are trying to come out in the right place in the right way. So whatever I feel about that is tempered by that. Mr. Wenner. Do you think institutionally it's working right, the press as a whole, the major newspapers, the networks, and so forth? The President. I think they're doing the best they can in a very new and different environment. I have a lot of sympathy with them. Mr. Wenner. So you don't have resentment towards them? Like, a lot of Presidents just hated once done, they just hated them. The President. No. Absolutely not. You know, how can Presidents hate the press? I mean, they give you you can gripe all you want about all the negative coverage you get on the evening news or on these talk shows or being blasted in the newspaper or having to get on something where they're dead wrong like on Whitewater, whatever it is dead wrong, but still, every day they're right in all kinds of other things about all the things that affect the American people and their lives. And anytime you want a microphone to have your say, you've got it. So I think to be obsessively negative is a mistake. The White House Mr. Wenner. What creature comforts are you going to miss the most about leaving the White House, not living there? The President. The movie theater, the swimming pool, Camp David. Everybody says I'll miss Air Force One the most once I have to return to commercial travel. But what I will miss the most is not the creature comforts it's the honor of living in the White House, which I have loved. I've loved living there, because I love my country I love the history of my country. I know I was a pretty good American historian before I got there, and I know a lot more than I did then, and I've read a lot about Presidents that most people don't know much about, including me before I got there. And even more than that, I'll miss the work. It's the job I'll miss the most. I love the work. I actually have loved doing this job. Mr. Wenner. Do you just get off every single day when you get up, just I am so lucky? The President. Even the worst day. Even in the worst times the whole impeachment thing I just thank God every day I can go to work. I love the job. I've always loved it. Mr. Wenner. Looking at the other side of the coin, what is there anything that seems attractive to you about not living there anymore? The President. Well, I look forward to kind of having being a citizen again. It will be the first time in 20 years you know, I've been I was Governor for 12 years, and 10 years, the last 10 years in a row so it will be the first time in 18 years that I've really had a private home that was my primary residence, and where I'll get up every day, feeling a responsibility to be of public service, but knowing that I'm basically in control of my life again. And it will be an interesting challenge for me. Eighteen years is a long time to be a chief executive, living in public housing, with every day scripted out you know, hours and hours a day, particularly if you work like I do. It's a challenge, and I'm going to be interested to see whether I can meet it and what it means, you know, to go into this next chapter of my life. I'm actually excited about it. Advice for the Next President Mr. Wenner. What's the one thing about being what's the one thing that would surprise either Bush or Gore about being President that they just can't know now? What was the greatest surprise to you? What advice would you give the next President? The President. I think they will be surprised how many different things happen at once. Now, Al won't be as surprised by that, because he's been there 8 years. It's another good argument for voting for him, because he's experienced and he makes good decisions. He'll be a very good President if he wins. He'll be quite good. He makes good decisions, and he's had experience. And the environment, I think, will be less hostile for either one of them than it was for me, and they will have more of an opportunity to craft cooperative solutions, because almost under any conceivable scenario, the Congress will be even more closely divided than it is now. You know, the Democrats are going to pick up some seats in the Senate. They might even be in control. But if they are, they will just have a one seat majority here, too, and I think the Democrats will win the House. But if they do, they won't have any bigger majority than the Republicans do now, maybe a little more, but not much. So you will have a very closely divided Government which will require them to all work together. So I think they may have a less hostile environment than I did, and I hope they do, but I think they'll still be surprised at how many different things they'll have crash in on them at once. Mr. Wenner. What would you tell them to do? You say, look, here's what you've got to do as the next President. Here's what I would like you to do. The President. Well, first of all, I think after the election, they ought to get more rest than I did. You know, I didn't really take a vacation. I think they ought to clear their heads. I would advise them to work as hard as they can to get a good Cabinet and a good staff, and then really emphasize teamwork, and when you come to the tough decisions, do what you think is right. A lot of these decisions, you know, that were unpopular that I made Bosnia, Haiti, debt relief in Mexico, taking on the NRA, doing the debt thing reducing the deficit, I mean, right now, it's like smooth sailing. But it's just not in the nature of human existence to be free of difficulty. And I think when you come down to those tough decisions, you just have to do what you think is right, tell the American people why you did it, and hope they'll go along with you. 2000 Presidential Election Mr. Wenner. So this comes out after the election. So do you want to give me a prediction. The President. I've always believed Gore will win, and I still do. And I think if he doesn't, the only reason that I think that he might not win is if they vote a higher percentage of the people that want Bush to be President vote than the percentage of people that want Gore to be President. But I believe if we get an even turnout, I think in the closing days of this election, people will begin to think about whether they really want to risk this prosperity by adopting an economic plan that has a huge tax cut, a huge Social Security privatization program, and a bunch of spending that will put us back into deficit. I think that people have to think about whether they want to risk having nobody to restrain a Republican Congress if they should stay in the majority, and I think they will think about what will happen to the courts. And so I think that those things will be enough to put Al Gore over, and I think he'll be elected. Mr. Wenner. What do you think the margin is going to be the popular vote? The President. I have no idea. I think it will be it will definitely be close in the popular vote. Whether it's close in the electoral vote depends on what happens there's a dozen States it could go either way. So either one of there could be a sizable electoral victory it could be Mr. Wenner. Predict Florida for me. Predict Missouri, Pennsylvania, Michigan. The President. I think Gore will win Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. I've always thought Gore would win Florida. We've worked like crazy there for 8 years, and we've done a lot for Florida and a lot with Florida, and Joe Lieberman has helped a lot in Florida. So I think Gore will win Florida. I think he will win Pennsylvania. I think he will win Michigan, and I think he will win Missouri if Mrs. Carnahan is the choice of the Missouri people for Senator. Mr. Wenner. And Washington State? The President. I think we'll win in Washington. Mr. Wenner. I don't want to take any of your money on that. Did you see the cover on Al that the Rolling Stone that's gotten so much talk? The President. Yes. Mr. Wenner. It took hours to do that interview. I just used eat up hours of his time. I appreciate your time very much. The President. Thanks. November 02, 2000 Situation in the Middle East Good morning. Thank you very much. Let me begin with a word about developments in the Middle East. Last night the parties announced that they had reached an understanding on how to end the violence based on the agreement we reached at Sharm al Sheikh. I hope the parties can move forward to put an end to this violence that has caused so much pain on both sides. We know it won't be easy. This morning we were reminded once again in Jerusalem that there are those who seek to destroy the peace through acts of terror. This cannot be permitted to prevail. It is now time for those who believe in peace to stand together to stop this violence and to work against the terrorists. 106th Congress I wanted all of you to be here today because you've worked so hard on our priorities here at home. The Republican leadership of the 106th Congress has proven itself unable to finish its work before facing the voters. Congressional Republicans are leaving behind a legacy of unfinished business on health care, education, economic progress, and social justice. Regrettably, this is a Congress that may well be remembered for broken promises, lost opportunities, and misplaced priorities. In contrast, our administration, with congressional Democrats, put forward an achievable agenda for America and its families, a real Patients' Bill of Rights, expanding health coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, a raise in the minimum wage, tax cuts for education and retirement, improving our public schools, protecting our environment, strengthening Medicare with a voluntary prescription drug coverage for all seniors, and a balanced budget that pays off the debt by 2012. We had a simple strategy to accomplish these goals heeding the wisdom of the American people reaching out to win bipartisan majorities in Congress and calling for a vote. That's putting progress over partisanship. The results should have been a strong record of legislative achievement. But time and again, rather than listening to the voices of the American people and responding to the bipartisan calls within the Congress, the Republican leadership has bowed to the demands of special interests. On every single issue, we have worked in good faith to craft compromises that were good for the American people. And when Democrats and Republicans have worked together, we have actually made real progress. We won new investments for our inner cities, rural communities, and Native American communities, and 79,000 new housing vouchers for families climbing their way out of poverty. We increased our investment in a clean environment and doubled our funds for land conservation. We enacted the largest one year increase ever requested for Veterans Affairs and the largest increase in the history of the National Science Foundation. And we met our historic commitment to debt relief for developing countries. Just last Sunday we reached bipartisan agreement on an education budget that would have been a tremendous achievement for our children. But under orders from their special interest, the Republican leadership canceled the compromise we had reached with the Republican congressional negotiators. So unless we keep fighting, there will be no funds for school construction, no more progress toward cutting class size by hiring 100,000 new qualified teachers, no new investment in teacher quality, no new funding to strengthen accountability, turn around failing schools, double the number of children served in after school programs. That is wrong. So we must keep working to make it right. We built a bipartisan coalition to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid by expanding coverage for children with disabilities, Americans moving from welfare to work, and pregnant women and children who are legal immigrants. But the Republican leadership rejected these proposals in favor of a massive give away to HMO's tens of billions of dollars without taking adequate care of these vulnerable populations or adequately compensating the teaching in rural hospitals, home health agencies, and other providers who serve our people. Before this year is out, we must resolve this matter, finally and fairly. The leadership says they didn't have time to complete the budget. But they wasted no time in blocking fair treatment for Latino immigrants, in blocking commonsense gun safety legislation, in trying to stop new worker safety rules, in filing the spending bills filling the spending bills they did pass with political election year pork. One thing should be clear The lack of progress in this Congress was not a failure of bipartisanship. On raising the minimum wage, a real Patients' Bill of Rights, hate crimes legislation, campaign finance reform, school construction, the new markets legislation for the areas still not touched by our prosperity on every single one of these issues, we had bipartisan majorities, Republicans and Democrats, ready to pass them. But the Republican leadership and their special interest allies, unfortunately, still had the power to kill them. It is unfortunate that their leadership failed to deliver on so much that was within our grasp. But the fight is not over. The American people expect us to finish the job they sent us here to do, and when the Republican leadership comes back after the election, I hope we are ready to work together and they are ready to work together to meet that challenge. I am ready. We've done a lot of good, but there's too much left undone, too much that a majority of both parties support. So thanks for your efforts. Let's go out and let the American people have their say, and we'll come back and go to work after the election. Thank you very much. October 23, 2000 Thank you very much. First of all, thank you for the wonderful welcome. I am delighted to be here. You may know that on the way over here today, I stopped at your local elementary school and shook hands with the principal, the teachers, and as many of the eager students as I could reach. Laughter And they made a lot of wonderful signs, and I signed them, and I'm very grateful for that. I had a great time. I also went across the street and shook hands with the kids at the pizza place. Laughter But because I was a little late, I didn't have one. Laughter I want to thank Mayor Gallo and Assemblyman Cahill and the other local officials who are here John Parete, the Ulster County Democratic chairman. And most of all, I want to say I'm honored to be here for Maurice Hinchey. We came in together, but I want to make absolutely sure he's still there when I go. Laughter We have fought our fights together. He has taken the risks that I have taken to try to turn the economy around and pull the country together and move us forward. I'm especially grateful for his leadership for the Patients' Bill of Rights, to put medical decisions back into the hands of medical professionals and their patients for a Medicare drug program that would provide all of our seniors access to affordable prescription drugs for our education initiatives and, especially, our school construction initiative, which would give States like New York that have either overcrowded or falling down schools the funds they need to help repair or build or modernize schools without putting all of the burden on the local property tax payers and for his help for the environment, because one of the things I was determined to do when I became President is to prove we could grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time. You know, when things go well, the President tends to get credit, and when they don't, well, that's the way it goes. Laughter Harry Truman said, "The buck stops here." But sometimes I think the credit should be more broadly shared, first and foremost with the American people. But you need to know that on more than one occasion, the critical initiative, beginning with our economic plan in 1993, has passed by one vote in Congress. So, if it hadn't been for Maurice and people like him, so much of the good things that we have been able to do for America over the last 8 years would not have been possible, and you need to keep him right where he is. I would also like to say a few words about this Senate race, in which I have a passing interest. Laughter And I would like to say a few words about Vice President Gore and Senator Lieberman. But I want to begin by just making two introductory comments. First of all, my heart is filled with gratitude for the people of the United States and especially to the people of New York, who have been so wonderful to me through two elections, giving me the State's 33 electoral votes, along with Al Gore. Last time, about 59 percent of the vote in 52 of the 62 counties supported our efforts, and you will never know how grateful I am. Secondly, as Maurice said, for all the celebrations we've had in the last few days, our 8year long effort to stand against ethnic cleansing and genocide and abuse in the Balkans, beginning with our efforts to stop the war in Bosnia, to roll back the expulsion of the people in Kosovo, the embargo on Serbia. Now we have a genuinely elected President there, committed to the rule of law. We have the President of South Korea winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which he richly deserved, a lifetime of struggle for democracy, first in his own country, narrowly escaping death, partly thanks to President Jimmy Carter over 20 years ago, and now opening the way to North Korea. And the United States supported that policy and, I think, had a significant impact on its success. And now Secretary Albright is there, and we have some hope of resolving our outstanding differences with North Korea and looking forward to the day when they will truly close the last chapter in the aftermath of the Korean war. That's all been very moving, but it is punctuated and overshadowed now by the terrible violence in the Middle East, which also occurred at the same time that we lost 17 fine young men and women in the United States Navy in the terrorist attack on our ship in Aden, Yemen. I don't want to say too much about that today except I'm working on it, and my experience has been, in these matters, that the less you say publicly, the more likely you are to get done. The point I want to make is, when I see, around the world, how people continue to struggle with their differences with their religious, their racial, their ethnic differences how people continue to misunderstand each other how after working together for 7 years for the cause of peace, with occasional difficulties but never anything like this, the thing could get off the tracks like this, it makes me so grateful that our country has been so blessed to be the most diverse it has ever been and yet to be more united and making more progress and moving forward. And the main thing I want to say to you today is, I've never thought much about the ability of one elected official to influence another one's race, so I don't know that I can convince anybody to vote for Maurice or Hillary or the Vice President. But what I would like to say is, I'd like to just share with you from my heart what I think the issues are and what I hope you will say to your friends and neighbors, because there's no doubt that citizens influence one another's opinions. And if you think about Hillary said this last night, and I had never quite thought of it this way, but she said, "You know, it was very hard for us to go down to that memorial service for the sailors and their families at the U.S.S. Cole." People often ask me what the most difficult days of my Presidency are, and bar none, they have been the days when I had to go greet the families of people who were killed because of their service for the United States in the Embassies in Africa, in Ron Brown's plane, Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. It is very difficult. But what my wife said last night that I would like to echo is, you know, the rest of us are not asked to put our lives on the line, and most of the people were so young. I think the oldest one was 31, but many of them were just 19. Many of them were younger than my daughter. And the least we can do is to be grateful for the progress of this country, to be proud of it, to show up and vote, and to take the next 2 weeks to discuss with our friends and neighbors and co workers and family members what we think this is about. And so that's the spirit in which I would like to speak to you today. Things are going well for this country, and we have this is the first time in my lifetime where we've had at the same time so much economic prosperity and social progress, with the absence of domestic crisis and foreign threat. And so we have before us the chance to build the future of our dreams for our children. And this election ought to be a feast for America. People shouldn't feel bad about the fact that nothing bad is happening. They should feel good about it. Laughter But they should understand that sometimes it's harder to make a good decision when times are good than when they're bad. There's not a person in this room over 30 years old that hasn't made at least one mistake in their life, not because your life was going so badly but because things were going so well, you thought there was no penalty for the failure to concentrate. Isn't that right? Isn't that right? It's true. Laughter And all of the younger people are looking at those who are laughing and laughter time will take care of it. You will soon know about that. Laughter So what I have urged my friends to do in the Democratic House and the Senate and in advancing the Vice President's cause and Hillary's cause is just to strive for clarity. I really think, you know, the American people nearly always make the right decision if they have enough information and enough time. If they didn't, we wouldn't still be around here after 224 years. So, from my point of view, this is what I would like you to know. First, I would like to say about my wife, that for 30 years, as long as I've known her and I met her almost 30 years ago her obsession has been the welfare of children and families. She took an extra year when we were in law school to study at the Yale Hospital and Child Study Center, so when she got out of law school, she would understand precisely how the law affected young children and their parents. And it has been the driving obsession of her whole life. She has spent most of the last 30 years working on education, health care, and other children's and families' issues, and also working on the relationship between education and economic development and, specifically, how to get jobs into places that aren't growing as fast as the economy as a whole is growing. And she went on corporate boards when we lived in Arkansas. She did a lot of work trying to figure out how to get investment into areas where it was needed, which is a big issue for upstate New York this year. And that's a subject that she's worked on for 20 years, so when she talks about it, it's not something that just sort of occurred to her when she started coming up here to see you. The second thing I would like to say is that, for the last 8 years in the White House, she has perhaps been the most active First Lady in history, certainly had the broadest range of interests since Eleanor Roosevelt. She has worked on the first thing she worked on was trying to help pass the first bill I signed, the family and medical leave law, which over 20 million Americans have now used to take some time off from work when a baby is born or a parent is sick, without losing their job. It is a great piece of legislation. And she was very active in our health care efforts, even though we knew it was controversial, and in the end we got a lot done. Medicare was supposed to go broke last year when I took office. It now has 26 more years of life, something that you should remember when people ask you what we did. We passed the bill that says you can keep your health insurance if you change jobs or if someone in your family gets sick. That's important. And we passed the Children's Health Insurance Program, the biggest expansion of child health since Medicaid was enacted in 1965, which has now given us a decline in the number of uninsured people for the first time in 12 years. She worked to find out more about the illnesses of veterans in the Gulf war and whether we should be doing more to help them, totally an issue that she just got interested in because nobody else was working on it. She didn't want those folks ignored. She thought up the idea of celebrating the coming of the millennium by having a project that imagined the future and honored our past, and her Millennium Treasures Project is now the largest historic preservation project in the history of the United States 100 million in private and public money together. And a lot of the places preserved have been in New York, places like George Washington's revolutionary headquarters, Harriet Tubman's home, parts of the Underground Railroad things that will go to places, many of them not doing so well economically, that will make them much more attractive for tourists, build community pride, and change their future. So I'm very proud of what she has done as First Lady. And I'm especially proud that she's been to more countries than any other person in that position, ever. She says I shouldn't say that, because there's a lot more countries now than there used to be. Laughter After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's sort of not a fair comparison. But she's spoken out for women's rights, for the rights of children, trying to get more kids in school. She's pointed out that national security involves more than just military aid, that we have to have education and health care and environment partnerships around the world. We have to work together to roll back the tides of AIDS and TB and malaria, which together kill one fourth of all the people who die every year on this Earth. And she's had a special role in the tough spots. She was very, very active in bringing women together and working with them in the Northern Ireland peace process. She spent a lot of time in Israel pursuing our twin goals of the security of Israel and the longterm necessity of resolving the matter through peaceful negotiations. And she's been to see our soldiers in Kosovo and Bosnia several times. I'm very proud of what she has done. And what I'd like to say to you is that, of all the people I've known in public life, I've never known anybody over 30 years and in spite of the fact that we all say harsh things about each other at election time, the truth is that most people in public life I've known are honest, work hard, and do what they think is right. Otherwise, we wouldn't be around here after over 200 years. But I've never met anybody that had a better combination of brainpower with a great heart and compassion who would just consistently, day in and day out, work for what she believed in, never get tired. She spent 30 years working for other people. As far as I know, this is the first time in 30 years she ever asked anybody to do anything for her, and she had a hard time doing it. I said, "You've got to ask people to vote for you. You've got to ask people to contribute to you." She said, "I'm used to asking them to do that for you. It's hard to ask them to do that for me." I think it's very important, if you're going to elect a Senator to succeed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most accomplished people to serve in the United States Senate in the 20th century, to succeed Robert Kennedy he held that seat you need a good partner for Senator Schumer. And New York has got a lot of big things on the agenda, and there are a lot of things that have to be done for America. I have never known anybody with the combination of brains, compassion, heart, and the ability to get things done that she does. She will be a great Senator if you make sure she wins. I want to say something about the Vice President. He has been a big part of all the success that we've enjoyed in the last 8 years and the decisions we made that were good. One of the things that President Kennedy said in more eloquent words I wish I could remember exactly what he said but he said, the Presidency basically is a place of decision it's important that you work hard. And I think I've met that standard. But he has worked as hard as I have. But in the end, hard work is not enough. You also have to make good decisions, and that requires a certain level of experience, a certain level of judgment, a certain instinct. And he was right when he supported our economic program. Maurice talks about it. He had to cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate, or it would have been defeated. And that's what turned this whole budget around, got interest rates down, got investment up, and got the economy going. He supported the efforts we made to reform the welfare system. We now have cut the welfare rolls in half, and families and children are better off, not worse off, as predicted. He led our reinventing Government program. You know, sometimes our friends in the other party talk about how they're against big Government. But the facts are that under Al Gore's leadership, we reduced the size of the civil Government to its lowest size since 1960, when President Kennedy was running for office and Dwight Eisenhower was still President. Under Al Gore's leadership, we have reduced 16,000 pages of Federal regulations which were on the book in the previous administration. We have reduced regulations in the Department of Education alone, regulations on States and school districts, by two thirds. You don't have to keep that a secret if you don't want to. Laughter You can tell people that. I think it's an important part of the record. He has I don't know if you saw the announcement last week. General Motors announced that they had developed a car that will get 80 miles a gallon, which is the target they set in the beginning of our administration when we organized something under Al Gore's leadership called the Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicle. You're all worried about the price of home heating oil this winter. We're all worried about what happens if there is instability in the Middle East with the price of oil. But I'm telling you, the answer is, more conservation, alternative sources of energy, free up the oil that is there for the things we need, like home heating oil. Now, if we get 80 miles to the gallon and when GM made the announcement, they said that their participation in this Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicles project made it possible. Al Gore also led our efforts to adopt a telecommunications law, a big bipartisan law that we passed 4 or 5 years ago that's created hundreds of thousands of jobs, thousands of new businesses, and something called the E rate, which we fought hard for, and he led the fight, which enables every school and hospital to afford to hook up to the Internet. Now, when we started this project in 1994, trying to get all our schools hooked up, we had only listen to this we had about 15 percent of the schools and only 4 percent of the classrooms in the entire country were connected to the Internet. Today, 95 percent of the schools and 65 percent of the total classrooms are connected. And part of the reason is the E rate people can afford to hook onto the Internet to give kids in the poorest schools in this country access to tomorrow's information and tomorrow's economy. Now, these are big things that he did. He also led our efforts on arms control, in many, many important other areas. So you cannot cite any person, I believe, in the history of the country who, in the position of Vice President, had the impact that he had. And I think that's very significant for this election. Now, let me just say this. It seems to me there are four things I'd like you to consider. Maurice said, "Tell your weather story." I told the Congress, our crowd in the Congress, last week that those who were on our side needed to think of themselves as America's weather corps in the next 2 weeks, because if things were clear to the American people, we would win, and if things were cloudy, we might be in trouble. So we wanted clear. We need for people to understand clearly what the issues are. And again I say that in a positive, happy sense. I think this could be the most positive election we've had in a month of Sundays. You don't have to be mad at anybody. You can posit the fact that your opponents are honorable, good people and that they will do what they believe is right, and we'll do what we believe is right. So what we need to do is make sure the voters know exactly what the differences are and then let the voters make up their minds. I trust the American people. And I trust the people of New York to do the right thing. But I think there are let me just make these four arguments for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and Hillary and Maurice. Number one, we've got to keep this prosperity going. You know, just looking around upstate New York, there are places and communities that still haven't fully participated in this economic recovery. Now, we've got a special program we're trying to pass to give extra incentives to get people to invest there. But to get there you've got to keep the overall prosperity going you've got to keep unemployment down and labor markets tight. If you want investments to flow to inner city neighborhoods, rural towns, Indian reservations, you name it anybody that's been left behind the economy has got to be strong to get people to invest there. This is a huge deal plus which, it benefits all the rest of you if the economy keeps going. Now, I believe it is critical to do that, to adopt a policy that our side, all of our candidates, have espoused, which is, "We'll give you a tax cut, but it's considerably smaller than the other guy's, even though most middle class people are better off under ours, because we think we've got to save some money for education and health care, and we have to get America out of debt. We've got to keep paying down the debt until America is debt free. We can do it in 12 years and put us out of debt for the first time since 1835, when Andrew Jackson was President." Now, why should that be important to you? Why should that be important to the young people in the uniforms back there who have been serving your meal, besides the fact that it sounds good? Because we live in a global economy a trillion dollars moves around the world every day, crossing national borders. And that means if we keep interest rates lower by paying down the debt, it means for all of you lower home mortgage payments, lower college payments, college loan payments, lower car payments, lower credit card payments. It means lower business loans costs, which means more businesses, more jobs, higher incomes, and a better stock market. So if you keep interest rates down, everybody benefits all the working people, all the business people, all the people on Wall Street, everybody else. And that is very, very important. And we have a program that will permit the country, under the Vice President's leadership, to do that. By contrast, the size of their tax cuts plus the cost of their Social Security privatization program plus their spending promises means they can't do that. They can't get America out of debt. The numbers won't add up. So this is a significant difference. You just have to decide whether it's important to you or not. But let me just give you an example. If you keep interest rates one percent lower a year than they would otherwise be, the American people save 390 billion on home mortgages alone, 30 billion dollars on car payments, 15 billion on college loans. That's a 400 billion tax cut right there, in lower interest rates. But people have to understand. That's a big decision you need to make, and you can make it either way. We haven't been out of debt since 1835. You can say we'll just go on and have higher interest rates take the money now and leave. But people need to understand what the decision is, and then we'll trust the American people to make the right decision. I think I know what they will decide if they clearly understand it. The second decision I think is very important is whether we're going to build on the progress that we've made in other areas over the last 8 years or reverse that. Now, let's just look at some of those areas, if I could. In welfare, I've already said, welfare rolls are half what they were. The crime rate has dropped every year. It's now at a 26 year low murder rate at a 33 year low gun violence down 35 percent. In health care, we finally got the number of uninsured people going down because we're insuring more children. In the environment, compared to 8 years ago, the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the drinking water is safer the food is safer. We've cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps, and we've set aside more land in perpetuity for all time than any administration since Theodore Roosevelt a hundred years ago. Now, I don't and in education, let me just say something about that, that I think is very important for the American people to know. The dropout rate is down. Test scores in math, science, and reading are going up. The collegegoing rate is at an all time high. There's been over a 50 percent increase in the number of our kids taking advanced placement courses and, among Hispanic kids, a 300 percent increase, among African American kids, a 500 percent increase. And perhaps most important to me, more important than anything else, we have evidence in every State in the country that schools that were once thought to be failing inevitably are turning around. I was in a school in Harlem the other day where, 2 years ago, a grade school listen to this 2 years ago, 80 percent of the kids were doing reading and math below grade level. Today, just 2 years later new principal, school uniform policy, high standards, accountability 74 percent of the kids' reading and math at or above grade level in 2 years 2 years. So are we going to keep building on this or not? So in this election, we believe that our program put 100,000 police on the street, and now to add 50,000 more in high crime areas, had a lot to do with bringing the crime rate down. So does every policeman in America. They believe that's not a Federal responsibility, and they want to get rid of it. You have to decide, but it will make a difference. In education, we believe that education is a constitutional responsibility of the States and an operational responsibility of the local districts but a national priority. And we think there's a limit to how much money local property tax payers can come up with. So we've been paying for 100,000 teachers to make sure we have certified, well trained teachers in the early grades to lower average class size to the point where the teachers can teach, and kids aren't sent to the fourth grade without the requisite reading and math and other skills they need. We think this is important. We're about a third of the way through that program. Al Gore will continue it and build on it. So will Hillary. So will Maurice. They believe that is not a national decision, that we shouldn't have made that, and they ought to just block grant the money, give it to the States, and see what happens. You can decide what you think, but people should know. In the environment, we believe we've proved you can clean up the environment and grow the economy. They believe the air pollution laws are too tough and I went too far in protecting 43 million roadless acres in the national forests, even though the Audubon Society said it was the most significant conservation move in 40 years in the United States. They don't agree with that. You get the drift here. It's not like there are no decisions. And I can make their argument. But you have to decide, and your friends and neighbors have to decide. So A, do you want to keep the prosperity going B, do you want to build on the social progress of the last 8 years, or do you want to reverse course C, who's the best qualified to meet the new challenges? This is going to be a very new era. We have to close the digital divide. You know, we could create a new, gaping chasm in America and throughout the world if people everywhere don't have access to computers, know how to use them, can afford to log on to the Internet, and can get this information and know what it means. We have to make the most of this new biotech revolution, which is one of the reasons I want to get medicine covered by seniors, because within the matter of a few years, you are going to see cures for Parkinson's, for Alzheimer's, for two or three different kinds of cancers. It's going to be amazing. With the human genome coming out, new mothers will soon begin to come home with genetic maps of their babies, and it will rather quickly take average life expectancy from where it is now, at about 77, up to 90 years. There are young women in this room that will have babies that will be born with a life expectancy of 90 years. You mark my words. Now, what does that mean? It means, among other things, we've got to figure out how to make sure these benefits are broadly shared, and it means that once all your medical and financial information is on somebody's computer, we've got to figure out how to protect your privacy rights, even as we make the most of this information. That's a big deal. And I'd like to have somebody that really understands that. I mean, the other day, 425 high tech executives including Vint Cerf, who really is one of the fathers of the Internet and sent the first E mail ever sent, 18 years ago, to his then profoundly deaf wife, who now can hear for the first time since she was 3 because of a computer chip implanted in her ear. They came out for Al Gore. Why? Because they know he understands the future, that he has thought about these things, that he cares about them. He understands the energy future and what kind of changes we're going to have to make, and that's very important. So how are you going to keep the prosperity going? Are you going to build on the progress or reverse course? Who understands the future best? And last, and maybe most important, how are we going to continue to build one America? The main reason I'm a Democrat is that we believe everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance everybody has a role to play and we all do better when we help each other. That's what we believe. Now, what does that mean? I believe that's why we are for the minimum wage. That's why we're for stronger enforcement of equal pay laws to make sure women who do equal work get equal pay. That's why we're for hate crimes legislation. That's why we're for the deductibility of college tax tuition, because we think the people who serve this meal ought to have the same chance to send their kids to college as those of us who could afford to pay for it. That's what we believe. So sometime between now and the next 2 weeks, I hope every day you will have some chance to talk about this election. And if somebody says, "Well, why are you for Hillary for Senator? Why are you for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman? What's Maurice Hinchey so great anyway about?" you need to say, "Look, there's four big things you've got to decide in this election. Number one, do you want to keep this prosperity going or not? If you do, you better pay down the debt and keep interest rates down, have a tax cut we can afford, and save some money to invest in education and our future. "Number two, do you want to build on the progress of the last 8 years or not? If you do, we better stay with the crime program, the education program, the health care program, the environmental program that have worked, that are moving this country in the right direction, not change course. "Number three, we need people in office that think about the future and understand it. "And number four and most important, we need people who really believe that we have to be one America across all the lines that divide us." If people think about these issues in that way, we're going to have a great celebration November 7th. Thank you very much. October 23, 2000 Thank you very much, my long time friend Tom Manton. You know, the story he told you was true. I was in Manhattan. They said, "We're going to the Queens Democratic Party. Congressman Manton is the chairman of the county party. If you do really well, they might endorse you." I said, "Well, what happens if they don't?" He said, "You'll lose Queens in the primary." Laughter "And we're going on the subway, and a television camera is going to follow you on the subway because they don't think anyone from Arkansas knows what a subway is." Laughter So properly intimidated, I haul myself onto the subway. And it was fascinating, because no one in New York knew who I was, and yet, here is this camera with this bright light filming my every move. And all these people are deadtired, and they're being elbowed around by this energetic camera person. They probably thought I was some you know, in the precursor to "Survivor" or something laughter just some anonymous guy trying to make it out of Queens, on the subway, with a funny accent. It was funny. So I was really apprehensive. We got to the meeting site, and I walked up the stairs, and the county committee clapped, and I walked down the middle of the aisle, not having a clue about what was going to happen. And this African American guy who was taller than me leaned over and put his arm around me and said, "Bill, don't worry. I was born in Hope, Arkansas, too. Everything is going to be fine here." Laughter And I thought, "Only in New York. This is great." Laughter So thank you, Tom Manton, for being my friend, for helping me get off to a good start as President. I wish your successor, Joe Crowley, could be here tonight, but he and Kasey had a baby girl today, and we're really happy for them, and that's why they're not here. I always say, the Democratic Party has to be pro work and pro family. So tonight is Joe's pro family night. I think we can give him an excused absence. I want to thank the other Representatives who are here Gary Ackerman, who was with me last night and Greg Meeks Anthony Weiner. I thank them for their leadership in the Congress. I thank them for their support of Hillary. I thank them for what they do for New York every day. You know, when things go well, the President gets a lot of credit. But the truth is that over and above the American people, who deserve the lion's share of credit for every good thing that happens in this country, so much of what I have done would not have been possible if it hadn't been for the support of the Democrats in Congress. And that became even more true after we were in the minority. So I want you to know that these men have my undying loyalty and gratitude, because they have been wonderful to me, along with Senator Schumer and the other Democrats in the delegation. I want to thank Alan Hevesi for being here, and your borough president, Claire Shulman, my long time friend. Michael Reich, thank you for the work you do for the Democratic Party. And Alisa, you are great. You're going a long way. That was a great national anthem. And I want to thank Brian McLaughlin for making me feel welcome and being so kind to Hillary over these years and this last year of hard campaigning. I was thinking about how I was introduced to Queens, by having this guy who was born in the same State I was, welcome me. And then I was thinking about all the times I've spent in Queens since then. I went to a Greek diner not very far from here a couple of times. I had a wonderful time in I bet a lot of you have eaten there. Today I spent an hour and a half in the Jackson Hole Diner, near LaGuardia. I broke all my caloric rules. Laughter While I was there, the guy that owns it who grew up a block from the diner but his manager is Vietnamese, and his mother still lives in Saigon. While I was there, I met this African American guy and his wonderful young son named Miles, who asked me more questions about the White House than I could answer, so finally I just gave him a book about it. Laughter And the man said something to me that meant more to me than just about anything anybody could say. When I was walking out of the diner he said, "Mr. President, I just want you to know that the whole time you were there, I felt like it was my house, too." I want to say to all of you, as America grows more diverse, that will be more important. Claire Shulman and I were at a school in Queens the other day that was built for 400 and has about 800 children, predominantly Asian American and Latino, the new children coming there, Chinese American, Indian American. And then tonight I showed up, and I looked out at all of you. Welcome to 21st century America. On the way out of the Jackson Hole Diner today there were two guys sitting outside drinking a beer, and I stopped and shook hands with them, and they said hello to me. And I said, "Where are you from in Ireland?" Laughter And they said they were both from the same little village in County Clare. And I said, "Did you know each other as children?" They said, "Yes, but we didn't like each other until we came to America." Laughter And I thought, "Oh, if I could just hold that thought." There is a lady back there with a sign that says Croatian Americans support Hillary. And I thank you for that. And I guess I would like to just start with that. There are four things I want you to know about this election, four reasons you ought to be for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and Hillary and our side. And I'll start with what I usually leave for last. We are committed, all of us, led by our candidate for President the Vice President to build one America across all the lines that divide us and to relate to the whole rest of the world, based on our values of peace and freedom and opportunity. We know that the world we're living in, the country we're living in, and whatever communities we're living in are growing increasingly more interdependent. And I am very grateful that we've had the chance, for example, to stand against ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, to stop the war in Bosnia and stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and stand with our embargo until Mr. Milosevic finally could be dislodged by the people of Serbia in a Democratic, true uprising of popular feeling. And I want you to know that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman and Hillary supported everything we ever did there. I don't know how many times Hillary went to the Balkans, not just with me but on her own, to support our troops, to meet with women who were struggling to get the Croatians and the Muslims and the Serbs together, across the ethnic and religious lines that divided them. There were a lot of people that came through the line where I just was shaking hands a few moments ago, had Irish accents. And these two Irish guys asked me today, said, "Well, where is your family from?" And I said, "Well, we're from the wrong side of the line. We were from Roslea, County Fermanagh. But my oldest known homestead is right on the borderline of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland." And this guy says, "So that's why you got involved?" Laughter I said, "Well, it was a reason." No administration had ever tried to play a constructive role in resolving the difficulties in Northern Ireland before, for fear of interrupting our special relationship with Great Britain. I finally concluded that Great Britain would be better off with a minor interruption where, over the long run, they had a long term settlement in Northern Ireland that was consistent with the interests of the people of the United States. And I'm very, very grateful that Tony Blair and, before him, his predecessor, John Major, came to accept that and welcome our involvement. And I'm grateful for the work we've done. We're not out of the woods yet in the Irish peace process. There is still some work to be done to get the police force right and to get the decommissioning finished. But it's a lot, lot different than it was 8 years ago, and for that I'm grateful. And again, as Tom Manton said, Hillary went there a lot on her own, not just with me, to work with women who were committed to reaching across the lines of division there and putting their children first and finding ways to grow a grassroots economy and to relate to one another. And of course, now, we're most concerned again about the recent tragic events in the Middle East. I promised myself when I ran for President that I would always be a friend of Israel, that the only way I could ever see that Israel could be secure in the long run would be to reach a fair, just, and lasting peace with its neighbors. And I had the great good fortune in the beginning of my term to work with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, one of the greatest human beings I ever met in my life. And we have made so much progress. And I end with Israel for a couple of reasons. First of all, because here again not only have I spent more time on that, I suppose, than any other part of the world, but Hillary has gone there a lot on her own, without me, at the request of Mrs. Barak and others, to just try to keep pushing things forward. We've done everything we know to do. But this is a cautionary reminder to all of us here in America. Look around the room at how quickly people who have even worked together for years can give into their fears and their misunderstandings and what turns out to be one bad day, turns out to be one bad week, turns out to be 2 bad weeks. And then all these unintended consequences flow. The commitment of the United States to the security of Israel is as strong or stronger than it has ever been. But we shall also keep trying to stop the killing and to give them a chance to work their way back to the peace table. And that brings me finally to something my wife said last night that, I must say, I identified with. She was talking about the memorial service we attended for the 14 young American sailors, men and women, who were killed on the United States Ship Cole, by terrorists in Yemen, at the port of Aden. Those are the toughest days I ever spent as President, in 8 years, by far much worse than any political setback or anything else going into room after room after room, seeing the parents of people, most of whom are less than half my age, or their wives or their children, people who had died serving the United States the Cole, Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, our two Embassies in Africa, on Ron Brown's plane, and in other cases. It is unbelievable. But I never went through one of those days without being profoundly grateful for these kids who get up every day and put the uniform of our country on and serve and do the best they can to represent us stunningly well, and have prevented more wars than you, even I, will ever know, and saved us more headaches just by going out there and putting themselves on the line every day than we will ever know. And one of the things that is so moving is, if you look at our Armed Forces today, they all look like this room. They're from every different racial and religious and ethnic group, and they work together. And just sending them somewhere around the world is a profound statement about what we Americans believe about how people should celebrate their diversity but affirm the primary importance of our common humanity. And that means, to me, two things. Number one, as Hillary said last night, we've all got to vote. The least we can do for those kids is vote. If they can put their uniform on and risk their lives, and sometimes give their lives, the least we can do is show up and be good citizens. Number two, we have to remember the lesson of who they are and how they worked together, as we stand for peace around the world and we work for one America here at home. So I'll get back to the main point here. This is an increasingly interdependent world. The more we believe that everybody counts, everybody deserves a chance, and we all do better when we help each other, the better we're going to do. The more we celebrate and find excitement in the differences among us but constantly reaffirm our common humanity, the better we're going to do. For the Democrats, that means significant differences in approach, very often, from our friends in the other party. We're for strong hate crimes legislation that protects people without regard to race, age, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. We're for it, and they're not. We're for that. We are for stronger enforcement of the equal pay laws, because we don't think it's right for women to do the same work as men and not get equal pay for it. We believe that. We believe that we've got to go forward together. That's the first thing I want to say. And it's a big issue for the 21st century. The second point I want to make is, you ought to be for Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Hillary if you want to keep this prosperity going. Just remember what it was like 8 years ago. You know, it may be hard to remember what it was like, but I do. That's how I got elected. The people of New York were very, very good to me in 1992, after making me run a gauntlet or two. Laughter That's just what you do and I liked it, actually, once I realized what the deal was. Laughter But we've come a long way. Now, our party has a plan Give a tax cut that we can afford, concentrated on the main needs of middle class people to send their children to college have long term care for their elderly and disabled family members have help for child care, help for retirement savings give extra incentives to invest in poor urban neighborhoods and rural areas that have been left behind but have a tax cut we can afford so we've got some money left over to invest in education, health care, the environment, and pay down the debt. Now, you heard Tom talking about how we've turned the deficit to surplus. Why should the Democratic Party be for paying down the debt? Here's why. Because every day a trillion dollars cross national borders every single day. Interest rates are set based on how responsible you are and how much money you need. The less money the Government takes, the more money is there for you, the American people, at lower prices. So if we keep paying down the debt, we'll keep interest rates low. Our plan, on the whole, would make interest rates about a percent lower every year for a decade. Do you know what that's worth to you? Just listen 390 billion in lower home mortgages 30 billion in lower car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments lower credit card payments lower business loans, which means more new businesses, more new jobs and a higher stock market. That's what that means. So number one, we're the party of one America. Number two, we're the party that will keep this prosperity going. Number three, we're the party that will build on the progress of the last 8 years in every other area. The crime rate is at a 26 year low. The welfare rolls are at a 30 year low. The environment is cleaner. We've got the number of people without health insurance going down for the first time in a dozen years. So you have to ask people, "Look, all this stuff is going in the right direction. Do you want to build on it, or do you want to reverse policy?" And finally, you ought to ask people, what about the future? Which candidates are more likely to figure out how to close the digital divide so that every kid has access to the Internet? Which party and which candidates are more likely to understand the implications of this biological revolution with the human genome? The young women in this audience today, within just a few years, when they enter their childbearing years, the young girls here, they'll be bringing home babies with a life expectancy of 90 years. That's the good news. But all of your medical and all your financial information is going to be on somebody's computer. Who is most likely to understand how to protect your privacy and make the most of the Internet and the biological revolution? These are big questions. This is a serious time we're moving into. Now, look, I've done everything I could do to turn this country around, pull it together, and move it forward. But in America, our public life is always about tomorrow always. And I can tell you, you need to go out and ask people which party and which candidates will stick up for one America and give us all a chance? Which party, which candidates will keep the prosperity going? Which party, which candidates will keep the progress going in crime, in the environment, in welfare, in health care, and in education? And which party and which candidates most nearly understand the future? If you can just remember to make those four points, it's going to be fine. And I just want to tell you, don't forget that Vice President Gore has been at the center of every major positive decision made in the last 8 years by this administration. He broke the tie on the economic plan when nobody in the other party would vote for it. It turned this country around and got the economy booming. He led our efforts to reduce the size of Government but increase its effectiveness. We've got the smallest Government since 1960, doing more good for more people. He led our efforts to get the so called Erate passed about 4 years ago, which guarantees a discount to poor schools, so that every school in this country can get hooked up to the Internet. When we started this project, 14 percent of our schools were connected to the Internet in 1994. Today, 95 percent are, thanks in large measure to the efforts of Al Gore. So I'll just tell you that. Everybody in New England and the Northeast is worried about home heating oil, the energy shortage this summer. Let me just tell you, it was a piece of good news 3 or 4 days ago General Motors announced that they had developed a car that gets 80 miles to the gallon. Did you see it? That's what they announced. And they gave credit to a project most of you probably never heard of, called the Partnership for the Next Generation Vehicles. They said, "We were able to do this because we were involved in this partnership." We started that partnership with Detroit and the United Auto Workers in 1993, and who ran it for 7 1 2 years? Al Gore. Listen, we need somebody like that in the White House, who will make good decisions, who understands the future, who can do what needs to be done. Now, let me say a few words about Hillary. Laughter I mean, I am a completely unbiased source. Laughter You can bank this. I may be biased, but I know more about this than anybody else. I met Hillary almost 30 years ago. When I met her, she had already been involved for some time in her lifetime obsession with children and families, with education, with health care, with child care, with all aspects of early childhood development. She spent an extra year when we were in law school just so she could study child development at the Yale Child Study Center and the Yale University Hospital. She stayed an extra year, so she wanted to know for sure when she got out of law school she would understand the impact of every legal and public policy decision on the children of this country. And for 30 years, until she started running for this office, she has worked tirelessly as a citizen advocate, starting organizations, heading up others, working for other candidates. She never asked anybody to do anything for her in 30 years, except to join her in common cause, until she started running for the United States Senate from New York. And I thought it would be the hardest thing in the world for her to go out, ask you to vote for her, ask you to contribute to her campaign. And it turned out, in the beginning, it was kind of hard. She said, "I never did this for myself before." But she has worked for 30 years on things that you need someone to work on for New York in Washington. For the last 8 years as First Lady, she has worked on a lot of things that had a direct, positive impact on the people of New York. She spoke out, as soon as we took office, for the family and medical leave law. It was the first bill I signed. Over 20 million Americans have taken advantage of family and medical leave when a baby was born or a parent was sick, to take some time off without losing their jobs. It's one of the best things we ever did in these whole 8 years. She brought people to the White House from all over the country to help us make policy on children's health, on early childhood development and what happens to kids' brains, what kind of things we should do more of. We got 90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood illnesses for the first time in history. She worked on that. She worked on the bill that allows people to keep their health insurance when they change jobs or when somebody in their family gets sick. She was an advocate for our Children's Health Insurance Program, which has now in the last couple of years brought health insurance to 2.5 million children in lower income working families and finally finally after a dozen years, got the number of uninsured kids going down in America, going in the right direction. And when we decided to celebrate the millennium, she came up with this idea that we ought to find a way to celebrate the turning of the century and the turning of the millennium by thinking about the future but honoring the past. And her Millennium Treasures Project is the largest single historic preservation movement in the history of the country. It has put 100 million, in public and private money, in it now. And a lot of the places preserved are right here in New York State, in places that need it economically, for tourism, for community pride George Washington's revolutionary headquarters, Harriet Tubman's home, parts of the Underground Railroad had a direct positive impact. It's the biggest thing of its kind in the history of the country. It came right out of her head. She thought about it. What's the point of all this? In 30 years, I have known hundreds, thousands of people in public life. And I want to tell you, most people who do this work are better than they get credit for most days Republicans as well as Democrats. I'll even say that 2 weeks from election. Most people I've known in public life are honest, worked hard, and did what they thought was right. But I have never known anybody in 30 years that had the strong combination Hillary does of brains and heart and determination and imagination and ability to get things done and work with all different kinds of people. She will be a worthy successor to the great Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to Robert Kennedy, and a great partner for Chuck Schumer, if you will just make sure she wins on November 7th. Ladies and gentlemen, the next Senator from New York. October 20, 2000 Thank you for that wonderful welcome. Thank you for coming out to help Marty tonight. I told him that now that he had all this support and has raised all this money, we needed to go find him an opponent. Laughter Seems a shame to waste all this energy and support and enthusiasm, you know. Laughter It's a good thing there aren't many more votes he can cast against me. Laughter Let me say, first, how honored I am to be here. I want to say more about Marty in a moment, but I also want to thank Richie Neal for being here and for representing Massachusetts so well he's a wonderful man and for supporting the efforts that we made with the Irish peace process, which, in the beginning, to put it mildly, were somewhat controversial. I want to thank Senator Kennedy. We've spent most of the day together. We flew here today. In an uncommon act of sensitivity, he flew to Missouri today for the funeral of the Governor of Missouri, who was our nominee for the United States Senate. You probably know he died tragically in a plane crash with his son and one of his closest aides. He was my neighbor and my very close friend. When I looked out today and I saw Ted and Vicki at the funeral, I thought, "What a great thing to do." I say this every chance I get. But whatever I have accomplished as President, so much of it would never have been possible if Ted Kennedy hadn't been there with me every single step of the way, and I cannot thank him enough. You know, we have a lot of fun together. Today I taught him a new card game so I could beat him. Laughter And he was convinced I didn't play fair, just because I won and he lost. Laughter You know, he's going to get the last laugh, though, because when he came to the Senate, I was in junior high school laughter and when I leave the White House, he'll still be in the Senate, thank goodness for our country's sake. I would also like to thank someone in this audience for coming here tonight. I was particularly glad to see Niki Tsongas. Where are you? Niki, are you here? She was in the other room when I was there. I was really delighted she was here. And I want to thank Marty's family for coming tonight at a difficult time, beginning with his wonderful mother. Mrs. Meehan, thank you for being here. Thank you. Bless you for coming tonight. Marty and Ellen and their beautiful baby and Marty's mom and the whole Meehan clan met me outside, and I understood how he had been elected. Laughter Frankly, there are so many of them, he doesn't really need you. Laughter But I'm delighted that you're helping him anyway. I wanted to come here as Senator Kennedy said, I've been to a lot of different communities in Massachusetts. I've tried to, in this course of my service as President, beginning in the '92 campaign, I've tried to make the whole State, to really spend time out in the State of Massachusetts to see every part of it and to have a chance to thank the people of this State. No State has been better to Bill Clinton and Al Gore than the State of Massachusetts, and I am very grateful to you. You heard Marty say that when I became President, unemployment here was 7.5 percent. Last month it was 2.4 percent, the lowest in 30 years, down two thirds from 1992. So, I want to have a serious talk here, just for a minute, about this election coming up, what it means to you, your children, your grandchildren, and the future of our country. I want to ask you to take some time, a little time every day, to talk to other people about it. I know that Vice President Gore and Joe Lieberman are well ahead in the polls in Massachusetts. But you can help them in New Hampshire. You may know some people in if we win this time in New Hampshire, I think it may be the first time the Democrats have ever won it three times in a row. But they ought to be with us. New Hampshire is a lot better off than it was in 1992. It's a lot better off. And they've been very good to me, too. You might have some friends in Pennsylvania, one of the battleground States, or Ohio, a lot of the other places where this election could go either way. I had the opportunity gosh, when was it? yesterday to appear before the Senate and House Democrats, and I said that we should view ourselves from here until election day as the "Weather Caucus," because if we make things clear, that is, if people understand with clarity the choice before them and the consequences of the choice, we will win. If they make things cloudy, we'll have a hard time winning. So they will be for cloudy we'll be for clear. What does that say about who you ought to vote for right there? Laughter So I just want to take a minute or two, because everybody here has friends who will never come to an event like this. Isn't that right? Every one of you has friends that will never come to an event like this, but they will show up on election day. You have friends in other States where the election could go either way who will never come to an event like this, but they will show up on election day. And I just wanted to tell you, we've now heard all the debates, and the candidates are kind of going into the homestretch, and sometimes it's easy to lose the forest for the trees. And you know, I care passionately about this election, not just because of my more than passing interest in the Senate race in New York. Laughter And I might add another kind thing Ted did he went to Buffalo with Hillary the other day and spoke to an Irish group, and he practically had her with a brogue by the time he got through. It was fabulous. Laughter And not just because I'm so devoted to Al Gore and all that he's done, and not just because Joe Lieberman has been a friend of mine for 30 years but because when the Vice President says, "We've come a long way in the last 8 years, but you ain't seen nothin' yet," I actually believe that. And I'm not running for anything. That's not just political rhetoric. I've worked as hard as I know how to turn this country around and pull this country together and move us forward, to fight off the most bitter partisan attacks in modern American history and just keep on going. And it's worked pretty well. And I think you will all agree with that. But never never in my lifetime have we had at the same time so much economic prosperity, social progress, national self confidence, with the absence of domestic crisis or foreign threat to our security. It has not happened in our lifetime. Now, when you get a situation like that, you have an obligation as a free society to build for the future, to seize the big opportunities, to deal with the big challenges, to make the most of them. And I'm telling you, the only thing that ever bothers me is when I see, well, people think that they kind of like both these candidates, and maybe there is not much difference, and maybe we should give the other guy a chance or this, that, or the other thing, and after all and things are going along fine. Who could mess this up? Laughter You know, you hear a lot of this talk, don't you? Don't you hear this talk people talking and what I want to say to you is that we ought to be happy about this election, because you have two people we can posit They're good people they love their families they love their country and they will pretty well do what they say they'll do if they get elected. But make no mistake about it, there are great differences in the candidates for President and Vice President, for the Senate and for the House, that will have profound consequences. And you've got to decide. And I'll just tell you a few of them. First of all, I've listened to all these debates, so let me tell you what this election is not about. This election is certainly not about one of us being one of our candidates being for big Government, the other one being for less Government. Let me tell you what the facts are. Now, we had a hard time getting those facts into these debates, because they're so inconvenient for the other side. And I admire that about the Republicans The evidence does not faze them. Laughter They are not bothered at all by the facts. And you've got to kind of give it to them. Ask Richie or Marty or Ted. Don't take my word for it. The evidence doesn't faze them. They just sort of show up and do it anyway. They know what they're for. But here are the facts. Under this Democratic administration, Government spending is the lowest percentage of national income it's been since 1966. Tax burden on average, middle income Americans is the lowest it's been in more than 20 years. Now, the size of the Government is the lowest it's been since 1960, Dwight Eisenhower's last year in the White House, the year you elected John Kennedy President of the United States. That is the size of the Federal Government. Those are facts. So when you hear our Republican friends talking about how we're for big Government, ask them, where have they been the last 8 years? And if you hear somebody who acts like they believe it, fill them in on the facts. This election is also not about how our side can't get bipartisan action done in Washington, so we need a Republican to rescue us to give us bipartisan action. Let me just run through a little of the bipartisan action. Once we made it clear to them that we weren't going to let them shut the Government down, abolish the Department of Education, and have the biggest education and health care and environmental cuts in history, and once you made it clear to them that you wouldn't support them if they kept doing that, we got a bipartisan welfare reform bill, a bipartisan balanced budget bill that had the Children's Health Insurance Program, the biggest expansion of children's health care since Medicaid in 1965. We got a telecommunications bill that's created hundreds of thousands of jobs in America. We got an extension of our bill to put 100,000 police on the street we're now working on 150,000. We got a bill to put 100,000 teachers in the schools we're already a third of the way home there all in a bipartisan majority. So if somebody says to you, "I've got to vote for the other guys because they're against big Government, or they're for bipartisan solutions," you say, "Hello. Stop. Facts." Do a fact check here. It tickles me. The Republicans are seeking to be rewarded for the harsh partisan atmosphere they created. Laughter "We made a mess of this. The Democrats will work with us. Give us the White House, and we'll behave." That's their argument. You should say, "I don't think so. That's not necessary." We get plenty of stuff done on a bipartisan basis. Ted Kennedy works every day. Marty Meehan's got this campaign finance reform bill with Chris Shays. Our problems is not bipartisanship. Our problem is that the Republican leadership in the United States Senate and in the campaign for the White House are against campaign finance reform. One hundred percent of the Democrats and a lot of the Republicans are for campaign finance reform. Isn't that right? So that's what it's not about. Here's what it is about. One other thing it's not about. It's not about change versus the status quo. Al Gore is not the candidate of the status quo. If anybody running this year ran on the following platform, "Vote for me, and I'll do everything Bill Clinton did," I would vote against that person. Why? Because the world is changing dramatically. So the issue is not whether we're going to change it is how we're going to change. Are we going to keep the prosperity going and build on the changes in the last 8 years that are working, or are we going to reverse course? That is the question. And that's the way you've got to frame it. It's not whether, but how, we're going to change. Now, look, here's the deal on this economic business. Our tax cut, I admit, is only a third the size of theirs our candidate's tax cut. But most people making under 100,000 do better under ours than theirs. Now, why is ours only a third the size of theirs? Because we learned the hard way in the 12 years before we got here that if you give it all away before it comes in, you may wind up with a lot of red ink on your hands, and you don't want to do that again. So, we say, "Let's have a tax cut we can afford for college tuition deduction, for longterm care for the elderly and the disabled, for child care, for retirement savings, for giving people incentives to invest in poor areas in America. But let's save a little money for education and health care and the environment, and let's keep paying this debt down, because this is a case where fiscal conservatism is socially progressive." If you keep interest rates down, the average family is already saving a couple thousand dollars on home mortgages because we've kept interest rates lower by getting rid of this deficit. If their plan passes, because the tax cut is so big 1 1 2 trillion, and on top of that, they've got a trillion dollar plan to partially privatize Social Security you're already in deficit once you do that, by the way then, they're going to spend several hundred billion dollars over and above that and I can tell you, their estimate of the surplus is too big we're going back into deficit. That means higher interest rates. Our tax cut for everybody is lower interest rates. If you take Gore's plan and you keep paying the debt down, interest rates will be a point lower for a decade. Do you know what that's worth to you? Listen to this For a decade, 390 billion in lower home mortgages, 30 billion in lower car payments, 15 billion in lower college loan payments, lower credit card payments, lower business loan payments means more jobs, more business expansion, higher incomes, a better stock market. Our tax cuts for everybody, in addition to the specifics, is lower interest rates and getting rid of the debt. Now, I'll tell you something else. The thirdbiggest item in the Federal budget is interest on the debt. Every last dollar you pay to the Federal Government, it begins with 12 cents going out for interest going out for the debt, because when they had the White House, they quadrupled the debt in 12 years. We quadrupled the debt in 12 years over the previous 200year history of this country. And I'm getting rid of it thanks to them and their voting for me and we want to keep getting rid of it. Now, so here's another interesting thing. If you have 8 years of a Gore Lieberman administration, Government spending will be an even smaller percentage of income than it will be if you get the Republicans in. Why? Oh, yes, we'll spend more on education. We'll spend more on health care. We'll spend more on the environment. But we're going to get rid of that 12 cents on the dollar you're paying on interest on the debt. They're going to keep paying that, and you're going to have higher interest rates. Now, look, we tried it their way for 12 years, and they want to go try it that way again. They want to say, "Look, the Democrats have got things in real good shape now, so let's go on a real tax cutting binge and try it our way one more time and see if it works better the second time around." That's what this election is about. Listen, this is a big deal. People have to understand this plainly. It's not like we haven't tried it. You've tried it our way for 8 years, and you tried it their way for 12 years before that. And that's all this is. You cannot make a 1 1 2 trillion tax cut, several hundred billion dollars' worth of spending and a 1 trillion Social Security privatization plan fit into the money that's there. We're going back to deficits, high interest rates, less investment in our future, less economic growth. Ask people if they really want to take that chance. If you want to keep the prosperity going, you better stay with Gore and Lieberman and Kennedy and Meehan and Neal and our crowd, because that's where we're going. This is a big deal. Now, I won't go into as much detail on the rest of this, but the same thing on every issue. On education, both sides say they're for accountability. The difference is, we believe if you're going to hold schools accountable for the performance of their children, you ought to help them succeed with preschool and after school programs and more qualified teachers in the early grades and modernized schools. And they say, "We don't need to do that. Let's just test the kids and see what happens and take the money away if they don't do well." We think we ought to help empower the schools to do well. We know how to turn around failing schools now. There's no excuse not to do it now. All we have to do is to develop the system, invest in it, reward it. Big difference. They're not for any of those specific things I just said. On health care, we say we ought to have a Patients' Bill of Rights that's real, and we ought to have a Medicare prescription drug program, because if we were creating Medicare today, we would never have it without drugs. In 1965, when Ted voted for Medicare, medical care was about doctors and hospitals. Today, anybody that lives to be 65 in America has a life expectancy of 82. The young women in this audience that are still in their childbearing years, thanks to the human genome project, will soon be bringing home from the hospital babies with a life expectancy of 90 years. Now, that's the good news. But it means you're going to have to totally reimagine the aging process. Within a few years, 80 won't be all that old. We will think of it as, you know, sort of late middle age. Laughter But it also means we've got to keep people healthy. We've got to keep people strong, and pharmaceuticals are an important part of that. So we have the money now, if we don't squander it, to take care of the pharmaceutical needs of our senior citizens, not only to lengthen life but to improve the quality of life, to keep people out of hospitals, to minimize their institutional time in life. This is a big deal. And we are for a Medicare program that does that. Why? Because Medicare is simply a financing mechanism that has a low administrative cost and can serve everybody. They're for serving about half the people that need it and telling everybody else they've got to get private insurance. The insurance companies you know, Ted and I, we've had a lot of fights with the health insurance companies. They ought to get a gold star for this. They keep telling us, "You can't write a health insurance policy for this." The health insurance policy this is another case where the Republicans are not fazed by the evidence. The insurance companies, which are usually with them on everything, have told them, "Hey guys, you can't write an insurance policy that people can afford that's worth having." So why don't they want to do it? What in the wide world is wrong with giving all the seniors access to the medicine they need? Did you ever meet a politician that didn't want more votes? Did you ever meet a business person that didn't want more customers? Why do the drug companies not want more customers? See, you never hear this in the debate because they don't have time to go into it, but you need to know this. This is a huge deal, the difference in the Democratic and the Republican prescription drug plan. The drug companies spend a lot of money developing the drugs and advertising them. And every country but the United States where they sell the drugs has price controls. So they've got to get 100 percent of the cost of developing the drugs and advertising them from you when you buy them. And then it's real cheap just to make another pill, so then they can sell them in Canada or Europe or wherever and make a lot of money. Now, I am not demonizing the drug companies. I would still rather have them in America. Wouldn't you? I mean, they're great. They uncover all these medical miracles, and they provide tens of thousands of wonderful jobs. And they've got a problem, because they think if Medicare is buying for all the seniors, they'll have so much market power, they can get drugs made in America for Americans almost as cheap as Canadians can buy drugs made in America. And they're afraid it will cut them so low that they won't have the money to make new drugs and to advertise them. Surely, the answer is not what they posit to leave half the seniors who need the medicine behind. That's not the American way. This is a big deal now. This is a huge deal, a big difference between Gore Lieberman, Meehan, Neal, Kennedy, our crowd, and their crowd. My view is, let's solve the problems of America's seniors. We've got the money to do it. And the drug companies have plenty of money and good lobbyists, and they can come down to Washington, and we'll figure out how to solve their problems. But we've got the cart before the horse if we say, "I'm sorry, here's half the seniors that need medicine. We can't give it to them because the drug companies are afraid they won't get enough money for their advertising and development costs." Let's take care of the seniors, then take care of the drug companies. That's our position. It's the right position. It is the moral position. It's the right thing for America. Now, you can go through every other issue crime, the environment, every single other issue and there are significant differences. But you ought to be able to tell people now what the economic differences are, what the health care differences are, what the education differences are. You ought to be able to tell them. It will affect you, your children, your grandchildren, and the future of this country. I can also tell you, having worked with him for 8 years and having had some experience now with the Presidency, it is fundamentally a deciding job. Oh, there's a lot of work. Harry Truman said I felt like this in the Middle East the last couple of days Harry Truman said that his job largely consisted of trying to talk people into doing things they should do without him having to ask them in the first place. Laughter And to some extent, that's right. But the President also has to decide Who are you going to put on the Supreme Court? Who are you going to make Secretary of State? Who are you going to make Secretary of Defense? Who will be Secretary of Education? Who will be Secretary of Health and Human Services? What will you send to the Congress? How will you deal with the first major foreign crisis you have? What is the future of arms control? How will we deal with terrorism and biological and chemical warfare? This is a deciding job. And that's the last point I want to make. Al Gore makes good decisions. He is smart. He knows what he's doing. He's tough. He has good values. He makes good decisions. So I'm just asking you to take a little time every day between now and the election. This thing is tight, and it is tight partly because things are going well, and it's easy to blur the distinctions. I'll close with the thing that's most important to me. If somebody said to me that my time on Earth was over and I got to leave America with one wish, what would my one wish for America be? Believe it or not, it wouldn't be for continued prosperity. After what I've been through with the Middle East and Northern Ireland and the Balkans, growing up in the South that was segregated, as I did, what I would wish for America is that we could be one country, united across all the various differences in this country. This is such an interesting place to live now. America is getting more interesting every day as we grow more racially and religiously diverse. But it's really important. The only way it's interesting is if we think we respect our differences, but we think our common humanity is even more important. And there are all kinds of issues that come up all the time where these values are at stake. I think campaign finance reform is one of them. Why? Because it basically will equalize the power of people's votes. I think stronger enforcement of equal pay laws for women is one of them, because it gives equality to the dignity of work. I think the hate crimes legislation is important for obvious reasons. And you know, the truth is you kind of got a little of that in the last debate the truth is, we're on one side of those issues, and they're on the other. And I think that we're on the side of one America. And in a world that's getting smaller and smaller, I think we're on the right side. So I want to say to you, I'm very I'm so grateful for what you've done for me, for my family and my administration. Nobody's been better to us than the people of Massachusetts. I am grateful. I am grateful for the chance I've had to serve. I am profoundly grateful that there are wonderful people like Marty Meehan who are willing to present themselves for public office and serve and do what they do. I'm grateful for that. But in America, our public life is always about tomorrow. And the tomorrow that counts now is election day, November 7th. Now, you just remember Clarity is our friend, if the American people clearly understand what are the differences in economic policy, in education policy, in health care policy, in the environment, in crime, and in one America. How will it affect me, my family, my community, my children, my grandchildren? How can I build the future of my dreams for our kids? If they really are clear on that, we're going to have an enormous celebration on election night. But a lot of this work now will be done by word of mouth, one by one. So you just remember that every day between now and the election. Most of the people you know who will show up and vote will never, ever, ever come to an event like this. So you tell them a little bit about what you heard tonight. Thank you, and God bless you. October 18, 2000 The President. Secretary Cohen General Reno Secretary Danzig General Shelton distinguished Members of the Senate and House Governor Admiral Clark Admiral Natter Chaplain Black Master Chief Herdt Master Chief Hefty the sailors of the U.S.S. Cole the family members and friends the Norfolk naval community my fellow Americans. Today we honor our finest young people, fallen soldiers who rose to freedom's challenge. We mourn their loss, celebrate their lives, offer the love and prayers of a grateful nation to their families. For those of us who have to speak here, we are all mindful of the limits of our poor words to lift your spirits or warm your hearts. We know that God has given us the gift of reaching our middle years. And we now have to pray for your children, your husbands, your wives, your brothers, your sisters who were taken so young. We know we will never know them as you did or remember them as you will, the first time you saw them in uniform or the last time you said goodbye. They all had their own stories and their own dreams. We Americans have learned something about each and every one of them over these last difficult days as their profiles, their lives, their loves, their service have been given to us. For me, I learned a little more when I met with all the families this morning. Some follow the family tradition of Navy service others hoped to use their service to earn a college degree. One of them had even worked for me in the White House Richard Costelow was a technology wizard who helped to update the White House communications system for this new century. All these very different Americans, all with their different stories, their lifelines and love ties, answered the same call of service and found themselves on the U.S.S. Cole, headed for the Persian Gulf, where our forces are working to keep peace and stability in a region that could explode and disrupt the entire world. Their tragic loss reminds us that even when America is not at war, the men and women of our military still risk their lives for peace. I am quite sure history will record in great detail our triumphs in battle, but I regret that no one will ever be able to write a full account of the wars we never fought, the losses we never suffered, the tears we never shed because men and women like those who were on the U.S.S. Cole were standing guard for peace. We should never, ever forget that. Today I ask all Americans just to take a moment to thank the men and women of our Armed Forces for a debt we can never repay, whose character and courage, more than even modern weapons, makes our military the strongest in the world. And in particular, I ask us to thank God today for the lives, the character, and courage of the crew of the U.S.S. Cole, including the wounded and especially those we lost or are missing Hull Maintenance Technician Third Class Kenneth Eugene Clodfelter Electronics Technician Chief Petty Officer First Class Richard Costelow Mess Management Specialist Seaman Lakeina Monique Francis Information Systems Technician Seaman Timothy Lee Gauna Signalman Seaman Apprentice Cherone Louis Gunn Seaman James Rodrick McDaniels Engineman Second Class Mark Ian Nieto Electronics Warfare Technician Third Class Ronald Scott Owens Seaman Apprentice Lakiba Nicole Palmer Engine Fireman Joshua Langdon Parlett Fireman Apprentice Patrick Howard Roy Electronics Warfare Technician Second Class Kevin Shawn Rux Mess Management Specialist Third Class Ronchester Manangan Santiago Operations Specialist Second Class Timothy Lamont Saunders Fireman Gary Graham Swenchonis, Jr Ensign Andrew Triplett Seaman Apprentice Craig Bryan Wibberley. In the names and faces of those we lost and mourn, the world sees our Nation's greatest strength people in uniform rooted in every race, creed, and region on the face of the Earth, yet bound together by a common commitment to freedom and a common pride in being American. That same spirit is living today as the crew of the U.S.S. Cole pulls together in a determined struggle to keep the determined warrior afloat. The idea of common humanity and unity amidst diversity, so purely embodied by those we mourn today, must surely confound the minds of the hate filled terrorists who killed them. They envy our strength without understanding the values that give us strength. For, for them, it is their way or no way their interpretation, twisted though it may be, of a beautiful religious tradition their political views their racial and ethnic views their way or no way. Such people can take innocent life. They have caused your tears and anguish, but they can never heal or build harmony or bring people together. That is work only free, law abiding people can do, people like the sailors of the U.S.S. Cole. To those who attacked them, we say You will not find a safe harbor. We will find you, and justice will prevail. America will not stop standing guard for peace or freedom or stability in the Middle East and around the world. But some way, someday, people must learn the lesson of the lives of those we mourn today, of how they worked together, of how they lived together, of how they reached across all the lines that divided them and embraced their common humanity and the common values of freedom and service. Not far from here, there is a quiet place that honors those who gave their lives in service to our country. Adorning its entrance are words from a poem by Archibald MacLeish, not only a tribute to the young we lost but a summons to those of us left behind. Listen to them. The young no longer speak, but They have a silence that speaks for them at night. They say We were young. Remember us. They say We have done what we could, but until it is finished, it is not done. They say Our deaths are not ours they are yours they will mean what you make them. They say Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope, we cannot say it is you who must say this. They say We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning. The lives of the men and women we lost on the U.S.S. Cole meant so much to those who loved them, to all Americans, to the cause of freedom. They have given us their deaths. Let us give them their meaning their meaning of peace and freedom, of reconciliation and love, of service, endurance, and hope. After all they have given us, we must give them their meaning. I ask now that you join me in a moment of silence and prayer for the lost, the missing, and their grieving families. At this point, those gathered observed a moment of silence. The President. Amen. Thank you, and may God bless you all. October 14, 2000 Well, come in a little closer there. Carmen, stand up here. I want you in this picture. Laughter Let me, first of all, thank Carmen Carrillo for welcoming us here today. I just had a wonderful time upstairs. I went up and talked to all the staff that were up there and met with a lot of the young people who were there who are working on trying to educate kids, give young adults the training they need, help young people avoid teen pregnancy and HIV infection. I thought they were terrific. I just wanted to say, I wanted to come here today, in part, because of what you're doing here. And those of you who are here, trying to improve your lives represents everything I've tried to do as President. I'm very proud of you, and I love this place. I want to thank the Secretary of Transportation, Rodney Slater, who is, like me, from Arkansas. We've worked together for almost 20 years now. He was underage when I first enlisted his services. Laughter And it will be apparent in a moment why I asked him to come today and join us. And I want to thank Mayor and Mrs. Webb for their leadership. And thank you, Wilma, for your service in the administration. Denver has prospered under your leadership, done well, and you've been a great partner for the Clinton Gore administration. We've done a lot of things in Denver. We even brought the leaders of the eight big industrial nations here to a conference about 5 years ago. My friendship with you and the work that we've done with this city have meant a great deal to me, and I thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is the first chance I've had in a couple days to make a public statement, and I think it's appropriate, in a way, that I make a few remarks about before I get into what I came to talk about today about the troubles in the Middle East and the terrorist attack which resulted in the loss of many of our sailors. I'm sure you've been following it. Some of those sailors are being brought home today, and they'll be brought home over the next several days, both the wounded and those who were killed, and we'll have a memorial service for them on Wednesday. But what I'd like to say to you I don't know if in the local press there have been any profiles of them. But a lot of those people who were killed came out of neighborhoods like this, several Latinos, one young African American girl only 19 years old, just completed her Navy training. Most of them were trying to do with their lives what you're trying to do with your lives, and they wanted to do it by serving their country in the United States Navy. And they were not over there on any hostile mission. They were simply patrolling and keeping the peace and stability of the region. So I hope you'll say a prayer for them and their families tonight. This is a difficult time for them. It's also very troubling in the region. There was all the troubles you've seen between the Israelis and the Palestinians, who were so close to a peace agreement. There was a hijacking today in the Middle East. We have no idea whether it's related to any of this or not, and we may not know for a while. But I'm going to leave I'm going to the West Coast from here, then I'm going to red eye back to Washington and fly over there to Egypt tomorrow, in an attempt to try to help put things back together. So I hope we'll have your prayers on that, too. But I ask today you specifically, think about those families that lost their loved ones, because most of those folks were just trying to do what you're trying to do and serve their country. They were wonderful people, very young, so their families need all the support of the all the American people. Now, let me talk about what I think is the good news of what you're doing and what I think we should be doing to help. In 1992, when I ran for President, I went to the American people with a very simple but, I think, profoundly important vision. I said that thought every person willing to be a responsible citizen should have an opportunity to share in the American dream and that I thought to achieve that, we had to be a stronger community we had to understand that we were going forward together and that nobody should be left out or left behind. Well, it turns out most Americans agreed with that, and together the country has made great strides. You all know we've had the longest economic expansion in the history of the United States. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. When I became President, unemployment in Colorado was 6.1 percent. It's 2.7 percent now. Unemployment among African Americans and Hispanics is the lowest ever measured. And together we've had over 22 million new jobs, almost 600,000 right here in Colorado. But we're also not just better off. I think we're a better nation because poverty is down, crime is down, teen pregnancy is down. Last year we even had a reduction in the number of people without health insurance, for the first time in a dozen years, thanks to the Children's Health Insurance Program. And homeownership, test scores, high school graduation rates, and the college going rate, all those are up. So to paraphrase what Al Gore used to say in 1992, when everything that should be up was down, everything that should be down was up Now the things that should be up are up, and the things that should be down are down, and we can be grateful for that. One of the most important things that would have been almost unthinkable 8 years ago is that the welfare rolls have been cut by more than half nationwide. Millions of parents have joined the work force. Now, how did this happen? Well, first, the strong economy helps, because more workers were needed. Secondly, we changed the rules so that all able bodied people who can work, have to work. But we obligated the Federal Government to enable them to succeed as parents, as well as workers, by investing more in training, more in child care and maintaining the guarantee of food and medical care for children. And it's working. But after all that, it also became necessary to have a system. That's what you have here, in Mi Casa. It's this fabulous system. You don't just deal with one part of a person's problem. People come here, families can come here and be dealt with. And if there weren't a place like this, even with a strong economy, even with a better welfare reform law, what we've tried to do would not have been nearly as successful. So all these innovative welfare to work partnerships between the Federal Government and States and local governments are important. And also in the private sector we have 12,000 private companies who've joined our welfare to work partnership and committed to hire people from the welfare rolls. And they have these 12,000 companies, themselves, some of them are as small as 40 and 50 employees some of them have tens of thousands. But they have hired hundreds of thousands of people from the welfare rolls. Right now, I can tell you, the retention rates are better than other first hires in all those companies. And they're doing very, very well. Denver has been a real leader here, thanks to Mayor Webb and people like Carmen. You offer education, employment, child care services in one place train potential workers in places like Mi Casa, support employers who train new workers for themselves. So the Federal Government where are you laughter I asked Carmen on the way down here, I said, "Where do you get the money to run this place?" And she said, "Well, we get some money from the Department of Labor. We get money from the welfare to work partnership." But the point is, you've got to have some place where the people can come and get what they really need. And the places that are doing best are places that have really put things together. In Denver there's also an effort to help fathers get jobs and pay child support and stay involved with their children's lives. So here's the point I want to make, and here's why I'm here. While the welfare rolls have dropped by more than 50 percent nationwide, which is huge, in Denver the welfare rolls have dropped 90 percent 90 percent. Now, once that happens, you've got to focus on making sure the people who get off welfare stay off and that hard working families succeed. And that's what is happening here now. But I came here today to talk about what more we can do to help more people get off welfare and stay off, and also to highlight the importance of places like Mi Casa and how we need it everywhere in America, because we can drive these rolls down even more if we have the kind of operations you have here in Denver. And that's where there are some more things we need to do, too, and that's where Secretary Slater and I come in. One of the most important things in helping Americans move from welfare to work is making sure they can get from where they live to where the job is. And this is still a huge problem nationwide. Listen to this. Two thirds of all the new jobs in America are being created in the suburbs, but three quarters of the Americans who are still on public assistance live in inner cities or small rural towns. So you've got the jobs here in the suburbs, and the people in the inner cities or out here in the country somewhere. And our public transportation networks simply have not kept up with the changing patterns and the disconnect between living and working. Now, we can help some people move where the jobs are. Under the leadership of our HUD Secretary, Andrew Cuomo, we have been able to get a bipartisan majority in Congress to go along with giving a lot of people who are eligible for public housing, housing vouchers so they can go find whatever is available, because, as all of you know, with the growth of the economy there is a real housing shortage in America, and there is a huge public housing shortage. So the housing vouchers have made a difference. I think we have an agreement with the Congress this year I haven't signed the law yet, but I'm pretty sure we got the deal done last week to increase the number of housing vouchers next year so we can keep doing this. But no matter how much we do that, there will still be large numbers of people who live someplace different from where the jobs are, who want to go to work, can go to work, and are capable of doing whatever it takes to be a qualified employee. So we can't continue with a system where people have to take three or four buses to get to work or they can't get to work at all on public transport, so they've got to get a friend or a family member to give them a ride to work every day. And a lot of you are nodding your heads. You know, what do you do if the friend or family members gets sick? What do you do if their kids get sick? What do you do if your kid is sick? There are a lot of problems with this sort of ad hoc system. And we do have a lot of people, literally, who still can't get a job because they can't get to the job. That is inconsistent with our goal of opportunity for every responsible citizen. It's inconsistent with our responsibilities as a national community to help each other go forward together. And it's inconsistent with helping people get off and stay off welfare. So from the beginning, in our administration, the Vice President and I have worked with Congress to try to build transportation links to where the jobs are. Three years ago, we proposed something called the job access initiative, and we worked with Congress and got a lot of support for it. It basically gives grants to communities to figure out what the solution is in their community, because it's different from place to place. Last year we funded over 71 million worth of grants for 42 States, and transit authorities have used this money to add new routes, to extend the hours of existing routes, which is a big problem in some places, and also to create vanpools when there is no practical public transit option. They have brought work to the doorsteps already with this job access initiative, to the doorsteps of 13,500 employers, which has enabled hundreds of thousands of people to find new ways to get to work, take their kids to school, and expand their own horizons through training and education. Last year those grants went to six Colorado communities, almost three quarters of a million dollars to help them design and build transportation links that connect workers to jobs. Today I'm here to announce that this year, we're going to have 73 million in grants to 39 States and the District of Columbia. There will be three in Colorado, and one I hope will particularly benefit those of you who are here at Mi Casa 700,000 to extend bus routes in Denver to help people travel to jobs at suburban business parks in the Denver tech center. Now, upstairs, one of the women asked me upstairs she said, "You need to do more to get women training and access to nontraditional jobs, jobs that women don't normally hold." And we talked about some of the things that we've been doing with the unions to train more women to do construction related jobs like you, right? Laughter Is that how you hurt your arm? And we talked about the work we're trying to do in Silicon Valley and other places to try to train more women to go to work in hightech industries where there is a huge gender gap in employment participation. And we talked about really nontraditional things like the massive shortage we've got in America for licensed truck drivers now a huge, huge shortage all over America. Now, it's tough if you've got young kids, because you've got to be gone for big chunks of time, so it's not a practical alternative to some. But for some people, it is an alternative. They've got family circumstances, or others they can do. Our focus here today is to try to do what we can do to help communities like Denver succeed even more and also to try to get other communities to develop the models that you have that has worked so well. You simply can't go to work if you can't get to work and now more and more people will be able to find work, get there, and either move off of welfare or stay off welfare. Now, let me also say that we're entering the final weeks of the congressional session. We are already well past the end of the budget year, which ended on September 30th. And the Congress all wants to come home and campaign, but they have to finish their business first. And a lot of the business I think they ought to finish relates to the needs of the people who have come through the doors at Mi Casa. Congress should raise the minimum wage, again. I have asked them to raise it by a dollar an hour over the next 2 years. That would have helped 10 million hardworking American families. I've also asked them to provide more tax relief for working people to increase the child care tax credit and make it refundable to help give families a long term care tax credit, because a lot of people are caring for elderly or disabled family members, and they can't afford to go to nursing homes, or they don't want them to, but they need some help at home to give a tax deduction for the cost of college tuition and to help people even with very modest incomes save for their own retirement. So there are very important things that can be done. I think the earned income tax credit, for which most of you with children are eligible, which has lifted over 2 million people out of poverty just in the last few years alone, should be expanded again, particularly for people with three or more kids. The way the earned income tax credit works, you max out if you have a certain number of children. But there are a lot of people that have four kids or five kids, that are trying to work, and I believe they should be able to get more relief. So that's all very important, and I hope that will pass. Something else that I think would be really helpful is that our budget has proposals to promote responsible fatherhood and to increase child support paid directly to families. Now, if the States collect your child support, they can withhold a portion of it because of the cost of collecting it. But if the child support check is meager, you may not wind up much ahead, even if the father is paying the child support. So we propose to change that. I think there is very broad support for this, and I hope and believe it will pass before the Congress goes home. We also have proposals that would help families save and expand access to child care and housing and health care. So I hope very much that this will pass. And finally, let me say for the people who live where the jobs aren't, there is a very important bipartisan initiative that I've worked on with the Speaker of the House, called the new markets initiative, which would give American investors the same tax incentives to invest in the poor areas in America we now give them to invest in poor areas in Latin America, Africa, Asia, or some place else. I think that a lot more can be done, but I hope and believe that this transportation assistance will really help. So let me end where I began. We are moving close to a country where there really is opportunity for every responsible citizen. But we're not there yet. We are a stronger American community than we were 8 years ago, but there is still friction and sources of division within our American community. Now, we've got the most expansive, strong economy we've ever had, and I think we ought to set our sights on big goals. Our goals should be prosperity for every family in every community still left behind. Our goals should be no child and no working family in poverty. And what I want to say to you is that we can achieve these goals and still keep the overall economy strong for the rest of America. We can pay the debt off in 12 years. That will keep interest rates down it will keep businesses expanding. It will leave funds for people to make pay raises. We can do this, but we have to decide to do it. And I just hope that not only in Colorado but all over America, people will see and hear about Mi Casa because of my trip here. And I hope every place where people feel good because they've reduced the welfare rolls 40 or 50 percent will understand that they can do much better when they see that Denver, thanks to people like you, got it down 90 percent. The transportation will help, but people have to make the initiative at the local level, too. So thank you. October 14, 2000 Good morning. This week an apparent terrorist attack claimed the lives of brave American sailors off the coast of Yemen, and new violence erupted between Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Our sailors aboard the U.S.S. Cole were simply doing their duty, but a dangerous duty, standing guard for peace. Yesterday I spoke to the captain of the Cole, Commander Kirk Lippold. On behalf of all Americans, I expressed our deepest sympathies and commended him and his crew for the great job they're doing at this very difficult time. To our sailors' families, let me say we hold you in our prayers. We will never know your loved ones as you did or remember them as you will, but we join you in grief. For your loss is America's loss, and we bow our heads to God in gratitude for the lives and service of your loved ones. In their honor, I have ordered that flags be flown at halfstaff in the United States, our territories, our Embassies, military bases, and naval vessels until sunset on Monday. As we see the flag this weekend, we should think of the families and the sacrifice they have made for America. This tragic loss should remind us all that even when America is not at war, the men and women of our military risk their lives every day in places where comforts are few and dangers are many. No one should think for a moment that the strength of our military is less important in times of peace, because the strength of our military is a major reason we are at peace. History will record our triumphs on the battlefield, but no one can ever write a full account of the wars never fought, the losses never suffered, the tears never shed because the men and women of our military were risking their lives for peace. We should never, ever forget that. Our military power is not all people see when ships of the United States enter a foreign port. When U.S. sailors head down the brow of the ship or our troops set foot on foreign soil, our hosts see in the uniform of the United States men and women of every race, creed, and color who trace their ancestry to every region on Earth, yet are bound together by a common commitment to freedom and a common pride in being Americans. That image of unity amidst diversity must confound the minds of the hate filled cowards who killed our sailors. They can take innocent life, they can cause tears and anguish, but they can never heal or build harmony or bring people together. That is work only free, law abiding people can do. And that is why we will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to find those who killed our sailors and hold them accountable, and why we will never let the enemies of freedom and peace stop America from seeking peace, fighting terrorism, and promoting freedom. For only by defending our people, our interests, and our values will we redeem the lives of our sailors and ruin the schemes of their killers. That includes, of course, our efforts to promote peace in the Middle East. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the greatest tragedies of our time and one of the very hardest problems to solve. Every step forward has been marked with pain. Each time the forces of reconciliation have reached out, the forces of destruction have lashed out. The violence we've seen there demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the alternative to peace is unacceptable, and that no one will gain from an endless contest of inflicting and absorbing pain. Ending the violence and getting people of the Middle East back to dialog will be hard after what has happened. But no matter how difficult that task may be, no matter how terrible the images of this week's violence, the effort must continue, with America's strong support. We must do so because we have a profound national interest in peace in the Middle East and a very special bond to the State of Israel. As in all the world's troubled places, our efforts do not guarantee success. But not to try is to guarantee failure. So today I ask your prayers for our men and women in uniform, for the families of our fallen sailors, and for all those here and everywhere who hope and work for a world at peace. Thanks for listening. October 12, 2000 The President. I have just been meeting with my national security team on today's tragic events in the Middle East, and I would like to make a brief statement. First, as you know, an explosion claimed the lives of at least four sailors on one of our naval vessels, the U.S.S. Cole, this morning. Many were injured a number are still missing. They were simply doing their duty. The ship was refueling in a port in Yemen while en route to the Persian Gulf. We're rushing medical assistance to the scene, and our prayers are with the families who have lost their loved ones or are still awaiting news. If, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable. If their intention was to deter us from our mission of promoting peace and security in the Middle East, they will fail utterly. I have directed the Department of Defense, the FBI, and the State Department to send officials to Yemen to begin the investigation. Secretary Albright has spoken with President Salih of Yemen, and we expect to work closely with his government to that effect. Our military forces and our Embassies in the region have been on heightened state of alert for some time now. I have ordered our ships in the region to pull out of port and our land forces to increase their security. Tensions are extremely high today throughout the entire region, as all of you know. I strongly condemn the murder of Israeli soldiers in Ram Allah today. While I understand the anguish Palestinians feel over the losses they have suffered, there can be no possible justification for mob violence. I call on both sides to undertake a cease fire immediately and immediately to condemn all acts of violence. Finally, let me say this. The Israeli Palestinian conflict is one of the greatest tragedies and most difficult problems of our time. But it can be solved. The progress of the last few years progress that brought Israel to the hope of a final peace with true security and Palestinians to the hope of a sovereign state recognized by the entire world was not made through violence. It happened because both sides sat down together, negotiated, and slowly built up the trust that violence destroys. Now is the time to stop the bloodshed, to restore calm, to return to dialog and ultimately to the negotiating table. The alternative to the peace process is now no longer merely hypothetical. It is unfolding today before our very eyes. Now I need to go back to work on this, and so I won't take questions right now. But the Department of Defense will offer a briefing today and will be able to answer the questions that are relevant to today's events. Thank you. October 05, 2000 Thank you very much. Thank you for the wonderful welcome. Thank you, President Shapiro, for your distinguished leadership here and the vital work you did during the course of our common Presidencies. It occurred to me that this might be the only place in America where people thought Woodrow Wilson got a demotion when he was elected President of the United States. Laughter Thank you, Dean Rothschild. And thank you, Ruth Miller, for putting off your retirement so I could come here today. I want to thank Professor Sean Wilentz for putting on this conference and for his many acts of generosity and kindness and support for our efforts over the last 8 years. I'd like to thank the Congressman from Princeton, Representative Rush Holt, for coming here. Thank you. I know this is not really a political event, but I can't help noting that Rush Holt is the only bona fide scientist in the Congress, and Lord knows, we need at least one. Another Member of Congress wanted to come here today, Senator John Edwards from North Carolina, a good friend of mine, whose daughter Katherine is in the freshman class. And I promised to give his excuses to his daughter and the rest of you, but they are voting in the Senate today. And part of the Progressives' tradition is showing up. Laughter And so he's showing up down in Washington. And I thank you, Katharine Strong Gilbert, for giving me this Whig Clio Award. You know, James Madison is a very important figure to every American and every President who cares, in particular, about the framework and history of the Constitution. But it's interesting to me that he actually participated in debates here in the 18th century, including one with Aaron Burr, where Madison was the Whig and Burr was the Clio. It was that debate that produced a memorable line that is too often attributed to me The era of Whig Government is over. Laughter I must say, when I first saw the program for this conference, I felt some ambivalence. The student in me wanted to come here and stay for the whole thing. But the politician in me wondered what in the living daylights I was doing here. I'm supposed to lead off a group of people whose books I have read, who know more about the subject I'm supposed to address than I ever will. I can say that I had some unique experience in carrying on the progressive tradition. I always felt that the work we did the last 8 years made us the heir of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson Al Gore and me, our entire administration. And I have a fascination with that period of history. I own a lot of Theodore Roosevelt's books in the first edition, including a fascinating account of how he organized the Rough Riders. I've also got a wonderful book that Owen Wister, the writer of westerns, wrote about his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, when, like many of you, they were undergraduates together at Harvard. The other day I acquired Joseph Tumulty's book he was Woodrow Wilson's private secretary about his relationship with President Wilson, both as Governor and as President. It's a fascinating account of the time, by someone who was admittedly biased but still had a unique perspective. So I've thought a lot about this period. And I suppose as a politician, I should give myself the leeway of quoting Theodore Roosevelt, who said in his speech on the new nationalism, "I do not speak merely from a historical standpoint. It is of little use for us to pay lip service to the mighty men of the past, unless we sincerely endeavor to apply those qualities to the problems of the present." It is in that spirit that I would like to say a few words today, about the Progressive tradition, about what it means for today and how it is part, I believe, of a larger ongoing debate in American history about the whole idea of America. What does the Nation mean? What does it mean to be an American? The Progressives thought we could only keep faith with the past by keeping faith with the future. Their time had much in common with ours, and therefore, our responsibilities have much in common with theirs, to preserve what is enduring but to adapt our Nation time and again to what is new. Woodrow Wilson said, "It behooves us once again to stand face to face with our ideals, to renew our enthusiasm, to reckon again our duties, to take fresh views of our aims, and fresh courage for their pursuit." These words ring with relevance for your time. Not simply because we stand at the dawn of a new century, as Wilson and Roosevelt did, but because this time, like theirs, is characterized by swift and stunning change. Like the industrial revolution, this information revolution is a true seismic shift. It alters forever the way we work, live, relate to each other and those beyond our borders. The consequences of the digital chip, nano technology, the Internet, and the sequencing of the human genome will be every bit as profound, if not more profound, than those of the telephone, the assembly line, and the vast migration of Americans to the cities and the opening of America to its first great wave of immigrants. But these are only the most obvious parallels between the Progressive Era and what I call this time, the last time I came to Princeton, a new progressive era. I also believe in a larger sense the Progressive Era and this time represent two of the five pivotal points in American history, when we have been called upon to reaffirm and to redefine not just the role of Government for new times but the very idea of the American Nation. That debate has gone on from the beginning. First there was the debate which George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Marshall won over Thomas Jefferson and his friends, about whether we were preeminently going to be one Nation or a just a little bit stronger confederation of States. I have to say out of deference to Mr. Jefferson that after he became President, I suspect he was glad he lost the argument, as he sent out Lewis and Clark, imposed the infamous embargo, and bought Louisiana, which at the time cost the equivalent of one full year's budget of the Federal Government. Can you imagine what would happen if I came to the Congress and said laughter "Have I got a deal for you." Laughter "Just 1.9 trillion. What difference does it make?" Laughter The second great debate we had about the idea of the Nation occurred obviously in the days leading up to and during and immediately after the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln saved the Union by moving it closer to the true ideals of the Declaration of Independence and, as Gary Wills has so brilliantly argued, literally redefining the Constitution closer toward those ideals, in the Gettysburg Address. The third great point was in the Progressive Era, when Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt presided over an America fully entering the industrial revolution. Then the fourth time was during the New Deal, the Second World War, and its immediate aftermath with the dawn of the cold war, when Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman gave us our first comprehensive social safety net and an institutionalized commitment to American leadership for peace and freedom in the world. Now, at the dawn of this global information age, Al Gore and I have been working to adapt all of the domestic and foreign policies of the United States to these sweeping changes in science and technology, in social diversity and pluralism, and in increasing global interdependence. History has taught Americans not to stand passively in the face of change. What the Progressive Presidents understood so clearly, from Teddy Roosevelt to Wilson to FDR and Truman to Kennedy and Johnson, is the understanding that America either will shape change or be shaped by it. As I've already said, I believe the time in which we live bears the most resemblance to the Progressive Era. But there are also elements of those other great hingepoints in American history in this time, too. You can see it in the fight we had with the Republican Congress that led to the shutdown of the Government. You can see it in our efforts to build one America across all the lines that divide us. You can see it in our struggle to end genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and to build binding ties to Africa, Latin American and Asian nations with whom we have not been closely aligned in the past. The central lesson of the progressive is that you either have to shape change consistent with your values, or you will be shaped by it in ways that make it more difficult for you to live by your values. To retreat from responsibility is to invite instability. To embrace the obligation of leadership has consistently under progressive times led to better lives for all Americans. Wilson and Roosevelt made an enemy of outdated orthodoxy, replacing them with what Teddy's famous cousin Franklin Roosevelt called "bold, persistent experimentation." As many of the scholars here have argued, and doubtless will argue with greater clarity than I can, the progressive legacy is not primarily a set of programs that no longer have great relevance to us but a vital set of principles the idea that new conditions demand a new approach to Government. When Teddy Roosevelt became President, few Americans looked to him, to his office, or even to their Government to solve their problems. At the end of the 19th century, the White House was weak the Congress was at the mercy of special interests. Roosevelt's genius was to redefine the role of Government and the role of the President, to protect the public interest and to act as an accountable agent of change. This is an ideal as old as Madison, but Roosevelt and Wilson gave it new meaning for a new era. What is its meaning today? When I ran for President in 1992, our Government was discredited. In fact, you could hardly run for President unless you had something bad to say about the Government. Indeed, part of the political genius of the ascendency of President Reagan and his associates was to attain power by discrediting the very idea of Government. They basically were able to say things like, "Government couldn't run a bake sale. The Government would mess up a twocar parade." And they found huge majorities of Americans sort of nodding their heads. Those in the progressive tradition, I believe, had given them some ammunition by clinging to old programs, bureaucracies, and approaches that no longer worked. Then the conservatives used the failures as an excuse to do nothing on the domestic front. Some of our leaders literally made a virtue of their endless capacity to tell the American people how bad the Government was. And then when those who were reacting against the progressive tradition took power, they seemed determined to prove it by digging us a huge budgetary hole, quadrupling the Nation's debt in 12 years. So our economy sank our society became considerably more divided and predictably, public confidence in our democratic Government collapsed. That's why, when I ran in 1992, I said that it would be necessary to change our party, change our national leadership, and change our Nation. Al Gore and I believed that we had to find a new way, something now popularly called around the world, "a third way," a way back to enduring values, a way beyond a Government profoundly indifferent to people's problems, a way forward to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. We committed to reinvent Government so it could function as it does best in an information society, as a catalyst, a partner to the private sector in creating opportunity, jobs, and hope and providing our citizens with the tools they need to make the most of their own lives. That, too, of course, is a principle as old as our Republic, opportunity for all. And whether we're talking about the information age, the industrial age, or the turn from the 18th to the 19th century, economic growth and opportunity have always gone hand in hand. That's why we set out to build an economic strategy that would work for this time, rooted in fiscal discipline, investment in our people and our future, and expanding our economic ties with the rest of the world. Well, lucky for us, or I wouldn't be here talking today, it's worked out pretty well. We've gone from record deficits to record surpluses. Our economy has created 22 million jobs. We're in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history. But in the progressive tradition, to use President Kennedy's words, the rising economy is lifting all boats. The Census Bureau reports that in the last year, typical household income rose to the highest level ever recorded, breaking 40,000 for the first time up since 1993 by 6,300, after inflation. The poverty rate has fallen to 11.8 percent, the lowest in 20 years. Senior poverty is below 10 percent for the first time ever. Child poverty dropped by the largest amount since 1966. Hispanic and African American poverty are the lowest since separate statistics have been kept. Since 1993, 7 million Americans have moved out of poverty, over 2 million last year alone. Now, a century ago, economic growth was generated by large industrial organizations, popularly called the trust then. Today, economic growth is largely generated by big ideas, which is why there are so many young people like you making a fortune in dot com companies. The antitrust provisions and worker provisions that were developed in the Progressive Era to make the economy work and to give more people a chance to share in it still matters today. And they have been built on, modified, and changed, but they still matter today. But today we need even more focus on boosting ideas and innovation, creating the conditions for prosperity, and again, giving everybody the tools they need to succeed in a very different and, in some ways, much less organized world. You can see our efforts there, just for example in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, where the Vice President and I fought for the E rate so that the poorest schools and hospitals and libraries could all afford to be hooked into the Internet and where we fought for a framework that favored competition from new companies over giving all the business of the new information economy to existing big enterprises. Again, it's worked reasonably well. There are hundreds of thousands of new jobs, thousands of new companies out there, and it's an example of how we tried to change the laws and the framework to meet what was best for opportunity for the largest number of Americans, and to give all of our people, especially our young people, the tools they need to take advantage of the age in which we live. So, in that sense, the nature of opportunity, a constant value, is changing. At the time our Nation was founded, opportunity most of all meant the freedom to carve a farm and an existence out of the forest frontier. In the industrial age, the progressives saw that it meant something different. It meant a high school education, a vocational training, preserving competition, protecting American workers from abuses, and keeping children out of the workplace when appropriate. Today it means mastering new tools and technologies, being able to think broadly, adjust quickly, and being able to keep learning for a lifetime. This morning, for example, at the White House, I met with House and Senate Democrats to push the Congress again to adopt our educational proposals, because I think they are more than ever before at the core of the concept of opportunity and at the core of our ability to keep changing and building an ever more progressive society. Even though we balanced the budget these last 8 years and run a surplus and we've eliminated hundreds of programs, we've also doubled investment in education and training. More than 10 million Americans this year will take advantage of the HOPE scholarship and lifelonglearning tax credit. We reorganized the student loan program to save students 8 billion in student loan repayments since 1993. We raised the minimum wage, an old tool that I think is still very important in new times, and I hope we can raise it again before the Congress goes home. But we took a new tool, the earned income tax credit, and doubled it so that it's helping this year alone 15 million families to work their way into the middle class. We adopted an empowerment zone program that the Vice President ran so ably, which has enabled thousands of jobs to be created in communities that otherwise would have been totally left behind in this economic recovery because they were remote or poor, because they didn't have people with a lot of skills that were well suited to the trends of the times. We created community development financial institutions to get capital to people who couldn't go into a normal bank and produce a record that would generate a loan. We also did as much as we could to try to help people move from welfare to work and to take maximum advantage of the new economy by investing in education, child care, and transportation, recognizing that we live in a place where very often the pool of available workers is here, usually in a city, and the pool of available jobs at their skill level is here, usually in the suburbs, usually with no public transport in between. To try to help people balance work and family, the United States began to join what most other industrial nations have been doing for years, by adopting the family and medical leave law, which now over 20 million Americans have used to take some time off when a baby is born or when a family member is sick without losing their job. And I just predict to you, all of you young people out here, this will be one of the big debates over the next decade, because we're the best country in the world at keeping the hassles of starting a business down, providing capital to start businesses, providing an environment in which people can flourish, but we lag way behind a lot of other nations in the progressive tradition in simply saying that the most important work of any society is raising children and that work will be more productive if people who are working who have kids don't have to worry about the welfare of their children. That's why we have to do more for child care. That's why we should expand family leave. That's why we should work more on flexible leave. When I became President, only 3 million people were making a living primarily in their own home. When I ran for reelection, 20 million people were making a living primarily in their own home. By the time you vote in November for the first President of the 21st century, we may be up to 30 million people. I don't have the latest figures, but it's stunning. Part of the reason is technology makes it possible the Internet makes it possible. But part of the reason is we haven't done as much as we should have to help people succeed at society's enduring work, raising children, and all the new work we're doing and the fact that more people than ever want to work or have to work and ought to be able to do so. I am very glad that more and more Americans are sharing in our prosperity. But the other thing I want to say is that still a lot of folks have been left behind. Most of them live in inner cities or small rural towns or on or around Native American reservations. And one of the big challenges now to sort of perfect this progressive movement is to figure out how to bring those people into the circle of opportunity. I hope very much that, before I leave office, the Congress will pass the new markets initiative that I worked on with the Speaker of the House in a bipartisan fashion. I won't go through all the details, but essentially what it says is we ought to give wealthy Americans with money the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America we provide to invest in poor areas around the world, because we believe that we can do this. And we ought to put the infrastructure there. For those of you who have never been on an American Indian reservation, let me tell you, just for example, at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the most historic parts of American history, the home of the Lakota Sioux, who were the tribe led by an Indian chief named Crazy Horse that dispatched General Custer in the late 19th century the unemployment rate is 73 percent. I was at Shiprock in northern New Mexico, one of the most beautiful places in our country, the other day at the Navaho Reservation, where the unemployment rate is over 50 percent 70 percent of the people don't have homes telephones in their homes. I was introduced by a young woman who won a contest, an academic contest at her school, the prize was a computer, and she couldn't log onto the Internet because there was not a phone line in her home. In our country, at our level of wealth, that is unconscionable. And this cannot rightly be called a full Progressive Era until we have addressed these challenges. We still have to be constantly, restlessly searching for ways to expand the circle of opportunity. This, too, is a principle rooted firmly in the Progressive Era but also in our Nation's founding. Remember what the Framers said They were committed to forming "a more perfect Union." They never said the Union would be perfect, that we would ever reach complete harmony in our living with our ideals, but that we had a constant, endless lifetime obligation to perfect the Union. And if I could leave any of you with a thought that I hope you will have in your mind as you, as citizens, go to the polls, and then as you, as citizens, build your own lives, it is that we get a chance like we've got today maybe once every 50 years, maybe even more seldom, where we have both prosperity, social progress, coupled with national self confidence and the absence of serious crisis at home or threat abroad, to really imagine the future we would like to build and then go about building it. And in my view, one of the most important things we have achieved is not any of these specific things people always talk about but just giving you the chance to build the future of your dreams. And I hope that decision will be made consistent with the values, the vision, and the record of the Progressive Era in America. Theodore Roosevelt said, "The people have emphatically expressed their desire that our principles be kept substantially unchanged, although, of course, applied in a progressive spirit to meet changing conditions." That's what you have to do. I just want to make one other point that I think is of equal importance. I believe that in order to preserve a new Progressive Era, we must go much further than we have in our own national consciousness in understanding that our continued prosperity, as well as our security, requires us to continue to be involved in the world, to lead in the world, and to cooperate in the world. Almost a century ago, Woodrow Wilson described the vision of collective peacekeeping, global security, the rights of nations against the backdrop of the looming threat, and then the fact, of a brutal modern, all consuming war, a war that is difficult for young people to imagine. In one European battle in World War I, 900,000 people were lost, because they had modern technology and they were stuck in old patterns of fighting digging trenches and shooting each other and moving up, line after line after line, that might have worked fine if they'd had bows and arrows or even Civil War era rifles and cannons but was an absolute disaster when modern technology was married to old ideas both geopolitical ideas, which led to the war, and the ideas of military strategy with which it was carried out. You should remember that today and try to make sure that the ideas you have are equal to the technology and the realities of modern life. When Woodrow Wilson painted this idealistic vision few of his fellow countrymen and women listened. A lot of people thought he was an idealist who'd passed his prime. And after he was no longer on the scene and the reaction prevailed, as it always does after periods of progressivism, Professor Schlesinger has told us in his writings on the cycles of history, we had to learn in a very hard way that America could not safely or responsibly withdraw from the world. Now we've had two cold wars and a long and bitter two World Wars excuse me and a long and bitter cold war. We live in a time when new democracies are emerging around the world. When you walk out of here, if you turn on CNN, you'll see the emergence I hope in Serbia, with a lot of young people like you fighting for the future you take for granted. More people live under free governments of their own choosing today than ever before. For the first time in history, more than half of the people on this planet live under governments of their own choosing, throwing off the yoke of oppression. Many of them, but not all, are also enjoying newfound prosperity. We are closer than ever to redeeming the vision of Woodrow Wilson, of reaching his dream of a world full of free markets, free elections, and free peoples working together. But we're still not there. And there are a lot of obstacles in the way, not least of which is the continuing bedrock of reluctance in our own society to pay our fair share and do our fair part, on the part of some conservatives, and on the part of some progressives who embrace the change that is the global economy and shape it, instead of denying it and pretending that as if we were Luddites that we can make it go away. And you have to think about that. What does it mean to you what Wilson said and what Roosevelt said. They understood at the start of what has been called the American Century, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman understood when they created the U.N. and NATO and the Breton Woods institutions, that the United States simply cannot be partly in the world, dipping in when it suits our purpose, hunkering down when it doesn't that we can't relate to our friends in fits and starts we can't lead just when it suits us and then tell people we're too busy when it doesn't. We have not made that decision yet. You can see it in the ambivalence the Congress has felt when they supported me on NAFTA and the World Trade Organization and bringing China into the WTO and when they wouldn't go along with giving me the same trade authority that Presidents have had for nearly 30 years now, to negotiate comprehensive trade agreements with other countries, and have them voted up or down. You can see it in the fact that a strong conservative bloc in the Senate and in the House have actually spent 8 years demanding 8 years the most prosperous years in our country's history, saying that the most important thing to do at the U.N. is to lower America's share of peacekeeping and lower our percentage of the total dues of the United Nations. You can see it in the breathtaking, and I think horribly shortsighted defeat in the U.S. Senate of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the first major treaty to be defeated since the Senate defeated Woodrow Wilson with the League of Nations Treaty. I must say, for my country's sake, I certainly hope it doesn't have a life risk consequence, and I don't think it will, if the American people decide that these matters are important. We live in a time when people have lots of opinions on lots of things. They're absolutely flooded with information. So if you took a survey in America and you said, "Should America pay its fair share to the U.N. should America responsibly participate in peacekeeping, because other people share the load should we have the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and have a cooperative approach to reducing the nuclear threats and other threats of weapons of mass destruction in the future?" you'd get big majorities that would say yes. But most Americans don't understand how important this is and what a significant piece it is of building a new era of progress. So it doesn't tend to be a voting issue. And whenever important new things are not voting issues in a free society, then entrenched, old interests tend to prevail, and we get in trouble. So I ask you all to think about that. The challenges of this new century are far more diverse than our predecessors could have foreseen. But all the good things that we have don't make all the bad problems go away. Information technology will not resolve all conflicts between nations. Indeed, it creates some new challenges. It enables, for example, networks of terrorists, narcotraffickers, international criminals to communicate with each other with greater speed, clarity, and often with less chance of being caught. New technology allows people to imagine weapons of mass destruction that are made smaller, just like computers, encased in small plastic containers that don't show up on airport metal detectors, that present new threats in the ongoing historical battle between the organized forces of destruction and the organized, and sometimes not so well organized, forces of civilization. So, for all the good things that are happening, we can't make all the problems go away. Therefore, the expansion of global commerce, the growth of democracy, the rise of other centers of economic activity does not diminish our responsibility to lead. It heightens it, and it requires that we do so in a more cooperative fashion. As American interests evolve, I believe we can stay rooted to the principles of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. I think we stay true to those principles when we change. For example, I think we're being true to the principles of the Progressive Era when we provide debt relief to the world's poorest countries. It's unconscionable that these countries are making interest payments that are often half or more of their annual Government budget, instead of spending the money on education and health care and the development of their nation. And they can't pay the money back to us anyway. Why are we doing this? It doesn't make any sense. So we have a new idea. Don't just give uncritical debt relief. Give debt relief to countries that can demonstrate they're not putting the money in Swiss bank accounts or building military or other instruments of oppression but only putting the money into education, health care, and responsible development. That is, in my judgment, a critical component of progressivism in a global age, just as I think it's important to fight maladies like AIDS, TB, and malaria. Those three things claim one fourth of the lives that are lost in the world every year today. One quarter of all the people who will die in the year 2000 will die of AIDS, TB, or malaria. And we have it within our power to do something about it and also to lead the world toward the development of an AIDS vaccine and to make the drugs more widely available and to do more about TB and malaria. We ought to do that. In an interdependent world, we'll be better off if people who are plagued have their plagues alleviated. We ought to do more, in my judgment, to support poor villagers in remote countries by giving them loans so they can start businesses and build a self sustaining life, to reinforce democracy, and to build from the grassroots up, countries that can be good partners with us in the future. We ought to do more to insist that a more open economy also be a more fair one or, in the common parlance, to put a human face on the global economy. We also stay true to the vision of Wilson and Roosevelt when we do our part to keep the peace and to support brave people struggling for the quiet miracle of a normal life, whether they're in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, in a small place like East Timor, a long way from here, in a poor country like Haiti or a country plagued by narcotraffickers and civil war like Colombia, and especially in the Balkans, where the First World War began. There especially, the fight for freedom should still be our own. Freedom has made steady advances in Bosnia and Croatia and Romania and Bulgaria and, today, as I said earlier, in Serbia, where a decade ago the forces of destruction began their march across the Balkans. Now the march of freedom is gaining new ground. Yesterday, the Serbian police went into the coal mines and refused to fire on the coal miners. Today, in the Parliament building, there are, as I said, thousands of young people, like you, and not so young people, like me, standing up there, saying they want their country back. They want to be free. They voted, and they want their vote respected. The people of Serbia have spoken with their ballot they have spoken on the street. I hope the hour is near when their voices will be heard and we can welcome them to democracy, to Europe, to the world's communities. When they do, we will move as quickly as possible to lift the sanctions and build the kind of responsible partnership that the people there deserve. We have made the world, I believe, more safe against force and selfish aggression. But we know, like Roosevelt and Wilson before us, that no peace is lasting unless it is backed by the consistent, dedicated leadership of nations that have the wealth, size, and power to do the right thing. Here in America and in more and more nations around the world, progressive parties are in power. Every now and then, we all get together and have dinner and try to help each other. And we try to figure out how to keep this going, how to keep up the fight for reform, for justice, for opportunity for all, for freedom. I believe that the continuation of this legacy in our time depends as much as anything else on whether we actually believe in our common humanity and the primary importance of acting on our increasing interdependence. There's a fascinating book that's been published sometime in the last year, I think, by Robert Wright, called "Non Zero." Some of you have perhaps read it. The title refers to game theory. A zero sum game is one that in order for me to win, you have to lose. A game like the Presidential election. A non zero sum game is one where in order for me to win, you have to win, too. And Wright attempts to make a historical argument through all the tragedies, travesties, brutalities of human history, including the gross abuses of science and medicine under the Nazis and the gross abuses of organization under totalitarian regimes of the 20th century attempts to prove Martin Luther King's moral assertion that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice, by arguing that, we are consistently growing more interdependent and that the more interdependent we become, the more we are forced to look for solutions in which in order for me to win, you have to win, too non zero sum solutions. The whole idea of the Progressive Era was that everybody should be treated with dignity everybody deserves certain minimal things in life that the power of government should be arrayed against private power, so that individual people who are equal under the law, all had at least a fair chance at life. In this era, I often say, in my sort of Arkansas way, that everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance and we all do better when we work together. That's what I believe. That, I think, is an enduring truth of the American dream, going back to the Founders, going back to all the voluntary societies that de Toqueville chronicled so eloquently, almost 200 years ago. In this time, we can have a progressive era that outlasts the one you came here to study, if we are faithful to its values, if we understand we have to change even more rapidly and perhaps even more profoundly than they did, and if we acknowledge that a pre condition of true independence, in the old fashioned American way in this very new age, is having some humility and compassion and understanding of our interdependence, which is founded on an acknowledgement, an acceptance, a celebration of our common humanity. That, after all, is what led to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It's what led Abraham Lincoln to lay down his life to hold the country together. And it's what gave us the Progressive Era, the sense that we all matter, that we were all connected, and that we were all entitled, each in our own way, to have a chance to play a part in the endless effort to create "a more perfect Union." The progressives have been important to America. They have redefined the idea of a nation in ways that were sorely needed. But you are in the middle of what could be the longest and most significant Progressive Era in American history. I ask you to study the one that happened before but to fully live the one that is unfolding before your eyes. Thank you very much. September 27, 2000 Thank you very much. I appreciate what Mayor Rendell said, once again illustrating the complete accuracy of Clinton's third law of politics Whenever possible, be introduced by someone you've appointed to high office. Laughter But I loved it. I want to thank all of the people who are responsible for this wonderful evening tonight. Jess and Betty Jo, thank you so much Bill and Andrea. Thank you, Garry. I thank my friend of nearly 30 years, Billie Carr, for being here tonight. And I thank all the State legislators and party officials, and especially Representatives Max Sandlin and Sheila Jackson Lee, who make my life so much easier in Washington. I thank Lloyd and B.A. Bentsen for being here tonight. I want to tell you, I just was with another group over at John Eddie and Sheridan William's house, and I said, people are always asking me we had all this great economic news, and they're talking about how brilliant my economic advisers were, how brilliant Lloyd Bentsen was, and how brilliant Bob Rubin and all the others were, and they said, "What great new innovation did they bring to Washington?" I always say, "What they brought to Washington was arithmetic." Laughter Lloyd and I tell them, "Where we came from, we weren't very smart, and we thought the numbers had to add up, or it wouldn't work." Laughter Sure enough, it worked out all right, and the prosperity our country enjoys today is in no small measure because of the service that Lloyd Bentsen rendered to our Nation. And I thank you so much. I want to thank my longtime friend Governor Mark White for being here. We were colleagues together back in the long ago, when we were working on improving our schools, and I think the children of Texas are still benefiting from a lot of the work you did, way back then. And I thank you for being here tonight, Mark. And I want to thank the entertainers. I have special feelings about all of them. Red Buttons and I were together in Los Angeles at an event that we did for Hillary right before the Democratic Convention started. He was funny then he was funnier tonight. And I was thinking, I wonder if I can tell those jokes when I'm not President anymore laughter or will I have to wait until I'm 81? Laughter But he was great. I loved it. The last time he spoke, I wrote down some of the jokes. Tonight I didn't even bother to write them down. I know I can't tell them until I get out of office. I let it go. Laughter I want to thank my friend Mary Chapin Carpenter for being here. What an immense talent she is. And she's been so generous to me and to our party over these last 8 years. I'm very, very grateful to her. And I want to thank Billy Ray Cyrus. I, too, will never forget the day we were on the train together going from West Virginia to Kentucky. He told me his father was a local Democratic official and that, even though he'd enjoyed some success in life, he had not strayed from the path his father blazed. We had a great day on that train, and I'll never forget it. And I did ask for that song. Every time Billy Ray Cyrus sings "Achy Breaky Heart," it reminds me of one thing I heard Tina Turner say one time, singing "Proud Mary," which was her first hit. When she sang it to us in Arkansas, it was about 25 years after she recorded it, and the crowd was cheering. And she said, "You know, I've been singing this song for 25 years, but it gets better every time I do it." Laughter That's the way I feel about him. He was great tonight. Let's give them all a hand. Applause There are people in this room tonight that I first met nearly 30 years ago. There are people in this room tonight that I haven't yet met, and I hope to shake your hand. Most of the people in this room tonight I met 28 years ago, plus, probably almost 29 years ago are probably immensely surprised my life turned out the way it did. Laughter But we have been friends all this long time. And fate had it that the first time I ran for President, I had to run against two guys from Texas. And now here I am going out with another nominee of the Republican Party from Texas. And throughout it all, I have really treasured the people who have supported me and Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore and what we tried to do there's a very large number of Texans who have actually participated in our administration and served in one capacity or another and the warm welcome I've always received here. So the most important thing I could say to you tonight is a simple thank you. I have loved it every time I've been here. I'm grateful, and I'm glad we tried to win it, even when we couldn't. It's been a joy, and I thank you for that. Now, I want to amplify a little on what Ed Rendell said. I'm working as hard in this campaign as I ever have, and I'm not running for anything. For the first time since 1974, I'm not on the ballot. Most days I'm okay about it. Laughter I tell everybody, now that my party has a new leader and my family has a new candidate, I'm the Cheerleader in Chief in America, and I'm glad to do it. I'd just like to take a couple of moments tonight to ask you to think about the future. I am very grateful that our country is better off today, by virtually every measure, than it was 8 years ago. And I am grateful for whatever role I and our administration had in it. But I am quite sure that the stakes in this election, though very different in 2000 than 1992, are every bit as high, perhaps higher. And if you'll just give me a couple of minutes, I'll try to tell you why, because I want to ask you to do something about it, even beyond the contribution you've made tonight. When I ran for President, I know the American people took a chance on me. My opponent, the incumbent President, used to refer to me as, after all, just the Governor of a small southern State. And back in '92, I was so naive, I thought it was a compliment. Laughter And you know what? After all this time, I still do. So I can imagine how many people in 1992 went into the polling place saying, "My God, can I really vote for that guy? He's 46 years old and may not be old enough to be President. He's just been the Governor of that little bitty State, wherever it is. All the Republicans just say terrible things about it, and every now and then the media helps them along a little bit. Maybe I shouldn't do this. Oh, it's a big chance." I just wonder how many people went in there and said, "Oh, heck, I'm going to do it anyway." But come on, it wasn't that big a chance, because the country was in a ditch. I mean, we knew we had to change, right? Laughter Now, it's different. Now we have peace and prosperity, the absence of internal crisis or looming, looming external threat to our existence. And people sort of feel like they're free to do whatever they want with this election. I don't agree with that. I think I can say that, maybe with greater conviction and credibility because I'm not a candidate. I can't say it much better than I did out in Los Angeles, but I want you to know that all my life I have hoped that my country would be in the position it's in now, with prosperity and peace, where we're coming together, not being driven apart and where we're not up to our ears in debt anymore and we've actually got the chance to build the future of our dreams for our children. When Al Gore says, "You ain't seen nothing yet," I know it seems like a campaign slogan, but I actually believe it. I believe it, because it took a good while for us to turn this country around. I announced today that this year we'd have a surplus of 230 billion this year, the biggest in the history of the United States that by the end of the year, when I leave office, over the last 3 years we will have paid down 360 billion on the national debt. We will have reduced the debt by that much. Now, if I had come here in 1992 and said, "I want you to vote for me, and we'll balance the budget in 1997. And then in '98, '99, and 2000, we'll run surpluses, and by the time I leave, we'll pay off 360 billion of the national debt." Keep in mind, that year the deficit was 290 billion, projected to be 455 billion this year. We had 4 trillion in debt. We were spending almost 14 cents of every dollar that you pay in taxes just paying interest on that debt. So if I said, "Hey, vote for me, and I'll begin to get us out of debt," you'd say, "You know, he seems like such a nice person. It's too bad he's imbalanced." Laughter Nobody would have believed that. Arithmetic. Now, we also know that, as the study showed yesterday, poverty's at a 20 year low. Now all income groups' incomes are increasing more or less the same percentage terms. Last year we had the biggest drop in poverty every recorded for Hispanics and African Americans. We had a 34 year the largest poverty drop for children in 34 years. Two million people moved out of poverty this last year alone. Median income for Americans exceeded 40,000, for the first time in history. In real dollar terms, after inflation, the average family's income has gone up 6,300 since 1993. Now, this is not just about money. You heard Ed Rendell talking about it. It's not just about money. One of my other laws of politics is Whenever you hear a politician tell you this is not a money problem, 5 will get you 10 they're talking about somebody else's problem, not their problem. What do I mean by that? Work and a decent income gives dignity to life, structure to families, pride to children, and the room, the emotional as well as the financial space to do the other things that we really care most about in life. So I want to say that I don't think all these things that have happened were an accident. We had a different economic policy, a different education policy, a different environmental policy, a different health care policy, a different crime policy, a different welfare policy, a different foreign policy, and we had a different policy about what kind of country we were going to be and whether I was going to bring this country together across the racial and religious and other lines that divide us or keep on playing the politics of divide and conquer. And I choose unity, and I think it was the right decision. That's the Democratic decision. So here we are, all dressed up, and where are we going to go? I want to just say two things about it. Number one, even though there is no apparent internal threat and external crisis, there are big challenges out there. And we can now meet them, because we're in shape to meet them. We were handcuffed from meeting them 8 years ago. I'll tell you what some of them are and what we can do. We've got the biggest and most racially, ethnically, religiously diverse group of school kids in the history of our country. We can give them all a world class education. We actually know how to do it, and there are examples in virtually every State where it has been done, against all the odds. But if we want it, we have to have what I would call a standards plus approach. We've got to have high standards and accountability. But we've also got to be able to invest in modern schools, in Internet connections, in smaller classes, in well trained teachers, and after school programs for the kids that need it. But if we're willing to do it and have accountability, we can get there. We have to decide. I think we'll pay a terrible price if we don't do it. If we do it, we will be the country of all those in the world best prepared for the global information age, because of our diversity. Second thing, we've got to get ready for the aging of America. You live to be 65 in America today, your life expectancy is 82, highest in the world. Pretty soon, the fastest growing group of people in the world Lloyd's going to live to be 120, but fastest growing group of people in the world in America are people over 80, in percentage terms. The young people in this audience that have not had their children yet, when you have your children, if you have them over the next 10 years, starting within a couple years, young mothers will bring home from the hospital with their babies a little genome card that will be the inevitable result of the sequencing of the human genome, which I'm very proud was completed during my tenure. And I'm proud of the support we gave it, although a lot of countries worked on it and it's been worked on for years. But anyway, this little card that will say, now, your little girl or your little boy has the following genetic makeup, and there are the following problems in the gene map of your baby's body which may, for example, make it more likely for your child to develop Parkinson's disease or Alzheimer's or breast cancer. But if you do the following 10 things, you can cut the risk by 80 percent. That's going to happen. And then, pretty soon after that, they'll figure out a way to fix the broken parts of the gene, so that it won't be any time before the young people here, when they have their babies, will be bringing home children who have a life expectancy at birth of 90 years. Now, that's the good news. But when the baby boomers retire, there's only going to be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. And I think I can speak for my generation when I say, one of our nightmares is, we don't want our kids to go bankrupt or be unable to raise our grandchildren because of our retirement. So we have to protect and save and extend the life of Social Security and Medicare and add that prescription drug benefit, so that old age will be good and full and active as possible, but not a burden on our children and grandchildren huge challenge. Every advanced economy in the world's facing it. What are we going to do about global warming, and how are we going to keep getting enough energy to do what we have to do? Will we have to have more energy in the world? Of course, we will. Will we have to conserve more? You bet we will. Can we do both and protect and improve the environment? Absolutely. I'll give you one example. We've been funding research at the Agriculture Department on how to make ethanol energy efficient. The problem with all these biofuels is, it takes 7 gallons of gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol. But we're right on the verge of a chemical breakthrough that is the equivalent of what happened when crude oil was cracked chemically so that it could be refined and turned into gasoline or heating oil. And when that happens, you'll be able to make 8 gallons of biofuel off any Texas farm from one gallon of gasoline. And when that happens, it will be like getting 500 miles to the gallon. We're also very close to fuel cells, to alternative energy sources, which will dramatically change the future of transportation. So, can we grow the economy, have enough energy, and improve the environment at the same time? You bet we can, but not by accident. We'll have to decide. Now, those are just three issues. I could mention a zillion more. But we have to decide. And the thing that has bothered me about it bothers me about all elections, but it really bothers me now, because people have got to really think about this. Everybody kind of knew what the deal was in '92. So if you had a lot of that kind of smoke and mirrors coverage and it was this issue this week, underlying it, everybody knew what the deal was. Were we going to change or not? And in '96 everybody knew what the deal was. Has Bill Clinton done a good enough job for us to extend his contract? That was the issue. Were we going to build a bridge to the 21st century we could all walk across? Here we are in the 21st century. We all walked across it. Now where are we going, now that we're on the other side and we have the freedom to decide? And I will say again, sometimes it's harder to make a good decision when times are good than when they're bad. There's not a person in this room tonight over 30 years old who has not made a doozy of a mistake at least once in your life, not because your back was against the wall but because things were going so well for you, you thought you didn't have to concentrate. That is a condition of age I can say that everybody's been there. Countries are no different. We have to decide what we are going to do with this moment of prosperity. Last point There are real differences. We don't have to bad mouth the Republicans, and they don't have to bad mouth us. They might feel like they do, but they don't. And I'll say again what I said in Los Angeles. I wish we could just all stand up and say, "Look, why don't we say between now and November 7th, we will posit that our opponents are good, patriotic, God fearing people, who love their families and love their country and will do what they think is right? And why don't they posit the same things about us, so that we could get about the business of making an intelligent choice which requires us to understand what the differences are?" Here's where you come in. There are real differences here, and they'll affect the lives of everybody in this room and especially the young people. And they will determine whether we will make the most of a kind of a chance a country gets maybe once every 50 years to build the future of our dreams for our kids. Look at the economic choice. Do you like where we are and what we're doing? The Democratic plan is to have a tax cut that's focused on long term care, child care, college education deductions, and retirement savings, that's small enough to let us invest in education, health care, and the energy and national defense and other issues we have to deal with, and still get this country out of debt in 12 years, so we can keep interest rates coming down, keep the economy going. Their plan is to spend three quarters of the non Social Security surplus, and we all agree that we shouldn't ever spend the taxes you're paying for Social Security again, except for Social Security. That's what they say. They want to spend three quarters of it on a tax cut that a lot of you here would get more money out of than ours otherwise if you could afford to pay the ticket tonight, you'd get more money. A portion of the President's remarks were missing from the transcript released by the Office of the Press Secretary. They also want to partially privatize Social Security, which, if you're good in the stock market and you're under 40, might be good for you. But they say, if they're going to give you back 2 percent of your payroll to invest as you see fit but they're going to guarantee everybody who's 55 or over which next year will include me and they're going to give us what we'd be entitled to anyway. Well obviously, if you take the money out, you've got to put it back in, right? So there's a 1.6 trillion tax cut. Then there's a 1 trillion payback to Social Security. Okay, you've already spent all the non Social Security surplus and some of the Social Security tax. And this is before you factor in Government spending going up at not only inflation but inflation plus population growth, which is done for 50 years before you change the rules so that upper middle class people don't have their income taxed away by something called the alternative minimum tax, just by raising their income. That costs another couple of hundred billion dollars before you allow for any emergencies and we spent 30 billion on the farms in the last 4 years, because the farm prices have been so low. In other words, they're taking us back to deficits. But the good news is, you get a nice quick hit, if you're in an upper income group, of a nice tax cut, and then 3 or 4 years later, you say, "Oh, my goodness, we're back in the soup again." And then what happens? Interest rates will be higher. My Counsel of Economic Advisers says that our plan will keep interest rates a point lower, every year for a decade. Do you know what that's worth to an average person 10 years worth? It 390 billion in lower home mortgages, 30 billion in lower car payments, 15 billion in lower college loan payments, from lower interest rates. Never mind what it does for business more loans, more jobs, more investment, and a better stock market. So you've got to decide if you want the money now. If you want to take the money and run now, you should be for them. If you like what's happened in the last 8 years, you want us to take advantage of this to deal with the big challenges, to give a tax cut we can afford, and get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835, you should be with us. But no American should be under the illusion that there is not a stark, clear choice that will affect the lives of our children. And that's what this election ought to be about. You take health care. We're for a Patients' Bill of Rights. At least for me, not because I'm against managed care I was for managed care. When I became President, inflation in medical costs was going up at 3 times the rate of normal inflation. It was going to bankrupt the country. But the problem with any management system is, sometimes it forgets any system why you organize it in the first place. The point is not to make the most money you can. The point is to make the most money you can and spend the least money you can, consistent with the real objective, which is the health of the American people covered in the health care plan. Now, this is a big deal. You know how many people in America today have health care their doctors recommend for them delayed or denied, every year? Eighteen million people. Now, if we pass a law that said, you've got a right to see a specialist if your doctor says so if you get hurt, you've got a right to go to the nearest emergency room, not one clear across town that happens to be covered by the HMO if you change jobs, but you're undergoing a cancer treatment or you're pregnant, you can stay with the same doctor until your treatment's over if you get hurt by a bad decision, you've got a right to sue that's our Patients' Bill of Rights. And it covers everybody. Their Patients' Bill of Rights leaves about a 100 million people out, and they have fought the right to sue. Well, without the right to sue, it's a patients' bill of suggestions, not a Patients' Bill of Rights. So we're for it. They're not. Why aren't they for it? Well, the health insurance companies don't want it, and they're trying to scare us by saying that it will cost a lot of money. The problem is that their own Congressional Budget Office says it costs less than 2 a month for insurance policy. Wouldn't you pay 1.80 a month to make sure that if she gets hit by a car going out of here tonight, she can go to the nearest hospital? And a month later, if the doctor says she needs a specialist and an accountant says she doesn't, she gets to see the specialist? I'd pay 1.80 a month for that. It's the right thing to do. But we're different. We're different on this Medicare drug issue. Don't you be fooled by all the smoke and mirrors here. Let me tell you what our position is simple. People are living longer. The older you get, the more medicine you get. If you get the right medicine and right amounts at the right time, you live longer, and you live better, and eventually you save money because you stay out of the hospital. Their position is their stated position is, "We can't afford to have a Medicare drug program that's voluntary but available to all seniors on Medicare. So we want to pay for people up to 150 percent of the poverty line and help other people by insurance, health insurance for medicine. And the Democrats just want a big Government program." Well look, Medicare is not a big Government program, right? We financed it. The doctors are private. The nurses are private. The health care is private, and the administrative cost is under 2 percent. It works. Now, what's the real difference here? Their program would not help half of the seniors who need to be in this program because they can't afford to buy the medicine the doctor says they're supposed to have. Why are they really against it? Because the drug companies don't want it. Now, that doesn't make any sense, does it? Why wouldn't the drug companies want to go and sell more medicine? Most people in business like to increase their sales, not restrict them. Why is that? Because they believe that if the Government has this health insurance that covers medicine, that we'll buy so much of the medicine that we'll be able to use our market power this is not price controls, our market power to keep the price of the medicine down. And they charge a lot more for medicine made in America in America, than they do in Canada or Europe or anyplace else. And the Republicans want to say they want to help everybody, so they say, "Well, you can get insurance if you're over 150 percent of the poverty line." The problem is and here's with all the fights I've had with the health insurance companies, I take my hat off to them. They have been scrupulously honest in this. The health insurance companies have told the Republicans in the Presidential race and in the Congress that they cannot write a policy that people can buy, that this is not an insurable thing, and that in order for them to write a policy they can justify, the premiums would be so high, nobody would buy it. Now, the State of Nevada the amazing thing about the Republicans is, they keep pushing this, in the face of all the evidence. I kind of admire that. Evidence has no impact on them. Laughter You know, this is about conviction. Never mind the evidence. "Yes, the Democrats got rid of the deficit, but we still want to cut these taxes until there's nothing left." This is really serious. The State of Nevada passed a plan just like this. You know how many insurance companies have written insurance for medicine for seniors in Nevada since they passed the plan that the Congress and their Presidential nominee recommend? Zero. Not one. Why? Because the insurance companies know this is not an insurable deal. That's why it ought to be done under Medicare. Now, why don't they really want to cover everybody? Because they want to keep the prices up. Now, let me be fair I'm not trying to demonize them. There's a reason they want to keep the prices up because it costs a lot of money to develop these drugs. We spend a lot of your tax money developing medicine, and they spend a lot of money. And they know that if they can recover 100 percent of the cost of developing these drugs from you, then they can sell them cheap in Canada and Europe and still make a profit, and they won't let them charge that much over there. Now, I'm sympathetic. I'm proud of our pharmaceutical companies. They do a great job. But I'll be darned if I think they ought to be able to keep American seniors, who need medicine to stay alive and lengthen their lives and improve the quality of their life, away. And it's a big difference in these two parties, and I think we're right and they're wrong. And the American people ought to understand that difference, and you ought to help them understand it between now and the elections. So these are just three examples the economy the Patients' Bill of Rights Medicare drugs. There are significant and important differences on education, where we favor putting 100,000 teachers in the classroom to lower class sizes. We favor a school construction program to help lower the cost of building new schools and repairing old ones, and they're opposed to it. Both sides favor accountability, but ours is accountability plus. There are differences on every single issue like that. There are big issues. The next President's going to appoint between two and four Justices on the Supreme Court. These people assume they're good people, and they believe what they say. They believe very different things about how the rights of the American people should be defined. And since they're both honorable, we have to assume that they will make appointments to the Supreme Court consistent with their convictions. It would be wrong to assume anything else. So what does all this mean for you? It means you have got to go out of here every one of you has got friends that live in Max Sandlin's district or one of these other districts where there's a tough fight in Texas. Every one of you has friends who live in States that could go either way in this Presidential election, and every one of you knows a lot of people who have every intention of voting but have never come to a fundraiser, have never come to a political event, have never met the President or anybody running for President. But they want to be good Americans, and they're going to show up on election day. But they follow all this static that goes back and forth. I mean, I can hardly keep up with it, you know? One week we're being told that Governor Bush has done something dumb and bad, and blah, blah, blah, and then we're being told, "Well, maybe the press is getting too tough on him." So the next week they really dump on Vice President Gore, and they give it to him. And then the American people are told, "Oh, he's done something terrible, blah, blah, blah." And the Democrats and Republicans, they jump whichever way the press is going. They're happy or sad, so they all jump in. And the truth is, most of it doesn't amount to a hill of beans. The stuff I'm talking to you about is where the rubber hits the road. There are real differences that will change the lives of the people in this country, depending on the choices made. So I can't do this to everybody, but you can. And if you made up your mind you look at how many people are in here if you made up your mind that every day between now and the election you were just going to talk to one person and explain why you were here, why you feel the way you do, and what a phenomenal opportunity we have, it would be breathtaking. In our lifetime, we'll see babies born with a life expectancy of 90 years. We will see people cure Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and maybe even get to reverse Alzheimer's. We'll find out what's in the black holes in outer space and the deepest depths of the ocean, which may be even more surprising to us. People will be driving cars that get 80 to 100 miles a gallon or maybe even more if the biofuel thing works out. We'll figure out how to deal with these frightening prospects of terrorists with chemical and biological weapons, allied with narcotraffickers, and all the problems. The problems will still be there. But I'm telling you, the main thing is, we ought to stick in this election and fight for clarity because we have a candidate for President and Vice President, we have candidates for Congress. We have a party with a record of 8 years proving two things above all We understand the future, and we'll fight for it. And it's more important to us than anything else that we go forward together. We believe everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance we all do better when we help each other. I was raised on that, and as modern as the Internet world is, it's still the best lesson you can take into politics, every single day. If you get clarity out there in this election, I'm not a bit worried about how it's going to come out. You make sure everybody understands it as well as you do, and we'll have a great celebration on November 7. Thank you, and God bless you. September 26, 2000 Thank you very much. Father O'Donovan, thank you for giving me another chance to come back to Georgetown and for your extraordinary leadership over these many years. And Dean Areen, thank you for giving me a chance to come to the law school. I have to tell you that when they told me I was coming into the moot courtroom laughter my mind raced back 30 years ago almost 30 years ago. When we were in law school at Yale, Hillary and I entered the moot court competition, and it was sort of like the Olympics. There were all these trial runs you had to get through, and then you got into the finals, and you tried to go for the gold. So we finished first and second in the trial runs, and then we got into the finals. And the judge, the moot court judge, was Justice Abe Fortas. You've got to understand, this was the early seventies it was a sort of irreverent time. Laughter Fashion was not the best. Laughter Some of us made it worse. Laughter And anyway, I had a bad day. Laughter Hillary had a good day. I thought she should have won. But Justice Fortas thought that her very seventies outfit, which was blue and bright orange suede laughter was a little out of order for a trial. And so he gave the award to a guy, a third person, who is now a distinguished trial lawyer in Chicago. And for his trouble, he has had the burden of contributing to all my campaigns and now to hers. Laughter So I suppose it all worked out for the best. Laughter Mr. Hotung, Mrs. Hotung, I thank you for your generosity. I loved your speech. Laughter And I'd like to thank you, especially, for what you've tried to do for the people of East Timor. It means a lot to me because I know how important it is to the future of freedom throughout Southeast Asia and, indeed, throughout all East Asia, that we come to recognize that human rights are not some Western concept imposed upon the rest of the world but truly are universal as the United Nations Declaration says. East Timor is a small place, a long way from here, that many people thought the United States should not care about. And the fact that you did and continue to care about them and the enormous odds they have to cope with still is, I think, a very noble thing, and I thank you very much for that. I'd like to thank the faculty and staff and students who are here and all the members of my administration and administrations past who are here and my friends from Georgetown days who are here. Georgetown Law School has given more talent to this administration than any other single institution in America. And I'm almost afraid to mention some for fear that I will ignore others or omit them, anyway. But among the people in the administration who are Georgetown law grads are my Chief of Staff, John Podesta my White House Counsel, Beth Nolan my Deputy Counsel, Bruce Lindsey former White House Counsel Jack Quinn Budget Director Jack Lew former Trade Ambassador and Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor Counselor to the Chief of Staff Michelle Ballantyne Deputy Communications Director Stephanie Cutter. They're all graduates of Georgetown law. And I've had various Ambassadors and other appointees, and Lord knows who else you gave me. So I'm grateful for that. It's also quite interesting to me that Beth Nolan's assistant, Ben Adams, and my personal aide, Doug Band, are actually working full time at the White House. In Doug's case, he's working around the clock, because we're traveling and we're working. We haven't slept in 3 weeks. And they're enrolled right now in Georgetown law. Laughter Now, therefore, I would like to make a modest suggestion, and that is that when they take their exams in December, they be judged not only on the basis of legal reasoning but creative writing. Laughter I also want to credit one other person for the remarkable fidelity Georgetown students and Georgetown lawyers have had to public service over the years. My freshman philosophy teacher, Father Otto Hentz, used to say that the Jesuits are convinced there was only one serious scriptural omission on the first chapter of Genesis God created politics, and God saw that it was good. Laughter You would get quite an argument, I think, from some people on that. But Georgetown has always been there for America's body politic, and we are a better nation because of it. The Eric Hotung International Law Center Building will house work that will, in no small measure, shape the kind of nation we are and the kind of world we live in, in the 21st century. The 20th century raised a lot of questions of lasting concerns of ethnic and religious conflict of the uses and abuses to science, technology, and organization and of the relationship between science and economic activity and the environment. But the 20th century resolved one big question, I believe, conclusively. Humanity's best hope for a future of peace and prosperity lies in free people and free market democracies governed by the rule of law. What Harry Truman said after World War II is even more true today. He said, "We are in the position now of making the world safe for democracy if we don't crawl in the shell and act selfish and foolish." Sometimes his unvarnished rhetoric was more effective than more strained eloquence. We are, today, in a position to make the world more free and prosperous if we don't crawl in the shell and act selfish and foolish. The scope of the challenge is quite large. In the 1990's, more people won their freedom than ever before in human history. People in nations like Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria, Indonesia now elect their own leaders. But it is just a first step. Without a strong and independent judiciary, civil society, transparent governance, and a free press to hold leaders accountable, the world's new democracies easily could sink under the weight of corruption, inequity, and poor government. I read an op ed piece by the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman a few months ago, which captured the experience I've had in this job for nearly 8 years now when he said, "Americans were born as a nation skeptical of government." Our Constitution was designed to limit government, and then we had a decade when we were told by all of our politicians how bad government is. But the truth is that in many parts of the world today, human freedom is limited by weak and ineffective government, without the capacity to deliver the good, honor the rule of law, and provide a transparent environment so that investment can come in to lift the lives of people. Without democratic elections, laws can too easily be a tool of oppression, not an instrument of justice. But without the rule of law, elections simply offer a choice of dictators. Building a rule of law is hard work. If you just look at our own history, you get, perhaps, the most persuasive illustration. We established our right to elect our leaders before independence. Even with independence, we still, in 1776, had no national executive, no system of courts, only a weak legislature. The Articles of Confederation came 5 years after independence but failed. The Constitution was ratified 13 years after independence and was quickly amended. And it was not until Marbury v. Madison in 1803, 27 years after the Declaration of Independence, that the courts established their rights to check the power of elected leaders. Of course, when we started, only white male property owners could vote. It wasn't until the end of the Civil War that African Americans were treated as citizens. Women didn't gain the right to vote until the 20th century. We are still very much a work in progress, and we need to take that humbling thought into account when we give advice to others in building their future. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it had no laws relating to private property or public elections or freedom of the press. In 1993 we launched a rule of law project that helped Russia draft a new civil code, a criminal code, a tax code, and bankruptcy law. We also helped Russia to separate its judicial system from the executive branch, train judges in commercial law, support Russian law schools. It was not a panacea, but it did help to create the foundation on which Russia can build. The same need for stronger legal institutions is apparent in China, especially because of its impending entry into the World Trade Organization, which, as all of you know, I think is a very, very good thing. It's more than an economic opportunity, because it can set China on a course that will diminish the role of government in its economy and its people's lives, while involving China in an international system of rules and responsibilities and mutual interdependence. China will have to make fundamental changes to meet its WTO obligations restructure its industries, publish laws that have long been secret, establish procedures for settling disputes, create a level playing field for foreign firms. China has asked us for help in developing its legal expertise and legal system. We should provide it. And I expect Georgetown will be part of that effort. This past summer Professor James Feinerman and Professor John Jackson and other Georgetown faculty met with some 25 senior Government officials in China from China, to advise them on structural reforms they will be making as they become fully participating members in the World Trade Organization. Since a Georgetown law professor helped Germany draft its democratic articles of government after the Second World War, Georgetown law professors have been active the world over, helping nations to establish democratic legal structures, from Estonia to Mexico, from South Africa to Mongolia. Next summer, you will begin an international judicial, educational, and exchange program to allow judges from other countries to come here to discuss with United States judges how to build a judiciary that is both independent and competent. These efforts illustrate how America's experience should be put to use to advance the rule of law where democracy's roots are looking for room and strength to grow. But in many parts of the world, people still struggle just to plant the seeds of democracy. For the last decade, one of the most important and gripping such places has been the former Yugoslavia. Eight years ago, the region was engulfed by war, caused by Mr. Milosevic's desire to build a Greater Serbia. It's easy to forget how very close he came to succeeding. If he had, it would have led to a permanent humanitarian tragedy and an end to the vision of an undivided, democratic Europe. But with our allies, we stood against ethnic cleansing and stood by democratic forces fighting for change. From Sarajevo to Pristina, the carnage has ended. Croatia is a democracy. Bosnians are now waging their battles at the ballot box. The control of Milosevic and his dictatorship is now limited to Serbia, and this weekend, it appears, because of brave people casting their ballot, he has lost the last vestige of legitimacy. The OSCE and the EU have concluded that this election was marred by widespread irregularity. Experienced international observers were prevented from monitoring the election. But still, the people of Serbia showed up in overwhelming numbers. And despite the Government's attempt to manipulate the vote, it does seem clear that the people have voted for change. And the question is, will the Government listen and respond? I do not underestimate Mr. Milosevic's desire to cling to power at the expense of the people. I have witnessed it, lived with it, and responded to it firsthand. But after this weekend's vote, we should not underestimate the people of Serbia's determination to seek freedom and a different and more positive force in the face of violence and intimidation. Neither should Americans underestimate the extent to which this vote is about Serbia, its people, and its future. Indeed, the opposition candidate also disagreed with our policy in Kosovo. I am under no illusions that a new Government in Serbia would automatically lead to a rapprochement between the two of us, and any new leader of Serbia should pursue, first and foremost, the interests of its own people. But if the will of the people is respected, the doors to Europe and the world will be open again to Serbia. We will take steps with our allies to lift economic sanctions, and the people of Serbia, who have suffered so much, finally will have a chance to lead normal lives. I hope that day is arriving, and when it does, people of good will will, around the world, help the people of Serbia to build and strengthen the institutions of a free market democracy. Some of you in this room will be needed in that effort. The persistence of people with your expertise, the institutions of our country, especially the Georgetown Law Center, will make an enormous difference in the future. Let me close with just one very personal thought. The law gives people a way to live together, to resolve their differences, to be rewarded when they should and punished when they're particularly destructive. But the idea is, it embodies our most fundamental values and applies it to practical circumstances so that even when we have differences, we find a way to abide a decision that is made. It will be more and more important in the years ahead because the world is growing more interdependent. It embodies the idea, just because there are rules, that all of us are created equal and that we should be treated blindly, without regard to our race, our religion, our ethnicity, our condition of ability or disability, whether we're straight or gay, whether we're Asian or European or African or Latin American. The whole idea of the American law, embodied in the ideals of our Constitution and continuously perfected, is that we are all equal and that we are growing more interdependent. If we were completely independent, we'd have no need for law. We'd just be out there doing our own thing. And if we weren't equal in the eyes of the law, the law would be a monster and an instrument of oppression. So the law is our society's attempt to reconcile our deep belief in independence and our understanding that interdependence is what enables us to make progress and to give our lives more meaning. The world is more interdependent than ever before. If we can find a way for people to believe that through the law we can create an environment in which everybody is better off, in which no group or individual is seeking to make unfair gains at anyone else's expense, then the world's most peaceful and prosperous and exciting time lies ahead. Then I'm not worried about what use we will make of the marvelous mysteries of the human genome. I'm not worried about whether some nation will abuse what they find out in the deepest depths of the ocean or the black holes of outer space. I'm not even worried about our ability somehow to find a way to deal with the terrorists and their ability to use the marvels of new technology for biological, chemical, and other weapons. We'll deal with it fine, as long as we remain committed to the integrity of the individual but the interdependence within and beyond our borders, or to go back to Mr. Truman's words, if we're not too stupid and too selfish, the best is still out there, and the law will lead us. Thank you very much. September 25, 2000 Thank you very much. First, ladies and gentlemen, let me just thank you for coming here. I want to thank our hosts. And thank you, Diane, and thank you, Bill Sisneros, the Santa Fe Democratic chair. I thank all the tribal leaders who are here. I thank your predecessor, Earl Potter, who is here tonight. Thank you very much. I'm glad to see you. I want to thank Congressman Udall. He's done a great job. He's really fun to work with, and as you can see, he's sort of a high energy person. Laughter And he has this idea which, there for a few years in Washington, I was afraid was getting altogether too rare. He actually thinks he's supposed to go back to Washington and get something done for you, instead of just laughter and he's really, really good, and you should be very proud of him. I like him very much. I want to thank my friend of more than 30 years John Kelly for running for Congress and for his service as United attorney. And I urge you to do what you can to help him. We're just six seats short of being in the majority. And it makes a huge difference. I'll just give you an example. Today, before I came here, I went over to a shelter for battered women and troubled children and families. And we're in this big struggle to get the Violence Against Women Act reauthorized, which ought to be an absolute laydown. And we clearly have a bipartisan majority in both Houses for this legislation. But the leadership, for reasons I don't quite understand, has not scheduled it for a vote, and it's supposed to run out Friday night. If we had six more seats, it would have been reauthorized months and months ago. So I say to you, it's a big issue for all the New Mexico specific reasons and also because your Nation needs it, I think, very clearly. I'd like to say more than anything else a word of thanks to a number of people. First, on behalf of Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore, I want to thank the people of New Mexico for sticking with us for two elections and giving us your electoral vote. And I want to say even more, thank you for how much I've learned about America and specific parts of America, from the people of New Mexico from our friends the Sikhs, many of who were at the Indian Prime Minister's dinner the other night from most especially the tribal leaders and those whom they represent. I was at the, you know, on the Shiprock Reservation not very long ago. And I think I'm the only American President ever to go to two Native American reservations, and I know I am the first President since James Monroe in the 1820's to invite all of the tribal leaders back to Washington to meet with me. And I've had liaison in the White House to the Native American community since the first day I became President. And I can't begin to tell you what it's meant to me to try to work with you to meet the common challenges we face and try to help solve some longstanding problems and try to change the whole nature of the relationship between the United States and the Native American tribes. I want to thank Tom Udall for what he said about me and my friends. You know, I have to say for my friends, I may be the only President in the entire history of the country who was literally elected because of my friends. Laughter I mean, I had the lowest net worth of any President since Harry Truman when I got elected. And as my predecessor never tired of telling the American people, I was just the Governor of a small southern State. Laughter And when I ran, I was so naive, I thought it was a compliment. Laughter You know something? I still do. And if Bruce and Alice and John Pound really thought I was going to be President in 1988, they were that's 75 percent of the people in the country who felt that way, my mother being the other. Laughter But it's worked out pretty well for America. And that's just the last thing I want to tell you. I hope you're proud of our party and proud of where we've come, compared to where we were, and proud of the fact that, if you listened to the debate, half the time they sound like us now. Laughter Or they kind of want to sound like us. Like they can't possibly admit that they're going to blow a hole in the deficit again, because being for a balanced budget and getting rid of this debt is now the thing to do. And I could go through a lot of other issues. But what I'd like to remind you of is that ideas have consequences. I think sometimes we forget that in politics. We just kind of like the way it feels Somebody looks good, sounds good, got a few good moves, gets through a press conference all right. Ideas have consequences, just like they do in every other aspect of your life. We changed the economic policy, the crime policy, the welfare policy, the education policy, the health policy, the environmental policy, and the foreign policy of the United States. Did we make some mistakes along the way? Of course we did. Not everything turned out just the way we intended in every policy. But if you look back at every single one of those areas, we're stronger today and different than we were then. So people need to understand that this is a very big election. I hope New Mexico will stick with Al Gore and Joe Lieberman. It's really, really important. We need you. In the parlance of my culture, I realize I'm preaching to the saved here, so I won't belabor this. But I will tell you just, you know, what I feel, as someone who is not running for office for the first time since before some of you were born, in this room. Laughter Most days, I'm okay about it. Laughter But, you know, we worked so hard to turn the country around and get it to this point. And this is really the first time in my lifetime we've been in a position to build the future of our dreams for our children, because our circumstances are good, because we have prosperity, social progress, the absence of pressing domestic crisis or external threat. We've got a lot of problems that's part of being alive. We'll always have problems as long as we're alive. And we have some big, big long term challenges. When all us baby boomers retire, there will be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security and Medicare. We don't want to bankrupt our kids, their ability to raise our grandchildren. We are the most racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse student population in our history and the biggest one by a good long ways, the first group of kids in the schools today, bigger than the baby boom generation, who need, even more than we did, a world class education. We actually know now how to turn around failing schools. So the real issue is whether we intend to do it and what the National Government's role should be in that great crusade. Tom mentioned something about environmental problems. No one denies anymore that climate change is real. We just had a fresh study last week from a huge polar icecap that demonstrated conclusively that the 1990's were the hottest decade in a thousand years. Now, this could have enormous consequences for every farmer in America. It could, if we don't reverse it. I worked so hard to save the Florida Everglades, and in 30 years, a bunch of it could be underwater. I mean, really underwater, not just sort of sliding along the top like today. How are we going to grow the economy and actually reduce the environmental threats? The truth is that there is on the shelf technology available today that would enable us to drastically reduce our emission of greenhouse gases without having any impact, except a positive one, on our economy, and would allow us to live in more harmony with our natural environment today. And we are very, very close, if we continue the research, to developing automobiles that get 80 miles to the gallon, that operate on fuel cells or dual use electricity and fuel. We are quite close to a chemical breakthrough in biomass fuels that is the equivalent of when people figured out a hundred years ago how to take crude oil and crack the petroleum molecule and turn it into gasoline, which changed the whole future of the world. Now, the problem with all biofuels today is, it takes about 7 gallons of gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol. But if we get over the last chemical problem, we'll be able to make 8 gallons of ethanol with one gallon of gasoline. And it won't just have to be corn. It can be rice hulls. It can be field grasses. It can be nearly anything. And when that happens, it will be the equivalent of 500 mile a gallon cars, and it will radically change the whole environmental future of America. Are we going to pursue these things or continue in denial? Or, as my daughter's generation says, "Remember, Dad, it's not just a river in Egypt." Laughter This is a big issue, a huge issue. And there are lots of others. Ideas have consequences. In this election for President, in the elections for Senate and the Congress, we have different economic policies. We're for a tax cut. We're for investments in education and health care, but we believe we have to keep paying down the debt to keep interest rates down and economic growth high, that we were profligate, inexcusably, in quadrupling the national debt in the 12 years before Al Gore and I came to Washington. It was wrong. All the economic analysis I've seen indicates that the difference in the Republican and the Democratic economic proposal they'll give you a bigger tax cut in the short run, especially if you're in an upper income group. And once they do that and partially privatize Social Security, the non Social Security surplus is gone, long gone. We're into the Social Security spending again. Interest rates will be about a percent a year higher over 10 years. If somebody in New Mexico wants to talk to you about tax cuts, tell them that if the Gore plan keeps interest rates a percent lower a year for 10 years, here's what it's worth to them in a tax cut A percent lower interest rates gives you, over a decade, 390 billion in lower home mortgage payments 30 billion in lower monthly car payments 15 billion in lower college loan payments. Now, if my math is right, that's a 435 billion tax cut that goes overwhelmingly to ordinary working folks and American families, kids trying to get an education, just by keeping interest rates down. There is a huge difference. It's hard to tell through the smoke and fire of the momentary campaign. This is one of the central decisions the American people have to make Was I right or wrong to say, yes, we're going to increase our investment in education and health care and the environment, but we're going to keep driving this debt down and we get out of the deficit, then we're going to use the surplus to keep driving the debt down? Was I right or wrong? Is it the right or wrong course for America? Someday we'll have another recession, and we may need a big tax cut. We'll have to run a deficit because in recession, unemployment goes up, which means not as many people are paying into the Government, and expenses go up, which means there is more money going out. But when I became President, we didn't even have any tools left to fight recessions with tax cuts and deficit spending, because we were running a deficit every year of over 200 billion. This is a huge decision. Now, this State has got a lot of people, I think, who are moderate Republicans and independents who think of themselves as fiscal conservatives and may find it hard to register that even after 8 years, we are the party of fiscal responsibility. And it's the right thing to do, and it's a bigger tax cut, in lower interest rates. We have differences in education policy. We think we ought to help these States that have growing student populations with smaller classes in the early grades, with building new schools and modernizing schools. They don't believe that's the Federal Government's business. I think it's America's business. I think every kid that needs to be in an after school program or a preschool program ought to be in it. And we've got the money to do it, and we ought to do it. We have huge differences in health care, right? Patients' Bill of Rights, exhibit A We're for it they're not, really. Now, as we get close to the election and the heat turns up, they may kind of come across the goal line here at the 11th hour, and I'm hoping. Laughter Medicare prescription drugs They want kind of a Rube Goldberg setup where we give some money to the poorest Americans and tell the rest of them they can buy insurance. And God bless them I've got to give it to them, even the insurance companies we fought so much over the last 8 years, I take my hat off to them. They have been totally honest here. They have told the Republican Congress, "Look, you cannot have an affordable private insurance program for prescription drugs for elderly people. It won't work. We can't do that." Nevada passed a law just like the Republicans are trying to shove through in Congress the exact same law. You know how many insurance companies have offered people above 150 percent of the poverty line insurance for Medicare prescription for drugs? Zero. I tell you, with all the fights I've had with the health insurance companies, I want to compliment them. They have been scrupulously honest here. They have told the truth. They have said, "There is no insurance market here. Why are you doing this? We don't want to look bad when we don't offer insurance or we've got to make the premium so high nobody can buy it." But the pharmaceutical companies are against having Medicare offer a prescription drug benefit to all the seniors who need it. It doesn't make any sense, does it? They're afraid that they'll acquire such market power, they'll be able to get prices down to where they're almost as low as they are in every other country in the world. Now, this is a big deal. These are huge differences. And there are massive environmental differences. They have made a commitment to repeal my order setting aside 43 million roadless acres in the national forests. The Audubon Society says it's the most important conservation move in 40 years. And they are committed to reversing it. They said they may take away some of the national monuments I've set up. They say that clean air standards are too tough. We've still got a lot of little kids getting asthma in this country because they can't breathe the air. And goodness knows, if we haven't proved that you can clean the environment and grow the economy, then somebody hasn't been paying attention. It's good for the economy to clean up the environment. Every single time for 30 years we've raised the environmental standards, the act of raising the standards and implementing them has created more jobs than it's cost every single time for 30 years. But we're still debating it. So you've got to go out across this State and say, "Look, there's a different economic policy, a different education policy, a different health care policy, a different environmental policy. There is a different crime policy." They're against my program to put 150,000 police on the street and have promised to get rid of it. Now, this is the first time ever that crime has dropped for 7 years in a row. We're at a 27 year low. The country is safer than it's been in over a quarter century. One of the reasons is that we put all those police on the street. They were also wrong about the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. There hasn't been a single hunter in New Mexico miss a day of a season, not a day. But even if you forget about that for a minute, they actually want to repeal the program that is putting 150,000 police on our streets, that's giving us a safer why? They say it's not the Federal Government's business. All I know is, when people don't feel safe that's that Violence Against Women Act we just did if people don't feel safe, they don't have much emotional space to worry about what your economic policy is or your education policy or your environmental policy or anything else. So I'm just asking you to go out across this State and talk to your friends around the country. Every one of you know and deal with people who never show up at events like this, have never been to a political event in their lives, but they'll all be there on election day, because they believe in America and they want to be good citizens. And if people really understand the nature of the choice, we will win. We will win in New Mexico. We will win the Presidency and the Vice Presidency. John will win. We'll get the Congress back, and we'll keep going forward. And I just don't want to see us give up this. I worry. You know, sometimes it's harder to make a decision, a good decision in good times than bad times. I know people took a chance on me in '92. I know they got tired of hearing that you know, they got worried when they heard, "He's a Governor of a small southern State, and where is it?" Laughter It was actually a bad strategy. I mean, think how many thousand people there are in New Mexico from Arkansas half of Chicago, half of Detroit. It was a bad strategy. If you come from a poor southern State where people couldn't make a living after World War II, you've got kin folks in 20 States. I mean, you can't lose them. Laughter Anyway, I know they were worried about it. But come on, it wasn't that big a chance because the country was in terrible shape. We had to do something different. Now people really do feel like they've got options. And there's not a person in this audience, at least who's 30 years of age or over, who cannot think of one time in your life when you made a big mistake, not because times were so tough but because times were so good, you thought you didn't have to concentrate. You can't live three decades or more without making that kind of mistake. That's what America has to avoid in this election. And you've got to go out and tell people what the differences are and what the nature of the choice is. When Al Gore says, "You ain't seen nothing yet," that's not just a political slogan. I believe that. I do. I believe that with all my heart. I believe the best stuff is still out there. I really do believe. You know, I think within 10 years, measured by today's terms, we'll be driving cars around that get 150 miles a gallon. I believe that mothers will come home with their babies, after they give birth, with little gene cards that will tell them how to plan their future, and the life expectancy of newborns will be 90 years of age. That's what I believe. I think this stuff is going to happen. I think technology will lift the lives of the disabled people in this country to a level never before imagined. I think we'll totally re imagine what it means to get older. I think we'll think of people 70 and 75 as sort of middle aged people. They'll be out doing things, you know, running marathons and stuff. Laughter I think all this is going to happen. It's going to be a very interesting time, if we make the right decisions. Will there be problems? Oh, yes, there will. You'll have to worry about chemical and biological warfare and terrorists putting them in plastic containers that don't go off in airport metal detectors. There will be all kinds of challenges out there. There will be problems until the end of time. But we have a chance to make this the most peaceful, exciting, and harmonizing time in history. And I'll just close with this. I think the most important thing about our party is that we are not interested in asserting our inherent superiority over anyone. We believe in one America. I mean really believe in it. We're glad to have people in our country who have different backgrounds, different heritages, different faiths. And we want everybody to be proud of themselves, their tribe, and their faith everybody. But we believe the only way we can really celebrate our diversity is if we accept the fact that our common humanity is the most important fact of life on this Earth. And so we really do believe that everybody counts everybody should have a chance we all do better when we help each other. And I believe the central fact of our time is not the scientific or the information technology revolution. It is the growth of interdependence within countries and beyond national borders. We're getting more and more and more caught up in what Martin Luther King called the inescapable web of mutuality. And our party believes in it. That's what one America means. And I honestly believe that if we just keep purging ourselves of our fears of people who are different from us, we keep looking for common ground, we keep reaffirming common values, that the best is out there. But you have to share this sort of stuff with people in this election. And you just cannot assume that because we're so much better off than we were 8 years ago and because the case is obvious to you, that everybody else will be there, because remember, the better things are, the easier it is to stop concentrating. So you go out and take some time every day between now and the election and share this with our fellow citizens and bring us home a great victory. Thank you, and God bless you. September 22, 2000 Thank you very much, and good afternoon. Secretary Albright, thank you for your remarks and your leadership. My longtime friend Ike Skelton and the other members of the Missouri congressional delegation, thank you for this great gift to America and to our children. John Truman and the members of the Truman family, we welcome you here. We are honored by your presence. And I'd like to say a special word of personal thanks on behalf of Hillary and myself to Margaret Truman Daniel for her uncommon kindness and concern for the First Lady and our daughter, for nearly 9 years now. We are thinking about her in what has been a hard year. I was telling John Truman when we came out here that Margaret came to dinner with her late husband several years ago at the White House, and I rather cavalierly, along with Hillary, had her to dinner in the private dining room on the second floor. And I did a little research right before she came and discovered that that had been her music room when she was a young lady living in the White House with another First Family that had only one child, a daughter. And so I asked her, I said, "Margaret, how do you like this dining room?" And she said, "Well, Mr. President, I like you, but I really don't think people should eat on the same floor they sleep." Laughter And I felt as if I were in the presence of Harry Truman all over again. Laughter So I dutifully got down my wellworn copy of David McCullough's great biography, and I looked at the houses of Harry and Bess Truman in Independence, and sure enough, they were two story houses, where the bedrooms were on the top floor and the dining room was on the ground floor. I want to say to you, Mr. Elsey, I wish you had just taken the whole program. Laughter I could have listened to you for another hour and a half. And I think I speak for all the people in this audience in saying that we are grateful you are here to provide us a living account of a remarkable time and a great President. And we are grateful for your service to America, as well, and we thank you, sir. And I want to thank James Earl Jones for being here, and also for his friendship to me over these years. I was so hoping, before I knew he would come, that there would be an African American in this place at this time who could be the living embodiment of the remarkable steps Harry Truman took that put us on the road we still travel today. You have made quite a showing in your life, Mr. Jones. But I can't help thinking that in more modest and less famous ways, there are hundreds of thousands of others whose lives were also encouraged and advanced by Harry Truman's courage. And we thank you for being here today to embody that. Most of all, I would like to thank our Foreign Service and civil service employees who are here, who work every day to advance our interests and values around the world and to make us more free and more secure. This is a very good thing we're doing today. Listen to this In 1956, at the close of his visit to Great Britain, the London Daily Telegraph called Harry Truman "the living and kicking symbol of everything everyone likes best about America." That's a pretty good reason for putting his name on the State Department. But it really doesn't even get into the top 10, for history will credit Harry Truman for creating the architecture of postwar internationalism in politics and economics for drawing the line against communism and for democracy, setting us squarely on the trail of freedom we continue to blaze today for leading America toward increasing prosperity and racial equality here at home and for laying the groundwork for pioneering achievements in meeting America's health care needs, even though he paid a dear price for it. We are still blessed because President Truman understood the importance not just of winning the war but of building the institutions and alliances that could maintain the peace. What a job he did the United Nations NATO the Truman Doctrine the Berlin Airlift Korea and the Marshall plan. Oh, yes, he was committed to military strength. But from the very beginning, he knew that peace could not be maintained and the cold war could not be won by military power alone. He told the National War College, behind the shield of military strength, "We must help people improve the conditions of life, to create a world in which democracy and freedom can flourish." That's an argument he had to make over and over and over again. I can identify with that. In early 1947, the House cut in half President Truman's request for funds to prevent starvation and disease in occupied Germany and Japan. He knew he had to turn that mentality around, but he believed he could. He would often say, "I trust the people, because when they know the facts, they do the right thing." So when he went before a joint session of Congress to call for emergency aid to keep Greece and Turkey from falling into the Communist orbit, he put it this way "The United States contributed 341 billion toward winning World War II. The assistance I recommend amounts to little more than one tenth of one percent of that investment. It is only common sense that we should safeguard this investment and make sure it was not in vain." With the leadership and support of like minded Members of Congress, the bill was on his desk in 2 months, passed by overwhelming majorities in both Houses. And he fought the same way to win America over to the Marshall plan. Harry Truman's unmatched insight allowed him to see emerging patterns in history, to identify new challenges over the horizon, and to build the institutions and approaches to meet them. Thanks, in no small measure, to President Truman, we have won the cold war and now must shoulder a like responsibility for meeting the challenges of a new century and a new era in human affairs. With global interdependence growing daily, creating ever new opportunities and new and different vulnerabilities, the need for U.S. leadership in the world has never been greater. The need for building on Harry Truman's legacy has never been greater. But the old American pull of isolationism or at least, in this age, cut way back ism is still there. We should remember what he said "Lasting peace," President Truman reminded us, "means bread and justice and opportunity and freedom for all the people of the world." My fellow Americans, this is a great day, and this is a good thing. But we should do more than dedicate this building to Harry Truman. We should rededicate ourselves today to fulfilling his vision in the new century. To paraphrase what he said so long ago, it means we have to put a small percentage of the resources we put into winning the cold war to work in the world in keeping the peace, advancing global prosperity, reducing poverty, fighting AIDS, battling terrorism, defending human rights, supporting free press and democracy around the world. We need to move forward with debt relief for the world's poorest nations, to give them the lifeline they need to fight AIDS and educate their children and become better partners for us in the world. These are the kinds of investments Harry Truman proved decades ago could keep our soldiers out of war. If we do not want to overuse our military, we must not underfund our diplomacy. I believe if President Truman were here today, he would tell us that if we truly want to honor him, we should prepare for the future in our time, as he prepared for our future in his. Those of us here today know that that means not only investing in foreign affairs it also means investing in the capacity of our own people at home. Truman once said, "The success of our foreign policy depends upon the strength of our domestic policy." Well, he tried it, and it worked. By the close of his administration, he had helped to create 11 million new jobs unemployment was at a record low farm and business incomes at all time highs the minimum wage had increased Social Security benefits had doubled 8 million veterans had been to college on the GI bill and our country had moved closer to one America, across the lines of race that divided us. In 1947 President Truman was the first President ever to address the NAACP. His biographer, David McCullough, called it the strongest statement on civil rights heard in Washington since the time of Lincoln. President Truman said, "I meant every word, and I'm going to prove it." And so he did, desegregating the Armed Forces and the Federal civil service and continuing to fight for civil rights gains. He also envisioned a new system of health care for the elderly and affordable health insurance for all Americans. He led America on the first leg of a long march that would end in 1965, with the creation of Medicare. He endured vicious attacks, and his party lost the Congress in a record way, in no small measure because he simply thought that people, when they needed a doctor, ought to be able to get one. But at the signing ceremony for Medicare several years later, the guest of honor was Harry Truman. President Johnson gave him the very first Medicare card and said, "It was really Harry Truman who planted the seeds of compassion and duty which have today flowered into care for the sick and serenity for the fearful." So at home and around the world, if we truly wish to honor President Truman, we will do in our day what he did so brilliantly in his see clearly the long term path we must follow, take the first steps without hesitation. This is a kind of time Harry Truman must have dreamed of at the end of World War II, at the dawn of the cold war, in the bitterest, bleakest days of the conflict in Korea an America at peace, with prosperity, social progress, no crippling internal crisis or external threat. Like our victory in World War II, this opens a whole new era for us. It gives us great opportunities, enormous challenges, profound responsibilities. At home, we have the chance and the duty to meet the challenge of the aging of America of the largest and most diverse group of schoolchildren in our Nation's history of families struggling to balance the obligation to work with the more important obligation to raise their children well to explore the far frontiers of science and technology in a way that benefits ordinary Americans and protects our most cherished values to get this country out of debt for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President. Around the world, we have to face the threat of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, narcotrafficking, the persistent, enduring ethnic, religious, tribal, and racial conflicts that grip so many places in the world, and new and different threats that could profoundly affect us all, including global warming and the rise of AIDS and other infectious diseases, along with the breakdown of public health systems around the world. But we're well positioned to deal with this, thanks in no small measure to what Harry Truman and his generation did so long ago. He gave us the opportunities we have today. It's a good thing that we say, thanks, Mr. President, by naming this building for him. It would be a far, far better thing if we would follow his lead and give the same set of opportunities to our grandchildren. I pray God that we will. Thank you, and God bless you. September 17, 2000 And Mr. Prime Minister, on behalf of the American people, let me welcome you again to the White House, along with all your party from India. I hope that in your time with us, we have at least come close to repaying the warm hospitality with which you and the Indian people greeted me, my family, and our fellow Americans on my visit in March. One of the most remarkable things to me about our relationship is its scope and its increasing interdependence. There are hundreds of American businesses, foundations, and universities with long commitments to India. When Americans call Microsoft for customer support today, they're as likely to be talking to someone in Bangalore or Hyderabad as to someone in Seattle. There are more than one million Indians here in America now, and I think more than half of them are here tonight. Laughter And I might say, Prime Minister, the other half are disappointed that they're not here. Laughter Indian Americans now run more than 750 companies in Silicon Valley alone. In India, the best information available on maternal health and agriculture can now be downloaded by a growing number of villages with Internet hookups. And Indian Americans can now get on line with people across the world who speak Telugu or Gujarati or Bengali. Americans have fallen in love with Indian novels. I'm told that Prime Minister Vajpayee, when he's not writing Hindi poetry, actually likes to read John Grisham. Laughter You might be interested to note, Prime Minister, that he's a distant relative of mine. All the Grishams with money are distant relatives of mine. Laughter And don't forget, whether we're in California or Calcutta, we all want to be a crorepati. Now, for the culturally challenged Americans among us, that's from India's version of "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?" Laughter Of course, our interdependence is about more than commerce and culture. We are also vulnerable to one another's problems, to the shock of economic turmoil, to the plague of infectious diseases, to the spread of deadly military technology, and as we have all too painfully seen, to the terrorists, drug traffickers, and criminals who take advantage of the openness of societies and boarders. The simple lesson of all this to me, Mr. Prime Minister, is that if we're already all in the same boat together, we had better find a way to steer together. We must overcome the fear some people in both our countries sometimes have, for different historical reasons, that if we meet our friends halfway, somehow it will threaten our own independence or uniqueness. That is why I am so gratified that, with your leadership and the efforts of so many people in this room, we have together built the strongest, most mature partnership India and America have ever known. We have so very much more to learn from each other. In both our societies, you can find virtually every challenge humanity knows. And in both our societies, you can find virtually every solution to those challenges confidence in democracy, tolerance for diversity, a willingness to embrace economic and social change. So it is more than a slogan for Americans to say that India's success will be our success and that together India and America can change the world. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you now to join me in a toast to Prime Minister Vajpayee, to the Government and people of India, and the enduring partnership between our two great democracies. September 14, 2000 Thank you very much. Vernon has got this microphone here. It's not on. It's feeding to the press. And if I know Vernon, he's already fed the press, which may mean that I will get a little bit of slack from them if I say anything I shouldn't. Let me begin by saying this is my second home. Usually, when I'm a surrogate for Hillary and I try to do this as much as I can, because that way she can be out getting votes. I'm glad to do it, but tonight I really got the better end of the deal. Vernon and Ann have been so wonderful to us, and we have had these seven soon to be eight Christmas Eves together, with Dwight and Toni and the rest of their family. And he's always letting me bring all my family here. And sometimes, that's a pretty large and rowdy bunch. I have two young, impish nephews who, from time to time inaudible grandchildren. And I'm very grateful for their friendship, and I want to thank Dwight and Toni and Ann and Vernon one more time for being there for our family tonight. We've had an interesting talk around the table tonight about everything in the wide world. But I'd just like to say a couple of things. This is a rather interesting time in my life. I'm not running for anything for the first time in 26 years. Laughter My party has a new leader. My family has a new candidate. I cast what may well be the last vote of a long and rich life in my native State of Arkansas for Al Gore for President. And Tuesday I got to vote for my wife for the first time, in a little school in Chappaqua, New York. And it was the most extraordinary experience. You know, I was happy as a kid on Christmas morning. It was amazing. We got to go in and shake hands with all the election officials. And I go into this little voting booth, and I realized what I was doing, and it was just an unbelievable feeling. So for me, personally, this is a source of great pride. And I was very proud of her last night, because I thought she gave a good account of herself in a difficult and challenging format. It should have been difficult and challenging. These jobs are not being given away. Candidates ought to be tested. But I was very, very proud of her. And apparently, the people who saw the debate liked her pretty well, too. And I always believe you can trust the people. People almost always get it right if they have enough information and enough time to digest it. So I felt good about that. But what I would like to say to all of you relates more to you than to her and to this campaign. I appreciate what Vernon said. I thought when I ran for President in 1991 and 1992, we needed to change not only the content of our policy but the way we did our politics and the way we related to each other as citizens. We needed to adopt a more unifying language and rhetoric and attitude toward one another, because we're growing more diverse in a world that's growing more complicated and more interconnected. And we can't get much done if all we want to do is to figure out how to segment the election in every political season in a way that divides the American people against one another so that, hopefully, we have at least one more vote than the other side. That's not the way the world works its best. It's not the way the best companies are run, not the way the best nonprofits are run. It's not the way people want to run their families or their communities. It's not to say that we shouldn't have vigorous debates, but I thought that the country had been disadvantaged by a harsh and exceedingly personal political style that, I thought, needed to go away for good. So we set about trying to turn the country around and change the policy and change the politics. And the result proves that a lot of sunshine and a lot of storms have been pretty good for the American people. We'll leave it to the historians to judge how good and what role we had in it, but I feel very grateful. I have a heart full of gratitude. But the point I want to make tonight and we discussed this at our table is that I think this is an election that's at least as important as the election of 1992, and in some ways it presents as big, if not a bigger challenge to people, because what you do when times are good is sometimes harder to judge than what you do when times are tough. The people took a chance on me in 1992. And we were laughing outside, and I have no idea how many people were in that polling place. "Can I really vote for this guy? He's only 46 years old, a little State. I've never been there. I'm not quite sure, you know? They say all these bad things about him. Aw, heck, times are tough. I'm going to give him a chance." People felt, "Well, it's not that big a risk. I mean, after all, we're in tough shape here." Now, the country's in good shape. People have a sense of well being that they have earned. Current trends are going in the right direction. The important thing in this election, I think, is for people to be quite clear about what they want out of this and what they want for their country. I've always believed that if we could, all of us who feel as I do, if we could just bring clarity to this election, to get the American people to sit down and take a little time to think, "What would I like my country to look like in 10 years? What is it that I should do with this truly magic moment? What are the big challenges what are the big problems what are the big obstacles? What are the big changes, and who can manage them best?" I've always thought that we could all come out okay in this election, because very often, the person for whom you decide to vote depends in large measure on what you think the election is about in the first place. So, I think the Vice President and Senator Lieberman are doing very well. I think Hillary's doing very well, but I don't think any of these elections are over yet, because I think the debate is still stewing out there. People are trying to come to grips with what it all means. I'd just like to say a couple of things, first about Hillary. One of the things that not much gets me mad anymore, I'm feeling pretty mellow but one of the things that still kind of steams me is when I hear somebody say, "Well, why is she doing this?" She wouldn't be doing this if she weren't his wife and the First Lady." You can ask Vernon. The truth is, if she hadn't decided to spend the last 30 years helping me, helping other people, being a public servant as well as a private lawyer, she could have been doing this 25 years ago. She chose to be a citizen rather than a candidate. She chose to do things like be on the board of the Children's Defense Fund and found the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and start our neonatal nursery down there and be the chairman of the board of a legal services corporation before she was 30 and did other things where she could serve and not ask for anything. This is the first time in 30 years she's ever asked anybody to do anything for her. So when people say to me well they don't say it to me, to my face, but I hear it all the time. It's sort of that's just not true. I've never known anybody that I thought was more qualified to serve as a Senator who wasn't one already than her, because she knows how to organize things. She knows how to get things done. She knows how to work with people who disagree with her. She's worked for 30 years on issues that are central to this country's future, not just children and families and health care and education but also some of the big issues in New York How do you bring economic opportunity to economically distressed places? We had to make a living doing that in Arkansas for a dozen years. So, I think she's superbly well qualified. She's been to all 62 counties in the State. She's the only person running, I think, for the Senate in New York this year that's done that. If you saw the debate last night, you know she's thought a lot about these issues. But the second thing I want to say, in a larger sense, is that there are big things we know that we're all going to have to deal with as people, that our elected officials will be at the center of. We know right now we've got to deal with the aging of America, all us baby boomers retire, two people working and one person retired. We know right now that in the world economy we live in, education is more important than ever, and we have the most diverse and largest student body we've ever had, a little picture of the changes in America. I'll just give you just a sample. There's a new movie out starring Denzel Washington. I don't even know if its premiered yet, and it's about the integration of T.C. Williams High School and the football, over the river there in Alexandria. T.C. Williams High School today, just three or four decades later, is a magnificent school, still. It has one of the best antiviolence programs in America, by the way, but it is part of the most diverse school district in America, where there are people from 180 different racial and ethnic groups, whose families speak over 100 different native languages, in one school district. It's a whole different world out there. How are we going to give all these kids a worldclass education? The truth is, we know how to turn around failing schools, so we're going to do it. I was at a school in Harlem, in New York, a couple weeks ago, that 2 years ago had 80 percent of the kids reading and doing math below grade level. Two years later, it has 76 percent of the kids doing reading and math at or above grade level. This can be done everywhere in America. The question is whether we're going to do it. How are we going to do that? What should the Federal Government's role be? What should we focus on? So there are things we know. Then there are all these things that are imponderable. When will global warming change our lives? See the polar ice caps are melting? What does that have to do with you? If you're from Illinois, what's it going to do to agriculture? Why? Will it bury the sugarcane fields in Louisiana? Now that we've saved the Florida Everglades, will they be overrun with water? How could we deal with that in ways that grow the economy and create jobs for working people, instead of take jobs away? Don't you want somebody in the Senate and somebody in the White House that's curious and thinks about that kind of stuff? The world is growing closer together. What are our responsibilities to deal with the AIDS epidemic in Africa, growing even more rapidly in India now, and soon to have the most rapid growth of all in the states of the former Soviet Union? What are our responsibilities for that? When you all when new mothers can bring home their babies with a little gene card that tells them what their genetic makeup is likely to be, what their life expectancy is likely to be, and what the probability of a girl getting breast cancer in her thirties is, a little baby girl coming home from the hospital, or a man having a debilitating stroke in his forties because he's got a little genetic crook what are our responsibilities there? How are we going to protect the privacy of that information and still get them the kind of on the kind of regime that will be drastically minimize the chances that those bad things will happen and increase their life expectancy? How are we going to bridge the digital divide that exists in the world so that poor kids, not just in America but all around the world, get the same chance that others do? What are you going to do if somebody decides figures out how to get a terrorist group a biological weapon that can be carried in a plastic case that can be not that won't be detected in airports. Something like this could all happen. This is just some of the questions. If we had all night, I could give you a thousand questions. I think about this all the time. So, quite apart from the fact that I think we're right and they're wrong on how big the tax cut should be, whether we should pay down the debt, what's our obligation to the poor areas in America, whether we should raise the minimum wage, whether we should have the Patients' Bill of Rights, whether we should have a Medicare drug benefit, we need to elect people this year who are curious and think about the future and who have the capacity to deal with these big things and imagine how it's going to effect our little children and grandchildren, because I'm convinced that for all the good things that have happened in the last 8 years, all the best stuff's still out there. But I'm also convinced that the future is not about to stand still, and therefore it will be more important than ever to have people who not only have very clear and unambiguous political values and common commitments that are clear to all of us at elections but people who are really curious in the best sense and learning and flexible and care about this. I have never known anybody that I thought had a better combination of mind and heart and of constancy and ability to work with other people than Hillary ever not anybody. I've never known anybody that I thought has thought about the future with a greater capacity to predict than Al Gore not anybody. These are not the things that you necessarily think about in political campaigns. You know, they may not it's hard to make a 30 second ad on those two things. But I'm telling you, that's the kind of stuff we need to be thinking about, because all the best stuff's still out there, but there are a lot of profound challenges out there. I went down to Colombia last week, and we're trying to help Colombia, and also Bolivia and Ecuador and the countries around there, you know, root out the scourge of cocaine, get the farmers to do something else for a living. Fourteen thousand kids die in America every year directly from drug overdoses, as a consequence of their drug habits. They can lose their democracy down there. Nobody really knows exactly how to save it all, but I can tell you one thing. We won't get it done by just shouting at each other. We're going to have to work with people and think about it. Just the last thought I'll leave you with The most important thing about the whole human genome project to me is that the people who did it figured out, with the most sophisticated computer technology available, that we're genetically 99.9 percent the same. And that the genetic differences within different racial and ethnic groups, within the group, among individuals, are greater than the genetic differences between any two racial groups, as a profile. There is a book that's out that I've been kind of touting lately, that I'm very interested in. It's called "Non Zero," written by a man named Robert Wright. I don't know if any of you have seen it, but he wrote a book a few years ago called "The Moral Animal," which got a lot of interest. Essentially, the argument of "Non Zero" is this The world is it is a scientific and historical argument. When Martin Luther King propositioned that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice, and essentially what the argument is that we have to become more just as a society, if we want to survive, as we grow more complex and more interdependent. He's not naive. I mean, he understands that science was abused by Nazi Germany, modern organizational techniques, and military capacity was abused by communists, totalitarians, dictatorships. But he basically argues that if you look at it over the whole sweep of history, it is a good thing that we are growing, A, more complex, and B, more interdependent, because it forces us to try to find solutions in which we all win, instead of solutions in which some of us win at everybody else's expense. As I said, he's not naive. If you have a race for President, one of these guys is going to lose, and one of them's going to win. You know, somebody's going to win, somebody's going to loose the race for Senate. But he argues that the leadership style that is required for this time is that we work together to try to find principled compromises but not say you'll split the difference. Things that are always on the edge of change, so that we can all win. And what I've tried to do is to modernize the Democratic Party but rooted on very simple ideas Everybody counts everybody deserves a chance people that need help ought to get it, to be empowered to make the most of their lives and we all do better when we work together very simple ideas. But you have to have people who can take those simple principles in a very complicated world and make it work for ordinary people. I don't know anybody I think can do that better than Hillary, and I know I'm biased, because I know we spent 30 years together. I'm just telling you I've seen hundreds and hundreds of people in public life, in both parties, and most of them were better than most folks thought they were. Most people in public life I've known have been honest, hard working, and did what they actually thought was right 95 percent of the time. But I've never known anybody I thought could do it that well. So I think that she would do a great job for New York, and I think she will win, only if she can continue to bring clarity to the message, and your presence here tonight and your support for her guarantees that she'll be able to be heard in her own voice, rather than somebody's clever transfiguration of it. And you should be very proud of that. I hope you'll always be proud you came to this dinner tonight. But the stakes are far bigger than another Senate race, even far bigger than another President's race, and they are just as important, if not more important, than what we did in '92, because we now have the future to run ourselves, and we've got to do a good job of it. Thank you very much. September 14, 2000 The President. Thank you so much. I want to begin, obviously, by thanking Dr. Anderson, the AMA, and the physicians who are here behind me from various medical organizations. I want to thank Ron Pollack, the director of Families USA, who has been such a long and tireless champion of health care. As is often the case when I get up to speak, everything that needs to be said has pretty well been said, but I hope to bring it into some sharper focus in terms of what will have to happen now in the next few weeks if we're going to actually get a real and meaningful Patients' Bill of Rights. Time is running out in Congress, and there is no more important piece of unfinished business. You see these numbers up here 18 million a year. We're trying to pass a minimum wage law. It will affect 10 million people a year. We're very proud here that we reached across party lines to pass the family and medical leave law. It has affected about 25 million people in the first 5 years for which we have statistics. I have already provided the protections of the Patients' Bill of Rights to 85 million Americans who are covered anyway by Federal health plans. And yet, you see that the remaining Americans, nearly 200 million of them, have the experience that leads 18 million of our fellow citizens to suffer delay or denial of care over a year. Now, what are the rights in the Patients' Bill of Rights. Let me just state them one more time. We should never forget The right to the nearest emergency room care the right to see a specialist when recommended by your physician the right to know you can't be forced to switch doctors in the middle of a treatment such as chemotherapy or a period of pregnancy the right to hold your health care plan accountable if it causes you or a loved one great harm. Now, as I said, these are protections we have provided to 85 million Americans who get their health care through Federal plans. Fact What did it cost to provide these protections? Less than a dollar a month. That's a fact. Even the Republican majority's Congressional Budget Office concedes that the costs to cover all Americans would be less than 2 a month. And only congressional legislation can provide all Americans and all plans the patient protections they deserve. Last fall, thanks to the leadership of Congressman Norwood, a physician and a Republican, and Congressman Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, the House of Representatives passed such a bill with a majority of 275 Members, including 68 Republicans. Nearly a year later, I am confident we now have the votes to pass the very same bill with the same protections in the Senate if big if we can get it up to a vote. The bill's vital signs, in other words, are growing stronger, but it's still a near run thing. If it were a tie, I know someone who would like to break it. And as Al Gore always says, whenever he votes, the people win. But this is not about politics. I was glad that Dr. Anderson said what he did. If you took a survey in any community in America except Washington, DC, there would be almost no difference in the opinion on this legislation between Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Now, let me remind you what the daily toll is. Ron's got the running total up there, but nearly 50,000 Americans every day face a delay or denial of care nearly 50,000. Every hour, more than 2,000 people fail to get the treatment they need. We can't turn back the counter, but we sure don't have to run it up. And this is not about statistics. This is about real people with real problems who deserve real care so they can get on with real life instead of the politics of Washington, DC. That's what this Families USA tour is all about. It's about let me just mention two people like Joan Bleakley, who lost her sight in her left eye, in part because her HMO forced her to wait 3 weeks before seeing a neurologist people like Doug Bolden you will remember him if you went with me to Missouri to the Patients' Bill of Rights event down there a big, burly emergency room nurse, whose patient was forced by his HMO to leave one hospital and travel more than 50 miles to another, suffered a heart attack and died along the way because he wasn't entitled to health care at the nearest emergency center. And believe me, these are not isolated examples. I've heard many, many more, and you've got the numbers here to back it up. So again, what this is about is whether the Senate leadership will let the votes be counted and allow a free and fair vote on Norwood Dingell. The American people need to be reminded. The rules of the Senate, which were set up to avoid measures being dealt with too rapidly, give everything but our annual budget the option of being subject to a filibuster, which takes 60 votes, not 51, not a majority 60 to pass. Now, there is no question that this has been debated forever. We do not need any more time for a debate. And the people who aren't for this bill ought to just stand up and tell the American people why they're not for it and why they think the doctors, the nurses, and 300 other health care provider and consumer organizations are wrong, and the HMO's and the insurance companies are right. And then, they ought to let everybody vote. But it is an abuse of the filibuster to deny the majority of the United States Senate, representing an even bigger majority of the American people, a chance to have their way on an issue this fundamental to democracy. We don't need any more time to debate this. They don't need to put on the brakes to look at it again. This thing has been hanging around for 2 years now, and it's been debated in and out. It's time to listen to the doctors, the nurses, the patients, the other consumer and provider experts, to listen to a majority of Members of Congress, including the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, who would vote for this bill today. The bill should not be held up or watered down. Again, I am willing to reach agreement. We reached an honorable compromise on one major provision with opponents of the legislation in the Senate, which everyone could live with. But we cannot abandon our commitment to a bill that covers all Americans all Americans with the right to the specialists they need, the nearest emergency room care, the right to keep a physician during a course of treatment, the right to hold health care plans accountable, the right, in short, that allows doctors, not people who have no training in medicine and are concerned only with the bottom line to make these decisions and also, a system that provides access to important clinical trials. In other words, a strong, comprehensive, enforceable Patients' Bill of Rights. We can do this. If we just let the Senate vote, we can put progress over partisanship, health care over special interests, and restore trust and accountability to our health care system. We should do it now. But every single American should know what's going on. In order to prevail on legislation that has the support of more than three quarters of the American people, including 70 percent or more of every political group in America, we have to do one of two things We've got to persuade the leadership of the Senate to let a majority vote on this, and if a majority's for it, to pass it or we have to find 9 or 10 more votes between now and the time they go home to break a filibuster that is, in my judgment, an abuse of the filibuster system. There is no debating this. Everybody knows what the deal is. Everybody knows what the differences are. Meanwhile, I will keep negotiating. I will keep trying, but I will not abandon the people who are part of these numbers up here, because I've heard too many of their stories. Again, I thank the doctors I thank the nurses I thank Families USA and I thank all the American people. We can do this, and we can do it in a nonpartisan way, if we can just get the roadblocks out of the way. Thank you very much. Wen Ho Lee Q. Mr. President, could you take a question? I was wondering, Mr. President, if you share the embarrassment that was expressed yesterday by the Federal judge in New Mexico about the treatment of Wen Ho Lee during his year of confinement under Federal authorities? The President. Well, I always had reservations about the claims that were being made denying him bail. And let me say I think I speak for everyone in the White House we took those claims on good faith by the people in the Government that were making them, and a couple days after they made the claim that this man could not possibly be let out of jail on bail because he would be such a danger of flight or such a danger to America's security, all of a sudden they reach a plea agreement which will, if anything, make his alleged offense look modest compared to the claims that were made against him. So the whole thing was quite troubling to me, and I think it's very difficult to reconcile the two positions, that one day he's a terrible risk to the national security and the next day they're making a plea agreement for an offense far more modest than what had been alleged. Now, I do hope that, as part of that plea agreement, he will help them to reconstitute the missing files, because that's what really important to our national security, and we will find out eventually what, if any, use was made of them by him or anybody else who got a hold of them. But I think what should be disturbing to the American people we ought not to keep people in jail without bail, unless there's some real profound reason. And to keep someone in jail without bail, argue right up to the 11th hour that they're a terrible risk, and then turn around and make that sort of plea agreement it may be that the plea agreement is the right and just thing, and I have absolutely no doubt that the people who were investigating and pursuing this case believe they were doing the right thing for the Nation's security but I don't think that you can justify, in retrospect, keeping a person in jail without bail when you're prepared to make that kind of agreement. It just can't be justified, and I don't believe it can be, and so I, too, am quite troubled by it. Q. Mr. President, can you explain to me, are you thinking in terms of clemency for him, for Wen Ho Lee? The President. I'd have to look at that. It depends on, if he's in fact he has said he's going to plead guilty to an offense which is not insubstantial, but it's certainly a bailable offense, and it means he spent a lot of time in prison that any ordinary American wouldn't have, and that bothers me. Visit of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee of India Q. Mr. President, tomorrow morning, right here on this lawn, you are going to welcome the Prime Minister of India who spoke today on Capitol Hill, and he's calling for stronger U.S. India security relations and also fighting against terrorism around the world, especially across the border from Indian border acrossborder terrorism. So what do you think, sir, coming out from this historical visit and, also, following your visit in March that you've been in India? The President. Well, first, I am delighted that the Prime Minister of India is coming here after my trip there, and I was honored to be the first President in over 20 years to go. They're the world's largest democracy. We need to have a better and closer and more constructive relationship with them, and I hope that this will be the next step in that, and I think we'll make some specific agreements. The United States is strongly opposed to terrorism in any form, and I still hope that, if not while I'm here, then in the future, because of the groundwork we've laid, the United States can play a positive role to a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute, which has been at the core of the difficulties between India and Pakistan for more than half a century now. If you look at how well I will say this again if you look at how well the Indians, the Pakistanis, and the Bangladeshis who have come to America have done, the extraordinary percentage of them that are involved in the hitech economy, the professions, building our country across a broad range of areas, it is tragic to think of what this conflict has done to hold back the people who live on the Indian subcontinent, who are still all of them living on around 500 or less a day, on average, and who have proven by their stunning success in this country, that they have the ability to be at the cutting edge of the 21st century. So I hope they can lay this burden down, and I hope we can help them, and in the meanwhile, of course, we'll have to oppose terrorism in all its manifestations. Thank you very much. President's Upcoming Visit to Vietnam Q. Mr. President, could you explain to the American people about Vietnam? Why you've decided to go? The President. Inaudible another press conference with the Prime Minister tomorrow, and I will answer some more questions then. But I've got to leave. September 14, 2000 Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to welcome you to the White House. This is the eighth, and final laughter for me, White House prayer breakfast that we have at this time every year. I want to thank Secretary Glickman for joining us. He's sort of a symbol of our broadbased and ecumenical approach in this administration. He's the first Jewish Secretary of Agriculture. Laughter And he's helping people to understand that "Jewish farmer" is not an oxymoron. So that's good. Laughter I want to say I bring you greetings on behalf of Hillary, who called me early this morning to ask what I was going to say laughter and the Vice President and Mrs. Gore. As you know, the three of them are otherwise occupied, but they need your prayers, maybe even more than I do. Laughter I want to thank you, particularly those of you who have been here in past years. Each one of these breakfasts has been quite meaningful to me, often for different reasons. We've talked about personal journeys and the journey of our Nation and often talked about particular challenges within our borders, very often due to problems of the spirit in our efforts to create one America. We've talked about that a lot. Today, because of the enormous good fortune that we as Americans have enjoyed, I would like to talk just for a few moments about what our responsibilities are to the rest of the world. There is a huge debate going on today all over the world about whether the two central revolutions of our time, the globalization of human societies and the explosion of information technology, which are quite related whether these things are, on balance, positive or, on balance, negative. When we had the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, the streets were full of thousands of people who were saying in a very loud voice, this whole deal is, on balance, negative. Interestingly enough, they were marching in solidarity, although often they had positions that directly contradicted one another. There were those who said this is, on balance, negative because it will make the rich countries richer and the poor countries poorer. And then there were those who said that this is, on balance, negative because it will weaken the middle class in the developed countries, because we don't require poor countries to lift their labor and environmental standards. And there were other various conflicts among them. But the point is, there's a lot of ferment here and a lot of people who are, at the very least, highly ambivalent about whether the coming together of the world in the new century is going to be a good or a bad thing. Then there's the whole question of how the coming together of the world and the way we make a living and, particularly, the way we produce energy to make a living, is contributing to changing the climate, which it is. There's more and more evidence that the world is warming at an unsustainable rate, and the polar ice cap if you've seen the latest stories there about how much it's melting, it's incontestable that sometime in the next 50 years, we're going to begin to sustain severe, adverse common consequences to the warming of the climate if we don't do something to turn that around. And some people believe that there's no way to fix this, if we keep trying to get richer and more global with our economy. I don't happen to agree with that, and I'm not going to talk about it today. But there's a big issue. And very few people are in denial on climate change any more. Virtually all the major oil companies now concede, for example, that it is a serious problem and that they have a responsibility to deal with it, and if they don't, it could shape the way we are all or our grandchildren are living, in ways that are quite different and, on balance, negative. Then there is the whole question of whether technology will offer more benefits to the organized forces of destruction than it does to the forces of good over the next 30 years. I just came back from a remarkable trip to Colombia. I went to Cartagena with the Speaker of the House. We only get publicity around here for the partisan fights we have, but in an astonishing display of bipartisanship, we passed something called Plan Colombia, which is designed to help primarily the Colombians but also all the nations on the borders reduce drug narcotics production, coca production primarily, steer farmers into alternative ways of making a living, and develop an increase in the capacity of the Colombian Government to fight the narcotraffickers, and to keep drugs from coming into this country, which are directly responsible for the deaths of about 14,000 kids a year in America. And it was this really beautiful effort. And then we got criticized, the Republicans and Democrats together, those of us that supported this, because people said, "Oh, Clinton is going down there to make another Vietnam," or we're trying to interfere in Colombia's politics or be an imperialist country. And I told everybody there that I didn't want anything out of Colombia except a decent life for the people there, with a way to make a living on honorable circumstances that didn't put drugs into the bodies of American children and children in Europe and Asia and throughout the world. But the point I want to make is, there are a lot of people who believe that with more open borders, greater access, smaller and smaller technology you know, you now get a little hand held computer with a keyboard that's plastic, that fits inside of your hand, that has a screen that hooks you up to the Internet and we know that, for example, terrorist networks in the world very often have some of the most sophisticated uses of the Internet. We know that as we get more and more open, we may become more vulnerable to people who develop smallscale means of delivering chemical and biological weapons. And all these scenarios are real, by the way. We've spent a lot of money in the Defense Department trying to prepare for the adverse consequences of terrorism, using chemical and biological weapons. So you've got that on one side. You've got the people that say that globalization of the economy is going to lead to increasing inequality and oppression, and whatever happens is going to destroy the environment. And if it doesn't, the organized forces of destruction will cross national borders and wreck everything, anyway. That's sort of what you might call the modest dark side. And then you've got people like me that don't buy it, that basically I think if you look at over the last 50 years, that over a 50 year period the countries that were poor, that organized themselves properly and rewarded work and had lawful systems and related well to the rest of the world and traded more, grew much more rapidly. If you just look at the last 10 years, with the explosion of the Internet, countries that are highly wired, even though they're poor, had growth rates that were 6, 7 percent a year higher than they otherwise would have been. And so finally, there is no alternative. It's not like we're all going to go back to huts and quit talking to each other. So if we believe that every person is a child of God, that everyone counts, that everyone should have a certain level of decency in their lives and a certain fair chance to make something, what are our obligations? And I just want to mention three things that are before us today that I think are quite important. And a lot of you in this room have been involved in one or all three. The most important thing I'd like to talk about is debt relief. There are many countries that, either because of internal problems or abject misgovernment, piled up a lot of debt that can't be repaid. And now every year they have to spend huge amounts of their national treasure just making interest payments on the debt, money they can't spend on the education of their children, on the development of public health systems which, by the way, are under huge stress around the world and on other things that will give them a chance to take advantage of the new global economy in society. Now, there are people who don't favor this sweeping debt relief. They say that it rewards misconduct, that it creates what is known, not in your business but in the economics business, as a moral hazard. Laughter In economic terms, moral hazard is created the idea is, if you don't hold people liable for every penny of the mistakes they made or their predecessors made, then somehow you've created a mess in which everybody will go around until the end of time borrowing money they have no intention of paying back. And there's something to that, by the way. It's not a trivial concern to be dismissed. The problem you have is that a lot of these countries were grievously misgoverned, often by people who looted the national treasury. And when they get a good government, a new government, a clean government, when they agree to new rules, when they hook themselves into the International Monetary Fund, to the World Bank on the condition that they'll change everything they've done, they still can never get out of debt and can never educate their kids and make their people healthy and create a country that is attractive to investors to give people opportunity, which is why the Pope and so many other people urge that we use the year 2000 as Jubilee Year to have a sweeping debt relief initiative. And there's a whole thing in the Judeo Christian religion about how the Jubilee is supposed to be used every 50 years to forgive debts, to aid the poor, to proclaim liberty to all and there are trends there are similar traditions in other faiths of the world, represented in this room. So for those of you who have been working on this, I want to thank you. What I would like to tell you is, I think that it is very much in the interest of America to have big, largescale debt relief if the countries that get the relief are committed to and held accountable to good governance and using the money not to build up military power but to invest in the human needs of their people. We worked very hard to develop a plan. And a lot of you are involved in other in developing countries throughout the world. There are a lot of people here, I know, that are involved in Africa, for example, where many of the countries most in need are, but you also see this in Asia and Latin America, which is a very important thing. We developed a plan with other creditor nations to triple the debt relief available to the world's poorest nations, provided they agreed to take the savings from the debt payments and put it into health and education. The United States I announced last year that we would completely write off the bilateral debt owed to us by countries that qualify for this plan. That is, they've got to be too poor to pay the money back and well enough governed to be able to assure that they'll take the savings and put it into health and education. That's as many as 33 nations right now. I'll just tell you, in the last year, Bolivia an amazing story, by the way the poorest country in the Andes, has done the most to get rid of drug production. The poorest country has done the most to get rid of drug production. Astonishing story. That ought to be worth it to us to give them debt relief, complete debt relief. But they saved 77 million that they spent entirely on health, education, and other social needs. Uganda, one of the two countries in Africa that has dramatically reduced the AIDS rate, has used its savings to double primary school enrollment. Honduras has qualified but not received their money yet. They intend to offer every one of the children in the country 9 years of education instead of 6. Mozambique, a country which last year, until the floods, had the first or second highest growth rate in the world, after having been devastated by internal conflict just a few years ago, because of the flood is going to use a lot of their money to buy medicine for government clinics, because they've got a lot of serious health problems that are attendant on the fact that the country was practically washed away. Ten nations so far have qualified for the debt relief. Ten more, I think, will do so by the end of this year. We've got to make sure the money is there for them. Last year I got the Congress was supported on a bipartisan basis the money for America to forgive our bilateral debt relief. And we have to come up with money that for example, if somebody owes a billion dollars, even though we know they won't pay, because they can't, it gets budgeted at some figure. And we actually have to put that money in the budget before we can forgive it. But the Congress did not appropriate the funds for the highly indebted poor countries initiative to forgive their multilateral debt relief. Most countries owe more money to the International Monetary Fund than they do to America or France or Germany or Britain or Japan or anybody else. So if we want this to work, we have got to pass legislation this year to pay our fair share of this international debt relief initiative. Now, we have members of both parties from dramatically different backgrounds supporting this. It's really quite moving to see, because a lot of times this is the only thing these people have ever agreed on. It's really touching. You know, we have a lot of Democrats who represent inner city districts with people who have roots in these countries, allied for the first time in their entire career with conservative Republican evangelical Christians who believe they have a moral responsibility to do this, because it's ordained, and then all kinds of other people in the Congress. But it's given us a coalition that I would give anything to see formed around other issues and issues here at home anything. And it could really if we can actually pull it off, it can change the nature of the whole political debate in America because of something they did together that they all believe so deeply in. What's the problem? The problem is, there is competition for this money, and some people would rather spend it on something else where there are more immediate political benefits. None of these people have any votes, we're helping. And some people do buy the moral hazard argument. But I'm just telling you, I've been in these countries, and I know what many of their governments were like 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and I just don't think it washes. If you want people to organize themselves well, run themselves well, and build a future, we've got to do this. And I think it is a moral issue. How can we sit here on the biggest mountain of wealth we have ever accumulated, that any nation in all of human history has ever accumulated and we're not just throwing money away. We're only giving this money to people who not only promise to, but prove they are able to take all the savings and invest it in the human needs of their people. So I would just say, anything that any of you can do Bolivia is waiting for more money that they haven't gotten. Honduras is waiting for money that they haven't gotten. They're going to spend this money to send kids to school for 9 years instead of 6. This is not a complicated thing. And I would just implore you, anything you can do to urge members of both parties to make this a high priority. Let me remind you, we've got a budget worth nearly 2 trillion, and this money is for 2 years. So we're talking about 210 million in one year and 225 million in the second year to lift the burden off poor people around the world only if they earn it, in effect. So I just ask you all, please help us with that. And let me just mention two other things very briefly. The public health crisis in a lot of these countries is threatening to take out all the gains of good government and even debt relief. There are African countries with AIDS infection rates in the military of 30 percent or more. A quarter of all the world's people every year who die, die from AIDS, malaria, and TB, those three things. A phenomenal number of people die from malaria, in part, because there are no public health infrastructures in a lot of these places. So the second thing I want to ask for your help on is, we want to double or increase by 100 million it's about a 50 percent increase our efforts to help countries fight AIDS. We want to increase, dramatically, our contributions to the global alliance for vaccines that helps countries who are poor afford the medicine that is there. I just got back from Nigeria, and the President of Nigeria, who was a military leader in prison because he stood up for democracy and against a corrupt government that was there before, dealt with all these taboos that have gripped Africa and kept Africa from dealing with AIDS in an astonishing way. We went into an auditorium, and he and I stood on a stage with a 16 year old girl who was an AIDS peer educator and a young man in his mid twenties this is an amazing story or maybe he's in his early thirties now. He and his wife are both HIVpositive. He fell in love with a young woman who is HIV positive. Her parents didn't want them to get married his parents didn't want them to get married. They were devout Christians. Their minister didn't want them to get married. And he finally convinced the pastor that he would never love anyone else, and the pastor gave his assent to their getting married. Within 4 months of their getting married, he was HIV positive. She got pregnant. He had to quit his job to go around and scrounge up, because his job didn't give him enough money to buy the drugs that would free their child of being HIV positive. So he finally was let go of his job, excuse me, because he was HIVpositive, and they were still afraid and prejudiced. So with no money he found a way to get the drugs to his wife, and they had a child who was born free of the virus. So we were sitting there with hundreds of people in Nigeria, and the President is talking about this. So this guy comes up, and he tells this story and about what a blessing God has been in his life and how much he appreciates his pastor for marrying them and how much he appreciates their families for sticking with them. And then the President of the country called his wife up out of the stands, and he embraced her in front of hundreds of people. Now, this is a big deal on a continent where most people have acted like, you know, you might as well have smallpox, and you were giving it out by talking to people. This is a huge deal. And the President got up and said, "We have to fight the disease, not the people who have it. Our enemy are not the people with it. We have to fight the disease." It was an amazing thing. Now, I think these people ought to be helped, so we but it's 100 million I want to come up with for that, and I forget how much we're giving to the Vaccine Alliance. And in addition to that, I have asked the Congress, after meeting with a lot of our big drug research companies, not just the big pharmaceutical companies but a lot of them that do biomedical research, to give us a billion dollar tax credit to encourage companies to develop vaccines for AIDS, malaria, and TB, because we have to do that, because they don't see any front end benefit in it. And they have to they can't justify the massive amounts of money that are needed to develop these vaccines, because they know that most of the people that need them can't afford to buy them. So if they develop them, we'll figure out how to get the money to get them out there. But first we've got to have them developed. So I've proposed a tax credit, more money to help buy the medicines that are out there now, and a hundred million more dollars directly to help these countries fight AIDS. I want to ask you to help me get that money. It ought to be an American obligation. This is a serious global problem. The last thing I want to say is that there was a remarkable meeting in Senegal not very long ago, where essentially an alliance of the world's developing and developed countries made a commitment to try to make basic education available to every child in the world within 15 years. And one of the reasons that kids don't go is, they're not sure it makes sense, or their parents there are even countries in the poorest countries where the parents, no matter how poor they are, have to pay some money for their kids to go to school lots of problems. So Senator George McGovern, who is our Ambassador to the World Food Organization in Rome, and Senator Bob Dole came to me with Congressman Jim McGovern no relation from Massachusetts. And these three people from different worlds asked me to support an initiative to try to get to the point where the wealthier countries in the world could offer every poor child in the world a nutritious meal in school if they'd show up to school. And they reasoned that even though there are lots of other issues and by the way, I won't go into all that we've got to do a lot more to help these schools in these developing countries but they reasoned that if we could do that, there would be a dramatic enrollment, especially among young girls, who are often kept at home because their parents see no economic benefit, and in fact a burden, to having their daughters go to school. But there are a lot of young boys that aren't in school in countries, too. So we, thanks to Dan Glickman, got 300 million up, and we are doing a test run. And we're going around to countries that want to do this. And with 300 million listen to this we can feed 9 million schoolchildren for a year in school. But you don't get fed unless you come to school. Now, for somewhere between 3 billion and 4 billion, we could give a if we can get the rest of the world to help us do this, we could give a nutritious meal, either breakfast or lunch, to every school aged child in every really poor country in the entire world for a year. Now, you don't have to do anything about that now. I just want you to know about it, because we have to go figure out how to do this. And let me tell you why. Dan has got to figure out, how is this stuff going to be delivered to remote areas, or is it going to be in dried packages then hydrated and heated? How are we going to do this without messing up the local farm economies? The last thing we want to do is destabilize already fragile farmers. There are practical things. But we have many countries that are interested in this. When I was in Colombia on the drug thing, the President's wife asked me about this program. She said, "Can we be part of that, or are we too well off?" You know, she said, "We're not really all that rich, with all these narcotraffickers taking the money." We were talking about it. But the point I want to say is, we have reaped great benefits from the information revolution and the globalization of the economy. We, therefore, have great responsibilities. We have responsibilities to put a human face on the global economy. That's why I think we're right to advocate higher environmental and labor standards, try to make sure everybody benefits. We have a responsibility to lead the way on climate change, not be stuck in denial, because we're still the number one producer of greenhouse gases. Although shortly, unless we help them find a different way to get rich, China and India will be, just because they've got more folks. And in the short run, we have a very heavy responsibility, I believe, to broaden and simplify this debt relief initiative to lead the assault on the global diseases of AIDS, TB, and malaria that take out a quarter of the people who die, most of them very prematurely before their time every year and to do more to universalize education so that everybody, everywhere, will be able to take advantage of what we're coming to take for granted. Now, we've had a lot of wonderful talks over the last 8 years, but I think that I do not believe that a nation, any more than a church, a synagogue, a mosque, a particular religious faith, can confine its compassion and concern and commitment only within its borders, especially if you happen to be in the most fortunate country in the world. And I can't figure out for you what you think about whether these sweeping historical trends are, on balance, good or bad. But it seems to me if you believe that people are, on balance, good or bad or capable of good, we can make these trends work for good. And I'll just close with this. There is a fascinating book out that I just read by a man named Robert Wright, called "Non Zero." He wrote an earlier book called "The Moral Animal," which some of you may have read. This whole book is about, is all this stuff that is happening in science and technology, on balance, good or bad, and are the dark scenarios going to prevail, or is there some other way? The argument of the book, from which it gets its title, is basically an attempt to historically validate something Martin Luther King once said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." It's pretty hard to make that case, arguably, when you look at what happened with World War I, with Nazi Germany and World War II, with the highly sophisticated oppressive systems of communism. But that's the argument of this book, that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. The argument is that the more complex societies grow and the more interconnected we all get, the more interdependent we become, the more we have to look for non zero sum solutions. That is, solutions in which we all win, instead of solutions in which I win at your expense. It's not a naive book. He says, "Hey look, there's still going to be an election for President. One person wins one person loses. There's still going to be choices for who runs the company or who gets the pulpit." Laughter There will be choices. It's not a naive book. But he says that, on balance, great organizations and great societies will have to increasingly look for ways for everyone to win, in an atmosphere of principled compromise, based on shared values, maximizing the tools at hand. Otherwise, you can't continue societies cannot continue to grow both more complex and more interdependent. So I leave you with that thought and whatever it might mean for you in trying to reconcile your faith with the realities of modern life. And again I say, as Americans, we have, I think, a truly unique opportunity and a very profound responsibility to do something now on debt relief, disease, and education beyond our borders. Thank you very much. September 01, 2000 Thank you very much. When you gave us such a warm welcome and then you applauded some of Dean Gallucci's early lines, I thought to myself, "I'm glad he can get this sort of reception, because I gave him a lot of thankless jobs to do in our administration where no one ever applauded." And he did them brilliantly. I'm delighted to see him here succeeding so well as the dean. And Provost Brown, thank you for welcoming me here. I told them when I came in I was sort of glad Father O'Donovan wasn't here today, because I come so often, I know that at some point, if I keep doing this, he will tell me that he's going to send a bill to the U.S. Treasury for the Georgetown endowment. Laughter I was thinking when we came out here and Bob talked about the beginning of the school year that it was 35 years ago when, as a sophomore, I was in charge of the freshman orientation. So I thought I should come and help this year's orientation of freshmen get off to a good to start. I also was thinking, I confess, after your rousing welcome, that if I were still a candidate for public office, I might get up and say hello and sit down and quit while I'm ahead. Laughter For I came today to talk about a subject that is not fraught with applause lines but one that is very, very important to your future the defense of our Nation. At this moment of unprecedented peace and prosperity, with no immediate threat to our security or our existence, with our democratic values ascendant and our alliances strong, with the great forces of our time, globalization and the revolution in information technology, so clearly beneficial to a society like ours with our diversity and our openness and our entrepreneurial spirit, at a time like this, it is tempting but wrong to believe there are no serious long term challenges to our security. The rapid spread of technology across increasingly porous borders raises the specter that more and more states, terrorists, and criminal syndicates could gain access to chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons and to the means of delivering them, whether in small units deployed by terrorists within our midst or ballistic missiles capable of hurtling those weapons halfway around the world. Today I want to discuss these threats with you, because you will live with them a lot longer than I will. Especially, I want to talk about the ballistic missile threat. It is real and growing and has given new urgency to the debate about national missile defenses, known in the popular jargon as NMD. When I became President, I put our effort to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction at the very top of our national security agenda. Since then, we have carried out a comprehensive strategy to reduce and secure nuclear arsenals, to strengthen the international regime against biological and chemical weapons and nuclear testing, and to stop the flow of dangerous technology to nations that might wish us harm. At the same time, we have pursued new technologies that could strengthen our defenses against a possible attack, including a terrorist attack here at home. None of these elements of our national security strategy can be pursued in isolation. Each is important, and we have made progress in each area. For example, Russia and the United States already have destroyed about 25,000 nuclear weapons in the last decade. And we have agreed that in a START III treaty, we will go 80 percent below the level of a decade ago. In 1994 we persuaded Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus, three of the former Soviet Republics, to give up their nuclear weapons entirely. We have worked with Russia and its neighbors to dispose of hundreds of tons of dangerous nuclear materials, to strengthen controls on illicit exports, and to keep weapon scientists from selling their services to the highest bidder. We extended the nuclear nonproliferation treaty indefinitely. We were the very first nation to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, an idea first embraced by Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower. Sixty nations now have ratified the test ban treaty. I believe the United States Senate made a serious error in failing to ratify it last year, and I hope it will do so next year. We also negotiated and ratified the international convention to ban chemical weapons and strengthened the convention against biological weapons. We've used our export controls to deny terrorists and potential adversaries access to materials and equipment needed to build these kinds of weapons. We've imposed sanctions on those who contribute to foreign chemical and biological weapons programs. We've invested in new equipment and medical countermeasures to protect people from exposure. And we're working with State and local medical units all over our country to strengthen our preparedness in case of a chemical or biological terrorist attack, which many people believe is the most likely new security threat of the 21st century. We have also acted to reduce the threat posed by states that have sought weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles, while pursuing activities that are clearly hostile to our longterm interests. For over a decade for almost a decade, excuse me we have diverted about 90 percent of Iraq's oil revenues from the production of weapons to the purchase of food and medicine. This is an important statistic for those who believe that our sanctions are only a negative for the people, and particularly the children, of Iraq. In 1989 Iraq earned 15 billion from oil exports and spent 13 billion of that money on its military. This year Iraq is projected to earn 19 billion from its legal oil for food exports but can spend none of those revenues on the military. We worked to counter Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons and missile technology, convincing China to provide no new assistance to Iran's nuclear program, and pressing Russia to strengthen its controls on the export of sensitive technologies. In 1994, 6 years after the United States first learned that North Korea had a nuclear weapons program, we negotiated the agreement that verifiably has frozen its production of plutonium for nuclear weapons. Now, in the context of the United States negotiations with the North, of the diplomatic efforts by former Defense Secretary Bill Perry, and most lately, the summit between the leaders of North and South Korea, North Korea has refrained from flight testing a new missile that could pose a threat to America. We should be clear North Korea's capability remains a serious issue, and its intentions remain unclear. But its missile testing moratorium is a good development worth pursuing. These diplomatic efforts to meet the threat of proliferation are backed by the strong and global reach of our Armed Forces. Today, the United States enjoys overwhelming military superiority over any potential adversary. For example, in 1985 we spent about as much on defense as Russia, China, and North Korea combined. Today, we spend nearly 3 times as much, nearly 300 billion a year. And our military technology clearly is well ahead of the rest of the world. The principle of deterrence served us very well in the cold war, and deterrence remains imperative. The threat of overwhelming retaliation deterred Saddam Hussein from using weapons of mass destruction during the Gulf war. Our forces in South Korea have deterred North Korea in aggression for 47 years. The question is, can deterrence protect us against all those who might wish us harm in the future? Can we make America even more secure? The effort to answer these questions is the impetus behind the search for NMD. The issue is whether we can do more, not to meet today's threat but to meet tomorrow's threats to our security. For example, there is the possibility that a hostile state with nuclear weapons and longrange missiles may simply disintegrate, with command over missiles falling into unstable hands, or that in a moment of desperation, such a country might miscalculate, believing it could use nuclear weapons to intimidate us from defending our vital interests or from coming to the aid of our allies or others who are defenseless and clearly in need. In the future, we cannot rule out that terrorist groups could gain the capability to strike us with nuclear weapons if they seized even temporary control of a state with an existing nuclear weapons establishment. Now, no one suggests that NMD would ever substitute for diplomacy or for deterrence. But such a system, if it worked properly, could give us an extra dimension of insurance in a world where proliferation has complicated the task of preserving the peace. Therefore, I believe we have an obligation to determine the feasibility, the effectiveness, and the impact of a national missile defense on the overall security of the United States. The system now under development is designed to work as follows. In the event of an attack, American satellites would detect the launch of missiles. Our radar would track the enemy warheads, and highly accurate, highspeed ground based interceptors would destroy them before they could reach their targets in the United States. We have made substantial progress on a system that would be based in Alaska and that, when operational, could protect all 50 States from the near term missile threats we face, those emanating from North Korea and the Middle East. The system could be deployed sooner than any of the proposed alternatives. Since last fall, we've been conducting flight tests to see if this NMD system actually can reliably intercept a ballistic missile. We've begun to show that the different parts of this system can work together. Our Defense Department has overcome daunting technical obstacles in a remarkably short period of time, and I'm proud of the work that Secretary Cohen, General Shelton, and their teams have done. One test proved that it is, in fact, possible to hit a bullet with a bullet. Still, though the technology for NMD is promising, the system as a whole is not yet proven. After the initial test succeeded, our two most recent tests failed, for different reasons, to achieve an intercept. Several more tests are planned. They will tell us whether NMD can work reliably under realistic conditions. Critical elements of the program, such as the booster rocket for the missile interceptor, have yet to be tested. There are also questions to be resolved about the ability of the system to deal with countermeasures. In other words, measures by those firing the missiles to confuse the missile defense into thinking it is hitting a target when it is not. There is a reasonable chance that all these challenges can be met in time. But I simply cannot conclude with the information I have today that we have enough confidence in the technology and the operational effectiveness of the entire NMD system to move forward to deployment. Therefore, I have decided not to authorize deployment of a national missile defense at this time. Instead, I have asked Secretary Cohen to continue a robust program of development and testing. That effort still is at an early stage. Only 3 of the 19 planned intercept tests have been held so far. We need more tests against more challenging targets and more simulations before we can responsibly commit our Nation's resources to deployment. We should use this time to ensure that NMD, if deployed, would actually enhance our overall national security. And I want to talk about that in a few moments. I want you to know that I have reached this decision about not deploying the NMD after careful deliberation. My decision will not have a significant impact on the date the overall system could be deployed in the next administration, if the next President decides to go forward. The best judgment of the experts who have examined this question is that if we were to commit today to construct the system, it most likely would be operational about 2006 or 2007. If the next President decides to move forward next year, the system still could be ready in the same timeframe. In the meantime, we will continue to work with our allies and with Russia to strengthen their understanding and support for our efforts to meet the emerging ballistic missile threat and to explore creative ways that we can cooperate to enhance their security against this threat as well. An effective NMD could play an important part of our national security strategy, but it could not be the sum total of that strategy. It can never be the sum total of that strategy for dealing with nuclear and missile threats. Moreover, ballistic missiles, armed with nuclear weapons, as I said earlier, do not represent the sum total of the threats we face. Those include chemical and biological weapons and a range of deadly technologies for deploying them. So it would be folly to base the defense of our Nation solely on a strategy of waiting until missiles are in the air and then trying to shoot them down. We must work with our allies and with Russia to prevent potential adversaries from ever threatening us with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction in the first place, and to make sure they know the devastating consequences of doing so. The elements of our strategy cannot be allowed to undermine one another. They must reinforce one another and contribute to our national defense in all its dimensions. That includes the profoundly important dimension of arms control. Over the past 30 years, Republican and Democratic Presidents alike have negotiated an array of arms control treaties with Russia. We and our allies have relied on these treaties to ensure strategic stability and predictability with Russia, to get on with the job of dismantling the legacy of the cold war, and to further the transition from confrontation to cooperation with our former adversary in the most important arena, nuclear weapons. A key part of the international security structure we have built with Russia and, therefore, a key part of our national security, is the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty signed by President Nixon in 1972. The ABM Treaty limits antimissile defenses according to a simple principle Neither side should deploy defenses that would undermine the other side's nuclear deterrent and thus tempt the other side to strike first in a crisis or to take countermeasures that would make both our countries less secure. Strategic stability, based on mutual deterrence, is still important, despite the end of the cold war. Why? Because the United States and Russia still have nuclear arsenals that can devastate each other. And this is still a period of transition in our relationship. We have worked together in many ways signed an agreement of cooperation between Russia and NATO, served with Russian troops in Bosnia and Kosovo. But while we are no longer adversaries, we are not yet real allies. Therefore, for them as well as for us, maintaining strategic stability increases trust and confidence on both sides. It reduces the risk of confrontation. It makes it possible to build an even better partnership and an even safer world. Now, here's the issue. NMD, if deployed, would require us either to adjust the treaty or to withdraw from it, not because NMD poses a challenge to the strategic stability I just discussed but because by its very words, NMD prohibits any national missile defense. What we should want is to both explore the most effective defenses possible, not only for ourselves but for all other law abiding states, and to maintain our strategic stability with Russia. Thus far, Russia has been reluctant to agree, fearing, I think, frankly, that in some sense, this system, or some future incarnation of it, could threaten the reliability of its deterrence and, therefore, strategic stability. Nevertheless, at our summit in Moscow in June, President Putin and I did agree that the world has changed since the ABM treaty was signed 28 years ago, and that the proliferation of missile technology has resulted in new threats that may require amending that treaty. And again I say, these threats are not threats to the United States alone. Russia agrees that there is an emerging missile threat. In fact, given its place on the map, it is particularly vulnerable to this emerging threat. In time, I hope the United States can narrow our differences with Russia on this issue. The course I have chosen today gives the United States more time to pursue that, and we will use it. President Putin and I have agreed to intensify our work on strategic defense while pursuing, in parallel, deeper arms reductions in START III. He and I have instructed our experts to develop further cooperative initiatives in areas such as theater missile defense, early warning, and missile threat discussions for our meeting just next week in New York. Apart from the Russians, another critical diplomatic consideration in the NMD decision is the view of our NATO Allies. They have all made clear that they hope the United States will pursue strategic defense in a way that preserves, not abrogates, the ABM Treaty. If we decide to proceed with NMD deployment we must have their support, because key components of NMD would be based on their territories. The decision I have made also gives the United States time to answer our allies' questions and consult further on the path ahead. Finally, we must consider the impact of a decision to deploy on security in Asia. As the next President makes a deployment decision, he will need to avoid stimulating an already dangerous regional nuclear capability from China to South Asia. Now, let me be clear. No nation can ever have a veto over American security, even if the United States and Russia cannot reach agreement, even if we cannot secure the support of our allies at first, even if we conclude that the Chinese will respond to NMD by increasing their arsenal of nuclear weapons substantially, with a corollary inevitable impact in India and then in Pakistan. The next President may nevertheless decide that our interest in security in 21st century dictates that we go forward with deployment of NMD. But we can never afford to overlook the fact that the actions and reactions of others in this increasingly interdependent world do bear on our security. Clearly, therefore, it would be far better to move forward in the context of the ABM Treaty and allied support. Our efforts to make that possible have not been completed. For me, the bottom line on this decision is this Because the emerging missile threat is real, we have an obligation to pursue a missile defense system that could enhance our security. We have made progress, but we should not move forward until we have absolute confidence that the system will work, and until we have made every reasonable diplomatic effort to minimize the cost of deployment and maximize the benefit, as I said, not only to America's security but to the security of law abiding nations everywhere subject to the same threat. I am convinced that America and the world will be better off if we explore the frontiers of strategic defenses, while continuing to pursue arms control, to stand with our allies, and to work with Russia and others to stop the spread of deadly weapons. I strongly believe this is the best course for the United States, and therefore the decision I have reached today is in the best security interest of the United States. In short, we need to move forward with realism, with steadiness, and with prudence, not dismissing the threat we face or assuming we can meet it while ignoring our overall strategic environment, including the interests and concerns of our allies, friends, and other nations. A national missile defense, if deployed, should be part of a larger strategy to preserve and enhance the peace, strength, and security we now enjoy and to build an even safer world. I have tried to maximize the ability of the next President to pursue that strategy. In so doing, I have tried to maximize the chance that all you young students will live in a safer, more humane, more positively interdependent world. I hope I have done so. I believe I have. Thank you very much. August 28, 2000 Mr. President, Secretary Slater, Minister Nyanda, members of the Tanzanian and American delegations, ladies and gentlemen. First, Mr. President, thank you for your warm welcome, and we'll save your speech. Laughter And thank you for your thoughtful and deep remarks. I'd like to begin by also thanking you for the warm welcome that you gave to Chelsea and to Hillary when they were here. They both fell in love with your country, and Hillary asked me to give you her regards. Since you've just started a campaign, you will understand that she is otherwise occupied. Laughter I am honored to be here in a place of peace, to visit a champion of peace. Tanzania's story is too often not the stuff of headlines. For that I say, congratulations. Think of the headlines you have avoided. Because you have avoided headlines about repression, famine, and war, and instead focused on the steady progress of democracy and development, being generous to your neighbors, and being a cause of peace and cooperation across the region, too many people in our country do not know enough about your country. I hope very much that my visit here, with so many Members of the United States Congress who are here with me, will help to change that. I look forward, Mr. President, to joining you and President Mandela and the other regional leaders shortly in your efforts to bring a lasting peace to Burundi, just the last chapter in the distinguished history that you have already made in such a short time. One of the tragic ironies of life is, sometimes the most terrible things happen to those who try to do the most good. You mentioned it was just over 2 years ago that the terrorist bombs went off at our American Embassies not far north of here in Nairobi, and not far south in Dar es Salaam. They claimed hundreds of Tanzanian, Kenyan, and American lives. I believe the terrorists went after Tanzania, Kenya, and the United States precisely because we are dedicated to tolerance, understanding, and cooperation across frontiers and lines of division. They took a lot of our loved ones, but as you pointed out, they failed utterly to deter us from advancing our common principles. So, 2 years later I would like to say again to the Tanzanian families and the victims who survived, we still share your sorrow and your determination to see justice done. But we are grateful that your nation has stayed on the course of peace and reconciliation. We also want to continue to support you during the current drought. We have already provided substantial food assistance and will continue to do what is needed. We are also trying to help both Tanzania and Kenya deal with your significant refugee problems, which we had a chance to discuss in our meeting just a moment ago. We will keep working with you, Mr. President, to promote education and health, to bring the benefits of the global information economy to your nation and to the developing world. I am glad that we were able to support Tanzania as one of the first three African countries to qualify for debt relief under the heavily indebted poor countries initiative. So long as these economic reforms continue, they will be worth the freeing of 100 million a year, which Tanzania can now invest in its greatest resource, your people. And I might say, Mr. President, I was very moved by what you said in our meeting about how you intend to invest that money. And I hope that the Members of our Congress will take home the powerful example that you have set as a good reason for us to fully fund our part of the global initiative to relieve the debt of highly indebted poor countries. I also want to do more to encourage foreign investment here. When I last met with you, Mr. President, you were just finishing a very successful tour of the United States to promote American investment here. It has doubled in the last 5 years. The Open Skies agreement, just signed, will strengthen our economic ties further, giving both our countries' airlines unrestricted international access from any airport to any airport in either country so that more people can travel and market their products to more places at lower cost. It was the first of six such agreements we have negotiated with African nations, and I am honored that the first was here in Tanzania. We will keep working with you, Mr. President, on all these issues, not only because your success is important in its own right and because your people deserve a chance to live their dreams, but because you inspire all those around you who are struggling to achieve freedom and peace and reconciliation. I urge you to continue to inspire them. I thank you for the power of your example. I support the work you do. And again let me say on behalf of all the American delegation, we are delighted and honored to be here. Thank you very much. August 26, 2000 Thank you very much. Mr. President of the Senate, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Deputy President and Deputy Speaker, members of the Assembly, it is a great honor for me to be here with members of my Cabinet and Government, Members of the United States Congress, mayors of some of our greatest cities, and my daughter. And we're glad to be here. I must say, this is the first time I have been introduced as President in 8 years speaking to parliamentary bodies all over the world, where they played a song before I spoke. Laughter I liked it a lot. Laughter It got us all in a good frame of mind. Twenty two years ago President Jimmy Carter became the first President ever to visit sub Saharan Africa when he arrived in Nigeria saying he had come from a great nation to visit a great nation. More than 2 years ago, I came to Africa for the longest visit ever by an American President, to build a new partnership with your continent. But sadly, in Nigeria, an illegitimate government was killing its people and squandering your resources. All most Americans knew about Nigeria then was a sign at their local airport warning them not to fly here. A year later Nigeria found a transitional leader who kept his promises. Then Nigerians elected a President and a National Assembly and entrusted to them to you the hard work of rebuilding your nation and building your democracy. Now, once again, Americans and people all around the world will know Nigeria for its music and art, for its Nobel Prize winners and its Super Falcons, for its commitment to peacekeeping and its leadership in Africa and around the world. In other words, once again, people will know Nigeria as a great nation. You have begun to walk the long road to repair the wrongs and errors of the past and to build bridges to a better future. The road is harder and the rewards are slower than all hoped it would be when you began. But what is most important is that today you are moving forward, not backward. And I am here because your fight your fight for democracy and human rights, for equity and economic growth, for peace and tolerance your fight is America's fight and the world's fight. Indeed, the whole world has a big stake in your success, and not simply because of your size or the wealth of your natural resources or even your capacity to help lift this entire continent to peace and prosperity, but also because so many of the great human dramas of our time are being played out on the Nigerian stage. For example, can a great country that is home to one in six Africans succeed in building a democracy amidst so much diversity and a past of so much trouble? Can a developing country blessed with enormous human and natural resources thrive in a global economy and lift all its people? Can a nation so blessed by the verve and vigor of countless traditions and many faiths be enriched by its diversity, not enfeebled by it? I believe the answer to all those questions can and must be, yes. There are still those around the world who see democracy as a luxury that people seek only when times are good. Nigerians have shown us that democracy is a necessity, especially when times are hard. The dictators of your past hoped the hard times would silence your voices, banish your leaders, destroy your spirit. But even in the darkest days, Nigeria's people knew they must stand up for freedom, the freedom their founders promised. Achebe championed it. Sunny Ade sang for it. Journalists like Akinwumi Adesokan fought for it. Lawyers like Gani Fawehinmi testified for it. Political leaders like Yar'Adua died for it. And most important, the people of Nigeria voted for it. Now, at last, you have your country back. Nigerians are electing their leaders, acting to cut corruption and investigate past abuses, shedding light on human rights violations, turning a fearless press into a free press. It is a brave beginning. But you know better than I how much more must be done. Every nation that has struggled to build democracy has found that success depends on leaders who believe government exists to serve people, not the other way around. President Obasanjo is such a leader. And the struggle to build democracy depends also on you, on legislators who will be both a check on and a balance to executive authority and be a source applause . You know, if I said that to my Congress, they would still be clapping and standing. Laughter And this is important, too let me finish. Laughter In the constitutional system, the legislature provides a check and balance to the executive, but it must also be a source of creative, responsible leadership, for in the end, work must be done and progress must be made. Democracy depends upon a political culture that welcomes spirited debate without letting politics become a bloodsport. It depends on strong institutions, an independent judiciary, a military under firm civilian control. It requires the contributions of women and men alike. I must say I am very glad to see a number of women in this audience today, and also I am glad that Nigerian women have their own Vital Voices program, a program that my wife has worked very hard for both in Africa and all around the world. Of course, in the end, successful political change must begin to improve people's daily lives. That is the democracy dividend Nigerians have waited for. But no one should expect that all the damage done over a generation can be undone in a year. Real change demands perseverance and patience. It demands openness to honorable compromise and cooperation. It demands support on a constant basis from the people of Nigeria and from your friends abroad. That does not mean being patient with corruption or injustice, but to give up hope because change comes slowly would only be to hand a victory to those who do not want to change at all. Remember something we Americans have learned in over 224 years of experience with democracy It is always and everywhere a work in progress. It took my own country almost 90 years and a bitter civil war to set every American free. It took another 100 years to give every American the basic rights our Constitution promised them from the beginning. Since the time of our Revolution, our best minds have debated how to balance the responsibilities of our National and State Government, what the proper balance is between the President and the Congress, what is the role of the courts in our national life. And since the very beginning, we have worked hard with varying degrees of success and occasional, regrettable, sometimes painful failures, to weave the diverse threads of our Nation into a coherent, unified tapestry. Today, America has people from over 200 racial, ethnic, and religious groups. We have school districts in America where, in one school district, the parents of the children speak over 100 different languages. It is an interesting challenge. But it is one that I am convinced is a great opportunity, just as your diversity your religious diversity and your ethnic diversity is a great opportunity in a global society growing ever more intertwined, a great opportunity if we can find unity in our common humanity, if we can learn not only to tolerate our differences but actually to celebrate our differences. If we can believe that how we worship, how we speak, who our parents were, where they came from are terribly important, but on this Earth, the most important thing is our common humanity, then there can be no stopping us. Now, no society has ever fully solved this problem. As you struggle with it, you think of the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the ongoing tragedy of Kashmir, and you realize it is a formidable challenge. You also know, of course, that democracy does not answer such questions. It simply gives all free people the chance to find the answers that work for them. I know that decades of misrule and deprivation have made your religious and ethnic divisions deeper. Nobody can wave a hand and make the problems go away. But that is no reason to let the idea of one united Nigeria slip away. After all, after all this time, if we started trying to redraw the map of Africa, we would simply be piling new grievances on old. Even if we could separate all the people of Africa by ethnicity and faith, would we really rid this continent of strife? Think of all the things that would be broken up and all the mountains of progress that have been built up that would be taken down if that were the case. Where there is too much deprivation and too little tolerance, differences among people will always seem greater and will always be like open sores waiting to be turned into arrows of hatred by those who will be advantaged by doing so. But I think it is worth noting for the entire world that against the background of vast cultural differences, a history of repression and ethnic strife, the hopeful fact here today is that Nigeria's 250 different ethnic groups have stayed together in one nation. You have struggled for democracy together. You have forged national institutions together. All your greatest achievements have come when you have worked together. It is not for me to tell you how to resolve all the issues that I follow more closely than you might imagine I do. You're a free people, an independent people, and you must resolve them. All I can tell you is what I have seen and experienced these last years as President, in the United States, and in working with other good people with similar aspirations on every continent of the globe. We have to find honorable ways to reconcile our differences on common ground. The overwhelming fact of modern life everywhere, believe it or not, is not the growth of the global economy, not the explosion of information technology and the Internet, but the growing interdependence these changes are bringing. Whether we like it or not, more and more, our fates are tied together within nations and beyond national borders, even beyond continental borders and across great oceans. Whether we like it or not, it is happening. You can think of big examples, like our economic interconnections. You can think of anecdotal examples, like the fact that we now have a phenomenon in the world known as airport malaria, where people get malaria in airports in nations where there has never been an single case of malaria because they just pass other people who have it from around the world in the airport. Whether we like it or not, your destiny is tied to mine, and mine to yours, and the future will only make it more so. You can see it in all the positive things we can build together and in the common threats we face from enemies of a nation state, from the narcotraffickers, the gunrunners, from the terrorists, from those who would develop weapons of mass destruction geared to the electronic age, very difficult to detect and easy to move. Now, we have to decide what we're going to do with the fundamental fact of modern life, our interdependence. Is it possible for the Muslims and the Christians here to recognize that and find common ground? Can we find peace in Jerusalem between the Muslims, the Christians, and the Jews? Can we find peace in the Balkans between the Muslims, the Orthodox Christians, and the Catholics? Will we ever bring and end to the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland I mean, finally ever really have it over with completely? Can the Hindus and the Muslims learn to live together in Kashmir? Isn't it interesting, when I came here, in part to help you move into the information revolution more quickly, to spread its benefits to more of your people, that all over the world, in this most modern of ages, we are bedeviled by humanity's oldest problem the fear of the other, people who are different from us? I'm sure there was a time in the deep, distant mists of memory, when everyone had to be afraid of people who were not of their tribe, when food was scarce and there was no means of communication. But all of us still carry around with us the fear of people who are different from us. And it is such a short step from being afraid of someone to distrusting them, to disliking them, to hating them, to oppressing them, to using violence against them. It is a slippery, slippery slope. So I say again, the biggest challenge for people in the United States, where people still, I'm ashamed to say, lose their lives because they are different not nearly as much as it used to be it's a rare occurrence, but it still tears at our hearts, because we know everyone counts, everyone deserves a chance at life, and we all do better when we help each other and when we find a way for everyone to follow his or her own path through life, guided by their own lights and their own faith. So I say to you, I come here with that in mind. The world needs Nigeria to succeed. Every great nation must become more than the sum of its parts. If we are torn by our differences, then we become less than the sum of our parts. Nigeria has within it the seeds of every great development going on in the world today, and it has a future worth fighting for. You are already a champion of peace, democracy, and justice. Last month in Tokyo, your President reminded leaders of the Group of Eight very firmly that we are all tenants of the same global village. He said, and I quote, "We must deal with the challenges for development not as separate entities but in partnership, as members of the same global family, with shared interests and responsibilities." So today I would like to talk just a few minutes about how our two nations, with our shared experience of diversity and our common faith in freedom, can work as partners to build a better future. I believe we have two broad challenges. The first is to work together to help Nigeria prepare its economy for success in the 21st century and then to make Nigeria the engine of economic growth and renewal across the continent. The second is to work together to help build the peace that Nigeria and all of Africa so desperately need. To build stronger economies, we must confront the diseases that are draining the life out of Africa's cities and villages, especially AIDS but also TB and malaria. AIDS will reduce life expectancy in Africa by 20 years. It is destroying families and wiping out economic gains as fast as nations can make them. It is stealing the future of Africa. In the long run, the only way to wipe out these killer diseases is to provide effective, affordable treatments and vaccines. Just last week I signed into law a new 60 million investment in vaccine research and new support for AIDS treatment and prevention around the world, including Nigeria. In the meantime, however, while we wait for the long run, we have to face reality. I salute President Obasanjo for his leadership in recognizing we can't beat AIDS by denying it we can't beat AIDS by stigmatizing it. Right now, we can only beat AIDS by preventing it, by changing behavior and changing attitudes and breaking the silence about how the disease is transmitted and how it can be stopped. This is a matter of life or death. There are nations in Africa two that have had a significant reduction in the AIDS rate because they have acted aggressively on the question of prevention. Tomorrow the President and I will meet with Nigerians on the frontline of this fight, and I will congratulate them. Building a stronger economy also means helping all children learn. In the old economy, a country's economic prospects were limited by its place on the map and its natural resources. Location was everything. In the new economy, information, education, and motivation are everything. When I was coming down here today, Reverend Jackson said to me, "Remind everybody that America, to help Nigeria, involves more than the Government it's also Wall Street and Silicon Valley." That's what's growing our economy, and it can help to grow yours. One of the great minds of the information age is a Nigerian American named Philip Emeagwali. He had to leave school because his parents couldn't pay the fees. He lived in a refugee camp during your civil war. He won a scholarship to university and went on to invent a formula that lets computers make 3.1 billion calculations per second. Some people call him the Bill Gates of Africa. Laughter But what I want to say to you is, there is another Philip Emeagwali or hundreds of them, or thousands of them growing up in Nigeria today. I thought about it when I was driving in from the airport and then driving around to my appointments, looking into the faces of children. You never know what potential is in their mind and in their heart, what imagination they have, what they have already thought of and dreamed of that may be locked in because they don't have the means to take it out. That's really what education is. It's our responsibility to make sure all your children have the chance to live their dreams so that you don't miss the benefit of their contributions and neither does the rest of the world. It's in our interest in America to reach out to the 98 percent of the human race that has never connected to the Internet, to the 269 of every 270 Nigerians who still lack a telephone. I am glad to announce that the United States will work with Nigeria NGO's and universities to set up community resource centers to provide Internet access, training, and support to people in all regions of your country. I also discussed with the President earlier today a 300 million initiative we have launched to provide a nutritious meal a free breakfast or a free lunch for children in school, enough to feed another 9 million kids in school that aren't in school today, including in Nigeria. We know that if we could offer and I'm going to the other developed countries, asking them to contribute, and then we're going to nation by nation, working with governmental groups, working with farm groups we don't want to upset any local farm economies we understand their challenges here, but we know if we could guarantee every child in every developing nation one nutritious meal a day, we could dramatically increase school enrollment among boys and especially among girls. We don't have a child to waste. I hope we can do this in Nigeria, and I hope you will work with us to get the job done. I have also asked the Peace Corps to reestablish its partnership with Nigeria as soon as possible to help with education, health, and information technology. Building a strong economy also means creating strong institutions and, above all, the rule of law. Your Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, has written that he imagines a day when Nigeria is, quote, "an unstoppable nation, one whose citizens anywhere in the world would be revered simply by the very possession of a Nigerian passport." I don't need to tell you that the actions of a small group of Nigerians took away that possibility, took away the pride of carrying the passport, stealing the opportunity from every decent and honest citizen of this country. But we will bring the pride and prosperity back by cracking down together on crime, corruption, fraud, and drugs. Our FBI is again working with Nigeria to fight international and financial crime. Our law enforcement agencies are working to say to narcotraffickers, there should be no safe havens in Nigeria. As we do these things, we will be able to say loud and clear to investors all over the world, "Come to Nigeria. This is a place of untapped opportunity because it is a place of unlimited potential." This year I signed into law our Africa trade bill, and many of its champions are here with me from our Congress. It will help us to seize that opportunity, creating good jobs and wealth on both sides of the Atlantic. The challenge is to make sure any foreign involvement in your economy promotes equitable development, lifting people and communities that have given much for Nigeria's economic progress but so far have gained too little from it. Neither the people nor the private sector want a future in which investors exist in fortified islands surrounded by seas of misery. Democracy gives us a chance to avoid that future. Of course, I'm thinking especially of the Niger Delta. I hope government and business will forge a partnership with local people to bring real, lasting social progress, a clean environment, and economic opportunity. We face, of course, another obstacle to Nigeria's economic development, the burden of debt that past governments left on your shoulders. The United States has taken the lead in rescheduling Nigeria's debt within the Paris Club, and I believe we should do more. Nigeria shouldn't have to choose between paying interest on debt and meeting basic human needs, especially in education and health. We are prepared to support a substantial reduction of Nigeria's debts on a multilateral basis, as long as your economic and financial reforms continue to make progress and you ensure that the benefits of debt reduction go to the people. Now, let me say, as we do our part to support your economic growth and economic growth throughout Africa, we must also work together and build on African efforts to end the conflicts that are bleeding hope from too many places. If there's one thing I would want the American people to learn from my trip here it is the true, extraordinary extent of Nigeria's leadership for peace in West Africa and around the world. I hope our Members of Congress who are here today will tell this to their colleagues back home. Over the past decade, with all of its problems, Nigeria has spent 10 billion and sacrificed hundreds of its soldiers lives for peace in West Africa. Nigeria was the first nation, with South Africa, to condemn the recent coup in Cote d'Ivoire. And Nigerian soldiers and diplomats, including General Abubakar, are trying to restart the peace process in Congo. In these ways, you are building the record of a moral superpower. That's a long way to come in just a couple of years, and I urge you to stay with it. But I know, I know from the murmurs in this chamber and from the murmurs I heard in the congressional chamber when I said the United States must go to Bosnia, the United States must go to Kosovo, the United States must train an Africa crisis response initiative, the United States must come here and help you train to deal with the challenges of Sierra Leone I know that many of you have often felt the burden of your peacekeeping was heavier than the benefit. I know you have felt that. But there's no one else in West Africa with the size, the standing, the strength of military forces to do it. If you don't do it, who will do it? But you should not have to do it alone. That's what's been wrong with what's happened in the last several years. You have too heavy a burden. Because of your size, everyone expects you to lead and to do so with enormous sensitivity to the needs of others. But despite your size, you cannot lead alone, and you shouldn't have to pay the enormous price. I am determined, if you're willing to lead, to get you the international support you need and deserve to meet those responsibilities. This week the first of five Nigerian peacekeeping battalions began working with American military trainers and receiving American equipment. With battalions from Ghana and other African nations, they will receive almost 60 million in support to be a commanding force for peace in Sierra Leone and an integral part of Nigeria's democratization. We think the first battalions will be ready to deploy with U.N. forces early next year. We expect them to make an enormous difference in replacing the reign of terror with the rule of law. As they do, all of West Africa will benefit from the promise of peace and stability and the prospect of closer military and economic cooperation, and Nigeria will take another step toward building a 21st century army that is strong and strongly committed to democracy. Let me say to the military leaders who are here with us today that the world honors your choice to take the army out of politics and make it a pillar of a democratic state. Last year President Obasanjo came to Washington and reminded us that peace is indivisible. I have worked to build a new relationship between America and Africa because our futures are indivisible. It matters to us whether you become an engine of growth and opportunity or a place of unrelieved despair. It matters whether we push back the forces of crime, corruption, and disease together or leave them to divide and conquer us. It matters whether we reach out with Africans to build peace or leave millions of God's children to suffer alone. Our common future depends on whether Africa's 739 million people gain the chance to live their dreams, and Nigeria is a pivot point on which all Africa's future turns. Ten years ago a young Nigerian named Ben Okri published a novel, "The Famished Road," that captured imaginations all over the world. He wrote of a spirit child who defies his elders and chooses to be born into the turmoil and struggle of human life. The time and place were modern Nigeria, but the questions the novel poses speak to all of us in a language that is as universal as the human spirit. In a time of change and uncertainty, Okri asks us, "Who can dream a good road and then live to travel on it?" Nigerians, as much as any nation on Earth, have dreamed this road. Since Anthony Enahoro stood up in a colonial Parliament and demanded your independence in 1953, Nigerians have dreamed this road in music and art and literature and political struggle, and in your contributions to prosperity and progress, among the immigrants to my country and so many others. Now, at the dawn of a new century, the road is open at home to all citizens of Nigeria. You have the chance to build a new Nigeria. We have the chance to build a lasting network of ties between Africa and the United States. I know it will not be easy to walk the road, but you have already endured such stiff challenges. You have beaten such long odds to get this far. And after all, the road of freedom is the only road worth taking. I hope that, as President, I have helped a little bit to take us a few steps down that road together. I am certain that America will walk with you in the years to come. And I hope you will remember, if nothing else, what I said about our interdependence. Yes, you need us today because at this fleeting moment in history, we are the world's richest country. But over the long run of life and over the long run of a nation's life and over the long run of civilization on this planet, the rich and the poor often change places. What endures is our common humanity. If you can find it amidst all your differences and we can find it amidst all ours, and then we can reach out across the ocean, across the cultures, across the different histories with a common future for all of our children, freedom's road will prevail. Thank you, and God bless you. August 26, 2000 President Obasanjo. Mr. President, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, members of the press, let me say how pleased I am for this opportunity to welcome President Bill Clinton to Nigeria. I am confident that by now President Clinton must have felt from the personal meeting to the enthusiastic crowds that greeted him the extent of our delight to have him among us. President Clinton and I have had very friendly and fruitful discussions covering all the items and subjects that make up the content of our joint declaration which we have just signed and exchanged, and even more. I just want to emphasize that for all the shared strategic interests between Nigeria and the United States of America, President Clinton and myself share a common view that is based on human welfare, human development, and human well being in both our countries, our continents, and throughout the world. Of course, whatever strategic interests, economic, political, or of a social nature, the essence is based on the fundamentals of humanity. Also deriving from this is the issue of Nigeria's role of peacemaking and peacekeeping in our sub region, our region of Africa, and under the auspices of the U.N., the whole world. Needless to say that this goes for the United States, by virtue of her status as the number one world power today. President Clinton has only just begun his visit, designed so far that it will be a memorable one, and we wish you a very pleasant day in Nigeria. We welcome you once again. President Clinton. President Obasanjo, members of the Nigerian Government, members of the press, I think I can say on behalf of the Members of the United States Congress who are here and the members of the American delegation, we are delighted to be in Nigeria. Two years ago I came to Africa to begin building a new partnership between this continent and the United States, one in which Americans look upon Africa not simply as a continent with problems but also as a continent which presents the world's next great opportunity to advance the cause of peace, justice, and prosperity. When I came here 2 years ago, one of the biggest obstacles to a new relationship with the entire continent was the fact that the democratic hopes of Nigeria's people were being smothered by military misrule and corruption, with your finest leaders being killed, banished, or in the case of President Obasanjo, forced to languish in prison. My greatest hope then was that some day I could come to Africa again, to visit a Nigeria worthy of its people's dreams. Thanks to President Obasanjo and the people of Nigeria, I have the high honor today to visit the new Nigeria and to pledge America's support for the most important democratic transition in Africa since the fall of apartheid. All of us in the American delegation know that after so many years of despair and plunder, your journey has not been easy. But we are also committed to working with the people of Nigeria to help build stronger institutions, improve education, fight disease, crime, and corruption, ease the burden of debt, and promote trade and investment in a way that brings more of the benefits of prosperity to people who have embraced democracy. We are rebuilding ties severed during the years of dictatorship. I am very happy that last week the first direct flight since 1993 left Muritala Mohammed Airport for the United States. Today we have signed our first open skies agreement. With patience and perseverance, Nigeria can answer the challenge your President issued in his inauguration 2 years ago a speech I got up very early in the morning in the United States to watch. I remember that he said, "Let us rise as one to face the tasks ahead and turn this daunting scene into a new dawn." With one fifth of Africa's people, and vast human and natural resources, a revitalized Nigeria can be the economic and political anchor of West Africa and the leader of the continent. We need your continued leadership in the struggle for peace. I am pleased we have begun this week to help to train and equip the first of five Nigerian battalions preparing for service in Sierra Leone. We also need your continued leadership in the struggle against poverty and infectious disease, especially AIDS. I thank President Obasanjo for his offer to host an AIDS summit in Nigeria next year. Finally, we need Nigeria to keep leading by example as a successful democracy and a nation that has managed, despite many years of repression and strife, to prove that for democracies, our diversity can be our greatest strength. These are just some of the issues we discussed today. Later, I will have the honor of speaking to the Nigerian Parliament, and I will speak in greater detail about the challenges ahead and the promise of our growing partnership. But let me just say, I begin this visit with enormous admiration for the progress you have made and the highest hope for the progress you will make in the future and the depth that our partnership will assume. Thank you again, Mr. President, for making us all feel so welcome. President Obasanjo. We will now take questions from the members of the media. I think we should go to our guests first. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, you're going to meet with President Mubarak of Egypt. Can you give us an idea of what you're going to discuss with him and whether this portends another Mideast peace summit? And President Obasanjo, I'd also like to have your perspective on these efforts to reach peace in the Middle East. President Clinton. Well, let me say, first of all, I think it's inconceivable that we could have a peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians without the support of President Mubarak. As you know, when I leave here, I'm going to Tanzania to support President Mandela and the peace process that he has been working on in Burundi, and then we have to make a refueling stop on our way home. I had hoped to see President Mubarak at the United Nations summit, which will be at the end of the first week of September, but he can't come to that. And so we were having one of our regular telephone conversations the other day and decided that since he would not be in New York, that I ought to refuel in Cairo and we ought to reconnoiter on the peace process. I don't think you should read too much into it, other than that we are working with a sense of urgency, given the timetable the parties have set for themselves. And we don't underestimate the continuing difficulties, but I'm pleased they're still working, and working under enormous pressures. President Obasanjo. I must take this opportunity to commend the efforts of President Clinton in the Middle East. I believe that the fact that the door is not completely closed and the fact that areas where, in fact, a few years back one would infer that there would be no advancement at all, whether Jerusalem could be negotiated on, is now an issue that can be put on the table to be negotiated I believe that should give all of us some hope. And as President Clinton just said, all the people that should be involved must be engaged, to be involved. And we should never be tired until we achieve success. And I believe success will be achieved. I have no doubt. Third World Debt Relief Q. President Clinton's attitude to Africa and the poorer nations of the world is very well known. He is sympathetic to those nations. But America does not make up the West, only America does not. Now, at a inaudible in Ghana in April, a position was adopted on the issue of the strangulating debt burden in the poorer countries of the world. Now, President Obasanjo, as the chairman of the inaudible was given the mandate to present that position to the G 8 at the July Okinawa summit. Both President Obasanjo inaudible on that issue came out at that meeting expressing disappointment at the lack of concrete commitment on the issues by the richest nations of the world. Is there any indication that the contact today with a key member of the G 8 would open up new vistas on the issues of debt cancellation for the poor countries of the world? And America is perhaps the strongest supporter of democracy around the world, and we know that democracy turns on the face of the huge debt burden. What is the way out? President Clinton. Well, let me say, first of all, what I believe the G 8 was saying. You may know that I, because of other commitments and because of the Middle East peace process, unfortunately, had to miss the first day of the G 8 summit and, therefore, I missed the President's presentation. At Cologne, Germany, we got the G 8 to make a commitment to a debt relief program for the poorest countries in the world, and we had some problems implementing it, but the basic idea, I think, was sound, which was that we should give debt forgiveness in return for a commitment to spend the freed up resources on human development and to have a responsible economic reform program. That was basically the agreement. I strongly support that, and I would favor expanding the number of eligible nations once we've actually taken them in some proper order. Our Congress has before it now legislation that would pay America's share of the debt relief for the countries that have qualified under the program that the G 8 adopted. My own view is that the G 8 would be willing to go beyond those 24 countries as long as it was clear that there was a commitment to economic reform and a commitment to democracy and a commitment to use all the savings for human development purposes, not for military purposes or other purposes that were inconsistent with the long term interest of the countries. But I think that the real issue is not whether they can afford the debt relief in most of these countries, they actually have to budget the debt relief even if they're not going to get repaid. And to be fair, the United States does not have the same dollar stake in most of these nations in the multilateral forum as some other countries do. So it is a little more difficult for them than it is for us. And I think that you are seeing the beginning of a process that I believe will continue, since I believe that we'll have more countries doing what Nigeria is doing embracing democracy, having a program with the IMF, a commitment to economic reform that will commend itself to the creditor countries of the world for debt relief. And I think that you'll it will happen. But, you're right, we have been in the forefront of pushing this. But to be fair to the other countries the relative size of the American economy make our makes it easier for us to do than for some of these other countries. And the real problem is not the money itself, because many of them don't expect to be repaid. The real problem is that they all have budget rules like we do that require them to budget that in their annual budgets the forgiveness of debt just as they budget for education or health care or defense or anything else, even thought it's, arguably, an unnecessary thing since they don't expect to get the money back from the poorest countries. But you need to understand that's the political problem that a lot of these leaders have. And since the European countries and Japan have a bigger percentage of their income tied up in debt than we do, it's a little more difficult for them to do. I think we have moved them in the right direction, and I think Nigeria, in particular, and other countries following behind will find a much more ready response. I think that what happened in Cologne, the call of His Holiness the Pope and others for debt relief in the millennial year, will lead to a process that I expect to play out over the next few years that I believe will result in significantly greater debt relief than we have seen, as long as it's coupled to maintenance of democracy, economic reform, and honest economies and using the savings from debt relief for the real human benefits and needs of the people in the affected countries. Nigerian Debt Relief Oil Prices Q. Mr. President, would you urge President Obasanjo to reduce to work within OPEC to reduce oil prices? And did you offer him any commitment on rescheduling or writing off of debt for Nigeria? And President Obasanjo, I was wondering if you can give your own views on inaudible situation. President Clinton. Let me answer the debt question first, since it sort of follows upon the previous question. I reaffirmed the commitment that I had previously made to the President that, first of all, the United States would do all we said to get the entire Paris Club to do what the G 8 has now agreed to do and have a generous debt rescheduling, which will alleviate a lot of the cash flow requirements, at least, for Nigeria in the short run and that now that there was an IMF program in place, once there was enough experience with this IMF program that we could argue to the other creditor nations that have a larger as I said to the previous questioner, the gentleman before, that these other nations that have a bigger share of the debt than we do that Nigeria has shown a commitment to economic reform, as well as a commitment to democracy, that I would support debt relief for them, that I thought they ought to have some debt relief in return for showing that they've got a commitment to a long term political and economic reform. That's the position I've had for some time now. On the oil prices, we talked about that, and Nigeria, of course, does not have the capacity to change the prices, because they're pretty well producing at full capacity already. So I asked the President to do whatever he could to encourage others to increase production enough to have the impact that OPEC voted to have at the last meeting. At the last meeting, they voted for production levels that they felt would bring the price back closer to its historic average, somewhere in the mid 20's. And that has not worked out for a number of reasons, and so I asked him to do what he could in that regard. President Obasanjo. I have always maintained that an excessive high price of oil is neither good for the oil producers nor for the oil consumers, particularly developing oil consumers. Neither is excessive low price of oil, neither is it good for the oil producers nor the oil consumers because you need certain amount of stability. I believe that that stability would be there when OPEC brought in the mechanism to trigger off oil if the oil price is above certain price level, to automatically go in and produce more, and if it's below certain levels to automatically go in and withdraw from the production. Well, as President Clinton said, what has taken place so far has not worked. The OPEC will have a summit meeting in Venezuela next month, and the price of oil will be one of the major issues to be discussed. And I will, by the grace of God, be at that meeting. And we will work to bring an element of stability into the price of oil. It is in the interest of all concerned that that should happen. U.S. Issuance of Visas to Nigerians United Nations Security Council Q. My question is to President Clinton, and it concerns the U.S. visa policy of Nigeria. The policy so far has inaudible going to do to affect some concrete change in this direction. And the second question is will the United States support a Security Council seat for permanent participation in the United Nations? President Clinton. Well, let me answer the first question first. I'm very concerned about some of the problems we've had in getting visas to Nigerians who have legitimate interests in coming the United States and should have a perfect right to do so. If I might say something in defense of the people who have to issue the visas. Because of the worldwide concern that has nothing to do with Nigeria about terrorism and other problems, they have been given instructions to bend over backwards to make sure that all the documents that anybody from any country applying for a visa are in perfect order. Because of a lot of developments here over the last several years, that's not always possible. So what we've got to do is go back and take a hard look at this situation as it affects Nigeria, because we acknowledge that there are many Nigerians who have tried to come to the United States, who should have been able to come and, therefore, should have been able to get visas, who haven't been. And we have to try to find a way to solve that consistent with our law. And I wish I had an answer for you today, but frankly, I was not aware of the dimensions of the problem until I was preparing to come here and preparing for my visit. And so I don't have a solution today. But I can I make you a commitment that we will work on it, and we will try to work this out, because I'm quite concerned about it. When I saw the numbers and I saw the small percentage of those who had applied who had been approved, and it was obvious that many, many more had legitimate interests, perfectly legitimate interests in coming to the United States, I realized we had to do something. And we're going to work with your government and try to work it out. President Obasanjo. Thank you very much. President Clinton inaudible . President Clinton. Oh, I'm sorry. Jet lag. Laughter The position of the United States is that the size of the Security Council should be expanded, that there should be a permanent African seat, and that the holder of that seat should be determined by the African nations, not by the United States and not by the permanent members of the Security Council. I don't think that's our business. I feel the same way about Latin America. I think there should be a permanent Latin American seat on the Security Council. The analog to Nigeria and Latin America, of course, is Brazil. Brazil is the most populous nation in Latin America, just as Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa, and we have very good relations with Brazil. But I think the Latin Americans should decide for themselves if they get the seat, and I think they should, who should hold it, and whether someone should hold it permanently or not. But I strongly believe that Africa should have a permanent representative with a permanent representative's vote on the United Nations Security Council. If it makes sense for it to be Nigeria, then that's fine with me. But I think the African people should decide that the leaders of Africa. President Obasanjo. Thank you very much. President Clinton. Thank you. August 24, 2000 Muy buenas noches. Tomorrow morning I will travel to your country to bring a message of friendship and solidarity from the people of the United States to the people of Colombia and a message of support for President Pastrana and for Plan Colombia. I will be joined on my trip by the Speaker of our House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, and other distinguished Members of our Congress. We come from different political parties, but we have a common commitment to support our friend Colombia. As you struggle with courage to make peace, to build your economy, to fight drugs, and to deepen democracy, the United States will be on your side. Some of the earliest stirrings of liberty in Latin America came in Colombia, as the proud people of Cartagena, of Cali, of Bogota rose up one after the other to fight for independence. Now, nearly two centuries later, Colombia's democracy is under attack. Profits from the drug trade fund civil conflict. Powerful forces make their own law, and you face danger every day, whether you're sending your children to school, taking your family on vacation, or returning to your village to visit your mother or your father. The literary genius you call Gabo, your Nobel laureate, painted a portrait of this struggle in his book "News of a Kidnapping." He presented me with a copy, and his book has touched my heart. Now I know why he said writing it was the saddest, most difficult task of his life. And yet, all across Colombia there are daily profiles in courage. Mayors, judges, journalists, prosecutors, politicians, policemen, soldiers, and citizens like you all have stood up to defend your democracy. Colombia's journalists risk their lives daily to report the news so that powerful people feel the pressure of public opinion. Their courage is matched by the bravery of peace activists and human rights defenders, by reform minded military leaders whose forces are bound by law, but who must do battle with thugs who subvert the law. There is also uncommon courage among the Colombian National Police. They face mortal danger every moment, as they battle against drug traffickers. Tomorrow in Cartagena I will meet with members of the police and the military and also with widows of their fallen comrades. The people of Colombia are well known for their resilience, their ability to adapt. But my friends, enough is enough. We now see millions rising up, declaring no mas, and marching for peace, for justice, for the quiet miracle of a normal life. That desire for peace and justice led to the election of President Pastrana. In the United States, we see in President Pastrana a man who has risked his life to take on the drug traffickers who was kidnapped by the Medellin, but who kept speaking out. As President, he has continued to risk his life to help heal his country. He has built support across party lines for a new approach in Colombia. The United States supports President Pastrana, supports Plan Colombia, and supports the people of Colombia. Let me be clear about the role of the United States. First, it is not for us to propose a plan. We are supporting the Colombian plan. You are leading we are providing assistance as a friend and a neighbor. Second, this is a plan about making life better for people. Our assistance includes a tenfold increase in our support for economic development, good governance, judicial reform, and human rights. Economic development is essential. The farmers who grow coca and poppy must have a way to make an honest living if they are to rejoin the national economy. Our assistance will help offer farmers credit and identify new products and new markets. We will also help to build schoolrooms, water systems, and roads for people who have lost their homes and their communities. Our assistance will do more to protect human rights. As President Pastrana said at the White House, there is no such thing as democracy without respect for human rights. Today's world has no place and no patience for any group that attacks defenseless citizens or resorts to kidnapping and extortion. Those who seek legitimacy in Colombian society must meet the standards of those who confer legitimacy, the good and decent people of Colombia. Our package provides human rights training for the Colombian military and police and denies U.S. assistance to any units of the Colombian security forces involved in human rights abuses or linked to abuses by paramilitary forces. It will fund human rights programs, help protect human rights workers, help reform the judicial system, and improve prosecution and punishment. Of course, Plan Colombia will also bolster our common efforts to fight drugs and the traffickers who terrorize both our countries. But please do not misunderstand our purpose. We have no military objective. We do not believe your conflict has a military solution. We support the peace process. Our approach is both propeace and antidrug. The concern over illegal drugs is deeply felt around the world. In my own country, every year more than 50,000 people lose their lives, and many more ruin their lives, because of drug abuse. Still, the devastation of illegal drugs in Colombia is worse. Drug trafficking and civil conflict have led together to more than 2,500 kidnappings last year 35,000 Colombians have been killed, and a million more made homeless in the past decade alone. Drug trafficking is a plague both our nations suffer and neither nation can solve on its own. Our assistance will help train and equip Colombia's counterdrug battalions to protect the National Police as they eradicate illicit drug crops and destroy drug labs. We will help the Colombian military improve their ability to intercept traffickers before they leave Colombia. We will target illegal airstrips, money laundering, and criminal organizations. This approach can succeed. Over the last 5 years, the Governments of Peru and Bolivia, working with U.S. support, have reduced coca cultivation by more than half in their own countries, and cultivation fell by almost one fifth in the region as a whole. Of course, supply is only one side of the problem. The other is demand. I want the people of Colombia to know that the United States is working hard to reduce demand here, and cocaine use in our country has dropped dramatically over the last 15 years. We must continue our efforts to cut demand, and we will help Colombia fight the problems aggravated by our demand. We can and we must do this together. As we begin the new century, Colombia must face not 100 years of solitude, but 100 years of partnership for peace and prosperity. Last year I met some of the most talented and adorable children in the world from the village of Valledupar. Ten of them, some as young as 6 years old, came thousands of miles with their accordions and their drums, their bright colored scarves and their beautiful voices, to perform for us here at the White House. They sang "El Mejoral." They sang "La Gota Fria." Everyone who heard them was touched. Those precious children come from humble families. They live surrounded by violence. They don't want to grow up to be narcotraffickers, to be guerrillas, to be paramilitaries. They want to be kings of Vallenato. And we should help them live their dreams. Thousands of courageous Colombians have given their lives to give us all this chance. Now is the moment to make their sacrifice matter. It will take vision it will take courage it will take desire. You have all three. In the midst of great difficulty, be strong of heart. En surcos de dolores, el bien germina ya. Viva Colombia. Que Dios los bendiga. August 23, 2000 The President. Thank you. You know, if I had any sense of fairness at all, I'd tell them to turn this off. Laughter But I'm not going to. Laughter I want to thank Robert and Lisa Stockman for having us here at this truly beautiful, beautiful home and for getting us all together and for supporting Rush. I want to thank all of you for coming here tonight, the officials, the union and teacher leaders, and other leaders, and just the citizens who believe in this good man. I know you've been here a long time, and I won't keep you long, but I want to say two or three things. First of all, I really like Jon Corzine a lot. You know, when he was running in the primary and they kept carping about how much money he was spending, I thought, well, at least he's not spending all this money to give himself a tax cut. Laughter The reason I really like him is that he thinks that these young people that served you tonight ought to have the same chance to send their children to college he has. That's what makes him a Democrat. And I think he will be a terrific United States Senator. He's got good ideas, and he's not afraid to tell you what he thinks, and he doesn't care if he disagrees with you, me, or anybody else. He's just out there telling you exactly what he thinks. And we need people like that in the United States Senate. I admire him. Also, I want to tell you, I've got a lot of interest in these Senate races one in particular, near here. Laughter I hope you'll help her, too. I like Rush Holt. And I was in Princeton earlier this afternoon, and I was walking up and down the town, and I was shaking hands with people. And when I came out of the hotel after I went in and took about an hour to do a little rest and get some work done, I came out, and there was a couple hundred people out there. So I went over and shook hands with them, and we started talking about Rush Holt, and a couple people said, "I really want you to help him, and why are you here," and all that kind of stuff. And I just started talking, and it occurred to me that I ought to say to you one of the things I said about him. I want to talk in a moment briefly about the big issues of the campaign, but I spent a lot of time thinking about the future, about what America will be like 10 or 20 years from now. If we had any success in the last 8 years, it was largely the credit of the American people. But the role we were able to play we, the whole administration and our allies in Congress I think it was in no small measure because before I asked the people to vote for me for President, I actually thought about why I wanted the job. And that may seem don't laugh, because a lot of people run without thinking about it. Laughter The White House is a nice place to live Air Force One, you don't have all this airport congestion the rest of you are going through. Laughter But you're all laughing Rush, that joke you told was really funny. Laughter But really, I think it ought to be told by somebody like me who is not running again. Laughter It was funny. Laughter Anyway, so I actually I thought about it. So I spent a lot of time thinking about the future. And when we my whole goal was, when I ran in 1992, was to have an America at the dawn of a new century where opportunity was genuinely alive for every responsible citizen, where we were more like a community coming together across all the lines that divide us, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, even party. You know, if you think about it, as the world grows more and more interdependent, we have to find ways to work together. And we'll be more and more rewarded when we can find ways to work together where everybody wins, where we have honorable compromise, or we come up with heretofore unthought of solutions that allow us to both live with our convictions and our interests and recognize the legitimacy of other people. And if you look around this whole world today, a lot of the problems that exist out there are existing because people are still bedeviled by the oldest problem of human society, the fear of the other people who are different from them and the sense that we can only matter in life if somehow we've got somebody we can look down on, you know. "I may not be the smartest star on the planet, but at least I don't have a double digit IQ like that guy." And how many times have you been guilty of that? I have. "Well, I did something I'm not particularly proud of, but at least I'm not like that guy," you know? Laughter Or, "at least I'm not a Republican," or, "I'm not a Democrat." Laughter How many times have you done that? But the truth is, the world is growing more interdependent, so we have to find a way both to fight for what we believe in and not give up what we believe in and still find a way to respect the common humanity that makes all this worth doing. So, against that background, what I tried to do when I came in was to get America to that point where we were once again leading the world for peace and freedom and prosperity and security, so that we could then take on the big challenges of this new era. And the last two State of the Union Addresses I devoted to those big challenges, knowing that we could make some progress now. But for a lot of the greatest things that America could achieve, because we've turned the country around, it would have to be done by others after I was gone. But if you think about it, I want us to stay on the far frontiers of science and technology, but I want us to protect our values. I want us to bridge the digital divide, but I want us to protect our values. I want everybody to have access to the Internet, but I think you ought to have to get permission before that means they have access to your medical or your financial records. I want with all my heart for the human genome project to give every young mother a little card that had their child's genetic map so that I predict to you within 20 years, newborns in America that don't die of accidents or violence will have a life expectancy of 90 years maybe before then because of the miraculous advances. And I want that. But I don't want anybody to be able to get ahold of your little gene card and use it to deny you a job or health insurance. I want to maximize the development of all these scientific developments, but I know, in addition to all the good things that happen, the organized forces of destruction will take advantage of these same revolutions. I was thinking the other day I went to the show that they have in Chicago every year, the information technology people do, and they're showing all the new products. And the people from Motorola gave me a little hand held computer that had a keyboard and a screen, and I could get the news, and I could send Email. My hands were too big to work the keyboard. And it was plastic, no metal in it, so it would go through an airport metal detector. Same thing may mean that terrorists will be able to have plastic bombs with chemical and biological weapons. I want someone who understands that. What's the point of all this? What I was telling those people in Princeton today, in the town, is that Rush Holt is the only physicist in the Congress. Laughter And even Republicans who may not agree with every vote he cast ought to think long and hard before they replace him. Most people who get elected to the United States Congress are like me they're lawyers. But we need somebody that really understands this stuff. You need someone who really understands all these big future issues, because I promise you, in spite of all the good things that have happened the last 8 years, the greatest benefits to America of the work we have done are still out there if we make the right choices, both to seize the opportunities and deal with the challenges. And he has a unique contribution to make to you and to America. That's a big reason you ought to go out and fight for his reelection. Let me make just one other point. I'm glad you came here, and I thank you for giving him your money. Laughter But it's not enough. Here's why. The great challenge in this election that will determine whether Jon Corzine is your Senator, whether Rush Holt is your Congressman, whether Al Gore and Joe Lieberman are elected, is really what the American people believe the election is about and whether they understand the differences on those subjects, between the choices they have. So I say to all of you, every one of you has friends who aren't as into politics as you are, both here in this congressional district or in the State, or even beyond the borders of the State. Every one of you has friends who aren't diehard Democrats. Every one of you has friends who really haven't started thinking about this much yet, or have just kind of a vague notion of where all these candidates are. You work with them. You go out to dinner with them on the weekends. You worship with them. Maybe you play golf or you bowl with them, or you go to your kids' soccer games with them. Every one of you has friends like this. And I am telling you, the election will turn on what the people think it's about. That's why Rush said this election is about the issues. Why did Vice President Gore do so well in his speech? Because he got up and he gave a version of a State of the Union Address. Yes, it was beautifully delivered, and yes, all the other things he said about his family, his values, and his role for the last 8 years, and all that was very well done. But the reason it worked is, he said, "If you vote for me, here's what I'm going to try to do for and with you." Now, there are just a few things I want to say to you tonight to hammer this home. There are huge differences between our nominees for President, Vice President, our candidates for the Senate and the House, and our parties on a number of critical issues. And let me just mention three or four. Safety public safety The crime rate is at a 25 year low gun crime has dropped 35 percent since we passed the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. The leaders of the other party and most of their members opposed them both. The previous administration vetoed the Brady bill. We lost a lot of Members of Congress in '94. We lost a dozen because they stood up and voted with me on these gun safety issues and because the gun owners, the sportsmen, the hunters, they hadn't had time to see that all these scare tactics were wrong. Now, this is a huge issue. We also put 100,000 police on the street, which helps us to catch criminals but, more importantly, helps us to prevent crime in the first place. And now we're putting another 50,000 police on the street. Now, the leaders of the other party oppose that, too. The nominee of the other party said the other day he'd get rid of the 100,000 police program and presumably means he certainly won't continue the 50,000 extra. Laughter We want to close the gun show loophole where and do background checks there. We want handguns to be sold with child trigger locks. We want to ban the import of these big ammunition clips that can then be put on guns here to get around our assault weapons ban. That's what we believe. That's what we believe. And we think more police in community policing situations will help lower the crime rate further. I'm glad crime is at a 25 year low, but I doubt if there is a person in this room that thinks America is safe enough. And I won't be satisfied until this is the safest big country in the entire world. This is a huge difference. There are massive consequences to public safety. Their answer is, "punish people more" which we've been doing pretty steadily for 25 years, but until we did what we did, the crime rate wasn't going down "punish people more and have more people carrying concealed weapons, even in houses of worship." That's their position. Now, this is different. This will have real consequences to you. And every person you know ought to know what the difference is. If they agree with them, they should vote for them. But they ought to know. And we shouldn't pretend now that both parties are talking about inclusion and reaching out to everybody that's good. You know, the Democrats made fun of the Republicans at Philadelphia because they had to go gather up people off the street to look like we do normally laughter but I didn't do that. You may think I just did, but laughter look, I think that's progress. And I think we should thank them for it, that they no longer think that the way to get elected is to demonize all of us I think that's good and to divide us. But there are still differences so that's one. Education You heard Rush talking about a big part of our program. We want to hire 100,000 more teachers for smaller classes in the early grades. And we want to train teachers better. And we just announced a program to basically let teachers teach off a lot of their student loans if they go into fields where there's a shortage or areas where there's a shortage. We want to help school districts like those in New Jersey with all of these housetrailers, like the ones I saw today, get a discount so they can build 6,000 more schools and then repair 5,000 a year over and above that over the next 5 years. They don't think that's a national responsibility. They're not for that. We believe that we ought to give more aid, but we're for higher standards. We say you ought to identify these failing schools and turn them around or shut them down and have a public school choice charter school program. And we have lots of evidence. In Kentucky, where they've had this same system I'm trying to go national with we did start requiring schools States to identify failing schools 4 years ago. But Kentucky went all the way, and now I was at a school the other day where over half the kids were on the school lunch program. It was a total failure 3 1 2 years ago. Today, it's one of the 20 best grade schools in Kentucky. I've seen this all over the country. I was in Harlem the other day in a school that 2 years ago had 80 percent of the kids reading and doing math below grade level. Today, 2 years later, 74 percent of the kids reading and doing math at or above grade level. You can turn this around. Their view is, we're all wet about this, and we should just cut a check to the States and let them do whatever they want to with the money. This is a big difference here. This is not an idle difference, whether we have more money for teacher training, more money to get math and science teachers, whether we say, "Okay, we'll give you more money, but we want after school programs, summer school programs, mentoring programs, every eligible kid in Head Start. Turn the failing schools around or shut them down." This is not idle. This is a significant thing. If you believe, with the largest and most diverse school population we've ever had, that giving all our kids a world class education is a very big issue for America, we have different views of this, and that will have consequences to what kind of America you live in. You already gave Rush his applause line on the Patients' Bill of Rights, but I'll just mention this again. The reason I feel so passionately about it is, I support managed care. Hardly anybody will say that anymore. But let me remind you what it was like in 1993. When I took office, for the previous 10 years medical costs had been going up at 3 times the rate of inflation. It was about to bankrupt the country. So to say we should manage our resources better that's all managed care really means. The problem is that we've gotten to the point where there's more managed and less care, because the companies have already picked what you might call the low hanging fruit in the management system. That is, the easy decisions have been made. And so now, if you want to keep controlling costs, somebody comes up and they need to see a specialist, or you want them to go to only the approved emergency room or something, even if they've got to go past two or three other hospitals, which happens all the time in America, or they have to apply for a certain procedure that may or may not be covered, the people that work in the lower levels of the managed care companies know that they will never get in trouble for saying no. If you're 30 years old and you've got a college degree and you're making a modest salary and you're a first level reviewer, you know that nobody will ever fire you for saying no. Don't you? And you just hope that somewhere up the line, someday, somebody will say yes if that's the right decision. And so the practice of medicine has basically been subject to reverse plastic surgery here in a lot of these cases. So that's why we're for this. This is not complicated. So if you vote for Jon and Rush and Al and Joe and Hillary, you get you don't get people that want these managed care companies to go broke. You don't get people that say, "Throw all the money you want to. Don't oversee doctors and whether they're wasting your money." You don't get all that. What you get is people who say, "Any institution, if left without any limits, is capable of forgetting its fundamental mission. The fundamental mission is the health care of America. That's what this whole thing is about." But it's a huge difference here. They think the ultimate nth decision should be left with the companies. We think it should be left with the physicians and the patients. And even when they change, they say, "Okay, we'll agree with you as long as the companies can't be held responsible for what they do." Well, that's not a Patients' Bill of Rights that's a patients' bill of possibilities. Laughter This is a huge thing. This will affect the way millions of people live. We're not talking about something idle here. We're talking about millions of lives. Last issue, the economy It concerns me that basically as Rush said, in '93 they all said my economic plan was going to wreck the country, and they wouldn't be held responsible for the results absolutely not. And I hope the American people will take them at their word, as I said the other night. Laughter But now they say, "Oh, this whole thing happened by accident. You couldn't mess it up if you tried, and there are no consequences. Vote for me vote for them. What difference does it make?" They say what really matters is, what are you going to do with the surplus, and they say, "The surplus is your money, and we're going to give it back to you." And that sounds good and doesn't take long to say. Laughter It's a good line. "It's your money, and I'm going to give it back to you." Now, here's the problem with that. What do we say? What do they say? You heard Rush talking about it. We say, "Well, first of all, we've got to take care of Social Security and Medicare, because when all these baby boomers retire there's only going to be two people working for every one person drawing, and we don't want it to bankrupt our kids and their ability to raise our grandchildren. So before you just go plumb off the handle here, what are you going to do when the baby boomers retire? Make sure you're not going to have Social Security and Medicare in a fix so that their retirement doesn't burden their children and their grandchildren." And we say, "And by the way, if you do that, we'll also pay the debt off, which will keep interest rates low." And we say, "We ought to save some money to invest in education and health care and the environment and science and technology." We're for a tax cut, for marriage penalty relief. We're for changes in the estate tax. We're for things the Republicans say they want. We're for some changes there. We're for also helping people like the folks that served us here tonight with college tuition tax deductions, child care increases, longterm care tax credit, savings for retirement. But all of ours cost way less than half theirs because we've got to have some money to invest, because there might be emergencies we can't foresee, and oh, by the way, this is all a projected surplus. It has not come in yet. Their argument reminds me of those letters I used to get in the mail, back when I opened my own mail laughter those sweepstakes letters from the Publishers Clearing House. Ed McMahon writes you a letter saying, "You may have won 10 million." Laughter You ever get one of those letters? Laughter Now, if you went out the next day and spent the 10 million, you should support their economic program, because that's what it is. You should do that. Laughter Ask Corzine he knows more about the market than I do. I'm glad that the market has more than tripled. I'm glad that we've made more millionaires and more billionaires than ever in history, together, as a people. I'm glad of that. I hope it keeps on going, but this is projected income. You think about how much money you think you're going to get over the next 10 years. Would you give it all away today, saving nothing for education, for health care needs, for family emergencies? What happens if you don't get the raise you anticipate or if your stocks don't get the return you think? You wouldn't do that. That's their position. Spend it all now. It's your money. Take it back. Laughter Now, our plan costs less than half theirs and will keep the Council of Economic Advisers says it will keep interest rates at least a point lower for a decade. Do you know what that's worth? Two hundred and fifty billion dollars in home mortgages, 30 billion in car payments, 15 billion in college loan payments. In other words, it's worth another 300 billion in tax cuts to keep interest rates low. Now, you've got to explain this to people who haven't been thinking about it. We cannot give the entire projected surplus away in a tax cut. It's not there yet. It may not all be there. You can't know what the emergencies are, and it's wrong not to invest in education. It's wrong not to invest in health care and the environment, and it is certainly wrong not to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers and keep getting this country out of debt. And people have to understand that. We've all had a good time tonight. But if you don't remember anything else I've said, remember this Every day, you find one or two people, every day between now and November, if you have to call them on the phone halfway across the country, you find one or two people, and you ask them to support Rush and Jon and Al and Joe. And you tell them, look Audience member. And Hillary. Laughter The President. and Hillary if they live in New York. If they live in New York, you tell them that, too. Laughter And you tell them and they say why say, "Here's the difference in economic policy. Here's the difference in health care policy. Here's the difference in education policy. Here's the difference in crime policy." If we had another 30 minutes, I could go through 10 other things. But those things matter. People have to understand. This will affect your life. This will affect your children. This will affect whether we make the most of a magic moment in our country's history. It will even affect whether we have the resources to continue to lead the world to a more peaceful place. I plead with you. I'm coming back to where you are. This is the first time in 26 years I haven't been running for anything. Laughter I'm going to be a citizen activist. But I know one thing. We may not have another chance in our lifetimes to build the future of our dreams for our children. And if we make the right decisions, that's exactly what we're going to do. You've got to be committed personally to leaving here and making sure that every one you know understands exactly what the choices are. If you do, they will make the right decision, and it will be great for them and, even more important, great for America. Thank you, and God bless you. August 15, 2000 2000 Democratic Convention Mr. Klein. I'll tell you what. I was nostalgic enough, and then you had to stop at McDonald's on top of it? The President. It was nice. We didn't get much sleep last night. It was a nice setting, though, today, and it was nice last night. That convention was nice. The stage seemed more in the audience than the previous ones we've had, didn't it? Mr. Klein. Yeah. And they were up for it, that crowd last night. The President. They were ready, weren't they? Mr. Klein. Yeah. If I remember correctly, in '92 there was still some skepticism in that audience, when you gave your acceptance speech. But you know, the difference between then and now is pretty The President. A lot of these people have been with me for 8 years now, you know. They have a lot of those delegates I've run into several people that tell me they were at the previous conventions, one or the other of them, going in Mr. Klein. How are you feeling right now? The President. I feel fine. I'm a little tired. You know, we just all I did in L.A. was run around and try to prepare for the speech. Except I did get to play golf one day, which was quite nice. Mr. Klein. You did? Where? The President. I played a public course there. What's it called? El Rancho? It's a public course right near Hillcrest that used to be the site of the L.A. Open. They were very proud of it. They mayor wanted to play on it. The bad thing about it was lots of folks out there. It took a good while to get around, but it was really nice. AmeriCorps Mr. Klein. Steve said, when he called me, that you wanted to talk a little bit more about foreign policy and The President. There were some things we didn't talk and I made a few notes. I don't think we said anything last time about foreign policy. I just thought you might have some questions you wanted to ask. I also thought we didn't talk much about environmental policy. And I couldn't remember whether we talked about AmeriCorps. Mr. Klein. About AmeriCorps? Did we talk about AmeriCorps? No, we didn't. We don't have to. The President. You know how important that is to me. Mr. Klein. Yeah, I know how important that is. The President. Did you see what Bush said 2 days ago? Mr. Klein. What did he say? The President. He said he was going to get rid of the 100,000 cops program, and he was going to take another look at AmeriCorps. Mr. Klein. Really? But so many Republicans have turned around on that. I mean, I thought that the adjustment that you announced in Philadelphia at the voluntarism summit was just the icing on the cake for that program. That really The President. I think the only reason he would get rid of it is just for personal Mr. Klein. Did you ever hear the story about John Kasich going to Jeff Canada's program in Harlem? The President. Yeah. Mr. Klein. And Kasich saying, "God, you know, this is the kind of thing that AmeriCorps should be." And Jeff said to him, "Every one of those kids in there are AmeriCorps kids." The President. And Kasich has turned around. Foreign Policy Mr. Klein. Yeah, Kasich has turned around. Santorum has turned around. Let me ask about let's go to foreign policy for a minute. In going through this thing, I've now written a mere 31,000 words. Every time you have to make a decision about global economic security during the last 8 years, you make it like that. Mexico, Asia, time and time again, you seem to have a really good sense of what global economic security is about. But international security decisions seem to be tougher. The President. Well, if you look at it, for one thing, if it's a decision that involves the use of force, almost without exception Haiti being the exception, I guess we have particularly in the Balkans, we thought we had to have first a consensus within NATO and then, if possible, some sanction from the United Nations. It took us a long time to put together that consensus in Bosnia. It took a couple of years. Mr. Klein. You were saying last time that first, especially Somalia, you hadn't that you didn't have the procedures in place that you later would. The President. I think Somalia was a special case. I don't feel that way about Bosnia. Bosnia was literally Christopher went to Europe early on. We tried to build a consensus. We failed. We didn't think we should go in there unilaterally. We finally got the country to, I think, eventually we're proud of what NATO did in Bosnia and proud of the peace process. And ironically, we didn't have the kind of delay in Kosovo that I was afraid we'd have. You know, it actually worked out pretty well. So I think you're going to see this from time to time where, if there's a question on the use of force, whenever possible, the American people will want the United States to act with others. And whenever possible, it would be a good thing if we do and if it's sanctioned by the U.N. or at least if there's a darn good argument that it's covered by a U.N. resolution. But Somalia was a special case. And I hope that Somalia will never be used as an excuse for the United States not to be involved in United Nations missions. We're training those soldiers in West Africa now that are going to go into Sierra Leone, which I think is a very good thing. And we have been working, ironically, for several years on the Africa Crisis Response Initiative, trying to generally train soldiers in Africa to be ready to deal with the problems. But what happened in Somalia, as I say, was a special case because you had the Americans were there under U.N. command. And I think we learned a lot from Somalia, but I think that we shouldn't overlearn it. That is, we shouldn't refuse to go into another situation with soldiers from other countries. It's just that I think, if it happened again, we would have a much clearer notion of the rules of combat. And before we would have an engagement that could literally have led to several hundred casualties on their side and 18 deaths on our side, we would have much greater involvement in the details of it. Mr. Klein. I talked to McCain about your foreign policy and other things. He was actually very supportive in a lot of other areas, especially high tech areas. But the argument that he made on foreign policy is one that you hear from the foreign policy priesthood all the time about your foreign policy. They use words like "ad hoc" and "untidy" and that you move from issue to issue and there isn't the kind of sustained interest in it. He uses an example they use the example of you calling China our strategic partner, and he says Japan's our strategic partner. What do you say to the critics who say that you haven't had a sustained and coherent foreign policy? The President. Well, I know they say it, but I disagree. A lot of those people didn't want us to be involved in the Balkans. They didn't think it was worth it. A lot of those people didn't think we should have gone into Haiti. They didn't think it was worth it. I think we have had a consistent policy toward China. We've had to do different things in response to developments there. I think we've had a consistent policy toward Russia, and I think that we've had basically, if you go back to some of the foreign policy speeches we gave, I think it's obvious that we've tried to meet the new security threats of the 21st century. We have tried very hard to support a united Europe. We've tried very hard to support the development of democracy in Russia and the reduction of the nuclear threat and removal of nuclear weapons from the other states of the former Soviet Union. We have tried to engage with China. We have tried to contain or reverse the North Korean nuclear threat, and we have supported a dialog between the North and the South. And I think the things that we did and the things that we refused to do in North Korea have some bearing on the ultimate decision of Kim Chong il to engage Kim Dae jung. We had an unusual and systematic outreach to our neighbors south of our border. And I regret that one of the few defeats of my administration legislative defeats that I really regret was the fast track defeat which sort of slowed up our initiative in building a free trade area in the Americas, because I think it's important. And the United States has actually paid a price for that as a lot of the South American nations have actually started doing much more business with Europe rather than the United States. But I just frankly don't agree with him. I think that what I think that if they're looking for some simple explanation of the world, a lot of them didn't agree with my outreach to Africa. A lot of them didn't agree with our designation of the global AIDS crisis as a national security threat. But I think that I don't know if you were I gave a few remarks kind of ad hoc to the NDI luncheon yesterday. I think that we should see our foreign policy and national security in terms of the traditional alliances and challenges that we have that haven't changed, even though the cold war is over, in terms of the new possibilities opened up either by the end of the cold war or the emergence of this sort of global information society and then the new security threats. And I think a lot of the security threats of the 21st century will come not from other nation states but from the enemies of the nation states. I think that you will see a convergence of terrorists, narcotraffickers, weapons merchants, and kind of religious and racial nationalists. I think you will see a lot of that. And then I think you will see a convergence of information technology in weaponry which will lead to the miniaturization of seriously dangerous weapons, both conventional and biological and chemical weapons. And I think the likelihood is that sometime in the next 10 years, people will come to think that there will be kind of cross national threats which will threaten our security as much as one particular other nation. I understand why they're all saying that. But the truth is, a lot of them didn't think I was right in Bosnia and Kosovo. Mr. Klein. They never disagree on the big picture stuff. I talked to Tony Lake, and I read the book that he has coming out in October. And one of the things he posits as a kind of a central principle of your years that was something different was the fact that we were more threatened by the weaknesses of other countries than their strengths. Is that something you agree with? The President. Absolutely. I think the United States can be threatened more by another nation's weakness than by its strength. And I used to tell I don't know how many times I've said to our crowd over the last 8 years, when we're dealing with a country that has interests that are in conflict with ours, I would rather have a strong leader of that country than a weak leader, because a strong leader can make an agreement and keep it and is capable of kind of distancing himself from the more destructive elements in the relationship and within their societies. So I believe that. I also believe let me be more specific. We want to preserve democracy in South America. But you still need to be strong to keep Colombia from collapsing, for example. There needs to be you have to have to have a certain amount of discipline and strength to do what Museveni did in Uganda and reverse the AIDS rate the infection rate of AIDS. There has to be a certain amount of strength in the state to rebuild the public health systems which are breaking down all over the world. Laurie Garrett, who wrote "The Coming Plague" do you remember that book? She's got a new book coming out I've just seen it in galleys about the breakdown of public health systems all over the world, in the states of the former Soviet Union, in developing countries, and speculating what it might mean for us. You've got to have a strong state with some fair measure of strength to deal with the challenges of climate change, for example, a lot of these big questions. So I absolutely agree with that. I think that, to take a more traditional national security problem the continuing agony between India and Pakistan and the centrality of Kashmir to that conflict and that relationship, it would take a pretty strong Government in both countries to really come to grips with the compromises that would be required to make an agreement that would have any shot at all of putting an end to that problem and also putting an end to it as a potential trigger of nuclear exchanges. Mr. Klein. So, is the story of Camp David II the fact that one country was stronger than the other, and they weren't able to make compromise? You don't have to answer it if it's undiplomatic. The President. Well, I think we're using no, because I understand what you mean, but I don't mean it in the same sense you do. There, Israel has land and army coherence the Palestinian state has existed in the minds of its adherents and implicit in these U.N. resolutions. So in that sense, that's a different kind of strong and weak. That is, if you don't have land, an army, and everything, maybe you have to adhere to words and ideas more, and compromise is more difficult. I don't mean it like that. I meant actually but both Arafat and Barak are strong, even though Barak didn't have a big margin in the Knesset. Mr. Klein. No, I was meaning it in the way that you were meaning it. I was wondering whether Arafat's coalition I mean, I've been over there, and I've seen all the various I know how good a politician he's had to be to, you know, to survive. The President. My gut is that if the other three or four of those other people who will take whatever if we can affect a compromise on Jerusalem that other Arab leaders will take, he can make whatever other arrangements he wants to make. But that's different from whether the Colombians can physically recover 30 percent of their land now in the hands of narcotraffickers and terrorists or whether the Russians can actually rebuild their health care system. Mr. Klein. Whether the Chinese can collect taxes from Guangdong Province? The President. Yes, that's right. Your fellow journalist Friedman, Tom Friedman, has written a lot of very interesting essays on this whole subject of the weakness of government as opposed to the strength of government threatening freedom and progress. You know. You've written a lot of very interesting pieces on it. I just come in contact with it over and over and over again. So it's something that I'm concerned about. Public Figures and the Public Mr. Klein. One thing my boss was really interested in. He's spent a lot of time in Russia David Remnick. But this had nothing to do with that. It was something that you said in the very end when we were talking last time, when we started talking about the loss of mystery and the fact that the distance between the leader and the public has evaporated during your time as President. And you were saying that you thought that was a good thing. And I understand the point that you made. Do you remember that? Do you remember? You said The President. Yeah, but let me say this I would like to make two points. Number one, I think that it's a good thing if the American people, through television or through journalistic writings, have a better, deeper sense of what a person the Presidency, for example not only what we're doing but why we're doing it and how it fits into the larger scheme of things and how it fits into the pattern of our lives. And you can get enough I think what you get out of the greater exposure and a more consistent pattern of exposure is worth as what you give up in majesty. Mr. Klein. What you give up in majesty? The President. Mystery or majesty. So I approve of that. I do not believe that the kind of invasion into public figures' private lives for the stated purpose of exploring their character but for the real purpose of destroying them for some political end is a very good thing. But I think it is unlikely to occur to the extent to which you've seen it in the last 8 years again for a long time. Mr. Klein. You don't think the Presidency has just changed forever because of that? The President. No. For one thing, the Democrats don't have anything like the infrastructure or the stomach or the desire to do that that the Republicans do. So there will have to be an actual abuse of power in office in some way that affects the public interest. We don't the guys that make money we've got a lot of rich people to support us. They wouldn't do what Scaife did. They wouldn't waste 7 million going on 15 wild goose chases to try to run somebody down. We're just not that kind of people. We're actually interested in government, and we care more about what we do with power than power. So I think that's part of it. And I think shutting the Independent Counsel law down was part of it. Finally, when it finally was hijacked as basically the private property of the party not in the executive branch, I think its legitimacy was destroyed. So I think, if there ever comes a time again when we really need one, we'll get it, the same way we got it back in the seventies. The press and the public will say the only appropriate response is for the Attorney General to name someone or to ask the court to name someone that's clearly independent. Mr. Klein. Even short of those kind of spectacular, disgraceful, disgusting, awful kind of investigations, the Presidency after you the Presidency exists in people's kitchens. You've been living in our kitchens for the last 8 years. The President. Part of that's television and part of that's my predisposition to work hard in an open fashion. So I don't as I said, I believe the ability to share with the public at large what you're trying to do and why and to take everybody along on the journey is worth the extra exposure in terms of the price you give up. Whatever the value of the mystery is, I think it's worth it. And I think most future Presidents will attempt to establish a more I don't know "intimate" may be the wrong word, but you know what I'm trying to say a more sort of closer bond with the American people not just on an emotional level but actually in terms of having them understand what you're trying to do and why. And if you do lots of interviews, if you're real accessful, if you work crowds, if you do townhall meetings, all these things that I did, you run the risk of making mistakes and paying some price and also sort of being demystified. But I think the benefit you get from it, in terms of keeping the energy flowing through a democratic system, is quite great. If you think about it, after the Republicans won the Congress, a lot of people thought we'd never get anything done again. But we got a big bipartisan balanced budget. We got a big bipartisan welfare reform. We got a lot of bipartisan education reforms. We've even gotten some environmental work done. We got the Safe Drinking Water Act, we got Conservation and Environment Mr. Klein. An awful lot of public land. I mean, I've been through these budgets line by line over the last 3 or 4 months. The President. I worked with Pete Domenici and I worked together to do this Baca Ranch deal in New Mexico. It's a huge thing. And we may actually get this whole CARA legislation through where we're really trying to make the right kind of compromises with the Republicans that would, in effect, take the royalties we get from offshore drilling and put it only into environmental preservation, buying land a small part of it for the Federal Government but a lot of it for States and then restoration of coastlines and all that kind of stuff. If this thing passes, it's huge. What do you think the odds are we can pass this CARA legislation? It's a really big thing. Chief of Staff John Podesta. It's up against some tough rightwing filibusters. Mr. Klein. Is this last round of negotiations going to happen during the next 2 or 3 weeks? The President. On the environmental stuff? Mr. Klein. No, I mean the budget. Is that in the budget? The President. No, it's a separate it's a stand alone bill, because it takes a funding stream that's already there and directs it only to basically long term land preservation and conservation work at the State and local level, primarily, and the Federal level. But the fact that some of these Republicans, including Don Young from Alaska, they're willing to work with us to institutionalize this sort of thing on a permanent basis is, I think, really encouraging. I still believe there's a lot to be said for showing up every day, and you just keep trying to push the rock up the hill. Reaction to Scandal Mr. Klein. Can I say something that might piss you off? And you can even turn that off if you want. Deputy Press Secretary Jake Siewert. We're landing. You just don't have to answer it. Mr. Klein. When Lewinski happened, I was more pissed off at my colleagues and at the Republicans than I was at you. I'm sitting there, writing this piece, and I go through this whole section of the trench warfare, line by line battles that you've won against the Republicans during those 3 or 4 years. And all of a sudden, I get to Lewinski, and I got to say, I got pissed off at you. It doesn't change the bottom line of the piece The President. I was pissed off at me. Mr. Klein. I was surprised. I was surprised by my own reaction to that moment because the stuff you had done you didn't get any credit for, you weren't going to get any credit for. Unless a lot of people read this piece and it changes other people's minds, you wouldn't get credit for it. But it was the stuff that you did for working people. You're probably the best President for the working people in the history of the country. And then The President. Robert Pear actually wrote a good story the other day about what we had done for the working poor that nobody noticed over 8 years. That's why we were able to get it done. But I think well, you know, for us to talk about that would require a longer conversation than we have. But I think the interesting thing was, I viewed the way they overreacted to it as sort of like the last as the second step of the kind of purging our national life of the hardcore, rightwing aspects of the Gingrich revolution, which was the Government shutdown. We rolled that back, and then we rolled this back, and then we had this unbelievable congressional election. And I think you see it in the tone and tenor of the Republican campaign this year. Although I told you before, I'm not sure their policies have changed very much, but at least in the tone and tenor of it, I think you can see basically a decision within their camp that, "Okay," that, you know, "we don't have to get beat a third time over this. We want to stay in." Mr. Klein. I think we've changed, too. A little bit late for your benefit. The President. Yes, I think so. Mr. Klein. But I think that Bush is getting a little bit of the benefit of the fact The President. Huge. Mr. Klein. that we've realized that my colleagues realize that we went way overboard in '98. I mean, our poll ratings yours The President. But I think it was even before that. I don't think well, sometime we'll have more time to talk about it. But I hope that nobody will ever have to undergo what I did from 1991 through 1998 again, or at least, I hope that if it happens, the media will know that it's happened, instead of being so willing to be basically suborned by it and kind of enlisted and all these other things that happened. In fact, if that is one result of it and it changes our politics and makes it a little less hostile and personally destructive, even if the changes last for 10 or 15 years, that would be a very good thing. I can't say that I think it would have been worth it, but it certainly would be a very good thing. President's Best Memories Mr. Klein. Let's end on an up. I don't want to end on that note. What's your favorite moment when you look back? What was your biggest high? The President. Well, it's very difficult to say because we did so many things, and one of the things that that I'm sitting here with you now. We just left the handoff deal, and I'm thinking what I mean, it seems like I just got inaugurated the first time. I can't believe that 8 years are gone. But I knew, when we won the economic plan, that it would turn the country around economically. I felt that when we passed AmeriCorps we had a chance to create a new citizen ethic in the country, which I thought was important. I loved going to Ireland when we made the peace there. I loved a lot of the things we did in the Middle East meant a lot to me. You know, when we just a lot of things. I feel very strongly that we did the right thing with welfare reform. I think I told you, when I was at the trial lawyers' meeting the other day and I was just shaking hands, I met two women. One had a master's degree, and one had a law degree. They told me they were on welfare when I became President. I went home I say I went home I went back to my political home in New Hampshire earlier this year on the eighth anniversary of my victory in the New Hampshire primary, and I met a woman in the crowd who was a nurse who had gotten some appointment from our administration and was on welfare when I got elected President. I suppose, in a funny way, those personal encounters are the biggest highs I get. There was a guy I don't know if you were out there when I spoke today and introduced Al and I started talking about the HOPE scholarship? There was a guy over to my left that said, "Yeah, I got one of those here." He screamed out in the audience. Because I said it would pay for the community college there. He said, "Yeah, I know. I'm there. I got one." You know, I run into people all the time that have taken the family leave law. I met a woman the other day who told me that her sister had taken the family leave law to take care of their mother, and then she had gotten cancer and taken it and now had a clean bill of health. And I think that in some ways, even bigger than all the 100,000 people in the street in Dublin and all of the huge emotional crowd events, when you actually look at somebody who says, here is something you did, and my life is better because of it, that's probably the most rewarding thing of all. Mr. Klein. Well, it was 9 years ago just about now that it was just you and me and a State trooper in Maine. And it does feel like The President. Maine? Mr. Klein. The State trooper was a source for the American The President. We also got beat in Maine. Jerry Brown won in Maine. Remember that? Mr. Klein. I was thinking about that out there today. I was just thinking about the first time I went out with you in Maine. And I remember we were stuck on the tarmac in Boston. You had to catch a plane to Chicago. And I looked at you, and I said, "Do you realize a year from today you could be giving your acceptance speech, and you'll have a fleet of cars and Secret Service and planes to take you anywhere you want to go?" And you looked at me as if to say, you're out of your mind, boy. The President. And now it's all over or just beginning. A new chapter is beginning. I've got to figure out after you write this, you ought to talk to me about what you think I ought to do next. President's Future Plans Mr. Klein. I have a couple of ideas. I know a guy, the guy who runs the Ford Foundation in Asia is really interested in funding ways to move new technology and biotechnology to Third World areas. He would give you a bunch of money for your collaborating on that. The President. Well, I'm going to spend a lot of time working on that. Mr. Klein. My guess is that, just from hearing you talk, that's the kind of stuff that floats your boat these days. The President. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I want to do stuff that keeps my juices running. Mr. Klein. I don't think you're going to have any problem with that. The President. No. I'm going to have a good time. But I've got to if my wife wins the Senate seat and my daughter stays in school, I have to make a sizeable income. Laughter Mr. Klein. One or two speeches a month. But we've still got to play golf next year. The President. You've got a deal. We can also play this year, if you want to come. Mr. Klein. By the way, I broke 90 for the first time between last interview and this. The President. That's great. Mr. Klein. Two birdies. The President. Two? Mr. Klein. That meant I screwed up some other holes. The President. That's great. If you want to come to Washington and play, I'd like that. August 14, 2000 Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Isn't it great to be here in California together? Applause Forty years ago the great city of Los Angeles launched John Kennedy and the New Frontier. Now Los Angeles is launching the first President of the new century, Al Gore. I come here tonight, above all, to say a heartfelt thank you. Thank you. Thank you for giving me the chance to serve. Thank you for being so good to Hillary and Chelsea. I am so proud of them. And didn't she give a good talk? Applause I thought it was great. I thank you for supporting the New Democratic agenda that has taken our country to new heights of prosperity, peace, and progress. As always, of course, the lion's share of credit goes to the American people, who do the work, raise the kids, and dream the dreams. Now, at this moment of unprecedented good fortune, our people face a fundamental choice Are we going to keep this progress and prosperity going? Yes, we are. But my friends, we can't take our future for granted. We cannot take it for granted. So let's just remember how we got here. Eight years ago, when our party met in New York, it was in a far different time for America. Our economy was in trouble. Our society was divided. Our political system was paralyzed. Ten million of our fellow citizens were out of work. Interest rates were high. The deficit was 290 billion and rising. After 12 years of Republican rule, the Federal debt had quadrupled, imposing a crushing burden on our economy and on our children. Welfare rolls, crime, teen pregnancy, income inequality all had been skyrocketing. And our Government was part of the problem, not part of the solution. I saw all this in a very personal way in 1992, out there in the real America with many of you. I remember a child telling me her father broke down at the dinner table because he lost his job. I remember an older couple crying in front of me because they had to choose between filling their shopping carts and filling their prescriptions. I remember a hard working immigrant in a hotel kitchen who said his son was not really free because it wasn't safe for him to play in the neighborhood park. I ran for President to change the future for those people. And I asked you to embrace new ideas rooted in enduring values opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans. You gave me the chance to turn those ideas and values into action after I made one of the very best decisions of my entire life, asking Al Gore to be my partner. Now, first we proposed a new economic strategy Get rid of the deficit to reduce interest rates invest more in our people sell more American products abroad. We sent our plan to Congress. It passed by a single vote in both Houses. In a deadlocked Senate, Al Gore cast the tie breaking vote. Not a single Republican supported it. Here's what their leaders said. Their leaders said our plan would increase the deficit, kill jobs, and give us a one way ticket to recession. Time has not been kind to their predictions. Remember, our Republican friends said then they would absolutely not be held responsible for our economic policies. I hope the American people take them at their word. Today, after 7 1 2 years of hard effort, we're in the midst of the longest economic expansion in history, more than 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the lowest female unemployment in 40 years, the lowest Hispanic and African American unemployment rate ever recorded, and the highest homeownership in history. Now, along the way, in 1995 we turned back the largest cuts in history in Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. And just 2 years later we proved that we could find a way to balance the budget and protect our values. Today, we have gone from the largest deficits in history to the largest surpluses in history. And if, but only if, we stay on course, we can make America debt free for the first time since Andy Jackson was President in 1835. For the first time in decades, wages are rising at all income levels. We have the lowest child poverty in 20 years, the lowest poverty rate for single mothers ever recorded. The average family's income has gone up more than 5,000, and for African American families, even more. The number of families who own stock, in our country, has grown by 40 percent. You know, Harry Truman's old saying has never been more true, "If you want to live like a Republican, you better vote for the Democrats." But our progress is about far more than economics. America is also more hopeful, more secure, and more free. We're more hopeful because we're turning our schools around with higher standards, more accountability, more investment. We have doubled funding for Head Start and provided after school and mentoring to more than a million more young people. We're putting 100,000 well trained teachers in the early grades to lower class size. Ninety five percent of our schools are already connected to the Internet. Reading, math, and SAT scores are up, and more students than ever are going on to college, thanks to the biggest expansion of college aid since the GI bill 50 years ago. Now, don't let anybody tell you that all children can't learn or that our public schools can't make the grade. Yes, they can. Yes, they can. We're also more hopeful because we ended welfare as we knew it. Now, those who can work, must work. On that, we and the Republicans agreed. But we Democrats also insisted on support for good parenting, so that poor children don't go hungry or lose their health care, unmarried teens stay in school, and people get the job training, child care, and transportation they need. It has worked. Today, there are more than 7 1 2 million people who have moved from welfare to work, and the welfare rolls in our administration have been cut in half. We're more hopeful because of the way we cut taxes to help Americans meet the challenges of work and childrearing. This year alone our HOPE scholarship and lifelong learning tax credits will help 10 million families pay for college. Our earned income tax credit will help 15 million families work their way into the middle class. Twenty five million families will get a 500 child tax credit. Our empowerment zone tax credits are bringing new business and new jobs to our hardest pressed communities, from the inner cities to Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to our Native American reservations. And the typical American family today is paying a lower share of its income in Federal income taxes than at any time during the past 35 years. We are a more hopeful because of the Family and Medical Leave Act, a bill that the previous administration vetoed. They said it would cost jobs. It's the first bill I signed, and we now have a test. Twenty two million new jobs later, over 20 million Americans have been able to take a little time off to care for a newborn child or sick relative. That's what it means that's what it really means to be pro family. We are more secure country because we cut crime with tougher enforcement, more than 100,000 new community police officers, a ban on assault weapons, and the Brady law, which has kept guns out of the hands of half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers. Today, crime in America is at a 25 year low. And we're more secure because of advances in health care. We've extended the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by 26 years, added coverage for cancer screening and cutting edge clinical trials. We're coming closer to cures for dreaded diseases. We made sure that people with disabilities could go to work without losing their health care and that people could switch jobs without losing their coverage. We dramatically improved diabetes care. We provided health coverage under the Children's Health Insurance Program to 2 million previously uninsured children. And for the first time in our history, more than 90 percent of our kids have been immunized against serious childhood diseases. You can be proud of that Democratic record. We are more secure because our environment is cleaner. We've set aside more land in the lower 48 States than any administration since Teddy Roosevelt, saving national treasures like Yellowstone, the great California redwoods, the Florida Everglades. Moreover, our air is cleaner our water is cleaner our food is safer and our economy is stronger. You can grow the economy and protect the environment at the same time. Now, we're more free because we are closer today to the one America of our dreams, celebrating our diversity, affirming our common humanity, opposing all forms of bigotry, from church burnings to racial profiling to murderous hate crimes. We're fighting for employment nondiscrimination legislation and for equal pay for women. We found ways to mend, not end, affirmative action. We have given America the most diverse administration in history. It really looks like America. You know, if I could just get my administration up here, it would be just as good a picture as anything you saw a couple of weeks ago in Philadelphia the real people loving it. And we created AmeriCorps, which already has given more than 150,000 of our young people a chance to earn some money for college by serving in our communities. We are more secure, and we're more free because of our leadership in the world for peace, freedom, and prosperity, helping to end a generation of conflict in Northern Ireland, stopping the brutal ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, and bringing the Middle East closer than ever to a comprehensive peace. We built stronger ties to Africa, Asia, and our Latin American and Caribbean neighbors. We brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO. We are working with Russia to destroy nuclear weapons and materials. We are fighting head on the new threats and injustices of the global age, terrorism, narcotrafficking, biological and chemical warfare, the trafficking in women and young girls, and the deadly spread of AIDS. And in the great tradition of President Jimmy Carter, who is here tonight, we are still the world's leading force for human rights around the world. Thank you, President Carter. The American military is the best trained, best equipped, most effective fighting force in the world. Our men and women have shown that time and again in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in Haiti, and Iraq. I can tell you that their strength, their spirit, their courage, and their commitment to freedom have never been greater. Any adversary who believes those who say otherwise is making a grave mistake. Now, my fellow Americans, that's the record, or as that very famous Los Angeles detective Sergeant Joe Friday used to say, "Just the facts, ma'am." Laughter I ask you, let's remember the standard our Republican friends used to have for whether a party should continue in office My fellow Americans, are we better off today than we were 8 years ago? You bet we are. You bet we are. Yes, we are. Yes, we are. But yes, we are we're not just better off we're also a better country. We are today more tolerant, more decent, more humane, and more united. Now, that's the purpose of prosperity. Since 1992, America has grown not just economically but as a community. Yes, jobs are up but so are adoptions. Yes, the debt is down but so is teen pregnancy. We are becoming both more diverse and more united. My fellow Americans, tonight we can say with gratitude and humility We built our bridge to the 21st century. We crossed that bridge together. And we're not going back. To those who say and I'm sure you heard this somewhere in the last few days to those who say the progress of these last 8 years was just some sort of accident, that we just kind of coasted along, let me be clear America's success was not a matter of chance it was a matter of choice. And today, America faces another choice. It's every bit as momentous as the one we faced 8 years ago. For what a nation does with its good fortune is just as stern a test of its character, values, and judgment as how it deals with adversity. My fellow Americans, this is a big election with great consequences for every American, because the differences, the honest differences, between our candidates and their visions are so profound. We can a have good, old fashioned election here. We should posit that our opponents are good, honorable, patriotic people, and that we have honest differences. But the differences are there. Consider this, just this. We in America would already have, this year, a real Patients' Bill of Rights, a minimum wage increase, stronger equal pay laws for women, and middle class tax cuts for college tuition and long term care if the Democratic Party were in the majority in Congress with Dick Gephardt as Speaker and Tom Daschle as majority leader. And come November, they will be. That has to be clear to people. And that's why every House and every Senate seat is important. But if you'll give me one moment of personal privilege, I'd like to say a word about Hillary. When I first met her 30 years ago, she already had an abiding passion to help children. And she's pursued it ever since. Her very first job out of law school was with the Children's Defense Fund. Every year I was Governor she took lots of time away from her law practice to work for better schools or better children's health or jobs for parents who lived in poor areas. Then when I became President, she became a full time advocate for her lifetime cause, and what a job she has done. She championed the family leave law, children's health insurance, increased support for foster children and adoptions. She wrote a best selling book about caring for our children, and then she took care of them by giving all the profits to children's charities. For 30 years 30 years from the first day I met her, she has always been there for all our kids. She's been a great First Lady. She's always been there for our family. And she'll always be there for the families of New York and America. Of course, we all know that the biggest choice that the American people have to make this year is in the Presidential race. Now, you all know how I feel. Laughter But it's not my decision to make. That belongs to the American people. I just want to tell all of you here in this great arena and all of the folks watching and listening at home a few things that I know about Al Gore. We've worked closely together for 8 years now, in the most challenging moments. When we faced the most difficult issues of war and peace, of whether to take on some powerful interests, he was always there. And he always told me exactly what he thought was right. Everybody knows he is thoughtful and hard working. But I can tell you personally, he is one strong leader. In 1993 there was nobody around the table more willing to make the tough choices to balance the budget the right way and take this tough stance against balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and working people of America. I have seen this kind of positioning and this kind of strength time and again, whether it was in how we reform welfare or in protecting the environment or in closing the digital divide or bringing jobs to rural and urban America through the empowerment zone program. The greatest champion of ordinary Americans has always been Al Gore. I'll tell you something else about him. More than anybody else I've known in public life, Al Gore understands the future and how sweeping changes and scientific breakthroughs will affect ordinary Americans' lives. And I think we need somebody in the White House at the dawn of the 21st century who really understands the future. Finally, I want to say something more personal. Virtually every week for the last 7 1 2 years, until he became occupied with more important matters, Al Gore and I had lunch. And we talked about the business between us and the business of America. But we'd also often talk about our families, what our kids were doing, how school was going, what was going on in their lives. I know him. He is a profoundly good man. He loves his children more than life. And he has a perfectly wonderful wife who has fought against homelessness and who has done something for me and all Americans in bringing the cause of mental health into the broad sunlight of our national public life. We owe Tipper Gore our thanks. Al has picked a great partner in Joe Lieberman. There's the Connecticut crowd. Hillary and I have known Joe for 30 years, since we were in Connecticut in law school. I supported him in his first race for public office in 1970, when I learned he had been a freedom rider, going into danger to register black voters in the then segregated South. It should not be a surprise to anyone that Al Gore picked the leader of the New Democrats to be his Vice President, because Joe Lieberman has supported all our efforts to reform welfare, reduce crime, protect the environment, protect civil rights, and a woman's right to choose and to keep this economy going all of them. And he has shown time and time again that he will work with President Gore to keep putting people and progress over partisanship. Now, it's up, frankly, to the Presidential nominee and the Vice Presidential nominee to engage in this debate and to point out the differences. But there are two issues I care a lot about, and I want to make brief comments on them, and I hope I've earned the right to make comments on them. One is the economy I know a little something about that and the other is our efforts to build one America. First, on the economy, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman will keep our prosperity going by paying down the debt, investing in education and health care, moving more people from welfare to work, and providing family tax cuts we can afford. That stands in stark contrast to the position of our Republican friends. Here is their position. They say we have a big projected 10 year surplus, and they want to spend every dime of it and then some on tax cuts right now. That would leave nothing for education or Medicare, prescription drugs nothing to extend the life of Medicare and Social Security for the baby boomers nothing in case the projected surpluses don't come in. Now, think about your own family's budget for a minute or your own business budget. Would you sign a binding contract today to spend all your projected income for a decade, leaving nothing for your families' basic needs, nothing for emergencies, nothing for a cushion in case you didn't get the raise you thought you were going to get? Of course you wouldn't do that, and America shouldn't do it either. We should stick with what works. Let me say something to you that's even more important than the economy to me. When Al Gore picked Joe Lieberman, the first Jewish American to join a national ticket, to be his partner, and he joined with our Presidential nominee, who has, along with his great mother and late father, a lifetime commitment to civil rights and equal opportunity for all, even when it was not popular down home in the South, when they did that, we had a ticket that embodies the Democratic commitment to one America. They believe in civil rights and equal opportunity for everybody. They believe in a woman's right to choose. And this may be the most important of all, they believe the folks that you're buying your soft drinks and popcorn from here at the Staples Center should have the exact same chance they do to send their kids to college and give them a good life and a good future. My fellow Americans, I am very proud of our leaders. And I want you to know that the opportunity I have had to serve as President at the dawn of a new era in human history has been an honor, a privilege, and a joy. I have done everything I knew how to do to empower the American people, to unleash their amazing optimism and imagination and hard work, to turn our country around from where it was in 1992, and to get us moving forward together. Now, what I want you to understand tonight is that the best is still out there. The best is yet to come if we make the right choices in this election year. But the choices will make all the difference. In February the American people achieved the longest economic expansion in our history. When that happened, I asked our folks at the White House when the previous longest economic expansion was. You know when it was? It was from 1961 through 1969. Now, I want the young people especially to listen to this. I remember this well. I graduated from high school in 1964. Our country was still very sad because of President Kennedy's death, but full of hope under the leadership of President Johnson. And I assumed then, like most Americans, that our economy was on absolutely on automatic, that nothing could derail it. I also believe then that our civil rights problems would all be solved in Congress and the courts. And in 1964, when we were enjoying the longest economic expansion in history, we never dreamed that Vietnam would so divide and wound our America. So we took it for granted. And then, before we knew it, there were riots in the streets, even here. The leaders that I adored as a young man, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, were killed. Lyndon Johnson, a President from my part of the country I admired so much for all he did for civil rights, for the elderly, and the poor, said he would not run again because our Nation was so divided. And then we had an election in 1968 that took America on a far different and more divisive course. And you know, within months after that election, the last longest economic expansion in history was, itself, history. Why am I telling you this tonight? Not to take you down but to keep you looking up. I have waited, not as President but as your fellow citizen, for over 30 years to see my country once again in the position to build the future of our dreams for our children. We are a great and good people. And we have an even better chance this time than we did then, with no great internal crisis and no great external threat. Still, I have lived long enough to know that opportunities must be seized or they will be lost. My friends, 54 years ago this week I was born in a summer storm to a young widow in a small Southern town. America gave me the chance to live my dreams. And I have tried as hard as I knew how to give you a better chance to live yours. Now, my hair is a little grayer, my wrinkles are a little deeper, but with the same optimism and hope I brought to the work I loved so 8 years ago, I want you to know my heart is filled with gratitude. My fellow Americans, the future of our country is now in your hands. You must think hard, feel deeply, and choose wisely. And remember, whenever you think about me, keep putting people first. Keep building those bridges. And don't stop thinking about tomorrow. August 14, 2000 Thank you very much. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, you have just heard a stirring example of Clinton's first law of politics Whenever possible, be introduced by someone you have appointed to high office. Laughter Secretary Albright, thank you for your great work as Secretary of State and, before that, as our Ambassador to the United Nations and for your constant friendship and support to Hillary and me. Gary, thank you for hosting this today and for what you said and for all the good work you do. Mr. Mayor, thank you for putting on a great convention and sitting through all these speeches by Democrats. Laughter There's been a lot of talk in this convention about religion because Joe Lieberman is our first Jewish candidate on the national ticket. But I want you to know I am still a confirmed Baptist. We believe in deathbed conversions, and I'd like to have you switch at any time. Laughter We love you very much. You too inaudible . Laughter I want to thank Paul Kirk, my friend of many years, and Ken Wollack and all the members of the NDI. Thank you, Senator Feinstein. And I'd like to thank all the members of the diplomatic community who are here, parliamentarians from around the world, and the people who have been or are now part of our diplomatic efforts Vice President Mondale, who did such a brilliant job in Japan and Reverend Jackson, our Special Envoy to Africa Ambassador Blinken Ambassador Shearer there are a lot of others here. But I thank them all for what they have done. I'd also like to say how much I appreciate the work of the NDI, how much I've tried to support it, how grateful I am that we have a nominee for President and Vice President in our party who will strongly support you for a long time in the future. Way back in the distant past of the last millennium, when I was first elected President, people were asking whether the end of the cold war would lead to a new birth of freedom or whether incipient democracies would be overcome by forces of hardship and hate. There were then perhaps as many reasons for fear as for hope. In Russia, people faced breadlines and hyperinflation. Many were resigned to an inevitable backlash that would lead back to communism or ultranationalism. Southeast Europe was full of backward economies and battered people willing to be manipulated to wage war on their neighbors. In parts of Asia, leaders claimed democracy was an alien, Western imposition, that there was really no such thing as a universal conception of human rights or free people governing themselves. Never mind, of course, that people from Burma to the Philippines to Thailand were already struggling and sacrificing for freedom. Some still believed democracy only works for people of a certain culture or a certain stage of development. Well, since then we've learned a lot about human nature and humanity's desire for freedom and self government. Looking back, I think we'll all say that the 1990's were democracy's decade. With our support and with your support, democracies flourished in central Europe. Despite all the difficulties, it has endured in Russia, persevered in Latin America, and truly triumphed in Mexico. In 1999, thanks to the democratic transformations in Nigeria and Indonesia, more people won the right to choose their leaders than in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. In the Balkans, the cause of pluralism faced perhaps its greatest obstacles. Prime Minister Dodik and the head of Bosnia's leading multiethnic party, Zlatko Lagumdzija, are both here with us today. We welcome them, and we urge them to keep up their good work for freedom. Their success has proven that Bosnians of every ethnic background are turning to leaders delivering prosperity and hope, instead of exploiting human differences. Last week I met with the new President and the new Prime Minister of Croatia. They're taking their country on a breathtaking journey to democracy. Their success says to all the people of the Balkans, where popular will overcomes authoritarianism and hate, the road to Europe is open. With Kosovo holding the first free elections in its history later this year, the only vestige of the Balkans' undemocratic past is Serbia. We are encouraging the democratic opposition there to mount as unified a challenge to Mr. Milosevic as possible, so that even if he steals the coming Presidential election he undoubtedly will try to do that he will lose what legitimacy he has left with the Serbian people. But whatever may happen, he has utterly failed to build a greater Serbia based on ethnic cleansing and exclusion. All around him, instead, we are seeing the emergence of a greater Europe based on tolerance and democracy. We also learned some lessons in democracy's decade of the nineties. It used to be said that unelected leaders were easier for America to deal with because they were free to make hard and unpopular choices. Well, it turns out to be one of those big ideas that just isn't true. Consider the case of Prime Minister Barak. In pursuit of peace he has been able to make some of the hardest and most courageous decisions I, personally, have ever seen because he knows he draws his mandate from the people. Consider Kim Dae jung of South Korea. He overcame his country's economic crisis because he had the legitimacy to push through wrenching change, and he made a brave, brave step in reaching out to North Korea. Ironically, unelected leaders tend to be more fearful of political opposition than elected leaders. That's a lesson I've had to learn the hard way. The first 3 or 4 years, when I heard that, I thought they were just making excuses for something they didn't want to do. And finally I realized that they really were afraid to take unpopular decisions, even if they might be able to sell a vast majority of their people on it because it was the right thing to do. Maybe it's because when dictators lose power, they lose everything Democrats live to fight another day or build Presidential libraries. Laughter Another lesson that we learned is that democracy's success is in our interest. Our support can be critical to that success. Next week I'll be going to Nigeria, to a new, democratic Nigeria, a Nigeria that's a leader for peace and economic development and the struggle against AIDS. If democracy takes root in Nigeria, it will lift up an entire region. So we'll do our part to help with trade and investment, support for Nigeria's peacekeepers in its efforts to ensure that the vast wealth it has accumulated and squandered in the past finally benefits its people. Now, a day after I come back from Nigeria, I'll be going to Colombia. There, people are struggling to keep one of the oldest democracies in our hemisphere alive in the face of terrible violence, fueled by a drug trade that threatens their children and ours. We have a national interest in supporting them, and now with strong bipartisan support from Congress for which I am profoundly grateful we have made a commitment to do just that. We care about democracy in countries like Nigeria and Colombia because the success of freedom is contagious, and so is freedom's failure. One reason we can tip the balance is because of the work NDI does. Just about every time I travel to an emerging democracy, whether it's Nigeria or Ghana or Bosnia or Russia or Nicaragua or Bangladesh, I find that NDI is there before I land and, most important, after I leave. Thanks to you, America not only has a Peace Corps it has a democracy corps. If the 1990's were democracy's decade, you had a lot to do with it. And with your help, we can now start building democracy's century, a century that we can't stop working on until the most powerful, liberating, revolutionary idea in all human history touches every human community. Let me just say in closing something that's not in my notes, and I'll probably get in trouble with all my staff for saying laughter but we have people here who devote your life to thinking about these things. I am gratified that in this very turbulent period, that we have been able to build in the United States a bipartisan commitment to democracy that has been manifested, for example, in Plan Colombia, manifested in the passage of PNTR with China, manifested in the passage of the African Caribbean Basin bill, manifested in the common commitment both candidates for President have consistently made this year, to an expansive, embracive, farsighted trade policy. But there are still challenges out there that, if we want to maximize our impact on, we have to internalize debate and resolve as a people. Because we have seen over and over and over again, it is very difficult for America to do anything big, good, profoundly long lasting unless we are agreed. And let me just give a few examples. I hope the commitment we have made to Africa will endure and be embraced in a bipartisan way. I hope those people who believe in the Congress and in the country that I honestly made a mistake and they honestly believe this those who believe that I made a mistake in committing our military resources and our diplomatic muscle, first in Bosnia, and then in Kosovo, will rethink, because I think if the cause of freedom had been lost in those countries and the principle of ethnic cleansing had been upheld, we would be paying for it along with free people across the world for a very, very long time. I hope the next administration will continue the commitment that we have begun to a new stage in our relationship with India and that we will continue to be involved in trying to resolve the tensions on the Indian subcontinent. If you think about the 200 or so ethnic groups that we have in the State of California and in the United States of America, Indians and Pakistanis both rank in the top five in per capita education and per capita income. There is no telling what could happen for the good on the Indian subcontinent in the 21st century that will open new vistas of possibilities, not only for people who are still desperately poor in those nations and in Bangladesh but, indeed, throughout the world, if they can just find a way to resolve their deep differences. So I hope that will happen, and I hope all of you will stay with us. The other day when we said our administration that we felt that the worldwide spread of AIDS had become a national security threat to the United States, some people ridiculed that. But I hope we will have a broader notion of our national security and a broader sense of what tools we need to bring to bear against them. I have done what I could in every year to support a strong defense budget, to support improvements in the quality of life for our men and women and families in the United States military, to modernize our weapon systems. But I think the work that we're trying to do this year in the Congress to fight AIDS, malaria, and TB is important. I think we should be doing much more than we are to help countries deal with the breathtaking breakdown in public health systems in a lot of the former Communist world and in a lot of the developing countries, things which really could just eat the heart out of democracy over the next 10 or 15 years unless people can at least find a way to keep babies alive and to stop children from dying prematurely. I hope we will be very creative in the ways we fight terrorism and chemical and biological warfare, cyberterrorism, and what I think will be the most likely threat to our security over the next 20 years, which is that the miniaturization process that we see, inevitably, part of technology that now allows you to have a little computer in your palm with a screen and a keyboard that people with big hands like me can't use anymore will also you will see this with weapons. And it is far more likely that we will deal with those kinds of weapons in the hands of terrorists, with enormous destructive potential, even than we will have to fend off hostile missiles coming in. And I hope we'll have a bipartisan consensus about how to imagine the new most likely security threats of the 21st century. I hope there will be even stronger support for relieving the debt of the poorest countries in the world. I hope there will be even stronger support for the initiative that Senator McGovern and Senator Dole brought to Secretary Glickman, who is here. We have we really believe that for a relatively modest amount of money, a few billion dollars, we could guarantee one nutritious meal to every poor child in the entire world every day at school. If we did it, it would dramatically increase school enrollment, especially among young girls, and do a lot to reverse the tide of trafficking in young women and of the abuse of the rights of young women. And it would change the whole fabric of society all across the world in a way that would be very good for democracy. We need a real consensus on those kinds of things that there has not been nearly enough talk about. And we need to look at all these things in terms of our commitment to democracy, our commitment to national security. We have to have and as I said, I don't think I have to take a back seat to anybody in my commitment to a strong national defense, but our national security and our advancement of democracy depends on far more than our military power. And as wealthy as we are now, as successful as we are, for a relatively modest increase in terms of the surpluses we're projecting, in the investments we make around the world in people problems and in building institutions and in giving people the capacity to fight off the demons of the 21st century, we will get a huge return in the advance of freedom. Thank you very much. August 13, 2000 Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking Tim and Joel Tauber and Todd Morgan and Bill Dockser and all the leaders of the organizations that brought you all here together. Thank you for giving Hillary such a good reception. I am grateful for that. I want to say, more than anything else, how profoundly grateful I am for the support I have received from the American Jewish community since 1991, when I first began running for President. When Hillary and I were discussing whether I should make this race, way back in '91, well over 8 years ago now, one of the things that I hoped I could do was to bring whatever powers of persuasion and understanding of history, as well as human psychology, that I've acquired over the years, to the process of peace in the world. It seemed to me that the end of the cold war had imposed upon the United States a very special responsibility to reach out and build bridges to countries and regions that we had too often overlooked or seen through a limited lens during the period of the cold war and to try to be a special force for peace, from the Northern Ireland problem to the Balkans to Haiti and our own region, but especially in the Middle East. And for nearly 8 years now, we have worked to be faithful to the commitment I made to the American people when I began, that we would make the United States the world's leader for peace and freedom, for human rights and security wherever we possibly could. This has been the most rewarding thing, I think, in many ways I've been able to do as President. But it's a work that is and by the very nature of the way we human beings are it's a work that will always be, to some extent, in progress. Hillary has done a lot, especially with her Vital Voices program in Northern Ireland, going to Israel and working with Mrs. Barak on the violence issue, and, before that, working with others who were in the Israeli Government. I think I should tell you that the last person I talked to before my plane landed in Los Angeles was Leah Rabin. She's back here in the United States seeing her doctor. She said she got a reasonably good report. And I told her I was going to see you, and she asked me to say hello, so I'm doing it. And I want to get my brownie points with her for doing it. Tim already mentioned the nomination of Joe Lieberman, but I want to say just a few words about it. I was at a dinner last night that a few of you attended, which honored the last 8 years of our administration. And one of the people who performed was the comedian Red Buttons, who must be I don't know how old he is now, but he's not a kid. Laughter And he can say things the rest of us can't say. And the first thing, he got up and said, "Do you know that in Los Angeles the Democrats are changing their theme songs from Happy Days Are Here Again' to Hava Nagila?"' Laughter He also gave me a lot of other jokes, but I don't think I should use any of them. Laughter Hillary and I have known Joe Lieberman she may have said this but we met him in 1970, when I was a first year law student, she was a second year law student, and he was a 28 year old candidate for the State Senate. And I was especially impressed by the fact that he had been a Freedom Rider in Mississippi, or somewhere in the South, and was down there registering voters at a time when it wasn't easy to do and, frankly, anybody who tried to do it was in some measure of physical danger. In all the years since, we've kept in touch. And about 15 years ago we were among those who started the Democratic Leadership Council. He's a brilliant man, a little bit of an iconoclast and always willing to think new thoughts, and I think we need more of that in politics. The world is changing very rapidly, and we need people who can think. And most important of all, he will be a living embodiment along with Hadassah, who, as all of you know, is the child of Holocaust survivors they will be a living embodiment of America's continuing commitment to build one national community, to embrace people across all the lines that divide us. It's still the most important thing we can do. I want to say just a few words, if I might, about the peace process in the Middle East. You'll hear enough of the election rhetoric elsewhere, and maybe a little from me tomorrow night. But I want to talk about that for a moment. In the last 7 years we've seen the signing of the Declaration of Principles on the South Lawn, which reflected the direct engagement of the parties at Oslo the Israeli Palestinian interim agreement, a treaty leading to genuine peace between Israel and Jordan the rallying of the world's leaders, including the leaders of the Arab world at Sharm al Sheikh, to condemn terrorist attacks against Israel the Hebron and Wye accords, which put the implementation of the interim agreement back on track. In these years, both sides have recognized that whether they like it sometimes or don't like it sometimes, the Israelis and Palestinians are bound to live side by side. Throughout the process, however, the ultimate question of how they would live side by side has been continually deferred. I always thought that was part of the genius of the Oslo accord. Some people didn't like it I thought it was a smart thing to do. Everyone knew how hard these final status issues were, and everyone knew there was absolutely no chance of resolving them unless the people, particularly those in responsible positions, lived together and worked together over a period of years and gradually began to implement other parts of the agreement so they could get a feel for each other. However, they agreed that they would resolve all this by September, and we were coming up on the deadline. And they had never really had a formal, face to face set of official conversations about these final status issues. And I can understand why. It's kind of like going to the dentist without anybody to deaden your gums. Laughter I mean, if this were easy, somebody would have done it years ago. But that is the context in which I brought them together at Camp David, not because I thought that there was a guarantee of success far from it but because they needed a setting in which they could speak openly, think freely, protected from the competing pressures and constant scrutiny that is a part of political life in Israel and throughout the Middle East, perhaps even more than it is in the United States. Now, I don't want to sugar coat it. I wanted an agreement. We didn't get one. But I can tell you, significant progress was made at Camp David. One of the Palestinian negotiators said that these were truly revolutionary talks because on their side they entertained publicly or, not publicly but in front of others positions they had never before considered. It's almost as if we cracked open a sealed container and took out a set of problems that had been festering in a dark place for 52 years. They're now out on the table the parties are talking about them issues never before confronted in an official setting. How would a new Palestinian State be defined? What would its borders be? What should be done about refugees from 1948, not just Palestinian refugees but Jewish refugees, as well. And you might be interested in knowing that the Palestinians felt that their families should be entitled to compensation, as well. How do you protect Israel's security if it withdraws from the West Bank? What in the world do you do about Jerusalem? It is a holy city, but it has caused a hellish lot of problems. And we have to think it through in a very serious and sober way. The process is not over, and therefore, it is inappropriate for me to discuss the specifics. I don't want to make a hard problem more difficult. But I can say one or two things. First of all, everybody affected by the peace process is faced with a choice. We are now at a crossroads because of the calendar to which the parties themselves have agreed Down one path lies more confrontation and conflict, more bloodshed and tears down the other is an agreement, however difficult. By definition, agreements require compromise, which means no one gets 100 percent and neither side can be in a position to say that it has completely vanquished the other. That means that, given the positions taken and I talked about this at the end of the Camp David process this is an excruciatingly difficult negotiation. The choices are painful and agonizing, but they have to be made. Otherwise, we will repeat the pattern of the past, and then, sometime in the future, another group of leaders will come back to the same set of choices with the same history after more bloodshed and tears, more grievances to redress, more bitterness to overcome. We may or may not be able to get an agreement, but we ought to keep trying, and I will keep trying every single day. I want to emphasize some things I have said for 7 1 2 years now, and I haven't changed my mind. We can come up with ideas. We can offer alternatives, but we must not, indeed, we will not attempt to impose any of our ideas. These choices must be freely made by people who must live with them. In the meanwhile, we must continue to stand by Israel, as we have during my entire tenure as President and for the last 52 years. We will help Israel to maintain its strength. We will minimize the courageous risks the Prime Minister is taking for peace. We will improve our security relationship. We will do everything we possibly can to make this work. One of the things I think you should know that struck me most at Camp David, and says something for the people who launched the Oslo process 7 years ago, is the difference in the way the negotiators relate to each other even when they were fighting. When I brought the parties together at Dayton after we and our NATO Allies ended the Bosnian war, they could barely stand to be in the same room together. When I went to Kosovo to see our soldiers and to meet with all the parties there, the wounds of ethnic cleansing and the battle we waged to reverse it were so fresh and raw that people could hardly bear to come into the same room and came only because I invited them and insisted that they come. When I went first to Northern Ireland and walked down the Shankel and the Falls, the Catholic and the Protestant streets in Belfast, it was difficult for the most controversial of the political leaders who had to be involved in any resolution to even be seen talking to each other, much less for anyone to know they had shaken hands. The Israelis and Palestinians, after these years, know each other by their first names. They know their spouses names. They know how many children they have. They know how many grandchildren they have. They tell jokes to each other, sometimes about their own leaders. They laugh, and they talk, and they have a feel for the humanity and the difficulty of the situation. This is not to say that they are soft headed. Indeed, I never saw anyone more resolute about the fundamental security interests of the State of Israel than the Prime Minister was in these negotiations. And for whatever it's worth, the security questions were the ones on which we made the most progress, which is something that should be encouraging to all of you. I don't know what's going to happen. But I know this. The most heartbreaking moments of the last 8 years for me and for Hillary, for Al, and for our whole team, have been those moments when people were blinded by acts of hatred against others because they fit in some sort of category or another that poor twisted boy that blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, his mind and soul polluted by this anti government venom that was out there at the time the schoolchildren who were killed by terrorist attack in Israel the man who belonged to a church that he said didn't believe in God but did believe in white supremacy, murdering an African American basketball coach in Chicago and killing a Korean Christian as he walked out of his church people who shot the the man who shot the Jewish children here going to their school and then killed a Filipino postal worker and thought he had had a double success he killed an Asian and a Federal employee. We see it within our country and beyond our borders. I have seen people who were literally ethnically indistinguishable in the Balkans killing each other because history made them Orthodox Christians or Muslims or Catholics. It is ironic that at a time when we celebrate the triumph of the human genome and where the Internet is the fastest growing communications vehicle in human history and, by the way, Al Gore did sponsor the legislation. Laughter Part of my job since I'm not running, you know, is to correct the record here. Laughter The Internet was, in the beginning, the private province of a few physicists. Al Gore saw virtually before anybody else, certainly in Congress that it could be transformed into a medium of communication and could hold information that could benefit all of human kind, that the whole Library of Congress would one day be on the Internet. That was the metaphor he said well over a decade ago. Now the whole Encyclopedia Britannica is on the Internet. Pretty soon, my whole Presidential library will be on the Internet. There were only 50 sites on the World Wide Web when I became President 5 0. Today there are I'm not sure how many but way, way over 10 million, the fastest growing mechanism in human history. But anyway, so you've got all this stuff happening, all this wonderful, modern stuff, and here we are bedeviled by the oldest problems of human society the fear of the other, people that are different from us. That's why it's a good thing that Al Gore put Joe Lieberman on the ticket, and other Americans will see that he is a brilliant person, that he is a good person, that he has a contribution to make. And I think more and more people will respect the fact that he gives up his entire Sabbath away from all work and politics on a day that coincidentally happens to be the best politicking day in the American political system. I think this will be a good thing for America. And what I would ask you to do as we see the events of the coming weeks unfold, is to never lose your passion for peace and for reconciliation, to remember that America cannot do good works abroad unless we are a good country first here at home, that we have to purge ourselves of all traces of bigotry and hatred, and that we have to go forward together as one community, and that we have to do it not just with our words and our pictures but with our deeds. It is one thing to say we want to build one America and another thing to do it, whether it's passing hate crimes legislation, employment nondiscrimination legislation, raising the minimum wage, or doing the other kinds of things that show that we really believe that we're all in this together, and we all do better when we help each other. The overwhelming fact of modern life is not the growth of the Internet, the growth of the global economy, the explosion of biotechnology, but what they all mean in a larger sense, which is that every single day, in breathtaking ways, many of which we cannot see, we are growing more interdependent. We need each other more. So we have to find a way not just to tolerate one another but to celebrate our diversity and take comfort from the fact that what we have in common is even more fundamental and more important. Yes, compassion is important, but enlightened self interest is even better. We need to know we actually need each other, and we need to do the right thing by each other. So for me it's a great comfort to know that the Vice President and Joe Lieberman are running, that Hillary is running, and that we're moving in the right direction. I just want to ask you this. Spend every day you can between now and November reminding people that it matters and that there are differences. And if you do that, we'll all win, and America will be fine. Thank you, and God bless you. August 10, 2000 Rev. Bill Hybels. It wasn't as bad as I told you it was going to be. Laughter The President. It's never been as bad as you told me it was going to be. Laughter Reverend Hybels. You know, there are some cynics out there that think that I'm just going to ask you a bunch of softball questions. They don't know me very well. The President. They obviously never sat in on any of our sessions. Laughter Buddy Reverend Hybels. So I'm going to start with a tough one How's Buddy? Laughter The President. He's doing fine. I'm not doing as well as he is. We took him up to Martha's Vineyard for a little family weekend, and we went swimming in the ocean. And he panicked and jumped on me, and I forgot to give him a manicure first. Laughter So it's a good thing I've got a suit on. Laughter Ministers' Leadership Conference Reverend Hybels. All right. These folks all know you and I have been meeting for many years. I'd just like to ask you, how would you characterize for these people what our meetings are like? The President. Well, first of all, they all have certain things in common then they're different from time to time. They all include you asking me point blank about the state of my spiritual life, and if you think I give you an evasive answer, then you do pointed followup questions. Laughter And then and they all end with a prayer. Most of the time we both pray. Before we came out here, we both prayed. I prayed that you wouldn't give me too tough a time for asking me to come here today. And then we talk about things. We talk about what's going on, what's going on at the office. You ask about the other people that work for me and how they're doing. If there is some particular issue in the news, we talked about that, or particularly if there's a big development involving war or peace, we talk about that. And you've given me the opportunity to ask you questions about what you do. I mean, I was fascinated about how Willow Creek was born and grew and how you got into this business that I think is so important, of trying to build up the strength of local churches throughout the country and throughout the world. And I've learned about how I do my work by talking to you about how you do yours. And I hope that the reverse is true on occasion. But basically, they've been spiritual conversations, conversations between two friends. There are some things that are always the same, and then they change based on what's going on. Reverend Hybels. Now, recently, you told me that you think more pastors should try to help politicians they should make themselves available and offer to kind of play the role that I've played. The President. Yes, I really believe that. Reverend Hybels. Why? The President. First of all, because we need it, and not just someone like me, who obviously does. But we do. In 1918 the German sociologist Max Weber wrote an essay. You and I never talked about this before I just thought about it while you asked me the question. It's called "Politics as a Vocation." And Weber was a Christian Democrat, a devout Catholic. And he said politics is a long and slow boring of hard boards. And anyone who seeks to do it must risk his own soul. Now, what did he mean by that? What he meant by that was, even in a democracy, where you draw your authority from the people, you have it for a limited amount of time, and it's self circumscribed by the Constitution. You get the ability to make decisions which affect other people's lives, decisions which are beyond your own wisdom, often made under circumstances which are unimaginably difficult, either because you're under political or personal duress. And I just think it's most people who don't know any people in public life who have to make those kind of decisions may think, well, they're just they don't have a spiritual life, or they're all automatons, or they're not this, that, or the other thing. I can tell you, most of the people I've known in 30 years of public life, Democrats and Republicans, have been good, honest, honorable people who tried to do what they thought was right, and when they differed, it was because they honestly differed. Ninety percent of the time plus that's been true. But if you're not careful, when you have this kind of job, it can overtake you. You can believe it's even more important than it is. You can let it take up even more time than it should. And it can crowd out all that other stuff inside you that keeps you centered and growing and whole. And it's very important that everybody in public life has somebody who's talking to them who either has no interest in either playing up to them and telling them what they want to hear, no interest in getting something from them, and no interest in attacking them that has anything to do with the fact that the person is in public life. And a pastor can do that in a way that, and you just sort of you can't imagine how much time that I've spent with you and, over the last couple of years, the time that I've spent also with Gordon McDonald and Tony Campolo and Phil Wogaman how much it means to me, because it sort of takes me out of all the stuff that's going on and forces me to look at it in a different way and to look at my own life in a different way. And it really kind of keeps me anchored. And you can all of you can do that for somebody else. 1958 Billy Graham Crusade Reverend Hybels. Something spiritual came into focus for you when you were just a young boy, about 10 years old. Tell us about that. The President. Well, really, it had a lot to do with how I wound up in public life, I think. I became a Christian in 1955, when I was 9, went to Park Place Baptist Church in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The minister's name was James Fitzgerald. He's a great, good man. Reverend Hybels. Now, did you like, hear a sermon and then inaudible ? The President. No, I had been a regular churchgoer ever since I was about 6. But yes, I loved this man. I haven't seen him since. I haven't seen him in 45 years. But I have a very vivid memory of exactly what he looked like and the way he talked, and he touched my heart. He convinced me that I needed to acknowledge that I was a sinner and that I needed to accept Christ in my heart, and I did. But I was 9 years old, and I was trying to figure out what it all meant. So then, when I was about 11 years old, maybe 12, the whole State was in an uproar. I guess I was 12 I think it was September of 1958. Billy Graham was coming to Little Rock to do a crusade in War Memorial Stadium, which is where the Arkansas Razorbacks play their football games when they're playing in Little Rock. And Billy Graham's the only person that could get a bigger crowd than the football team. Laughter So the schools in Little Rock had just been closed in the Little Rock integration crisis. Some of you who are older will remember it. Perhaps if you're younger, you read about it. But 1957 was the first big crisis of the school integration movement, and the Governor closed the schools, called out the National Guard to keep nine black children out of the schools and then closed them for a year, and all the kids had to go somewhere else to school. And the White Citizens Council was basically dominating the politics of the town. So Billy Graham scheduled these crusades years in advance, and he didn't plan all this. All of a sudden, he's supposed to step in the middle of this. And my Sunday school teacher was going to take me and a bunch of kids over to hear him. I never will forget it. And the White Citizens Council and a lot of the business people in Little Rock were worried about some sort of great encounter because the racial tensions were very high, and they asked Billy Graham to agree to give this crusade to a segregated audience. And he said that if they insisted on that, he would not come, that we were all children of God, and he wanted to lead everyone to Christ. He wouldn't do it. And it really touched me, because my grandparents, who had no education, particularly, and were very modest people, were among the few white people I knew who supported school integration. And all of a sudden, to have Billy Graham validating this based on his Christian witness had a profound impact on me. And it got me to thinking at that early age about the relationship between your faith and your work, which, of course, has been one of the most hotly debated issues in Christianity for 2,000 years now. What does the Book of James really mean, and all that? But I really I can't tell you what it meant. And for a long time right after that I would send a little bit of my allowance money to Billy Graham. You know, I'm still on somebody's list somewhere laughter for giving next to no money, but it was a pretty good chunk of what I had. And he came back to Arkansas 30 years later to do another crusade. And I took him by to see my pastor, who was dying at the time and who had been his friend for decades, and we relived that moment, and I've never forgotten it. And I never will. It's just like it happened yesterday to me. Even now, I can hardly talk about it. President's Church Attendance Reverend Hybels. Now, you and Hillary have been churchgoers all the time in your public service. And some people think that's just an act. How would you respond? The President. Well, at least, it's a consistent act. Laughter Well, I think I have given evidence that I need to be in church. Laughter To me, it's you know, I don't talk about it a lot. I never sought to politicize it. But it was very interesting. I started off, and I went to church with great regularity until I graduated from college high school. And like a lot of people, when I went to college, my attendance became more sporadic. And actually, Hillary had been very active in her local Methodist church in Park Ridge, which is not too far from here, when she was growing up. And I remember when I was elected Governor, I had my dedicatory service in the church this was 1979 in the church in Little Rock, which I'm still a member, Emmanuel Baptist Church. And Hillary said to me, "You know, we should start going to church again on a regular basis. We ought to do it, and you should join the choir. It would do you good to think about something besides politics." So I talked to the choir director, and because I was Governor, I was out 3 or 4 nights a week, I couldn't go to practice. But I had been in music all my life, so I was a good sight reader, so he let me sing anyway. So from 1980 until the year I became President, I got to sing in my church choir every Sunday, and it meant a lot to me. And then after we came here, we both, because we wanted to go together and with our daughter, we both started going to the Methodist church outside here in Washington, Foundry Methodist Church, that Dr. Wogaman is the pastor of, and you know him, of course. And we've gone pretty regularly for 7 1 2 years now. So I've been doing this a long time. I don't do it for anybody else I do it for me. It helps me to go. It helps me the same way it helps me to spend an hour talking to you. I'm sitting there in church, just like everybody else, except needing it maybe more, and it's one of the best hours of the week for me. I just let everything else go, take my Bible, read, listen, sing. I don't know why does anybody go? It means something to me. It's a way of not only validating my faith but deepening it and basically replenishing it. One of the things I like about my observant Jewish friends and you've seen a lot about this in the last few days with all the publicity over Senator Lieberman becoming the Vice Presidential nominee is that they take a whole day, and I mean they really take the day. They don't go to service for an hour. I mean for a day they shut down and shut the whole world out and think about what's most important in life. Anyway, in a very small way, that's what my church attendance does for me. President's Spiritual Life Reverend Hybels. Okay. So if we were having our regular meeting, this would be the time when I would ask the consistent question What's the current condition of your spiritual life? Describe right now where you're at spiritually. The President. Well, I feel much more at peace than I used to. And I think that as awful as what I went through was, humiliating as it was, more to others than to me, even, sometimes when you think you've got something behind you and then it's not behind you, this sort of purging process, if it doesn't destroy you, can bring you to a different place. I'm now in the second year of a process of trying to totally rebuild my life from a terrible mistake I made. And I now see I don't think anybody can say, "Hey, the state of my spiritual life is great. It's constant, and it's never going to change." I think I've learned enough now to know that's not true, that it's always a work in progress, and you just have to hope you're getting better every day. But if you're not getting better, chances are you're getting worse. That this has to be a dynamic, ongoing effort. But you know, I had to come to terms with a lot of things about the fundamental importance of character and integrity. Integrity, to me, means is a literal term. It means the integration of one's spirit, mind, and body being in the same place at the same time with everything, doing what you believe is right and you believe is consistent with the will of God. It's been an amazing encounter, you know, trying to rebuild my family life, which is the most important thing of all and it took a lot of effort that I've never talked about and probably never will, because I don't really think it's anybody else's concern and then to rebuild the support of the people I work with to try to be worthy of the fact that two thirds of the American people stuck with me. That's an incredible thing. So I wake up every day, no matter what anybody says or what goes wrong or whatever, with this overwhelming sense of gratitude. Because it may be that if I hadn't been knocked down in the way I was and forced to come to grips with what I'd done and the consequences of it, in such an awful way, I might not ever have had to really deal with it a hundred percent. This kind of thing happens to not, maybe, this kind of thing but all kinds of problems come up in people's lives all the time, and usually they're not played out with several billion dollars of publicity on the neon lights before people. But they still have to be dealt with. And in a funny way, when you realize there is nothing left to hide, then it sort of frees you up to do what you ought to be doing anyway. I don't know if that makes any sense, but to me, I feel this overwhelming sense of gratitude. I also learned a lot about forgiveness. I've always thought I was sort of a forgiving, generous person, you know, nonjudgmental in a negative sense, not that I don't have opinions. But I realized once you've actually had to stand up and ask for forgiveness before the whole wide world, it makes it a little harder to be as hard as I think I once was on other people, and that's meant something to me, too. I think I've learned something about that. Reverend Hybels. A lot of people, when they learned that I was going to interview you, and a lot of people who know that we've been meeting, have said to me, "The guy never really apologized. The guy never really owned it and came clean about his mistakes, tried to hide it, said it didn't happen. He never came clean." Now, that's a little surprising to me, because we sent a staff member, one of our senior staff members, to the White House the day in September of '98 when you gave one of the most clear confessional statements that I have ever heard. I'm not going to ask for a hand raise or anything, but there's a whole bunch of people here who think you never really said it. The President. No, I don't know why. I just you know, to me I had to come there was a lot of things going on at the time, as you remember, that were unrelated, I think, to the fact that I did something wrong that I needed to acknowledge, apologize for, and then begin a process of atonement for. And there were a few days when I basically was thinking more about what my adversaries were trying to do than what I should be trying to do. And finally, this breakfast we had we're about to have it, actually. We're coming up on the second anniversary of the prayer breakfast I have every year for people of all different faiths in the White House that we sort of do at the start of school, because it's kind of a rededication period. And I've done it for 8 years, over and above the President's prayer breakfast, which is a there's a whole committee that does that. Hillary and I just invite people to the White House, and we have breakfast, and we talk about whatever we're talking about that year. We pray together, and people get up and say whatever they want to say. But I think I gave a clear, unambiguous, brutally frank, and, frankly, personally painful statement to me because I had to do it. I mean, I finally realized that I was it would never be all right unless I stood up there and said what I did and said it was wrong and apologized for it. But I think what happened was, I think anybody who was there thought so I think anybody who read it thought so. I don't know what was covered by television, really, because I don't watch the TV news much, or what was written in the newspaper or who heard it. But I think that anyone who saw that and who observed what happened afterward would not doubt that there had been a full and adequate apology. Reverend Hybels. You sent me the text of it right then, and I read it, and it was I mean, I'm an elder at this church, as well as the pastor, and we've had many times where people have had to make confessions, and this was as clean. You said, "Not only am I" you said, "There's no fancy way there's not a fancy way to say it I have sinned." And you went on and quoted from Psalm 51 and talked about the need for a broken and contrite heart, and you confessed that. And you went on to say that it's not enough just to say I'm sorry, there has to be the fruits of repentance and the gathering together of people who would hold you accountable for walking a new way. You announced that day publicly you were putting an accountability group together that would meet with you and help you stay on a new path. And you ended the speech by saying, "Let the words in my mouth, the meditation in my heart, and the work of my hands be pleasing to my God." It was about as clean as I have ever read something like that. And it must have been terribly frustrating for you to live on in the future with the sense that there's a whole bunch of people who just continue to believe you never came clean. The President. Oh, it was for a little bit. But I think one of the things you learn is that even a President all you can do is be responsible for what you do, and what other people say about it or whether it gets out there you have to work hard to get it out there, but I suppose there was a time when I was upset about it. But then I realized that that was another form of defensiveness, that if I really thought about that, that was just another excuse not to be doing what I should be doing, which is to work on my life, work on my marriage, work on my parenthood, work on my work with the White House and the administration, and work on serving the American people. So believe it or not, I haven't thought about it in a long, long time now. I thought about it a little bit now because you asked me to do this, and I said, yes, and here we are in the soup together. But I don't think about it now, because I realize that anytime you're supposed to be doing something with your life and you get off thinking about what somebody else is saying or doing about it or to you or whatever, it's just a crutch for not dealing with what you're supposed to be dealing with. So I finally just let it go, and I hope people can see that it's different. You just have to hope that and go on. Leadership Reverend Hybels. Let's switch subject matters and go over to leadership. I mean, you know a lot about leadership. And you've been the leader of the most powerful country in the world for almost 8 years now. So okay, leadership questions, are we all right on that, or is there anything more you wanted to say on other stuff? The President. I thought you'd never change the subject. Laughter Reverend Hybels. All right, then. When did you first recognize that you were a leader? It's not a trick question. I'm just asking it. Laughter The President. I know. I'm just trying to remember. When I was young I don't know, in grade school I used to often be the person who sort of organized the games and got people to do things and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know that I ever thought about it in leadership terms. And I began to get interested in all this when I got interested in politics as a kid. We got a television when I was 9, I think, or 10. We didn't have a television until I was about 10. I watched the 1956 Republican and Democratic conventions. I was just fascinated by it. And then by 1960, I began to think, "Well, maybe I could actually do this someday, because I'm real interested in people I care a lot about these issues." But I think the first things I actually did were when I was in high school and I was the president of my class and the head of the band and I used to organize the State Band Festival with the band director. And one time I remember a young man came to school he came to our school. He hadn't been there very long, and he was in the band. And he had a fight with a teacher, and he said a very intemperate thing. At least, back then, you couldn't do that kind of thing, and she suspended him. So he was going to miss this big band trip we were taking over the weekend. And this kid had come to our town he had no friends he was all alone. Anyway, I decided that he ought to go. And the teacher, by blind coincidence, was a woman I very much admired. Her husband had been a plumber, and she was a housewife and a genius. And they both went back to school in their mid thirties. And they lived across the street from me, just by coincidence. So I went to her house, and I told her why she ought to reinstate this kid. And I said, "I want to bring him to you and let him apologize." But, I said, "I don't know what's going on in his life, but he's a decent kid. And he's absolutely in the wrong, and you're absolutely right to suspend him. But you ought not to do it anyway, because he just got here, and this will be good for him if he takes this trip he'll make friends and everything." So she agreed to let me bring this kid to see her. And he apologized and cried, and she cried, and they became it was great. He went on the trip. I never saw him again after I graduated from high school until I ran for President in 1992. But that made me want to be a leader. I don't know if that meant I could be. I was about I don't know I was 15 or 16 years old. But it made me understand that you could do things that would make a difference in other people's lives if you just thought about it in the right way. Reverend Hybels. All right. So you started realizing you had leadership skills or talents in you. But then at some point you said, "I'm going to direct this leadership toward the political arena." I mean, you could have been a leader in business you could have been a leader in academia you could have been a leader in ministry, probably. Laughter The President. You will find this funny, in light of all that's happened. When I was about 11, I gave my grandmother a big speech about civil rights. I was just going on and on, waving my arms and everything. My grandmother looked at me, and she said, "You know, Billy, I think you could be a preacher if you were just a little better boy." Laughter True story. Reverend Hybels. But anyway, you decided to choose I'm not going to follow up on that one. I'm letting that one go. The President. Thank you. Reverend Hybels. I mean, that was a free shot for me, and I took a pass. Laughter So please acknowledge. The President. I owe you one. Well, like I said, I was about 16, I guess, that I really decided that if I could do this kind of work, I would like to do it, this political work. And the only other thing I had I had thought about being a doctor, and I was very interested in it. But I knew I wouldn't be great at it. I thought about being a musician, and I was really quite good when I was in high school. And I knew I would be very good. But I didn't think I could be the best. Especially then, you know, 40 years ago, if you were a saxophone player, there weren't any saxophone players like there are up here on this church stage. And there was certainly nobody like Kenny G making a living just making records. I mean, if you wanted to make a living doing that, you had to get your days and nights mixed up. You had to go to some club, stay up all night playing jazz you'd sleep all day. How was I going to have a family? How was I going to have a life? And it certainly wouldn't be worth it unless you literally were the greatest person doing it. And I knew I was real good but not great. I thought to myself, I can do this really well, what I'm doing now, and I love it. And it's like the only thing I could ever think of where every day you're getting up and peeling another slice off the onion of human existence. There's like an endless layer of exposure to different people and different problems and different dreams. So I decided when I was about 16 that if I could do it, I would. And I would do it because I could do it better than I could do anything else. And I must say it was a great advantage to me in life. It's like there are all these great stories coming out now on Tiger Woods and how he's done things younger than anybody else has ever done and how he used to keep Jack Niklaus' golf records taped on his bedstead, you know. He decided younger than I did what he was going to do. It's a huge advantage. You pay a little price for it, too. None of these decisions are free in life, but I think it is a big advantage. And I've always been grateful that I just knew when I was young. Reverend Hybels. There's always that picture of you shaking hands with John Kennedy. Was that as momentous in your mind at the time as people have made it out to be since? The President. Yes, but not in the way they make it out to be. I mean, that is, I think if I had never gone in and shaken his hand, I still would have tried to go into politics because it's what I wanted to do. But I admired him, and I supported him when I was 14. He was running for President we used to have these great debates in my ninth grade class. And my very best friend as a child, who is still one of my closest friends we stay in touch all the time and he sends me an E mail once a week. He's in the computer business in Arkansas and comes to see me and tells me when he thinks I'm all wet. But he was there. He came from a Republican family, and I came from a Republican county. So he was for President Nixon, and I was for President Kennedy. And we'd have our little debates in the ninth grade. And for me, it was basically about civil rights, which I felt very strongly about. So when I got to go to Boys Nation, the American Legion did a great thing for me. It was a huge deal for me I was a 16 year old kid from Arkansas to get on an airplane, go to Washington, go to the White House, stand in the Rose Garden. And we all were standing there in alphabetical order by State, so Arkansas was near the front. And President Kennedy gave this little speech and complimented us on what we'd done in civil rights legislation, because it was a mock Senate program, this Boys Nation program. He said we were doing better than the real Senate, which is probably still true. Laughter And anyway Trent Lott will make me pay for that. Laughter Anyway, so then he comes down, and he starts shaking hands. I was the biggest kid from any of the States that started with A, so I just sort of muscled my way up there and got to shake hands. But he was kind enough to stand there for many minutes and shake hands with all the kids. And I think in every year but one this year, because I had an emergency, or a very important thing I had to do, and we had to slot the Boys Nation and Girls Nation people in every year except this one, I've actually stood there and shaken hands with and had a picture taken with every one of those kids, because you just never know when something you do to some child from a small hamlet in North Dakota or an inner city neighborhood in L.A., or anywhere else just by taking a little bit of time, that the child might imagine that he or she could do something that otherwise they hadn't imagined. So what Kennedy, meeting him, I think, did for me is it gave me first of all, I was just touched that the President was seeing us and paying a little attention to us, but it gave me the ability to imagine that I might have this life that I knew I wanted. Reverend Hybels. All right. Characterize your leadership style. Would you say like you're a visionary leader, a strategic leader, team building leader? The President. Well, you probably ought to ask the people who came with me today. They would probably say, an exhausting one. Laughter Let me try first of all, I think the vision is the most important thing. I mean, to me, what you have to have, if you want to really lead in any endeavor you've got to say, "Okay, what is my objective? What are the facts here? What are the facts on the ground? Here's my vision." Then you need a strategy for how you're going to achieve your vision. Then you have to have all these tactics that explain it. Then you have to put together a team that can do what you can't do. And so what I have tried to do is to focus on the vision thing, as some politicians say. I mean, it's not for nothing that the Scripture says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." I mean it is the most important thing. Otherwise you get remember that great old Yogi Berra line, "I may not know where I'm going, but I'm making good time." I mean, that happens to everybody in life, and part of it is when you lose your vision. But I also I think that team building is very important because a lot of the things that I get credit for, the good things that have happened have been done by somebody else that I empowered to act, consistent with an agreed upon plan that we started with. I mean, one of the things that frustrates me it's no different from everybody else that's had this position, but Vice President Gore doesn't get near enough credit for a lot of the things that I've done that he was the main executor on. I've been very fortunate. I've had one Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, the former Governor of South Carolina, and there's been a dramatic amount of improvement in the schools that we've been an integral part of because of him. I've had one Secretary of Health and Human Services one Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, who has probably made the greatest impact on the interior in a positive way since the days of Harold Ickes in Roosevelt's administration or Gifford Pinchot before that in Teddy Roosevelt's administration. So the team is very important. If you don't have the people around you that are good, you can have the vision, and you can have the strategy, but if you're doing anything that requires more than one person to do it, if you're doing something besides writing a book, you've got to have somebody else to help you. Reverend Hybels. When I first started seeing you, you had quite a few Arkansas folks in the early days or friends that you brought with you in the early days into the office. And then my perception and I don't think we've ever talked about this, actually my perception is some of them found out that the job was over their heads, and eventually you had to ask some people who started with you to do something else. The President. The truth is, though, most of the people that came with me from home have done very well. The most popular member of the Cabinet, I think, is James Lee Witt, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And he was the county judge in this little rural county in Arkansas where my stepfather was born. He was my head of the Emergency Management Agency, and the reason he's popular is we've had a lot of disasters since I've been President natural disasters, I mean. Laughter We've had a lot of natural disasters, and he's the first guy that ever had that job that got it not as a political appointment. He really knows it. The person who does all my appointments, Bob Nash, is from Arkansas. It's one of the most difficult and sensitive jobs in the Government. Nancy Hernreich, whom you know and work with, she's obviously from Arkansas. So I've had a huge number of people I brought up with. The only two that I can think of just off the top of my head some of the others have come and gone, but they came and went for the same reasons others come and go. The only two I can think of that really changed their jobs or that left their jobs under less than optimum circumstances, one of them, principally, was Vince Foster who, as you know, in a heartbreaking incident actually killed himself, apparently partly because of criticism he was receiving in the press that he thought was unfair and unjust and untrue. And I must tell you, that had a big impact on me and my wife. I had gone to kindergarten with him. Everybody thought at home that he was maybe not only the best but the most ethical lawyer they ever knew. And he had this self image of himself that was completely assaulted from day one in Washington, and he took it seriously. I'll never forget talking to him a day or so before he died. And I said, "You know, how can you take this seriously? These people, they don't know anything about you." And I said, "Everybody that reads this editorial page is against us anyway. None of these people are going to vote for us." And for me, I was so used to being beat on, I was insensitive to the fact that a man that I had lived next door to when I was 4 years old was dying inside, literally. And it's something that I think pastors maybe this has happened to you before, and if it hasn't, I hope it never will, but it's something you've got to be sensitive to. I thought he was receiving all this incoming fire in the way that I was receiving it. And instead, he was receiving it the way Woodrow Wilson talked about when he was President. He said that words could wound more than bullets and that it took an extraordinary courage to bear up under it. I'd been in public life and debates so long, I was so used to people saying things for whatever reason I missed it. So I tried to joke him out of this, instead of being sensitive to it. He performed very well, but he didn't understand the Washington culture. When Mack McLarty, who went to kindergarten with me and was a big time automotive executive, became my Chief of Staff, he didn't want to do it. He said, "You need somebody with Washington experience." But we had put most of those people that we had into the Cabinet. And so, I knew he was a good manager. It's interesting. So after a couple of years he moved on and became my Special Envoy to the Americas, where he helped to, basically, dramatically improve and broaden our relationship with all the countries south of our border and where he still does work for me, even though he's returned. He and Henry Kissinger have gone into business together. So McLarty has done very, very well. But he didn't want to be Chief of Staff. It's just that, at the time they were fixing to swear me in, and I had to have somebody. And I had to have somebody that actually knew how to run things. And you might be interested to know that Bob Rubin whom everybody considers sort of a consummate insider, you know, was my Secretary of the Treasury and, before that, head of the first National Economic Council and clearly one of the two or three most important architects of our economic revival says that McLarty did more than anybody else to establish the spirit of teamwork that we've had. In 1995, after we lost the Congress, I had a couple of Presidential scholars from Harvard come in. And one of these men I didn't even know him he said, "Don't worry. You're going to be reelected." No one thought I was going to be reelected in 1995. I said, "Why do you say that?" He said, "You have the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second administration." He said, "I never saw anything like it." He said, "There's no backbiting. They work with the White House. You all work together." He said, "I don't know how you all did it, but you're all devoted to each other." And he said, "Believe me, in the end, in ways that no one can quantify, it will work out." So I think the guy's a genius now, even though I never knew him before. Laughter Polls Reverend Hybels. Sometimes it appears as though you live by simply taking the pulse or looking at polling numbers. Other times you seem to step out and lead by conviction, deep conviction. Is that a fair characterization of your leadership? The President. No. And I'll explain why. First of all, the role of polls is widely misunderstood, so let me tell you a little about at least how I see polls. Let's begin with a poll in a campaign. Who is ahead? Vice President Gore or Governor Bush, right? The Gallup poll says one day Bush is 19 points ahead. Vice President Gore names Joe Lieberman. The next day he's 2 points ahead. Believe me, 17 percent of the people did not really change their mind in one day. That doesn't mean that Mr. Gallup's organization didn't tell the truth that is, that they called what they thought was a representative group of people one day, and they called another representative group the other day. But the first thing you need to remember about every poll is, if it's an election, it's a picture of a horserace that's not over. And if you've ever watched a horserace and you see the replays, they always show how it was at the first turn, how it was in the back stretch, how it was at the final turn. Every picture is a poll. That's what you should keep that in your mind. So when you see the polls unfold in this Presidential race, you should remember that. And therefore, it's like a horserace. How big is their lead? is one issue. Second is, what is it based on? Like if one horse is stronger than another, even he may just be a half may be a head or even a nose ahead, but if he's a stronger horse, he's going to win anyway. But otherwise, there could be if the horse has got a lot of juice running third, the horse running third may win. Now, on the issues, which is what Bill's asking me about, there's something else you need to remember about polls. First of all, they may be totally misleading. I'll explain that. Second, they may change. I'll tell you what I normally use polls for as President. If you go back and look at what I did in 1992, I issued a booklet called "Putting People First" and said "If you vote for me, this is what I'm going to do." In 1995, Thomas Patterson, the Presidential scholar, said that I had already kept a higher percentage of my commitments than the previous five Presidents, even though I'd made more commitments. So what do I use polls for on the issues? What I primarily use polls for is to tell me how to make the argument that's most likely to persuade you that I'm right about what I'm trying to do. Reverend Hybels. Give us an example. The President. Okay. I'll give you an example where, according to the polls I have the unpopular position, okay? The Congress passes a repeal of the estate tax, an outright repeal. Now, I can and I'm going to veto it if it comes to my desk, okay? Now, I can say the following. I can say, "I'm going to veto this because it only helps less than 2 percent of the people and half of the relief goes to one tenth of one percent of the people, and it's an average 10 million." That is a populist explanation. I can say, "I'm going to veto it because we only have so much money for tax cuts, and I think it's wrong to do this and say this is our highest priority, when we have done nothing to lower the income taxes of low income working people with three kids or more or to help people pay for child care or long term care for their elderly or disabled relatives or to get a tax deduction for college tuition." Or I could say, "I think there should be estate tax relief." I do, by the way. "I don't care if it does help primarily upper income people. The way so many people have made so much money in the stock markets in the last 8 years, there are a lot of family owned businesses that people would like to pass down to their family members, that would be burdened by the way the estate tax works, plus which the maximum rate is too high. When it was set, income tax rates were higher, but there was a lot of ways to get out of it. Now the rates are lower, but you have less ways to get out of it. You have to pretty much pay what you owe more." So I could say that. So it's not fair to totally repeal it. Like even Bill Gates has said, "Why are you going to give me a 40 billion tax break?" And he's going to give away his money, and I applaud him and honor him for it. So I could make either of those three arguments. It's helpful to me to know what you're thinking. I know what I think is right. I'm not going to change what I think is right. But in order to continue to be effective, you have to believe I'm right. So that's kind of what I use polls for. Also, if you know that you've only got time let's say Congress is going to be in session 3 more months, and you know you can get two things done, and there's five things you want to do. And you like them all five more or less the same, but you just know you can't get it all done, the system won't absorb that much change at once. It may help you to do a survey to see for example, the Patients' Bill of Rights that I've been trying to pass for 2 years. One of the reasons that I have felt good about trying to push it and we keep making progress and the House of Representatives passed it is that 70 percent of Republicans, Democrats, and independents outside Washington support it. It's helpful to know that, because then you're not asking if in other words, the Congress is a majority Republican. So if I give them a bill that's got 60 percent of the Democrats for it and 60 percent of the independents for it, when 60 percent of the Republicans are against it, I'm really asking them to make a sacrifice. But if I give them a bill that Democrats, Republicans, and independents are all for, even though there may be some organized groups against it, I'm not asking them to hurt themselves to do something that I think is good for America. That's how I use polls. Now, let me just say one other thing. Polls can be misleading. Reverend Hybels. He loves this stuff. I mean, just listen to this. Laughter The President. No, no, but you need to understand it. Polls can be misleading. For example, the polls show that people normally support the positions I took on the Brady bill, banning assault weapons, closing the gun show loophole. Does that mean it's a good thing to do politically? Absolutely not not necessarily. One of the reasons the Republicans won the House in 1994 is that I got Democrats to vote for the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. Why? Let's say people I'll exaggerate let's say people are 80 percent for my position and 20 percent for the NRA position. Okay? But if the 80 percent who are for my position are interested in a dozen issues, and it's only a voting issue for 5 percent, and of the 20 percent of the NRA members who are against my position if it's a voting issue for 10 percent, for 15 percent, it means you lose 10 percent of the vote. See what I mean? So the polls can be totally misleading. Therefore, even though it looked like the public was for us, when we took on guns, when we took on tobacco interests, when we took on a lot of these other things, it was very risky. And the final thing I want to tell you is, sometimes you have to do things that are unpopular because you know they're right and you're absolutely convinced time will tell. The most unpopular decision I made as President, at the moment I made it, was to give financial aid to Mexico when they were going broke. Remember that a few years ago? On the day I made that decision the polls said that by 81 to 15 81 to 15, you couldn't get those numbers for the proposition that the Sun will come up tomorrow laughter by 81 to 15, the public thought that I should not do that. It took me 5 minutes to make the decision to do it. It was not a hard decision. We did it right away. Why? Because I knew that no matter what you thought about whether I was doing something wrong, I couldn't allow Mexico to go bankrupt if I could stop it because it was an important trading partner for us because if they went down, then Argentina and Brazil might go down countries half way around the world might down we would be flooded with more illegal immigrants we'd have more trouble on our border than we could say grace over and that even if everybody got mad at me and wanted to vote against me, I owed it to you to do what I had more evidence and knowledge of than most voters and go ahead and do what I thought was right. So I did. You should use polls and you should follow them, but neither those who follow nor those who use should take them too seriously or fail to understand their limits. Race Relations Reverend Hybels. If I asked you what are two or three issue oriented convictions that you are going to stand for from here to the grave, you just go, "This one goes down into my soul"? The President. The first is the whole question of race. You know, I'm a southerner I grew up in the segregated South. The most important thing to me is that we learn to live together. Let me say, for one thing, I'm quite sure that some of my positions are wrong. I'm quite sure some of your positions are wrong. That is, if you know enough and have enough opinions, some of them are going to be wrong. In a way, one of my very favorite Bible verses is the 12th chapter of the 12th verse of the 12th chapter of First Corinthians "Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now we know in part, but then we shall know even as we are also known. Now abideth faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love" or charity or charitable love or whatever. Why? Because we see through a glass darkly. But I'm quite sure that what I am right about is our common humanity and that our common humanity is more important than the things that divide us. The human genome project has discovered that we are genetically more than 99.9 percent the same. Furthermore, it has discovered that if you take let's say we took four groups. Let's say we take a hundred Chinese, a hundred Indians from South Asia not Native American a hundred Indians, a hundred Norwegians, and a hundred West Africans. That the genetic differences between the groups would be less than the genetic differences among the individuals within each racial group stunning. Basically, science is confirming what our faith has taught us. And so, to me, if I could have one wish for America it would not be that the economic recovery would go on another decade, it would not be even that the crime rate would be lowered or that we would all that all of our children would have a chance at a good life. It would be that we would find a way to live together as one America, because we'll figure out how to solve all the problems if we'll stop getting in each other's way. So that's what I believe. Reverend Hybels. It's funny, when you start going in on this genetic thing I went to Washington. I think it was a day after you had done all that reading. I walked in the door. You could not wait laughter to tell me the findings of these genetic differences and similarities. And I was thinking, I flew all the way there, sat and listened for an hour and 15 minutes, flew all the way back, and never said a word. Laughter The President. But somebody has got to do that to him, right? Laughter Reverend Hybels. I think you're two down now. The President. Boy, I'll pay for that, I'll tell you. I'll pay for that. Influences on the President Reverend Hybels. Yes, you're two down now. Laughter Okay. Dividing your life into thirds, like zero to 20, 20 to 40, 40 until now, which leaders had the most important influence on you in each of those thirds? The President. Well, when I was very young, my mother was a role model to me and for lots of reasons. She was a good mother, a good provider she got up early, worked late, put us first my band director, my high school principal, President Kennedy, a couple of my college professors. Between 20 and 40, I think I admired Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, a lot of people in public life. Between 40 and 60, especially after I got to be President, I spent more time studying Abraham Lincoln and Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. And I've been very influenced by Nelson Mandela, who is a good friend of mine and my family and Yitzak Rabin, the late Prime Minister of Israel, whom I loved very much and was very close to and, as you know, lost his life because he was working for peace in the Middle East, the same thing we're still struggling with. And I kind of drew something from each of them. But I would say those are the people that have really influenced me. Presidential Decisions Reverend Hybels. Okay. What are the toughest one or two decisions you've had to make during your Presidency? When did you just go, "Oh, my goodness gracious, there is no good way this is going to come out, but I've got to make the call." The President. Well, any time you put Americans into battle, you do, because you know the chances are some of them will die. And even if they don't, they're going to kill somebody else. And you can't use all those big fancy weapons I don't care how good the computers are, how accurate the weapons are without some people getting killed that you didn't want to kill. So the decision to go the conflict in Kosovo when I first got elected I had to take a military action against Saddam Hussein because he had authorized an assassination plot on President Bush. I don't know if you all remember that, back in 1993, after President Bush had left office, and he went to the Middle East, and they authorized an assassination squad. Thank goodness it failed. But I couldn't just walk away from that and pretend it didn't happen and pretend the people who were responsible for that thought they could kill an American President who had done something that we all most of us supported in the Gulf war. But every time you do that, every time you unleash a missile or send a pilot, and you know that it's life and death, you just have to pray you're right. We did it in actions there were other times when we took actions over Iraq. There were other times we more limited actions in Bosnia, because thank goodness, we brought them to the peace table. But I think those are the hardest things. There were a lot of other things. It was very hard to put together the economic plan in 1993, because I knew the country was deep in trouble. We had quadrupled the debt in 12 years the deficit was high the interest rates were high the economy was weak. And I knew it was going to take a real cold shower to turn it around. And it would take a combination of tax increases, which I wanted to have mostly on upper income people, and spending cuts, which would mostly affect middle and lower income people. But we had to do them both to try to get rid of this deficit. And I knew if we didn't do it, we'd never get there. But I also knew that I was asking a lot of Members of Congress to walk the line and to risk being defeated. And when the Republicans announced that they would give no votes to it and it was going to be the first major piece of legislation in 50 years to pass with the votes of only one party, you know, I knew what I was asking them to do. But I also knew I believed very strongly it would work, and I thought if we didn't do something about the deficit and the accumulating debt that we would never turn the country around. And so I did it. But it was very hard for me, because I knew that the Congress would pay the price, because there was no way the economy could be that much better by '94 in the elections, and that if I was right and it worked, that I would be reelected in '96, and they would have, in effect, sacrificed for a decision that I made and got them to support. And it's turned out that's how it was. That was one of my lower days as President, when that happened. Reverend Hybels. Now, let's say that it's the night before you have to send troops into battle. Who do you have in the room with you? What process is going on? How do you make that final call to say, "Go"? The President. Well, you have the national security team, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of Central Intelligence, and a number of other people would be there. And we would probably be meeting in the secure room in the White House that we have for such purposes. And we would go over all the facts, all the options, what options we had other than going into combat, what our objectives were, what the likelihood of achieving our objectives are, and what could go wrong. And if the worst happens and something goes wrong, what are we going to do then? We try to game it all out and think about it in advance. Then I go around the room, and whenever I have a big decision, I make everybody tell me what they think. And one of the things that I have tried to cultivate is to tell people I do not want them to tell me what they think I want to hear. And I must say, they have certainly taken that to heart. Laughter But one of the problems that Presidents one of the things that causes Presidents problems is they tend to pick people to be around them who are too much like them. This is not a negative thing. It's a hard job. You're under a lot of pressure. You like to be around people you feel comfortable with, who have the same interests you do, have the same strengths you do. But the truth is, you need to have people around you who see the world differently, who have different experiences, and who have different strengths and skills. So I tried to do that, too. And we just go around, and they all tell me what they think. And then when we have to make a decision, I make a decision. Reverend Hybels. And would you try to gain consensus, or at a certain point, if you realize there is not consensus, you just say, "Well, men and women, we're going to do this"? The President. I always try to get them to get a consensus because I know they're smart enough and their takes on things are different enough the same thing is true in the domestic field. I do the same thing with economic policy. But if they can get a consensus, more than likely, they're right, because they're not all rubber stamp type people, and they're in there really working it through. And they can present the arguments to me. But if they can't make a consensus and we run out of time, I just make a decision. I make the best decision I can. President's Best Moments Reverend Hybels. All right. You're going to be leaving office in a few months, and you look back and you say what were one or two of just the highest moments, just the greatest feelings, when you said, "It doesn't get better than this"? The President. Well, I'll give you a couple. When we won the economic fight in August of '93, I knew it was going to turn the country around. I just knew it. Because the productive capacity of the American people and the fact that we were ahead in this information technology age anyway was beginning to assert itself. And I knew if we could just get the deficit down, get interest rates down, get out of the way of the economy, and then do some things that would speed it up, it would be great. That was a great day. In September of '93, when Arafat and Rabin met on the White House lawn and I got them to shake hands for the first time in front of a billion people on television, it was an unbelievable day. When I signed the AmeriCorps bill to give now 150,000 young people a chance to serve at their communities for a year or two and then earn money for college, and I did it with the pens that President Kennedy used to sign the Peace Corps and President Franklin Roosevelt used to sign the Civilian Conservation Corps, that was a great day. It was one of my dreams to do. In December of '95 I went to Ireland. And our administration was the first American administration ever to become deeply involved in the Irish peace process. And we had just about got a final peace in Northern Ireland. And my people are Irish they were Irish Protestants from Fermanagh, right on the line between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And to see 50,000 people in the streets in Belfast, to walk down the Shankel and the Falls, the Catholic and the Protestant neighborhoods, and see them there together, all these young people cheering for peace see over 100,000 people in Dublin waving American flags and Irish flags, all because they thought America stood for peace. The first time I went to Sarajevo after the war in Bosnia ended and all these people came up to me on the street and thanked me because America gave them their lives back. You know, that means you forget the enormous capacity of our country to represent the best hope of humankind. And you realize, when you're President, you're just sort of the temporary steward of something that's so much bigger than you are. But if you use the power in the right way, how it can move the world, not because of you but because of America, because of 226 years of history, because of the values of the country, because of the way it works, I mean, it's unbelievable. So those were some of the things. There were many more standing in Nelson Mandela's prison cell with him was a pretty amazing thing. Listening to him tell me the story of how he let go of his hatred and resentment so he could be free to be a human being after being unjustly imprisoned for 27 years. You get a chance to have some pretty good moments in this job. Laughter President's Worst Moments Reverend Hybels. And then describe the lowest point, where you just said, "It doesn't get worse than this." The President. Well, obviously, one of them was my personal crisis, but we've already talked about that. So if you go beyond that, let me just mention a couple. Somalia, when we lost 18 of our soldiers in Somalia in a firefight, where somewhere between 300 and 500 Somalis got killed. When our soldiers were asked we were there remember we went there to help because people were starving, but this political conflict was going on. And the U.N. had troops there, not just Americans. And a lot of you don't remember, I bet, what precipitated this. One of the factions in the Somalis fighting killed 22 Pakistani troops who were there with us for the United Nations. And the U.N. couldn't just walk away from that. I mean, they ambushed them. They bushwhacked them and killed them. So only the United States troops had the capacity to try to arrest those who were responsible. And I remember General Powell coming to me and asking for my approval for us to try. And he said, "I think we've got only a onein five, one in four chance of getting this guy alive, but we've got a one in two chance of some success." But the people on the ground decided the that best thing to do was to launch an attack in broad daylight on this hotel. And when they did it, it turned out to be an unbelievably bloody battle under unbelievably adverse circumstances, and 18 of our guys died, and several hundred of theirs did. And it wasn't the sort of decision made in the way it should have been made by me, with our involvement. And I felt the sickest I have felt since I've been here. And they were very brave, they fought very well. I gave a couple of them the Medal of Honor, who were killed. They were unbelievable. But it was a terrible moment. It was a terrible moment when those people were killed in Oklahoma City, because, if you remember, it came there briefly people assumed that it was some sort of foreign terrorist remember that where they were trying to arrest a gentleman who was an Arab American who was traveling on a plane out of the country. And I thank God for whatever it was that made me think to say to the American people, "Well, don't jump to conclusions here. This may not be what's going on." And then when we found out what did go on, there was this terribly twisted, disturbed young man who had been affected by all this rhetoric that had been kind of seeping through the underground of America, about how inherently evil the Government and anybody who worked for it was, I just felt sick. I felt, what can we do I just and one of those people, by the way, who was killed in Oklahoma City, when I went down there to see his family, they showed me a picture of him at my inaugural. And I was talking to all these victims, and every one of them had a story people have stories. If you ever get a chance to go to the Oklahoma City Memorial, if you're ever within a hundred miles of there, stop whatever you're doing and drive and go see it. It is the most effective memorial of its kind I have ever seen. But I just felt that there were forces at work in our society that made my words seem weak and inadequate. And I wanted to do something to try to heal the heart of the country, to go beyond sort of bigger than policies and bills and who was up and who was down. It was just unbelievable. So those two things kind of stand out to me as really low moments. And I mention just personally, for my allies, I felt sick when the '94 congressional elections occurred, because I felt like those people bled for a decision that I got them to make. So I felt responsible for their losing their careers, even though I thought what we did was right for the country. And I think the future bore us out. President's Legacy Reverend Hybels. What would you like to be remembered for? The President. I would like to be remembered for leading the country through a great period of transformation. This period is most like what happened at the turn of the last century, when Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson led America from an agricultural country into an industrial country and helped us to make the changes necessary in that context to reaffirm our commitment of opportunity for every responsible citizen and to realize, in that context, what our responsibilities to one another were, to have one national community. And I would like to be remembered as the President that led America from the industrial era into the information age, into a new global society that reaffirmed the importance of our mutual responsibility to one another and the importance of guaranteeing an opportunity to everybody, and that I was a force for peace and freedom and decency in the world, that tried to bring people together instead of drive people apart, tried to empower poor people so they could have a chance like everybody else, and that tried to change the nature of our politics so we spent more time debating our ideas than trying to destroy our opponents and basically tried to lift us up and move us on. That's how I'd like to be remembered. The Presidency Reverend Hybels. One of the last times we were together, we were just taking a little stroll around the White House grounds, and you said, "Man, I'm going to miss this job." What are you going to miss about it? The President. People ask me all the time, what are you going to miss the most? Will it be living in the White House, which is the best public housing in America laughter or going to Camp David, which is a pretty good vacation home, or getting on Air Force One, which relieves me of all the kind of screaming tedium that tests your faith every time you walk in an airport? Laughter But the truth is or having the Marine Band play "Hail To The Chief" every time you walk in a room? Laughter I've had a couple of my predecessors tell me you feel lost when you walk in a room the first 4 or 5 months, and nobody plays the song anymore. Laughter But what I will miss more than anything else is the job. I loved the job. I love it every day. My biggest problem now is I hate to go to sleep at night. I go to bed, and I sit there, and I read for hours. I just keep working. I'm trying to get everything done I can do before I leave. I have loved the work. I wanted to be President at a time when I was very happy being the Governor of my State, very happy with the life that Hillary and Chelsea and I had in Arkansas, because I wanted to make some specific changes in the direction of the country. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. And it is the most rewarding work you could ever imagine. And believe it or not, it's a job like other jobs. I mean, it really matters how hard you work at it. It matters how smart you work at it. It matters whether you've got a good team helping you. I mean, it's not sort of like sometimes I think it assumes proportions, the Presidency does, that are both too mythical and too trivial, as if it's all just positioning and politics. Not true. It's a job, like other jobs. It matters what you think you're supposed to do. It matters whether you've got a strategy to get there. It matters whether you've got a good team. And it matters how hard you work. And problems yield to effort, just like other jobs. And the work I will miss the work. And the other thing I'll really miss is the opportunity on a regular and consistent basis to come in contact with every conceivable kind of human being. I hope that I can find something to do when I leave office which will at least keep me in contact with different kinds of people who have different interests and know different things, from whom I can continue to learn and for whom I can continue to contribute. But it was the job that I loved. Every day. Even the terrible days, I loved the work. People ask me all the time, "How did you survive all that?" I said, "I remembered who hired me." I got up in the morning and said, "At some level, Presidents aren't supposed to have feelings. They're supposed to be servants. They're supposed to remember who hired them. And you get 24 hours in a day, and you have to sleep a little, and you need to take time for your family and renewal, but otherwise, you need to be there for the American people." And it's just been a joy. I can't even I don't even have the words to describe how much I love the work. Mission of Church Leaders Reverend Hybels. I just have a couple minutes left. There's many, many thousands of pastors here and at the satellite sites. And if I said, what challenge, what words of inspiration would you have for pastors? Is what they're doing important? How do you see it in the overall scheme of things? The President. Well, first of all, I would say that I believe in what it is you're doing here, because every one of us who has a job that anybody ever held before we did is normally reluctant to admit we don't know everything we should know about how to do it. I mean, we think, well, everybody knows what the President does. Pick up a textbook. Everybody knows what a pastor does. I mean, you've got to pass the plate on Sunday you've got to get enough money in to keep the church open you've got to inaudible . It's not true. There are ways to imagine what you do that will dramatically increase your effectiveness in doing what God put you on Earth to do. And what I would say is I think that I wish I'd actually spent more time even than I have thinking about that in my work. And so I think I'll go back to what I said I think basically America works best when it's really strong at the grassroots. And that means that the role of community churches is pivotal. The second thing I would say is, to everybody listening to me, we may have very different political views about certain issues, or maybe a lot of different political parties, but I think every church needs a mission that goes beyond its members. And I think that this church does, and I respect it very much. I think that the words of Christ in St. Matthews about how we're all going to be judged in part by how we dealt toward the least of these is very important, especially in a time of extraordinary prosperity like this one. And the final thing I would say is you asked me today about whether these pastors should minister to other politicians, and I said some things about politicians and their spiritual needs and me in mind. But that's really true of everyone. One of the things I think that must be hardest one of the most rewarding things I think about being a pastor, and yet one of the hardest things to remember, especially as you have some success, is that whether you have 20,000 members in your church or 200, they've all got a story, and they all have their needs, and they're all they have a claim as a child of God to have a certain level of connection. And as you get bigger and more successful, you've got to figure out how to keep giving it to them, because nobody goes through this whole life without a slip or a turn or a scar or a challenge or something that seems just beyond their ability to cope with. And so I think learning these leadership skills and thinking about what your job is all I can tell you is that's what's kept me going for 8 years. I just kept thinking about the personal stories of all the people who touched me and reminded me of why I was supposed to show up every day. I think if you can do that and have a mission that deals with your members as individuals and that goes beyond your members, I think America will be better. And I know that all of us who are involved in these endeavors will be better. The last thing I want to say is I used to say this about Al Gore all the time I used to say, when I was being criticized, he doesn't get enough credit for what we did together that is good, and surely no fairminded person would blame him for any mistake that I made. I hope you'll feel that way about Hybels. I've got to make up for these two cuts I took him. Laughter He didn't fail in his ministry because I did. And what he did was good for America, because I needed somebody to talk to, to brace me up, and make me think about things in another way. It was a gift. It's something I'll treasure all my life. And for those of you who have whatever political or personal differences you have, I hope you will still believe that he did the right thing, because he did. Thank you. July 30, 2000 Well, thank you all for being here today. I'm delighted to be in this beautiful new restaurant. One of the owners of this restaurant, Phil Stefani, is a good friend of mine, and in honor of my coming, he went to Rome. Laughter I don't know what it means, but it's probably a pretty good choice. Laughter I want to thank Senator Dick Durbin, one of the finest human beings and one of the bravest people and one of the most eloquent people who has served in the United States Congress in my adult lifetime, since I've been covering. He is an extraordinary human being, and I'm grateful that he is my friend, and I thank him. Thank you, Mr. President Middleton, and thank you, Fred Baron, Leo Boyle, Anthony Tarricone, all the other members of the ATLA, for being here today. I want to thank all the candidates who have come here today. And I know Fred told me he'd already introduced them, but this is a very interesting group of candidates. We have Ron Klink and Debbie Stabenow running from the House of Representatives for the United States Senate. And they can both win, and they should win if you help them. I saw earlier Deborah Senn and Ed Bernstein. I think Brian Schweitzer is here. We have a whole slew of House candidates. One of them, John Kelly from New Mexico, went to college with me, so I have a particular interest in seeing him make good. Laughter But he was also a distinguished U.S. attorney. But we have this incredible group of people running for the House. They can win the majority. And now we have an extraordinary new Senator from the State of Georgia, Zell Miller, who will be running for election in November. And believe me, we can win not only the House but the Senate, as well, if you give them enough help. And a number of you have helped the Senate candidate that I care the most about, in New York laughter and I want to thank you for that. And if you haven't, I hope you will, because it's a big old tough State. And they're trying to take us out, and I think she's going in, with your help. So I hope you will, and I thank you very much for that. Let me say, normally I don't speak from any notes at these events, but I want to do it today for a particular reason. You make a living making arguments, persuading people, knowing what's on people's minds, understanding the predispositions that they bring to any given circumstance. And this is a highly unusual circumstance, so I want to talk to you about it today, because with the conventions of the Republicans in Philadelphia, the Democrats in Los Angeles, we're beginning to have this election in earnest. The first thing I want to do is to say a simple thank you. You've been thanking me I want to thank you. I want to thank you for being so good to me and Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore for these 8 years. I want to thank you for supporting the civil justice system and, when it was threatened, the Constitution of the United States. I want to thank you for supporting ordinary citizens, the people who can't afford to come to fundraisers like this but work in places like this, people who can't afford to hire lobbyists in Washington to plead their case. And I want to thank you again for supporting the candidates here and those who are not here who can help to give us a new majority in the Congress. The second thing I'd like to say, with some humility, I guess, is that your support has been validated by the record of the last 8 years. This country is in better shape than it was 8 years ago. It's stronger than it was 8 years ago, and people are better off than they were 8 years ago. And as Senator Durbin said, yes, part of it is economics. We have the longest economic expansion in history and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the strongest growth in 40 years, the highest homeownership in history, all of those statistics. But it's more than that as well. This is a more just society. We have the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rates in 40 years, the lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years. We have rising scores among our students in schools, the first time in history the African American high school graduation rate is equal to that of the white majority, the highest percentage of people going on to college in our history. We have cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food. We set aside more land in the lower 48 States than any administration in history except those of the two Roosevelts. And we proved that you could improve the environment and the economy at the same time. The welfare rolls have been cut in half. The crime rate is at a 30year low. Gun crime has dropped 35 percent in the last 7 years. So it's about more than money. It's about who we are as a people and how we live together. Many of you whom I met earlier mentioned my work in the last couple of weeks on the Middle East peace process. I've been very honored to be part of making a more peaceful world, from the Balkans to the Middle East to Northern Ireland, trying to reduce the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and trying to build a positive set of relationships with countries throughout the world. And America is better positioned than it was 8 years ago. Now, here's the most important thing Now what? What are we doing with this prosperity? That's my answer and your answer, but how do we get it to be America's answer? What are we going to do with this remarkable moment of prosperity? Will we use it as a precious, oncein a lifetime gift to meet the big challenges and seize the big opportunities of this new century? Or will we do what often happens in democracies, when things are going well, and break our concentration and sort of wander through this election? The outcome of the election, who wins, depends on what people think the election is really about. Now, on our side, we've got people led by Vice President Gore who have brought America back and who have great ideas for keeping this positive change going. On their side, they have people led by their Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees who are speaking in very soothing, reassuring ways about compassion and harmony and inclusion. Gone are these harsh personal attacks that dominated their politics from '92 to '98. You watch their convention. I bet butter wouldn't melt in their mouth for the next few days. Laughter It is appealing as a package and a terrific marketing strategy. But that obscures the differences between the candidates for President, the candidates for Senate and Congress, and, fundamentally, the different approaches between the two parties. And it is just what they mean to do, because on issue after issue, this ticket is to the right of the one that Al Gore and I opposed in 1996. So this election you just need to know three things about it. It is a big election there are big differences and only the Democrats want you to know what the differences are. What does that tell you about who you ought to vote for? Laughter It is a big election, but a lot of people don't think so. Story after story after story that our friends in the press write indicate that people aren't sure what the differences are between the candidates for President. "Do they have different approaches to crime and gun safety? Do they have different approaches to the economy? Do they really have different approaches to health care? They both seem like compassionate people. Who could mess this economy up, anyway? I mean, it's so strong. And maybe there aren't any real consequences, and so maybe we should give the other side a chance. We had it for 8 years." Now, how many times in your own life if you're over 30 years old, every person in this room over 30 at some point in your life has made a mistake, not because your life was so full of difficulty but because things were going along so well you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate. A lot of you are nodding your head. That's true. You know that's true. If you live long enough, you'll make one of those mistakes. And countries are no different than people. Things are going along well they kind of relax, feeling good. I'm glad everybody is feeling good. But wouldn't it be ironic if, as a consequence of the good feeling of America now and our yearning to sort of have everything come out all right, that the people that made the decisions and paid the price were punished for the error they helped to bring about? Now, that's basically the issue in this election. And so I say to you, I don't blame our friends in the Republican Party. If I were them, I would be trying to obscure the differences between us, too, because it's the only way they can win. Laughter I mean, it's a good strategy, and they're doing it very well. And they've got a great package, and they just hope nobody ever unwraps the package to look and see what's inside. Now, this is America, and people should do whatever they think they can do to get elected. But if that happens and if the electorate goes into the polling place in November without knowing what the real differences are, that's our fault, not theirs. You can't blame them for trying to get elected. They want back in in the world's worst way. And all those interest groups that are behind them want back in in the world's worst way. And you know some of the things they want to do if they could get the White House and the Congress, don't you? And you can't blame them. They're just doing what they're supposed to do they're trying to win. And the American people almost always get it right, almost always for over 220 years now, if they have enough time and enough information to make a good choice. That's our job. And that's your job, because you make arguments for a living, so you are uniquely positioned to influence the outcome of this election, not so much by your money as by your insight and your persuasiveness and understanding. And you have to take it on. Let me just give you an example. What you've got to convince people of is, "Look, an election is a decision. It's a choice, and choices have consequences. If you like the consequences of your choice, you should vote for that person. But let's just look at some of them. Number one, on economic policy, the goal ought to be to keep this recovery going and spread its benefits to more people, right? Okay. What's our policy? Our policy is Stay with what works keep investing in America's future, in education, in science and technology and health care keep paying down the debt get us out of debt, so the interest rates will stay low save Social Security and Medicare for the baby boom generation and add a drug benefit to Medicare, and give the people a tax cut we can afford and still do that stuff for college education, for longterm care, for child care, for people with a lot of kids to save for retirement have a tax cut but don't let it interfere with our obligation to invest in our children's education, to save Medicare and Social Security and get us out of debt." What's their side? They can say it better. Their side is, "Hey, it's your money. We've got it. It's a surplus. We want to give it back to you. That's the problem with the Democrats. They never saw a program they didn't like. It's your money. We're going to give it back to you." And they propose to spend, at least from the taxes they passed in the last 12 months to the one that their candidate for President is advocating and is in the Republican platform, over 2 trillion in tax cuts over the next 10 years. And they say, "Well, so what? We're supposed to have a surplus of 2 trillion." Now, never mind the fact that that, number one, gives them no money for their own spending promises. Did you ever get one of those letters in the mail from Publishers Clearing House, Ed McMahon? "You may have won 10 million." Did you go out and spend the 10 million the next day? If you did, you should support the Republicans this year. Laughter If not, you'd better stick with us. You better stick with us. Folks, that money is not there yet. That money is not there yet. If we invest this year in education and we say we want to spend this much next year and the money doesn't come in, we don't have to spend it. But once you cut taxes, it's gone, and it's pretty hard to get a bunch of politicians to come back in and raise them again because the money didn't materialize. So you've got to tell people that. Look at your friends and say, "Listen, if I ask you to sign a contract right now, committing to spend every penny of your projected income over the next 10 years, would you do it? If you would, you should support them. If not, you'd better stick with us. Keep this economy going." I got an economic analysis last week from a professional economist that said that Vice President Gore's economic plan would keep interest rates at least one percent lower at least one percent lower than his opponent's plan over the next decade. Do you know what that's worth? 250 billion in home mortgage savings, 30 billion in car payment savings, 15 billion in student loan payments. That's a pretty good size tax cut, and besides, you get a healthy economy, and you get America out of debt. It's a huge difference. People don't know it. It's up to you to make sure they do. Let me just take one or two others. In health care, we want to lengthen the life of Medicare and Social Security. We want to add a Medicare drug benefit that all of our seniors can afford, We want a Patients' Bill of Rights. On those three issues they say, "No, no, no. No lengthening the life of Medicare and Social Security." Indeed, one of the tax cuts they passed this week would take 5 years off the life of Medicare. "No Patients' Bill of Rights with the right to be vindicated if you get hurt. No Medicare drug benefit that all of our seniors can afford who need it." On crime, we say, "Put more police out there, and do more to take guns out of the hands of criminals and kids. Specifically, close the gun show loophole mandate child trigger locks don't import large capacity ammunition clips to get around the assault weapons ban." And the Vice President says and I agree with him "Make people who buy handguns get a photo ID license like people who buy cars, showing that they passed a background check and they know how to use the gun safely." They say "No, no, no, no. Instead, have more people carrying concealed weapons in church, if necessary." Laughter That's their record and their position. Now, that's a clear choice. People don't know that. Did you see that survey last week of suburban women voters who care a lot about this issue? And they had no idea what the differences were. Now, the chief political argument is that the head of the NRA said they'd have an office in the White House if the Republicans win. But what I want to tell you is something more profound. They won't need an office in the White House, because they'll do what they want to anyway, because that's what they believe. Look, I think we have got a chance here to get away from this politics of personal destruction. We should say that our opponents are honorable, good, decent, patriotic people, and we have honest disagreements with them. The only thing we disagree with is, they're trying to hide the disagreements. So let's tell the American people what the differences are and let them decide. And whatever they decide, we can all go on about our business and be happy with our lives because democracy is working. But we can't if they don't know. Let's look at the environment. We say we should have higher standards for the environment and deal with the problems of climate change, and we can improve the environment and the economy at the same time. And they don't believe that, basically. And one of the specific commitments made by their candidate in the primary something they hope all you forget they hope you have selective amnesia about the Republican primary but one of the specific commitments made was to reverse my order establishing 43 million acres that are roadless in our national forests, something the Audobon Society said was the most significant conservation move in the last 40 years. Now, they're on record committing to repeal that. So there's a difference there. People need to know what the differences are, and if they agree with them, they should vote for them. If they agree with us, they can vote for us. But they ought to know. I'll give you a couple other examples. Hate crimes legislation We're for it their leadership is opposed to it because it also protects gays. Employment nondiscrimination legislation We're for it they're against it. Raising the minimum wage We're for it they're against it. More vigorous civil rights enforcement and involvement We're for it they're against it. Now, all the big publicity is about, in the last few days, an amazing vote cast by their nominee for Vice President when he was in Congress against letting Nelson Mandela out of jail. And that takes your breath away. But Mr. Mandela got out of jail in spite of that congressional vote. Most of the Congressmen voted to let him out. He became President of South Africa, and the rest is history. I'm worried about the people now whom I've tried to put on the Court of Appeals who are African American and Hispanic, who are being held in political jail because they can't get a hearing from this Republican Senate, and their nominee won't say a word about it never. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the southeastern part of the United States has never had an African American, but it has more African American citizens than any other one. I've been trying for 7 long years to fix it, and they've blocked every one. They are so determined to keep an African American off the court that they have allowed a 25 percent vacancy rate on the fourth circuit just to keep an African American off the court. There are two now I've got up there. They could prove me wrong. Give them a hearing, and confirm them. In Texas, I nominated a man named Enrique Moreno from El Paso that the Texas State trial judges said was one of the best lawyers in west Texas, a guy that graduated at the top of his class at Harvard, came out of El Paso and did that. He got the highest rating from the ABA. And the Texas Republican Senators said he wasn't qualified. And by their likes, he's not qualified because he's not a guaranteed ideological purist vote. And the leader of the Republican Party in Texas, now the leader of the American Republican Party, all he had to do was say, "Give this man a hearing. This is wrong." But not a peep. So let's worry more about Moreno Mandela took care of himself just fine and the people in the fourth circuit and the other people. This is a big issue. Now, I'm sure they have principled reasons. They really want somebody on the Court of Appeals. They think it would be a better country if people toed the ideological line. I have appointed the most diverse and the highest rated group of judges in the last 40 years, and I didn't ask them what their party lines were. Now, that leads me to the last point. I think the last place where there is a clear choice is, choice and civil rights enforcement and the civil justice system. The next President will make two to four appointments to the Supreme Court, almost certainly. The Vice President has said where he stands on this. Their nominees are both avowed opponents of Roe v. Wade, and their nominee for President said the people he admired most in the Supreme Court were Justices Thomas and Scalia, those that are the most conservative. Now, I'll bet you anything nobody gets up and gives a speech about this in Philadelphia. But it's a relevant thing. It will change the shape of America far beyond the lifetime of the next Presidency. So I say to you and I'm not attacking them personally. These are differences. And I don't even blame them for trying to hide the differences because they know if the folks find out, they're toast. Laughter I don't blame them. But I have worked so hard to turn this country around. I have done all I could do. And I don't want my country to squander the opportunity of a lifetime, the opportunity of a generation to build the future of our dreams for our children. That's what I want. And I think what's best for America is Al Gore. That's what I really believe. That's what I believe. He's done more good in the office of Vice President than anybody who ever held it. We've had some great Presidents who were Vice President. None of them did remotely as much for America as Vice President as he has, from casting the tie breaking vote on the budget to casting the tie breaking vote for gun safety in this year from managing our downsizing of the Government to the smallest size in 40 years to making sure that we pass an E rate in the Telecommunications Act that can make sure all the poor schools in this country could hook up to the Internet from managing a lot of our environmental programs to managing a lot of our foreign policy with Russia, Egypt, and other countries. There has never been anybody who has had remotely as much influence as Vice President as he has. And therefore, he is, by definition then, the best qualified person in our lifetime to be President. The second thing you need to know is, there is a big difference in economic policy. I've already said that, but if you want this thing to go on everybody who wants to live like a Republican needs to vote Democrat this year. Laughter Now, if you want it to go on, you've got to do it. And the third thing that you need to know about him is he understands the future. He understood the potential of the Internet to carry the Library of Congress when it was the private province of Defense Department physicists. Don't you want somebody like that in the White House when we have to decide who gets a hold of your medical and financial records that are on the Internet? He understands the potential of the human genome project and this whole biomedical revolution. Don't you want someone like that in the White House when we have to decide whether someone can deny you a job or a promotion or health insurance based on your gene map? He understands climate change. People made fun of him 12 years ago. When we ran together in '92, they made fun of him. Now the oil companies acknowledge that climate change and global warming are real, and it's going to change the whole way our children live unless we deal with it. Wouldn't you like someone in the White House that really understands that? You need somebody that understands the future. It's going to be here before you know it. And the last thing I'll say it's what you already know or you wouldn't be here this is the most diverse, interesting country we've ever had. We're going out into a world that's more and more interdependent, where we have obligations to people around the world that we must fulfill if we want to do well ourselves. And I want someone in the White House that will take us all along for the ride, and he will. Thank you, and God bless you. July 13, 2000 Well, let me say it's good to see you. Thank you for making me feel so welcome. Thank you, Julian thank you, Kweisi. Thank you, Myrlie Evers Williams, Ben Hooks, Elaine Jones, the whole board. Thank you, Wendell Anthony, for letting me come to Detroit to the biggest dinner in the history of the world. I know I had dinner with Wendell in Detroit with over 10,000 people, because he told me so, but I couldn't even see the people at the other head table, it was so big. Laughter Thank you, Mayor O'Malley, for welcoming us to Baltimore and for being such a great leader. Thank you, Representative Elijah Cummings, for representing Baltimore so well. And thank you, Mayor John Street, for representing Philadelphia so well and making it true to the Founders' dreams. I have, I know, oh, a dozen or more members of the White House staff here, but I would like to mention a few Thurgood Marshall, Jr., whose father was a native of Baltimore my chief speechwriter, Terry Edmonds, a Baltimore native. I thank Mark Lindsay Mary Beth Cahill Ben Johnson, who runs our One America office my political director, Minyon Moore Janis Kearney Broderick Johnson, a Baltimore native Orson Porter and we have at least another half a dozen folks who are here because they wanted to be here with you today. This has been a remarkable week for African Americans. Venus Williams became the first African American woman since Althea Gibson to win the Wimbledon. Perhaps even more remarkable for those who know the mysteries of the church, Baltimore's own Dr. Vashti McKenzie became the first woman bishop in the history of the A.M.E. church. And you have had an amazing conference. I'm really glad Governor Bush came. Laughter I am. But I thought the other fellow gave a better speech. Laughter And I liked especially the speech that that Senate candidate from New York gave. I caught that one on Tuesday. I want to tell you, I'm very proud, as we look back on the last 7 1 2 years of all the work that my wife has done, not just for those but for 30 years for children, for families, for education, for health care. But as First Lady, she has done so much to increase adoption and improve foster care, to increase the access to children to health care and to early education. And one thing that ought to be of particular importance to the African American community for the celebration of the millennium, she started she had this theme, we were going to honor the past and imagine the future. And part of honoring the past was setting aside millennial treasures, a lot of which are important landmarks of the civil rights movement, Abraham Lincoln's summer home at the Old Soldiers' Home, Harriet Tubman's cottage up in New York, a lot of other places. And the head of the National Historic Preservation Trust came up to me the other day when we were protecting Mr. Lincoln's home, and he said, "Mr. President, I want you to know that your wife came up with this idea of the millennial treasures. It has now raised 100 million in public private money. It's the biggest historic preservation movement in the history of the United States of America." So I'm very proud of her for that. Now, as all of you know, I came here from Camp David this morning, where we are meeting with the Israelis and the Palestinians in an effort to resolve the profound differences that have kept the people of the Middle East apart for a very long time. I know that in our quest for a full, fair, and final peace which Dr. King reminded us is more than the absence of war, but the presence of justice and brotherhood and genuine reconciliation I know we will have your prayers and your best wishes. But I had to come to Baltimore today, because you embody the spirit of freedom and reconciliation we're trying to capture there, that we need so badly in our talks a spirit that is woven into the fabric of American life because of the contributions of African Americans from W.E.B. Du Bois to Rosa to Thurgood to Martin to Daisy Bates, Coretta, Medgar, Malcolm, to Jesse, and John Lewis and Julian and Kweisi. One of the greatest days of my Presidency was last March, on the 35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when I was honored to walk with many people in this room across the Pettus Bridge in Selma. I said then something I'd like to repeat today, that as a son of the South, the brave souls who marched across that bridge 35 years ago set me free, too. It is important to know that every movement for human rights in this country is about even more than gaining equal opportunity and equal rights and decent justice for the oppressed. It is also about forgiveness and healing, about letting go and moving on, about giving our children a better tomorrow. So I wanted to be here especially during these peace talks to draw strength from you and take the spirit of the NAACP back to Camp David. And I wanted to come here one last time to say thank you, a simple but deep thank you for your support, your prayers, your friendship over all these years, for all that we have done to turn America around and bring America closer together. Eight years ago this week I can't believe it 8 years ago this week, at your national conference in Nashville, I was the Governor of Arkansas, the apparent nominee of the Democratic Party. And I brought my choice for Vice President, Senator Al Gore, to the NAACP convention. Rather, I accepted Ben Hooks' mandatory invitation to appear. Laughter And I pledged then and I want to quote it exactly I don't want to miss a word I pledged you, "an administration that looks like America, one that knows the promise and the pain of this country, one that will rebuild, reunite, and renew the American spirit." I think together we have honored that pledge. The American dream is real to more Americans than it was 7 1 2 years ago. And we are more nearly one America than we were 7 1 2 years ago with 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment and welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in 25 years, the lowest child poverty in 20 years, the lowest minority unemployment rates ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rates in 40 years, the highest homeownership in history, the longest economic expansion in history. We have more opportunity than we did 7 1 2 years ago. And perhaps equally important, our social fabric is on the mend. The family and medical leave law, the first bill I signed, vetoed in the previous administration, has allowed over 20 million Americans to take a little time off when a baby was born or a parent was sick, without losing their jobs, and it's been good for the economy, not bad for the economy. For the first time ever, 90 percent of our children are immunized against serious childhood diseases. Our food is safer. Our air is cleaner. Our water is purer. More land has been protected for all time to come for Americans to enjoy 150,000 young Americans have served in communities in every State in this country in AmeriCorps. The high school graduation rate of African Americans is virtually equal with that of the white majority for the first time in the history of the United States of America. And all over the country I have seen schools, that once were failing, turning around. In Harlem, I was in a school the other day where 2 years ago 80 percent of the children were reading and doing mathematics below grade level 2 years later 74 percent of the children reading and doing mathematics at or above grade level in just 2 years. This is happening all over America. Today we're releasing an annual report on the status of our children. According to the study, the teen birth rate for 15 to 17 yearolds has dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. The birth rate for African American adolescents has dropped by nearly one third since 1991. The report also found that child poverty continues its decline. And the rate of serious violent crime committed by young people has dropped by more than half since 1993 to the lowest level recorded since statistics has been kept on this subject. This is very good news. And I hope you will trumpet it, not because we're as safe as we need to be but because we need to destroy stereotypes so we can start making real progress on the issues still remaining. Now so that's my report. Thank you for giving me a chance to serve. That's my report. Now, here's my question What do you intend to do with all this? You know, I'm going to treasure this award for the rest of my life. But what really matters is what all of us do tomorrow with what our yesterdays have piled up. So before you leave here, when you go home and people say, "What did you do in Baltimore?" if you don't answer any other thing, you ought to be able to say, "Well, I figured out what I was going to do with all the prosperity and progress my country has made in the last 8 years." That is the issue. And I guess I can say this now because my hair is a lot grayer, and I've got a few more wrinkles than I had 8 years ago. But one thing I know how a nation deals with its prosperity is just as stern a test of its judgment, its vision, and its values as how a nation deals with adversity. After all, when you elected me 8 years ago and the other side kind of referred to me as a Governor of a small southern State, and I was so naive, I thought it was a compliment. Laughter And you know what? I still do. But when you elected me, it didn't require rocket science to know that if we had quadrupled the debt in 12 years and all the social indicators were going in the wrong direction and the country was coming apart at the seams and unemployment was going up and crime was going up and opportunity for our children was going down, that we had to change. I mean, this was not I don't want to deprive myself of any credit, but it wasn't rocket science. We had to do something. So you said, "Well, I'll take a chance on that fellow." Now, every person in this room we've got a lot of young people here, and I'm grateful for that, and I'm grateful for the role that you've done to bring all the young people back into the NAACP. But listen, everybody over 30 in this room listen to me if you're over 30, you can remember at least one time in your life when you have made a mistake, not because times were so bad but because times were good, so good you thought there was no penalty to the failure to concentrate. Am I right about that? Laughter Listen to this. In the Scripture, Ecclesiastes 11 25 says, "In the day of prosperity there is forgetfulness of affliction." Everybody over 30 has had that kind of forgetfulness at one time or another. Am I right about that? So here is my point to you. You look at these kids before you leave here. We cannot do that now. I have done everything I knew to do to turn this country around, to move this country forward, to lift people up, to lift people together. But man, the best stuff is still out there. And the big challenges are still on the horizon. And we will never forgive ourselves if we don't say we are going to use this moment of prosperity to build the future of our dreams for all God's children. That's what this is for. That's what this millennial election is all about. I want to commend the NAACP for your campaign to register new voters. I want to join you in mourning the passing of the chairman of your voter empowerment campaign, Earl Shinhoster. But you need to finish his job. And then, you have to get people to actually go to the polls, to choose and choose wisely. We must make it clear again that every election is a choice. This is a big election. There are big differences, honest differences, between the parties, the candidates for President, the candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives big and honest differences. I'm determined to make as much bipartisan progress with the Congress as I can in the last 6 months. I think we'll get a lot done, but no matter how much we do, there will still be a lot that remains on America's future agenda. And there will be differences. And the thing I like about this election is, if we've got the right attitude about it, it can be an old fashioned election, the kind the civics books say you ought to have, where we don't have people swinging mud at each other and repeating what we've seen in too many elections in the past where people basically say, "You ought to vote for me, not because I'm so great, because my opponent is just one step above a car thief." Laughter I mean, how many elections have you seen run like that? Well, we don't have to do that. We can assume everybody is honorable and good, got their merit badges in the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but they're different. There's a choice to be made, and there are consequences. So when you leave, you say, "What I learned was, we've got to use this year to decide what to do with this moment of prosperity. It may never come around again in our lifetime. I want to build the future of my dreams for my children. This is a big election. That's the main arena right now, and there are big differences." Now, let me just mention a few of them. On economic policy, the Vice President and most people on our side of the political aisle, we believe that we ought to keep the prosperity going and do our dead level best to extend it to people and to places that have been left behind so far. But we think to keep the prosperity going, the right thing to do is to take the taxes you pay for Medicare and take them off the books, like we do with Social Security keep paying the debt down use the interest savings to put into Medicare and Social Security to lengthen our life so us baby boomers don't bankrupt the rest of you when we retire invest in education and science and technology, the health care, and the environment and then have a tax cut we can afford that helps families with the basic things they're dealing with and still leaves us the money to meet our responsibilities around the world to help fight AIDS in Africa and Asia, to help relieve the debt of the poorest countries of the world, to help promote freedom and stand against ethnic cleansing, fight against terrorism that allows us to do these basic things and still get this country out of debt over the next 12 years. Why? Because that will keep interest rates lower. And if interest rates stay a percent lower over the next 10 years than they otherwise would be, that saves families listen to this African American homeownership at an all time high that will save families 250 billion in home mortgage rates in a decade. Now, they say something different, and it's easier for me to give you their pitch, and it sounds better the first time you hear it. They say, "We have a projected surplus of 1.9 trillion, and it's your money. So we're going to give more than half of it back to you in a tax cut. And then we're going to spend the rest of it to partially privatize Social Security. And when we take money out of the Social Security Trust Fund, we'll put money in it from this surplus." And by the time you do that, they've spent the whole projected surplus and then some. Now, here's the problem with that. If I ask you I want to ask all of you right now you just think about this real quiet, now you don't have to say anything out loud, but everybody think about this what is your projected income over the next 10 years? Now, think. How much money do you think you're going to make over the next 10 years? How confident are you that you're right about your projected income? Laughter Now, get it on up there to where you're about 80 percent confident. Now, if I sat here at a desk with a pen and a notary public, and I said, "I want every one of you to come up here right now and sign a contract that commits you to spend every penny of your projected income," would you do it? Well, if you would, you should support them. If not, you should support us and keep this economy going. That's what this is about. Then there are the issues of economic justice. How can we assure a fair share? We believe that we should strengthen efforts to require equal pay for equal work for women, and they don't agree with us. We think we should raise the minimum wage a dollar over 2 years, because we think the people that serve our food at restaurants and help us do things, we think they ought to be able to raise their kids, too, and send their kids to college and make a decent living. And they're not. Our top tax cut priorities are for working families with low incomes and a lot of kids, for increasing child care assistance, for a long term care tax credit, when you've got an elderly or disabled loved one, for retirement savings, and to allow you to deduct college tuition for up to 10,000 a year. That's our top inaudible . We can do all that and still pay the country out of debt over the next 12 years and have money to invest. Their top tax cut priority rolling through Congress like a hot knife through butter is a complete repeal of the estate tax, which costs 100 billion over 10 years, and half of the benefits half the benefits go to onetenth of one percent of the population. There's a difference here. In education, we know that every child can learn. I just told you about the school I visited in Harlem. I was in rural western Kentucky the other day in this little old school that, 4 years ago, 12 percent of the kids over half the kids on school lunches 4 years ago 12 percent of the kids could read at or above grade level today, 57 percent 5 percent of the kids could do math at or above grade level today, 70 percent zero percent of the kids could do science at or above grade level today, 63 percent in 4 years. It's amazing. It's happening everywhere. Now, intelligence is equally distributed. It's opportunity that's not equally distributed. So our education policy is to invest more and demand more higher standards, greater accountability, but empower people to develop the capacities of all of our children. And it's working. But we have a very definite set of ideas about that, based on what we have seen and what educators have told us. We want to modernize or build 6,000 schools and repair another 25,000 over the next 5 years. And the other side doesn't agree with us. They think that's wrong. We want to keep our commitment to hire 100,000 teachers for smaller classes in the early grades, because we know that's important to long time learning capacity, and the other side doesn't agree with us. They don't think we should require that, somehow, of the States. We want universal access to preschool, summer school, after school for all kids who need it. You can't say, end social promotion and then blame the kids for the failure system you have to have a system that says, okay, no social promotion, but here is how the children are going to meet the standards and go on and learn and do what they're supposed to do. So there are differences here in the economy, in economic justice, in education, and there are differences in health care. And the Vice President talked a lot about this yesterday, so I won't beat it to death. But this is very important. We believe that because we have the money to do it, we should have a true Medicare prescription drug benefit that's available and affordable to all seniors and disabled people who need it. We think we should do this. They say it might be too costly. I'll give you their honest and I think they really believe this. Laughter No, I do. I think they really do believe this. They say it could cost more money than we think it would, and so we ought to have this more limited, private benefit, funded through insurance companies. The problem is let me say just this the problem is I fought with the health insurance companies quite a bit, you may have noticed that. But I've got to give it to them, they've been real upfront about this. The health insurance companies have said, "No, this won't work. We cannot offer these poor people an insurance policy to buy drugs that they can afford to buy that will be worth having." The insurance companies have been really honest about it. And you know what? Nevada adopted a plan just like the Republican plan, and you know how many insurance companies have offered coverage under it? Zero. Not one. So we've got this interesting debate going on now in Washington. We said "We're for Medicare prescription drug coverage," and they say, "So are we." So the "so are we" is designed I learned from reading the newspaper that they hired a political consultant to tell them what language to use so you would think they were for something they were not. Laughter And I'd rather them say, "Look, we're not for this, because we think it will cost too much money." But if they took that position, then they would have to explain how come they want to spend 100 billion on repealing the estate tax and give 50 percent of it to the top onetenth of one percent of the population and not spend money on drugs for our seniors. There are choices to be made here. We don't have to be hateful. They really believe this. They don't think it's a good idea. But instead of trying to convince us that they are really for our plan, they should fess up that they're not and explain why they're against it. And then you decide whether we are right or they are. And the same thing on the Patients' Bill of Rights. The Patients' Bill of Rights we're for covers all Americans and all health care plans and gives you a right to see a specialist, a right not to be bumped from your doctor if you change employment and you're in the middle of having a baby or a chemotherapy treatment or any other kind of treatment. It gives you a right to go to the nearest emergency room if you get hit God forbid when you walk out of the convention center here today. And if you get hurt and you're wrongly treated, it gives you the right to sue. Their plan doesn't cover 100 million people, and it doesn't give you a right to sue. Now, we say we're for the Patients' Bill of Rights. They say what they should say is, "We don't agree with this. We think it will cost too much." But that's not what they say. What they say they try to figure out how to convince you they're for what we're for. So they say, "We're for a Patients' Bill of Rights" if you ever hear that, if you hear "a" instead of "the," big alarm bells ought to go off in your head. You ought to say, ding dong, hello, what is going on here? But this is a huge deal. You heard the Vice President talking about this yesterday. I was down the other day in Missouri with the Governor, and we were with an emergency room nurse, a male, who was 6 1 , weighed 230, looked like he could bench press me on a cold day. Laughter And this big old husky guy spends his life trying to save people's lives. And he almost couldn't get through his talk, talking about somebody who died because they couldn't take him to the nearest emergency room. This happens every single day. We're one vote away from passing it. I want to compliment the Republicans in the House who voted for the Patients' Bill of Rights, and the four in the Senate who did. We are one vote away. I'm telling you, there are big issues here. This affects 100 million of your fellow citizens. We're for expanding the Children's Health Insurance Program that Hillary did so much to create. We think the parents of the kids ought to be able to buy in, too. We think people who are over 55 and not old enough to be on Medicare but lost their insurance at work, ought to be able to buy into the Medicare program, and we should give them a little help of they need it. And we want to do more to close the gaps and do something about the fact that people of color suffer far higher rates of heart disease, cancer, AIDS, and diabetes. Let me just give you one example. Diabetes is 70 percent higher among African Americans than white Americans. Hispanics are twice as likely to suffer from it. Type I diabetes, commonly known as juvenile diabetes, affects a million Americans alone, half of them children, but research has taken us to the threshold of a potential new breakthrough. Recently, researchers successfully transplanted insulin producing cells into seven individuals with juvenile diabetes, and apparently, every single one of them was cured. Now, if we can repeat these preliminary findings, it could put a cure for juvenile diabetes within our reach, a true miracle for anyone who has ever had this in your family, you know this. But we have to do more to get there. That's why today I want to tell you a couple of things we're doing. First of all, the National Institutes of Health is investing in 10 research centers immediately to try to replicate the results of the first study so we can prove it wasn't an accident. This is part of a larger partnership between the NIH and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation we have some of their leaders here with us today with a commitment of 300 million over 5 years for research and the prevention of diabetes. Now, I've been pretty tough on my friends on the Republican side today, so I want to say something nice about them. This is one we all agree on that there is no partisan position on whether we would like to see our children lifted from the burden and the fear and the terrors and the agony that can come with juvenile diabetes. But we actually have some research here that may allow us to close one of the big racial gaps and help disparities in our country. And I just want you to know we're going to do everything we can about it, and I hope we'll have your prayers and your support. It's worth some of your money to spend on that. The last thing I want to talk about in terms of your decision this year is civil rights and equal justice. I don't have to come here and say nobody should be denied a job, a home, access to school or a loan because of their race or any other condition that no one should have to fear being a target of violence because of the way they worship God or their sexual orientation. And I don't have to come here for you to know that those indignities are still all to real to too many Americans. I have proposed the largest investment in civil rights enforcement ever, so that the EEOC, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and others can enforce our civil rights law. And we're fighting for passage of a strong hate crimes bill. And I am so grateful I'm so grateful that our unanimous caucus was joined the other day by enough Republicans who are willing to break from the leadership to pass the hate crimes bill in the Senate. I am grateful for that, and I hope that we can pass it in the House. But the hate crimes legislation, if it does not become law, should be an issue in this election. The employment nondiscrimination legislation, if it doesn't become law, should be an issue in this election. This is not negative politics. We should talk about what side we're on and why, and let people decide. It's important. You look all around the world at all these places that are bedeviled by the hatreds of the groups of people within their countries for one another, from Kosovo to Northern Ireland to the Middle East to the tribal wars in Africa to the Balkans. I mean, look at what the world has been dealing with just for the last few years. We have to keep hammering away at this. It's not over. And you look at all the hate crimes that have occurred in America in the last few years, in spite of all of our improving attitudes and greater contact across racial and religious lines. We've still got problems here. This deals with the biggest problems of the human heart. We've got to keep at it, and we ought to debate our different approaches to it in an open way. We may never have this chance again, where we are secure and confident and we know we can go forward if we make the right decisions. One other thing I want to say about this One of the most important responsibilities of the next President is appointing judges, and one of the most important duties of a Senator is deciding whether to confirm the people the President appoints. Now, I believe the next President will be called upon to appoint in the next 4 years between two and four Supreme Court judges, more than a score, much more, Court of Appeals judges and perhaps over 100 Federal district court judges. The record here is instructive. The quality of justice suffers when highly qualified women and minority candidates, fully vetted, fully supported by the American Bar Association, are denied the opportunity to serve for partisan political reasons. Now, just last year the Republican majority in the Senate, on a party line vote, defeated my nominee for the Federal court in Missouri, Ronnie White, the first African American State supreme court judge in the history of the State of Missouri, plainly well qualified, defeated on a party line political vote in an attempt to give the incumbent Senator a death penalty issue against the incumbent Governor in the race for the U.S. Senate in Missouri. Never mind that throw this guy's career away. Act like he's not qualified. Distort his position on the death penalty. Ignore what it will make the African American community in Missouri feel like. It was awful. As we speak today, there are four African American appellate court nominees poised to make history if the Senate would just stop standing in their way Judge James Wynn, Roger Gregory, Kathleen McCree Lewis, Judge Johnnie Rawlinson. That's just the ones I've got up there now. But let me to put that in perspective, in the 12 years that they served, the two previous Presidents appointed just three African Americans to the circuit courts of our country in 12 years. Of course, we all want justice to be blind, but we also know that when we have diversity in our courts, as in all aspects of society, it sharpens our vision and makes us a stronger nation. I have nominated two highly qualified candidates for the fourth circuit that includes where we are now, the State of Maryland. The fourth circuit has the largest African American population of any of our circuits, and remarkably, there has never been an African American jurist on the fourth circuit. We've got a chance to right that wrong. Two weeks ago I nominated Roger Gregory of Virginia. He is a Richmond lawyer of immense talent and experience. Almost a year ago, I nominated Judge Wynn for a North Carolina seat on the circuit, and he's not the first African American from North Carolina I nominated. Now, Senator Helms won't let these people get confirmed. He says we don't need any more judges on the fourth circuit. Maybe, that's what he thinks. But I think it's interesting that for over 7 years now, he has stopped my attempts to integrate the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Republican majority has made no move to change the tide that turned the policies. This is outrageous the circuit court with the highest percentage of African Americans in the country, not one single judge on the Court of Appeals. Now, a lot of women don't do much better. We have excellent nominees Elena Kagan Helene White Bonnie Campbell, former attorney general of Iowa, up there no movement. Another travesty of justice is taking place in Texas, and I want to talk about this. I nominated a man named Enrique Moreno to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He grew up in El Paso and graduated from Harvard Law School. The State judges in Texas said he was one of the three best trial lawyers out there in far west Texas. The ABA, the American Bar Association, unanimously gave him its top rating. But the two Republican Senators from Texas, they say he's not qualified. And the leader of the Republican Party in Texas who, I think, talked here a couple days ago laughter stone cold silence. Nobody says, "Give this guy a hearing." Why don't they want to give these people a hearing and vote? Because they don't want him on the court, but they don't want you to know they don't want him on the court. The face of injustice is not compassion it is indifference or worse. For the integrity of our courts and the strength of our Constitution, I ask the Republicans to give these people a vote. Vote them down if you don't want them on go out and tell people. At least they voted Judge White down. They're having a hard time explaining it in Missouri, but at least they did it. This is not right, folks. You know, the judges I've appointed, yes, they're the most diverse judges in history. But they also have the highest ratings from the ABA in 40 years. And no one says that they're ideological extremists. Therefore, I conclude that the people that don't want them on the court want people who are ideological purists. But you've got to have a judge needs somebody that's felt the fabric of ordinary life, that's got a good mind for stuff in the books and a lot of common sense, that can understand what happens to people, that can be fair to everybody that comes before him. I'd be ashamed if one of my judges discriminated against someone before them because they were members of the other political party or a different religion or had strong views. I would be outraged. I just want people who will be just and fair. But I don't want people denied their chance to serve because of their race or their politics. It's not right. Now, you need to think about that, because it's an important part of the next 4 years. I just want to make one last point in closing. You all heard the Vice President's speech. I thought it was brilliant and impassioned, and I can't make a better case. But I want you to remember four things about him. I don't want you to forget this "the President told me four things about Al Gore." Number one, he is by far the most influential and active Vice President in this history of the country. We've had a lot of Vice Presidents. A lot of Vice Presidents made great Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson but we've never had a Vice President that did so much good as Vice President as Al Gore never, not ever in the history of the country. Second, for the reasons I said earlier, when none of you wanted to contract away your projected income for the next 10 years, he is the most likely, by far, to keep our prosperity going and to spread it to people left behind. Thirdly, you can see from his leadership with the empowerment zones, to connect all of our schools to the Internet, to his work with the science and technology issues and the environment issues, this is a guy who understands the future. And the future is coming on us in a hurry. I'm glad we've decoded the human genome, but I don't want anybody denied a job or health insurance because of their genetic map. I love the Internet, and I think the Internet can move more people out of poverty more quickly than ever before. But I don't want anybody to be able to get your financial or health care record just because they're on somebody's computer somewhere unless you say okay. You need someone in the White House who understands the future. So, he's the most qualified person we've ever had because he's the best Vice President. He'll keep the prosperity going. He understands the future. And the fourth and most important thing for your point of view is, he really does want to take us all along for the ride, and I want a President that wants to take us all along for the ride. Thank you. Thank you. Let me just say this one last thing. After January, I won't be President, but I'll still wait a minute laughter hey, everything comes to an end. Laughter But I have loved every day of it. It has been an honor to fight, an honor to work. And for the rest of the time the good Lord gives me on this Earth, I'll be with you. I'll work with you. But you just remember this. The arena that counts today on the question of what we're going to do with our prosperity is what we do today to elect tomorrow's leaders. You've got to lead the country in this. You've got to make sure we choose and choose wisely. Believe me, in spite of all that's happened, the best is still out there. Go get it. I love you. Godspeed. Thank you. July 05, 2000 President's Historical Perspective Mr. Klein. Do you essentially agree with my sense that you had that the big issue has been moving from the industrial age to the information age, and that I mean, the toughest thing The President. Yes. The short answer to that is yes. Mr. Klein. to explain to people is, you take something like how can being in favor of affirmative action and being in favor of welfare reform be part of the same vision? How can being in favor of free trade and being in favor of universal health insurance be part of the same vision? There are people on the right or the left who would say, "You can't do that." And yet, I think that they are part of the same vision. But my first question is, how would you describe that vision? The President. I think my view I saw my Presidency as a transformational period, and basically, America has gone through two before. Maybe it could start if we did it in historical times. There were basically I look at American history in the following we had the creation how we got started and sort of filling out the elements of the National Government and defining what it meant. And that basically went from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, Washington's Presidency, and the appointment of John Marshall as Chief Justice which is a very important thing and then, ironically, through Jefferson's Presidency, with the purchase of Louisiana and the Lewis and Clark expedition, and then the next big challenge was, how would we adapt that to our growing industrialization? And how did we get rid of slavery, which was inconsistent with our principles? So obviously, that's what Lincoln and the Civil War and the constitutional amendments and everything that happened on civil rights after that was about slavery. But there was no single President that managed the process, if you will, or laid out a framework from the agricultural society to an industrial society. But that's part of what the railroads, the canals was all about, and it's part of what and Lincoln was a part of that with the Morrill Land Grant Act, with the colleges. Mr. Klein. This happened too slowly for The President. But it happened over a long period of time. Then, there was the transformation from the you know, it happened over a long period of time as we slowly became a balanced society. But then, when we burst onto the world scene as a major national industrial power, that process was basically defined by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And I sort of saw this period in parallel with that. The rest of the 20th century was mostly about dealing with the rise of first, the Great Depression then the war and the need to defeat totalitarian systems, which was part of the war and the cold war and dealing with the specific challenges at home, principally civil rights, the women's movement, and the growth of environmental movement in America. So here, we are moving into, basically, from an industrial society an industrial economy to an information economy, and at the same time moving into an ever more globalized economy, which also is more and more of a global society in that we share common challenges and common interests that go beyond economics. And the globalization of the media has accelerated that. So I saw my challenges trying to, first of all, maximize America's presence in the information economy second, to try to maximize our influence in the welfare of our country and likeminded people around the world in a globalized society. And then, the other and I'll get to your questions and then the third big thing for me was trying to make people have a broader and deeper vision of the American community and how to handle diversity and how we would finally get a chance to see, in ways we never had before, what it meant to make one out of many, what our national motto meant. And I think the and you ask me, well, how can you reconcile those things? It seems to me that the two operational strategies we had to pursue those three great goals were, one, the Third Way political and social philosophy. If you believe in opportunity and responsibility and community, then it's perfectly clear why you would be for affirmative action and a global trading system, you know, why you would be for health care for everybody and whatever else you said what was the other thing? Mr. Klein. Free trade. No, I said that. The President. Welfare reform. Mr. Klein. Welfare reform. The President. Welfare reform, because first of all, work is the best social program. Secondly, it is imperative to have a basic work ethic if you believe in individual responsibility and you believe it gives meaning and direction to life, and I do. But if you do, you also recognize that there is no society no society has succeeded in providing access to health care to everybody without some governmental action. Mr. Klein. But there have been people all along, as you know I mean, you and I had this same conversation in 1991. People all along said, "This is just an electoral strategy. It isn't a Government strategy." The President. It was never just an electoral strategy to me. Mr. Klein. Well, me, neither, as you know. And the question I guess my question is, do you feel that you were ever able to really communicate the depth and breadth of this to the public? The President. Yes, but only probably only at the State of the Union Addresses, because it's probably the only time I ever got to say it unfiltered. If I made an error in those, even though they always received very high public approval ratings, they said it always took me so much time to explain my specific ideas in education or whatever, I'm not sure I ever took full advantage of the opportunity to lay the coherent philosophy out because I do think at those points, that people got it. But what I was going to tell you, if I could go back I think we had the transformation from the industrial economy to the information economy, from the idea of a national society to an idea of a more global society in which nation states matter. I think the nation state will matter more in some ways in the 21st century. We can talk about that some. And thirdly, the whole idea of defining America where our diversity was something to be cherished and celebrated because because our common humanity and common values were more important. And then, operationally, I think, the two things I think that mattered, I made some the whole Third Way political and social philosophy, one and second is sort of a relentless focus on the future, making people always trying to force people to always think about not only what we're doing, how does it affect today, but what's it going to be like 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now? And I think that is often that hasn't often been the business of the Government. But if you go back to Roosevelt's focus on conservation or Wilson's struggle of failed attempt at the League of Nations, I think what made them both great Presidents for the transformational period America was in is that they were not only successful in the moment, by and large, but they had this focus on the future they kept trying to spark the public imagination with the future. And that's I hope very much that the announcement of this genome project, although I think it fills people with foreboding as well as hope, will tend to spark future orientation on the part of the voters, so the issues that are plainly before us, but won't be felt for a few years will have more effect on the debate and also on people's voting rights. Trade Mr. Klein. But it's a difficult thing. Charlene Barshefsky said to me that there are times that you've really been concerned, that the expression you used was that you hadn't found your voice on trade, which is the equivalent of The President. Well, one of the things she, of course, has to deal with it. But the two things in trade that have frustrated me most, although I think we've got a great record and you can go from NAFTA to the WTO, to the Africa CBI, to launching the free trade of the Americas to China. Mr. Klein. The reason I raised it was because what you just said about the genome reminded me I just read your remarks about NAFTA in October '93, and it was very similar, too. The President. Yes. And then, of course, China, and then in between we had 270 odd agreements, and we had the Mexican financial crisis and the Asian financial crisis. But the thing that bothered me about trade the two things that have bothered me about trade, I think, are One, I have so far not created a consensus within my own party, at least among the elected officials, for the view of trade which I hold. And two and I think it's genuine that is, I don't think this is just politics. I think it's how people view the world the second thing, and closely related to that, is that I went to Geneva twice, and I went to Davos once, and then I went out to Seattle to try to make the case that you can't have a global trading system apart from a global social conscience, anyway, where there is a legitimate place for the voices of those who care about the rights of workers, the condition of children in the workplace, the impact of economic development on the environment, both nationally and globally. I haven't yet, at least, been able to convince people that there is a synthesizing vision here that has to drive not only a global trading system but these other initiatives as well. And I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because it's a fairly new debate. And one of the great things that always struck me is, if you look at the people who were demonstrating in Seattle, while I think they were all sincere that is, they believed in what they were demonstrating against their sense of solidarity was truly ironic, because they had completely conflicting positions. Mr. Klein. What? The President. I mean, for example, a lot of the labor union people that demonstrated believe that even though for example, they think that even though this China deal is a shortterm benefit to American industry because China drops their barriers, that they're so big that there will be so much investment there that they will develop a great deal of industrial capacity and that wage levels will be so low that it will cost the developed world, and particularly America because our markets are more open than the Europeans, a lot of our industrial base within a fairly short term. And that's what they really believe. I don't believe that, but that's what they believe. And then you have the people that are demonstrating on behalf of the Third World, and they believe our concern for labor and the environment is a protectionist ruse to protect American high wage jobs. But they're all out there in the streets in Seattle demonstrating together, because they're genuinely frustrated about the way the world is going and they kind of don't like this whole globalization thing. They think it's going to lead to further loss of control by ordinary people over the basic circumstances of their lives, and that bothers them. Mr. Klein. I think that this is to kind of put a cap on the first question I mean, that's so much at the heart of what you've been trying to overcome. I was talked to Zoe Baird, who said that she always remembers the statistics that you used, I think in around '95, that more jobs had been created by companies owned by women than had been lost by Fortune 500 companies. You always tried to make the future less frightened for folks. And yet, I'm not sure you're convinced that you made the case. The President. Well, I think I made the case to the people that were open to it, but I believe that I think that it's hard. Everybody's for change in general, but normally against it in particular. You know, what's that Dick Riley used to say? "Let's all change. You go first." Laughter That's his sort of formulation of it. It shouldn't be surprising. But I still believe, first of all, I think that what I said to the American people is true and right. Secondly, I don't think there is any alternative to change. So I think the real question is, how do you bring your, basically, values that don't change how do you translate them into specific approaches and policies that have the greatest chance of enhancing those values in the world you're going to live in? That's the way I look at this. And I think that for the United States to have essentially turned away from this world, I think, would have been a terrible mistake. And in fact, I think the only mistake we've made in this whole thing is not accelerating the integration of the free trade area of the Americas more more rapid. Deficit Reduction Mr. Klein. Let me ask you some specific questions. Let's take a walk start in '93. The First Lady said to me the other day that she believed that deficit reduction was a predicate for doing all the rest of the stuff. The President. Absolutely. Mr. Klein. She compared it to education in Arkansas when you were reelected. The President. The '93 economic plan made all the rest of this possible. Mr. Klein. There were a fair number of people on your staff that were saying, you know, it would throw the economy into recession. And you were dealing it was a theory at that point that if you lowered the deficit, interest rates would come down, and you would achieve the kind of growth that you have achieved. I mean, what made you think that The President. First of all, let me back up a little bit. The people on the staff who favored somewhat there was nobody on my staff that was against vigorous deficit reduction. There were some who were afraid that to make the decisions we would have to make to get the 500 billion, which is what Lloyd Bentsen and Bob Rubin felt was sort of the magic psychological threshold we had to cross to get the bond markets and the stock market to respond in an appropriate way, they were afraid that if we did that, we would have to shelve too much of our progressive commitments in the campaign. Now, what finally happened was, we came up with a plan that raised income taxes only on the top 1.2 percent of the people, which I had, after all, promised to do in the '92 campaign. It wasn't like I didn't tell upper income people who supported me I wouldn't try to raise their taxes. But we had to raise them at the very end. Bentsen came in with a plan that essentially lifted the income cap off the Medicare taxes, which closed the gap. And we stuck with the gas tax, which Charlie Stenholm and some of our conservatives who were big deficit hawks were worried about, because they were afraid it would make our guys vulnerable, and I think it did. It was the only thing that average people had to pay, except that there were, I think, 13 percent of the Social Security recipients paid more because we began to tax Social Security income more like regular pension income. But it was the Republicans who believed that tax increases by definition were recessionary and that so they unanimously opposed the plan. You asked me what convinced me. What convinced me finally was that I believe fundamentally, unless we got interest rates down and investment flowing, that we would never be able to see a decline in unemployment and growth in new businesses, particularly in this high tech sector which depended on vast flows of venture capital, confidence capital, if you will, that it seemed to me was just out there bursting, waiting to happen. I think and maybe it was my experience as a Governor that informed all this but I really did believe there was this huge, vast, pent up potential in the American economy that had been artificially repressed ever since the deficit spending recovery at the end of President Reagan's first term. Basically, what happened at the end of the first Reagan term is, interest rates weren't too high because we had such a terrible recession and so much inflation and such high interest rates at the end of President Carter's term, so when the interest rates came down, then inflation naturally inflation around the world came down. Those huge deficits brought us back a little bit. But the long term potential of the American economy, I was convinced, could never be unleashed until we got rid of the deficit. So finally, I just decided that if I didn't get the economy going, nothing else would matter in the end, and I believed that the pent up potential of the American economy was so great, that if we did get the interest rates down and we did get investment up, everything else would fall into place. And I thought that I ought to listen to Bentsen and Rubin because they knew a lot more about it than I did. Earned Income Tax Credit Mr. Klein. But you didn't listen to Bentsen on the EITC. That was one place where you absolutely didn't bend at all. The President. No, but we had promised that, and I believed in it. I thought and again, I'm confident that not only what I saw in the campaign but my experience as Governor of a State that was always in the bottom two or three in per capita income had an impact on this. But I just believe that we had to use the tax system to dignify the work of low wage workers and to make it possible for them to raise their children more successfully. I didn't think I could go out there and argue for a tough welfare reform bill and a tough deficit reduction package, and say I was going to have to slow down my increases in education spending and some other social spending, housing, and all these other things that I would otherwise like to do if we weren't prepared to give lower income working people more income. I also thought it was good economics, because they were going to spend it. They needed to spend it. Congress and Taxes Mr. Klein. Did you ever think that was there any way that you could have gotten Republicans to go along with this? The President. I don't know, and I'll tell you why. In retrospect, maybe there were some things I could have done. Mr. Klein. What if you had invited Dole and Michel to that dinner in Little Rock? The President. Yes, or invited them down even on their own it might have worked. The real problem I see with it in retrospect, the reason I say I don't know first of all I wish I had done that, because later on I started bending over backwards. I had Gingrich in and Armey in, and I met with them exhaustively, and I tried. Often it didn't work, but we did get some things done from time to time. I think they had made a decision to oppose all tax increases because of the Gingrich position vis a vis President Bush. And he was pretty well in the ideological saddle, the political saddle in the House then. And I think because Senator Dole obviously hoped to run for President in '96, I think the Republicans in the Senate were going to be reluctant to break ranks once it was obvious that the House Republicans were going to oppose any kind of deficit reduction package that had any tax increases in it. And I didn't believe if we hadn't gone for some upper income tax increases, then number one, we would have had to adopt cuts that the Democratic majority in the House would not have supported, even under me. And number two, we could not have kept our commitments on the earned income tax credits on education, where we did have a substantial increase, or on the empowerment zones or a lot of the other things I did that I believed in. Washington Politics Mr. Klein. Did the atmosphere surprise you, the vitriol, the difficulty? The President. Yes, it did, I think, basically, but I now know things I didn't know then. Mr. Klein. What do you know now? The President. Well, they really believed first, I know now something I didn't know, which is that some of the people on the Republican side actually, I did know this, but I didn't believe it when I got a call from the White House early before I decided to run in the summer of 1990 from a guy I knew who worked there who was saying, "You know, you shouldn't run." Bush was at like 80 percent then or something. I couldn't believe so I had this serious talk with him about how President Bush had used his popularity to try to deal with the economy. And after about 5 minutes, the guy said, "Now, let's just cut the crap. We've looked at this crowd, and we can beat them all. All the guys in Congress have votes. We can beat them all. And we think Governor Cuomo's too liberal, but you're different. You might beat us, and so if you run, we're going to take you out early." Then I realized that they somehow thought it was serious. Then, after I got up here and started dealing with them, what I realized is that they had been in for 12 years, but they basically had been in since President Nixon won, except for the Carter interregnum, which they thought was purely a function of Watergate, and therefore they saw it as an historical accident that they had quickly corrected, and that's the way they saw it. I actually think Jimmy Carter and, before him, Bobby Kennedy were the precursors of the sort of New Democrat, Third Way stuff I've tried to do here. And I think, therefore, it's not fair, but that exactly, to diminish but that's the way they viewed it, anyway. So I think they believed that there would never be another Democratic President. I really think a lot of them thought they could hold the White House forever, until a third party came along to basically offer a competing vision. And so, they just never saw me as a legitimate person. They just thought I was, in President Bush's words, the Governor of a small southern State. And as I often crack on the trail, I was so naive that I actually thought that was a compliment. Laughter And I still do. So anyway, it did surprise me. I mean, I knew it was there, and I'd seen the Democrats do things in my view, I guess I've got a warped view, but I never thought it was nearly as bad as what they did to me. But from time to time, the Democrats did things I didn't approve of. I didn't like the nature of their arguments against John Tower or the fact that somebody checked out the movies that Bob Bork and I knew there was some of this up here. But I never thought I would see it in the kind of systematic way that I saw it unfold. But when I got to know Newt Gingrich and actually had a lot of candid conversations with him, I realized that that's just the way they thought politics worked. Mr. Klein. War without blood. The President. Yes, that's what they thought. Mr. Klein. That's what Newt called it. The President. I had a fascinating conversation with one Republican Senator in the middle of the D'Amato hearings when they were impugning Hillary. And I asked this guy, who was pretty candid, I said, "Do you really think that my wife or I did anything wrong in this Whitewater thing? Not illegal, even wrong?" And he just started laughing. He said, "Oh, you've got to be kidding." He said, "Any fool who has read the record would know you didn't do anything wrong." He said, "How could you do anything wrong? You didn't borrow any money from the S L which failed. It was a very small S L failure. And you lost 40,000 or whatever you lost on the real estate deal." He said, "Of course, you didn't do anything wrong." He said, "That's not the point of this. The point of this is to make people think you did something wrong." But so, it was funny. Yes, I was surprised by their vitriol, and yes, I was surprised, and I must say I was surprised that they believed and they had an electoral and they turned out to be right, but I made a mistake or two that helped them. They believed that they could win the Congress if they could just say no to everything, and they did. And I think it rested on basically three things. One is, we did the economy, the budget plan, which we had to do, and we had to expect some loss of midterm seats. And some of those seats we had for a long, long time were naturally Republican seats, anyway. So that was the first thing. The second thing is but the people hadn't felt the benefits of it. Then the second thing we did that cost us some seats, but I am absolutely convinced is the right thing to do, was the Brady bill and the crime bill, which had the assault weapons ban. But there again, we got that done in 1994. Had it happened in '93, I think it would not have hurt us so bad. But in '94 there wasn't enough time, between the time that bill passed and the time people voted to convince the world people that voted, against our Congressmen on the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban that there wasn't anything going to happen to them and their hunting and sport shooting and all that. By '96, the issue was working for us, because I could go to places like New Hampshire and say, "I want everybody that missed a day in the deer woods to vote against me. But if you didn't, they didn't tell you the truth, and you ought to get even." That's what I said. And our winning margin in New Hampshire went from one point to 13 points or something. But in '94 my party's Members bore the brunt of that. Then the third problem we had, and this is where I think you were right, is I was trying so hard to keep all of my campaign commitments and the way I made them I should have done welfare reform before health care. You were right about that. Mr. Klein. I don't know that I took that position. In fact The President. I thought you were saying that. Mr. Klein. Well, I might have said it, but The President. And it was right. Welfare Reform Mr. Klein. I'll tell you where I was wrong, is that when it came to doing welfare reform, I chickened out, and I wrote a column the week you signed it telling you not to sign it. I talked to Elwood last week, and he's turned around on it as well. We were both wrong. The President. But the reason is, I think, if you go back, there's one thing that nobody in the press has picked up and we ought to talk about this later is why I vetoed the first two bills and signed the third one. We'll come back to that. But if I hadn't done welfare reform first, that would have given the Democrats a chance to appeal to more conservative and moderate voters. And the system one thing I've learned is, since I've been there, is actually the system is capable of great change, but it can only digest so much at once. So in '93, they did a big economic plan and NAFTA, and in '94 they did this big crime bill. And they might have been able to do welfare reform, but there's no way the system could digest the health care thing. Either that, or if we were going to do health care first, then the mistake I made was saying I would veto anything short of 100 percent coverage, because Mr. Klein. Why did you say that? The President. it was one of those decisions we made practicing for the State of the Union, and I just shouldn't have done it. It was a mistake. I was trying to bring clarity to the debate, and I was afraid that they would try to run something bogus by. Health Care Reform Mr. Klein. You're saying that you think there is no way you could have gotten a health insurance deal in '94? The President. No. Mr. Klein. You don't think so? The President. No. Mr. Klein. What about The President. Let me tell you what happened. Mr. Klein. What if you had gone and just dumped your bill and gone over to Chafee's press conference and said, "I'm with him"? The President. Well, maybe, but Mr. Klein. He had universality. He had a tax increase to pay for it, and he had Bob Dole. The President. Well, he sort of did, but let me tell you what happened. What happened was, I offered and Hillary offered not to submit a bill. We offered to do two different things. We offered to submit sort of a generic bill and let Congress fill in the blanks, and Rostenkowski asked us this is a little more detail, but then we offered not to submit our own bill at all but instead to submit a joint bill with Dole, which I thought was good politics for him, because then he couldn't lose anything Mr. Klein. What was the timeframe for this? When did you make that The President. Well, before we introduced a bill. I can't remember exactly when. Mr. Klein. So this is while the task force was The President. Yes, before we introduced the bill. And Dole said to me I'll never forget this, because we were at a leadership meeting in the Cabinet Room, and he said, "No." He said, "That's not the way we should do it." He said, "You introduce a bill. We'll introduce a bill. Then we'll get together. We'll put them together. We'll compromise and pass them." Then after that, Dole got the memo from Bill Kristol, I think, which said which basically took the Gingrich line. "The way you guys are going to win in the Congress and weaken them is to have nothing happen. If anything happens, the Democrats will get credit for it, so you guys have to make sure nothing happens." After that, I don't think we really had a chance, because Mitchell killed himself to try to figure out a way to get to Chafee, do something and maybe if I had gone to Chafee's press conference, maybe that would have worked. Mr. Klein. Or if the First Lady had. The President. You know, I hadn't thought of that, but all I can tell you is that I really believed, because Dole with that single exception, all my other dealings with Dole, whatever he said was the way we did it. In other words, not the way we did it, but I mean, if I made a deal with him, it always was honest. Mr. Klein. He was as good as his word. The President. Exactly. And in this case, I just think, you know, he saw a chance to win the majority, saw a chance to get elected President. Bill Kristol told them don't do it they didn't do it. And that's what I think happened. Mr. Klein. But this is the thing that people on the left point to, that would have been your big achievement, the big, New Deal kind of achievement. And when you look back on it, do you regret the substance of what you did? Do you think that going with an employer mandate was the wrong thing? And also, do you regret the detail in which you did it, the fact that you did the 1,300 pages and The President. I think politically it was bad politics. On the substance, I think basically it was a privately financed plan that relied on managed care but had a Patients' Bill of Rights in it. And I think the two things that made it unpalatable to Republicans were the employer mandate and the Patients' Bill of Rights. I think the thing that made it unpalatable to Democrats, a few of them, was the employer mandate. But if you're not going to have an employer mandate, then you have to have a subsidy where people buy into either Medicare or Medicaid. And probably, that would have been simpler. Mr. Klein. That's what you're going to have eventually. The President. That's what you're going to have eventually. And if I could do it now, that's what I would offer. But the problem is, I couldn't do it in '94, with the deficits the way they were, without a tax increase. And I didn't feel that I could ask the Congress to vote for another tax increase, even if it was a dedicated thing, after we had just had that big one in '93. Mr. Klein. Plus the reporting was way out of whack at that point, because you weren't getting credit for the savings, the managed care The President. We were getting killed by the scoring. The scoring was all wrong, and we knew it was wrong, but I was stuck with the scoring. So if you look at it, the position I was in is, I was stuck with the scoring. I didn't want to ask for another tax increase I didn't think that was right. So I had to try stay with the private insurance system. And I would have thought that the insurers would actually have liked that, because they were going to get a lot more customers. But basically, they didn't like it because we couldn't just let them have all those mandated customers and have no Patients' Bill of Rights and no restrictions on managed care, so they then developed this whole argument that it's a Rube Goldberg machine, it's a Government takeover of health care, and all this stuff. And that sort of stuck because they had all that money to put behind it. But the truth is, in defense of what we offered, if you go back and look at all the early soundings from all the experts when we first laid it out there, everybody said, "This is a moderate plan. This is not too far left. They've tried to keep their private insurance system. They've certainly left the private health care delivery system intact." Because nobody said it was some big Government takeover until all the people spent whatever they spent, 100 million, 200 million, whatever they spent in there later, to try to perform reverse plastic surgery on it. But I think that in the context you ask the questions, to go back, I think that the combined impact of the economic plan, with people not fully feeling the benefits in '94 the gun deal, where people had their fears fully allayed and the health care thing, where the people that wanted it didn't get it and the people that didn't like it knew what they didn't like about it. That tended to depress the Democratic voters. And the three things together produced plus the fact that the Republicans had this contract on America, and people didn't really know what it was they just knew they had a plan gave them the big win they got. Mr. Klein. Just to stay with health insurance for a minute, do you regret structurally the way you went about doing it? If you had to do it all over again, would you give it to the First Lady? Was that a mistake? The President. I don't think it was a mistake to give it to her. I think the mistake I made was, I either should have insisted on having her say, "Okay, here's all of our work. Look at it. Here are the basic principles we want. You guys draft the bill," or I would have insisted that we had a joint bill. If we were going to draft the bill, I would have made the Republicans draft it with me. That was the mistake I made. Neither one of those things was her doing. She gets a total bum rap on this. The plan she came up with, which was she was told, "We ain't going to have a tax increase, right, and therefore it's not going to be a total Government program, but you have to try to get 100 percent coverage," so there was no other way to do it except with an employer mandate. And she was also told that "managed care is going to happen, and we favor it," which she did favor it, "but we've got to have some protections in there for people." I don't know how many doctors I've had come up to me since then, tell me that we were right and that basically it was a good plan. So in a way, I think she really got a bum rap on that deal, because she was operating within constraints that were, we now know, impossible. What I should have done is to let her do all the work, publish all the findings, say, "Here are our principles. You guys write the bill." Or I should have said, "If you want me to do a bill, I will only do it if we have a bipartisan agreement on the bill." That would have produced something less than 100 percent of coverage, but at least it would have produced something that would have passed and gotten us up to 90 or maybe above 90 percent. That was the mistake I made. But it was my mistake, not hers. She, I think, has gotten a totally bum rap on this deal. All she did was what she was asked to do. Mr. Klein. I asked Ira about it, and he pointed to his E commerce protocols, and he said, "What I did was, I decided to do everything the exact opposite of what we did with health insurance, and it worked." The President. But the interesting thing there was, it worked because number one, we didn't have to pass a big bill because of the Telecommunications Act, which was a great success which we ought to talk about later was a big part of the economic program, was operating on a parallel track. And all we had to do there was to basically invite them to help us make Government policy that would maximize economic growth. It was a much simpler problem. There was absolutely no way to get to 100 percent of coverage, to have universal health coverage, unless you had an employer mandate or the Government filled in the difference. If we were doing it today, we could do it. And the next administration could do it, because now we have the money to do it. But then, we didn't. Mr. Klein. You're going to come down closer to get what you want in reconciliation if you move the CHIPS program to cover the parents, and only The President. The CHIPS program, the parents, and you let people between 55 and 65 buy into Medicare. Then the only people that won't be able to get health insurance are young, single people who think they'll live forever and just don't want to do it, or very wealthy people who just would rather go ahead and just pay their doctor. Mr. Klein. The reason why I was always for universal was because I thought those people had a moral responsibility to pay in to help the risk pools. The President. I don't know if I can get this CHIPS thing, but if I can, it will make a huge difference. White House Operations Gays in the Military Mr. Klein. I don't want to stick on the bad stuff in the first term too long, but things in retrospect, things seemed pretty much a mess in the White House for the first couple of years. And there were times several people have said to me that you came to them at various times and said, "Look, I'm in the wrong position. I'm to the left of where I should be," or "Things just don't feel right," or "Things are out of control." And I guess two or three questions you could answer in a bunch How did that happen? I mean, how do you come out of the box doing gays in the military, for example, which I assume well, you believe in the policy it probably wasn't the best thing to come out of the box with. Why did you surround yourself with why were there so few At this point, a portion of the interview was missing from the transcript released by the Office of the Press Secretary. Mr. Klein. At what point did you get a White House that you were really happy with the way it was working? The President. Well, first of all, I think that in retrospect, I think if you compare the functioning of our White House, for example, with the Reagan White House in the first term, I think ours looks pretty good. And I think that the problems we had were fundamentally most of the mistakes we made were political, not substantive. I mean, Bruce Reed was there Sperling was there McLarty was there and Rubin was there. So I don't think I don't think it's fair to say and Laura Tyson agreed with us. I don't think we had a bad I think we did have people who were, philosophically and substantively and on policy terms, consistent with our New Democrat philosophy. And I think that budget, from the empowerment zones to the charter schools we got in the beginning, to the Goals 2000 program, to what we did on the student loan program which was terrific it saved 8 billion in student loan costs for kids to the overall economic plan, I think it was consistent. I think the economic plan was consistent I mean, the crime bill was completely New Democrat. I think family leave and the Brady bill were. A lot of the most important things that were done that made possible all the stuff we've done in the last 4 years Mr. Klein. You left out NAFTA and reinventing Government. The President. Yes, we had NAFTA, and we did RIGO, and we did the WTO all that in the first 2 years. Mr. Klein. But even given all that The President. But what was wrong was that the political image was different from the reality. The substantive reality, I think, was quite good. I've heard Bob Rubin defend the White House repeatedly and talk about how the things that worked well later, especially the sense of camaraderie and teamwork and joint decisionmaking, were all put in place in that first year and a half. But let's just go through the problems, and you'll see. Part of it was, I think, none of us were sensitive to the way sufficiently sensitive to the way Washington works and to the way little things would look big to other people. Now, let's just start with the gays in the military. How did that happen? It is not true that we brought it up first. Mr. Klein. Andrea Mitchell brought it up in a press conference on November 11th. The President. Yes, but why? What happened? Dole introduced legislation Dole deserves credit for this. The Republicans should give Dole credit for this. They always say he was too moderate and all that. They should give Dole credit for this. And I give him credit for it. I've thought a lot of times about how I could have outmaneuvered him on it. But I had two things going and the Joint Chiefs obviously agreed with him, which helped. But what put this on the front burner early? Not me it wasn't my decision. Dole introduced a bill in Congress which was going to fly through there, because Nunn agreed with him, to keep the present policy. That was like the first thing he did. And then the Joint Chiefs demanded a meeting with me. The President can't refuse to meet with the Joint Chiefs. So it was those two things that put this thing front and center. I did not want this Mr. Klein. The bill came in after you said after Andrea Mitchell asked the question and you responded the way you did. I always thought that was because she needed a vacation and hadn't taken it. The President. No, no, it was because but he was going to put that in anyway. We knew what he was doing. So what happened was, between the Joint Chiefs and the Dole bill, we were forced to put it up. I was going what I intended to do was to get all the stuff, my basic stuff organized, lead with that, and figure out how to handle the gays in the military. And they basically forced me to deal with it from the beginning. And then the thing that then I got a lot of heat, obviously, from the gay community for what I did. But everybody ignores what precipitated "don't ask, don't tell," which was a vote in the Senate, essentially on the Dole position, that passed 68 32, i.e. by a veto proof margin. There was no vote in the House. In retrospect, given the way Washington works, what I probably should have done is issued a clean Executive order, let them overturn it, and basically let them live with the consequences of it. And I might have actually gotten a better result in the end, more like the one I wanted. But when General Powell came to see me about the "don't ask, don't tell" policy, the commitments that were made were very different from the way that it worked out in practice later on. And so there was no question in my mind, given the way they laid out what their policy was going to be, that gay service people would be better off under the new policy than they were under the old one. It didn't work out that way, but the commitments that I got and the descriptions that I gave when I announced it at the War College, there's no question that if that had been followed through, the gays in the military would have been better off than they were under the old policy. And the thing that I didn't understand about the way things play out in public, because I really was inexperienced in the way Washington worked when I got there, is that sometimes you just need clarity. And even if you lose, it's better to lose with clarity than ambiguity. And what had not sunk in on, I think, even the press writing about this was that once the Senate voted 68 32, the jig was up. It was over, because everybody knew there were more than 300 votes in the House against the policy. So we had a veto proof majority in both Houses in favor of legislating the present policy, unless I could find some way to go forward. So that's what I tried to do. But the reason it came up first was essentially because the Joint Chiefs and Dole were determined Mr. Klein. So it wasn't the Andrea Mitchell question on November 11th? The President. No. Mr. Klein. It was up The President. Because I had lots of options there. I mean, Harry Truman basically, if you go back and look at what he did with integration of the military, he basically signed an order that said Integrate come back within 3 years and tell me how you did it. Mr. Klein. You could have signed an Executive order. The President. I could have done that. And like I said, in retrospect, we would have had greater clarity. And since there had been so many problems with implementing the policy, I'm not sure that for the past 6 years it would have been better. Now I think Secretary Cohen has really taken hold of this thing, and there have been some changes in the last 6 months that I think really will make the future better than the previous policy was. Mr. Klein. But to go back to the original question, I have a strong sense that during that first year, year and a half, you weren't satisfied with the way the White House was working. The President. No, because I thought we were often first of all, we had to do some stuff that was tough, that was going to get us out of position. Our foreign policy team, I think, was working very well, and except for it took us too long to build an international consensus in Bosnia. But we eventually did it and did the right thing there. We were doing well in the Middle East. We took a big, bold step away from the traditional American position to get involved in the Irish peace process. And on balance, I was pleased with that. And actually, a lot of people have forgotten this, but when I came back from Jordan, from the signing of the peace agreement in the Wadi Araba in Jordan in late '94, right before the election, we were still in reasonably good shape, because my numbers went back up and that helped the Democrats. But I still believe that the underlying problems were the reasons for the election results. But the political problems of gays in the military hurt. I think that we had a lot of I was more frustrated by operational things, like leaks on Supreme Court appointments that weren't even accurate, and I thought that the White House was not operating politically in a way that I thought was effective. I thought, policywise, we weren't out of position on anything except the retrospective on health care. And I've already said what I thought the political mistake was there, about how I should have handled it, given the fact Mr. Klein. If you had to do it over again, you would have done welfare reform in '94 and the crime bill? The President. If I had to do it over again, I would have tried to do the welfare reform and the crime bill in '94, together, and started a bipartisan process on health care. I would have had Hillary up and meeting, issue the report with basic principles that whole 600page however long it was, the stuff we did, I would have given it all to the Congress and said, "Either you write a bill, or we write a bill together." Independent Counsel's Investigation Mr. Klein. Let me give you another, I think a tough "if you had to do it all over again." When I look back on this period, you were rolling at the end of '93. You did NAFTA. You gave the speech in Memphis. I mean, even I was writing positive stuff about you at that point. And then came the wave of stupid scandal stories, the Troopergate story, the Whitewater stuff. That December the Washington Post asked for all the documents. And there was a meeting that you had, maybe the only time in recorded history that George and David Gergen agreed and said you should turn over all the data, everything. And you didn't do it. Do you regret that? Do you think that that changed things? The President. I don't believe, given the subsequent coverage of the Whitewater thing, it would have made any difference. What I regret is asking for the special counsel, because under the law that existed before and the law that existed after, under neither law could a special counsel be called. They had one Mr. Klein. Why did you do it? I was there the night you did it. You were in Ukraine, Kiev. The President. Yes. I did it because I was exhausted, because I just buried my mother, and I had poor judgment. And I had people in the White House who couldn't stand the heat of the bad stories, and they suggested that I do it and that I'd have to do it. And I knew that there was nothing there. I knew it was just one guy lying. And I had Bernie Nussbaum and Bruce and a few other people screaming at me not to do it. They said, "You don't understand." I knew that Janet Reno would appoint a Republican, even though all other Presidents had been investigated by people who had basically supported them. Lawrence Walsh supported Reagan Sirica no, what's his name? Mr. Klein. Sirica. The President. No, Sirica was the judge. Jaworski supported Nixon. I knew Reno wouldn't do that. I knew Reno would appoint a Republican, but I knew that there was nothing there. I knew she'd appoint an honest, professional prosecutor. So I just did it, but it was wrong, because the decision to appoint a special counsel is a decision to bankrupt anybody who's not rich. I mean, by definition, there's a penalty associated with it. But if Fiske had been allowed to do his job, this whole thing would have been over in '95 or '96. And of course, that's why he was replaced, because he was going to do his job. Mr. Klein. Just staying on this for a minute The President. But do I think so? No, because I think I mean, I don't want to get into this. I shouldn't talk about this much until I'm out of office. But I believe that the desire, the almost hysterical desire to have something to investigate was so great that it wouldn't have made any difference, because, look, what did this thing hang on? There was nothing in those private papers that we we gave it all to the Justice Department. There was nothing in there that did anything other than support what the report said, which was that we lost money on a real estate investment. And if you noticed, when Starr got ahold of this, he immediately abandoned that and just went on to other stuff. There was never anything to it. And I do not believe I have no reason to believe, given the coverage of the events of Whitewater, that it would have made any difference. I think they would have found some way to say, "Oh, there are questions here let's have a special counsel." But do I wish I had done it? I mean, I don't know. Criticism of the President Mr. Klein. Last week you talked about the clanging tea kettle, and you know I've written this continuum I've wrote that this era is going to be remembered more for the severity for the ferocity of its prosecutions than for the severity of the crimes. And there's never been anything proven. And yet, the hatred and the vitriol has been relentless. What do you think it is about you? Do you think it's you? Do you think it's us, our generation? And what about the Steve Skowronek theory, the Yale professor who talked about Third Way Presidents like you, like Wilson, substantively like Nixon, people who take the best of the opposition's agenda, sand off the rough edges, implement it, and are therefore distrusted by their own party and hated by the opposition? The President. Well, I think that that I read his book, and it's a very good book. But I think in this case that's not accurate, for the following reasons. Number one, if you go back to '93 and '94, the Democrats in Congress supported me more strongly than they had supported a higher percentage of Democrats voted for my programs than voted for Kennedy, Johnson, or Carter. It was that the Republican opposition was more unanimous. Number two, the Republicans never owned crime and welfare. They owned them rhetorically, but they didn't do much about it. And at least in the tradition that I came out of as a Governor, we thought we were supposed to act on crime and welfare. Nobody when you check into the morgue, they don't ask for your party registration. And I never knew that anybody had a vested interest in poor people being out of work. And so I just never accepted that, and I found that there were a lot of Democrats in the Congress that were eager to deal with those issues. And if you look at it, we had I don't know more than two thirds of the Democrats in the House and more than 75 percent of the Democrats in the Senate voted for welfare reform. And we had a higher percentage of Democrats than Republicans in the Senate voting for it and slightly higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voting for it in the House but not huge. So I think that maybe transformational figures generally inspire that, because most times people like to deal with folks they can put in a box. Maybe it's just maybe it's something about me that made them mad. You know my favorite joke about the guy that's walking along the edge of Grand Canyon and falls off so this guy is hurtling down hundreds of feet to certain death. And he looks out, and he grabs this twig, and it breaks his fall. He heaves a sigh of relief. Then all of a sudden he sees the roots coming loose. He looks up in the sky and says, "God, why me? I'm a good person. I've taken care of my family. I've paid my taxes. I've worked all my life. Why me?" And this thunderous voice says, "Son, there's just something about you I don't like." Laughter I don't know. I don't think Mr. Klein. The folks like you. They never cared about this stuff. The President. But I believe the Republicans thought I told you, I think that they thought Mr. Klein. It wasn't just them. It was us, too. The President. Yes. The press, I think I wasn't part of the Washington establishment, and I think that the press didn't know what to make of me. I think this travel office deal, it was largely a press deal. I mean, I didn't know that they thought they owned the travel office. It was a weird deal. And of course, all I ever heard was one guy in the press who happened to be the head of the White House Correspondents at the time said, "I wish you'd have somebody look into this because the costs are going up and it's not working well." I didn't realize that everybody else didn't care what happened. It was a strange thing. But I think that all I can tell you is that the same guy that told me the same Senator that told me that it was about making people think I'd done something wrong in Whitewater also said that the Republicans had learned a lot from my Presidency. He said, before, that they thought there was a liberal press. And he said, "Now we have a different view. We think that they are liberal and that they vote like you, but they think like us, and that's more important." And I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, we just don't believe in Government very much, but we love power." And he says, "You know, the press wants to be powerful, and we both get it the same way, by hurting you." There could be something to that. But I'm sure maybe there were times when I didn't handle it all that well in the early going. But all I can tell you is, if you look back over it, the Whitewater thing was a total fraud. Now, I've got a friend named Brandy Ayres, who is the editor of a little newspaper in Addison, Alabama. Do you know who he is? Mr. Klein. I've met him, yes. The President. He wrote an editorial that said, "This is what always happens when Republicans get in the majority. They did it when they got in the majority after World War II. They tried to convince us Harry Truman and Dean Acheson were Communists. And then the second time, they gave us McCarthy. And now, they gave us this." I don't know. I think part of it is how you view power. But for whatever reason, there is something about me that they didn't like very much. But it all worked out all right. Like I said, I'm sure that my not being familiar with Washington mores may have had something to do with the way I didn't handle the press right. Maybe I didn't Mr. Klein. Yes, you know I mean, I've said this in print, so I can say it to your face. You're the most talented politician I've ever come across, and you're not a slow study. That's the other thing we know about you. The President. But I think in the beginning, for the first 2 years, I thought I was pushing a lot of rocks up the hill. I was obsessed. Thomas Patterson, who has written books about the Presidency and the media and all that, he said in '95 that I'd already kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than the previous five Presidents, which I felt really good about. We had just lost the Congress. I needed something to feel good about. But I do believe in '95 I was and '93 and '94, I was just fixated on trying to get as much done as quickly as I could, and also on trying to learn the job, get the White House functioning, all that kind of stuff. And I think that I did not spend enough time probably at least working with the media, letting them ask me questions, at least trying to get the whole letting them get something in perspective. And I think maybe I was just the last gasp of 25 years of scandal mania. We may be swinging the other way on the pendulum now. Oklahoma City Mr. Klein. I think, after '98, maybe we've learned. I think we're doing a little bit better this year. You might see that in a different way. Let's talk about '95 for a second. To my mind, the period of this Presidency that is most touching to me, I think, are the weeks after well, the 2 days, April 18, 1995 The President. Oklahoma City? Mr. Klein. No, the press conference the night before Oklahoma City when you said the President is still relevant here. I thought, "Oh, my God, that must be the rock bottom for him." The President. Well, actually, it wasn't. I didn't have the same reaction to it than maybe you know, we often don't perceive ourselves as others see us. But that question, I learned something from that, which is, if someone asks you a question that you want to answer directly, but there's a word in it that's dynamite, you should answer it without using the word, because actually, what I was doing in April of '95 in my own mind was prefiguring the fight which occurred at the end of '95 and the end of '96. That is, I honestly didn't feel pathetic or irrelevant or anything. I knew that in the end, if a veto proof minority of my party would stay with me, after the terrible licking they'd taken in '94, if they would stay with me, I believed in the end we'd have our chance to make our case to the American people. In other words, I believed it would turn out the way it did turn out at the end of '95 and the beginning of '96. So actually, to me, it wasn't the worst point of the Presidency. When they asked me that question, a light went on in my head. I actually felt good about it. But because I used the word, it came out people perceived it differently than I did. I didn't feel that about it. Mr. Klein. But then, a week later, you said at Michigan State, you said, "You can't love your country and despise its Government." And that's when a light went off in my mind He's figured out how he's going to go up against these folks. The President. Yes, that's what I believed. I think the Oklahoma City thing was awful. It was awful. But I think it began a kind of reassessment, a kind of breaking of the ice. And I don't mean that God knows Mr. Klein. Someone told me that you said, you told them that you wouldn't use the word "bureaucrat" again in a speech after that. The President. Yes. I did. It affected even me. I realized that I had played on the resentments people feel about Government. And I thought that when Government did something stupid or indefensible, they ought to be taken on. But I realized that even when you do that, you have to be careful what word you use. And I did say that. I said, "How many times have I used the word bureaucrat, and there are people there." And I didn't mean to say that I or even Newt Gingrich was responsible for Timothy McVeigh. I don't want to get that's what he did. Are the liberals responsible for Susan Smith, the one throwing her kid out the window? I didn't want to get into that. But Oklahoma City had a profound impact on me, too. I went down there, and I was sitting there with the relatives, and one of the people that was killed had been in my Inaugural, and I was talking to his kinfolk. And I said, you know I just made up my mind I would try never again to discuss the Government, even people's frustrations with it, in a way that could be directed against categories of people. It really had a big impact on me, and I think it did on the country. Mr. Klein. Would it be fair to say that by the time you gave that speech at Michigan State, you were ready for battle? The President. Yes. Yes. Balancing the Budget Mr. Klein. Now, this is a really interesting part of your Presidency to me. You had at that point a brilliant strategy in place to screw them. It was, smoke them out. You could have just sat there and said, "Well, what's your plan?" You could have done to them what they did to you in '94. And yet, you insisted, ultimately against, from what I can gather, your entire staff, including people like Bob Rubin you insisted on coming out with your own budget, your own balanced budget, that June. Why did you do that? I mean you didn't have to politically, right? The President. No, probably not. In other words, I could have done to them what they did to me. And that was the argument, that we'd just say no to them like they just said no to us. But governing is important to me. And I thought that in the end we would all be judged by how we had performed and by whether we had performed. And this may sound naive, but I believed that in the end, we could change the politics of Washington. See, one of the reasons I ran for President is, I didn't just want to prove that I could play the game they'd all been playing with each other "I got an idea. You got an idea. Let's fight, and maybe we can both get our 15 seconds on the evening news." That's basically the operative mode. I didn't want to do that. I came here to do things. I wanted to be President to do things, to change the country, to be relevant. And I thought that the Democrats I didn't think the Republicans would take us up on it initially, because Gingrich had basically made it clear that he wanted to basically be prime minister of the country and turn me into a ceremonial and foreign policy President. We'd have the French system, in effect. Mr. Klein. Not only that, he told me on the phone one night he was personally going to lead a Wesleyan revolution that year. The President. So that's basically what he wanted to do. But I just felt that the Democrats could not sacrifice what I was trying to do was to build the Democrats as a party of fiscal responsibility. I wanted to prove that you could be socially progressive and fiscally responsible. And for us and I went out there saying, "Look, our credo is opportunity, responsibility, community." I just didn't see that I could stand there and say, "What do you expect of me? I'm just the President. They're in the majority." That's just not my way. I believe that you have to do things if you can. And my own view of politics is that there's always plenty that the parties are honestly divided about at election time, no matter how much you get done. Furthermore, I really did believe that the Democrat Party, in the end, would be successful by developing what is now known as the Third Way, but which I really saw as basically an information age version of what we'd always been for. Second Term Agenda Mr. Klein. What was your fantasy for a second term? If you'd had everything you wanted the day after you were reelected, what would it have been? The President. Well, the validation of the economic strategy has been a part of it. I would have finished the job in health care and enacted my entire education budget. And the rest of it is still sort of pending. The Irish peace process worked out the way I'd hoped. I'm still hoping that we'll get more done in the Middle East. It's very difficult, but I'm hoping we will. And then, on the foreign policy front, it's going to pretty much work out the way I'd hoped it would, I think. Mr. Klein. When I look back at your speeches, if there were a couple of paragraphs where you best describe your political philosophy, the Third Way, they were in the 1998 State of the Union Address, and nobody paid any attention. And you know why? The President. Because I was standing what I got credit for there was just getting up, standing up. Laughter Mr. Klein. What was the opportunity cost of that scandal? What did it cost you? The President. I don't know yet, because actually we did in '98 we won seats in the House of Representatives, the first time a President's party has done that since Mr. Klein. I mean, substantively. The President. Well, I don't know, because I don't know whether the Congress, the Republicans would have been more willing to work with me or not. Social Security Medicare Reform Mr. Klein. What about things like Social Security reform could you have made a The President. Maybe. What I wanted to do with Social Security I am disappointed there. We still may get some Medicare restructural reform out of this. And in any case, Medicare is going to be okay for 30 years, which is the longest it's been okay for in forever and ever. And I think Mr. Klein. Yes, but that's a problem, for God sakes. I mean, the generational transfer issue, I think, is something that you're really concerned about. The President. I am concerned about it. But Mr. Klein. You can't keep a fee forservice The President. But, but, but both Medicare taxes and Social Security taxes, in fairness, since 1983 have been paying for everything else. So we've had a little of that in reverse. Mr. Klein. That's very good. The President. Everybody has forgotten that. We've been dumping all these Social Security and Medicare taxes into the general economy all this time. I personally believe, though, that I regret we didn't get to do Social Security because I would have what happened was, I think maybe we could have gotten it if we hadn't had that whole impeachment thing. But there was more resistance in both parties to do anything than I had imagined there was. They'll have to come to terms with this. It will have to be done. And I think you've either got to raise taxes, cut benefits, or increase the rate of return. What I proposed in '98 on Social Security, I think, was a very good beginning, and I really thought we'd get something. Was that '98 or '99? Mr. Klein. That was '98. And there was also the Breaux Thomas, later Breaux Frisk commission on Medicare. You could have, with your abilities, you could have gotten some kind of deal if you'd been able to at that point. The President. Maybe. But they Mr. Klein. Breaux was your guy, right? The President. Well, I don't agree with what he wanted to do there, and he knows that. I mean, I thought I agree with some of what they proposed, but some of what they proposed I think would not be good for Medicare. On policy grounds, he and I have had long discussions about it. I think there are a couple of things in that report that I just simply didn't agree with. Safety Net Mr. Klein. In general, when you talk about an information age safety net, what would it be, and what would be the guiding principles? I don't think that you can have the kind of centralized, top down sort of programs that Social Security and Medicare The President. I think if you had yes, but there's a great article let me just say this. There's a great article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine the day before yesterday Mr. Klein. The Sara Mosle article? The President. about voluntarism. And I don't believe I think you have to have some sort of if you believe there should be a safety net, there has to be some sort of safety net. Now, there's all kinds of options to get it done, and I think there should be more you can have some more room for private initiative. But if you had a safety net that worked, you'd have something for the poor and the disabled, the people who through no fault of their own were in trouble. You would have genuinely worldclass education for everybody who needed it, which is everybody. You would have access to health care at an affordable rate and decent housing, and you'd have to have a lifetime learning system. And then I think you'd have to have some more generous version of the new markets initiative I proposed, because there will always be unevenness in the growth of the market economy. That's part of its genius, because you have to have opportunity for new things to branch out. But in my view, this new markets thing has been underappreciated. Mr. Klein. I was out there a year ago watching Al From and Jesse Jackson cavort along beside you. The President. And it may be one of the great opportunities for bipartisan achievement in this session. It may be one of the great opportunities because Hastert is completely committed to it. He's been as good as his word on everything. And I think Lott knows it's the right thing to do. I've talked to them both a lot. We do have a good working relationship now, even though we have our differences. I think the Senate has been far too grudging on the judges, particularly since I appointed basically mainstream judges. But they want more ideologues, and they hope they can get them next year. And I hope they can't, and we'll see what happens. But anyway, I think a part of the safety net ought to be viewed as a willingness of the Government to make continuing extraordinary efforts, including big tax incentives, to keep the people in places that are left behind in the emerging global economy keep giving them a chance to catch up. And I think this whole digital divide is a I prefer to think of it as a digital bridge. I think if you think about what this means, basically, this information economy can collapse distances in a way that telephones and railroads and electrical I mean, I think about it in terms of Arkansas. When they brought us REA and the Interstate Highway System and I put all these little airports up in remote towns and all that, it all helped to bring, like, small scale manufacturing to places that had been left behind. But there was always the factor of distance. And then I got to a place like the Shiprock Navajo Reservation, where they make really beautiful jewelry, for example, where the unemployment rate is 58 percent and only 30 percent of the people have telephones. And you realize that if they really were part of an information age economy, there are ways in which they could do I remember when I became President there were a lot of banks in New York shipping their data processing to Northern Ireland every day every day and then bringing it back. There are all kinds of opportunities that we never had before. And I think people ought to start thinking about that as a part of the safety net. Information Technology Mr. Klein. You know, this raises an interesting point about you, personally. Shalala said to me that she thought that just as you were obsessed and voracious about social policy when you were Governor in the eighties that's one of the things I first noticed about you, is that you knew everything. I mean, you knew about the schools up here in East Harlem, more than Cuomo did, in fact. But as you were to social policy in the eighties, you've been hungry in the same way for knowledge about science and technology in the nineties. And I talked to Harold Varmus about it, and other people have said the same thing. Is that true? And in that regard, talk to me a little bit about the policy that you pursued in high tech and information age things that I don't understand that well, like telecommunications and The President. Well, let's talk about that. The one thing in our mantra about our economic policy which we always repeat fiscal responsibility, expanded trade, and investing in people those three things really were the sort of three stools of our economic policy. But one thing I think that tends to understate is the role that technology, particularly information technology, has played in this remarkable growth and the productivity growth and the long economic expansion. And I think our major contribution to that, apart from getting interest rates down so capital can flow to that sector, was in the Telecommunications Act of '96. And there were our major contributions to that act I might say, Al Gore deserves a lot of credit for because he was our front guy on it were two. One is we insisted that the Telecom Act would be very much pro competition, which required us to get into a very difficult political fight principally with the RBOC's, operating companies, many of whom I've had very good relationships with because they do great stuff. They've helped us on all of our digital divide stuff, a lot of the new market stuff. But I just thought that we had to bend over backwards to maximize the opportunity for people with ideas to start new companies and get in and compete. And we fought that through, and it delayed the passage of the Telecom Act, but eventually we got what we wanted. And as I remember, while there were more Democrats than Republicans for our position, there were actually people on both sides of both parties. But we very much wanted to have a procompetition bias. The other night, interestingly enough, I was at dinner in New York with a friend of mine who was in the telecom business and then got in the venture capital business with telecom. He had a dinner for me, and I had dinner with like 40 people, all of whom headed companies that didn't exist in 1996. I went out to UUP, which is an Internet connection company, which had 40 or 80 employees, something like that, in 1993, when I became President, and they have 8,000 now. I mean, it's amazing. So that was good. And the second thing we did was to fight for the E rate, which democratized the Internet and democratized the telecommunications revolution. We've got 95 percent of our schools have at least one Internet connection, and 90 percent of the poorest schools have an Internet connection. So I think that those are the two things that happened. And then I also continued to push relentlessly these last 8 years for greater investment in science and technology. It was interesting I've had an interesting relationship with the Congress since the Republicans won the majority, because they look around for things that they can spend more money on than me. Mr. Klein. NIH. The President. Yes. And it's been very interesting. They knew they would always be whatever defense number I proposed, they'd always be for more. And they liked to I'm always for a balance between mass transit and highways, and they're always a little more on the highways side. But the big area was NIH. And Harold Varmus did a brilliant job when the Republicans won the Congress, he brought all these freshmen Congressmen out, showed them the NIH, showed them what they were doing, explained the genome project to them. And I think John Porter was the head of the subcommittee in the House that had this. He's a good man. He's smart, and he wanted to do the right thing. And so, anyway, I figured out after the first go round that whatever I proposed, they'd propose more, which suited me fine because I basically don't think you can spend too much on those things. But the problem I had early on and the problem I still have is, notwithstanding how much money we have, the Republicans do not, in my view, spend enough money on non NIH research. For example, they just took out all the money that I proposed for nanotechnology, this highly microscopic technology which could increase the power of computer generation by unfathomable amounts. Now, why is that a mistake? Because as one night Hillary had we had all these millennial evenings at the White House. And then we had one the other day on outer space and the deep oceans we did it in the afternoon. But we had one on the human genome project, and we had Eric Lander from Harvard, who is a biological scientist, and we had Vint Cerf, who was one of the developers of the Internet. He actually sent the first E mail ever sent, 18 years ago or 19 years ago now to his then profoundly deaf wife, who now can hear because she's got a microdigital chip that's been planted deep in her ear. She heard, at 50 she said she's sure she's the only person who's ever heard James Taylor sing "Fire And Rain" at the age of 50 for the first time. She came and sort of stood up and was exhibit A. But the point they were making is that the biomedical advances that would flow out of the human genome project, which the Republican majority will support lavishly, depended upon the development of the computer technology, and that without the development of the computer technology, you could never parse something as small as the human genome and get into all these genes and understand all the permutations. For example, there was a fascinating article the other day about one of the implications of the human genome, saying that talking about these two women who had a form of cancer, and that basically, if you look at the historical studies of all women in this category with this kind of cancer, diagnosed at this point in their illness, that you would say they had a 45 percent chance of survival. But now they can do genetic testing showing that they actually have very different conditions, and that one of them had a 20 percent chance of survival, the other had an 80 percent chance of survival. Now, the reason they can do that is because not only of the biological advances but the nonbiological advances that make it possible to measure the biological differences. And I could give you lots of other examples. And again, I owe a lot of this to Al Gore. He convinced me in 1993 that climate change was real. And he wrote that book in '88, and they're still making fun of his book. And I remember as late as last year we had a House subcommittee that treated climate change like a conspiracy to destroy the economy of the United States. But now, you've got all the major oil companies admitting that it's real, that the climate really is warming at an unsustainable rate. And that's why we pushed the Kyoto Protocol and why I want to spend a lot more money, and also have tax incentives, for people to keep making advances in energy technologies and environmental conservation technologies. So my frustration about where we are now is that I'm really grateful that the Republican majority has embraced NIH, because it's been good and it's enabled me to present budgets under the old budget caps that I knew they would break, so I could get adequate funding for education, for example, and still know we're going to do a really good job on NIH. But I think we need a much broader commitment in the Congress to research in other areas of science and technology, going beyond the biological sciences. At this point, a portion of the interview was missing from the transcript. Events of 1998 Mr. Klein. when it became clear to you I mean, I know this is prompting you to sound braggart, but so be it. There must have come a time when you realized, "Hey, our economic policy worked. This whole thing is taking off, and my larger sense of us moving from the industrial age to the information age is really true, and all of a sudden we have these surpluses." Was there a moment when the bolt of lightning hit and knocked you off the donkey on the way to the West Wing? Was there a day when you realized that The President. I spent a lot of '98 trying to dodge bolts of lightning. Laughter Mr. Klein. Well, that's the irony of this, I think, is that that was probably going to be the moment that the press was going to realize that there had been a coherence to this whole project all along, and we managed to work our way out of that. The President. In '98, I spent a lot of '98 Mr. Klein. Is it fair to say '98 was the time that this The President. Yes, yes. And I spent a lot of '98 sort of wrestling with three overwhelming feelings. One is, obviously there was a lot of pain involved because I had made a terrible personal mistake, which I did try to correct, which then a year later got outed on or almost a year later and had to live with. And it caused an enormous amount of pain to my family and my administration and to the country at large, and I felt awful about it. And I had to deal with the aftermath of it. And then, I had to deal with what the Republicans were trying to do with it. But I had a totally different take on it than most people. I really believed then and I believe now I was defending the Constitution. And while I was responsible for what I did, I was not responsible for what they did with what I did that was their decision and that I had to defend the Constitution. And so I felt that I still believe historically two of the great achievements of my administration were facing down the Government shutdown in '95 and '96, and then facing this back, and that those two things together essentially ended the most overt and extreme manifestations of the Gingrich revolution. And then the third thing I felt was this "Gosh, it is all working, and it's coming together, and all these things will be possible." And I still believe if we can get one or two things straight for the future, that a lot of the good stuff is still ahead. Mr. Klein. I'm not going to let you off that so easily. Were there days, were there moments that you remember where you saw, hey, this is happening? The President. Yes, I was really happy. I just was happy because I thought to be fair, I don't think any of us thought in '93 if you asked me in '93, "What level of confidence do you have this economic plan is going to work," I would say very, very high. And if you asked me, "What do you mean by working,"' when I started in '93, I would say we'd probably have between 16 million and 18 million new jobs. I never would have guessed 22.5 million and maybe more. I would have said I was fairly sure that we'd get rid of the deficit by the time I left office. I didn't know in '93 that we'd be paying off nearly 400 billion of the national debt when I left office and we'd be looking at taking America out of debt, which is a goal I hope will be ratified by this election. And I hope the American people will embrace that, because I think that's quite important. So in '98 I began to imagine just how far we could go, you know, and to think about that. Race Relations Mr. Klein. There's another aspect to this that we haven't talked about that I think has really been central. In '93 would you have predicted that the state of race relations would have gotten to the point that it's gotten to now? I mean, I don't know whether you can sense I sensed it out on the trail this year. Bob Dole went to Bob Jones in '96 and didn't pay any price at all, did he? This year you couldn't do it. And everywhere you go in this country, people of different races are having lunch together and holding hands. The President. I confess, you know, I like Senator Dole very much, but I would have made him pay a price if I had known he went to Bob Jones University. I just didn't know. Mr. Klein. You didn't know about the dating policy? The President. No, I didn't know he went to Bob Jones University. I didn't know about the dating policy, but I knew about Bob Jones because I'm a white southerner. And I think the Bob Jones thing I think Governor Bush going there mattered more maybe to white southerners my age who supported civil rights than maybe to even other Americans, because it has a whole because of the history there. It was a big deal to me. I just didn't know. But I do believe we have come a long way. And I think I hope I made some contribution to that, because I think it's really important. I've tried to get Americans to understand that how we handle this I still believe how we handle this is, in a way, the most important thing, because we're a great country and we're full of smart people and we nearly always get it right, unless we get in our own way. And it's just like me nations are like people, individuals, in the sense that very often all their greatest wounds are self inflicted. And this whole state of racism, it's a self inflicted wound. Mr. Klein. This was where I was wrong on affirmative action, I think, in the end, when I kicked you around on that. The President. I never wanted it to last forever, and I think that we had to clean up some of the contracting policies and some of the other things. But we Mr. Klein. Have those been done? The President. Well, we made some changes, and I hear a lot of complaining about it from people that have been affected by them. But I still believe that and to be fair to my critics or skeptics, it's a lot easier to sell an affirmative action in good economic times than in tough economic times. I believe what launched the assault on affirmative action in the beginning was that, number one, it did seem to be that nobody was ever reexamining it, its premises. But secondly, the big start was in California because California was suffering so much from a recession in the late eighties and early nineties. And people felt that they were being disenfranchised, and they felt that the circumstances were squeezing in on them anyway, and they didn't want any other burdens that they lost just because they happened to be in the majority. So I think maybe the acid test of whether I was right or not won't come until there's another period of economic difficulty. Welfare Reform Mr. Klein. People argue the same on welfare reform, as well, although The President. But I think there's enough evidence in on that. I think if there are adversities coming out of welfare reform in the next economic downturn, or as far as there are now, it may be because it's largely because of decisions States have made about how to spend or not to spend properly the big extra money they got because we grandfathered them in at the amount of money they were getting when welfare rolls were at their height in February of '94. I think that's when we did that. Maybe it was '96, but I think it was '94. I think we grandfathered them anyway, whatever month it was, we grandfathered their cash flow in when welfare rolls were high, on the theory that we wanted them to spend this money on education, on transportation, on housing assistance, on training people to not just take jobs but to be able to keep jobs, or find new jobs if they lost them. And there are some stories coming in which are troubling, but which have more to do with decisions that were made at the State level. The thing that some of the people who criticized me on the left for welfare reform never understood, I don't think they said, "Oh, gosh, he's ending this national benefit." But that was a joke, because for more than 20 years, by 1996, States had been able to set their own rate. So you had the family support monthly support for a family of three on welfare varied anywhere from a low of 187 a month to a high of 665 a month on the day I signed the welfare reform bill. So to pretend that there was somehow some national income safety net was a joke. Nobody was going to go below 187 a month. And if there was a political consensus for a higher level, they weren't going to go out and gut people. And the idea of spending this money to empower people to go into the workplace and then require people who could do so to try to get their personal act together and access the benefits and go in there, and then letting them keep their medical coverage for a while, is very, very important. The only thing I didn't like about the welfare reform bill was not that it was the immigrant thing. But the two I vetoed everybody acted at the time the only thing that really disturbed me, and I realized I had not succeeded in getting people into the intricacies of welfare policy, was that I had people, both liberals and conservatives, who said, "Well, he vetoed two of them, but he signed the third one because it's getting close to the election, and he wants credit for that." That's not true. The thing we were fighting about was whether or not, if you required people on welfare to go to work and they refused to meet the requirement that is, they acted in a way that violated the responsibility portions of the law how do you minimize the impact on their kids? And what I was unwilling to do, because there was a uniform national benefit there, was to scrap the food stamps or the Medicaid coverage for the children, where we did have a uniform national standard and nowhere near the variations that already existed in the monthly cash payment. So I thought that finally when they agreed to put those back in, I believed, given the way the budget fights were unfolding and by then I was in my second one, in '96 that within a couple of years I would be able to restore most of the immigrant cuts. And sure enough, we did. So I still think that some of them are not right and that we haven't restored, but I think, on balance, the welfare reform bill was a big net advance in American social policy and the right thing to do. Budget Negotiations Mr. Klein. That's an interesting phrase, "given the way the budget fights were unfolding." There seems to have been a pattern since '95, and I think that that may be part of the reason why people might not see the whole of what has gone on here is that a lot of the stuff you've gotten since '95 has come in budget reconciliations at the end of the year The President. Huge. And I've got to give a lot of credit to Panetta and Bowles, who was brilliant at it, and John Podesta and Ricchetti and all these people that worked the Congress, because they and the congressional leadership in our party. Keep in mind, any time that our support among the Democratic minority drops below a third plus one, I have no power in the budget process. So I think that but we have gotten enormous amounts done for poor people, for the cause of education we've gone from a million dollars a year in 3 years to 445 million a year, something like that, in programs for after school. And my budget this year, if we get that, we'll really be able to put an afterschool program in every failing school in America if we get what I asked for this year. Amazing stuff. I think that's one of the reasons that a lot of what we did in education has not been fully appreciated. Education Mr. Klein. Ten million people taking advantage of HOPE scholarships and lifelong learning credits this year, according to Gene. The President. That's right. Mr. Klein. I mean, are you frustrated that this kind of stuff isn't more known? The President. Oh, a little bit. But the main thing for me now is that it's happening. And the other thing that I think is really important I'd just like to mention, that I think almost no one knows, that I think is, over the long run, particularly if we can get it's interesting, the Republicans say they're for accountability, but they won't adopt my "Education Accountability Act," which would require more explicit standards, more explicit "turn around failing schools or shut them down," and voluntary national tests, which they're against, but we're working on it still. But just what we did in '94 in '94, in a little known provision of our reenactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we required States to identify getting Title I money to identify failing schools and to develop strategies to turn them around. States like Kentucky that have taken it seriously have had a breathtaking result. I was down at that little school in Kentucky, in eastern Kentucky, the other day. And it was a failing school, one of the worst in Kentucky, over half the kids on school lunches now ranked in the top 20 elementary schools in Kentucky, in 3 years. Mr. Klein. What did they do? The President. Well, let me tell you the results they got. In 3 years, here's what happened. They went from 12 percent of the kids reading at or above grade level to 57 percent. They went from 5 percent of the kids doing math at or above grade level to 70 percent. They went from zero percent of the kids doing at or above grade level in science to 63 percent in 3 years. And they ranked 18th in the performance of elementary schools in Kentucky. Well, smaller classes, good school leadership, heavy involvement by the parents, and basically measuring their performance. It's stunning I mean, it's just amazing. I was in a school the other day in Spanish Harlem that in 2 years went from 80 percent of the kids doing reading and math at or below grade level to 74 percent of the kids doing reading and math at or above grade level below grade level, 80 percent below, to 74 percent at or above grade level in 2 years. And I know what they did there because I spent a lot of time there. They got a new principal, and they basically they went to a school uniform policy, one of my little ideas that was falsely maligned, had a huge impact. And they basically went to they established goals and results, and you either met them, or you didn't. It's amazing. And these children, the pride these children felt was breathtaking. So one of the things I mean, I think one of the most important accomplishments of the administration was basically opening the doors of college to everybody with the HOPE scholarships and the direct loans. And if we could just get this tuition tax deductibility, then we haven't made it possible for every person making 40,000 to send all their kids to Yale, but we made it possible for everybody to send all their kids somewhere. Mr. Klein. That's not refundable, is it? The President. Not refundable, but it is deductible at the 28 percent level for people that are in the 15 percent income tax bracket. Mr. Klein. Oh, I see. So it's a kind of semideduction. The President. Yes, well, in our proposal you get to deduct up to 10,000 at the 28 percent level even if you're in the 15 percent income tax bracket. So it's not refundable, but for the people that need refundability, they have access to the Pell grants and to loans they can pay back now as a percentage of their income under the direct loan program. Mr. Klein. You're getting restless. Let me ask you one last well, I'm not going to guarantee this is one last. I might want to ask you if I have a few more over time, is there some way I can get in touch with you? The President. Sure. You've interviewed 50 people. You've taken this seriously, so I want to try to Foreign Policy Mr. Klein. Well, it's the last 8 years of my life, too, you know. Laughter And I haven't even asked you about foreign policy, for God sakes. We'll do two things. Let me ask you about foreign policy. It seems to me that if you look at what you did, there are two big things you did in foreign policy. One was raise economic issues to the same level as strategic issues, which was crucial, and the other was to demonstrate over time that America was going to be involved and use force when necessary in the rest of the world. The second one is, obviously, more messy and dicey than the first. The third thing you did was essentially not do anything wrong and do really right things when it came to the big things like Middle East, Russia, China. The messy part of it is the dustups in places like Bosnia, Kosovo. People have told me that you really feel awful that you didn't do more in Rwanda. Is that true? The President. Yes. I don't know that I could have. Let me back up and say, I had a when I came here, came to the White House, I sat down, basically, and made my own list of what I wanted to accomplish in foreign policy. I wanted to maximize the chance that Russia would take the right course. I wanted to maximize the chance that China would take the right course. I wanted to do what I could to minimize these ethnic slaughters, which basically the end of the cold war ripped the lid off. It's not that they didn't occur before, but now they became the main problem with the world. I wanted to try to create a unified Europe, which included an expanded NATO, supporting European unification, and dealing with all the countries around. I wanted to try to get Turkey into Europe as a bulwark against fundamentalist terrorism. That required some progress between Greece and Turkey, and we made some, not enough to suit me. I wanted to try to minimize the turbulence the possibility of war and nuclear war between India and Pakistan, which is something that was not right for my involvement until rather late in my term. But one of the things that and I wanted to try to and I'll leave this until last I wanted to try to broaden the notion in America of what foreign policy and national security was, to include health issues, to include like we made AIDS a national security threat to include climate change, to include the globalized society, all these issues we started talking about. So the one thing I would say to you is that I think this has all occurred kind of under the radar screen I'll come back to Rwanda but one of the things I think should be mentioned is, we have spent an enormous amount of money and time and effort focusing America on how to minimize the threats of biological warfare, of chemical warfare. What are we going to do? Will the miniaturization of the information revolution lead to small scale chemical, biological, even God forbid nuclear weapons? How are we going to deal with that? So we've done a lot of work on that. And to come back to Rwanda, one of the things I've tried to do with Africa is to and Sierra Leone is giving us a good test case here is to increase the capacity of the African nations to deal with their own problems, to support the regional operations like ECOWAS or OAU. And I developed something called the African Crisis Response Initiative, where we would go in and train African militaries. When I was in Senegal, for example, I went out to the community to the training site there, on our trip to Africa, and saw the American soldiers training with the Senegalese to dramatically increase their capacity. What happened basically with Rwanda is, we were obsessed with Bosnia and all the other stuff, and it was over in 90 days. I mean, they basically killed hundreds of thousands of people in 90 days. And I just don't think we were any of us focused on it and whether we could have done something. But I made up my mind that we would certainly try to increase the capacity of Africans to deal with it and we would move in as quickly as we could. And like I said, what happens in Sierra Leone is going to be a little test of that. Mr. Klein. Do you think you were prepared for being a foreign policy leader when you came in? What are the things that you've learned in terms of The President. I would say yes and no. I think Mr. Klein. You had it in principle. The President. I think I had a very because I'd been interested in it since I was a student in college, and I'd always been fascinated by world affairs. So the fact that I had not been a Senator or served in a previous administration I don't think was a particular disadvantage. I think all the economic stuff I think I had right and the fact that there was a lot more in economics involved, and it was about democracy it was about minimizing war it was about lifting people's sights so they had something better to do than killing their neighbors, be they were of a different religion or ethnic group I think we had that right. I think we basically had the nuclear issues right, and the big power issues right with Russia, with China, what we tried to do in the Korean Peninsula. Where I felt I think where I felt some frustration is maybe where even a President with a lot of experience would have felt frustration, a lot of experience in this, which is building the post cold war alliances, which proved to be very frustrating. I mean, we had a lot of frustrations and we got panned a lot, and maybe we deserved some of it, and maybe we didn't in '93 and '94, trying to put together some kind of coalition of our European allies to move in Bosnia. In Kosovo, having had the Bosnia experience, even though there were differences in the alliance, I have nothing but compliments for my allies. They were basically we had our arguments. We should have. Nobody has got a monopoly on truth. But basically, we got together we moved quickly we did the right things. And I think that the idea of how we might even go about mechanically, operationally, dealing with something like Rwanda just wasn't there. The French and others that had been more active in that part of Africa, I think they may have had a better sense of it, although they went in late. Mr. Klein. But you were acting with more confidence, too. You weren't asking you were telling. The President. Yes, well, it happens once you've been around and you know people, you know what it was. But it was I think that some of that, when you've got to have some support from other countries and you can have an uncertain result but you think you have to try, it just takes a while until you get your sea legs and you get everything worked out, particularly when there aren't sort of institutional structures and policies and rules of the road there. And so I think we did get it right. If you take another sort of sad moment of the administration, when we lost our soldiers in Somalia Mr. Klein. Almost at the same time as the ship turned around in the harbor in Port au Prince. The President. When we lost our soldiers in Somalia, it was a very sad thing. But that happened, I think and I hope the Congress will never decline to put people in peacekeeping missions because of it, because basically our guys did a terrific job there. But there was an operational, I think, decision made there, which, if I had to do it again, I might do what we did then, but I would do it in a different way. I remember General Powell coming to me and saying, "Aideed has killed all these Pakistanis, and they're our allies. Somebody needs to try to arrest him, and we're the only people with the capacity to do it." And he said, "We've got a 50 percent chance of getting him, and a 25 percent chance of getting him alive." And so, he said, "I think you ought to do it." And I said, "Okay." But today, with that number of people there and then he retired. He left, like, the next week. I'm not blaming him I'm just saying that he was gone. So what happened was, we had this huge battle in broad daylight where hundreds and hundreds of Somalis were killed, and we lost 18 soldiers, in what was a U.N. action that basically, if I were going to do it again, I would treat it just like if we were going to do that, I'd say, "Okay, I need to know what's involved here, and let's do this the way we planned out the military action we took against Saddam Hussein, for example, or the military action I took to try to get Usama bin Ladin's training camps, or anything else." It doesn't mean America shouldn't be involved in peacekeeping, but it means if you go beyond the normal parameters that you decide on the front end, then the United States has to operate in a very different way. Mr. Klein. There doesn't seem to be a uniform set of ground rules yet in place. The President. I don't think there is, but we're getting there. Mr. Klein. Should there be? Could there be? The President. I think it's pretty hard, but I think you anyway, I will always regret that. I don't know if I could have saved those lives or not, because I think what we were trying to do was the right thing to do, and the people who were there on the ground did the best they could. But I would have handled it in a different way if I had more experience, I think. I know I would have. The only other thing I was going to say about this is that we talked about earlier how I hope in the future that the Congress will give more support to science and technology, beyond NIH. I hope in the future the Congress will give more support to our national security budget beyond the defense budget. As well off as we are, one real big problem, we should be spending much more than we're spending, in my judgment, to fight global disease, to promote global development, to facilitate global peacemaking and peacekeeping. I think that we need to succeed in getting the bipartisan majority in Congress with a much broader view, because people look at us, and they know how much money we've got, and they know what our surplus is. And all these other countries are struggling, and we shouldn't be so begrudging I fight with the Congress all the time in our contributions to peacekeeping and to creating the conditions in which democracy and peace will flourish. I'm encouraged by how Congress voted in this Colombia package because it's a balanced package, and it has a lot of nonmilitary, nonpolice stuff in it. And I'm hopeful that we'll have a more I saw Ben Gilman had a very good article somebody else he and a Democrat, I can't remember who it was, wrote an article in the L.A. Times yesterday talking about the importance of the United States taking the lead in the international fight against global disease. That's one thing that I hope, after I'm gone, I hope that the next President will be more successful at than I was. President's Future Plans Mr. Klein. Let me ask you this is it after you're gone, you're going to be the youngest ex President since Teddy Roosevelt. If there was one thing that Teddy Roosevelt did absolutely awful, it was be an ex President. I mean, he was really terrible at it because he was so engaged, so involved, and he couldn't quit kibitzing. The President. Well, he felt, to be fair to him, that the Republicans had abandoned his philosophy. He felt Taft had kind of let him down. Mr. Klein. You also have a restraining amendment in the Constitution that he didn't. But do you worry about that? The President. No. Well, I do, because laughter but not in the way you think. I don't think that the next President, whoever it is, will have problems with me acting like I wish I were still President. I mean, I think I know how to behave, and I've been here, and I want my country to succeed. And for my country to succeed, the Presidency has to function. And I don't want to complicate that. So the challenge I have is to figure out how to have a meaningful life, how to use all this phenomenal experience I've got and what I know and the ideas I have in a way that helps my country and helps the things I believe in around the world and doesn't get in the way of the next President. And that's what I have to do. I've got to figure out how to do it. Mr. Klein. Any thoughts? The President. I've thought about it, but I'm not ready to talk about it yet. But the one thing that I laughter Mr. Klein. You've talked about everything else today. Laughter Philosophy of the Presidency The President. Yes, but the one thing that I the reason I wanted to spend so much time with this interview if you want to talk to me anymore, just call, and we'll talk more on the phone is that you always knew and even when you got mad at me, it was because you thought I'd stopped it that I would take this job seriously. I mean, the basic thing that I can tell you about this is, I will leave Washington, believe it or not, after all I've been through, more idealistic than I showed up here as, because I believe that if you have a serious Presidency, if you have ideas and you're willing to work and you're not so pig headed that you think you've got the total truth and you work with other people and you just keep working at it and you're willing to win in inches as well as feet, that a phenomenal amount of positive things can happen. And you always thought that I was trying to have a serious Presidency. That's all I ever wanted. Mr. Klein. I got pretty pissed off at times. The President. Yes, that was all right. But at least but when you were mad, it was because you thought I was abandoning something I said I would do, that I was trying to do. I never had any my frustration was with the people in your line of work that I thought didn't take all this seriously, that thought it didn't matter one way or the other, that thought it was some game, or who was up or who was down, or where was the power equation, or something. Because it really does matter. There are consequences to the ideas people have. One of the worries I have about this election is all these people writing as if there is no differences and there are no consequences. The American people should make a judgment knowing that there are differences and there are consequences and it matters what you do. The thing that I think the last several years has shown is that a lot of these problems yield to effort. And if you're willing to just put in a few years of effort, you can push a lot of rocks up a lot of hills. People should feel really good about that. One of the things that I hope when I leave office that people will say is, I hope that there will be a greater sense of self confidence about what America can achieve. But it requires you everybody has got to play politics, and I understand all that. I don't want to get sanctimonious about that just because I'm not running for office for the first time in 26 years. That's part of the political system. And everybody will take their shots and do this. But in the end, the Presidency should be informed by a set not just of core principles and core values but ideas that there ought to be an agenda here. People ought to always be trying to get something done. And you shouldn't be deterred by people saying it's not big enough, or it's too big, or all that. There ought to be a broad based view of where the world should go and what the role of the Presidency is in taking America where it should go. And as long as there is, I think our country is going to do pretty well. In that sense, I will leave office phenomenally optimistic. And everything I ever believed about the American people has been confirmed by my experience here. If they have enough time and enough information, no matter how it's thrown at them, in how many pieces and how slanted it is or whether it's inflammatory or whether it's designed to produce sedation, no matter what happens, they nearly always get it right. That's the only reason we're around here after the Founding Fathers were right. Democracy, if given a chance to work, really does. If there's enough time and enough information, the American people nearly always get it right. So, in that sense, I just I'm grateful I've had the chance to serve. I've had the time of my life. I've loved it. Probably good we've got a 22d amendment. If we didn't, I'd probably try to do it for 4 more years. Laughter Mr. Klein. Well, I'll tell you something turning this off two things. One is, every last campaign I've covered since '92, I found myself judging against that one, in just big ways and little ways. And the other thing I promised my son I'd tell you he's just finishing up his first tour as a foreign service officer in Turkmenistan, and he said his proudest possession is his commission document with your signature on it. The President. Wow. Well, if you go back to that '92 campaign, it just shows you, though the only other thing I would say is, I think I was so advantaged by having been a Governor for 10 years when I started running, or however long I'd been serving, and having had the opportunity to develop these ideas over time and then to measure them against the experience I've had. I still think ideas and organized, concentrated effort mattered. No President with an ambitious agenda will fail to make errors. Things happen in other people's lives. Maybe something will happen to the next President. God knows they won't go through what I did, but maybe their kids will get sick. Things happen in people's lives, and mistakes get made. And sometimes you just make a wrong call. But if you've got if you're serious and you've got a good agenda and you have good people and you work at it in a steady way, you get results. It really is a job like other jobs. That's another thing I think it's important you said something in your letter to me, which I think is true, that maybe we had removed all the mystery around the President Mr. Klein.I didn't even get a chance to ask that question. The President. and maybe that's not good. And maybe that's not good, but I do believe that we need to demystify the job. It is a job. And if you love your country and you've got something you want to do and you've thought it through and you've put together a good team and you're willing to be relentless and to exhaust yourself in the effort, results will come. That's what I would like the American people to know. They should be very optimistic about this. Diversity Mr. Klein. You know, they are. They're in such great shape right now. I noticed it traveling around this year. It's not just everybody is getting along, but they appreciate the thing that you always said way back when, which is that diversity is a strength. Sandy was telling me about your first G 7 conference, which I don't expect you to talk about on the record, but he was telling me about how the Japanese were lecturing you about how to run an economy. And when you took office, most people believed that we were going to get taken to the cleaners by the Japanese and the Germans, because they were homogenous and we were mongrels. And now most people you know, most of those Archie Bunkers out in Queens have a niece or a nephew who is dating a Puerto Rican at this point. And most people The President. Or an Indian or a Pakistani. I went to a school in Queens the other day, and I mean, I thought I was there was one guy there, I could swear the kid was from Mongolia. There were a lot of East Asians. There were a lot of South Asians. There were all the Puerto Ricans. There were all the other Latins, you know. But the test that that's not over, but I think people are beginning to feel good about it. Mr. Klein. Well, I mean, kids my kids' age, your kid's age, think it's a positive value. The President. It is a positive value. It makes life more interesting. I keep telling everybody, the trick is to figure out how to respect all these people's other people's traditions, religions, the whole thing, cherish your own, and then but the only way to make it work, which is why I keep citing this human genome finding that we're 99.9 percent the same, is to realize that the differences make life interesting, but the similarities are fundamental. If you can get people to think that what we have in common is fundamental, but the differences make life more interesting then I think we'll be okay. And I still think that's still the most important thing of all. It's even more important than the right economic policy, because eventually we'll get all that stuff. We'll make mistakes we'll correct it. But if your whole heart and mind and spirit is wrongly turned, then you can do everything else right, and you still come a cropper. You'll have problems. So I really I think this advance in race relations is profoundly important. I'll give you one exhibit A was old Gordon Smith's speech for the hate crimes bill. Did you see that? June 28, 2000 The President. Good afternoon. This has been a good week for the American people first, the landmark breakthrough in human genomic research, which promises to eradicate once incurable diseases and revolutionize health care for a very long time to come second, the release of the midsession review, which told us that the health of our economy continues its remarkable expansion. Our budget surplus this year will be the largest in history, 211 billion. Over the next 10 years, after we lock away Medicare and Social Security surpluses, the remaining surplus is expected to be almost 1.5 trillion. This progress exceeds even our own predictions just 4 months ago, another milestone in what is now the longest economic expansion in our history. This is a tribute to the hard work of the American people and our commitment to fiscal discipline, expanded trade, and investments in our people and our future. Now is not the time to abandon the path that has brought us here. We must use this moment of prosperity to make important investments in our most pressing priorities. Chief among them is the need to provide affordable, reliable prescription drug coverage to our seniors. There is no question that this is a critical need. Just yesterday a study released showed that prescription drugs shot up over 10 percent last year alone. That is too heavy a burden for our older seniors to pay and for our people with disabilities to pay. There are some who say we can't provide affordable, accessible prescription drug coverage for all our seniors. I believe that's wrong. With millions of them without coverage, the absence of prescription drug coverage is a fatal flaw in our present health care system. Think about it. Because of breakthroughs like the human genome project, in our lifetime, there may be new life saving drug treatments for many dreaded diseases. But they won't mean anything if our seniors and people with disabilities can't afford them. That's what this debate is really all about. Today the House is set to vote on a prescription drug plan that amounts to an empty promise for too many of our seniors. It's a private insurance plan that many seniors and people with disabilities simply won't be able to afford. Insurers, themselves, say the Republican plan won't work. The bottom line is, their plan is designed to benefit the companies who make the prescription drugs, not the older Americans who need to take them. It puts special interest above the public interest. Let me make it specific and clear. This plan would not guarantee affordable prescription drugs to single senior citizens with incomes above 12,600 a year or to senior couples with incomes above 16,600 a year. And we have all heard countless, countless stories of those with crushing medical burdens, that if they could get these prescription drugs, would have their lives lengthened and the quality of their lives improved. An article in today's paper reveals that a group calling itself Citizens for Better Medicare is running I give it points for chutzpa Citizens for Better Medicare is running millions of dollars in ads to kill our prescription drug proposal. You'd think a group with this name would be in favor of affordable Medicare prescription drug coverage for all seniors and people with disabilities, but this is one of those mysterious interest groups whose financial backers are cloaked in secrecy. Now, just last night the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force groups like this to open their books and disclose their fundraising sources to the American people. I applaud the House for this vote and all those, Democrats and Republicans, who voted for it. With the vote on Medicare in the House, I call on Citizens for Better Medicare to respect the will of the Congress and reveal the sources of their support today. We should let the American people judge who is truly interested in better Medicare. It is clear that this lobbying effort is part of a larger campaign to block real progress. In fact, the Republican leadership in Congress won't even allow our prescription plan to come up for a vote in the House I suspect, because they're afraid it would pass. I have offered a Medicare prescription drug benefit that is voluntary and affordable. My plan puts the interest of seniors first. Whether you're on a fixed income, live in a big city or a rural area, the plan is dependable, and it is affordable. This is particularly important for rural Americans. More than half of our oldest seniors in rural communities go the entire year without any prescription drug coverage at all. Earlier this week, in an effort to break the logjam, I offered a compromise proposal to give seniors the relief they desperately need. I said we could pass a prescription drug benefit while providing real tax relief to married couples, something the majority in Congress say they want to do. And we could do both now within the framework of fiscal responsibility. As the Vice President has proposed, the first thing we should do is to take the Medicare tax receipts we get off budget so they are saved for Medicare alone and, meanwhile, used to pay down the debt. That will do more to protect and strengthen Medicare. It will help extend the life of the Medicare Trust Fund to 2023. It will put us in a position to pay down the debt completely by 2012, a year ahead of schedule. It will enable us still to set aside 500 billion to reserve for America's future, to be used after a full debate and after this year's elections to meet the country's key priorities. Now, with less than 35 days left in the legislative year, time is running out for Congress to meet its obligations to the American people. They have to make the tough choices to get something done or continue to be dragged down by the weight of special interests. So again I ask Congress, let's not waste these precious weeks. It's time to get down to business, to pass a strong Patients' Bill of Rights to raise the minimum wage by one dollar over 2 years to pass the commonsense gun legislation to hold tobacco companies, not taxpayers, accountable for the health care costs of tobacco to pass hate crimes legislation to finish the jobs of giving American businesses and farmers access to a huge new market by passing permanent normal trade relations with China to open new markets to American investors here at home to bring prosperity to people in places who have been left behind and most important of all, to continue to improve our schools, to demand more of them and invest more in them, including more teachers for smaller class sizes, after school programs for all our kids who need them, and repairing or modernizing thousands of our schools that are today literally falling apart or so overcrowded they can't contain all the kids. We can still do a lot of this if we work together in the days ahead. That's what the American people want us to do, even in an election year. There's been some encouraging developments in this Congress. We lifted the earnings limit on Social Security we passed the Africa Caribbean Basin trade bill. Apparently, the bill to aid Colombia is making good progress. And I think the China legislation will pass if we can get it up to a vote in a timely fashion. So the Congress can do a lot of things, and I hope they will, and I'm looking forward to work with them. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Cuba U.S. Relations Q. Mr. President, after 7 months, the Elian Gonzalez case is coming to a conclusion, removing a thorn from U.S. Cuban relations. And House Republican leaders have struck a deal to ease decades old sanctions against Cuba. Would you accept that legislation? Is it time to normalize relations with Fidel Castro's government? What would that take? The President. Let me deal with the questions separately. First, on the question of the legislation proposed by Mr. Nethercutt If I believe that the legislation essentially allows for the sales of American food and medicine to Cuba or to other countries, but has some protection for us for extraordinary circumstances that foreign policy might require, like Senator Lugar's bill does in the Senate, then I would be inclined to sign the bill and to support it. I've always wanted to sell more food and medicine not only to Cuba but to other countries as well. I have some concerns about it, and I just have to analyze the bill as it passed and whatever legislation finally makes its way to my desk, because, as I understand it, they put some new restrictions on travel to Cuba, which might undermine our people to people contacts, which had been more and more extensive over the last several months and which, I believe, to be very important. And since no Federal programs can be used to help finance these food sales, as they can be to other countries, we need an analysis of whether there actually will be more sales under the legislation. So I guess what I want to know and I just haven't had time to get the analysis from our folks is whether this will be a net plus in terms of our strategy, which is to reach out to the Cuban people without supporting the Cuban Government. Now, the second question you ask is whether it's time to move toward normalization. Let me just do a little history here. In 1992, when I was running for President, the Congress passed the Cuban Democracy Act, and President Bush signed it, and I strongly supported the bill. The bill seemed to strengthen economic sanctions on Cuba but actually provided a specific, stepby step way for us to move toward normalizing relations. And we were in the process of doing that. We did it in '93, '94, '95. We were moving toward sort of we would do something they would do something. It was working, I thought, quite well. And I thought the law was actually quite good. And then, the Cuban Air Force shot the planes down and killed American citizens illegally and deliberately. And so, since after that, the Helms Burton bill passed, and it codified the embargo. So the real answer to your question is, I don't believe that we can change that law until there is a bipartisan majority which believes that there has been some effort on the part of the Cuban Government to reach out to us, as well. I like the old law I thought it was working well. The killing of those innocent people in those two airplanes changed all that. And now we're in a position where until there is a bipartisan majority of Congress persuaded that there has been a fundamental change, we can't do more than what I've been doing, which is to try to aggressively expand people to people contacts. That brings us back to the Nethercutt bill. If I think, on balance, it allows the President not just me, my successor as well to pursue our foreign policy interest and will, on balance, further that policy, then I would support it. But I want to analyze it for the reasons that I said. Go ahead, Steve Steve Holland, Reuters . Middle East Peace Process Q. There are reports that Israel and the Palestinians will be coming to Washington next week for talks. Do you think enough progress is being made to arrange a Middle East summit, or are you discouraged? And secondly, should Israel stop the sale of radar systems to China? The President. Let me answer the second question first because that's a much clearer one. We're very concerned about that sale, and I've talked to Prime Minister Barak about it extensively. And as you know, there's a lot of concern in the Congress, so we're still working on that. Now, in terms of their coming here for talks, there has been no date set. I do not believe that they can resolve the final, most difficult issues without having the leaders get together in some isolated setting and make the last tough decisions or decide not to make them, as the case may be. Of all the issues involved with regard to all the parties in the Middle East peace talks, the final status issues between the Israelis and the Palestinians are the most difficult. I do not, however, believe they're going to get any easier with the passage of time. I think that some foreign policy problems the answer is to kick the can down the road and wait for them to get better and hope time takes care of them. Some have to be decided sooner or later, and sooner is better than later. My own instinct is that the cluster of problems here would be better off being resolved sooner rather than later. I've had Mr. Ross out in the Middle East, and then Secretary Albright went, and she's going to give me a report. And when she does, then I'll make a judgment about whether the time is right to ask them to come here. But I have not made that decision yet. Go ahead, Paul Paul Singer, United Press International . Death Penalty Q. A death penalty question, sir. Do you believe that Governor Bush made the wrong decision by allowing Mr. Graham to go to his death last week? And secondly, do you believe it's time for the American people to stop and reassess where we stand on implementation of the death penalty in this country? The President. Well, on the Texas case, I didn't read the file. All I know about it is what I've read about it in the press. But let me say generally what I think. I think that those of us who support the death penalty have an extra heavy responsibility to assure both that the result is accurate and that the process was fair and constitutional. And that means, to me, at least in modern terms, the broadest possible use of DNA evidence and the strongest possible effort to guarantee adequate assistance of counsel. That's a big issue. And I think those were two of the reasons that motivated Governor Ryan in Illinois to do what he did, and have driven a lot of other things in this debate. So that's where I think it is. Now, I don't know that the American people have changed their position that it's still an appropriate penalty under certain severe circumstances, and I haven't. But I am concerned also, at the Federal level, with the I don't believe that adequate assistance of counsel is an issue in the Federal cases. And as far as I know, there are no cases in which the question of DNA is an issue. There may be. I don't know if there are some. The issues at the Federal level relate more to the disturbing racial composition of those who have been convicted and the apparent fact that almost all the convictions are coming out of just a handful of States, which raises the question of whether, even though there is a uniform law across the country, what your prosecution is may turn solely on where you committed the crime. I've got a review underway of both those issues at this time. Yes, Bill Bill Plante, CBS News . 1996 Campaign Finance Investigation Q. Mr. President, as you know, for the third time, a Justice Department investigation has recommended that the Vice President's activities in fundraising during the last campaign cycle be looked into. Previously, on two occasions, the Attorney General has declined to do this. Would it be better for the Attorney General, for your administration, and for the Vice President's candidacy if he invited such an investigation? The President. Well, first let me say, my understanding is I know this is true in the previous cases, and I think it's true here is that there are some people in the Justice Department that think there should be and some who think there shouldn't be. And the Attorney General, who has shown no reluctance to ask for a special counsel when she thought one was called for, didn't think one was called for in this case, and she reaffirmed that yesterday. I think the fact that the Vice President released the transcript of his interview was a very good thing, because some Republican Senators had made some assertions about it that just weren't so they weren't true. And now that the whole thing has been put out in the public, it seems to me that the best thing to do is for the American people to make their own judgments about it. But I don't see any reason that the Attorney General shouldn't make a decision in this case, as she has in every other one. Claire Claire Shipman, NBC . Vice President Al Gore Q. Another question about your Vice President. A year ago when people looked at his poll numbers compared to the Texas Governor's, his supporters would say, "Oh, the election is a long way off." Six months ago people were saying the election's a long way off with those same poll numbers, and today, his supporters are still saying that. And I wonder, do you think it's time to suggest that this might be a trend, that there is a reason why the Vice President is trailing the Texas Governor in the polls? And secondly, you have said that the Vice President will not be held accountable, that the American people will not hold him accountable, for the scandals of this administration. Do you still believe that's the case or is this, in fact, part of it? The President. Well, first of all, I said no, let me say exactly what I said I said that the people would not hold him responsible for anything I did that they didn't agree with or that was wrong, and that's clearly true. That's still true. There is no evidence of that in the surveys. Secondly, let me remind you that a lot of these other so called scandals were bogus. Mike Espy was acquitted. The Cisneros thing was a tempest in a teapot, totally overdone, and you all know that the Whitewater thing was bogus from day one. It had nothing to do with the official conduct of the administration, anyway. Now, so the word "scandal" has been thrown around here like a clanging teapot for 7 years. And I keep waiting for somebody to say I noticed there was one columnist in the Washington Post that had the uncommon decency to say, "Will no one ever stand up here and say that a whole bunch of this stuff was just garbage and that we had totally innocent people prosecuted because they wouldn't lie? We had totally innocent people's lives wrecked because they wouldn't go along with this alleged scandal machine." So let's be careful let's be specific. Now, I've already told you, my view is that the Vice President, on the only thing as far as I know that he's been in any way implicated in is this campaign finance thing. He put out the whole transcript of his interview, made himself available for questions, and, I thought, made a very compelling case and certainly demonstrated that a lot of the accusations against him with regard to that are not so. There was also a very interesting article I think in the National Law Journal which basically went through all of the things and concluded that there was no basis for a lot of these criticisms of him, under these circumstances. And I think another magazine here maybe the New Republic, the Washington Monthly one of those other magazines had an analysis of it. So I think that we should be very careful in throwing that around. Now, let me come back to the polls. First of all, I must say, I haven't seen any or done any lately, so I don't know. But I'm perplexed that I can't remember a time when we had two major polls coming out within a couple of days of each other that had 13 points difference. One said there was a 13 point difference in the race the other one said it was tied and they came out, they were done within 2 or 3 days of each other. I don't think either one of those pollsters rigged the results, so my instinct is that people are still trying to figure out what they think about this race. And all I can tell you is, I know three things, and I've said this over and over again. I know three things. One is, no person in the history of the Republic has ever had the positive impact on this country as Vice President that Al Gore has had. That is a historical fact. We've had a lot of Presidents who were Vice Presidents who were great Presidents. Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman were great Presidents, but not because of their service as Vice President. Nobody has ever done as much for America as Vice President as Al Gore has. Therefore, in my lifetime, he's the best qualified person to serve. The second thing is, I believe that he's right on the issues. I think his economic policy is right. I think it's far more likely to keep the prosperity of this country going. I think it's far more likely to include people that would otherwise be left out. And the third thing is, I think it's important that somebody be elected that understands the future. We just announced this genome project yesterday. What are we going to do to make sure there's no genetic discrimination? A lot of people will want genetic discrimination in employment, in promotion, in extension of health insurance. What are we going to do to make sure it doesn't exist? What are we going to do to make sure, in the computer revolution, that there's no violation of people's privacy rights with their health and financial records? A lot of people will want to get that private health and financial information. So I think that what will happen is, we'll come to the conventions we'll have these debates and somehow I've been amazed by an amazing volatility since the end you know, at the end of the primary campaign, most of the polls had him up a point or two. So there's a been a lot of volatility in these polls, and my best judgment is that people are still trying to figure out what they're going to do. And sooner or later they will. I don't think they have and I think they know those three things about Al Gore, and it's still more likely than not that he will win. Yes. Cuba U.S. Relations Q. Mr. President, you've spoken to the congressional constraints that are attached to your ability to deal with Cuba, and yet, a hallmark of your foreign policy, sir, has been a commitment to engagement, the idea that American trade and investment, ideas and practices can be powerful engines of change China, Russia, Vietnam, now even North Korea. Do you think, sir, that it's in the American interest not to have those tools available in dealing with Cuba? Do you think there's any prospect at all that the current policy will actually work? And after 40 years and now nine Presidents, do you think the time has come to reassess? The President. I think the next I like I'll go back. I like the system that exists under the Cuban Democracy Act. I think Congress has a role to play here, but I like the Cuban Democracy Act. I think it's not wise to take away from the President all the tools of diplomacy with regard to one country that he might have, or she might have, some day with another country. So I like that. But I will say again, there was a reason for that. All these other countries you mentioned, none of them none of them by order of the leader of the country, killed, murdered two airplanes' worth of people. I think there were four people involved. These people were killed illegally. It violated the Chicago convention. Even if you believe that those planes were in Cuban airspace, which we believe they were not, they could not legally be shot down. Now, let's not that changed everything. The deliberate decision to murder those people changed everything. And it made me wonder whether Mr. Castro was hoping we never would normalize relations, so then he could use us as an excuse for the failures of his regime. But we are where we are here. What have I done? I was aggressively moving to implement the Cuban Democracy Act before that happened. Since then, we have done everything we could and I noticed there was one article about it last week which pointed out how Secretary Albright had dramatically increased the people to people contacts and the travel to Cuba. We are doing what we can. Obviously, I think that anything we can do to engage the Cuban people, to get them involved in the process of change, to get them to look outside the world, to get them to look beyond the present system they have, is a positive thing to do. And that's why I answered in response to that very first question, to evaluate the legislation in the House on the food and medicine sales, I've got to really have an analysis of it to say, will the restrictions and personal contact, which the legislation imposes which I think are a mistake be outweighed by the increased sales of food and medicine, in terms of the ultimate benefit to the Cuban people? And I will look at it and see. Yes, George George Condon, Copley News Service . Supreme Court Decision on Partial Birth Abortion Q. Mr. President, does the closeness of today's abortion vote in the Supreme Court suggest to you that abortion rights are at risk in the next court? Or does it suggest that the fact that partial birth abortion can survive even a conservative court say that they aren't as threatened as some believe? The President. Well, first, I think the court decision is clearly the only decision it could reach consistent with Roe v. Wade. So I think what you know there is that that's the vote for Roe v. Wade. You can't have a rule like the rule of Roe and then ignore it. So that's why if you remember, on this late term abortion issue a couple of years ago, I pleaded with the Congress to adopt a broad limitation on lateterm abortions consistent with Roe v. Wade, but to make an exception for the life and health of the mother, as the Supreme Court decision required. They declined to do that, and so we've had a political impasse here, and then you've seen what's happened in all these States. So the decision is, I think, consistent with Roe v. Wade. And as you pointed out, it was narrowly upheld. I think that's about what the vote for Roe is. And I think that in the next 4 years, there will be somewhere between two and four appointments to the Supreme Court, and depending on who those appointees are, I think the rule will either be maintained or overturned. And I think that it's very much in the balance, depending on what appointments are made in the next 4 years. That's what I believe. Yes, go ahead, Larry Larry McQuillan, USA Today . Gasoline Prices and Energy Policy Q. Mr. President, Governor Bush has been critical of you and the energy policy of the administration, saying that you've failed to adequately convince OPEC to increase oil production. He also claims that, if he became President, he'd be able to use personal diplomacy to persuade allies, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to, I believe he said, turn on the spigot. Do you find that kind of claim realistic? And do you have any reaction to his criticism of you? The President. Well, first of all, I have spent an enormous amount of time on this in the last several months, and there have been two decisions by OPEC to increase production not as much as we would like. If you look at the allocation of the production increases against the real capacity of those countries, most countries don't have the capacity to produce much more than their latest allocation, except for the Saudis. And it's clear that they were trying to maintain some sort of harmony within the OPEC family. Let's go back. I think that these big increases in gasoline prices in America are the result, as I said, I think, several weeks ago, first and foremost, of the unfortunate decision of OPEC several months ago to cut back production at the very time the world economy was growing. They left production out there when the world economy sunk, which is one reason we had very inexpensive gas prices for a good period of time. And these two developments grated up against each other. So that's the first thing. Then the second thing is, we had here, as you know, in America so we had a tight supply situation. Then we had some broken pipelines, which interrupted supplies, which caused a temporary spike. And then in the Midwest we did have, apparently, some, but I think quite a modest, impact on prices because of the intersection of the clean air rules with trying to mix the fuels in a different way, particularly ethanol. And I think what we have to do now is to keep doing what we can to get production up, to let this FTC investigation proceed. I think the gas prices have dropped 8 cents a gallon in the Midwest and, in the blended fuels area, 12 1 2 cents a gallon just since the investigation was announced. But the main thing I would say to you is, we need a long term energy strategy to maximize conservation and maximize the development of alternative sources of energy and also maximize domestic sources of energy. Now, let me just mention two or three things I've mentioned this before. The House, by the way, has reauthorized the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and I compliment them on that. That's a good thing. We also need a home heating oil reserve for the Northeast. We need to do that. That's very important. We ought to pass my proposal to provide tax credits to people who manufacture or buy energy efficient homes, cars, and consumer products. That ought to be done. We ought to pass my appropriations to help develop alternative sources of energy and energy conservation technologies. Since I've been President, or since '95, anyway, the Congress has approved approximately 12 percent of my requests, and the House voted to zero our participation in the Partnership for New Generation Vehicles. This kind of research is just as important as the human genome research in terms of the role of the Government in this. A lot of this basic research needs to be done by the Government. We can be driving cars that get 80 miles to the gallon through fuel cells, through electric cars, through natural gas fuel, a lot of other options, within a matter of 3 or 4 years if we'll just get after it and treat this like it's important. So I think that's very important. Let me just mention one other thing. I think it's very important to pass a comprehensive electricity restructuring proposal, because they also, the electricity companies also electric companies use traditional fuels, and if we can reduce their reliance on it, obviously it will lower the price for other purposes. I think there's 20 billion a year in savings to the American people through electricity restructuring, which is also quite important. Yesterday the Vice President issued a number of other proposals, including what he said he felt should be done with some of the surplus, which dealt with energy efficiency in factories and power plants. And all the analyses there show that there are massive, massive savings there, again, which would not only cut their bills but by freeing up supply would lower the overall price of the fuel that we need. So that's the system we need. We need to it's all out there. It's not like we don't know that these technologies are there. It's not like we don't know we have options for conservation. Some of you were with me, I think it was 3 years ago now, when I went out to San Bernardino, California, to a stop on the rail line outside Los Angeles, to a lower income housing project where they promised 40 percent lower utility bills, using elemental solar reflectors that looked like just little shingles on roofs, better windows, better insulation. And I can tell you, after 3 years, the average utility bills are 65 percent lower than they would be for that kind of floorspace for those families in other places in California. So it's out there. All we have to do is to make up our mind that we're going to accelerate this. That's what I think we should be doing. Q. Mr. President, does that mean that Governor Bush is oversimplifying things when he points to places like The President. Yes, I think that it's a we all rate our powers of persuasion differently, you know, and our powers of persuasion sometimes work when people's interests are involved and sometimes don't. But it's not just a question of how much oil is being pumped. And obviously, I have done what I could in the way I felt was most effective to increase production. I will continue to do that. But I think it's a simple answer to a complex problem and although I saw that story that one of you put out about his 1992 letter in which he was arguing for high energy prices. So I'm glad that he's changed his position anyway. It's amazing how a few years will do that to you. So I like that. Yes, John John Harris, Washington Post . Presidential Decisionmaking Q. Mr. President, supporters of Vice President Gore have been fairly blunt in raising questions about whether Governor Bush has the knowledge and depth to be President. On the other hand, many scholars have noted that Ronald Reagan managed to be effective by concentrating on a few big ideas and leaving the details to others. In your experience here, how important is command of facts and plain old brainpower to being President? Are there other qualities that are more important? Laughter The President. That's a dead bang loser, isn't it? Laughter No matter what I say, I'm in a big hole. Well, first of all, I don't think it's so much a question of intelligence, generically. I think it's more a question of curiosity and willingness to learn what you think is important, and learn I guess I think that no President can say, "Well, it should be enough for the voters if I get the best advisers in my party, and they come up with a position, and I take it." So what the voters will have to analyze here is, how important is the fact that Al Gore spent 20 years working on arms control issues, for example, and dealing with all these things. How much of an effort see, I ran as a Governor, although I had been a Governor a lot longer but how important is what you know, what you've learned in the job you've got? And I think this is a question that's more readily addressed, really, to the candidates than to me. I'm a different person. Everybody's different here. So I always felt that I needed to know as much as I could, not so I could make decisions without experts and without advisers but so I'd be in the best position to evaluate the advice I was getting. But it's very important for a President not to try to micromanage the Presidency. So what you try to do is to find a balance between because it's a deciding job it's a deciding job. And a lot of our Presidents, I think, have had some problems, not because they knew too much but almost because they worked so hard that they were so tired, they maybe couldn't make really good decisions when they were tired. But I think what you know counts, because I think the more you know, the better position you're in, not only to draw your own conclusions but to take advice. And so, I think what the best is a balance, obviously. It's like everything else in life the best is a balance. The best is a President that's had broad experience and that knows a lot and that is curious I think curiosity is profoundly important but also a President who understands what the big, important things are and then can listen to the right people. You've got to have a blend of both if you want to make the best decisions. That's my view. Mark Mark Knoller, CBS Radio . Supreme Court Decision on Gays in the Boy Scouts Q. Mr. President, what do you think of the Justices' ruling this morning that allows the Boy Scouts to bar gays as leaders? And if you disagree with it, can you justify your role as honorary president of the Boy Scouts, which discriminates against gays and atheists? The President. Well, first of all, the Court's ruling, I noticed with interest I haven't read it yet, but I did get a pretty good report on it I noted with interest that they seem to go out of their way to draw the ruling quite narrowly and to limit it strictly to the question of whether the Boy Scouts could pick the people who were going to be Scout leaders. I, generally I have to tell you, I'm generally against discrimination against gays, and I think that the country has moved a long way. And I'm proud of the things that we've been able to do, and I'm disappointed we haven't been able to do more in some areas, but I think we're moving in the right direction. And I think that's all I should say. The Boy Scouts still are they're a great group. They do a lot of good. And I would hope that this is just one step along the way of a movement toward greater inclusion for our society, because I think that's the direction we ought to be going in. Go ahead, Jim Jim Angle, Fox News . Elian Gonzalez Q. Thank you, Mr. President. As you know, the Supreme Court declined to intervene today either to stop Elian Gonzalez from leaving the country or to overrule other courts, all of which have deferred to your administration. As you look back on this The President. That's pretty rare, isn't it? Laughter Q. As you look back on this, sir, do you have any sense, any regrets, at all about the way your administration handled this matter? And in light of what you've said about Cuba here today, sir, do you have any second thoughts about Elian returning to Cuba? The President. Well, if he and his father had decided they wanted to stay here, it would be fine with me. But I think that the most important thing is that his father was adjudged by a people who made an honest effort to determine that he was a good father, a loving father, committed to the son's welfare. And we upheld here what I think is a quite important principle, as well as what is clearly the law of the United States. Do I wish it had unfolded in a less dramatic, less traumatic way for all concerned? Of course I do. I have replayed this in my mind many times. I don't know that we had many different options than we pursued, given how the thing developed. But I think the fundamental principle is the right one, and I'm glad we did. I was just in Germany, having a discussion with Chancellor Schroeder about some family reunification issues where we have serious differences with the Germans, who are our great allies, on this. And as I looked and reviewed some of these cases that I've tried to bring to the attention of the German officials, it made me even more convinced that we had upheld the proper principle here. Yes, John John King, Cable News Network . National Missile Defense System Q. Mr. President, we hear increasingly from senior officials here and at the Pentagon that when it comes to national missile defense, you're inclined, essentially, to split the difference, authorize the contracting but leave the decision about whether to break from the ABM Treaty to the next President. Is that a fair reflection of your thinking? The President. The most important thing I can say to you about that today is that I have not made a final decision and that most of this speculation that is coming in the press is coming from people who have not talked to me about it. Let me try to at least set up the thing, because I'm working hard on it now. Remember when we put out when Congress passed a law about this a couple years ago, you remember, and we had to sort of come up with some timetables, I said two things that I want to repeat today. First of all, insofar as there might be technology available which would protect us and other people around the world from missile attacks with warheads of weapons of mass destruction, obviously, anybody would have a moral obligation to explore that technology and its potential. I believe that. Secondly, whether I would make a decision to go forward with deployment would depend upon four things one, the nature of the threat two, the feasibility of the technology three, the cost and, therefore, the relative cost of doing this as compared with something else to protect the national security and four, the overall impact on our national security, which includes our nuclear allies and our European alliance, our relationships with Russia, our relationships with China, what the boomerang effect might be about whatever China might do in South Asia, with the Indians and then the Pakistanis, and so on. So what I have tried to do since then is to say as little as possible, except to explore what would have to be done in our relationships with the Europeans, our allies, and with the Russians, in the first instance, to keep our options open could we get an agreed upon modification to the ABM Treaty. Even the Russians keep in mind, don't minimize everybody talked about how we didn't reach an agreement, Mr. Putin and I, when I was in Russia. And that's absolutely true we didn't. But we did get a document out of there which I think is quite important, because the Russians acknowledged that there are new and different security threats on the horizon that is, that it's quite possible that in the next few years, countries not part of the arms control regimes of the last three decades could develop both long range missile delivery capability and weapons of mass destruction which they could put on warheads, and that none of this would be covered by, essentially, the mutual deterrence structure of the ABM Treaty and all the things we've done since then. So they recognize, too, that we, in the new century, in the coming decades, are going to have to make adjustments. Now, what they don't say is, they don't want America unilaterally building a missile defense that they think someday can undermine their deterrent capacity. That's kind of where they are now, and we're still talking about all that. But John, the truly accurate thing is that I have not yet formulated a position which I am prepared to go to the American people with, but I will do so some time over the next several weeks based on those four criteria and what I think is the right thing to do. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. Mr. President, last Monday the IRA allowed inspectors to come in and see caches of their weapons. Would you like to see the other terrorist organizations on the Protestant sides allow inspectors to look at their weapons? And are there any words that you could say to the people of Northern Ireland who are facing the marching season, other than Colonel Crowley's oft "peace is good" position any personal laughter any words from the heart that you could ask as they approach this very tense time? The President. You know, one of the hardest things I've had to learn in life is that not every cliche is wrong. Laughter Peace is good. Well first, I think it would be a good thing for all the paramilitary groups that have secret arms caches obviously to follow the lead of those who are doing what's been done. I think this is a great deal. I think this is a very, very hopeful development. And it ought to inform the marching season that is, if people are going to do their marches, ought to do it mindful of the context in which they're doing it and the diminished tension and the enhanced hope for long term peace and the institutions working again, and all of that. This is America. We can't say anybody can march anybody can talk anybody can say whatever they want to say. But everybody ought to what I would hope is that there will be a new sense of responsibility and a new sense of possibility in Northern Ireland because of these developments. You know, there's been lots of work done now over the last several years on this. We've come a long way since the first talk of then Prime Minister Major and then Prime Minister Reynolds, and I think that the work, particularly the things that have been done, the commitments that have been made, and the actions that have been taken in the last few months, they ought to be cherished by the people of Northern Ireland, and we ought to have a marching season that unfolds, I would hope to the maximum extent possible, in recognition of all we have seen. Yes, ma'am. Vice President Al Gore Q. Mr. President, I'd like to know how you feel Al Gore is doing at being his own man. The reason I ask that question is so many of his policies seem to be extensions of your policies, and even last week in the handling of the renewed call for a special prosecutor, the press was full of reports of how his response was very "Clintonesque." So how do you think he's doing at establishing a sense of his own identity? The President. Oh, I think he's done that very well. Let me remind you, when I asked him to become Vice President, there were some people who criticized me, who said what a dumb thing I did because we were the same age, we came from although he never lets me say that he's a year younger than I am, and looks much younger now because he has no gray hair but anyway, that we came from the same part of the country, and we basically came from the same wing of the Democratic Party. But I thought I was getting good balance because he knew things I didn't know about arms control, energy, environment, the way Washington worked. So it shouldn't surprise you that having worked here for 8 years, as we all have, that a lot of the new things he proposes would grow naturally out of what has been done, rather than being a departure from it. But I must say, I read quite carefully those proposals he made yesterday, and while he did incorporate a lot of what I have proposed on energy efficiency, he went way beyond anything I'd ever proposed, too. I was kind of sorry I'd never thought of one or two of the things that were in there. So I think he's doing fine on that. I think that if you just go back to the times when this has happened before to good effect and if you go back to when President Nixon ran in 1960 or when Hubert Humphrey ran in '68 or when President Bush ran in '88, it's a gradual process. But then one day, it reaches, in the words of that now famous book that everybody is reading, it reaches a tipping point and people kind of get it, and they say, "Oh, there it is. There this person is." And I think that's happening with him. And I think after the conventions, it will be crystal clear. And the main players on the stage of American political life will be the two candidates for President. Mara Mara Liasson, National Public Radio . Gasoline Prices Q. Mr. President, the proposals that Vice President Gore laid out yesterday on energy and the proposals that you discussed today are all long range solutions to the Nation's dependence on oil. In terms of the problems that drivers in the Midwest are experiencing right now, during the summer driving season, with high gas prices, what would be so bad about suspending gas taxes temporarily just to give those drivers a break? The President. First of all well, the Federal gas tax is not that big. Most of the gas taxes come from are at the State level. But if it were done and Congress debated this before if it were done, they would just have to decide what they were willing to pay in terms of either the deferral or the cancellation of Federal highway projects. And that's it's a tradeoff, and they would have to make that judgment. It would even there, it would take some time, and there was some question, as I remember, when it was raised before, whether all those price savings would be passed along to the consumers. So I think if the Congress was going to do that, they would want to have some assurance that that would be done. But let me say, this is not such a long term deal. First of all, the most important thing is to let the industry know we're running a serious investigation here and I would remind you, gas prices have dropped 8 cents in the Midwest, a gallon, since we announced it, at the pump more, much more, at the wholesale level and the blended gas has dropped more than 8 cents a gallon. So let's not minimize that. The second thing we need to do is to make absolutely sure that everything that can possibly be done to make sure the pipelines are flowing properly and the refineries are working that's done. You know, we had a small problem, you may remember, where I used the Strategic Petroleum Reserve recently because of a breakdown in supply available to a refinery in the South. So if I can find any other kind of backlogs like that where there is something I can do to get the flow going, I will do that as well. But the most important thing I can tell you is, I think that this, as we get more production online, this present price crisis will begin to abate. But we will have fundamentally higher prices, now that the rest of the world's economy has recovered, and now that virtually all of the OPEC members but Saudi Arabia are operating virtually at full capacity until we make up our minds that we're going to drive higher mileage vehicles and do other things that use less oil. And we are not talking about a long, long, long term thing. You're talking about a lot of these cars could be on the road and available for sale within 2 years a lot of them. And it's just a question of whether we think it's a national priority, because we've treated the human genome like a priority every year because we all want to live forever. And that's good. I'm not minimizing that. I'm not being flippant about that. We do. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. But we only get interested in this when the price of gasoline goes through the roof. And this was inevitable. We were actually quite I expected it was going to hit sooner, but the Asian financial crisis dropped it down. Now, they went up more than they should have and more than any of us anticipated, including me. And I think part of that is perhaps not justifiable, and that's what we're seeing why we're seeing some price adjustments in the Middle West today. But the only real answer for this is for us to develop alternative sources to oil and more efficient ways of using the energy we have. And we can do it in a hurry if we just put our minds to it. Q. If I could just follow up on that. The Federal gas tax is 18 cents, which is not insignificant. Half of that was instituted originally for deficit reduction. Now that we don't have deficits and, in fact, we have record surpluses, what would be wrong with temporarily rolling back, say, 9 cents, or maybe even just the 4.3 cents that you instituted as part of your 1993 budget deal? The President. Inherently, there's nothing wrong with it. But you would want to know two things first of all, the Congress should be satisfied that whatever the financial consequences are to the highway construction and repair program are consequences they're willing to pay, and they think their constituents are willing to pay, number one. And secondly, they'd need some assurances that actually the people would benefit from it at the pump. Deborah, go ahead Deborah Mathis, Gannett News Service . President's Future Plans Q. Sir, you know we're obligated to ask you about your post Presidential plans just in case you've made a decision since the last time we asked you. Laughter I recall that many years ago, you were asked about when you were still Governor of Arkansas, you were asked about your future political plans. And interestingly, you didn't mention the Presidency, but you did say that you had always wanted to be in the United States Senate. Is that on the table for you? Have you made any other decision that we need to know about? The President. No. But let me remind you what the context you go back and read that interview. I think you'll see what I said was, when I was a young man, I always wanted to be a Senator, and I never thought about being a Governor. But when I became a Governor, I found that I liked being an executive better than I liked being a legislator. And I still feel that way. I think maybe I'll run for the school board some day. That's about the only thing I can imagine doing. I don't have any other plans. I just want to be a good citizen. Go ahead, in the back. Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. Last question. Congressional Action on the Budget Q. Republicans in Congress are seeking to pass the spending bills early this year, in an effort to get out of Washington and go campaign in the fall. And yet, there are significant differences between what they want to spend and what you have proposed. I'm wondering, what do you see as the major points of disagreement at this time, and do you think that we're in for the same type of prolonged budget stalemate that had been featured in the past? The President. That's entirely up to them whether we're in for the budget stalemate. But if you just look at the education budget. I mean, how many times do we have to go down this road? You know, it's still not supportive of the 100,000 teachers and the smaller classes it's still not supportive of the dramatic expansion in after school programs, which is critical to school performance still has nothing in there for school construction still is inadequate in terms of my plan that people ought to either identify these failing schools and either turn them around or shut them down and lots of other problems with the school program. If you look at the crime proposals this is unbelievable. When they wouldn't adopt the commonsense gun safety legislation, all I heard was this constant barrage about how, if only the administration would enforce the gun laws on the books, everything would be wonderful we wouldn't have any problems in America. So what I said, "Look, why don't we do both? We have increased gun prosecutions under my administration, but we can do more. So please, give me some more money for people to investigate gun crimes, for people to prosecute gun crimes, to develop safe gun technology" this whole it was nothing but a straight enforcement measure exactly what they said they wanted, and no money for it. Still no support for the 50,000 new police officers in the higher crime areas. And still the constant threat of these environmental riders, and underfunding of the land's legacy initiative, and a number of other things. So we still have some serious differences. Now, we've been doing this every year since 1995 we just sort of slightly change the script every year. And I'm more than happy to do it again, because, frankly, in the end, we normally wind up with an agreement that's pretty good for the American people. But the timing in which we do it it depends more on them than me. I'm not going to give up my commitment to education as our most important domestic priority and what we're doing to build the future of our children. And I think we've got the crime rate down now to a 25 year low we can't stop the policy that works. And here I gave them a big proposal that is exactly what they say they want and believe in, and they don't want to fund that. So we'll just have to see what happens. I'm kind of hopeful about it, though. It's just late June, here. This drama has several more acts before it's over. Go ahead. We'll take one more. Go ahead, sir. National Missile Defense System Korean Summit Q. Mr. President, if I could return you to missile defense for a moment. The missile defense plan was based in large part on the threat from North Korea. You've now seen a first warming of relations between North and South. South Korea is not enthused about the missile defense plan. I'm wondering whether you now view it as urgent as you did the threat as urgent as you did a few months ago. I'm also wondering whether you would be willing to meet with Kim Chong il of North Korea? The President. Well, first let me say, I got a report both from President Kim on the phone and from his representatives in person about the summit of the Koreas. And I thought it was a very, very important development and a great tribute to President Kim's vision and courage and persistence. And I also think it justified the American policy, which is that we would never allow ourselves to be put in the middle between the two Koreas, that we wanted them to meet and work together. So we, I think, contributed to it the Chinese and others did as well. I think this is good for everybody, and I'm encouraged by it. I'm also encouraged by the moratorium that the North Koreans have on testing. But they still have a missile program, and so it's still something that the United States has to be mindful of and to prepare to deal with and to keep up with. And of course, I hope it will go away as a problem. I hope it for the people of North Korea, too. All these countries that have a lot of people in great need that are spending vast sums of money on defense, it's one of the great tragedies of the world today. So, would I like it to go away? Of course I would. Do I think it's gone away because of this meeting? I don't. Do I think it might? It might, and I hope it will, but we don't know that yet. Thank you. June 24, 2000 Thank you very much. First, I thank you, Joan, for 8 years of friendship and for the remarkable support that you and the State of Massachusetts have given to me and Al Gore and our whole team. Thank you, Governor Davis, for your friendship and for the extraordinary example you've set here in California, with your education legislation, your crime control legislation, and your devotion to our party. And we thank you, and we thank you for the day you had with the Vice President up in northern California yesterday. I liked reading about it. It was good press, and we thank you. Thank you, Joe Andrew, for leaving their ranks and coming to ours. It's hard for me to say I thank Bill Daley for leaving my Cabinet. Laughter But he might take it wrong. But I thank him for his willingness to assume the chairmanship of the Vice President's campaign. And I thank you, Donna Brazile. And thank you, Johnny Hayes, who is my political memorabilia partner. I thought I had a lot of it until I met Johnny. I want to thank Maxine Waters, who had me in her home in 1992 to meet with people from Los Angeles after the riots here, to deal with the economic and the social problems. And we walked down the streets together, burned out streets, and talked to people in a very different Los Angeles, a very different California, and a very different America than we have today. I thank Dennis Archer and Kathy Vick and Bill Lynch and Lottie Shackelford and all the rest of you, so many of you I've known a long, long time. When you were introduced, ma'am, as having been at every convention since '36, I've been at every one since 1972 and that makes me pretty creaky, I guess. Laughter But I'd like to say a few things. First, I just got off the phone with the Vice President, and he told me to tell you hello and to thank you. Secondly, I don't think you can possibly know how grateful I feel to all of you for your loyal support in '92 and '96 and in the all the times in between, in the good times and the bad times. I've had a real good time doing this job, and I'm glad it has worked out so well for the American people. But I want to have a brief but serious conversation with you now. We have to win. We have to win the White House. We have to win the Senate. We have to win the House. We have to win these governorships. We need to get some more of them back. And to win, we have to make sure that the election is about the right subject. People ask me all the time, "Who's going to win this or that election?" I say, "It always depends on what the voters believe the election is about." Very often, the answer you get depends upon the question you ask. And for me, it is a pretty simple matter. I have worked as hard as I could to turn our country around, to get us going in the right direction. You know, you didn't have to be a genius in '92 to figure out what the election ought to be about. The economy was in the tank. All the social indicators were going in the wrong direction. Washington politics was basically a matter of lobbing rhetorical bombs, or, as I like to say, "I got an idea, and you've got an idea. Let's fight. Maybe we'll both get on television tonight." Laughter And it often got people on television, but it didn't often change the way we were living. This country is in good shape now. But there are some huge challenges out there still and huge opportunities. And I would argue to you that how a country deals with its prosperity is at least as big a test of its judgment and its character as how a country deals with adversity. For me, it's not even close, because I know that a time like this comes along maybe once every 50 years, where you have a strong economy and improving society, a lot of national self confidence, the absence of crippling domestic or foreign threats. And those of us who have lived most of our lives have a profound obligation to make sure that this election is about building the future of our dreams for our children. What are they going to do, when all those baby boomers retire, about Social Security and Medicare? How are we going to make aging meaningful in terms of helping people to work who want to work, making sure people have affordable prescription drugs who need it? What about the largest and most diverse group of schoolchildren in our country? Will they have world class educations or not? Will they all be able to go on to college or not? What about the environment? Will we continue to improve it as we grow the economy, or will we go back to the old idea that you can't improve it and grow the economy? Will we really seriously take on this problem of global warming and climate change that Al Gore has been talking about for years and years and years now, and now everybody recognizes it's real, and he was right all along? Or are we going to continue to deny that it's a real problem until we see the flooding of the sugar cane in Louisiana, and the Everglades in Florida and a lot of farmland dry up and blow away? What about all the people that have jobs but still have problems raising their children and doing their work? Are we going to do more for child care, for after school programs, for long term care for elderly and disabled relatives? Are we going to do more for family leave? Are we going to do more, in short, to help people balance work and family? What about people like a lot of the people who work in this hotel that are doing the best they can, but they need some help to reward their work so they can raise their kids, too? We're going to take account of them in the tax policy of the country, in the education policy of the country. What about the people in places that have been left behind? Are we going to bring them into the free enterprise revolution or not? What about the digital divide? Are we going to close it or let it gape open? What about our responsibilities around the world? What about here at home, where people still get hurt and unfortunately sometimes killed because they're black or brown or Asian or gay or they work for the Federal Government or some other reason? We may never get another chance in our lifetime to take on this big stuff. So the first thing you've got to do is to convince people back home that this is a huge election. It is just as important as the election of '92 or '96 every bit as important. Point number two, there are real differences. Point number three, only the Democrats want you to know what they are. Laughter Now, you laugh, but it's true, isn't it? Do you ever hear them talk about their primary campaign? They want America to develop amnesia about their primary campaign who was on what side, who said what, what commitments were made. You don't see them passing out copies of that Texas Republican platform, do you? Laughter I was down in Texas the other night when that thing came out, with a bunch of my old friends. And one of them said that it was so bad, you could get rid of every Fascist tract in your library if you just had a copy of the Texas Republican platform. Laughter And I noticed their leader didn't go to the convention, and he didn't repudiate it. He just said, well, he was talking about other things. I say that in a good natured way. But let me say this. I don't believe we have to have a negative campaign this year. I don't think we should. I'm sick and tired of these campaigns where this vast amount of money and effort is spent to try to convince people that there's something wrong with their opponents. How many elections have we had in the last 20 years where basically the whole deal is designed to put everybody into a white heat, including our friends in the press, to convince the voters that your opponent is just one step above a car thief? Now, we don't have to do that this year. This country is in good shape. And what we ought to do is to have a real debate here. We ought to say, "Let's assume that everybody is honorable. Let's assume that they're pretty much going to do what they say they're going to do." That's what history indicates is the case, by the way. Most Presidents do pretty much what they say they're going to do. And when they don't, we're normally glad. Aren't you glad Lincoln didn't keep his campaign promise not to free the slaves? Aren't you glad President Roosevelt didn't keep his campaign promise to balance the budget when unemployment was 25 percent? But basically, Presidents do what they say they're going to do, so we can have this debate. So you've got to go out and say, "Folks, whatever your take on this is politically, this is a huge election. We may never get another chance in our lifetime to actually vote to make the future of our dreams for our children." Secondly, we have real differences. I'll just mention a few. We think we ought to raise the minimum wage, and they don't. We think we ought to pass a Patients' Bill of Rights if somebody gets hurt, they ought to be able to sue and they don't. We think we ought to have a voluntary prescription Medicare drug benefit available to everybody who needs it, and they don't. We think we ought to close the gun show loophole, require child trigger locks, and not import large capacity ammunition clips that make a mockery of our assault weapons ban. And we don't believe anybody is going to miss a day in the deer woods if we do that. But they're not for it. We think we ought to put 50,000 police on the street in the highest crime neighborhoods, because the 100,000 we put on worked so well, and they disagree. We think we ought to build 6,000 new schools and modernize another 5,000 a year for the next 5 years, and they don't. We think that we ought to require schools to turn around or shut down failing schools, school districts in States, but we ought to give them enough money so that every child who needs it can be in an after school or a summer school program, and they don't. We think we ought to put 100,000 more teachers out there in the early grades to lower class size, because it has a direct impact on student achievement, and they don't. We think we ought to keep trying to clean up the air and the water and deal with climate change and develop alternative sources of energy and support the development of cars that get better mileage, and they voted against that stuff every year I put it up. They just don't agree. If you're buying gasoline in Chicago and Milwaukee now, you probably wish we'd move faster to develop alternative sources of fuel and higher mileage vehicles. So in all these things, I think we're right, and I think they're not. But they ought to be given a chance to have their piece say their piece. Most important of all, on how we're going to keep the prosperity going, they think that we ought to have a tax cut that costs over half of the projected new surplus, which is real big, and that we ought to spend the rest of it on the projected surplus on the partial privatization of Social Security, on a big national missile defense system, and on whatever else they promise to spend money on, even though all that together is more than even the new surplus projections. Now, we're taking a more politically risky position at a time when people feel kind of relaxed. The Vice President says, "Why don't we not spend all our projected surplus." What's your projected income for the next decade, folks? Are you ready to spend it all tomorrow? Everybody that wants to spend your entire projected income for the next decade should seriously consider changing parties, because that's their position. And everybody that doesn't, who's not in our party, should seriously consider changing parties. So what does Al Gore say? He says, "Why don't we just start by saying there is at least 20 percent of this projected surplus we are not going to spend, because we're getting it from your Medicare taxes, anyway. So we'll put it over to the side, and we'll pay the debt down with it. And then we'll take the money we save from doing that and put it into Medicare so when the baby boomers retire, we can keep Medicare alive, we won't bankrupt our kids. And, by the way, we're not going to spend all this projected surplus. "And why don't we have a generous tax cut that helps working people, especially at modest incomes, to set up their own retirement accounts and invest, if they want, in the stock market and generate wealth, while we don't mess up Social Security and then help others with the cost of child care or long term care or paying for our children to go college, so we can open the doors of college to all and one that gives wealthy people the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America to create jobs we give them to invest in poor areas in Latin America or Asia or Africa. And why don't we do that, and then we'll still have some money to invest in the future." I know what I think is more likely to keep this prosperity going. People ask me all the time now that I've just got a few months left, 7 months left. They say, "What was the secret of your economic policy? What was the genius that Bob Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen and all of them brought to Washington?" And I look at them, and I say, "Arithmetic." Laughter The Democrats brought arithmetic back to Washington. If we didn't have it, we didn't spend it. We made a commitment to cut out programs that we didn't have to have, so we'd have more to invest in education and technology and the future. But I'm just telling you, these are big issues, and you ought to clarify them. But if the public believes that this is a big election and it's about building the future of our dreams for our children, and if the public believes that there are real differences and I only touched on a few of them. There are real differences in our position on what it really means to include women and gays and people of color, people of all different backgrounds in the Government and in the life of America. The next President is going to get two to four appointments to the Supreme Court. They've made different commitments about what their heartfelt positions are on the right to choose, for example. And I think you have to assume that both these people now running for President will do what they have promised to do on this. You have to assume that they are honorable and they will. So you have big differences. And we can have a great debate. Let me just say one other thing I want you to know. I think I know Al Gore about as well as anybody alive except his family. And I've seen him at every conceivable kind of circumstances, in good and bad times for him, good and bad times for me, good and bad times for our administration. There are three things that I think you ought to know or four. Number one, this country has had a lot of Vice Presidents who made great Presidents. Thomas Jefferson was Vice President. Teddy Roosevelt was Vice President. Harry Truman was Vice President. Lyndon Johnson was Vice President. But we have never had anybody who, while he was Vice President, made so many decisions and did so many things that helped so many Americans remotely compared with Al Gore. He has been by far the most important Vice President in the history of the United States of America. Whether it's breaking the tie on the economic plan or leading our empowerment zone program to bring economic opportunity to poor people, or leading our efforts in technology, or our efforts to reinvent Government that has given us the smallest Federal Government since Kennedy was President, or our efforts to continue to improve the environment while we grow the economy, or our efforts with Russia or South Africa, or our arms control policy, or sticking by me when I made very, very tough decisions in Haiti and Bosnia and Kosovo, in financial aid to Mexico a lot of them some of you didn't agree with me on he was always there. The second thing I want you to know is, it's my opinion, based on a lifetime of experience with this economy and some fair understanding of it, that our economic policy, the one he has embodied, is far more likely to keep this economic expansion going and get the most out of it. Thirdly, and in some ways most important of all to me, I think that we ought to have a President in a time of prosperity who is genuinely committed to helping all families participate in it, to giving all people a sense that they belong in America, and to giving everybody a chance to express their opinions and to be part of the future. And fourthly, I think it's quite important that we have a President that really understands what the future is going to be like, that really gets it. I don't know how many people I've said heard tell me that Al Gore is the first person that ever talked to them about the Internet. He said when we took office that someday the whole Library of Congress would be on the Internet, and I thought it was something that would happen in 20 or 30 years, and it's just about there right now. He was the first person I ever heard talk about global warming. The first lunch we ever had, in January of '93, he was showing me his charts. Now everybody says it's real. I had to listen to 8 years of some people saying it was some sort of subversive plot to undermine the American economy. Laughter I'll give you another example, something really important in the future. We're going to have all of our medical records and all of our financial records on somebody's computer somewhere. I think it's important whether you have privacy rights. I think you ought to be able to you ought to have to give specific approval before somebody goes into somebody else's computer and gets your financial records or your medical records in ways that can affect your life. I think that's important. That's a big issue. I could give you lots and lots of other examples. I'll give you one chilling one. The same things that are working in the information technology revolution that are going to give you little computers you can fit in the palm of your hand, with a screen that works just like the Internet so you can bring up things you'll even be able to watch CNN news or something on a little screen you're holding in your hand all that's going to happen in weapons systems. The biggest challenge we're going to face in the future, I think, over the next 20 years will be from the enemies of the nation state, from the terrorists, the drugrunners, the weapons peddlers, and people who will have miniature weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological God forbid maybe even nuclear weapons. We need somebody who understands this stuff, somebody that's worked at it for years and years, somebody that gets it. So that's my pitch. We've got our nominee is the best Vice President the country ever had. He is clearly the person who is offering an economic strategy most likely to keep the recovery going. He has a clear commitment to help all the people to make sure nobody gets left behind. And he understands the future and can lead us there. Now, if the public understands, if the people we represent believe that this is a huge election, that it's a chance of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams for our children, if they believe there are real differences, if they understand what the differences are, then he will be elected President, and Hillary will be elected to the Senate, and so will a lot of others, and we will win the House back, and we will be celebrating. Now, that's your job. You've got to make sure people understand what the deal is. That's what our job is. This is a happy job. You never have to say a bad word about a Republican. All you have to do is go out and say, "Here is where we are. Here is where we want to go. Here are the honest differences, and at least our party would like you to know exactly what they are." Thank you, and God bless you. June 19, 2000 Thank you. I feel first of all, I feel a little sorry for all of you. You have to look at me, and I'm looking at all this, behind you. Laughter I want to thank Lynn and Tom for making us feel so welcome in this beautiful, beautiful place. And I want to thank them and Ben and Melanie and everyone else who worked on this dinner tonight, for its success. I want to thank Roy and Mary Spence, who hosted me earlier, for the Democratic Senate candidates and for what they did. Thank you, Mayor Watson we're glad to be here. Thank you, Governor Richards. Thank you, Garry Mauro. Thank you, Liz Carpenter, my old friend. Thank you, B. and Audre Rapoport and Dan Morales and John Sharp. Thank you all. And I'd like to say a special word of thanks to Luci Johnson and, through her, to her mother and her entire family for what they have meant to the United States. And I want to thank Lyle Lovett for being a good Democrat and a good friend to me and always being there when I've needed him over the years. He made me think that even on my bad hair days, I could still be President. Laughter That was probably the last song he'll ever sing for me. Laughter I also want to tell you how much I admire and appreciate the work that I've had the chance to do with Tom Daschle and Bob Torricelli and Chuck Robb and Pat Leahy and Ron Wyden. We really do have a big percentage over 10 percent of our caucus here tonight. And maybe Ann is right maybe it's because Texas needs Senators and we need money, but for whatever reason, they're here. And I hope you'll take advantage of it. Let me say, as is usually the case when I get up to speak, everything that needs to be said has already been said, but not everyone has said it. Laughter But I'd like to just make a comment or two, if I might. First of all, I've had a lot of friends here in Texas, and especially in Austin. And as I look back on the last 7 1 2 years and I look forward to the next approximately 7 months I have to serve, I would just like to say thank you. Thank you for your help. Thank you for staying with us. Thank you for giving me and Al Gore and Hillary and Tipper and our entire administration the chance to do what we've done for the last 7 1 2 years. I've had a wonderful time doing it, and I am very grateful that the results turned out to be pretty good for you, as well as for us. It's been a joy. Now, I also want to say to you that I thought a lot back in 1992 about what I would like America to be like in 2000, if I should be fortunate enough to be elected and to be reelected. And I believe that one of the reasons that we had some success is that I'd worked as a Governor for a dozen years, through very difficult economic times. I had had a chance to try to come to grips with the major economic and educational and other challenges of the day. And I had a pretty clear idea about what I wanted to do if I got elected. And it turned out that the ideas that I and many others who worked with me over a decade developed worked pretty well. I say that to make this point. I'm glad that we've got the longest economic expansion in history. I'm very glad that we have the lowest minority unemployment rate ever recorded. I am profoundly grateful that we have a 20 year low in poverty and a 40 year low in female unemployment and a 32 year low in the welfare rates and a 25 year low in the crime rate. I'm glad the country is at peace and America has been a force for peace and freedom throughout the world. But the question I want to ask you is, what do you intend to do with it? Our host mentioned the great work that President Johnson and the Congress did 30 years ago plus, with the civil rights legislation. I would like to remind you that 1961 to 1969 was, until this period, the longest economic expansion in American history. And with that expansion, we got not only the civil rights legislation under of President Johnson, we got Federal aid to education, and we got Medicare, among other things. So what I want to ask you again is, to me, this election for the Senate and the House and the Presidency will be determined largely by what people think it's about, because times are good and the candidates are presentable, to say the least, from top to bottom. So who you're for depends in large measure on what you think the election is about. And I just want to make three points tonight, briefly. Number one, this is a big deal. This election is every bit as important as the elections of '92 and '96. Why? Because I've done everything I could to turn this country around and move it in the right direction. And now we have the chance to build the future of our dreams for our children. But what a country does with its prosperity is sometimes just as stern a test of its judgment, its wisdom, and its character as what a country does when its back is against the wall. There is not a person here tonight over 30 years old who cannot recall at least one time in your life when you made some sort of a mistake, a personal or a business mistake, not because things were going so badly but because things were going so well you thought you did not have to concentrate. And one of the things that you learn as you get older is that nothing ever lasts. And for those of us that have been through a few tough times, we say thank God for that. But when you're going through these good times, it's well to be humble and not to engage in too much self congratulation and not to break your concentration. So I will say again, I think this election will be determined by what the American people think it is about. And I believe it should be about building the future of our dreams for our children. I believe it should be about what we propose to do with our prosperity. And if you start from that premise, then you have to say, well, what do you think we ought to do with it? I think the most important thing we can do is to keep it going and spread its benefits to the people and places that still aren't part of it. I think we need to make sure that all of our families have a chance to make the most of it. That means we have educational and health care and environmental challenges we need to meet. I think it's important that we continue to keep our eyes on the future and not be satisfied with where we are. I'm glad we've got a crime rate that's at a 25 year low. I think we ought to make America the safest big country in the world. I'm glad the air and the water are cleaner. I think we ought to turn back the tide of global warming. I'm glad that more people than ever are going to college. I think we ought to open the doors to every child who is qualified to go to college, and money should never be a bar to anybody going ever again. Then, if you think that's the subject, then the second point I want to make to you is this. It's an important election it ought to be about what we're going to do with our prosperity. Point number two, there are real and profound differences between the parties. This does not have to be an election where, like all too many in the past, we see one exercise after another in character assassination, where you think you don't really have a campaign unless you can convince the people that your opponent is just one step above being a bank robber. That is not true. You can start with the Presidency and go to the Senate races and the House races and say, "You know, we've got perfectly presentable candidates here, but there are real differences." That's my second point. It's a big election there are real differences. Now, here's my third point. We're the only party who wants you to know what the differences are. Laughter And I suppose I should take that as a great compliment. But you need to understand, and you need to talk to people. That's why these Senators are here. You wouldn't be here if you didn't understand that. But there are profound consequences. The next President is going to appoint somewhere between two and four Justices of the Supreme Court. And both of them bring commitments to the Presidency about those appointments, and they are different. And the Congress will have to ratify or reject those decisions the Senate, alone. That's just one example. I'll give you another example. I was the first leader of any nation in the world to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, a dream of President Eisenhower and President Kennedy and President Johnson. Every President for the last 50 years has longed for the day when we could ban nuclear testing, so we could keep other countries from becoming nuclear powers. And it now happens at a time when our own experts tell us, because of those of you in the high tech business who are involved in weapons, we can simulate testing, and we don't have to test anymore. So banning nuclear testing makes the world a lot safer place. That's what I believe. The Republican Senate voted against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They made us the only major country in the world to reject the Test Ban Treaty America, alone. Everybody else said it's the right thing to do except India and Pakistan haven't come along yet, and I went over there to try to stop a conflict that could go into a nuclear war, pleading with them to stop it, when our own Senate said, "Oh, let's go on and test. Who cares?" Now, this affects the lives your children are going to lead. In the future, you're going to have to worry about, when I'm long gone, not just the United States and Russia but whether terrorists in other states are going to use the tools of modern technology, which make everything smaller, to bring many weapons of mass destruction nuclear, chemical, and biological around. I think we missed a terrific opportunity not to lead the world toward a safer place. We turned around and walked away from 50 years of Republican and Democratic history. And we better reverse it. We ought to ratify the Test Ban Treaty. Your decisions on the White House and the Senate will determine whether we do. And you need to make up your inaudible . I'll give you a few other examples. We're for a comprehensive Patients' Bill of Rights. Some of us I'm strongly supportive of the right kind of managed care, but I think that the patients ought to come first. They're against the Patients' Bill of Rights. We believe we ought to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare that all of our seniors can afford and have a chance to buy. They don't favor that. I could just go on and on and on. We believe we ought to tackle the problem of climate change. Some of their Members still think it's some sort of subversive plot to wreck the American economy. In the digital economy, much of which is represented on this porch tonight, it is now no longer necessary to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere around Austin, Texas, for people to grow wealthier. In fact, for the first time in history we can grow wealthier by improving the environment instead of polluting it. That's what we believe. They don't agree with us about that. Now, you may think that's a pretty esoteric subject. I don't. The children in this audience tonight will find in 20 to 30 years that will be one of the two or three most important issues they have to face, unless we turn it around right now. It's a big issue. There are consequences in this election. On the matter of public safety, I think you all know that I am not the favorite person of Charlton Heston or his executive director, Wayne LaPierre. Laughter But all they can do is shout generalities, because there hasn't been a single hunter miss a day in the deer woods because of me in 7 1 2 years. Laughter I listened to all that when I signed the Brady bill, when I signed the assault weapons ban. And now, we believe that there should be no guns around children, that don't have trigger locks. We believe that large ammunition clips ought not to be imported into America to evade our assault weapons ban. We believe that a crook shouldn't be able to get a gun at a gun show that the crook can't get at the gun store without a background check. Now, these are not radical things, but what I want to tell you this is an interesting argument, because it's not like there's no evidence here. The same crowd that's against this told me 7 years ago, when I signed the Brady bill, that all it would do is inconvenience legitimate gun owners and be a terrible burden, and it wouldn't help anything. Well, a half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers later who didn't get handguns because of what the Brady bill required in the background check, we have a 35 percent decline in gun crime. And I'll say again, not a single Texas hunter has missed a day in the deer woods. They are wrong about this, and there's a difference about this. And I don't care how low the crime rate has gone anybody that thinks this country is safe enough has not spent enough time where the crime rate is high. We ought to keep going until this is the safest big country in the world. We owe it to our kids. We think I'll just say one other thing. I believe that one of the reasons America has done so well is that our prosperity has been broadly shared, that we've had over 22 million new jobs, that we've got the lowest minority unemployment rate among Hispanics and African Americans ever recorded. We favor raising the minimum wage, because we need it and they don't. We favor dramatically increasing what's called the earned income tax credit, which is an income tax refund to poor working people with children, especially those with three or more kids and they don't. Now, this is not negative. You should listen to them and let them tell you why they're against what we're for. But we should not be under any illusions that there are no consequences to this election. If you want the prosperity to continue, you should know that there are two different approaches. If you want us to be sure we can guarantee excellence in education to every young person, you should know there are two different approaches. If you want working people to have a chance to succeed at work and raising their kids, whether they work at one of your wonderful companies or whether they work in this hot weather serving your food tonight, there are two different approaches. And so I say, all I can ask you to do between now and the election is to help our people, but talk to other people. And don't let the American people I don't mean just here in Austin or in Texas, but I mean all over the country where you have friends people must understand. All I want to know is that, when I walk out the door on January 20th, the American people took this election seriously. They understood that we turned this country around, that we had the chance of a lifetime, that there were differences, and they understood what the differences were. And in their own heart and mind, they voted to build the future of our dreams for our children. And I know if that happens, everything's going to be all right. Thank you, and God bless you. June 05, 2000 First of all, I thank you for that introduction. And even though it is still in the morning, I am delighted to be here with the Members of the State Duma and the Federation Council. It is important to me to have this opportunity because the prospects for virtually every important initiative President Putin and I have discussed over the last 2 days will obviously depend upon your advice and your consent, and because through you I can speak to the citizens of Russia directly, those whom you represent. I have made five trips to Russia in my years as President. I have worked with President Yeltsin and now with President Putin. I have met with the leadership of the Duma on more than one occasion. I have spoken with Russia's religious leaders, with the media, with educators, scientists, and students. I have listened to Russian people tell me about their vision of the future, and I have tried to be quite open about my own vision of the future. I have come here at moments of extraordinary optimism about Russia's march toward prosperity and freedom, and I've been here at moments of great difficulty for you. I believed very strongly from the first time I came here that Russia's future fundamentally is in the hands of the Russian people. It cannot be determined by others, and it should not be. But Russia's future is very important to others, because it is among the most important journeys the world will witness in my lifetime. A great deal of the 21st century will be strongly influenced by the success of the Russian people in building a modern, strong, democratic nation that is part of the life of the rest of the world. And so, many people across the world have sought to support your efforts, sharing with you a sense of pride when democracy is advanced and sharing your disappointment when difficulties arose. It is obviously not for me to tell the Russian people how to interpret the last few years. I know your progress has come with unfilled expectations and unexpected difficulties. I know there have been moments, especially during the financial crisis in 1998, when some wondered if the new Russia would end up as a grand social experiment gone wrong. But when we look at Russia today, we do not see an experiment gone wrong. We see an economy that is growing, producing goods and services people want. We see a nation of enterprising citizens who are beginning, despite all of the obstacles, to bring good jobs and a normal life to their communities. We see a society with 65,000 nongovernmental organizations, like Eco Juris, which is helping citizens defend their rights in court like Vozrozhdenie, which is aiding families with disabled children like the local chambers of commerce that have sprung up all across Russia. We see a country of people taking responsibility for their future, people like those of Gadzhiyevo on the Arctic Circle who organized a referendum to protect the environment of their town. We see a country transforming its system of higher education to meet the demands of the modern world, with institutions like the new Law Factory at Novgorod University and the New Economic School in Moscow. We see a country preserving its magnificent literary heritage, as the Pushkin Library is doing in its efforts to replenish the shelves of libraries all across Russia. We see a country entering the information age, with cutting edge software companies, with Internet centers at universities from Kazan to Ufa to Yakutsk, with a whole generation of young people more connected to the outside world than any past generation could have imagined. We see Russian citizens with no illusions about the road ahead, yet voting in extraordinary numbers against a return to the past. We see a Russia that has just completed a democratic transfer of executive power for the first time in 1,000 years. I would not presume to tell the people you represent how to weigh the gains of freedom against the pain of economic hardship, corruption, crime. I know the people of Russia do not yet have the Russia they were promised in 1991. But I believe you, and they, now have a realistic chance to build that kind of Russia for yourselves in far greater measure than a decade ago, because of the democratic foundations that have been laid and the choices that have been made. The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world. Its defining feature is globalization, the tearing down of boundaries between people, nations, and cultures, so that what happens anywhere can have an impact everywhere. During the 1990's, the volume of international trade almost doubled. Links among businesses, universities, advocacy groups, charities, and churches have multiplied across physical space and cyberspace. In the developing world, some of the poorest villages are beginning to be connected to the information superhighway in ways that are opening up unbelievable opportunities for education and for development. The Russian people did more than just about anyone else to make possible this new world of globalization by ending the divisions of the cold war. Now Russia, America, and all nations are subject to new rules of the global economy. One of those rules, to adapt a phrase from your history, is that it's no longer possible to build prosperity in one country alone. To prosper, our economies must be competitive in a global marketplace and to compete, the most important resource we must develop is our own people, giving them the tools and freedom to reach their full potential. This is the challenge we have tried to meet in America over the last few years. Indeed, the changes we have seen in the global economy pose hard questions that both our nations still must answer. A fundamental question is, how do we define our strength and vitality as a nation today, and what role should government play in building it? Some people actually believe that government is no longer relevant at all to people's lives in a globalized, interconnected world. Since all of us hold government positions, I presume we disagree. But I believe experience shows that government, while it must be less bureaucratic and more oriented toward the markets and while it should focus on empowering people by investing in education and training rather than simply accruing power for itself, it is still very important. Above all, a strong state should use its strength to reinforce the rule of law, protect the powerless against the powerful, defend democratic freedoms, including freedom of expression, religion, and the press, and do whatever is possible to give everyone a chance to develop his or her innate abilities. This is true, I believe, for any society seeking to advance in the modern world. For any society in any part of the world that is increasingly small and tied together, the answer to law without order is not order without law. Another fundamental question is, how shall countries define their strength in relation to the rest of the world today? Shall we define it as the power to dominate our neighbors or the confidence to be a good neighbor? Shall we define it by what we are against or simply in terms of what others are for? Do we join with others in common endeavors to advance common interests, or do we try to bend others to our will? This federal assembly's ratification of START II and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty suggests you are answering these questions in a way that will make for both a stronger Russia and a better world, defining your strength in terms of the achievements of your people and the power of your partnerships and your role in world affairs. A related question for both Russia and America is, how should we define our relationship today? Clearly, Russia has entered a phase when what it needs most is outside investment, not aid. What Americans must ask is not so much what can we do for Russia, but what can we do with Russia to advance our common interests and lift people in both nations? To build that kind of relationship, we Americans have to overcome the temptation to think that we have all the answers. We have to resist the feeling that if only you would see things our way, troubles would go away. Russia will not, and indeed should not, choose a course simply because others wish you to do so. You will choose what your interests clearly demand and what your people democratically embrace. I think one problem we have is that many Russians still suspect that America does not wish you well. Thus, you tend to see our relationship in what we call zero sum terms, assuming that every assertion of American power must diminish Russia, and every assertion of Russian strength must threaten America. That is not true. The United States wants a strong Russia, a Russia strong enough to protect its territorial integrity while respecting that of its neighbors, strong enough to meet threats to its security, to help maintain strategic stability, to join with others to meet common goals, to give its people their chance to live their dreams. Of course, our interests are not identical, and we will have our inevitable disagreements. But on many issues that matter to our people, our interests coincide. And we have an obligation, it seems to me, to focus on the goals we can and should advance together in our mutual interest and to manage our differences in a responsible and respectful way. What can we do together in the years to come? Well, one thing we ought to do is to build a normal economic relationship, based on trade and investment between our countries and contact between our people. We have never had a better opportunity, and I hope you will do what you can to seize it. This is the time, when Russia's economy is growing and oil prices are high, when I hope Russia will create a more diversified economy. The economies that will build power in the 21st century will be built not just on resources from the soil, which are limited, but on the genius and initiative of individual citizens, which are unlimited. This is a time when I hope you will finish putting in place the institutions of a modern economy, with laws that protect property, that ensure openness and accountability, that establish an efficient, equitable tax code. Such an economy would keep Russian capital in Russia and bring foreign capital to Russia, both necessary for the kind of investment you deserve, to create jobs for your people and new businesses for your future. This is a time to win the fight against crime and corruption so that investment will not choose safer shores. That is why I hope you will soon pass a strong law against money laundering that meets international standards. This is also the time I hope Russia will make an all out effort to take the needed steps to join the World Trade Organization. Membership in the WTO reinforces economic reform. It will give you better access to foreign markets. It will ensure that your trading partners treat you fairly. Russia should not be the only major industrialized country standing outside this global trading system. You should be inside this system, with China, Brazil, Japan, members of the European Union, and the United States, helping to shape those rules for the benefit of all. We will support you. But you must know, too, that the decision to join the WTO requires difficult choices that only you can make. I think it is very important. Again I will say, I think you should be part of making the rules of the road for the 21st century economy, in no small measure because I know you believe in the importance of the social contract, and you understand that we cannot have a world economy unless we also have some rules that people in the world respect regarding the living standards of people, the conditions in which our children are raised, whether they have access to education, and whether we do what should be done together to protect the global environment. A second goal of our partnership should be to meet threats to our security together. The same advances that are bringing the world together are also making the tools of destruction deadlier, cheaper, and more available. As you well know, because of this openness of borders, because of the openness of the Internet, and because of the advances of technology, we are all more vulnerable to terrorism, to organized crime, to the spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons which themselves may someday be transferred, soon, in smaller and smaller quantities, across more and more borders, by unscrupulous illegal groups working together. In such a world, to protect our security we must have more cooperation, not more competition, among like minded nation states. Since 1991, we have already cooperated to cut our own nuclear arsenals by 40 percent in removing nuclear weapons from Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan in fighting illicit trafficking in deadly technology. Together, we extended the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, banned chemical weapons, agreed to end nuclear testing, urged India and Pakistan to back away from nuclear confrontation. Yesterday President Putin and I announced two more important steps. Each of us will destroy 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium, enough to build thousands of nuclear weapons. And we will establish a system to give each other early warning of missile tests and space launches to avoid any miscalculation, with a joint center here that will operate out of Moscow 24 hours a day, 7 days a week the first permanent, joint United States Russian military cooperation ever. I am proud of this record, and I hope you are, too. We will continue to reduce our nuclear arsenals by negotiating a START III treaty and to secure the weapons and materials that remain. But we must be realistic. Despite our best efforts, the possibility exists that nuclear and other deadly weapons will fall into dangerous hands, into hands that could threaten us both rogue states, terrorists, organized criminal groups. The technology required to launch missiles capable of delivering them over long distances, unfortunately, is still spreading across the world. The question is not whether this threat is emerging it is. The question is, what is the best way to deal with it? It is my strong preference that any response to strengthen the strategic stability and arms control regime that has served our two nations so well for decades now if we can pursue that goal together, we will all be more secure. Now, as all of you know well, soon I will be required to decide whether the United States should deploy a limited national defense system designed to protect the American people against the most imminent of these threats. I will consider, as I have repeatedly said, many factors, including the nature of threat, the cost of meeting it, the effectiveness of the available technology, and the impact of this decision on our overall security, including our relationship with Russia and other nations, and the need to preserve the ABM Treaty. The system we are contemplating would not undermine Russia's deterrent or the principles of mutual deterrence and strategic stability. That is not a question just of our intent but of the technical capabilities of the system. But I ask you to think about this, to debate it, as I know you will, to determine for yourselves what the capacity of what we have proposed is. Because I learned on my trip to Russia that the biggest debate is not whether we intend to do something that will undermine mutual deterrence I think most people who have worked with us, not just me and others, over the years know that we find any future apart from cooperation with you in the nuclear area inconceivable. The real question is a debate over what the impact of this will be, because of the capacity of the technology involved. And I believe that is a question of fact which people of good will ought to be able to determine. And I believe we ought to be able to reach an agreement about how we should proceed at each step along the way here, in a way that preserves mutual deterrence, preserves strategic stability, and preserves the ABM Treaty. That is my goal. And if we can reach an agreement about how we're going forward, then it is something we ought to take in good faith to the Chinese, to the Japanese, to others who are interested in this, to try to make sure that this makes a safer world, not a more unstable world. I think we've made some progress, and I would urge all of you who are interested in this to carefully read the Statement of Principles to which President Putin and I agreed yesterday. Let me say that this whole debate on missile defense and the nature of the threat reflects a larger and, I think, more basic truth. As we and other nation states look out on the world today, increasingly we find that the fundamental threat to our security is not the threat that we pose to each other, but instead, threats we face in common threats from terrorist and rogue states, from biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons which may be able to be produced in increasingly smaller and more sophisticated ways public health threats, like AIDS and tuberculosis, which are now claiming millions of lives around the world and which literally are on the verge of ruining economies and threatening the survival of some nations. The world needs our leadership in this fight, as well. And when President Putin and I go to the G 8 meeting in July, I hope we can support a global strategy against infectious disease. There is a global security threat caused by environmental pollution and global warming. We must meet it with strong institutions at home and with leadership abroad. Fortunately, one of the benefits of the globalized information age is that it is now possible to grow an economy without destroying the environment. Thanks to incredible advances in science and technology over the last 10 years, a whole new aspect in economic growth has opened up. It only remains to see whether we are wise enough to work together to do this, because the United States does not have the right to ask any nation not Russia, not China, not India to give up future economic growth to combat the problem of climate change. What we do have is the opportunity to persuade every nation, including people in our own country who don't yet believe it, that we can grow together in the 21st century and actually reduce greenhouse gases at the same time. I think a big part of making that transition benefits Russia, because of your great stores of natural gas. And so I hope we will be working closely together on this in the years ahead. In the Kyoto climate change treaty, we committed ourselves to tie market forces to the fight against global warming. And today, on this World Environment Day, I'm pleased that President Putin and I have agreed to deepen our own cooperation on climate change. This is a huge problem. If we don't deal with this within just a few years, you will have island nations flooded you will have the agricultural balance of most countries completely changed you will have a dramatic increase in the number of severe, unmanageable weather events. And the good news is that we can now deal with this problem again I say and strengthen our economic growth, not weaken it. A third challenge that demands our engagement is the need to build a world that is less divided along ethnic, racial, and religious lines. It is truly ironic, I think, that we can go anywhere in the world and have the same kinds of conversations about the nature of the global information society. Not long ago, I was in India in a poor village, meeting with a women's milk cooperative. And the thing they wanted me to see was that they had computerized all their records. And then I met with the local village council, and the thing they wanted me to see in this remote village, in a nation with a per capita income of only 450 a year, was that all the information that the federal and state government had that any citizen could ever want was on a computer in the public building in this little village. And I watched a mother that had just given birth to a baby come into this little public building and call up the information about how to care for the child and then print it out on her computer, so that she took home with her information every bit as good as a well to do American mother could get from her doctor about how to care for a child in the first 6 months. It is truly ironic that at a time when we're living in this sort of world with all these modern potentials, that we are grappling with our oldest problems of human society our tendency to fear and then to hate people who are different from us. We see it from Northern Ireland to the Middle East to the tribal conflicts of Africa to the Balkans and many other places on this Earth. Russia and America should be concerned about this because the stability of both of our societies depends upon people of very different ethnic, racial, and religious groups learning to live together under a common framework of rules. And history teaches us that harmony that lasts among such different people cannot be maintained by force alone. I know when trying to come to grips with these problems, these old problems of the modern world, the United States and Russia have faced some of our greatest difficulties in the last few years. I know you disagreed with what I did in Kosovo, and you know that I disagreed with what you did in Chechnya. I have always said that the Russian people and every other people have a right to combat terrorism and to preserve the integrity of their nations. I still believe it, and I reaffirmed that today. My question in Chechnya was an honest one and the question of a friend, and that is whether any war can be won that requires large numbers of civilian casualties and has no political component bringing about a solution. Let me say, in Kosovo my position was whether we could ever preserve a democratic and free Europe unless southeastern Europe were a part of it, and whether any people could ever say that everyone is entitled to live in peace if 800,000 people were driven out of a place they had lived in for centuries solely because of their religion. None of these questions will be easy, but I think we ought to ask ourselves whether we are trying to resolve them. I remember going to Kosovo after the conflict, after Russians and Americans had agreed to serve there together as we have served in Bosnia effectively together, and sitting down with all the people who represented the conflict around the table. They would hardly speak to each other. They were still angry they were still thinking about their family members that had been dislocated and killed. So I said to them that I had just been involved in negotiating the end of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and that I was very close to the Irish conflict because all of my relatives came from a little village in Ireland that was right on the border between the north and the south, and therefore had lived through all these years of conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants. And I said, "Now here's the deal we've got. The deal is majority rule, minority rights, guaranteed participation in decisionmaking, shared economic and other benefits." Majority rule, minority rights, guaranteed participation in decisionmaking, shared economic and other benefits. I said, "Now, it's a good deal, but what I would like to tell you is that if they had ever stopped fighting, they could have gotten this deal years ago." And so I told the people of Kosovo, I said, "You know, everybody around this table has got a legitimate grievance. People on all sides, you can tell some story that is true and is legitimately true. Now, you can make up your mind to bear this legitimate grievance with a grudge for 20 or 30 years. And 20 or 30 years from now, someone else will be sitting in these chairs, and they will make a deal majority rule, minority rights, shared decisionmaking, shared economic and other benefits. You can make the deal now, or you can wait." Those of us who are in a position of strong and stable societies, we have to say this to people. We have to get people not just the people who have been wronged everybody has got a legitimate grievance in these caldrons of ethnic and racial and religious turmoil. But it's something we have to think about. And as we see a success story, it's something I think we ought to look for other opportunities to advance. Real peace in life comes not when you give up the feelings you have that are wrong, but when you give up the feelings you have that are right, in terms of having been wronged in the past. That's how people finally come together and go on. And those of us who lead big countries should take that position and try to work through it. Let me say, finally, a final security goal that I have, related to all the others, is to help Europe build a community that is democratic, at peace, and without divisions one that includes Russia and strengthens our ability to advance our common interest. We have never had that kind of Europe before in all of history, so building it will require changing old patterns of thinking. I was in Germany a couple of days ago in the historic old town of Aachen, where Charlemagne had his European empire in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, to talk about that. There are, I know, people who resist the idea that Russia should be part of Europe and who insist that Russia is fundamentally different from the other nations that are building a united Europe. Of course, there are historical and cultural arguments that support that position. And it's a good thing that you are different and that we are different it makes life more interesting. But the differences between Russia and France, for example, may not be any greater than those between Sweden and Spain, or England and Greece, or even between America and Europe. Integration within Europe and then the transatlantic alliance came about because people who are different came together, not because people who are the same came together. Estrangement between Russia and the West, which lasted too long, was not because of our inherent differences but because we made choices in how we defined our interests and our belief systems. We now have the power to choose a different and a better future. We can do that by integrating our economies, making common cause against common threats, promoting ethnic and religious tolerance and human rights. We can do it by making sure that none of the institutions of European and transatlantic unity, not any of them, are closed to Russia. You can decide whether you want to be a part of these institutions. It should be entirely your decision. And we can have the right kind of constructive partnership, whatever decision we make, as long as you know that no doors to Europe's future are closed to you, and you can then feel free to decide how best to pursue your own interests. If you choose not to pursue full membership in these institutions, then we must make sure that their eastern borders become gateways for Russia instead of barriers to travel, trade, and security cooperation. We also should work with others to help those in Europe who still fear violence and are afraid they will not have a stable, secure future. I am proud that together we have made the OSCE into an effective champion of human rights in Europe. I am pleased that President Putin and I recommitted ourselves yesterday to helping find a settlement to the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. I am proud we have together adapted the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, to reduce conventional arms in Europe and eliminate the division of the continent into military blocs. I believe it is a hopeful thing that despite our different outlook on the war in the former Yugoslavia, that our armed forces have worked there together in both Bosnia and Kosovo to keep the peace. We may still disagree about Kosovo, but now that the war is over, let me say one other thing about Yugoslavia. I believe the people of Serbia deserve to live in a normal country with the same freedoms the people of Russia and America enjoy, with relationships with their neighbors, including Russia, that will not constantly be interrupted by vast flows of innocent people being forced out of their country or threatened with their very lives. The struggle in Belgrade now is not between Serbia and NATO. It is between the Serbian people and their leaders. The Serbian people are asking the world to back democracy and freedom. Our response to their request does not have to be identical, but Russia and America should both be on the side of the people of Serbia. In the relationship we are building, we should try to stand abroad for the values each of us has been building at home. I know the kind of relationship that we would both like cannot be built overnight. Russia's history, like America's, teaches us well that there are no shortcuts to great achievements. But we have laid strong foundations. It has helped a great deal that so many Members of our Congress have visited you here, and that a number of Duma committee chairmen visited our Congress last month, that members of the Federation Council have been invited to come to Washington. I want to urge you, as many of you as can, to visit our country and invite Members of our Congress to visit you. Let them understand how the world looks from your perspective. Let them see how you do your jobs. Tell them what you're worried about and where you disagree with us. And give us a chance to build that base of common experience and mutual trust that is so important to our future together. All of you are always welcome to come and work with us in the United States. We have to find a mutual understanding. I also would say that the most important Russian American relationship still should be the relationship between our peoples, the student exchanges, the business partnerships, the collaboration among universities and foundations and hospitals, the sister city links, the growing family ties. Many of the Russians and Americans involved in these exchanges are very young. They don't even have any adult memories of the cold war. They don't carry the burdens and baggage of the past, just the universal, normal desire to build a good future with those who share their hopes and dreams. We should do everything we can to increase these exchanges, as well. And finally, we must have a sense of responsibility for the future. We are not destined to be adversaries, but it is not guaranteed that we will be allies. For us, there is no fate waiting to be revealed, only a future waiting to be created by the actions we take, the choices we make, and the genuine views we have of one another and of our own future. I leave you today looking to the future with the realistic hope that we will choose wisely that we will continue to build a relationship of mutual respect and mutual endeavor that we will tell each other the truth with clarity and candor as we see it, always striving to find common ground, always remembering that the world we seek to bring into being can come only if America and Russia are on the same side of history. I believe we will do this, not because I know everything always turns out well but because I know our partnership, our relationship, is fundamentally the right course for both nations. We have to learn to identify and manage our disagreements because the relationship is profoundly important to the future. The governments our people elect will do what they think is right for their own people. But they know that one thing that is right is continuing to strengthen the relationship between Russia and the United States. Our children will see the result, a result that is more prosperous and free and at peace than the world has ever known. That is what I believe we can do. I don't believe any American President has ever come to Russia five times before. I came twice before that, once when I was a very young man and our relations were very different than they are now. All my life, I have wanted the people of my country and the people of your country to be friends and allies, to lead the world away from war toward the dreams of children. I have done my best to do that. I hope you will believe that that is the best course for both our countries and for our children's future. Thank you very much. June 05, 2000 I believe we should give a round of applause to Natalia and Kateryna. They were fabulous. Didn't they give a good applause they are a great representative of the young people of Ukraine. Let me also thank the representatives of your government who came here with me today, Deputy Head of Presidential Administration Rohovyi, Foreign Minister Tarasyuk. I'd like to thank Mayor Omelchenko and Patriarch Filaret and all the other distinguished representatives of the Ukraine Government who have joined me and the Secretary of Energy and my National Security Adviser and our two Ambassadors for a good day of meetings. I thank all of you for coming out here on this beautiful day. I am honored to be in Kiev again, to come to the cradle of Ukrainian culture, to pay respects to Ukraine's ancient and glorious past, and to tell you, America will stand by you as you fight for a free and prosperous future. Here in this historic and beautiful square, you can see for a thousand years before me, the magnificent Saint Sophia's Cathedral, built by Prince Yaroslav in the 11th century and behind me, the beautiful and reborn Saint Michael's Monastery, built by his grandson, with a stunning cathedral built since the last time I was here between them, statues of Saints Olga and Andrew, Cyril and Methodius, all proof of your extraordinary artistic and cultural accomplishments. Sadly, the people who created and cherished these treasures suffered deeply. I am honored to have laid a wreath of flowers at the memorial to the millions who perished in the forced famine of the 1930's. Ukraine has endured oppressors who carved up your lands, banned your books, starved your children, purged your writers, enslaved your workers, plundered your art, stole your rich soil, and forbade you even to talk about the tragedy of the famine. Today, the oppressors are gone. Stalin is gone. The Nazis are gone. The Soviet Union is gone. Russia is working to build a new society. But you, the people of Ukraine, you are still here, stronger than ever. You are reclaiming your land, uniting your people, restoring your culture, and raising your children in freedom and democracy. You are fulfilling the longing of your ancestors. You are building a free, sovereign, and independent Ukraine. I know you have faced disappointments, and your dream is not complete. You have your vote, but you may ask, will it lead to have a real, positive impact? You have your freedom, but you may ask, will it lead to a better future? I ask you to look around you. From Lithuania to Poland to the Czech Republic, those who chose open societies and open markets like you started out with sacrifice, but they ended up with success. I have not lived what you have lived. I am an American, not an Ukrainian. I cannot tell you how to build your future. But I do believe this I believe Ukraine has the best opportunity in 1,000 years to achieve both freedom and prosperity. You are on your way. President Kuchma has helped to pass a strong budget. He has moved to give people their own land, to reform the old government bureaucracy, to privatize new businesses in accord with international standards, and he has appointed a strong Prime Minister. But my friends, you too must be strong leaders. You must encourage the government. You must exhort the Rada. You must build a free and prosperous Ukraine. Do not give up. Keep on fighting. Boritesya poborete. There will be obstacles. I know some in Ukraine want to discourage foreign investment they oppose free markets. But that thinking is lost in the past. But I ask you, look around the world today. The nations with the highest standards of living, the greatest security, the lowest poverty are free market democracies, people who trade and invest in one another. Communism has lost in Ukraine, but a full commitment to free market democracy has not yet won. If your children are to live their dreams, it must win. So again I ask you, do not give up. Keep on fighting. Boritesya poborete. America needs a strong, prosperous, and democratic Ukraine as a partner. Together we have made the whole world safer from the risk of nuclear war. Our soldiers are serving together with courage and pride in missions of peace. There is so much more we can do together. We can explore the frontiers of science and space, increase our efforts to protect the environment, fight disease, defeat terrorism, and promote democracy, prosperity, and peace. These are challenges all nations face and no nation can meet alone. And so I say again, let us meet them together. We must not give up. We must keep on fighting. Boritesya poborete. America believes Ukraine has a right to a place among the nations of Europe. No one must take that right away from you. We reject the idea that the eastern border of Europe is the western border of Ukraine. Of course, your future is your own choice. But we can, and we will, keep the door to the transatlantic community of democracies open to Ukraine. Ukraine has so much of what it takes to succeed in the global information age strong universities, an educated society, and partners willing to stand with you. All you need now is to stay on course and pick up speed, open the economy, strengthen the rule of law, promote civil society, protect the free press, break the grip of corruption. In Ukraine, I understand you have a saying, "He who is an hour late will spend a year catching up." People of Ukraine, seize this moment now for your nation and your children. And so I say for the last time, Boritesya poborete. In the cathedrals around me, I see Ukraine's past. In the faces of all the young people before me, I see Ukraine's future. It is a promising future. You have kept alive your language, your unity, your dream of independence for 1,000 years. You have what it takes to build the future of your dreams. Your parents battled tyranny to help you win your freedom. Now, you must use your freedom to make sure you and your children prosper in peace. America is your friend and your partner. Again, I thank you for coming to be with me today. Again I say, America will be with you all the way. God bless you. Slava Ukrainiy. June 04, 2000 President Putin. Good day, ladies and gentlemen. I will allow myself to begin summing up our 2 days of work with our guests and partners, with the President of the United States, Mr. Bill Clinton, and members of his team. For 2 days now, we worked very intensively. And I have to say right off the bat that both in terms of the spirit and the quality of our talks, as well as the results, the Russian side cannot but express its satisfaction. We discussed issues of interest in our opinion not only to the United States and the Russian Federation but to the other countries, as well, on global matters all of mankind's interest really lies here. We discussed in great detail everything that had been done in this very important issues of interest to both of our sides, and that which have been in the last several years. We agree that we're going to be acting in this direction jointly in the future. We discussed the issues of new global threats, threats such as terrorism, narcotics, crime. We talked about issues which, to our mind, have a certain solution in the estimation of our American colleagues, maybe have a different kind of a solution. We exchanged ideas and opinions on issues to which we had different solutions in the past. These talks were very candid, very open, and very topical. As you know, with my colleague, with the President of the United States, I signed several documents, including statements on security. And many things are determined and defined there, and much is said in these documents. The result I think can be summed up by saying that we not only confirmed the high level of our relations, but we also expressed the trend of the development of our relations between our two countries for the near future. I wanted to stress here, ladies and gentlemen, the following, that over the last period of time, say a year or even more, the relations between our two countries have been of a varied kind. At one time, we had relations increasing and improving then they would be falling. But that high level which was reached over the last 8 years by the efforts of the Russian leadership and of the administration of President Clinton allowed us to always find a way out of these crises with honor, not only to reestablish good relations but also to solve problems where we had disagreements. And we really cherish this. I am pleased to note here that in these very tough questions, we observed not only a desire to speak but also to find joint and mutually beneficial solutions. We discussed also topics that had to do with bilateral economic interests. Here I wanted to say that the Russian Federation, in the face of your humble servant and the Chairman of the Government, the Prime Minister, Mr. Kasyanov, the leading ministers of the Government who participated and took part in these talks and negotiations, not only informed and described to our American guests what's happening economically in Russia today but also discussed with our partners joint actions, joint activities, both of a bilateral nature as well as within the framework of international financial institutions. I wanted to stress here as well that the Russian Federation aims not only to go through its transformation, about which many people have so much spoken, but very decisively to do so in a practical way. I mean moving ahead on the tax code and moving ahead on production sharing. Here we have some issues which we have not yet been able to resolve between us and the State Duma, but I think these are rather technical issues. I think, together with the Deputies in the State Duma, we're going to be trying to find solutions and finally get this legislation. We spoke about the upcoming international events, the Okinawa summit, the Millennium summit in the United Nations in New York, the Brunei meeting. In this way, Mr. Clinton and myself, we have reached an accord on further joint progress along a whole series of issues, which not only we discussed today and yesterday and which we will still have an opportunity to discuss some more tomorrow, to move ahead on these issues at the events that I have listed. On behalf of the leadership of the Russian Federation, I want to thank the American delegation not only for accepting our invitation and coming to Russia but for a very constructive and businesslike discussion in an attempt to find solutions. Thank you so much for your attention. President Clinton. I would like to first thank President Putin and the Russian delegation for making us feel welcome and for these talks. I have come to Moscow at an important time. Russia, after all, has a new President, new government, new Duma. Its economy is showing encouraging signs of growth. This gives Russia a pivotal opportunity to build on the strong record of engagement between our two countries. It is also an opportunity for the United States. I welcome President Putin's interest in building a Russia that enjoys the enduring strength of a stable democracy. President Yeltsin led Russia to freedom. Under President Putin, Russia has the chance to build prosperity and strength, while safeguarding that freedom and the rule of law. We've had good discussions both last night and today on a range of common interests, including nonproliferation and arms control. We expressed our differences with clarity and candor. And I, for one, appreciate that. The importance of this relationship to ourselves and the world demands that we take every opportunity we can to find common ground and that, where we cannot find it, we express our differences with clarity and candor. I congratulated President Putin on the key role he played in the Duma's ratification of START II and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The United States ratified START II first, and I hope we will now follow Russia in ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. I also look forward to the ratification of the START II protocols by our Senate so that we can get about the business of further reducing the number of nuclear missiles that we have. I am very pleased today we agreed on two other major steps to reduce the nuclear danger. We reached an important agreement each to destroy 34 tons of military grade plutonium, enough to make thousands of warheads this raw weapon material that will now never fall into the wrong hands. We also agreed to establish a joint data exchange center in Moscow to share early warning information on missile and space launches. This is terribly important. It is the first permanent U.S. Russia military operation ever. In this new center, Russian and American military officials will be working side by side, 24 hours a day, to monitor missile warning information. It is a milestone in enhancing strategic stability, and I welcome it. The President and I also discussed our common commitment to prevent the proliferation of missile technology and our determination to exert firm control over exports of sensitive technology and strictly enforce export control laws and regulations. We discussed our common interest in commercial space cooperation, including the successful joint venture that launches commercial satellites. We agreed that our teams would soon meet to discuss future cooperation in the commercial space area, with the aim of moving toward eliminating existing constraints on commercial space launches. We also had a thorough discussion of our work on the START III treaty and the issue of national missile defense. We have agreed to a statement of principles, which I urge you to read carefully. It makes clear that there is an emerging ballistic missile threat that must be addressed, though we have not yet agreed on how best to do so. We have acknowledged that the ABM Treaty foresees the possibility of changes in the strategic environment that might require it to be updated. We have reaffirmed our commitment to pursue further reduction in offensive arms in parallel with our discussions on defense systems, underscoring the importance of the doctrines of strategic stability and mutual deterrence as the foundation for this work. We've asked our experts to keep working to narrow the differences and to develop a series of cooperative measures to address the missile threat. And we have agreed that we will continue to discuss it in our next meeting. We spent a large share of our time discussing economics. I'm encouraged by the economic plan President Putin has outlined and by the current recovery. I look forward to Russia's continuing to implement proposed reforms that will actually make the recovery last, reforms such as tax reform, anti money laundering legislation, strong property rights protections. I look forward to Russia's successful negotiations with the IMF. This is a good economic team with a very good opportunity to increase investment in Russia, both the return of money that Russians have placed outside the country and new investments from other countries. Later this month, our former Ambassador to Moscow, Bob Strauss, will come to Russia with a delegation of investors, including some of America's best known chief executive officers, to discuss opportunities in Russia and the steps Russia is taking to improve its investment climate. I think this will be only the beginning of a very successful effort at economic reform, if the intentions that President Putin outlined become reality. The President and I also discussed another area where we disagree, Chechnya. I have restated the opposition that I have to a policy which is well known. Essentially, I believe a policy that causes so many civilian casualties without a political solution ultimately cannot succeed. I also urged President Putin to move forward with transparent and impartial investigations of the stories of human rights violations and to authorize a speedy return of the OSCE to the region. Finally, I stressed to President Putin the importance the United States places on protecting religious freedom and the rights of an independent media. I strongly agree with what President Putin himself has said, that Russia has no future if it suppresses civic freedoms and the press. We agreed to advance our technical cooperation on climate change. We believe it's essential to complete work on the Kyoto Protocol, including market mechanisms, to protect the environment, promote clean energy, and reduce costs. I think Russia has a great economic opportunity here as well as a great environmental one. And on these issues, the President and I are asking the U.S. Russia binational commission, under the leadership of Vice President Gore and Prime Minister Kasyanov, to carry forward the work. I was encouraged by our discussion, pleased with our agreements, pleased with the candor and clarity of our disagreements. I am eager for more progress. I'm also looking forward to the chance to talk to the Russian people tonight, in a radio talk show, and tomorrow, as I have the opportunity to speak to the Duma and the Federation Council. Again, Mr. President, I thank you for this and especially for these two agreements, and I look forward to our continued work together. Russia U.S. Relations Q. The question to the President of Russia. What is the priority you give to Russian American relations in the world, and a world that, as we see, is changing and forming in a different way? Thank you. President Putin. The history of relations of the former Soviet Union and the United States of America, and now Russian Federation and the United States its history, as I've said, has many dramatic as well as many positive elements. We were allies. There was a period of time when we suffered through confrontation between our two sides. One would hope that the very worst in our relations is far, far behind us. For today, the United States is one of our main partners. And as far as Russia is concerned, it will never make the choice regarding the United States in order to start once again confrontation. Never. We are for cooperation. We are for coming to agreement on problems that might arise. And naturally, problems like this exist and have existed and probably will exist. That is not important. What's important is that the approach to finding a solution is only one it's unique it cannot be aimed at destroying everything positive that has been achieved in the recent past but also looking into the future. And this kind of chance and this intention among the leadership of Russia, as well as I understand it, among the leadership of the United States, the President of the United States, we are going to follow these principles, these kinds of tendencies. Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty Q. Mr. President, do you see the chance that the United States would exercise its option to withdraw from the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty if it is not possible to negotiate changes to permit a national missile defense? And was this possibility raised in your discussions with President Putin? President Clinton. Well, first of all, I have not made a decision on the national missile defense stage one. It is premature. The statement of principles that we have agreed to I thought reflected an attempt to bring our positions closer together. I do not believe the decision before me is a threat to strategic stability and mutual deterrence. The Russian side disagrees. But we had a lot of agreement here.And again, let me say, I urge you all to read that. I do not want the United States to withdraw from the ABM regime, because I think it has contributed to a more stable, more peaceful world. It has already been amended once, and its framers understood that circumstances might change and threats might arise which were outside the context of U.S. now Russian relations. We acknowledge that there is a threat. It needs to be met, and we're trying to bridge our differences. And I think that's where we ought to leave it. START Treaties Q. President Clinton, Mr. President, what do you feel about Russia's continuation of reducing within START III the number of warheads down to 1,500 warheads? Thank you. President Clinton. I missed the translation. Would you give it to me again? Q. What would be the attitude of the United States, Mr. President, on the Russian position of coming down to 1,500 warheads within START III? President Clinton. Well, we had previously agreed to a range of 2,000 to 2,500 on START III. If we were to come down below that, it would require us to change our strategic plan. And we believe it would be much better if we were going to do that, if we could also know that we were defending ourselves against a new threat, which we believe is real. So we will continue to discuss all these things. Let me say, I am certain I am eager to get down to the START II levels, and I am eager to go below the START II levels, but I also want to try to solve the new threat, as well. And I will do whatever I can to achieve both objectives. Clinton Putin Relationship Q. This is for both Presidents. Now that you have met together as Presidents, how would you describe each other's personalities and leadership qualities? And how do you see them affecting relations between the two countries? And in particular, President Clinton, are you any more or less assured about the future of democracy in Russia following your meetings today? President Clinton. You want to go first? President Putin. As you know, this is not our first meeting, between myself and President Clinton. President Clinton, now for almost 8 years, heads one of the most powerful countries in the world. He's a very experienced politician. In my mind, we've established now not only good business ties but also personal relations. For me, President Clinton is a person who is a very comfortable and pleasant partner in negotiations. I think that if everyone behaves the way President Clinton has behaved, not trying to find dead ends and problems but to seek ways of moving ahead, I think, between us in the future our relations really will be successful. Take a look at the ABM Treaty. There are a lot of problems there. We've written down in our statement, about which Mr. Clinton just spoke, a basis, a principle of basis for maintaining the ABM Treaty as a major key point in the whole strategic balance and for maintaining security. Now, the starting point for the possibility of seeing new threats arrive, we have a commonality. We're against having a cure which is worse than the disease. We understand that there are ways and a basis that we can build upon in order to solve even this issue, an issue which seems to be one of the most difficult to solve. So I repeat, we know that today, in the United States, there is a campaign ongoing. We're familiar with the programs of the two main candidates. And if these programs are implemented, and there it says, for instance, the necessity to positively improve relations between Russia and the United States, the time that Mr. Clinton is going to pass on to the next President, no matter who gets to be President, we're willing to go forward on either one of these approaches. Thank you. President Clinton. Well, let me say first, I think President Putin has an enormous opportunity and a great challenge. If you want to know what my personal assessment is, I think he is fully capable of building a prosperous, strong Russia, while preserving freedom and pluralism and the rule of law. It's a big challenge. I think he is fully capable of doing it. And I want to use the time I have remaining as President not only to further the interests of the United States in meeting our national security threat but also to further our interest in having a good, stable relationship with a Russia that is strong and prosperous and free, respecting pluralism and the rule of law. That's what I'm trying to do. I think he is fully capable of achieving that. And I'm encouraged by the first 2 days of our really serious work. June 03, 2000 President Clinton. Thank you very much. First of all, I would like to, I think, speak for all of us in thanking Chancellor Schroeder for this remarkable meeting and the communique which is coming out of our meeting. It's, I think, a fair statement of the way we view the 21st century world and what our responsibilities and opportunities are in it. There is a consensus among us that we face, in the globalized information society, great opportunities and great challenges that we want economic growth and social justice that the countries around this table, because of their size differences, their continental differences, their developmental differences, face particular challenges but that there are things we can do to help each other and to help our own people. We talked specifically about economic empowerment, about education, about closing the digital divide, about the importance of reducing income inequality as a result of the globalization. We talked about the importance of a global initiative to reduce disease and poverty. We talked about climate change. And we talked a good deal about the importance of reaffirming our common humanity in the midst of the racial and ethnic and religious tensions that still dominate too much of the world's conflicts and are present, to some degree, in every one of our countries. We did agree, as the Chancellor said, to set up a network of our people to work together to identify specific challenges and come up with specific responses to them, so that we can now move from the more theoretical level of our discussions to concrete suggestions that will be helpful and could actually improve the lives of the people we represent. And finally, let me say we agreed that those of us who are members will emphasize a lot of these concerns at the coming G 8 meeting in Okinawa, where we expect to see a real emphasis on, in particular, on three things we talked about today on spreading educational opportunities in the developing world on closing the digital divide and on a major effort by the developed countries to increase our response to disease, particularly to HIV AIDS, TB, and malaria. So this was a very good meeting. And Chancellor, again I thank you, and I, for one, learned a lot, and I think it was very much worth the effort that you made to put it on. At this point, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany began the question and answer session. A participant asked if and when another meeting was scheduled and if the group would stay together regardless of election results. The Chancellor stated that the group was indissoluble and had scheduled another meeting in July. European Union Q. Mr. President, yesterday the Chancellor called you a true European. As a true European, can you tell us where you think Europe should be moving? Should Europe be moving to become a United States of Europe should it becoming a kind of federal state? Is that what it should be doing, or should it be a rather looser confederation of nation states? Laughter President Clinton. Well, I'm also a true democrat, which means I believe people should make their own decisions laughter about their lives. Let me say, as I said yesterday in Aachen, I have strongly supported the cause of European union. I think that what has been done so far is a plus. I think that more members will be added to the Union, and I think that is a good thing. You already have a common currency and a forum for resolving common concerns. Whether the Union will grow tighter, as well as larger, I can't say. That's a decision you have to make. And my guess is that now that you have a framework that's plainly working economically and politically, that those decisions will be made over a longer period of time and that for the next few years you'll be at least as concerned about how many other countries should be let in. But it's entirely a decision for Europe to make. The United States will support you whatever you do as long as we continue to share values and work together and deal with the kind of questions we're discussing today. Latin America Q. To President Clinton, how do you view the situation in Latin America? And I'd like to know how you can see the principles you're advocating here coming about in Latin American countries with the difficulties facing democracy there at the moment. Thank you. President Clinton. Well, first, I think that all the people here who are not from Latin America should know that every country but one is a democracy that there has been an enormous amount of economic and political reform in Latin America in the last decade but that because of the rise of narcotraffickers and terrorist activities in Colombia and in other countries, democracy is under great strain in Latin America. And my belief is that we should do everything we can to support the elected governments and democratic tendencies. We should make sure that we do whatever we can to see that the economies work for ordinary citizens, that there is a human face on Latin America's part of the global economy, and that we try to strengthen those governments that are under particular stress, which is why I've done what I could to persuade our Congress to help Colombia and the other countries in the Andean regions to deal with the combined impacts of the narcotraffickers and the civil wars in the region. Perhaps the Latin American Presidents here might have a better insight. But I think the fact that we have the Presidents of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile here, I think, has been a big addition to the quality of our discussions because of the particular challenges facing Latin America at this time. President Fernando Cardoso of Brazil and President Fernando de la Rua of Argentina commented on democracy in Latin America. Progressive Governance Q. Mr. President, you said that globalization should be given a new human face. What was striking was that the term "Third Way" wasn't used at this conference progressive governance was the motto of this conference. Is this a turning point for future meetings of the center left? President Clinton. I hope not, because I believe that, to me, it does reflect the Third Way. But, you know, that term, "the Third Way," is fairly closely identified with our administration and with what Prime Minister Blair has done in Great Britain. And I think this idea of progressive governance is perhaps less of a political slogan and more of a description of what it is we're all trying to do. But essentially, I think what unites us is, we believe in the positive possibilities of a globalized information economy. And we know we have to have responsible economic policies to make the private markets work, but we don't believe that's enough. We don't believe you can have social justice and deal with all these other challenges we face unless you have effective, progressive governance that makes the most of the new economy and deals with its rough edges and difficulties as well. I think that's so I think, in that sense, progressive governance describes what we're trying to do. We don't believe in just laissez faire economics, but we don't believe that government alone can solve these problems or ignore the importance of economic performance. So what we want is progressive governance to deal with the opportunities and challenges that are out there. I think it is a fair description of what we're about, and it is perhaps more inclusive of all the countries here represented than the Third Way. I like the Third Way because it's sort of easy to remember. Laughter But I think that far more important than the labels are the substance, and I think that's what has really bound us together here today, is the substance of what we're about. Chancellor Schroeder commented that the absence of Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom was due to the birth of his child rather than to differences of substance. President Clinton. Progressive governance and the Third Way are pro family. Laughter Chancellor Schroeder. One last question, please. Internet Q. Mr. Clinton, I'd like to ask you, what is your view of how the Internet should be used as a tool for strengthening democracy and for the education of the developing countries and strengthening democracy in countries like China or other countries where this is a problem, instead of being used as a tool to spread destructive information? How should you enforce that tool? And what is the role for countries that are far ahead in this area, like Sweden and the United States, for example? President Clinton. Well, first, I think that we should recognize what an enormous potential the Internet has for bridging economic, educational, and social divides, not only in the developing world but in the poorest areas of developed countries, because it collapses time and space and allows access to information that was previously unthinkable for people in difficult situations. Prime Minister Chretien talked about how he had all the Eskimo villages in northern Canada connected to the Internet. That has enormous health implications, enormous educational implications, and my guess is, economic implications. So to specifically answer your question, I'll give you just three examples of things I think we ought to be emphasizing. I believe we ought to try to have Internet connections with printers in all the poorest villages where we're trying to get children into schools and give them modern education, because for example, the entire Encyclopedia Britannica is now on the Internet. And if you have a printer and a computer in a poor village, you don't have to be able to afford textbooks anymore, and it's a far more efficient way for government to spread universal information. So that's one example that's an education example. For an economic example, I think that all over the world we see economic empowerment initiatives. In Latin America, for example, there has been a lot of work to get native crafts and also in African villages out. I think there ought to be a systematic effort to use E commerce to market these things all over the world and increase the incomes of poor people in villages dramatically by the use of E commerce. The third thing, a political usage. In India, where I just visited, in several of the villages in several of the States in India, they're now providing government services over the Internet. In some places, they're more advanced than we are in the United States. I was in Hyderabad, where you can get 18 government services over the Internet, including a driver's license, so no one ever waits in line for it anymore. If anyone did that in America, they could be elected for life. Laughter So I think that but far more important is, I saw a poor woman in a village who just had a baby go into the only public building in this village, to the village computer, where there was someone there who helped her operate it. And she called up the health department and got instructions, with very good software, very good visuals, about how she should care for this baby for the first 6 months. And I reviewed it it's just as good as anything she could get in the wealthiest community in America from the finest obstetrician so that we're going to keep more babies alive because of the Internet. So those are three examples of things that I think we should be focused on. And those of us in the wealthier countries should be providing the money and the technical support for countries to do more of this, because it will move more people more quickly out of poverty, I think, than anything that's ever been out there, if we do it right. June 02, 2000 Ladies and gentlemen, Chancellor Schroeder, Lord Mayor Linden, President Rau, President Havel, His Majesty Juan Carlos, President Halonen, previous laureates, members of the Charlemagne Foundation, leaders of the clergy and cathedral, and members of the German and American Governments. Let me begin by thanking the lord mayor for his welcome and his wise words and my good friend Chancellor Schroeder for his kind comments and his visionary statement. The rare distinction you have bestowed upon me, I am well aware, is in large measure a tribute to the role the American people have played in promoting peace, freedom, and security in Europe for the last 50 years. I feel the honor is greater still because of the remarkable contributions made by previous recipients of this prize toward our common dream of European union. Of course, as has already been said, that dream has its roots here in Aachen, an ancient shrine that remains at the center of what it means to be European, the seat of an empire, a place of healing waters, peace treaties, furious fighting. With its liberation at the end of World War II, Aachen became perhaps the first German city to join the postwar democratic order. Today, as I have seen, Aachen is both a sanctuary for sacred relics dating back to the dawn of Christianity and a crucible of Europe's new information economy. Here, Charlemagne's name summons something glimpsed for the first time during his life, a sense that the disparate people of this Earth's smallest continent could actually live together as participants in a single civilization. In its quest for unity, even at the point of a sword, and in its devotion to the new idea that there was actually something called Europe, the Carolingian idea surpassed what had come before, and to an extent, it guides us still. Twelve centuries ago, out of the long, dark night of endless tribal wars, there emerged a light that somehow has survived all the ravages of time, always burning brighter, always illuminating Europe's way to the future. Today, that shining light of European union is a matter of the utmost importance, not just to Europeans but to everyone on this planet, for Europe has shown the world humanity at its best and at its worse. Europe's most violent history was caused by men claiming the mantle of Charlemagne, men who sought to impose European union for their own ends without the consent of the people. History teaches, therefore, that European union, not to mention transatlantic unity, must come from the considered judgment of free people and must be for worthy purposes that when threatened must be defended. The creators of this prize and its first winners clearly understood that. We often say that theirs was the generation that rebuilt Europe after World War II, but actually they did far more. They built the foundation of something entirely new, a Europe united in common commitment to democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. That achievement endured for half a century, but only for half a continent. Then, 11 years ago, the Berlin Wall fell, the Iron Curtain parted, and at last the prospect of a Europe whole and free opened before you. All of us will remember 1989 for the Wall crumbling to the powerful strains of Schiller's "Ode to Joy." It was a moment of great liberation, like 1789 or 1848, a particular triumph for the German people, whose own unification defied great adversity and set the stage for the larger unification of Europe. Too often we forget that 1989 was also a time of grave uncertainty about the future. There were doubts about NATO's future, reinforced later by its slowness to confront evil in Bosnia and Croatia. There were fears that the EU's efforts to come closer together would either fail or, succeeding, would fatally divide Europe and the United States. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe feared becoming a gray zone of poverty and insecurity. Many wondered if Russia was headed for a Communist backlash or a nationalist coup. In January of 1994 I came to Europe for the first time as President, both to celebrate Europe's new birth of freedom and to build upon it. Then I spoke of a new conception of European security, based not on divided defense blocs but instead on political, military, and cultural integration. This new security idea required, as has already been said, the transatlantic alliance to do for Europe's East what we did for Europe's West after World War II. Together, we set about doing that. We lowered trade barriers, supported young democracies, adapted NATO to new challenges, and expanded our Alliance across Europe's old divide. We made clear, and I repeat today, that NATO's door remains open to new members. The EU took in three new members, opened negotiations with a dozen others, created a single market with one currency. We've stood by Russia, struggling to build their own democracy, and opened the way to a partnership between Russia and NATO and between Ukraine and NATO. We defended the values at the heart of our vision of an undivided Europe, acting to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and forging what I believe will be an enduring peace there. We acted in Kosovo in one of our Alliance's finest moments. A year ago in Germany we launched a Stability Pact for southeastern Europe. We stand, still, with crusaders for tolerance and freedom, from Croatia to Slovakia to Serbia. And we do encourage reconciliation between Turkey and Greece. Over the last 11 years, of course, there have been some setbacks. But unquestionably, Europe today is more united, more democratic, more peaceful than ever, and both Europeans and Americans should be proud of that. Think how much has changed. Borders built to stop tanks now manage invasions of tourists and trucks. Europe's fastest growing economies are now on the other side of the old Iron Curtain. At NATO Headquarters the flags of 19 Allies and 27 partners fly. In Central Europe and Eastern Europe, the realistic dream of membership in the EU and NATO has sparked the resolution of almost every old ethnic and border dispute. And, finally finally our friend Va clav Havel has spent more years being President than he spent in prison. In southeastern Europe, the Bosnians are still fighting, but now at the ballot box. Croatia is a democracy. Soldiers from almost every European country, including bitter former adversaries, are keeping the peace together in Kosovo. Last year as German troops marched through the Balkan countryside, they were hailed as liberators. What a way to end the 20th century. In the meantime, Russia has stayed on the path of democracy, though its people have suffered bitter economic hardships, political and criminal violence, and the tragedy of the war in Chechnya, which yet may prove to be selfdefeating because of the civilian casualties. Still, it has withdrawn its troops from the Baltic States, accepted the independence of its neighbors, and completed the first democratic transition in its thousand year history. European unity really is producing something new under the Sun, common institutions that are bigger than the nation state and, at the same time, a devolution of democratic authority downward. Scotland and Wales have their own Parliaments. This week Northern Ireland, where my family has its roots, restored its new government. Europe is alive with the sound of ancient place names being spoken again, Catalonia, Piedmonte, Lombardy, Silesia, Transylvania, Uthenia, not in the name of separatism but in the spirit of healthy pride and heritage. National sovereignty is being enriched by lively local voices making Europe safer for diversity, reaffirming our common humanity, reducing the chance that European disunity will embroil Europe and America in another large conflict. One thing, thankfully, has not changed. Europe's security remains tied to America's security. When it is threatened, as it was in Bosnia and Kosovo, we, too, will respond. When it is being built, we, too, will always take part. Europe's peace sets a powerful example to other parts of the world that remain divided along ethnic, religious, and national lines. Even today, Europe has internal disputes over fundamental questions of sovereignty, political power, and economic policy, disputes no less consequential than those over which people still fight and die in other parts of the world. However, instead of fighting and dying over them now, Europeans argue about them in Brussels in a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect. The whole world should take notice of this. If western Europe could come together after the carnage of World War II, if central Europe could do it following 50 years of communism, it can be done everywhere on this Earth. Of course, for all of the positive developments and our good feelings today, the job of building a united Europe is certainly not finished, and it is important not to take all this self congratulation too far. Instead, we should focus today on two big pieces of unfinished business and one enduring challenge. The first piece of unfinished business is to make southeast Europe fully, finally, and forever a part of the rest of Europe. That is the only way to make peace last in that bitterly divided region. It cannot be done by forcing people to live together there is no bringing back the old Yugoslavia. It cannot be done by giving every community its own country, army, and flag. Shifting so many borders in the Balkans will only shake the peace further. Our goal must be to debalkanize the Balkans. We must help them to create a magnet that will bring people together, a magnet more powerful than the polarizing pull of their old hatreds. That's what the Stability Pact that Germany helped to establish is designed to do, challenging the nations of southeast Europe to reform their economies and strengthen their democracies and pledging more than 6 billion from the rest of us to support their efforts. Now we must turn quickly those pledges into positive changes in the lives of ordinary people and steadily bring those nations into Western institutions. We must also remain unrelenting in our support for a democratic transition in Serbia. For if there is to be a future for democracy and tolerance in this region, there must be no future for Mr. Milosevic and his policy of ethnic hatred and ethnic cleansing. If southeastern Europe is to be fully integrated into the continent, Turkey also must be included. I applaud the EU's decision to treat Turkey as a real candidate for membership. I hope both Turkey and the EU will take the next steps. It will be good for Turkey, good for southeast Europe, good for more rapid reconciliation between Greece and Turkey and the resolution of Cyprus, and good for the entire world, which is still too divided over religious differences. Our second piece of unfinished business concerns Russia. We must work to build a partnership with Russia that encourages stability, democracy, and cooperative engagement with the West and full integration with global institutions. Only time will tell what Russia's ultimate role in Europe will be. We do not yet know if Russia's hard won democratic freedoms will endure. We don't know yet whether it will define its greatness in yesterday's terms or tomorrow's. The Russian people will make those decisions. Though Russia's transformation is incomplete, there clearly is reason for hope in Russia's remarkable journey over these last few years, from dictatorship to democracy, from communism to the market, from empire to nation state, from adversary to partner in reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Because the stakes are so high, we must do everything we can to encourage a Russia that is fully democratic and united in its diversity, a Russia that defines its greatness not by dominance of its neighbors but by the dominant achievements of its people and its partnership, a Russia that should be, indeed, must be, fully part of Europe. That means no doors can be sealed shut to Russia, not NATO's, not the EU's. The alternative would be a future of harmful competition between Russia and the West and the end of our vision of an undivided continent. As Winston Churchill said when he received the Charlemagne Prize in the far darker days of 1956, "In a true unity of Europe, Russia must have her part." Of course, Russia may very well decide it has no interest in formally joining European or transatlantic institutions. If that happens, we must make sure that, as the EU and NATO expand, their eastern borders become gateways to Russia, not barriers to trade, travel, and security cooperation. We must build real institutional links with Russia, as NATO has begun to do. Of course, it won't be easy, and there is still mistrust to be overcome on both sides, but it is possible and absolutely necessary. The steps necessary to bring southeast Europe and Russia into the embrace of European unity illustrate the continued importance of the transatlantic alliance to both Europe and America. The enduring challenge we face, therefore, is to preserve and strengthen our alliance as Europe continues its coming together. We have agreed on the principles. We have laid the foundations. But the future we're building will look very different from anything we have ever known. In a generation, I expect the EU will have as many as 30 members, from the Baltics to the Balkans to Turkey a community of unprecedented cultural, political, and economic diversity and vitality. It will be a bigger Europe than Charlemagne ever dared dream, a reflection of our recognition that ultimately Europe is a unifying idea as much as a particular place, an expansive continent of different peoples who embrace a common destiny, play by the same rules, and affirm the same truths that ethnic and religious hatred are unacceptable that human rights are inalienable and universal that our differences are a source of strength, not weakness that conflicts must be resolved by arguments, not by arms. I believe America must continue to support Europe's most ambitious unification efforts. And I believe Europe should want to strengthen our alliance even as you grow stronger. The alliance has been the bedrock of our security for half a century. It can be the foundation on which our common future is built. Oh, it's easy to point to our differences. Many do. On my bad days, I do. But let's keep a healthy perspective. Consider these news headlines about U.S. European dispute "Allies Complain of Washington's Heavy Hand," "France to NATO Non, Merci," "U.S. Declares Economic Warfare on Allies," "Protestors Rally Against American Arms Plan." The first of those headlines is from the Suez crisis in 1956. The second is from 1966, when France left NATO's military command. The third is from 1981, the Siberian Pipeline crisis the fourth, from 1986, during the debate about deploying intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe. Yes, we've always had our differences, and being human and imperfect, we always will. But the simple fact is, since Europe is an idea as much as a place, America also is a part of Europe, bound by ties of family, history, and values. More than ever, we are also actually connected. Underwater cables allow us to send staggering amounts of E mail and E commerce to each other instantaneously. A billion dollars in trade and investment goes back and forth every day, employing more than 14 million people on both sides of the Atlantic. And there is the enduring connection, the 104,000 Americans who lie in military cemeteries across Europe. Today's Europe would not be possible without them. And whatever work I have done to merit your prize was built on their sacrifice. So my friends, we must nourish the ties that bind us as we work to resolve honest disagreements and to overcome potentially harmful misperceptions on both sides of the Atlantic. Let me mention just two. There is a perception right now in America that Europe doesn't always carry its fair share of our mutual responsibilities. Yet Europeans are providing more than 80 percent of both the troops keeping the peace in Kosovo and the funds for economic reconstruction there. And few Americans know that in our own backyard, Europeans paid for more than 60 percent of all aid to Central America when it was ravaged by Hurricane Mitch and a third of all support for peace in Guatemala. At the same time, there is a perception in Europe that America's power military, economic, cultural is at times too overbearing. Perhaps our role in NATO's air campaign in Kosovo accentuated such fears. But in Kosovo, our power was exercised in alliance with Europe, in pursuit of our shared interest in European peace and stability, in defense of shared values central to the goal of European integration. If, after Kosovo, European countries strengthen their own ability to act with greater authority and responsibility in times of crisis, while maintaining our transatlantic link, I think that is a very good thing. There is no contradiction between a strong Europe and a strong transatlantic partnership. I would also like to mention that our partnership, as the lord mayor pointed out, and as Chancellor Schroeder said, remains profoundly important, not only to ourselves, but to the rest of the world as well. Together, we account for more than half the world's economy and 90 percent of its humanitarian aid. If we're going to win the fight against terrorism, organized crime, the spread of weapons of mass destruction if we want to promote ethnic, religious, and racial tolerance if we want to combat global warming and environmental degradation, fight infectious disease, ease poverty, and close the digital divide, clearly, we must do these things together. Europe and America should draw strength from our transatlantic alliance. Europe should not be threatened by it, and America must not listen to those who say we should go it alone. America must remain Europe's good partner and good ally. Lord Palmerston's rule that countries have no permanent alliances, only permanent interests, simply does not apply to our relationship. For America has a permanent interest in a permanent alliance with Europe. Our shared future is deeply rooted in our shared history. The American Revolution, after all, stemmed in part from the Seven Years War, which in turn stemmed from a treaty signed here in Aachen in 1748. Now, a few days ago, I stood at the mouth of the Tagus River in Lisbon. From that spot over five centuries ago, brave Europeans began to explore the far reaches of our planet. They traveled unimaginable distances and conquered indescribable adversity on their way to find Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In their wake, the sons and daughters of this continent came across the Atlantic to populate places they called New Spain, New England, New France, New Netherlands, Nova Scotia, New Sweden, in short, a new Europe. Without the longing for a new Europe, there never would have been an America in the first place. Now, as the longing for a new Europe takes root on the soil of the old continent, we should never let a sense of history's inevitability cloud our wonder at how astonishingly Europeans changed the rest of the world through enterprise, imagination, and their ability to grow, qualities that always will define Europe's identity far more accurately than any mapmaker ever will. In the years ahead, as pilgrims of peace come here to Aachen, I hope they will reflect on the similarity of the two monuments enshrined here first, the magnificent cathedral holding Charlemagne's mortal remains, begun in his lifetime, added to throughout the Middle Ages, repaired in the 20th century, when our failure to keep the peace required it and second, the peace and unity that three generations have been building for five decades now in Europe, a work far from complete, perhaps never to be completed, but completely worthy of our best labors and dreams. Let us keep building this cathedral, the cathedral of European unity, on the foundation of our alliance for freedom. Because I have tried to lay a stone or two in my time, I am honored and humbled to accept this prize. Thank you very much. May 31, 2000 Prime Minister Antonio Guterres. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. A few words in English before making my statement in Portuguese. First of all, let me say that this was not a business as usual summit. It was a strategic summit strategic in the way we discussed the diplomatic and security problems of our hemisphere, the new common security and defense policy of the European Union, its relationship with NATO, our relations with Russia and the Ukraine, our commitment to the protection of the values of all civilization in the Balkans strategic in our approach, bringing confidence to multilateral way of dealing with trade issues, our commitment to relaunch this year the new round of World Trade Organization and to solve in a case by case situation our disputes based on the WTO rules but especially strategic because we concentrated on the new global problems that represent today the main threats to our planet infectious diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, or AIDS, the digital divide, the difficulties to make the new economy a truly inclusive economy and strategic because we decided to work together, the United States and European Union, to promote a global effort to match this challenge and to win this challenge, aiming at the next G 8 organization summit and working together in all relevant international fora. Ladies and gentlemen, this has indeed been a meeting in which questions of global strategy have been a major element. Firstly, on this level of diplomacy and security, I think that we have fully understood the importance of our common European security and defense policy and the interrelations between this policy and the instruments within it and NATO and in perfect accord with the relations between these two organizations. We also discussed in a very consensual manner the efforts that the United States and the European Union are going to be making in their relations with Russia and the Ukraine, considering this an essential triangle for the stability of our continent. And we were able to reiterate our firm commitment to what we are doing in the western Balkans and our conviction that what we are concerned with here are essential values of civilization in Bosnia and Kosovo, as to the possibility there of establishing a real multiethnic community in this territory, and a commitment to transform Yugoslavia into a truly democratic country, commitment to guaranteeing or to trying to guarantee stability in such complicated areas as Montenegro, and to offer support to all the countries in the region in their development to offer a long term prospect which is truly European for the whole Balkan region. In our discussion, we attached great importance to the transformation of the new economy, the knowledge based economy, not simply to be a privilege for the richest countries and for people and organizations with the greatest power in society but also, particularly in the United States and Europe, for all our citizens, for all our businesses, for all our organizations, and at the same time to establish a very strong interlinkage in our efforts with the objective of promoting a broadband link between our education information services on either side of the Atlantic. We want to develop our common efforts to combat separation between rich and poor countries in this area, since we believe that this new economy is a basic and fundamental opportunity for the poorer countries to be able to press forward, to leap forward, and come closer to the living conditions of the more developed world. But we can't talk about this without recognizing the drama which exists today in the world, given the series of infectious diseases leading to suffering and death for so many, such as AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. And we need to work together, seriously cooperating to promote global action to combat effectively these diseases and to develop in the next meeting of the G 8 an approach on this subject and to involve the whole international community and all international organizations, with the support of the European Union and the United States of America, in being catalysts in our efforts in this area. Given the global responsibilities we have, we must also meet these challenges of our times. We also discussed many other questions foreign policy, for instance and of course, one point that the Portuguese Government cannot fail to mention We talked about the transition of East Timor to democracy and independence. President Clinton. President Clinton. Thank you very much. First, I would like to thank Prime Minister Guterres for his outstanding leadership in his tenure as EU President. I thank President Prodi, Commissioner Patten, High Representative Solana, for their strong leadership and the work they have done for transatlantic cooperation, and especially in Kosovo and in the Balkans in these last few months. I would like to just take one minute to put this meeting into some historical perspective. We've come quite a long way since Portugal's first EU Presidency 8 years ago. At that time, many were predicting that Europe's new democracies would falter, that Russia would turn inward and reactionary, that NATO had lost its reason for being, that Europe's project for a common currency and foreign policy would founder, and that the United States and Europe would go their own separate ways. Eight years later Europe's new democracies are joining the transatlantic mainstream. Russia, for all its problems, has completed the first democratic power transfer in its entire history. We have preserved and strengthened NATO. The EU has brought monetary union into being and made a fast start at a common foreign and security policy, a development the United States strongly supports. And far from moving apart, the United States and Europe today complete the 14th U.S. EU Summit of my Presidency. So I thank all of those who have supported those developments. Today we talked a lot about security in Kosovo, the Balkans, southeastern Europe. We talked about the European Security Defense Initiative, which the United States strongly supports, in cooperation with NATO. And we talked about a number of other issues, including Russia, at some length. We discussed the need to support democracy and economic reform in Russia and the continued need for a political solution in Chechnya. I'd also like to thank the European Union for something else which is on my mind today because of the work I've been doing in the Middle East. I welcome the efforts that the EU has led to give Israel an invitation to join the Western Europe and others group in the United Nations. This is a very good development, and I think it will contribute to the negotiating atmosphere that is so important at this difficult and pivotal time in the Middle East. Just two other issues briefly. We did talk, as Prime Minister Guterres said, a lot about the new economy, about how to maximize its spread within our countries and how to bridge the digital divide both within and beyond our borders, and we talked about the importance of dealing with other common challenges. I'll just mention two. I talked at some length about the climate change global warming challenge, and we have made a joint commitment to do more to try to help developing nations deal with AIDS, malaria, and TB. And I am very grateful for the leadership and the energy of the EU in that regard. So, in closing, I think it's been a good meeting. I think it demonstrated the vitality and importance of our partnership. I'd like to thank the business leaders who are here, who also have been meeting, and the environmental leaders and just say that from my point of view, all these exchanges have been very much worth the effort and are leading us into a better future. Thank you. Prime Minister Guterres. Senor Prodi. President Romano Prodi. Well, I am most pleased to be here today with Antonio to discuss with our common friend the President of the United States the relationship between the European Union and the United States. But before anything, I want to pay tribute to the support of President Clinton to the European Union. You always supported European Union, without any doubt. And this is the reason why our transatlantic ties are so good now and so strong. And I think that you will go to Aachen to receive the Charlemagne Prize. I think you deserve it because this is the prize that is given to the Europeans. Your predecessor President Kennedy was a Berliner. You now, you are not a Berliner but a European, I'd say, because I think that you belong to our family, really. The United States helped Europe, even at the most difficult point, even when Europe was becoming more and more powerful, like making up a euro in the last building of our new Europe. Now we are 375 million people we shall arrive to 500 million people with enlargement. And we discussed enlargement this morning, and we discussed how enlargement can be performed quickly, well, in a peaceful way, not harming anybody, and being accepted also by Russia. This almost was a photo op of the meeting that I had with the Russian President Putin just the day before yesterday, discussing how enlargement would be done and the aim, the goals of enlargement. Concerning the point you didn't touch in our relation, we discussed frankly about trade. And of course, conflicts between the two biggest trade powers in the world are always possible. We are the largest trade in the world, and we represent more than 40 percent of world trade. We are committed, and we decided to be committed today to a more territorial trade system, and all trade disputes will be settled case by case under WTO rules. This was clear. There was a clear commitment. And we decided also that megaphone diplomacy will be replaced by telephone diplomacy. It is more constructive, even less sexy. Laughter I am pleased that we have already two results of this cooperation. After 3 years of discussion, we are finally able to come today with a solution to settle our difference on that of protection, which is a very delicate issue. And then we developed jointly the safe harbor concept. And so we shall have, together, high data protection standards and free information flows. This deal has been approved today by our member states and so will not be reviewed by the European Parliament. It's done. WTO accession of China will take place very soon, I hope we hope. We are working for that, and we are the two teams, the American, U.S. team and the European Union teams, are really working together for that. And we launch today the biotechnology consultative forum to foster public debate and create more common understanding. I remember that this forum, which I proposed in October last year at my first meeting with you, Bill, is made of outstanding and independent individuals from outside the government. It's a very independent body. And I do expect that this forum will meet in July. And so we agreed also to go together to the G 8 with a strong agenda on the tragic problem of sickness in the world. We shall elaborate this strategy for tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS fighting over all the world. This is the agreement that we have today in a very good friendship environment. And also, I want to add as the last reflection that you talked about the Balkans we know that together with the action, with the Stability Pact, with the progress that you are doing day by day, we must find a long term solution in the idea of European Union spirit, in the European Union environment, in order to give a long lasting solution to the Balkan problems. Thank you. National Missile Defense System Q. Prime Minister Guterres and President Prodi, in a few months President Clinton will make a decision about a national missile defense system for the United States. For an American audience, can you explain any European concerns about deploying such a system and whether, in your just completed trip to Moscow, President Putin expressed any flexibility about amending the ABM to allow such a system? And President Clinton, in the system that you envision, would that allow for the missile protection system to protect Europe and our NATO Allies, as Governor Bush has suggested? Thank you. Prime Minister Guterres. Well, President Clinton was kind enough to inform us about what he thinks about the matter. I think he'll express that better than myself. I'd like to say that this is a matter in which the European Union has not an official position, but we have I'll say all of us a main concern. We live in the Northern Hemisphere where from bearing to bearing we want to have a strong security situation. We believe we have built a lot on the process to create that. And we believe that every new move to strengthen these must be as comprehensive as possible, as agreed by everybody as possible, and as corresponding as possible to everyone's concerns and to everyone's preoccupations in this matter. President Prodi. Well, I have to add also that President Clinton there was no yet precise proposal done. But we discussed it on the general principle that there was no decoupling, that there is no division between the two sides of the Atlantic. We are still and we are more and more joined together in our defense purpose, not only in our economic purposes. And so the spirit in which we judge the program we didn't go into the details was a constructive and friendly talk. Q. And the Russian President? President Prodi. No, the Russian President didn't touch the problem 2 days ago. The program was not on the agenda, and we didn't make any head to that. President Clinton. First, let me just very briefly reiterate the criteria that I have set out for making a decision. First of all, is there a threat which is new and different? The answer to that, it seems to me, is plainly yes, there is, and there will be one that is, the danger that states that are not part of the international arms control and nonproliferation regime would acquire nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them and that they might make them available to rogue elements not part of nation states but allied with them. Secondly, is the technology available to meet the threat? Thirdly, what does it cost? Fourthly, what is the impact of deploying a different system on our overall security interests, included but not limited to arms control? So that is the context in which this decision must be made and why I have worked so hard to try to preserve the international framework of arms agreements. Now, I have always said that I thought that if the United States had such technology, and if the purpose of the technology is to provide protection against irresponsible new nuclear powers and their possible alliances with terrorists and other groups, then every country that is part of a responsible international arms control and nonproliferation regime should have the benefit of this protection. That's always been my position. So I think that we've done a lot of information sharing already with the Russians. We have offered to do more, and we would continue to. I don't think that we could ever advance the notion that we have this technology designed to protect us against a new threat, a threat which was also a threat to other civilized nations who might or might not be nuclear powers but were completely in harness with us on a nonproliferation regime, and not make it available to them. I think it would be unethical not to do so. That's always been my position, and I think that is the position of everyone in this administration. NATO Enlargement Q. Mr. President, for Portuguese Public Television, my name is Carlos Pena. In the middle of this month, in Lithuania, nine countries met, and they expressed their will to be part of NATO, and they want to work together. Did you address the question of further NATO enlargement and how you all see this kind of new "big bang"? President Clinton. Well, the short answer to your question is, we didn't talk about further NATO enlargement. But we have worked hard to try to make NATO relevant to the 21st century. We've taken in new members. We have had partnerships with dozens of new democracies, stretching all the way to central Asia. We have specific agreements with Ukraine and Russia. And I think we will have to continue to modernize the structure of NATO as we go along. And I think more and more, the countries against whom NATO was once organized that is, Russia and other members of part of the former Soviet bloc will see NATO as a partner, not a former adversary, and you will see further integration and further cooperation. That's what I believe will happen. European Union Q. Yes, I'll start with Mr. President. Now that you are formally a European, considering Mr. Prodi has given you the qualification, I just wanted to ask you how do you feel about the position that's been expressed by some members of your administration that there is really not an adequate counterpart when they have to deal, for example, on economic and financial matters? That there is a Europe, but there are no ministers. Every 6 months you meet a different President of the European Union. Do you feel that it would be better for Europe as a whole to move further ahead into further integration, expressing better and with more determination their position? And the same question is for Mr. Prodi and for Mr. Guterres. Mr. Prodi, I know you've been attacked and some people have been saying that Europe is really moving back into some kind of national environment, a national policy. Isn't that a negative development? Thank you. President Clinton. Well, first, I think it's entirely a question for Europeans to determine, how they should organize themselves and at what pace this integration should proceed. But if you look at the roles now occupied, for example, by Mr. Solana and Mr. Patten, if you look at the work that the EU has done to get our common endeavors energized in Kosovo, for example, just in the last few months, I think you have to say that the European Union is growing stronger, not weaker, and that it's growing more effective. How you should proceed from here depends upon, I think, both the attitudes of the leaders as well as popular opinion and will be determined in no small measure by what the specific circumstances are confronting Europe in the next 4, 5 to 10 years. But as an outsider, let me just say, I think that whenever something is in the process of being born, being formed, maturing, and you want to understand it and then explain it to other people, which is what your job is since you're in the media, you have to first understand it and explain it to other people there is always the tendency to see in any specific event evidence of a pattern which shows either that there's backsliding or accelerating, going forward. I think you have to resist that a little bit now because, really, history has no predicate for the European Union. Even the formation of the United States out of the various States is not the same thing. And we had quite a period of time before we had a National Government, when we were sort of a nation and we sort of weren't, when we were sort of together and we sort of weren't, in a much simpler time when the States had nothing like the history all the nations of Europe have. So I think that we all have to have a little humility here and let this thing sort of unfold as history, popular opinion, and the vision of the leaders dictate. But I take it, from my point of view as an American, I think that so far all the developments, on balance, are very positive. I believe we want a strong and united Europe that is democratic and secure and a partner with us for dealing with the world's challenges of the future. So I think it's going in the right direction, and I think it's a very good thing. President Prodi. Well, on my side, the answer is very simple. You know that the rotation of power is as ancient as ancient Rome, you know, and Rome became Rome and it began with the rotation of 6 months, as we are doing now. Laughter But I can also add there is a rotation of the President's Council, but there is no rotation of the President of the Commission. And so there is some stability in this, on this power. But I will tell you something more, just a hint, joining what Bill Clinton told now look, let's stay on the path. Let's stick on the facts. The enlargement, resting on the facts, never happened in history to put together 11 currencies, you know. Let's stick on the facts never happen in history to enlarge this democratic process as we are doing now. I'm touring every day in the new applying countries. And to see 12 parliaments working day and night to apply the new legislation, to conform to the European legislation, is something that it makes different with history. This is what is happening now. And so I am not only confident that Europe is strong, but Europe will be the real new event of the democracy of the 21st century. Prime Minister Guterres. If I may add something. I think we have achieved a lot, but we are not satisfied. We are going on. We have an intergovernmental conference taking place now to improve our efficiency in decisionmaking, our democracy, our transparency, and to make sure we'll be able to cope with enlargement and, at the same time, to deepen our integration. And if one looks back at the recent Lisbon extraordinary summit, I have to recognize that I, myself, was not expecting the European Union to be able to take so many policy decisions in so many relevant matters in such a quick frame of time, which proves that when we want when we have the political will to do that, we really can have good decisions, quick decisions, and can find the right path. So I'm very optimistic about the future of Europe, and I think my optimism is shared by all those that want to join the European Union at this moment. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, it's been a very busy couple of weeks in the Middle East, as you know. I'm wondering whether what's happened there recently has created any new opportunities for the peace process, what dangers it might have raised, and whether anything that's happened there has given you new hope that the September 13th deadline for a Palestinian Israeli agreement will be reached? President Clinton. Well, I think the decision of Prime Minister Barak to withdraw the Israeli troops from southern Lebanon, in accordance with the United Nations resolution, was, first of all, a daring one which creates both new challenges and new opportunities. It changed the landscape. And from my point of view, it imposes on it should impose, at least, on all parties a greater sense of urgency, because things are up in the air again. So there is an opportunity, to use a much overworked phrase, to create a new order, to fashion a new peaceful order out of the principles of the Oslo accord and all that's been done in the year since. But from my point of view, it also imposes a much greater sense of urgency. I think the consequences of inaction are now likely to be more difficult because of this move. And so for example, you have now just for example, you talked about the Palestinians. I think this will heighten the anxieties of the Palestinians in Lebanon. Does this mean that there is going to be a peace and, therefore, they will be able to have a better life, either going home or going to some third country, going to Europe, going to the United States? Or does this mean that this is it, and there is sort of a new freezing of the situation? So there is anxiety in that community. You see that in every little aspect of this. I think, on balance, it's good, because I believe they are going to reach an agreement. But it both turns the tension up in all camps and increases the overall price of not reaching an agreement fairly soon and the overall reward of reaching an agreement fairly soon. It changes everything in a way that both increases the pluses and increases the potential minuses. That's my analysis. Q. President Clinton, sir, can you confirm if it's true that tomorrow you will meet in Lisbon with Prime Minister from Israel Ehud Barak? President Clinton. Yes. I will, and I'm going to talk to Mr. Arafat before that, sometime today. Yes. Indonesia Q. Mr. President, I'm from Indonesia. Since in the senior level group it was mentioned the coordinated support for the President, Wahid, and Indonesian Government, how do you feel the political and economic development in Indonesia? Thank you. President Clinton. Well, first, I think it's worth pointing out that it's the largest Muslim country in the world, one of the handful of nations which will determine much of the shape of the 21st century the next 30 or 40 years by whether it does well or does poorly. So I think that everything that has been done to try to stabilize the country politically and get back to economic growth is a plus. And I suppose, like any outsider, my only wish is that more could be done more quickly, because so many people within Indonesia's lives are at stake, and the rest of us, we really need you to succeed. Prime Minister Guterres. If I may say something that might sound surprising to you probably before this press conference ends, our Minister of Foreign Affairs will fly to Jakarta. And under the Portuguese Presidency of the European Union, it will be held, the first political dialog between Indonesia and the European Union. And that also shows the attachment we have in the European Union for democracy, peace, and stability in Indonesia. Russia Q. The New York Times. Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. President, could you share with us your impressions of President Putin and the extent to which you see any prospects for some flexibility on a political solution in Chechnya? And President Clinton, could you kindly expand a bit on your discussions today about Russia? And on the eve of your trip to Russia, do you foresee any progress on any bilateral issue, including arms control, Chechnya, corruption? Prime Minister Guterres. Well, in our last meeting in Moscow, I must say that I was quite impressed by President Putin's determination in creating in Russia a democratic state based on the market economy and rule of law. It was also clear, from our point of view, that even if our views about Chechnya are different, he said and he said publicly that he was committed to a political solution. And he also announced his firm support to the inquiries to be made by an independent committee, his will to see the OSCE back, and to give better support to international organizations involved in humanitarian help. And he even stressed in the press conference that there would be people prosecuted for violations of human rights in Chechnya. So even if this does not correspond entirely to what we think, it really shows a move and a step which I believe is in a positive direction. President Prodi. I confirm that there was a precise engagement on concrete decision to make inspections and transparency more visible in Chechnya for the immediate weeks, for the time that is in front of us. Last question. President Clinton. Wait, she asked me a question. Let me just say this, to start with a negative and end with a positive, I would be surprised if we bridge all of our differences on Chechnya, and I would be surprised if we resolved all of our differences on the question of missile defense, although we might make more headway than most people expect. I'm just not sure yet. However, I do expect that there will be two or three other areas where we will have truly meaningful announcements that I think will make a real difference one of them, in particular, we're working on it. If we get it done, it will be very, very important. So I think the trip is well worth it, and even in the areas where we may not have an agreement, in some ways that may be the most important reason for the trip of all. We shouldn't only do these trips and these dialogs when we know we've got a guaranteed outcome. Sometimes it's most important to be talking when there's still unresolved differences. Upcoming Meeting With Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel Q. Mr. President, can you please explain the timing and reasoning behind your visit tomorrow with Barak and tell us what you hope to accomplish? President Clinton. Yes. They have first of all, all the balls are up in the air as I just explained, and so there is both greater potential for something happening and also greater tension in the atmosphere, which is causing a ripple effect in the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Secondly, Mr. Barak and Mr. Arafat have set for themselves an earlier timetable, as you know, to reach a framework agreement not a final agreement that's supposed to be done in September but an earlier one. And there are lots of things that need to be gone through that we need to go through if we're even going to reach the framework agreement, because a lot of the toughest things have to be they'll have to come to grips with those just to reach the framework agreement. So I have been looking for an opportunity to meet with Prime Minister Barak. As you know, he was supposed to come to the United States a few days ago, and because of developments in the region, he could not come. Then he was going to come to Germany and participate in an event to which he was invited anyway, and we were going to talk, and then he couldn't do that because of a holiday in Israel. So this was the only shot we had to do it and still have enough time to meet the deadline that both he and Mr. Arafat are trying to meet. There's no you shouldn't overread this. It's not like there's some bombshell out there. But we just really needed to have a face to face meeting, and we needed to do it in this timeframe. He couldn't come last week to the United States. Then he couldn't come to Berlin to the meeting to which he was also invited. So we're doing the best we can with a difficult situation. Prime Minister Guterres. Ladies and gentlemen, I must confess I have enjoyed some time ago, very much, a picture called "NeverEnding Story," but I don't think we can repeat that picture and transform this press conference in a new version. So, thank you very much, all of you. May 25, 2000 Well, thank you for the warm welcome. I am delighted to be here. I'm sorry to be late. I got here in time to see Mario Andretti's film, or at least to hear it. And I want to begin by congratulating Mario Andretti and Connie Stevens on their award and congratulating you on honoring them. I was, today the reason I had to be a little late tonight is, I'd been forced to go to Rhode Island I had to go to a memorial service today for a friend of mine. And then when I came back, I stopped by the Asian Pacific American dinner tonight. And I brought Mary Beth Cahill, my Director of Public Liaison. Now, she's Irish. I'm Irish. We went to the Asian Pacific dinner, and then we came to the Sons of Italy dinner. Is this a great country, or what? Laughter I want to thank all the Members of Congress who are here Michael Capuano, Rosa DeLauro, Peter DeFazio, Nick Lampson, Dave Weldon. And I know John LaFalce was here, and since he's from New York, I think I'll mention him anyway. Laughter I want to I see Ambassador Salleo back there. Thank you, sir, for representing your country so well. And our U.S. Ambassador to Hungary has come all the way back, Peter Tufo, thank you. Thank you, Paul Polo. Thank you, Phil Piccigallo. Thank you, Phil Boncore. And I'd also like to recognize one of my heroes, since I'm a baseball nut, Tommy Lasorda, and Vic Damone. And Vince Panvini, the Sheet Metal Workers' president, thank you. You know, I do a lot of these dinners. And I never come so late, but normally by this hour, people are beginning to flag. But you look pretty lively to me tonight. Laughter And I don't think it's me I think, the espresso, maybe. Laughter I am going to follow tonight the admonition of one of the greatest of all Italians, Cicero, who was a pretty fair speaker. He said this "Brevity is the best recommendation of a speech." So I agree with that, except when it comes to the State of the Union. Laughter And Cicero never had to give one of those, so I forgive him. Let me begin by saying that obviously this is the last one of these dinners I will attend as President. Many of you have helped me and the Vice President and our administration family over 7 1 2 years, especially when it comes to advancing the cause of education. I thank you for what you do for the young people every year, and I hope to meet your young honorees tonight, which you've given the scholarships to. And I thank you very much for what you've done for us over these last 7 1 2 years. I'd also like to say how profoundly indebted I am to the host of Italian Americans who have served in this administration today, my Chief of Staff is John Podesta, the second Italian American chief of staff I have had my Deputy Chief of Staff, Steve Ricchetti the Counselor to the Chief of Staff, Karen Tramontano my Director of Communications, Loretta Ucelli my Deputy Press Secretary, Jennifer Palmieri and that's just the beginning. I used to joke with them that someday, someone would file an affirmative action suit against me for having too many Italians in the administration. Laughter But I'm very glad also to have Secretary Andrew Cuomo, who's done a terrific job, and I want to thank him. I want to also thank the Italian American community for the contributions that so many millions have made to the progress of America these last 7 1 2 years, to the economic progress, the social progress, bringing the values of immigrants, of hard work, faith, and family, to the forefront of America and bringing us together. And I want to make basically just two points, very briefly, that I think are consistent with what the Sons of Italy have done for 90 years now and more. First of all, you may have noticed that this is an election year. It's the first time in 26 years I haven't been on the ballot, so I haven't paid much attention to it laughter but I'm told that this is an election year. Most of the time, I'm okay about not being on the ballot. But what I want to say to you is this I've done everything I know to do to help our country deal with the challenges that have faced us at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. We are now in a once ina lifetime position, in terms of the strength of our economy, in terms of the strengthening of our social fabric, in terms of our security position in the world, and I believe the great question in this millennial year is, what are we going to do with this good fortune? And those of you, at least in this audience, who are over 30 can all remember at least one time in your lives when you made a mistake a personal mistake or a professional or a business mistake or, if you're in politics, a political mistake not because things were going so poorly but because things were going so well you thought there were no consequences to a lapse in judgment, to taking the immediate path rather than the long view. The whole history of Italian Americans is the history of people who overcame obstacles, strengthened their families, made sacrifices today for the benefit of tomorrow. And what I hope and pray for Americans, without regard to whether they're Democrats or Republicans or independents, is that we will take advantage of this precious opportunity. We have to ask ourselves, what are we going to do with this good fortune to build the future of our dreams for our children and our grandchildren? How are we going to meet the big challenges still out there? What about the people in places who have been left behind by this prosperity? A couple of days ago we had what is, to me, one of my most moving days as President, when we had a large number of Members of Congress, including a couple who are in this room tonight, join the Speaker of the House and me to announce that we had reached a bipartisan agreement that I hope will pass the House and the Senate unanimously to give investors, like some of you in this room, the same tax incentives and other incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods in urban and rural America and our Native American reservations we give you to invest in poor areas overseas and around the world. That's a big issue. What are we going to do to make sure all of our children have world class educations and they can all go on to college? What are we going to do to reward work and help people balance work and family, the most important question many people face? How will we manage the aging of America? What's going to happen to Social Security? What's going to happen to Medicare? What about the families that are taking care of their parents in long term care? How are they going to deal with that? The average life expectancy of anybody that lives to be 65 today in America is 82, and it will soon be a lot higher. When we get the full decoding of the human genome sometime later this year, it will spark the most amazing revolution in the biological sciences we have ever seen. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are young people in this audience today who will have children over the next 20 years who literally will be able to look forward to a life expectancy of about 100 years. Now, that is a high class problem. But it means we have to do more to prepare the way. We've got to give seniors prescription drugs so they can live healthier and better as well as longer. We've got to deal with this. If a family's going to take care of a loved one, an elderly or disabled loved one, we've got to help them do that. They ought to have some sort of tax break to do that. I think these things are very important. But they're big questions, and they don't have any simple partisan answers. They're people issues. How are we going to deal with the new security challenges from terrorists and rogue states and narcotraffickers? Someone told me the Ambassador from Colombia is here tonight. The next big national security challenge we have is getting the Congress to pass America's share of helping to save the oldest democracy in Latin America, in Colombia, and I hope all of you will support that. We have got to prove that a free system of free people can defeat narcotraffickers and civil war and terrorists. We've got to prove that. But to me, the most important thing of all is, as we become more and more a nation of immigrants, how shall we remain one America? How will we celebrate our diversity? I don't believe in tolerating difference I think it should be celebrated and enjoyed. This is a more interesting country, don't you think that it's growing more diverse? You know, when I was over at the Asian dinner tonight, there are people from at least 25 different national groups, speaking over 75 different native languages, from hundreds of different ethnic groups, just in the Asian American community alone. Across the river here, in Alexandria, there is one school district that has children in it whose parents speak over 180 languages as their first language. Now, in a global economy and an increasingly global society, this is a godsend. But we don't have time anymore, or the luxury, for people to endure some of the prejudice and discrimination that the Italians and the Irish went through when they came here that the Japanese felt when they were put in the internment camps in World War II that we still see in the hate crimes around this country. So I hope you will help us to support the hate crimes legislation, the "Employment Non Discrimination Act," and even more important, genuine efforts in every community and every school to expose our children to all the differences that make up America today, to let them appreciate them and respect them and celebrate them and recognize that the only way we're ever going to hold our ship of state together is to find that incredible balance between loving our ethnic diversity and understanding that our common humanity is even more important. It's probably too late in the evening for such heavy stuff, but this is my last shot, and I thought I'd take it. Laughter Again let me say, I thank you. I've had a wonderful time. The country's in good shape. You have to decide what to do with it. You want to be able to tell your children and your grandchildren that when the century turned and when we started a new millennium, America was not just in good shape but you made the most of it, that we were a good friend and a good neighbor to the rest of the world and that we built a new future for all our people. That's what you want to be able to say. And so whatever your political background, whatever your predisposition, be Italian this election year. Think about family. Think about work. Think about the future. Think about your grandchildren. And give it all you've got. Thank you, and God bless you all. May 22, 2000 President Mbeki, Mrs. Mbeki, distinguished members of the South African delegation, we welcome you back to America and to the White House, where we hope, despite the rain, you feel our warm welcome and you feel very much at home. Sometimes the most important history is made quietly. Last June was such a day, when the people in townships in South Africa waited patiently in long lines to vote for President Mbeki, to elect him the new President of South Africa, and complete the first transition from one democratic government to another. It reminded us that for all the setbacks, the 1990's were a time of extraordinary liberation for humankind, with democracy spreading to more people in 1999 than it did in 1989, the year the Iron Curtain came down. President Mbeki, you embody both the courage of the long struggle that brought democracy to South Africa and the vision now needed to define South Africa's critical role in the new century. You are leading your nation and an entire continent forward, supporting peacemaking and peacekeeping, fighting against poverty and illiteracy and for economic opportunity. Our nations have drawn closer together over the last few years, thanks in no small part to the remarkable work that you and Vice President Gore have done together to deepen our ties. Today we will move forward on many fronts, fighting common threats and removing barriers to trade and investment. Last Thursday I was proud to sign into law a bill that will build commerce and investment between us and many other nations in Africa and the Caribbean region. As I said in South Africa in 1998, I believe in Africa's future, in its progress and its promise. Just one small example Last year three of the world's five fastest growing economies were in sub Saharan Africa. Of course, terrible problems remain in the Horn of Africa, where a senseless war is again claiming new victims in the Congo and Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone, in Angola, and across the continent, where so many millions are too burdened by debt and so many innocents are dying of AIDS, TB, and malaria. These are hard challenges without easy answers, and they will test our partnership. But that is what partners are for, to solve big problems together. The United States can and must work with South Africa and all our friends in Africa to fight poverty, disease, war, famine, and flood. We do so because it is right and because it is in our interests. If we want a world of rising growth and expanding markets, a world in which our security is not threatened by the spread of armed conflict, a world in which bitter ethnic and religious differences are resolved by force of argument, not force of arms, a world in which terrorists and criminals have no place to hide, a world in which economic activity does not destroy the natural environment for our children, a world in which children are healthy and go to school and don't die of AIDS in the streets or fight in wars, then we must be involved in Africa. That is why we have passed the Africa trade bill, why we support debt relief for the poorest countries, why we have been working to recognize AIDS as a security threat to the United States, and why we have moved to make critical drugs available at affordable prices and to lead an international effort to develop vaccines for AIDS, TB, and malaria. A few weeks ago, President Mbeki announced a new coat of arms for South Africa. The motto of the coat of arms, written in an ancient African language, means, "people who are different join together." That sentiment strikes close to the heart of what it means to be an American, as well as a South African. And it concisely summarizes our goal today and for the future, advancing a partnership between two nations that will always be different but are joined together by a profound commitment to freedom and to our common humanity. We welcome you here, Mr. President, and we look forward to working with you. Thank you. May 21, 2000 Thank you. Bill, thank you for welcoming me back to Hyde Park and the Roosevelt Library. I love coming here. I'm sorry I've only come three times. And Al, thank you for your wonderful introduction, and to you and Ginger, thank you for your years of friendship. He's very good at giving the credit to everybody else, but the truth is it would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From. I am delighted to see so many Members of Congress here, Members of the Senate and the House the Governor present and former members of the administration. Mack McLarty was Chief of Staff when we did four big DLC things. We did the economic plan, the Brady bill, family leave law, and NAFTA. Somebody said, Mack, the other day I saw a commentator Hillary and I were watching the commentators "You know, if it hadn't been for his first 2 years, Bill Clinton's approval ratings would be the highest ever recorded." And Hillary looked at me, and she said, "If it hadn't been for the first 2 years when you made all the unpopular decisions, the next 6 years would not have happened." Laughter Mayor Brown, we're glad to see you here. And my Mayor, Mayor Williams, thank you. And thank all of you for being here and for what you're about to do. Franklin Roosevelt said he often came back to Hyde Park because it gave him, quote, "a chance to think quietly about the country as a whole, and to see it in a long range perspective." That's what you're being asked to do. I've often, in quiet moments at the White House, thought about my predecessors, the ones that succeeded, the ones who didn't, why they did. Roosevelt had what Justice Holmes called a first class temperament, a lot of personal courage, a good mind, and a great attitude. He had a good time being President, even in difficult times. And he learned to have a good time in the midst of almost constant personal pain. It's worth remembering that life's successes are a curious blend of what you make happen and what happens to you, the gifts God gives you and what you do with them. But today I want to focus on the fact that he was always interested in ideas. I read the other day Frances Perkins' wonderful book about her lifetime friendship with Roosevelt. You know she was the first woman in the Cabinet she served as Secretary of Labor the entire time President Roosevelt was in office. She kept trying to quit, and he wouldn't let her. And if you read this book, at the end you get some sense just in the curious, wonderful relationship between these two remarkable people that he had some sense of his own mortality. She kept trying to leave, and he kept trying to get her to hold on to the end. And then, of course, he died shortly after being reelected to his fourth term. But through this whole thing, you get this sense that from the time she was a young social worker and he was a young State Senator, when he still had full use of his physical facilities and played a pretty good game of golf, I might add that they had this magical chemistry born of the fact that even though they were different people from different worlds in the beginning, with very different positions on certain issues, they both understood that public service was something that you weren't supposed to covet for the power but something you wanted to do so you could help other people, and that ideas mattered. So you come here today to think about where we are and where we ought to go and what the long range challenges are. And Al's already said a lot of what I want to say, but I want to say some of the things he said and tie it back to what we did in New Orleans in 1990, because I believe that thinking is a big and often underutilized part of success in public life. Laughter And I think ideas matter. Let me say that some time into my first term, maybe 1995 or something, a distinguished scholar whom I at that time had never met, and who at that time was at Syracuse I believe he's at Harvard now named Thomas North Patterson no, Thomas Patterson I can't remember what his middle name was. Anyway, he wrote this article, and he said, "Contrary to the popular belief that most politicians are congenitally dishonest, most people do what they say they're going to do when they get elected." And if you look at the history of Presidents, most of them do what they say they're going to do. And when they don't, it's usually because something has really changed, and we're glad they didn't. We're glad Franklin Roosevelt didn't balance the budget, because if he had, under those circumstances, it would have been worse. Abraham Lincoln promised not to free the slaves. We're glad he broke that commitment. But, by and large, if you look at the whole history of American public life, when a President runs for office and says, "Vote for me this is what I want to do," they pretty well do that. Or they at least get caught trying to do it. And one of the things that really has meant the most to me, of all the things I've read and I've read a lot a stuff I just as soon not have in the last 8 years laughter was Patterson said that by 1995 our administration had already kept a higher percentage of its commitments to the American people than the previous five Presidents. And we had made more commitments. And the point I want to make today to emphasize the importance of what it is you're about to do is that the reason that was possible is, I had thought a lot about that what I would do. And I had thought with many of you with Bruce and Will and Rob and the whole DLC crowd and a lot of you that were going to these meetings back in the eighties and the nineties so that when I announced for President, I did it not because I wanted to get out of what I was doing I was actually happier than I had ever been with my work as Governor and with my situation at home in Arkansas but because I thought something needed to be done, and I had thought a lot about it. And this New Orleans Declaration had a lot to do with it. So the first thing I want to say to you is, you cannot possibly overestimate the importance of what you're here to do if you do it in all seriousness. Let's just look at New Orleans. We met in New Orleans in 1990. As Al said, the times were different. The economy was bad the deficit was high the debt had exploded all the social conditions were worsening. And Washington seemed to be stuck in a kind of ideological trench warfare, where the Republicans said that Government was the problem, and we said that it was the solution. And we always had to have a false choice You had to choose the economy or the environment you had to choose impoverishment or entitlement you had to choose business or labor. And most of us, many of the DLC people this is one of the reasons the DLC succeeded, by the way, is that we had people who were in politics in Washington and out in the country, and a lot of our people in Washington spent a lot of time in the country. And we realized that no one else in the world thought about things or experienced things in the way the Washington media and political establishment talked about issues, and that we didn't agree with all these false choices. And so in New Orleans 10 years ago we set out to say and to outline what we believed ought to be done. Our approach came to be known as the Third Way. But basically, it was rooted in common sense, a common devotion to our party's oldest values, and a common vision of the new era in which we were living. In 1992 the American people gave us a chance to put our ideas into action. And we have done our best to do that, working across party lines where possible, and where bitter partisanship forced it, going alone. In New Orleans let's just look at some of the things we said in New Orleans, as against some of the things that Al has already mentioned. This is what the New Orleans Declaration said We believe the Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not Government that economic growth is a prerequisite for expanding opportunity for everyone and that the way to build America's economic security is to invest in the skills and ingenuity of our people and to expand trade, not restrict it. Now, these ideas were all turned into action in the '93 economic plan, in the '97 Balanced Budget Act, in the Telecommunications Act, in our commitment to science and technological research, in our education budget. We doubled investment for education and training even as we were reducing the deficit, and we emphasized results and proven strategies. We very nearly opened the doors of college to all Americans. We had 300 trade agreements. Those ideas put into action have given us those 21,615,000 jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years and the highest homeownership ever and the longest economic expansion in history. And the Government Al is continuing to shrink it is now the smallest it has been since 1958. We said we believe the purpose of social welfare is to bring the poor into the Nation's economic mainstream, not to maintain them in dependence. That idea, turned into action through the expansion of the earned income tax credit, the Vice President's empowerment zone program and welfare reform, has given us the smallest welfare rolls in absolute numbers in 32 years, a 20 year low in the poverty rate, the lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years, while we fought and succeeded in maintaining health and nutrition benefits for poor children and increasing our investment in child care and transportation for lower income workers. We said we believed in, quote, "preventing crime and punishing criminals, not explaining away their behavior." That idea was turned into action through the crime bill, which gave us 100,000 police, an assault weapons ban, and through the passage of the Brady law, which has kept a half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from getting handguns. That's given us the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest homicide rate in 30 years, and a 35 percent reduction in gun crime since 1993. We said we believe in the politics of inclusion, in the protection of civil rights, and the broad movement of minorities into the American economic and cultural mainstream. That idea, turned into action, has given us the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded, record numbers of minorityowned businesses, vigorous enforcement of civil rights, and the widest participation of minorities in the Federal Government at high levels and in the Federal judiciary in American history. We said we believe in the imperative of work and the importance of family. I could give you lots of examples of that, but if you just take the family and medical leave law, the first bill I signed, vetoed by the previous administration, 21 million plus Americans have taken some time off when a baby is born or a parent is sick. And they said it would wreck the economy. Well, 21 million families are stronger, and so is the American economy. The idea was right in the New Orleans Declaration. We said we believe American citizenship entails responsibility as well as rights, and we mean to ask citizens to give something back to their community. That idea, turned into action, has led to a whole series of remarkable partnerships. The Welfare to Work Partnership, for example, has led to 12,000 companies to voluntarily commit to hire now something like 400,000 people off the welfare rolls. The Vice President's partnership with the auto companies and the auto workers has led to this whole effort to develop the next generation vehicle, which already has prototypes that will be on the market within 2 years 60, 70, 80 miles a gallon. The partnership we had with the entertainment industry led to the passage of the V chip requirement and rating systems for movies, television programs, and video games. And most of all, of course, it led to AmeriCorps, which now has permitted over 150,000 young Americans to serve in their communities. We had more people in AmeriCorps in 5 years than the Peace Corps did in its first 20 years of existence because of the idea that the DLC relentlessly advanced. We said we believed, quote, "the U.S. must remain energetically engaged in the worldwide struggle for individual liberty, human rights, and prosperity, not retreat from the world." That idea, turned into action, has given us a stronger and expanded NATO, new initiatives against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, progress on peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, forceful stands against ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, and new initiatives to expand trade and advance democracy in Africa, the Caribbean Basin, Latin America, and the Asian Pacific region. In short, because of the work done in New Orleans and the fact that the American people gave us a chance 2 years later to test it, we have proven that ideas matter and that for the decade of the nineties our ideas were the right ones. They have put the Democratic Party at the vital center of American life and inspired the rise of new progressive governments throughout Europe and the industrialized world. Indeed, I'm going to be meeting with many of these leaders next month in Berlin people all over the world now who have seen what happened here, taken ideas seriously, and want to see what they can do to lift their people and make them a part of the new information age of globalization. And most important of all, these ideas, put into action, have brought our country into a moment of unparalleled prosperity and promise. Now, I think we have a rare opportunity to identify and move on the big, long term challenges the country faces in the new century. And I think the DLC to borrow a little of your own medicine has both the opportunity and the responsibility to put forth a declaration here which will guide our party and should guide our Nation for the next 10 years. That's your task What is the New Democratic agenda for the 21st century? Here's what I think it ought to say. First, we will keep the economy strong by paying down the debt, maintaining our lead in science and technology, and extending our economic benefits to people and places left behind, opening new markets and closing the investment and digital divide. Second, we will lift up all working families out of poverty, ending child poverty by increasing the EITC, the minimum wage, our support for child care, housing, and transportation, and for responsible fatherhood. Third, we will make sure every child starts school ready to learn, graduates ready to succeed, has the chance to go to college by investing more in education and demanding more of all the participants in our education process, and by opening college access to everyone by making tuition deductible. Fourth, we will enable Americans to succeed at work and at home, with more support for child care, expanding opportunity for health care coverage, passing a Patients' Bill of Rights, and providing middle class families tax relief to educate their kids, take care of them through child care, take care of their parents if they need long term care. Fifth, we will make America the safest big Nation on Earth, with more police, more prevention, more prosecutors, and more effective measures to keep guns away from children and criminals. Sixth, we will meet the challenge of the aging of America by extending the life of Social Security, strengthening and modernizing Medicare with a prescription drug benefit, and providing a tax cut for long term care, and helping working families to establish their own retirement accounts so that more Americans have a chance to create wealth. Next, we will reverse the course of climate change while enhancing rather than eroding economic growth with new technologies and new sources of alternative energy. Let me just say, when I went back and read the New Orleans Declaration, the one thing I wish we'd made more of is the environment, because we have now proved you can grow the economy and improve the environment. And this is a much more important issue now than it was 10 years ago because of the global impacts of climate change. We must address this. Every Member of Congress here will tell you that a huge portion of decisionmakers in our country and throughout the world and most troubling, in some of the biggest developing nations still believe you cannot have economic growth unless you pour more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Just like these big ideas helped us back in 1990, there is nothing so dangerous as for a people to be in the grip of a big idea that is no longer true. It was once true that you had to put more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to grow the economy, to build a middle class, to make a country rich. It is not true anymore. And there are all kinds of manifestations of this the assault that the other party is making on my decision to set aside the roadless acres in the national forests the Audubon Society says it's the most important conservation measure in the last 50 years. It's just a applause . I say that not the applause is nice, but that's not the point I'm trying to make here. The point I'm trying to make is that good people will continue to make bad decisions if they're in the grip of a wrong idea. This is not simply a case of interest groups fighting each other. This is really a question of whether we have honestly come to terms with what the facts are, what the evidence shows about the way economies can and, indeed, should work. And there's no way in the world we'll be able to convince our friends in India or China, which over the next 30 years will become bigger emitters of greenhouse gases than we are, that they can take a different path to development and that we're not trying to keep them poor, unless we can demonstrate that we have let this idea go and that we have evidence that a different way will work. You can't expect any of these Members of Congress who come from rural districts that have a lot of poor people or that rely on agriculture to take different approaches unless there is a specific, clear, meaningful alternative that they can embrace. So I'm sort of off the script here, but this is a big deal. We need more of our people every one of our people we need to know what the facts are here. We need to know what can we really get out of automobile and truck mileage how realistic is it to have alternative sources of fuel what can you get if you build all new houses and office buildings with glass that lets in more heat and light lets in more light and keeps out more heat and cold. We need to know these things. This is something that most of you normally wouldn't think of as something that an elected official needs to know. We need to know this. This is a huge, huge issue. And we will not be able to convince either our own people or, even more importantly, developing countries who are our partners around the world, unless we have the evidence in hand and we understand the argument. Next, we will keep working to build one America at home, to make a strength of our diversity so that other nations can be inspired to overcome their own ethnic and religious tensions. For me, that means passing the "Employment Non Discrimination Act," the hate crimes bill, and expanding national service. I meet with these AmeriCorps kids everywhere I go, and the thing they say over and over and over again is that "this gave me a chance to see how different people live, to see how much we have in common as human beings, and understand just what it means to be an American citizen at the dawn of a new century." And last, we will continue to lead the world away from terror, weapons of mass destruction, and destructive ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts, toward greater cooperation and shared peace and prosperity. That's what this vote about China is all about. Yes, it's a good economic deal. China has agreed to open its markets. I just stopped, when I got out of the airplane here, before I drove up here, there were a few hundred people at the airport. So I went over and shook hands and said hello to all the children. And this guy says, "You really think this China thing is a good deal?" I said, "Yes, it is I do." Laughter And he said, "Why?" And I said, "Well, in the first place, we've been calling it a trade agreement, and it isn't." I said, "You know, when I made the agreement with Mexico and Canada, it was a trade agreement. So I got a few things, and I had to give up a few things." I said, "This is a membership agreement. All we give them is membership, and they do all the market opening. And that's their dues for membership in this world organization." That's why, in narrow self interested terms, it's a 100 to nothing deal not only for the United States but for anybody else who lets the Chinese votes to let the Chinese into the WTO. But even though, for me, the economic choice is clear, I have to tell you, far, far more important to me are the moral and national security arguments. I looked at all those kids in that crowd today I was shaking hands with, and I was reminded again that we fought three wars in Asia in the last half of the 20th century and that we have a chance to build a different future not a guarantee but a chance. Yes, China is still a one party state, restricting rights of free speech and religious expression, doing things from time to time that frustrate us and even anger us. But by forcing China to slash subsidies and tariffs that protect inefficient industries, which the Communist Party has long used to exercise day to day control, by letting our high tech companies in to bring the Internet and the information revolution to China, we will be unleashing forces that no totalitarian operation rooted in the last century's industrial society can control. Two years ago there were 2 million Internet users in China last year there were 9 million this year there are something over 20 million. At some point there will be over 100 million, and at some point, some threshold that no one can identify with precision will be crossed, and it will be a very different world. And I think it is worth also pointing out that the more China operates within rule based systems, with us and with other countries, the more likely they are to see the benefit of the rule of law and the more likely that benefit is to flow down to ordinary people in those 900,000 villages where they're already electing their mayors and in other places. So this is very important. I think it is quite interesting that the people who hope we will beat this next week in China are the ultraconservatives in the military and the state owned industries and quite interesting that people who have been persecuted in China and other places, by and large, want us to adopt this, want us to vote yes on PNTR. Martin Lee, the head of the democracy movement in Hong Kong, came all the way over here to ask the Congress to vote for this. This is a man who cannot, himself, go to China a man who has never met Zhu Rongji a man who is still considered persona non grata. But he said to me, he said, "You know, we've got to back the reformers in China. We've got to get them into a system where there is rule of law. We have got to move this way. This is the next big step. All the human rights activists in America are, I think," he said, "blinded by their opposition to things that have happened in the past, that may be happening now, instead of thinking about what is most likely to change China in the future." The new President of Taiwan supports us letting China into the WTO and America extending PNTR. And yesterday the Dalai Lama, a man who has undergone literally decades of frustration in his dealings with China, strongly endorsed PNTR with China. So this is a big deal to me, beyond the obvious economic benefits which make it easier for some Members and others to vote for because of the economic makeup of their districts. You have to understand that by far the bigger issue is, what can we do to promote human rights what can we do to promote the rule of law what can we do to minimize the chances that there will be another war in Asia in our lifetime or in our children's lifetime? To me, that is what is at issue. So that's my pitch here. What you're about to do is really important. I've told you the kinds of things that I hope you'll do. But those of you out here listening to me will have a bigger role than me in the next 10 years of America if you just remember what I did with that New Orleans Declaration today and every specific thing that I could cite to you that grew right out of that. It really matters whether you think and whether you put your feelings into organized fashion and whether that then organizes the process for developing specific policies. The New Orleans Declaration is largely responsible for the success we have enjoyed in the last 8 years, because it gave us a platform on which to stand and a framework from which to work. You've got a lot of really creative people here. I could cite a thousand examples, but I want to just mention two or three to give you an illustration of how we got started, partly on what we did. You remember Franklin Roosevelt one of the greatest successes of his New Deal was that he essentially took social welfare progress that had been made in various States and went national with it, especially in New York, which is one way Frances Perkins got to be Secretary of Labor. But Marc Pacheco back there from Massachusetts, the State senator, sponsored a program to give medical students and other health professionals academic credit for providing primary and preventive health services to underserved people. Should we do more in our public health clinics like that? Mayor Webb negotiated a contract with the teachers unions in his city to give an incentive to teachers to improve academic performance. Michael Thurmond, his Georgia labor commission has taken absent fathers who weren't supporting their children and given them training and jobs and values of responsible fatherhood. And now 84 percent of those fathers are working and supporting their children. That's a huge deal. Shouldn't we go national with that? These are the kinds of things that I hope you will think about. There's just one other thing I want to say. I didn't do this by myself. If it hadn't been for the Members of Congress here who have helped me, I couldn't have done it. If it hadn't been for the members of the administration, past and present, I couldn't have done it. If it hadn't been for the DLC, with its constant idea machine and Al From constantly harping on me not to abandon the reformist path laughter I couldn't have done it. If it hadn't been for Al Gore, I couldn't have done it. And I just want to I have said this in other places, but I have I believe I have a good grasp on the institution of the Vice Presidency, and I can tell you it is my judgment that he has had far more positive impact in practical ways on the way the American people live as Vice President than any other person as Vice President in the history of the Nation, by a good long ways. He managed the empowerment zones program. He managed our administration's position on the Telecommunications Act, which had two important features. One, it was pro competition we didn't give in to the monopoly forces, and there are now hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been created, mostly in companies that didn't even exist in 1996, because we stood firm for competition. And we got the E rate, which is now providing 2.2 billion a year so that poor schools and libraries and hospitals can hook up to the Internet. Second, he managed our positions, many of them, on the environment, including the partnership for new generation vehicles, which I mentioned, and the climate change. Third, he ran the RIGO program, which many of you were involved in, which in addition to reducing the size of Government, has dramatically improved the performance of many agencies, expanding health care for children and parents of working families, and the mental health parity issue, and the fatherhood initiative. He cast the deciding vote on the economic plan and on the gun safety legislation in the Senate. And on every tough decision I had to make, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo to loaning money to Mexico now, there was a winner the day I made that decision, there was a poll that said, by 81 15, the people didn't want me to do it to taking on the gun issue and tobacco issue, to lobbying for NASA at the beginning and now all the calls he's made on China PNTR at the end, he's been there. So I wanted to say that because we did this together. And that's the last thought I'll leave you with. Roosevelt loved ideas, had good ideas, but he had a first class temperament, and he had a good time, and he enjoyed working with people. So you guys have got to keep working together. We've got to get behind all of our crowd we've got to work to win elections. But afterward, remember, this document is a big deal. Some day somebody will write a whole book on how this New Orleans Declaration was the foundation of the success of the last 8 years. That's what what you do at Hyde Park ought to be. And if you do it, you will change America forever for the better. And what happens in 2000 fundamentally is just as important as what happened in '92 and '96, because what a country does with its prosperity is just as stern a test of its character and vision and wisdom as what it does when its back is against the wall. I've done everything I could to turn the ship of state around. Now you've got to make sure that it keeps sailing in the right direction. Thank you, and God bless you. May 19, 2000 Thank you very much. Secretary Cohen, thank you for your kind words and your truly exemplary leadership of the Department of Defense. Secretary Slater, thank you for your presence here and the support you have given the Coast Guard. General Shelton, thank you for your lifetime of service and for your leadership of the Joint Chiefs. And Senator Glenn, I thank you for your service, your personal friendship to me, and your astonishing lifetime example. We're all looking forward to going into space in our late seventies, thanks to you. I thank the members of the Joint Chiefs and the Service Secretaries. General Jones, General Shalikashvili, thank you for being here. Ladies and gentlemen of our Armed Forces, family members, and friends. I want to begin, if I might, by paying tribute to the men and women of our military who work in the White House, my Andrews based Air Force One crews, my helicopter crews, my military aides, and those from every branch of the services who actually work at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Without you, we couldn't do America's business, stand up for America's interests, or even keep the White House open as America's house. Thank you for 7 1 2 wonderful years. As has already been said, 50 years ago tomorrow America marked the first Armed Forces Day. It was then an uncertain time for our country, Americans coming to realize that our new global leadership carried with it global responsibilities, chief among them, the defense of freedom across the world. American troops then still occupied Germany and soon would be pouring into Korea. All around us there were new and terrifying weapons, determined adversaries, and an unfamiliar landscape. Against that backdrop, President Truman moved to put in place the foundations of America's modern military, a force united under the Department of Defense. The first Armed Forces Day celebrated service unity, honored those in uniform, and reassured Americans that our military was ready for whatever challenges lay ahead. Fifty years later we can look back proudly on a half century in which America's best have more than met those challenges. We are as secure at home and safe from external threat today as we have been at any time in our long history. For that, we owe every American in uniform and everyone who has served before an eternal debt. Next week, as we celebrate Memorial Day, we will remember the thousands of men and women who have given their lives so that we might live in peace. I hope all Americans will teach our children how their forebears fought and died for the freedoms we hold dear. I have asked every office in the Federal Government to observe a moment of remembrance for our military dead, to put the "memorial" back in Memorial Day. Over my service as President, I have seen our men and women in uniform meet every conceivable kind of challenge, from flying flawless missions over Kosovo, to working to contain Saddam Hussein, to keeping our word on the Korean Peninsula, to slogging through the mud to rebuild lives and communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in Central America, to keeping the peace in Bosnia and everywhere you go, always representing the best of America. Some of you have mentioned to me, from time to time as I meet our service personnel, that you see in the pictures at the Oval Office the stands of military coins I have there given to me by units, officers, and enlisted personnel all over the world. I have about 400 now. And my historians at the White House say I have visited more military units than any President before. All I can tell you is, it's been one of the great honors of my life. I never get tired of it. And if you have a coin I don't have, I'd be glad to have it today. Laughter I never cease to be amazed at all the different things we ask our Armed Forces to do. We ask them to serve in the White House or in Kosovo's Camp Bondsteel, on the deck of a carrier or on the crew of a space shuttle launch. We ask you to defend our interests in a 21st century world of high tech weapons, fast moving, small scale warfare, peacekeeping sometimes when there's no peace to keep and terrorism. But the 21st century challenge is the same essentially as President Truman defined 50 years ago, readiness for any eventuality. Today I want to talk just a little bit about what we are doing and must continue to do in the areas of personnel readiness, combat readiness, and civilian readiness to help you meet that challenge. As has already been said by previous speakers, the people in our Armed Forces are our most important asset. So our first task is doing the best job we can of recruiting and retaining good people, to train them to do their jobs right, to train them so they can do their jobs safely, and then to provide the state of the art equipment that will keep them ahead of every adversary and every eventuality. Keeping faith with you is a sacred obligation. We've tried to do it. Over the last 2 years, military pay has been raised by more than 8 percent, with another significant raise slated for this year. This year's raise was the largest in about 20 years. In July we're increasing parts of the military pay scale as much as 5 percent more to reward service members who gain experience and stay with us to put it to use. And we must never forget that, although we recruit individuals, we must retain families. Thanks to the leadership in the Department of Defense, military child care and schools are now the envy of many civilians. We are working to provide better military housing and taking steps to improve access to medical care for all military personnel, families, and retirees. Readiness also means making sure our forces are trained to fight and equipped to win. The world we live in demands a high tempo of operations. That puts strains on individuals and families and creates important challenges for readiness. I realize that I am the first President to serve his entire service in the post cold war era and that, as a consequence, I have imposed more high tempo operations on the military, more different kinds of things in more different circumstances than any previous President in peacetime. Often, when I see our young men and women in uniform, I don't know whether to thank them or apologize, because I know what burdens I have imposed on many of you and your families. All I can tell you is, America is a safer, stronger place and the world is a more peaceful, more democratic place because of what you have done. And we have to continue to do everything we can to ease your burdens and make it more likely that you will be successful. We have tried to watch combat readiness closely. We have tried to respond rapidly where there are strains. For several years now, we've increased the amount of money available for readiness spending, including 5.4 billion for the year ahead. We've worked with Congress to protect funds for training and equipment and proposed an increase of 124 billion to support military personnel, strengthen readiness, and speed modernization with improved facilities through the next 5 years. That includes the latest advances in digital communications and navigation technology for soldiers in the field advanced combat aircraft like Super Hornets, Raptors, and the Joint Strike fighter new and modernized destroyers and a new aircraft carrier and, less exciting but perhaps even more important, more money for spare parts. I've talked about our budget and priorities for readiness, but we also must meet our responsibility for civilian readiness, creating an understanding among our elected officials and among our people at large that power and prestige don't just happen, that America cannot be a leader for peace and freedom and prosperity without paying the price. Civilian readiness means commitment to keeping our military the best trained, the best equipped, the best led fighting force. It means support for diplomacy that can help us avoid using force in the first place. It means that when we do make the difficult decision to commit our troops, we stay the course. Secretary Cohen talked about our involvement in Kosovo. Last spring I had the privilege of meeting with our fighting men and women, from Barksdale and Norfolk to Aviano and Skopje. When I met the Wing Commander of Spangdahlem Air Force Base in Germany, he told me, "Sir, our team wants to stay with this mission until it's finished." He could have spoken for every one of our men and women in uniform. When we and our allies responded to the rising tide of violence in Kosovo, we sent a message of hope and determination to Europe and all the world. Let me remind you that there had previously been a terrible war in Bosnia. It took the world community a long time to respond. When we did, we put an end to it, and people are living and working together there in peace. Then as if no lesson had been learned, Mr. Milosevic drove nearly a million people out of their homes in a poor country, over difficult roads and adverse circumstances. Thousands lost their lives, but nearly a million people were run out of their country just because of their ethnic background and the way they worship God. That was a threat to our national interests because it was a threat to the security and stability of southeastern Europe and because it was a colossal affront to the basic notions of human rights and freedom. The 20th century has witnessed a lot of this kind of hate and human suffering. But it ended with an affirmation of freedom and human dignity, because in the face of division and destruction, we helped to stand with our allies and good people in that region for humanity and for freedom. Well, what's happened since then? Our troops are on the ground in Kosovo, doing another job every bit as vital, working to help the people there rebuild their lives and build a lasting peace. Now our allies and partners have taken on the lion's share of the burden. Since the end of the conflict, our European allies and others are supplying 85 percent of the troops and nearly 85 percent of the police on the ground. Our share of international assistance for Kosovo is now well under 20 percent. It's been a fair burden sharing because we bore the majority of the responsibility for the military conflict that made the peace possible. But it's still important that we do our part. Our presence is vital, for our forces symbolize something fundamental about the promise of America, the possibility of true peace and, frankly, the confidence your presence gives to others because nobody doubts that if any job can be done, you will do it. Our forces in Kosovo are doing a terrific job under still difficult circumstances. We must give them the tools to succeed and the time to succeed. Yesterday the Senate of the United States, in bipartisan fashion, cast a profoundly important vote. They affirmed our Nation's commitment to stay the course in Kosovo, rejecting language that would have called our resolve into question, permitting people to say, had it passed, that the United States would walk away from a job half done and leave others to finish. But the Senate said, "No, we won't walk out on our allies. We won't turn our back on freedom's promise. It may be a difficult job, but we started it, and we intend to finish it." And I would like to thank the Senators, Republicans as well as Democrats, and the American leaders around the country, Republicans as well as Democrats, who took this position to stand by you until the mission is completed. In 1963, on Armed Forces Day, a great American veteran, President John Kennedy, said that our service men and women "stand as guardians of peace and visible evidence of our determination to meet any threat to the peace with measured strength and high resolve. They are also evidence of a harsh but inescapable truth, that the survival of freedom requires great cost and commitment and great personal sacrifice." We're a long way from the cold war world in which President Kennedy spoke those words. But today, the words are still true, where you stand as freedom's guardians in a world where communication is instant, but so is destruction a world where the threats of the last century have largely been vanquished, but the timeless demons of hate and fear and new destructive possibilities rooted in new technologies and new networks are with us in a world where millions still struggle for liberty, decency, and the very basics of life. Today America thanks you for your commitment, renews our pledge to stand with you, and asks you to continue to do your best and give your best for freedom. The last 50 years are proof that when you do your job, and we support you, the world is a much, much better place. Thank you, and God bless you. May 17, 2000 Thank you very much. Secretary Slater, Admiral Loy, Rear Admiral Teeson, Captain Dillon, Senator Dodd, distinguished members of the diplomatic corps, Dr. Haas, members of the faculty and staff, and honored guests the friends, family, and members of the class of 2000. I want to begin by complimenting Cadet Christopher Burrus on what I thought was a remarkable speech showing the devotion to the Coast Guard and the country that every American can be proud of. I would also like to thank the family members who are here for standing behind these cadets for 4 years and for making it possible for them to be here. This is a highly appropriate place for me to give what is, for me, a very nostalgic address. It is the last speech I will ever give as President to a graduating class of one of our military service academies. This class came to Washington and marched in my second Inaugural Parade. I pledged to use this term to build a bridge to the 21st century. And in so many ways, the first class of the 21st century represents that bridge. I have been personally, deeply indebted to the Coast Guard because of the military aides I have had every year I've been President who are Coast Guard officers. The last one, Pat DeQuattro, class of '88, is here with me today. They have all been outstanding people, and it made me think more and more of the Coast Guard. You can be proud of the road you have traveled from Swab Summer to today. You've survived academic rigors, countless games of football and volleyball against officers, even golf balls and dog food in the wardroom. For those of you who, like me, are somewhat less literate in these matters, that is cadet speak for hardboiled eggs and corned beef hash. Laughter You have, as we have heard, done extraordinary volunteer work. You placed first among universities at one of America's most prestigious national science competitions. You engineered Solar Splash, the top ranked solar powered boat in the Nation this year. Four of your classmates were all American athletes, and one of your classmates even found fame and fortune on "The Price is Right." Laughter I can't help noting that you were also the first class in history to have an adviser who had a recurring role on "Baywatch." Laughter Now, Eric Kowack chose to give up that difficult duty, come back, and teach classes on personal finance for those of you who don't become TV stars. Laughter I have been told that your spirit as a class is so strong that this class received more letters from opposing class presidents complaining about heckling at soccer games than any other class in the history of this academy. Laughter It's really nice to know you feel bad about it. Laughter I don't know if any of you got in trouble for that, but pursuant to long standing tradition, I hereby grant amnesty to all candidates marching tours or serving restrictions for such minor offenses. As the first Coast Guard class of the 21st century, you will face a new set of challenges to America's security, values, and interests, though your mission will be consistent with the long and storied history of America's defenders. The waters off this shore have seen a lot of that history. In the West Wing of the White House, just a few feet from the Oval Office, there's a painting of the first naval battle of the War of 1812 that happened off the coast of New London. That day a British frigate called the Belvidera was chased by five American warships. You might be interested to know that three of those ships were named the President, the United States, and the Congress. History tells us the President was the fastest ship. Laughter But unfortunately, the Belvidera got away anyway, because at a crucial moment the President suffered significant damage. We're not sure exactly what caused it, but I am curious to know where Congress was at the time. Laughter I ask you to compare that picture with the picture to be painted in these same waters this summer, when the Eagle leads ships from more than 60 nations, including our adversary in 1812, Great Britain, into New London Harbor, the biggest, broadest gathering of its kind in history, a strong symbol of the global age in which you will serve. It is a wonderful sign of these times that two of the cadets who graduate in this class today come from Russia and Bulgaria, nations that were our adversaries when they were in elementary school, and neither they nor we think twice about it. We know it's a good thing. Globalization is tearing down barriers and building new networks among nations and people. The process is accelerated by the fact that more than half the world's people live in democracies for the first time in history, and by the explosive advance in information technology that is changing the way we all do business, including the Coast Guard. Just for example, a mere decade ago a cadet assigned to a buoy tender had to go through an elaborate process to place the buoys. Three people would stand back to back, tracking horizontal sextant angles, and then comparing those readings to hand drawn navigational grids with a lot of yelling back and forth. Today, all that work is done instantly by satellites and computers through the Global Positioning System. The very openness of our borders and technology, however, also makes us vulnerable in new ways. The same technology that gave us GPS and the marvelous possibilities of the Internet also apparently empowered a student sitting in the Philippines to launch a computer virus that in just a few hours spread through more than 10 million computers and caused billions of dollars in damage. The central reality of our time is that the advent of globalization and the revolution in information technology have magnified both the creative and the destructive potential of every individual, tribe, and nation on our planet. Now, most of us have a vision of the 21st century. It sees the triumph of peace, prosperity, and personal freedom through the power of the Internet, the spread of the democracy, the potential of science as embodied in the human genome project and the probing of the deepest mysteries of nature, from the dark holes of the universe to the dark floors of the ocean. But we must understand the other side of the coin, as well. The same technological advances are making the tools of destruction deadlier, cheaper, and more available, making us more vulnerable to problems that arise half a world away to terror, to ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts, to weapons of mass destruction, drug trafficking, and other organized crime. Today, and for the foreseeable tomorrows, we, and especially you, will face a fateful struggle between the forces of integration and harmony and the forces of disintegration and chaos. The phenomenal explosion of technology can be a servant of either side or, ironically, both. Of course, our traditional security concerns have by no means vanished. Still we must manage our relationships with great and potentially great powers in ways that protect and advance our interests. We must continue to maintain strong alliances, to have the best trained, best equipped military in the world, to be vigilant that regional conflicts do not threaten us. In this scenario, one of the biggest question marks of the 21st century is the path China will take. Will China emerge as a partner or an adversary? Will it be a society that is opening to the world and liberating to its people or controlling of its people and lashing out at the world? Next week the Congress and the United States will have a once in a lifetime opportunity to influence that question in the right way. There are brave people in China today working for human rights and political freedom. There are brave people within the Government of China today willing to risk opening the Chinese economy, knowing that it will unleash forces of change they cannot control. For example, in a country of 1.3 billion people, 2 years ago there were just 2 million Internet users. Last year there were 9 million. This year there will be over 20 million. When over 100 million people in China can get on the net, it will be impossible to maintain a closed political and economic society. If Congress votes to normalize trade relations with China, it will not guarantee that China will take the right course. But it will certainly increase the likelihood that it will. If Congress votes no, it will strengthen the hand, ironically, of the very people the opponents of this agreement claim to fight. It will strengthen the hands of the reactionary elements in the military and the state owned industries who want America for an opponent, to justify their continued control and adherence to the old ways and repression of personal freedom. I believe that a no vote invites a future of dangerous confrontations and constant insecurity. It also, by the way, forfeits the largest market in the world for our goods and services and gives Europe and Japan all those benefits we negotiated to bring American jobs here at home. Granting China permanent normal trading relations, it's clearly in our economic interests. But from your point of view, even more important, it is a national security issue for stability in Asia, peace in the Taiwan Straits, possible cooperation with China to advance freedom and human rights within the country and to retard the proliferation of dangerous weapons technology beyond it. It is profoundly important to America's continued leadership in the world. That's why all former Presidents, without regard to party, as well as former Secretaries of State, Defense, Transportation, Trade, National Security Advisers, Chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, support this legislation. It illustrates a larger issue I want you to think about today, which is the importance of a balanced security strategy with military, diplomatic, and economic elements. I have worked hard to adapt our security strategy to the 21st century world, with all its possibilities and threats. Last year, as part of that effort, I asked the task force to conduct a fresh look at the roles and missions of the Coast Guard What are you going to do in this new world anyway? The task force found that a flexible, highly motivated Coast Guard continues to be vital to our security. We often see, personally, our reliance on the Coast Guard during floods in North Carolina, after Hurricane Floyd, after the tragedies of EgyptAir and Air Alaska. Today, in the average week, you and your fellow coasties will seize more than 60 million worth of dangerous drugs, board 630 vessels for safety checks, intercept hundreds of illegal immigrants, investigate 119 marine accidents, respond to more than 260 hazardous chemical spills, assist more than 2,500 people in distress, and save 100 lives. And the more we travel and the more we are connected together, the more those responsibilities and opportunities for service will rise. So your class will play an even larger role in defending and advancing America's security. It is very important to me, as the Commander in Chief, that each and every one of you understand the threats we face and what we should do to meet them. First, international terrorism is not new, but it is becoming increasingly sophisticated. Terrorist networks communicate on the World Wide Web, too. Available weapons are becoming more destructive and more miniaturized, just as the size of cell phones and computers is shrinking shrinking to the point where a lot of you with large hands like mine wonder if you'll be able to work the things before long. You should understand that the same process of miniaturization will find its way into the development of biological and chemical and maybe even nuclear weapons. And it is something we have to be ready for. As borders fade and old regimes struggle through transitions, the chance for free agents looking to make a profit on weapons of destruction and personal chaos is greater. In this sort of environment, cooperation is profoundly important more vital than ever. We learned that in the days leading up to the millennium. We are joined today by the Ambassador from Jordan to the United States, Dr. Marwan Muasher. He's sitting here behind me. He's an excellent representative of his country. And I want to tell you a story that, unfortunately, will not be the last example you will have to face. Last December, working with Jordan, we shut down a plot to place large bombs at locations where Americans might gather on New Year's Eve. We learned this plot was linked to terrorist camps in Afghanistan and the organization created by Usama bin Ladin, the man responsible for the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which cost the lives of Americans and hundreds of Africans. A short time later, a customs agent in Seattle discovered bomb materials being smuggled in to the U.S., the same materials used by bin Ladin in other places. Thankfully, and thanks to Jordan, New Year's passed without an attack. But the threat was real, and we had to cooperate with them, with the Canadians, with others throughout the world. So the first point I wish to make is, in a globalized world, we must have more security cooperation, not less. In responding to terrorist threats, our own strategy should be identical to your motto Semper paratus always ready. Today I'm adding over 300 million to fund critical programs to protect our citizens from terrorist threats, to expand our intelligence efforts, to improve our ability to use forensic evidence, to track terrorists, to enhance our coordination with State and local officials, as we did over New Year's, to protect our Nation against possible attacks. I have requested now some 9 billion for counterterrorism funding in the 2001 budget. That's 40 percent more than 3 years ago, and this 300 million will go on top of that. It sounds like a lot of money. When you see the evidence of what we're up against, I think you will support it, and I hope you will. We also have to do all we can to protect existing nuclear weapons from finding new owners. To keep nuclear weapons and nuclear materials secure at the source, we've helped Russia to deactivate about 5,000 warheads, to strengthen border controls and keep weapons expertise from spreading. But Russia's economic difficulties have made this an even greater challenge. Just for example, I know you know that when you decided to become a Coast Guard officer, you made a decision that you would not be wealthy. But let me give you some basis of comparison. The average salary today of a highly trained weapons scientist in Russia is less than 100 a month. Needless to say, there are a lot of people who'd like to develop nuclear weapons capability who are out there trying to hire those folks. The programs that we fund in joint endeavors to secure the Russian nuclear force and the materials and to do other kinds of joint research help to give such scientists a decent living to support their families. And I think we have to do even more to help them turn their expertise to peaceful projects. We shouldn't just depend upon their character to resist the temptation to earn a living wage with all of their knowledge and education. And we have asked Congress for extra funding here to help Russia keep its arsenal of nuclear weapons secure. Still, we have to face the possibility that a hostile nation, sooner or later, may well acquire weapons of mass destruction and the missiles necessary to deliver them to our shores. That's what this whole debate over whether we should have a limited national missile defense is all about. Later this year, I will decide whether we should begin to deploy it next spring, based on four factors that I will have to take into account. First, has this technology really proved it will work? Second, what does it cost, and how do we balance that cost against our other defense priorities? Third, how far advanced is the threat how likely is it that another nation could deliver long range ballistic missiles to our shore within 3 years, 5 years, 10 years what is the time frame? And finally, what impact will it have on our overall security, including our arms control efforts in other areas, our relationships with our allies in other countries around the world? I also want you to know, as I said earlier, we've got to be ready for the prospect of biological and chemical warfare. We saw that in the sarin gas attack in Japan 4 years ago. We've established a national defense preparedness office to train first responders, using new technology to improve our ability to detect these agents quickly. And we're doing all we can to see that poison gas and biological weapons are, in fact, eliminated from the face of the Earth. We have to do the same when it comes to problems in cybersecurity. Today, critical systems like power structures, nuclear plants, air traffic control, computer networks, they're all connected and run by computers. Two years ago we had an amazing experience in America and around the world. We saw that a single failed electronics link with one satellite malfunction disable pagers, ATM's, credit card systems, and TV and radio networks all over the world. That was an accident. The "love bug" was not an accident. So to protect America from cybercrime and cyberterrorism, we have developed a national plan for cybersecurity, with both public and private sector brains putting it together. We're asking for increased funding to implement this plan to protect our vital networks. That's something else I hope you will support. We talk about computer viruses and often forget the world is also threatened by physical infection like malaria, TB, and AIDS. Some people questioned me when our administration announced a couple of weeks ago that we considered the AIDS crisis a national security threat. But let me just give you a couple of examples. In Africa alone, there are 70 percent of the world's AIDS cases. The fastest growing rate of AIDS is in India, which happens to be a nuclear power. In Africa, some countries are actually hiring two employees for every job, on the assumption that one of them is going to die from AIDS. In other African countries, 30 percent of the teachers and 40 percent of the soldiers have the virus. In addition, millions of people suffer from malaria, and about a third of the world has been exposed to TB, a disease that can reach our shores at the speed of jet travel. With malaria, people now discuss in common parlance airport malaria, something people can get at any international airport in any country in the world because we're all traveling around and bumping into people from other countries. These diseases can ruin economies and threaten the very survival of nations and societies. I think meeting this public health challenge is a moral imperative and a national security concern. I issued an Executive order last week to help make AIDS drugs more affordable to people in poor countries. I propose that we give a generous tax credit to our private pharmaceutical companies to give them an incentive to develop vaccines for things like AIDS, malaria, and TB, because the people who need it most can't afford to pay for it. If we help them pay for it, we can save millions of lives and strengthen our security. If we don't, we will dramatically increase the chances of chaos, murder, the abuse of children, the kind of things we have seen in some of the terrible tribal wars in Africa in the last couple of years. Finally, there's one more global challenge I want you to think about that I think is a security challenge, the challenge of climate change. Nine of the 10 warmest years since the 15th century were recorded in the 1990's 9 of the 10 warmest years since the 15th century. Unless we change course and reverse global greenhouse gas emissions, most scientists are convinced that storms and droughts will intensify as the globe continues to warm. Crop patterns will be disrupted. Food supplies will be affected. The seas will rise so high they will swallow islands and coastal areas, and if that happens, all the Luders training in the world won't save us. Laughter I want you to laugh, but I want you to listen. This is a huge challenge that can become a national security challenge. If we value our coastlands and farmlands, we must work at home. If we value the stability of our neighbors and friends and the rights of people around the world, particularly in island nations, to live their lives in peace according to their cultures and religious faiths, we must work with other nations. This is a global challenge. And the good news is, we don't need to put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere anymore to grow the economy. All we need is the vision and will and discipline to do the job. Finally, we have to deal with the global challenge of narcotrafficking and drugs. We have to do a lot here at home, zero tolerance for drug use, treatment for those who suffer, punishment for those who profit. But we also have to fight these big drug cartels and the criminal empires they finance. Ninety percent of the cocaine consumed in America, two thirds of the heroin seized on our streets comes from or through just one country, Colombia. Now, Colombia has a courageous new President, Andres Pastrana, who has asked for our help to finance his comprehensive Plan Colombia to fight drugs, build the economy, and deepen democracy. I've asked Congress to give 1.6 billion to pay our share of Plan Colombia over the next 2 years. The House just passed a bill I hope the Senate will do so as soon as possible. It is a national security issue. For Colombia, Latin America's oldest democracy, is not just fighting for its peoples' lives and its way of life it's fighting to preserve stability in the entire Andean region, and it's fighting for the lives of our kids, too. So again, it's not in the Department of Defense budget in a direct way, or in the Department of Transportation budget in a direct way, but it directly affects our national security, and I hope you will support it. In all these challenges, the Coast Guard will play a vital role. You always have. In the 18th century, the predecessor to today's Coast Guard manned antislavery patrols and coordinated tariff collection for a young nation. In the 19th century, you assumed responsibility for search and rescue, marine inspection, and quarantine laws. In the last century, the 20th century, you arrested rumrunners during Prohibition, enforced environmental laws, interdicted drugs, and even delivered marines to the beaches at Normandy. We're trying to make sure you can do your job in the 21st century. My 2001 budget requests another 376 million for the Coast Guard, the largest one year increase in 20 years, including a 34 percent increase to buy ships. I will also recommend to the next President that America continue to support the Coast Guard's Deep Water Project, so you have the ships and planes you need to meet challenges that face us. We can't meet threats to the future with a Coast Guard fleet from the past. Let me say just this last point. We cannot accept the fact that the burden of protecting America's security falls solely on the shoulders of those who stand watch on our borders and coastlines, on the high seas or our allies' home ground, that it involves only immediate threats to our security. Ever since the end of the cold war, some people have been saying, "We don't need to play such an active role in the world anymore or worry about distant conflicts or play our part in international institutions like the United Nations." I want to ask you what you think the alternative is a survivalist foreign policy, build a fence around America and retreat behind it a go it alone foreign policy, where we do it our way, and if people disagree with us, we just don't do it at all? I profoundly disagree with both. Remember the story I told you about the millennium and the help we got from Jordan and the work we did with Canada. It wouldn't have mattered what we had done if they hadn't helped us, we'd have had bombs going off here as we celebrated the millennium. We have got to be more involved in a cooperative way with other nations to advance our national security. America has been called a shining city on a hill. That doesn't mean our oceans are moats. It doesn't mean our country is a fortress. If we wait to act until problems come home to America, problems are far more likely to come home to America. I hope when you leave here today as new officers, you will be convinced that more than any previous time in history, your Nation must be engaged in the world, paying our fair share, doing our fair share, working with others to secure peace and prosperity where we can, leading where we must, and standing up for what we believe. That's why I support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. I hope the Congress will ratify it next year. That's why I've worked to relieve the debts of the poorest nations of the world and to help them build their economies and their educational systems why we have worked to expand trade with Africa and the poor Caribbean nations, to deepen our economic ties to Latin American and Asia why we work for peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, for democracy in Haiti, and an end to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo for reconciliation between North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. They may be a long way from home, but more and more, as the years go by, you will see that in an age of globalism, our values and interests are at stake in these places, as well. Almost 40 years ago, President Kennedy stood on the deck of the Eagle, and that day he said this "There is not a single person who has sailed any of our lakes or oceans who has not at one time or another been the beneficiary of the faithful service of the Coast Guard." Today, that great tradition falls to you in the greatest age of possibility in human history. You are the generation chosen by providence to lead the Coast Guard into the new century. Your class motto says, Ducentes viam en millennium leading the way into the new millennium. Now you have the preparation to do it. You clearly have the courage and character to do it. I pray you will also have the vision and wisdom to take your motto and truly make it your own. Good luck. Thank you for your service, and God bless you. May 16, 2000 Helen Thomas of United Press International The President. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Before we start, I would just like to say a few words of appreciation and respect about Helen Thomas, who has decided today to leave UPI after 57 years. Presidents come and go, but Helen's been here for 40 years now, covering eight Presidents and, doubtless, showing the ropes to countless young reporters and, I might add, more than a few Press Secretaries. I hope this change will bring new rewards and new fulfillment to her. Whatever she decides to do, I know I'll feel a little better about my country if I know she'll still be spending some time around here at the White House. After all, without her saying, "Thank you, Mr. President," at least some of us might never have ended our news conferences. Prescription Drug Benefit When I gave my State of the Union Address this year, I said that in good conscience we could not let another year pass without finding a way to offer voluntary prescription drug coverage to every older American. I think we're beginning to make progress toward that goal. And today I want to support one step in the right direction, a congressional proposal, scheduled for a vote this week in the House, to extend prescription drug coverage to all retired military personnel over 65. Keeping faith with men and women in America who have served in our Armed Forces is a sacred obligation for all of us. That's why we have raised military pay over 8 percent over the last 2 years, why we're working to provide our troops with better housing, and taking steps to improve access to medical care for all military personnel, families, and retirees. We asked them to risk their lives for freedom, and in return, we pledged our support. Part of that promise is a medical network that helps to provide prescription drugs at reasonable costs. Some senior retirees are able now to take advantage of that network. But they're out of reach for as many as three of four of them. This proposal would make sure that we meet our promise to more than one million older military retirees across the Nation, providing every single one of them with a prescription drug benefit, sharing with them the price discounts that the military negotiates with drug companies. At a time of unprecedented prosperity, there is no reason for military retirees to go without these prescription drugs that they need to live longer and healthier lives. We need to show them that they count, and they can count on us. This initiative is another step for finding a way to offer every older American voluntary prescription drug coverage and affordable prescription drugs. That ought to be our next goal, because today, more than three in five American seniors lack such coverage. Too many spend huge percentages of their income on prescription drugs. Too many have to choose every month between filling those prescriptions and filling grocery carts. Too many are simply not getting the medicine they need. If we were creating Medicare today, as I have said over and over and over again, we certainly would include a prescription drug benefit to give older Americans and people with disabilities access to the most cost effective health care. Prescription drugs help to keep seniors mobile and healthy. They help to prevent expensive hospital stays and surgical procedures. They promote the dignity that every retired person is entitled to, the quality of life all of us want for our own parents. We should act this year to make sure all seniors have access to such coverage. In my budget, I proposed a comprehensive plan to provide a Medicare benefit that is optional, affordable, and available to all, based on price competition, not price controls a plan to boost seniors' bargaining power to get the best prices possible, just as this military plan would a plan that is part of an overall effort to strengthen and modernize Medicare so that we won't have to ask our children to shoulder the burden of the baby boomers' retirement. I'm glad there is growing bipartisan support for providing this coverage to all beneficiaries. Both sides say they want to get it done. Unfortunately, I still believe that the proposals put forward by the congressional majority will not achieve the goal. They'd provide no assistance to middle income seniors, nearly half of all those who now lack coverage. They'd subsidize private insurance plans that the industry itself says it will not offer. This will not get the job done. But the bipartisan spirit of this proposal for military retirees shows us the way forward for all retirees. In reaching out to extend coverage to older military retirees, Congress has recognized that high prescription drug costs are a burden for every senior and that we owe every military retiree a dignified and healthy retirement. Both parties now have agreed that prescription drug coverage should be available and affordable to older Americans. We can, surely, come to an agreement on the details of how to do this. We all want our seniors, all of them, to live longer, healthier lives. And I'm very glad that here, as so often before, our armed forces are leading the way. Thank you very much. Q. Mr. President, on Q. Mr. President, you The President. I'll take them both. Go ahead. Q. Mr. President, you seem to be having a prescription drug event each week, now. Is it safe for us to assume that this is the one piece of what would be historical legislation historic legislation that you would like to sign on behalf of your legacy? The President. No. It's safe for you to assume that I think there's a fair chance we could pass this, and I think it's the right thing to do for America. The Congress will have a chance to cast any number of profoundly important votes, including the vote on China and the trade relations. And I hope they'll do the right thing on each and every one. But you know, my philosophy has always been the same in election years as in off years. I think that we owe it to the American people to govern, to do as much together as we can in good conscience, secure in the knowledge that no matter how much we get done there will still be significant areas of disagreement between the two parties, beginning with our Presidential candidates and extending to the Senate and the House candidates, on which we can have a marvelous election and a rousing debate. So, do I want to get this done? Absolutely, I do. But I want to do it because we have the money to do it now and we know how to do it and because the people need it. Go ahead. Interest Rates Q. Sir, on the economy, are you concerned that if the Fed Chairman's efforts to slow this economy down have the desired effect, it might negatively impact the Vice President's campaign going into the November election and really give the Republican challenger some ammunition to go after Mr. Gore with? The President. No, because what we've done is to minimize inflation by paying down the debt and keeping our markets open. And I think that if anything, the Chairman of the Fed has made it clear that if you had a huge tax cut, it would cause even higher interest rate increases. So I think you know, the Fed will do its job, and we will do ours. And I'm going to let them make whatever decision that Chairman Greenspan and the others think is warranted. But I think it should remind us all of the wisdom of continuing to pay down the debt, because the more we pay down the debt, the more we'll keep interest rates as low as they can, the more we'll keep inflation down. It's also a good argument for passing the normal trade relations with China and continuing to expand our trade. 2000 Presidential Election Q. Mr. President Q. Mr. President excuse me poll after poll continues to show that Governor Bush is ahead of Vice President Gore. Do you think his campaign strategy, the Vice President's, is working? The President. I don't want to comment on the campaign. It's a long time before it's over, and I think that in these elections the fundamentals tend to take over, and the American people tend to take the measure of both the candidates, especially in the course of the debates. And you know, I trust them to make the decision. I don't have anything to comment about that. Q. Sir, are you a registered voter in New York, sir? Q. Mr. President, on The President. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Permanent Normal Trade Relations With China Q. Mr. President, on the Chinese vote, how are you doing? And could you elaborate on your statements of the other day that China could still get WTO membership, and the U.S. would be hurt if the Congress doesn't pass it? The President. Sure. China could get into the WTO and will get into the WTO, but the United States would not be able to claim the benefits of the agreement we negotiated. So all those big cuts in agricultural tariffs, all that right to sell automobiles in China without putting plants up there or transferring technology, all the access to what will clearly be the biggest telecommunications market in the world, all those benefits we negotiated will go to the Europeans, the Japanese, and others who will be in a position to take advantage of them. So that, it seems to me, is clear. You can't if they go in, they have to be accepted on membership terms that apply to everyone else, and that's fair, because we expect them to follow the rules that apply to everyone else. And therefore, any nation that withholds those membership terms doesn't get the benefit of the agreement that was negotiated. And it would be quite significant. Q. How hard are you finding this China trade fight? And when you meet one on one with Democrats, are they saying they're just facing terrific pressure from the labor unions? Are you losing some of those one on ones? And what's your prediction for the outcome? The President. I'm losing some and getting some. My view is that in the end it will pass, not only because the economic benefits are clear and overwhelming but in a larger sense, because the national security interests are so clear. Let me just say again, I think it's quite interesting that for all the differences the Taiwanese and the Chinese have had, and the tensions between them, everyone, beginning with the President elect of Taiwan, wants us to approve China going into the WTO. Why is that? They think it's good for them economically, but in a larger sense, they think it will reduce tensions along the Taiwan Straits and maximize the chance that the Chinese and the people of Taiwan will have a chance to work out their differences in a peaceful way, which is consistent with over 20 years of American policy. I think it's interesting that Martin Lee came all the way over here from Hong Kong, a man who cannot even legally go to China, who has never met the Premier of China, to say to us, we had to support this because China had to be brought into a system that extols the rule of law, and that was the beginning of liberty. I think it's interesting that Chinese dissidents in China, people who have been subject to abuses we would never tolerate in our country, whose phones have been tapped, who can't sponsor public events, still implore us to support this because they know it is the beginning of the rule of law and change in China, and ironic that the people in China who do not want us to vote for this are those that hope they will have a standoff with us and continuing control at home, the more reactionary elements in the military and in the state owned industries. So I think the national security arguments are so overwhelming that, notwithstanding the pressures, and especially given the economic realities of this agreement, in the end that Congress will do the right thing. I believe they will. Q. Mr. President, Charlie Rangel came out today and said he's going to go ahead and support normalizing trade relations with China. Can you tell us how you feel about that, and how it may affect other Democrats? The President. Well, I think it's an enormously important decision by Mr. Rangel. If we're successful in the elections in November in the House, then he would become the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. I think his decision will affect other Members on the Committee. And I think if we're fortunate enough to get a majority of Democrats on the Committee to vote for this, because of Charles Rangel's leadership and because some of the others are already come out, that surely will have an effect on our caucus, because they are in the best position to understand the economic issues involved here. And I think it's an immensely important thing. And I think if this passes, combined with the bill for Africa and Caribbean Basin trade which was passed with overwhelming majorities last week, this Congress will build quite a legacy for itself in this area, and one that would be well deserved for members of both parties that vote for it. New York State Democratic Convention Q. Mr. President, can you tell us how you came to the decision to go up to New York tonight, and any thoughts you have on seeing the First Lady nominated? The President. I just decided I ought to be there. I mean, it's a big deal for her, a big night for her, and I want to be there with her. I just want to be there to support her. And I also a secondary but important consideration for me is it's Senator Moynihan's, kind of his farewell address to the people in New York who have elevated him to the Senate and given him the chance to serve our country in a remarkable way. I'd like to hear what he has to say as well. But mostly, I just wanted to be with Hillary tonight. It's a big night for her, and I just started working on my schedule today to see if I could go. President's Voter Registration Q. Are you yet registered to vote in New York, Mr. President? The President. Excuse me? Q. Are you yet registered to vote in New York? The President. No. But I intend to register so I can vote for her in November. You know, this was a Mark Mark Knoller, CBS Radio , this was kind of a difficult issue. I just voted in the last school election in Little Rock a few days ago. And for me, it's hard, you know, on a personal basis. But this is a commitment that we made together. And it's something that she wanted to do and a lot of people in New York wanted her to do, and I want to support her in every way I can. And I certainly intend to vote for her. And since I'm a tax paying resident of New York now, I'm entitled to vote, and I intend to take advantage of it. 2000 Presidential Election Q. Mr. President, on guns, I know you didn't want to talk about the campaign in general terms, but there are a lot of polls that shows Bush is doing as well or even better than Mr. Gore on the issue of guns. How can that be? What's your take on that? The President. The people don't know what their respective positions are. You know, one of the things I said here on Sunday morning, before the Million Mom March, is that I think we'd lose, particularly in how people vote on this issue, if it gets muddled in rhetoric and we win, if people know what the specifics are. And this just and that's often true about issues in America. If you say, do you want more gun control or not, or you want the Government to control guns more, we'd probably win that, but it would be close. If you say, do you believe we should close the gun show loophole and ban large capacity ammunition clips from being imported and require child trigger locks, or should we have people who buy handguns get a photo ID license showing they passed the Brady background check and a safety course, then I think we win. And I think that it's really interesting it's very instructive to compare this with automobiles. The NRA always talks about the right to keep and bear arms. Well, the Supreme Court says there's a constitutional right to travel, enshrined in and guaranteed by the Constitution. And when we have speed limits, seatbelt laws, child safety restraint laws, and drivers have to get licenses, nobody talks about car control in ominous terms. You don't hear all the "there's a big threat of car control out there." Now, if I come get your car, park it in my backyard, that's car control. Otherwise, it's highway safety. And I have not proposed to confiscate the gun or take away the gun or the right to hunt or sport shoot or even to have a gun in selfdefense for any law abiding American. I have not made any proposals. Neither, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone else in Congress. So what we're talking about is gun safety legislation, to keep guns away from criminals and other people who shouldn't have them and out of the hands of kids. So my view is that as this debate unfolds and we have a chance to debate the specifics and I hope we'll do it in a civilized fashion. I really enjoyed I did one of the morning programs last week, and there were people on both sides of the issues there. And we actually had a chance to talk specifics, and some of them made a couple suggestions that I agreed with. And I think that surprised them. I think we need to get down to the specifics here and get away from the labeling, and I think it will turn out just fine. The American people will make the right decision on this if we give them a chance to. Social Security Q. Sir, Senator Moynihan, who you mentioned, Senator Bob Kerrey, many of the Democrats from the DLC wing of the party, like yourself, have suggested changes to Social Security not unlike those outlined by Governor Bush. Yet the Vice President says the Governor would "destroy" the program. Would Democrats like those recommend changes that would destroy Social Security? The President. Well, I'm not sure they are the same. And you know, I saw a headline in the paper today that said that the Governor's campaign had released more details on Social Security and Medicare, and I need the chance to study them before I do. I do think I will say again, to get something done on this in the longer term, you need a bipartisan solution. And it's going to have to come out of the Congress. And I had hoped we could get it done this year. But let me just caution you. You have to see all this stuff together. I'll say you know, one thing people all over America ask me is, "What did you do different on the economy that changed America?" And I always say, only half jokingly, "We brought arithmetic back to Washington." So what you need to do on this is, for purposes of analysis, is take the projected revenues over the next decade, when they get you know, and they'll be written up some when the socalled midsession review comes out, because we've had more growth this year than was anticipated subtract the size of both candidates' proposed tax cuts, take the Social Security program and see what the so called transition costs are and then the other differences in spending in defense and education vouchers and what's inflation going to be, see what you've got left and whether you can pay for it, and then what do you think the chances are that we won't have this much robust revenue growth over the last 10 years, and don't you have to have some sort of guard against that, and then evaluate where it is. We need to I think it's going to be a good thing that we'll have a Social Security debate. But keep in mind, the people who want these private accounts, they argue two things. One is, we ought to have a higher rate of return on Social Security because it's going to go broke in 2034. Two is, we ought to give more Americans a chance to share in the wealth of the country with private savings. Now, what I argued back is that if you take the interest savings that we get from paying down the debt because of the Social Security tax just that that comes from the Social Security tax, so arguably that's a savings that you're entitled to as a payer of the Social Security tax if you put that into the Trust Fund, you get it up to 2054, for probably no more cost than the transition costs would be. That is, if you let the people start taking money out of the Trust Fund, obviously, and you guarantee the rights of the retirees that are here, you've got to put something back in from somewhere. Then what I suggested, that did not find favor with the Congress, was that we have some means of letting the Trust Fund as a whole benefit from the markets, up to about 15 percent of the Trust Fund. That would increase the rate of return. And then remember, the year before last I proposed a very ambitious program and I proposed a more modified, income limited program this year that would have the Government support private savings and wealth creation outside the Social Security system by individual citizens. I still think that's the safer way to go, and we could easily get the Social Security Trust Fund out beyond the life of the baby boom generation just by doing that. So we've got a chance now to have a big debate. I haven't seen the Medicare proposals, but I think that we've got to be particularly careful with that. We've added 24 or 25 years to the life of the Medicare Trust Fund since I've been here, and we need to put some more time on that and do the drug issue. And there are some I've proposed some structural reforms, but we need to be careful with that. But just let me just say, there are four or five different variations that I've seen of people who have proposed various kinds of private accounts. So I think it's important again, you've got to get behind the labels to the facts and see how everybody's proposal works. And that would be my advice on that. I think the way we're the safer way is to take it the way we've done, and it would achieve the other two objectives. That is, you could get a higher rate of return on the Social Security Fund, and you could open savings and wealth creation opportunities for individual Americans, without actually privatizing the fund itself and running some of the risks that are inherent in that. But that's a debate the American people will get a chance to resolve, if they get together and discuss it, and if they flesh out their ideas. I think it's an important debate to have. Tobacco Regulation Q. Mr. President, what was your reaction to the first McCain tobacco regulation bill, that gives the FDA direct authority to regulate tobacco products? The President. Well, you know, I think they should have that authority. Patients' Bill of Rights Q. In your discussions with House Speaker Hastert last week on Patients' Bill of Rights, what assurances were you given that he's willing to support some form of coverage for everyone? The President. He said that that was his position. And I must say, so far he's been as good as his word on everything he said. Now, we do have some differences there. You know, he admitted that we still don't have the liability issues worked out, and we've got some other issues to resolve. But I think he wants legislation to pass, in this area and in the new markets area, which is terribly important. Again, that's something that could change the face of America. It could give us a chance to bring free enterprise to poor areas in a way that we've never tried to do before as a nation and to go beyond, even, what we've done with the empowerment zones, which has been quite successful. So we were just talking, and that's what he said. And I've found that when he says something, he normally means it or he always means it when he's talked to me. Prescription Drug Benefit Q. Sir, on prescription drugs, isn't this similar to a measure that you told the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs that you couldn't afford to put into an already bulging FY 2001 defense budget? And how is it that that measure can be afforded now by Members of Congress? The President. Well, for one thing, when they no. What happened is, after I had already presented the budget, they asked me about it. And I pointed out that under our program all the military retirees would be covered by a system very similar to this legislation. But I'm certainly not opposed to the military retirees being covered. I think that the real question is, how can the Congress, in good conscience, provide this coverage in the same way actually, the mechanism works just like what I want to do to cover all seniors. How can they do this and say they're not going to do it for people in the same situation in the rest of the country, the other senior population, when we can do it and do it with the same sort of mechanism that they provide here? So I'm fine for them to do this, and if they do it in this way and then they pass the other, then the cost of the other program will be diminished if for the military retirees who stay in this program. In other words, they're not going to be in both programs buying the same drugs twice. So what I said was, I didn't I had already presented the budget and that all military retirees would be covered in my program, along with all other seniors. But now that Congress is doing this, I think that this ought to be evidence that they understand, A, that people over 65 need this coverage and, B, that this is a good kind of mechanism to guarantee that they get the medicine at affordable prices. Thank you. Colombia Q. Mr. President, are you worried about Colombia aid? Mr. President, the aid to Colombia? The President. Well, it's funny, I talked to General McCaffrey about it this morning, actually. At this time I'm not worried about it, but I think it's important, given the continuing difficulties and challenges the Government in Colombia is facing, that it pass as soon as possible. We need to send a signal to those people down there who are fighting for democracy, fighting for freedom, fighting for the rule of law, fighting against the narcotraffickers, fighting against terrorism, that we're on their side. And we also need to signal to them that there is an alternative economic way that the people can make a living who've been caught up in the drug trade kind of at the grassroots farmer level. And this bill does that, so that I think in the end, Congress will pass this bill. But I hope it can be put on some bill I'll get as quick as possible so we can send the right signal in a very timely fashion. I just don't want it dragged out another 3 or 4 months. I think it would be a really bad mistake in terms of our national security interests, not just in Colombia but throughout the Andean region. People are looking at us to see if we're really going to make a serious commitment. It also will help Colombia to get the other support it needs from the international institutions, from other countries, to make a stand there, and in the process, hopefully, to see victory there for a democratic government and the rule of law, a reduction in drug production and exports, and a stabilization of the democracies that surround Colombia in the Andean region. Thank you very much. May 10, 2000 Ms. Rehm. Mr. President, thank you for joining us. The President. I'm glad to do it. Permanent Normal Trade Relations With China 2000 Election Ms. Rehm. It looks as though the normalized trade relations with China isn't likely to go through. Would you agree with that? The President. I'm not sure yet. Ms. Rehm. You're still not sure? The President. We don't have the votes yet. I think we'll get the votes, because I think it's the right thing for the country. But I think it will be I won't know for a few days yet. Ms. Rehm. If you do, how might that hurt or help Mr. Gore in his bid for the Presidency? The President. Well, I think that, on balance, it will help him because he's been a very strong supporter of this agreement and, generally, of our trade policy. And even though some of the strongest elements of the Democratic Party and some of our best friends are on the other side of this fight, it shows that he's willing to take an independent stand to do what he believes is right. And I think that's very, very important. I think that's something people will look to. And they might compare that, for example, with Governor Bush's going to Bob Jones University and defending his outreach to Jerry Falwell and the members of the far right in his party, and conclude that our people, the people that we're disagreeing with are good folks, and we're proud to have them as a part of our party we want them to. But we need a President who will make an independent judgment from time to time. Ms. Rehm. So you think it's not going to hurt him? The President. Yes, I think it's a net plus. I think that let me just say this I think the reverse is, it would be a problem for our country. That's the most important thing. I think it would be a big problem for our country if it didn't pass, because it would increase the chance that something bad would happen in that area it would give aid and comfort to the reactionaries in China and it would make it possible for people to question whether the Democrats were running away from our global responsibilities. Right now, that's the burden the Republicans have to bear, because they defeated the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They opposed our efforts to lead a global march on ending the testing of nuclear weapons. And I think that was a terrible mistake by them. So it's a problem they'll have to come to grips with. I just don't want to see our party responsible for walking away from another big opportunity and responsibility of the United States. Million Mom March and Gun Safety Legislation Ms. Rehm. The Million Mom March takes place this Sunday. How do you address the concerns of law abiding citizens who own guns, who feel that any additional controls would be an infringement on their personal rights, on their second amendment rights? The President. Well, I just disagree with them. I think that every law abiding gun owner ought to want to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children and should recognize that no strategy will succeed that doesn't have a lot of prevention. For example, I don't see why any gun owner could possibly object to closing the gun show loophole and the Brady background check. We now know these background checks have kept 500,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers from buying handguns. I don't see why any law abiding gun owner would object to having a photo ID and a license for anybody buying handguns that proves that, A, you've passed the background check and, B, you've passed a safety training course on a gun. We do that for cars. If you have to get a license to prove you can drive a car and that you're a law abiding citizen and you have to observe seatbelt laws and speed limits, you don't hear people going around complaining about "car control." They don't call it "car control." They call it sensible public safety. I just think we need to look at the specifics of every proposal. Does this keep any law abiding hunter out of the deer woods in deer season? No. Does it keep any law abiding sport shooter away from his or her activities? No. Does it prevent any law abiding gun owner who believes that he'll be safer having a gun in their home from having a gun in their home? No. So if the answers to those questions is no, but it would clearly keep more guns out of the hands of children and criminals, then we ought to be for it, and everybody ought to be for it. That's what I believe. President's Disappointments in Office Ms. Rehm. You've had a number of successes during your administration. The economy is up. Unemployment is down. The crime rate is down. What has been your greatest disappointment or failure? The President. I'm disappointed that we haven't been able to make health care available to all the working families of the country. You know, the very poorest people have health care through the Government Medicaid program. And we have extended health insurance to children of low income working families through the Children's Health Insurance Program, and we're still enrolling more children in that. But I'm very disappointed in that. And I'm disappointed that the two parties in Congress, once we became financially able to do it when we started running surpluses we can save Social Security now for the baby boom generation, and as yet they haven't taken me up on even the easiest part of my proposal, which is to dedicate the savings we will get from paying down the debt, because of the Social Security taxes we pay dedicate those savings from lower interest rates on the debt to the Trust Fund. If we did that, we could take the life of Social Security out to about 2054 just that which would take it beyond the life expectancy of all but the most fortunate baby boomers and get this country over a big hump. Now, I think there are further Social Security reforms that should be enacted, but they'll have to await the election and probably a less hopefully, a less partisan climate. Relations With Republican Congress Ms. Rehm. Of course, from the time you first came into office, there's been this animosity between you and the Republicans in Congress, and some of the Democrats as well. What do you think it is that has created this climate of mistrust between you and the Congress? The President. Well first of all, I disagree that there's very much among the Democrats. I have enjoyed, even in my first 2 years, I got a higher percentage of Democratic support for my programs than Presidents Johnson and Carter did, and Kennedy, as an historical fact. We didn't lose many Democrats. You always lose some just disagree with you. So they've been quite good to me. I think what happened is, I had more partisan opposition than at any time in history, and I think there were two causes. I think some Republicans thought that the Democratic majority in Congress had been too hard on their Presidents, and so they thought it was payback time. I think there was some of that. But the overwhelming reason is that they resented the fact that they didn't have the White House. They thought that they owned the White House, and they thought they had found a formula that would always keep Democrats out of the White House. They would say we couldn't be trusted on the economy and foreign policy and national defense and welfare and crime, and we were going to tax people to death, and all the things they always said. And when it didn't work, I think they were very angry. And they decided that they would oppose me at every turn and in every way. I've had many of them come up to me and tell me that that's what they did. It was about power. It wasn't about all these things, and it had nothing to do with oh, some of them may have very strong personal adverse feelings, but they're basically rooted in they thought that they owned the White House. And the people own the White House. I don't own it. The Democrats don't own it, either. But I think that's really what drove it. And I certainly hope that after this next election that they will moderate their conduct. But we'll just have to see. I don't personally have you know, I worked with all these people. And I've worked with them, and I think it's important to point out that in spite of all the partisan animosity, we have gotten a great deal done here. We passed the Balanced Budget Act together. We passed welfare reform together. We passed the bill to put 100,000 teachers in the schools together and a lot of other really big we passed financial services reform, telecommunications reform. We got a lot done together because, in the end, if we keep working in the end, to get anything done, we have to work together. And I'd keep thinking, this is easing off, and we're making improvements. I have a lot of people that I have very good relationships with in the Republican caucus, and I will continue to just try to bring more of them around to the idea that we should all be in the business of governing. We have these elections on a regular basis, and before you know it, we have another one, and before you know it, there's a new crowd in town. And it's a terrible waste of energy to spend all your time in partisan fights. The thing that I'm most discouraged about right now is that the Senate has been here since January and has only approved 11 of my proposed appointments. I've got over 250 proposed appointments up there. And they can say, "Well, this always happens in an election year." That's simply not true. If you look at it's true that the appointments process slows down in election years if you have a President of one party and a Senate of another. It slows down. But it doesn't come to a grinding halt like they're doing now. And again, this is about political power. But it's not good for the taxpayers. It's not good for the public interest. And I hope that I'll be able to persuade the Senate to resume fulfilling their constitutional responsibility to act on these appointments. And they ought to vote against them if they don't like them. Ms. Rehm. There seemed to have been some personal animosity against you, personally, right from the start, before you left Arkansas. The President. Yes, I think there was. But it was rooted in there's a new book out by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons called "The Hunting of the President" that explains what it was about. It was, they were afraid I was going to win. And they thought it would upset their automatic hold on the White House and their little formula. Maybe they didn't like me, but I think mostly what they didn't like was the prospect that they wouldn't win the White House forever and ever and ever. I think it's not too much to say that before the '92 election, they really thought they had found a formula and there would never be another Democratic President, not for a long, long, long time, that maybe a third party would have to come up before they'd ever be challenged. And it made them very angry. And I kept telling them that politics is about ideas and action. We've got elections all the time nobody stays around forever. They need to relax and have a good time and go to work. Whenever they did, we got a lot done. We got a lot done together. I enjoyed working with them. But I think, to me, spending your time on personal animosity is highly counterproductive. Life is too short for that. Impact of 2000 Election Ms. Rehm. How and to what extent do you think the character and the goals of the Federal Government might change if either George Bush or Al Gore is elected in November? The President. Well, I think both the nature and the goals will change. I think if the Vice President regardless, because the country is changing. And the environment in which our people live and, therefore, in which our Government operates will change. I think if the Vice President is elected, he will do what he said he would do, which is to stay with the economic policy that has brought us this unprecedented prosperity, but to modernize it. I think he will implement his keep paying down the debt. He will continue to try to do more for the poor areas of our country and the cities and the rural areas that have been left behind. And I think he will try to save enough money to make sure we protect Social Security and Medicare and reform it for the baby boom generation and to continue to invest in education. So I think that's what he'll do. If Governor Bush gets elected, I think he'll do what he said he would do. I think it's not necessary to attack these people personally. I mean, most people do what they say they're going to do. And what Governor Bush said he was going to do is have a tax cut much bigger than the one I vetoed before, defense increases bigger than the ones that I proposed, and vouchers for our schools. And I believe if that happens, we'll basically be back to the Reagan Bush economic philosophy, which is cut the revenues of the Government, even if it means going back to deficits and higher interest rates. And it will mean that we won't have much money left over to invest in education or the environment or health care. That's what they've but I think you have to just look at what they say they're going to do and ask yourself what the consequences are. I think if Al Gore gets elected, he'll try to grow the economy and keep cleaning up the environment. I think if Governor Bush gets elected, he will do what he did in Texas. He will let the people who basically are the primary polluters control environmental policy. That's what he did in Texas. He got rid of all the environmental commissioners, appointed someone who represented the chemical industry, someone from the Farm Bureau, and someone who was a political activist. I think but that's what they we shouldn't be surprised if people do what they say they'll do. I think that the next President will get two to four appointments to the Supreme Court. So I think if the Vice President gets elected, he'll continue to appoint diverse judges who are committed to individual liberties and basically in the mainstream of American constitutional history, the way I've tried to do. And I think if Governor Bush gets elected, he'll appoint judges more like the ones appointed by the previous Reagan and Bush administrations. And if they get two to four appointments on the Supreme Court, I think Roe v. Wade will be repealed, and a lot of other things that have been a part of the fabric of our constitutional life will be gone. Because and again, I just think just look at what these people say they believe, both candidates, what they say they're going to do and assume that they will do it. There's been a lot of studies which show that, by and large, people who get elected President do what they say they're going to do. Ms. Rehm. What about foreign policy, and the question of how the two might deal differently with issues of foreign policy? The President. Well, the Vice President has a big advantage in the sense that he has worked on this for not only 8 years as Vice President, where he's had a major role in issues affecting our nuclear security and issues affecting biological and chemical warfare and our relationship with Russia, our relationship with South Africa, our relationship in the Middle East. So he's got a rich, real history here. Governor Bush, like me when I got elected, is Governor, and he served far less time than I did as Governor. But he would say, I'm sure if he were here, "But my father was President, and I know all these big time Republicans, and they're all for me. So I can get them all to come and give me good advice." And so I think, again, the best thing to do is to say that on the question of experience and record, I think the Vice President has the better claim there. But I'm more concerned about the positions that Governor Bush has taken because, again, I think you have to assume these candidates are honorable people and they will do what they say. He's opposed to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and he says that he wants to build a much bigger missile defense system than the evidence warrants right now it may support it later no matter what the consequences are to the efforts we're making to reduce the nuclear weapons threat around the world. So I think that, you know, that gives me some pause. I think that's troublesome, because it could cause the country a lot of trouble in the next 4 or 5 years. And he says that's where he says he is, and so I assume he I believe he believes that. President's Role in the Democratic Party Ms. Rehm. Mr. President, as your time here in the White House winds down, what role do you see for yourself in the Democratic Party now? The President. You mean, right now, or in the future? Right now? Ms. Rehm. Right now. The President. First of all, I'm trying to help as many of our candidates as possible. I'm trying to help as many of our candidates for the Senate and the House of Representatives. I will do whatever I can to help the Vice President in the fall. I will try to make sure that our side has enough funds to compete with the Republicans. They will have more money as they always do, but I think we've got a better message, and so I think if we've got enough money to get our message out, we'll be fine. So I expect to work on all that. I remember in '98, they outspent us by 100 million, and we still won seats in the House because we had a good message. We said we were for 100,000 teachers in our schools, and we were for modernizing our school facilities. We were for a Patients' Bill of Rights. We had a good specific set of things we were for. And we will in the fall. And so I'm going to do my best to just be a messenger for that and support other people. That's what I'm doing. I'm not a candidate anymore, so I get to go back to being a good citizen and be supportive of other people. President's Future Plans Ms. Rehm. And what are you going to do as a good citizen after you leave the White House? The President. Well, I haven't decided yet. In terms of any income earning activities I might undertake, I think that it's premature for me to deal with that, because I need to wait as long as I possibly can certainly until after the election and, if possible, when I leave office, to make final decisions on that. I intend to write a book. I intend to maintain my activities in areas that I care a lot about around the world, in supporting the peaceful resolution of racial and religious and ethnic conflicts, supporting my initiatives when I'm gone from office to provide economic empowerment to poor people at home and around the world. I'm interested very much in our continuing efforts to meet the challenge of global warming, which I think will dominate a lot of our concerns for the next 20 to 30 years. So those are just three things I want to be involved in. And then I've got to build a library and a museum and a public policy center in Arkansas Ms. Rehm. Where are you going to live? The President. Well, I'm going to live in New York with my wife, and then I'm going to be in Arkansas a few days a week while I'm building the library and museum. We're going to build an apartment there, so that I'll have a place there and a place in New York. So I expect to be back and forth between the two places and then traveling around a little bit. You know, I'll find something useful to do. I've never every stage of my life I've always enjoyed. I've had a good time, and I'm not I love this job. I'd do it forever if I could. But I'm not apprehensive, exactly, about what I'll do when I'm gone. I'll just have to think about it, and I don't want to spend too much time thinking about it while I'm here, because I'm trying to squeeze every last drop out of every minute I've got to be President. Memorable Aspects of the Presidency Ms. Rehm. But you know, at the White House Correspondents' dinner, you certainly received a lot of acclaim as a wonderful comedian. I was in the audience, but there certainly seemed to be a little bit of wistfulness in your presentation. What are you going to miss most about being here? The President. The job. The work. That's what I'll miss most. I'll miss the opportunity every day to push an agenda that I think is good for America and ordinary citizens and the future of this country. I will miss that terribly, because I love this work. I just love it. I will miss the people. I will miss living in the White House. The people who work here are wonderful, and it's a great place to live. I'll miss working in this beautiful office we're sitting in now. It's the most beautiful place I've ever worked. Because of the shape of the room and the size of the windows, there's always light here, even when it's raining outside. I'll miss Camp David. I'll miss the Marine Band. I'll miss flying on Air Force One. I'll miss a lot of things. But the thing I'll miss more than anything else is the chance to do this work for the American people every day. It is a joy. I've spent a lot of time since I've been here reading histories of other administrations, both ones that are very well known and those that aren't. And I'm amazed at how many people, beginning with George Washington, complained about how hard it was to be President and how all their motives were suspect. George Washington said, once he got to be President, people treated him like he was a common criminal. Laughter And of course, in the beginning of the country, the politics was about as rough as it is now. The three periods which have been most partisan were, in the beginning, Jefferson and Adams, and then around the Civil War, and this time we're living through now. But a lot of people referred to Harry Truman referred to the White House as a great white prison and all that, you know. And if they were serious, I must say I just disagree with them. I think and I've had a pretty rough time here, but it's still it's just part of the costs of doing business. And I think the job is a joy. I mean, it's just a gift to be able to do this kind of work. I've just loved it. Family Life in the White House Ms. Rehm. What does 8 years in the White House do to a marriage? The President. Oh, I think it's been good for ours, because I got to live above the store. You know, until Hillary started running for the Senate, we actually probably had more time together than we did previously. And of course, in the early years our daughter was finishing up junior high school and high school, and we were together at night a lot. You know, we talked about her schoolwork and what was going on in her life, and that was a lot of fun for us. Then, after Chelsea left and went off to college, we were able to go to Camp David more. This is really quite a wonderful place to live. It's a great place to there's a swimming pool here, and Hillary and I spent a lot of happy days out there just talking and reading, or on Sunday afternoons up on the Truman balcony. I mean, you can get busy and drift apart, I guess, in any circumstances. But for us, we worked hard before we got here, and we had a lot of things to do, and we've probably had more time together in our time here than at any point in our marriage. And I've enjoyed that immensely. It's been wonderful for us. Outlook for the Future Ms. Rehm. Looking ahead, when Chelsea is 50, what kind of a world is she going to see? Is it going to be better or worse than it is today? The President. I think it will be better. No one can foresee the future, but I believe it will be. I think that it will be a world in which, first of all, the average life expectancy will be bumping 100 years, because of the human genome discoveries and all the things that will happen. I think the world will be even smaller than it is now and that the ability to collapse time and space through travel and the Internet will be greater. I think that our familiarity with, understanding of different cultures and religions and racial groupings will be greater. And I think we will be a much more polyglot society, and I think we'll be much more comfortable with it. Ms. Rehm. So you're optimistic. The President. I'm very optimistic. I think the problems that we will have will be the flip side of the positive changes. That is, I think that the likelihood is that the security problems over the next 30 years that's what you asked me about will be from we may have a conflict with other nations. I hope we won't. That's one of the reasons I hope this China initiative will pass. I hope we won't, but I think it's virtually certain that there will be kind of a global rough alliance between the terrorists, the gunrunners, the narcotraffickers, the organized criminals. I think it's virtually certain that the technological advances which may allow us to put computers and DNA strands together in a way that are exponentially powerful may make it possible for the bad guys to have very small I mean, less than the palm of your hand sized chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. We don't know. So we're going to have and I think the enemies of the nation state, the enemies of the ordered society, under the guise of religious or ideological causes or maybe just making their purses bigger, will probably be a bigger security threat 20 to 30 years from now than other nations will be to America and to others. I think that we will unless we're prepared to have a much bleaker future, two big challenges we'll have to take on beyond our borders are global warming, which if we don't deal with it is going to be very serious, and we'll also have to view global public health problems as our own. We've got to roll back the AIDS crisis, and we've got to deal with malaria. We've got to deal with TB in Africa and other places around the world. And we have to keep working until every child in the world has access to clean water. We still lose as many kids from dysentery and diarrhea and just basically poison polluted water as we do to these diseases every year. So I think that Americans will be much more in tune to all that and feel much more immediately affected by what goes on in Africa or Southeast Asia or the Indian subcontinent or other places, than they do today. President's Faith Ms. Rehm. I have one last question. What is your concept of God, and how has that belief influenced your Presidency? The President. Well, I believe in a God who is both a Creator, who created the world, who oversees the world, and who has provided an eternal existence for human beings. I believe in the eternal life of the soul. And I think that that has helped me a lot. It's given me a lot of perspective. It's given me a lot of ability to withstand the bad times, to believe that I could overcome my own shortcomings, to understand why I had to forgive people that I thought were being unfair to me, just as I asked them to forgive me, and basically to keep my eyes on the bigger things in life and to keep trying to grow personally, even as I was trying to do this job for the American people. It's very important to me. And I think if you have a concept of the eternity of the human spirit, I think, as the creation of God, I think it makes it a lot easier to live with whatever happens. It keeps your head on straight when things are going well and keeps your back up and your spirits high when things are going poorly. See that rock there? I always tell people this story. That rock came off the Moon. Neil Armstrong picked that off the Moon in 1969, and he brought it to me last year for the 30th anniversary of the Moon walk. It's a vacuum packed rock. And it's been carbon dated at 3.6 billion years old. Now, when people come in here and they get real mad at me or they're real upset about something, sometimes I say, "See that rock? It's 3.6 billion years old. We're all just passing through here. Chill out. It's going to be all right." Laughter Presidents need things that help them stay centered and keep perspective. It's very bad to think about yourself very much in this job. I don't mean in quiet moments, in reading, trying to build your personal life I don't mean that. But I mean, most of the time when people attack you, it's just part of the job. They're supposed to. That's part of the deal. Presidents need devices, routines, systems, reminders, and friends and family to keep their focus on the American people. Because you're just here for a little while, and if you get all caught up in the things you started asking me about, the personal animosities and the partisan fights and all that, then you basically give a victory to your adversaries by letting them define how you spend your time and how you shape your feelings. I used to tell the young people here that our job was to do the job we came here to do for the American people. Their job, they thought, was to stop us from doing our job. They could only win if we helped them by letting them get inside our heads and our hearts. And if we just kind of kept focused on what we came here to do, it was probably going to work out all right. So far it has. Ms. Rehm. Thank you, Mr. President. The President. Thank you. May 07, 2000 Thank you very much. Vic, thank you for being here. Marion, thank you for being here. Vic Snyder was one of the bravest people in the Arkansas State Senate when I was Governor. When he ran for Congress, I told Hillary, I said, "I'm afraid he can't get elected. He's got too much guts. He'll say what he thinks about everything." But he got elected, and he got reelected. And I thank when Marion Berry ran for Congress after doing a stint in our administration in the Agriculture Department, Dale and David and I really felt that he was entitled to be in Congress, almost as a conciliation prize for having hosted us at the coon supper in Gillette all those years. Anybody who could get us to eat coon for 10 or 15 years in a row should be given a seat in Congress, just as a matter of course. But I thank them so much. The other night, when I was home a couple of weeks ago or maybe it was last week to dedicate the law school here to Bill Bowen and to do the event in honor of our friend Daisy Bates, Dale and David and I went to dinner alone, just the three of us. And we needed adult supervision. Laughter If there were a tape of the conversation we had we relived everything we had ever done together, and amplified it all in an unconscionable way. I don't know when I've had as much fun. And Barbara, you should have been there to give us a little civilizing influence, but we had a good time. Today mostly is a day for us that is full of sentiment and gratitude. I want to thank you for all you've done for us over the years. I want to thank you for things large and small when I was Governor and for backing us in the two times I ran for President. Yesterday I did have a chance to travel the backroads of Logan and Franklin and Madison and Washington and Benton Counties and to relive my first race for Congress in 1974. We went to Stephanie Streett's wedding in the beautiful chapel in Subiaco. I thought about all my old friends, including a lot of them, unfortunately, who aren't around anymore. And Hillary and I both agreed that if we hadn't had to start our careers in public life in a place where you actually had to go see people and listen to them, instead of someplace where you just spent all your time raising funds to run television ads, our lives would have been very different, and I never would have had a chance to be the President. I also was reminded of the first time I brought Hillary to Arkansas, and I picked her up at the airport here in Little Rock, and instead of going to Hot Springs, I drove her up to River Valley, and then we drove down Highway 7, a fairly indirect way, but I wanted to give her a sense of what I hoped she was getting into. I'm looking forward to building this library and policy center, and we're going to have big apartment on top of the library. We're finalizing the plans now. I'm trying to keep this library to a reasonable price, somewhere around 125 million. But I want it to be a world class building, a place that is beautiful and distinctive for our State, that will capture the imagination of the people, and that will in some way, some small way, try to repay the people of Arkansas for all they have done for me. And we're going to have a nice apartment there, and I'll be there a lot. Even Senator Hillary will be there some, too, when I can work it out. I want to say a few things that are more comfortable for me to say, I think, than Hillary, before I bring her on. When Senator Moynihan announced that he would not run for the Senate again and the New York Democrats were trying to decide, you know, what they were going to do, they didn't just want to give the Senate seat back to the Republican Party and to Mayor Giuliani, and they knew he would be a very formidable candidate, that it was a seat that had been occupied by Robert Kennedy and then by Pat Moynihan. And all these House Members started calling Hillary. Then they started calling me to lobby Hillary. And we talked, and I had always hoped she would have a chance to run for office and to serve because I thought she would be so good. But we decided she needed to go up there and just visit people, just the way we did so long ago in all those communities I went through yesterday. Every town of any size, I had been in every store in town more than once that we went through. And so she did and came back and said, "You know, the stuff I've worked on all my life is really what they need someone who cares about the education of our children, how families balance work and child rearing somebody who knows something about health care somebody who knows something about bringing economic opportunity to underdeveloped areas." If New York State, upstate that's exclusive of the suburbs and the city were a separate State, it would be 49th in job growth in my tenure as President, something that I have tried to help on. And much of what needs to be done there is what we've tried to do in the Delta and other rural areas of our State. And she had so many people who wanted her to run and wanted her to do it that she really decided that she ought to try. And then I just practically beat her up, time and time again, working on this announcement speech. She said, "I've given a zillion speeches. Why do you keep doing this?" I said, because an election is a job interview, and if you get the job, it helps to have decided in advance what you intend to do when you get there. And one of the reasons I think that the people here were good enough to elect me Governor five times is I always tried to be the candidate of change. I always tried to lay out what I wanted to do, and I always tried to be doing what I said I would do in the election. And one of the things I'm proudest of, a little known fact, is that in 1995, a Presidential scholar who at that time I had never met said that by '95 I had already kept a higher percentage of my campaign promises than the previous five Presidents. And I'm proud of that. So she worked on that. And I thought she gave a terrific speech that day, with a wonderful program. And she showed that movie, which has a lot of Arkansas in it, as you saw. Now, I want to make one general statement before I bring Hillary up here. This is a huge election. This election is just as important as what happened in '92, when this country was in terrible trouble. A lot of people have forgotten how bad it was in '92. And that's not good. It's just as important as it was in '96, when the American people decided to give me another chance to try to finish what I'd set out to do. But we have worked so I've tried hard to take good care of this, and Hillary has been involved in so many of the things we have done together these last 8 years. But so much of the time we spent Dale and David were saying they were glad they were part of it all we did was make unpopular decisions in '93 and '94, because we had to do hard things to get this country turned around again. Hillary made fun of me today. She said there was some article talking about that I had real good job ratings, and if they could just take out the first 2 years, they'd be perfectly astronomical. Well, in the first 2 years, I had to do all the hard stuff that made it better the last 6. And so we got the country turned around. And the unemployment rate last month was 3.9 percent, for the first time in over 30 years, and that's good. The welfare rolls have been cut in half 90 percent of our kids immunized for the first time, something I know is very important to Dale and Betty Bumpers. Today the statistics were to be released, or have already been released, showing that crime has come down every year, down another 7 percent across the board. Only about three dozen cities in the United States last year, in the whole country, had an increase in the crime rate. So things are going in the right direction. But the big test for a country is, what do you do when things are going well? What do we propose to do with our prosperity, with the fact that our social problems are lessened, with the fact that we've got the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded? What are we going to do with this? And in all fairness, one of the reasons that our adversaries in the other party, beginning with the Presidential nominee, are sort of trying to blur all these issues and say, "We care about all those things that Bill Clinton and Al Gore worked on for 8 years," is that they hope that people will forget what it was like in '92. But there are huge decisions before you. And as sentimental as I feel today, elections are always about tomorrow. And what I wanted to do with all my heart is literally build a bridge for this country to the 21st century, so that when I left office, America would be in a position to build a future of our dreams for our children. To me, that's what this whole thing was about. And I was furious and disappointed in 1991, when I saw our country just paralyzed in Washington, nobody getting anything done, everybody fighting, partisan politics the order of the day which, unfortunately, there's still too much of there. And so we set about doing things. But it's important for all of you to focus if you believe that the results were good, it's not just because you knew me and you saw I gave a good speech and I was a pretty good guy. What we did was those were the right things to do. You can be as eloquent as you want, and if you advocate the wrong thing, you'll get the wrong result. That's what this election for the Senate is a big issue. It really matters who is in the Senate. The Republican Senators from Texas just announced a couple of days ago that they weren't even going to even permit a hearing on an Hispanic judge who was from El Paso, who graduated cum laude from Harvard and Harvard Law School and was endorsed by every single organization with an informed opinion. Why? Because he wasn't ideologically far enough to the right. This is a big election, and I can tell you who's in the Senate makes a huge difference, for good or ill. And you're going to have to decide, including in Arkansas, whether you want to build on the progress for the last 8 years or reverse the policies. Do you like this economic policy? If you do, you better stick with it and build on it. Do you believe that it's a good thing that the educational attainment is going up, the college going rate is going up, more people than ever before can afford to send their kids to college? If you do, you've got to build on it, and the same thing with the environment and the same thing with health care and with national security. The other party is honestly opposed to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And if they do what they say they're going to do, there's a real chance we could have a new arms race again in the world, which is the last thing in the wide world we need. We've got enough problems out there with the terrorists and the drugrunners and the organized criminals, without setting off another arms race. So, you know, I'd like to come home and just make this a perfectly happy thing, but I'm telling you, this is a big decision that the people will take. And this election of 2000 is every bit as important, even though I'm not on the ticket. And a lot of you did a lot for me. You went to New Hampshire. You did all the things in the wide world. What was going on in '92 and '96, that was important. But the 2000 election will determine whether we really like the direction of the country and we want to continue to change built on that, or whether we say, "Well, we feel so good now, what they say sounds good I think we'll go back to their economic policy and their education policy and their health care policy and their environmental policy and their foreign policy." This is a huge, huge decision. And that's why I thought it was a good thing for Hillary to run. Because I've been doing this a long time. I don't think any State ever had two Senators working together that were remotely as good as Dale Bumpers and David Pryor. They were the best team I ever saw. I served with 150 Governors, and I've seen another 100 run through the White House since I've been there. You know, I realize I am prejudiced in this, but I know a lot about public service and public service efforts. And I have spent the last almost 30 years, now, having conversations with my wife about every conceivable issue. I watched her when she started the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. I watched her when she ran this education standards program here, when a lot of our kids couldn't even get science and math courses in their schools. I watched her labor to try to get rid of all the ridiculous Federal barriers to people adopting children, and to try to get us to adopt policies up there that would enable working families to afford health insurance and deal with a whole lot of other issues. And in my whole life, I have never known anybody that had a better grasp of the issues, a better ability to organize, a better ability to get people who thought they would never get along to work together, and could get up every day and just keep going, than Hillary never, not a person. So, I think the Senate would be a much better place if she were there. I think she would do a superb job for the people of New York. I think she would be great for America. I think you know that, and you will never know how grateful we are that you're here today. And I hope you'll make her feel welcome. Come on up, Hillary. Thank you. May 05, 2000 The President. Good afternoon. In a few moments I will depart for a meeting with the Senate Democrats in Pennsylvania, where we will discuss ways to keep our economy strong and our Nation moving in the right direction. Before I leave, I'd like to share the latest good news about our economy. This morning, we received the news that we have achieved 3.9 percent unemployment. That is the lowest peacetime unemployment since 1957. That was the year the Dodgers last played ball in Brooklyn. Most Americans have never lived in a peacetime economy with unemployment as low as it is today indeed, its lowest rate overall in over 30 years. Over the last 7 years, our Nation has created 21 million new jobs, cut the unemployment rate almost in half. I just want to make the point again that this is clear evidence that our economic strategy works, fiscal discipline, more investment in education, technology and training, the expansion of markets for American products and services. It's given us the lowest unemployment rate for African Americans and Hispanics ever recorded, the lowest unemployment rate for women in more than 40 years, strong wage growth among all income groups. The American people deserve the lion's share of the credit for this historic achievement. But we have a responsibility to stay on the path that got us here, the path of fiscal discipline, debt reduction, expanded trade and increased investments in our future. I hope we will do that. This is a happy day for the people of the United States. Thank you. National Rifle Association Q. Mr. President, what did you think of the video done by the NRA some time ago? The President. The NRA video? I haven't seen it. I thought you were great in mine. Q. Put that in writing. Laughter Q. Mr. President, we don't know if your The President. No, I really haven't seen it. I'll be glad to comment on it once I see it or know what's in it. But I haven't seen it. Q. You haven't read about it? The President. I heard about it, but I haven't the one where they're oh, do you mean the film where they say they're going to have an office in the White House? Did they make that video, or was it just video by someone else? I thought they were trying to keep that a secret until after the election. What I think about it I don't know that they think that Mr. LaPierre will literally have an office here if President Bush Governor Bush gets elected President. But I do believe that it's clear, from the record of Governor Bush in Texas and from the statements and from the increased visibility of the role of the NRA in the Republican National Committee, that whatever is done on this issue will only be done with their approval. They will have unprecedented influence here if the American people should decide that that's what they want. But you know, that's what you have elections for. You can I can believe that without thinking anything bad about Mr. LaPierre or about Governor Bush. I think they may just really agree that we shouldn't close the gun show loophole or ban the importation of large scale ammunition clips. Q. Do you think it's going to be a The President. Let me just say let me remind you, the previous Republican administration was not for the Brady bill, and they weren't for the legislation banning cop killer bullets. That's just the way they think. But I think one of the reasons I'm glad the Million Mom March is occurring is that it at least raises the possibility that Americans who disagree, who believe that we can have commonsense gun safety measures to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children, without having something that they believe is destructive gun control, those people may vote on these issues this year. But the American people need to understand, this is one of the four or five big choices before them, and they'll just have to decide, and that all the NRA did was to commit the truth. I mean, they told the truth, and what they said was right. "I Love You" Computer Virus Q. Mr. President, I don't know if your office has been affected or infected in any way, but what does this "I love you" computer virus say about the world, our society, et cetera, and how maybe even one person can affect it and create chaos? The President. Well, it says that first of all, we've been very fortunate the Government has fared well here. But it says that we've got a lot more work to do to protect all these systems in the private sector, and the Government has to keep working, too. It says that as we become more interconnected, in an open way, that we become as we reap the benefits of greater interconnectivity, we become more vulnerable to the disruptive forces that would seek to either for bad design or just to provoke chaos to take advantage of it, and we just have to keep working on this. But I'm very gratified that the fundamental governmental systems seemed to have been unaffected here, and we just have to keep working on it. Usama bin Ladin Q. Mr. President, the State Department, the other day, issued an international report on terrorism. And also, this was the last of your administration, sir, and as Usama bin Ladin is still at large, so what do you have to say about international terrorism and all the The President. You mean about bin Ladin still being at large? Well, we're doing our part to change it. And I hope we'll be successful. Interest Rates Q. Mr. President, on the economy, are you afraid the Fed's going to raise the rate in response to the numbers? The President. Well, I think that these numbers have to be seen in terms of yesterday's numbers. Yesterday's inflation figures were quite encouraging, and I think they show that core inflation at something like 2.4 percent, and I think the overall inflation rate will come back toward that, now that the oil prices are moderating. So I think that should be quite encouraging, not just to the Fed but to all Americans and to American business that basically the productivity of the work force, continuing to be fueled by information technology, has enabled us to have an amazing amount of growth and low unemployment, at quite modest levels of inflation. And so that's encouraging to me, and I think the facts speak for themselves on that. Thank you. Vieques Island, Puerto Rico Q. What did you think of the Vieques operation? The President. Well, it went pretty well, I think. They did a good job. Thank you. May 02, 2000 Thank you very much. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you, Buddy MacKay, for that fine introduction. That introduction was a classic example of Clinton's third law of politics Whenever possible, be introduced by someone you have appointed to high office. Laughter They will always make you look good in good times and bad, whether you deserve it or not. I want to thank the Ambassadors of Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and Brazil, who are here, for their interest and their presence and all the people in the State Department who work on the Americas. David Rockefeller, I want to thank you for taking the lead 35 years ago now in establishing the Council of the Americas. And I want to thank the Council for its support of our efforts, beginning with NAFTA, alleviating the financial crisis in Latin America, the free trade area of the Americas, and the Caribbean Basin Initiative, as well as our efforts with Colombia. I want to thank Buddy MacKay for his work as my Special Envoy and especially for the work he's doing now on Capitol Hill as our point person for the Caribbean Basin Initiative. I'd also like to thank my former Chief of Staff and the first Special Envoy to Latin America, Mack McLarty, for the work he has done. And let me say, the two of them together, I hope, will convince the next President and all future Presidents, without regard to party, that we have made a change in the configuration of the White House which ought to continue. I think that for decades to come, every President should have a Special Envoy to the Americas, because we have a special relationship with the Americas. And I hope those of you in this room of both parties who agree with that will do what you can to see that it happens after next January. I think it's a very, very important thing to do. Let me say to all of you, especially to you, David, and to all of you who have been involved in this endeavor for a long time, you had the vision to see that North and South, in this increasingly small globe of ours, could come together, and that free trade could be a force for peace as well as prosperity, the basis of our partnership across the whole range of other areas in this hemisphere. You saw that in the middle of the cold war when most people only saw the world divided by East and West here in the United States. Developments have proved that you were visionary, and we are grateful. We are also grateful today in the United States for the extraordinary success that our economy has enjoyed and for the ability it has given us to play a positive role in the world for peace and freedom and prosperity, for democracy and open markets. I think it is very important today that we ask ourselves what we propose to do with this prosperity and whether we really understand the role that our engagement in the world and our trade with other nations clearly has played in our prosperity and what responsibilities that imposes upon us in terms of our future. We have benefited immensely from trade. There is no question that we have the longest economic expansion in history because we got rid of the deficits, and we've run 3 years of surpluses in a row and paying off 335 billion of our debt, and we've got low interest rates. There is no question that our investment in science and technology, our reform of our telecommunications system, and our continued commitment to education is important. But everyone should understand that our commitment to expanding trade, including not just NAFTA and joining the WTO but 270 other agreements, has helped us not only to find new markets for our products and services but, by keeping our own markets open, has kept inflation down as our economy has grown. The two most significant things that have allowed the longest economic expansion in history for America to be long has been the enormous increase in productivity because of technology and the fact that we have permitted ourselves to have inflation free growth because we've kept open markets with a responsible financial policy. I hear so many times people talk about trade only in terms of exports, because that sounds good politically, and when you say you're importing a lot, that doesn't sound good politically. But our imports have helped us a lot. They've kept inflation down, and they've made our people's dollars go further. And they've enabled us to keep growing without inflation. And along the way, they've helped our trading partners to lift their own well being. Our two top trading partners today are our neighbors to the north and to the south. And during most of the last decade, our trade with Latin America grew faster than any other region of the world. So we have been very fortunate. During the period since NAFTA entered into force, our exports to Canada and Mexico have gone up almost 80 percent. Our employment has skyrocketed. Canadian employment has jumped by more than one million overall, and Mexico's employment has climbed by one million. NAFTA played a major role in this. It has set the stage for much of what has followed. During the Mexican financial crisis in 1995, we offered a loan package that wasn't too popular at the time. I always laugh about it. When Bob Rubin came to see me about it with Larry Summers, as I remember there was a poll in the paper that day that said by 81 to 15, the American people thought it was a bad idea for us to give financial assistance to Mexico. And I thought to myself, this is what's wrong with polls. If we don't help Mexico, and Mexico and Brazil and Argentina and the rest of Latin America and half the other developing economies of the world go in the tank, and our economy nose dives, it will be 100 to nothing, people think it's a bad idea that we let the world economy go to pieces. And I am very glad that what we did worked. I think the Mexican Government and the Mexican people deserve a lot of credit for a painful recovery, in which they paid back their loans with interest and ahead of schedule. Then 3 years later, our hemisphere was hurt by a crisis half a world away in Asia, but I'm glad that we worked to keep our markets open. And I still believe our choice for more trade, not less, contributed to minimizing the impact of the Asian financial crisis and enabling those countries to pull out of that crisis more quickly. That doesn't mean that the size of our trade deficit is not a source of concern to me it is. But I'm convinced the only way it will get smaller is when our partners, both to the south and around the world, grow wealthier and stronger, so that they can consume more of their own production and buy more of ours. I think the decision we made for open markets has plainly been the right decision, not simply for the United States economy but for the rest of the world. And I am absolutely confident it's the right decision going forward. Right now I think we're making very good progress in moving the Caribbean Basin initiative through Congress. It is tied, as all of you know, to the Africa trade bill, which is also, I believe, very, very important to us in terms of our long term security interests and very important in terms of our fulfilling our responsibility to Africa. I think there is every likelihood now that that bill will be on my desk for signature by the end of the month. And I think it is high time. I know I don't need to plug that legislation here, but the nations of the Caribbean have suffered quite a lot economically and have come under enormous pressure to become way stations for narcotrafficking. And we need to do more for them. I believe this bill is a good bill, much better than it was about to be a few weeks ago. I hope you will all support it, and if you can help me pass it quickly, I'd be grateful. I also want to affirm that we are still determined to meet the goal we set at the Miami Summit of the Americas in December of 1994, to achieve a free trade agreement by 2005 that will embrace the entire Americas the world's largest trade zone, 800 million people investing in each other's future, enriching each other's lives, advancing each other's interests. Negotiators are on schedule to complete and present a draft agreement to the trade ministers next April in Argentina. It will also be presented then to the heads of state at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec. We must stay on track to do this by 2005. The date should not slip, and I am confident we will do so. I think a lot of people over read the meaning of the failure of Congress to renew fast track authority. The truth is, there was a fight largely along partisan lines over the content of that authority and whether the President should be given explicit authority to negotiate trade agreements that included environmental and labor conditions. I thought that fast track authority was a lousy vehicle on which to wage that fight, even though I was sympathetic with the substance of the argument. I still believe that. But you should not believe that because the legislation didn't pass over philosophical and partisan differences on that issue, that the United States is any less committed to finishing the free trade area of the Americas, or that because it didn't pass, any agreement we make in the context of the free trade area of the Americas is less likely to pass Congress. That is not true. And you know that we're having an election this year. You may have noticed that. And there will be a lot of differences between the nominees and the parties over a lot of issues, but I am very gratified that there is no difference on this. You are going to have an American President committed to a free trade area of the Americas by 2005. And if it doesn't happen, it will not be the fault of the executive branch of the Government of the United States of America. We know this is the right thing to do. And I just want you to know that. And I will try to find other ways to manifest that before I leave office. And there are some, but the most important one, I think, would be the passage of the CBI Africa trade bill. But I ask you to you know, we're having the same argument now with China and the WTO, where there are people who have honest differences over the way the World Trade Organization operates. They think it's too closed, too undemocratic, too private, and I agree with them. But voting against this is a lousy way to litigate that issue. So parliamentary processes are often uneven and awkward, and many times people in parliaments throughout the world find the only forum they can for the fight they think that needs to be waged. But I think it's very important that you understand that what that fasttrack battle was about. It was about the philosophical differences in our country over whether trade agreements should include labor and environmental conditions and whether the President should be given explicit authority to negotiate on that basis. It didn't have anything to do with people not really wanting a free trade area of the Americas. I don't agree with the fact that it wasn't extended, and I am sympathetic, as all of you know, to the idea that if the world becomes closer knitted, we don't live by bread alone. It's inconceivable to me that we will have a global economy without having more and more of a global society. That will happen in some way, in some form, at some pace. But it shouldn't turn us against trade. Similarly, it's inconceivable to me that the WTO, as it becomes more important, won't have to become more open and more democratic. But that's not an excuse for sticking it to China after China has made good faith efforts to open its economy and to give access to the other members of the world trading community. So I think it's important to understand these debates are going on, but this does not mean that the United States is not committed to a free trade area of the Americas. It is profoundly important. It is important economically. It is also important politically. One of the things that I'm very concerned about in Latin America is that, with all the triumph of democracy 34 of 35 leaders democratically elected, people now expecting to choose their leaders and chart their future and shape their destinies there are too many people and too many places who have still not benefited from the global economy in ways that they can touch and feel. The answer is not to turn back the answer is to keep going forward to spread the benefits to more people. And we have to continue to push that. I am afraid democracy itself could be made far more fragile if more and more people grow more and more frustrated about the circumstances of their own lives. And it would be a terrible mistake for the United States ever to send a signal that we have any policy other than full steam ahead, more engagement, more support, more commitment. I think that is very, very important. We've worked hard to uphold the rule of law in this hemisphere. We upheld that principle in Haiti. Haiti is still desperately poor and wracked with problems and facing new elections. We will do everything we can to help them stay with their democracy. But eventually, real people are going to have to feel real benefit. The answer is not for the United States, with the strongest economy, to withdraw. The answer is to deepen our engagement. We acted again on the principle of the rule of law and democracy when we stood with the people of Paraguay to preserve democracy there when it was threatened in 1996. We attempted to uphold that policy every time it was threatened in Ecuador, earlier this year last month through the Organization of American States, when the countries of the hemisphere, thankfully, voiced strong support for a fair and open electoral process in Peru. But most important, I think, today we are called upon to stand for democracy under attack in Colombia. Drug trafficking, civil conflict, economic stagnation combine everywhere they exist and explosively in Colombia to feed violence, undercut honest enterprise in favor of corruption, and undermine public confidence in democracy. Colombia's drug traffickers directly threaten America's security, but first they threaten Colombia's future. In the United States, 90 percent of the cocaine and two thirds of the heroin seized on our streets comes from or through Colombia. Fifty two thousand Americans die every year from drugs, about as many as died in the wars in Vietnam and Korea. It costs us more than 110 billion a year in crime, accidents, property damage, and lost productivity. But the price to Colombia is even higher. Last year, drug trafficking and civil conflict led to more than 2,500 kidnappings a murder rate 10 times ours, which is virtually the highest of any country in the advanced world terrorist activity that is now probably the worst in the world. Thirty five thousand people have been killed and one million more made homeless in the last decade alone. Drugs fund guerrillas on the left and paramilitaries on the right. Honest citizens, the vast majority of the people of Colombia, are simply caught in the middle. Eight hundred to nine hundred passports are issued every day every day as engineers, architects, and doctors take their families, their wealth, their talent out of Colombia. And yet, thousands upon thousands of courageous Colombians choose to stay and fight, because they love their country, and they want to save their freedom. President Pastrana came to office with a record of risking his own life to take on drug traffic. He was kidnapped by the Medellin cartel. As mayor of Bogota, he saw them kill three Presidential candidates. Then he became a Presidential candidate he used to joke that maybe that meant he was certifiably mentally unstable enough to serve a very brave decision. Once in office, he worked with experts in Colombia and elsewhere to put together Plan Colombia. It's a comprehensive plan to seek peace, fight drugs, build the economy, and deepen democracy. The plan costs about 7 1 2 billion. It includes contributions from the Government of Colombia, international financial institutions, and other donors. And I've asked our Congress to give it 1.6 billion over 2 years. That will be a tenfold increase in our U.S. assistance to promote good government, judicial reform, human rights protection, and economic development. It will also enable Colombia's counterdrug program to inflict serious damage on the rapidly expanding drug production activity in areas now dominated by guerrillas or paramilitary groups. We know this approach can succeed. Over the last 5 years working with the Governments of Peru and Bolivia, we have reduced coca cultivation by more than 50 percent in those countries, reduced overall cocaine production in the region by 18 percent. Drug traffickers, driven from their old havens, unfortunately now are consolidating operations in Colombia. But we have an historic opportunity and an historic responsibility to do serious and lasting damage to the international drug trade if Congress approves our package. I am convinced the rest of the world will follow suit. If we show that we are prepared to pay our fair share of this, the rest of the world will help. We need to help train and equip Colombia's counterdrug battalion, enhance its interdiction efforts, provide intelligence and logistic supports to the counterdrug mission, including force protection. They need this support. We can provide it, and we ought to provide it. We must not stand by and allow a democracy elected by its people, defended with great courage by people who have given their lives, be undermined and overwhelmed by those who literally are willing to tear the country apart for their own agenda. And make no mistake about it If the oldest democracy in South America can be torn down, so can others. Every one of you here has a deep and abiding interest in helping to see that the fight for freedom, democracy, and good government in Colombia is successful. I urge Congress to pass this package now. The Colombians waging this campaign are fighting not just for themselves they are fighting for all of us, all of us in this room and the hundreds of millions of people we represent, and for our children. As we know, the globalization of our societies is presenting us a lot of new challenges. The issue in Colombia is just the beginning. You will see, more and more, drug cartels, organized criminals, gunrunners, terrorists working together. The Internet will make it easier for them to do so, just as it makes it easier for you to work together to pursue your legal endeavors. But we have every reason to be optimistic, if we meet our common challenges our common security challenges, our common environmental challenges, our common educational and health care challenges. The mission you have championed for 35 years in this Council is closer than ever before to being successful. We have a chance to completely rewrite the future for our children because of the revolution in information, because of the biomedical revolution, because of the material science revolution. All these things together enable us to grow an economy and improve the environment, to expand trade and deepen democracy. But when we have an opportunity like a free trade area of the Americas, we have to take it. And when we have a challenge, like the challenge in Colombia, we have to meet it. The United States wants to do its part. It's very much in our interest to do so. We have benefited more than any other country in the world from the last decade, and we need to stand up here and do our part to be good neighbors and to help other people benefit as well. But we need all your help. We have to win in Colombia. We have to win the fight for the free trade area of the Americas. We have to prove that freedom and free markets go handin hand. That's what you believe, and we're going to be given a chance to prove it. Thank you very much. April 19, 2000 Thank you very much, Governor Keating. I wanted to be here today, and I was grateful to be asked. I wanted to thank you and Cathy for all you have done. Thank you, Senator Nickles and members of the congressional delegation. Thank you, Mayor Humphreys, and I thank your predecessor, Mayor Norick. Thank you, Chairman Johnson thank you, Karen Luke. I thank all of the Federal leaders who are here today who lost their employees and worked so hard, Attorney General Reno and our Secretaries of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation, the leaders of the Office of Personnel Management, the Customs, the ATF, and the Secret Service and many others. I thank Bob Stanton and the Park Service for making sure this place would be well cared for, forever. I thank that unknown number of people who contributed to the building of this magnificent monument and to the scholarship fund. I thank General Ferrell and all those who are working and will work here from now on to combat terrorism. I congratulate the young couple who designed this magnificent memorial, and I think we should give them a round of applause. Applause I thank the Oklahoma City Philharmonic Brass and the Memorial Community Choir and Shawntel Smith for their ringing in wonderful music today. Most of all, I thank the families who lost your loved ones the survivors and your families the rescue workers and the family of Oklahoma for setting an example for America. I can add little now to the words and music, even more to the silence and amazing grace of this memorial. Its empty chairs recall the Mercy Seat of Old Testament Scripture a place for the children of God to come for renewal and dedication. So this is a day both for remembrance and for renewal. Hillary and I will never forget being with you at that first memorial service while the rescue teams were still searching. I know the last 5 years have not been easy. I hope you can take some comfort in knowing that, just as I said 5 years ago, America is still with you, and that with this memorial you can know America will never forget. As the Governor said in alluding to Gettysburg, there are places in our national landscape so scarred by freedom's sacrifice that they shape forever the soul of America Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Selma. This place is such sacred ground. I think you should all know that it was on this exact day 225 years ago that the American Revolution began. What a 225 years it has been. The brave Americans we lost here 220 years later were not fighting a war, but they were patriots in service to their fellow citizens, just as much as the police and fire and other public servants are here among us today. And they were children whose promise keeps our old democracy forever young. Five years ago the cowards who killed them made a choice, a choice to attack this building and the people in it, because they wanted to strike a blow at America's heartland, at the core of our Nation's being. This was an attack on all America and every American. Five years later we are here because you made a choice, a choice to choose hope and love over despair and hatred. It is easy for us to say today, and even perhaps easy for you to clap today, but I know that this wise choice was also a very hard one, especially for the families of the victims. I know there are still days when the old anger wells up inside you, still days when tears fill your eyes, when you think your heart will surely break. On those days in the future, I hope you can come here and find solace in the memory of your loved ones, in the honor of your fellow citizens. I hope you can find the strength to live a full and loving life, free of hatred, which only cripples. I believe your loved ones would want you to have that life. And though you have given too much, you still have so much to give. The great writer Ralph Ellison, who was a native of this city, once said, "America is woven of many strands... our fate is to become one, and yet many." On April 19th, 1995, our many strands became one, one in love and support for you and in our determined opposition to terrorism. You taught us again how much stronger we are when we all stand together in our common humanity to protect life, liberty, and the rule of law for all. We may never have all the answers for what happened here. But as we continue our journey toward understanding, one truth is clear What was meant to break has made you stronger. As I left the White House today, I looked, as I often do, at your tree, the beautiful dogwood Hillary and I planted on the South Lawn 5 years ago for those who were lost here. Five years later that tree stands a little taller its spring flowers are a little fuller its roots have dug in a little deeper. But it's still a young tree. Five years isn't a very long time for trees to grow or for wounds to heal and hearts to mend. But today, like your beautiful dogwood tree on the White House lawn, Oklahoma City clearly is blooming again. For that, all your fellow Americans and, indeed, decent, good people all over the world are grateful to you and grateful to God for the grace that led you on. In Romans it is said, "The night is far spent the day is at hand. Let us cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light." May you keep on your armor of light. May you keep your light shining on this place of hope, where memories of the lost and the meaning of America will live forever. May God bless you, and God bless America. April 14, 2000 Thank you very much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for that wonderful welcome. I want you to know what I've been thinking, sitting over here. I'm sitting here thinking to myself, now that Reverend Lewis has preached laughter and Sister Battle has sung laughter there's nothing left for me to do but pass the plate, and that's already been done. The invitation was issued in advance I'm just preaching to the saved. Laughter Let me say to all of you how profoundly grateful I am to be here, to be joined by John and Lillian and John Miles and the whole Lewis family Governor and Mrs. Barnes Mayor and Mrs. Campbell Congressman Bishop former Congressman Buddy Darden and Lillian. And I want to thank Brock Peters he's been a great master of ceremonies. And Reverend Belin also sang us a pretty good prayer, didn't he? Applause I thought he was great. I want to congratulate Ray Strother on that beautiful, beautiful film. He did a wonderful job, and I thank him. You know, John was up here talking about being 60 years old, and I was thinking about the first time I met him, when I was just a young man back in the seventies, held no office, wanted to get elected to something in my State, and was interested in helping a fellow from Georgia named Carter get elected President. And I remember John talking to me about all these stories we saw in the movie. Twenty five years ago, my eyes were big. I thought, one of the reasons I liked politics and one of the reasons I'm a Democrat is I can sit here, a 29 year old kid, and talk to John Lewis about his life. If anybody had ever told me 25 years later I'd be back here talking about a distinguished 60 year old Congressman, and I'd be President, I'd have thought they were nuts. Laughter But I'm honored to be here. It's amazing how quickly time passes. I was looking at John Miles Lewis talking about his daddy. Didn't you think he did a good job, by the way? I thought he was great. Applause But Lillian and John and John Miles and I were standing up there getting our picture taken. And John was playing his daddy role, and he said, "I don't know about that hair." I said, "John, let's don't act like we're old." I said, "If I was 23 and I could have hair like that, I'd do it in a bird dog minute." Laughter I thought it was great. That's true. When John Lewis introduced me a few weeks ago in Selma and we were standing at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, he gave a beautiful statement like he did tonight. And then when he introduced me, I said, "John, the only thing you said I'd disagree with is, you said the President didn't have to be in Selma today." Because I did have to be there because it was my story, too because what was done at Selma before and after freed me, too. And what I want to say I had to be here tonight, too. I have loved John Lewis from the first day I met him. I would feel that way if he had never gone to Congress and certainly if I had never become President. I love Lillian. She and I were over here crying at the gospel singing tonight. John Lewis and two of his colleagues then colleagues Congressman Mike Espy from Mississippi and Bill Jefferson from New Orleans, met with me in 1991 when I wanted to run for President, and they pledged their friendship and support to me when only my mother and my wife thought I could be elected. Laughter . And then he went out trying to validate me to these very skeptical northern Democrats. They sort of agreed with President Bush who used to refer to me as the Governor of a small southern State. Laughter And I was so dumb, I thought that was a good thing. Laughter I was kind of proud of that. And then through all the dark days of the campaign, John was there, and Georgia was there. So I had to be here tonight for that reason. I had to be here tonight because without John and the many people in our Congress that he influenced, the prosperity and peace and social progress we enjoy could not have been achieved over these last 7 years. And I had to be here tonight most of all because, just as much today as 40 years ago, John Lewis' life reflects what I think is the central lesson we all have to learn about life, and that is that we find more meaning in compassion than in judgment, and we find more meaning in unity than division. John has somehow incorporated into himself the spirit that elevated Gandhi and Dr. King, that freed Nelson Mandela of his hate and bitterness in spite of 27 long years in prison. He always says that one of his favorite hymns is "This Little Light of Mine." Well, his little light has certainly shined. And I've tried to make it mine. And I say that because for all the good that's happened in the last 40 years, we still have a lot of bridges to cross. There are still a lot of people who are just as smart and hard working as we are who couldn't afford to be here tonight because they haven't participated in our recovery. Then there are a lot of people who are here tonight, but they're serving our food. Their kids deserve a chance to go to college, too. They ought to be paid a decent wage, too. They ought to have access to health care, too. And for all the bridges we have crossed, even in the last 2 years, there are people in this country who have been shot because they were black or Asian or Jewish, people who have been falsely accused of terrorism because they were Muslims, a young boy stretched out on a rack to die in Wyoming because he was gay. So we've still got a few bridges to cross. But I close with this thought, so you know why I came here for someone I truly love. People ask me all the time, you know, "Well, what do you think your greatest achievement was? What do you think your biggest disappointment was? If you had one wish for America, what would it be?" And if I had one wish God came down to me tonight and said, "It's time to pack it up and go. You can't finish your term. But I'm going to give you one wish. I'm no genie no three wishes, just one" I would pray that somehow America could be infected, every single one of us, with the spirit that has animated John Lewis' life. Because, you know, all of us, we get so puffed up with the importance of what we're doing and our positions. And I finally got so frustrated trying to reach people who were fighting with each other that I I had a gift that was given to me last year, and I just put it smack dab on the table that you see when the Oval Office is on television, you know. And I'm there meeting with a world leader, and there's two chairs and two couches, and there's a little table in between. On that table, I have a gift, a Moon rock that Neil Armstrong took off the Moon in 1969. He brought it to me for safekeeping only during the period of my service, I might add. Laughter It belongs to you, to NASA. But it is this vacuum packed Moon rock, and it is 3.6 billion years old. So when people get to fighting each other and they are just about to call each other names and they are just about to go over the top, and we're sitting there in the Oval Office including me I get angry, you know I call a timeout. And I say, "Here, everybody. See that rock there? It's 3.6 billion years old. Chill out we're all just passing through here." Laughter Ultimately, the lesson of the civil rights movement was that what freed us is that the people who were oppressed not that they got legal rights. It's that they got legal rights and we overcame past problems, and then they let it go, and they forgave us, and they were able to go on. So many problems in the world today are still caused by the fact that we are, A, afraid of those who are different from us. And once we fear people it is easy to dehumanize them, and once you dehumanize them, it is easy to justify hurting them or not helping them when they deserve a hand up. And then it is a short step from there to violence. The next big problem is that almost all of us at some point in our lives find it impossible to define our importance, our meaning, unless it is with negative reference to another human being or group. And there's not a soul in here who hasn't done that. You make some big mistake, and you say, "Well, at least I'm not them. I'm not like that. I didn't do that. We're not there." And I have spent so much time as your President just trying to get the Democrats and Republicans together to get over years of accumulated frustration and hurts and angers and perceived slights and the deep need that both of us sometimes have to at least feel we're better than them. I've had to send young Americans in to risk their lives for the freedom of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo so that Europe has a chance to be free and at peace and we don't drift back into a world war situation. To try to stop the conflict in Northern Ireland or try to stop the conflicts and make peace in the Middle East or try to help the tribal differences in Africa get sorted out every one of them is rooted in the fundamental fact that people have a natural tendency to define the pluses in their life in terms of the negative in someone else's. And all those beautiful things John says about the beloved community, what it basically means is you'd rather hold hands than clench your fist. You don't mind being different from other people. You celebrate it you enjoy it you laugh about it it makes life more interesting. But in the end, you know somehow, when you strip it all away, our common humanity is the most important fact of life on this Earth. Now, that's what John Lewis' life in public service represents to me. So if I could do one thing for America, I would move us closer to being one America, so we could hold our trembling house down. But to do it we'll have to be more like him. We'll have to forgive all those people that beat us up, at least with words. We'll have to get over all of our not just our perceived but our real beefs. Everybody here has got a real beef against somebody. Everybody here has been the subject of some unfairness, some piece of bad luck, some people's mean spiritedness. When you strip it all away, the thing that makes us want to be here for John tonight is not just that he got his brains beat out, nearly, 35 years ago for all our freedom but that he let it go. He's not mad at anybody. He treats people right, doesn't think he's better than the rest of us. He believes we can get more out of holding hands than clenching fists. I wanted to come here tonight because America and the world need more of what is in John Lewis' heart. And for that, I am eternally grateful and full of love. Thank you very much. April 13, 2000 The President. Thank you very much, Chris. And thank you for asking me again I think. Laughter I want to say I am delighted to be here. And I'm glad you said it was the sixth time. I knew I had been here more than half the time, but we were talking on the way in about how when you live a busy life, how memory fades. And I've enjoyed these six occasions, or at least the previous five, and I think I'll enjoy this one. I was asking myself on the way over here, why am I doing this? I'm not running for anything. Laughter And I read the Vice President's speech to you and the jokes that he made, the joke he made about Chris and the Orange County Register. I was so delighted to carry Orange County, I didn't care whether the newspaper was for us or not. Laughter And surprised. But I am delighted to be here. And I want to talk primarily today about the present debate over the budget and tax proposals on Capitol Hill. But I would like to say one thing very briefly at the outset about the census and to ask for your help. Because the census is, at its core, information about who we are as a democracy, I would imagine everyone in this room is particularly interested in it. The information especially from the long form helps hometowns do everything from design mass transit systems to provide 911 emergency services. The census helps us to calculate cost of living increases for Social Security, military retirement, veterans' pensions. It serves as a foundation for a variety of economic surveys, including the monthly jobs reports, and it's important in the calculation of the Consumer Price Index. So far, about three of five census forms have been returned. That means about 40 percent have not. We want everyone to count, and we hope that you will help us to reach them. So I would just say, anything you can do to help encourage the people who read your papers to fill out their census forms, every one of them, would be very much appreciated. More than 35 years ago, President Johnson spoke before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, at a time superficially not so unlike this time. Unemployment was low inflation was low growth was high. The economy was humming in the middle of what was then the longest to prove to be the longest economic expansion in our history. It lasted from 1961 to 1969. President Johnson spoke of our obligation to look beyond the moment, to think of America as what he called "a continuing community," to see how decisions affect not only today's citizens but their children and their children's children, "to build for tomorrow," he said, "in the immediacy of today." I think that's a good way of capturing what it is I believe we should be doing today building for tomorrow in the immediacy of today. It was very different 7 years and 3 months ago when I came to office. The economy was in trouble the society was divided the politics appeared to be paralyzed here. I had a vision of 21st century America and a roadmap I thought would help get us there. I saw an America where the American dream of opportunity was alive for every person responsible enough to work for it an America strong, of strong communities with safe streets, good schools, a clean environment and a national community, which not only respected but celebrated our diversity and found even greater hope in our common humanity. And I saw an America still leading the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity. We had a strategy to achieve that vision, one rooted in opportunity, responsibility, and community. The roadmap included economic reforms, education reforms, welfare reforms, health care reforms, reforms in criminal justice, reforms in environmental policy greater efforts to strengthen the combined roles of work and family in the modern world efforts to support our American community through community service and initiatives in foreign policy against wars rooted in racial and ethnic conflicts, against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and for peace processes all across the world efforts to build new partnerships in Asia and Latin America, to advance the cause of world health, and to relieve the debts of the poorest countries in the world. We also had an idea to reform the role of the Federal Government, to make it smaller but more empowering and more aggressive in creating the conditions and the tools within which people could make the most of their own lives. Strengthening the economy, of course, was key to realizing our vision. Doing that made all the rest of this possible. Our strategy was quite simple We wanted to pursue a course of fiscal discipline, the greatest possible investment in education and technology, science, and other things that would advance our objectives, and to expand trade in American products and services around the world. Now, we are in the midst of the longest, strongest economic expansion in history, with 21 million new jobs, the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates on record, the highest homeownership in history. We also have the lowest crime rate in 25 years. Gun crime is down 35 percent since I took office. We have cleaner air, cleaner water, fewer toxic waste dumps, greater land preservation in the lower 48 States than in any other period, except the Presidencies of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Twenty one million people have received the benefits of the family and medical leave law 150,000 young Americans have earned money for college by serving in AmeriCorps 2 million children, with 2 million more on the way, have been given health insurance under the Children's Health Insurance Program. Ninety percent of our children are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in our history. In our schools, test scores are up college going is up. And America has been a source of support for peace and freedom in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, the Balkans. We have done it with the smallest Federal Government in 40 years. In the course of all this, the nature of the economic debate has changed radically. If I had come here the first time I spoke with you and said, "Give me a few years and we will eliminate the deficit, run three surpluses in a row for the first time in half a century, double our investment in education, and we'll have tax relief for middle class and lower income working people, including the earned income tax credit, the HOPE scholarship tax cut, the child tax credit, and we'll actually lower the tax burden on average American families" and according to the Treasury Department, income taxes for a typical family of four are the lowest percentage of income they have been since 1965. If I had said that, and I had said, "Now, give me a few years and the main question we will be debating is, what are we going to do with our surplus?" you would have been forced to write editorials complaining that the new President was slightly deranged, but he seemed like a pretty nice fellow. Laughter Now, nonetheless, that is now the subject of debate in Washington What do we do with the surplus? The question really, I think, is a larger one What do we make of this moment? Do we believe, as President Johnson believed when he came here in the early sixties, that we should plan for tomorrow in the immediacy of today? To me, the answer to that question is clear. We should be looking at our long term challenges and opportunities, the ones I outlined in the last State of the Union Address. The challenge of the aging of America the number of people over 65 will double in the next 30 years. There will be only two people working for every one person drawing Social Security at present rates of Americans maturing and immigration and retirement. We can extend the life of Social Security beyond the expectancy of the baby boom generation, and we can extend the life of Medicare and add a prescription drug benefit so that baby boomers, when they retire, are not a burden to our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. We have the challenge of expanding opportunity for all the children of America, the most racially and ethnically and religiously and linguistically diverse group of children ever in our schools. We can give every child a world class education, and now, unlike 15 years or so ago, when we started the education reform movement of the late 20th century, we actually know how to do it. And we know that all children can learn we know what strategies work and we have evidence, abundant evidence all across the country. We have the challenge of securing the longterm health of America. I believe to do it, we ought to continue to pay down the national debt and make America debt free for the first time since 1835. And I believe we have a challenge to extend economic opportunity to people and places that have not been part of this recovery even yet, which is the heart of my new markets initiative. We have the challenge of continuing to help people balance work and family, and eliminating what is still a scourge of child poverty in the United States. We have a challenge of proving that we can meet our environmental challenges, including global warming, and still grow the economy a challenge of making our country the safest big country in the world a challenge of accelerating our leadership in science and technology and spreading the benefits of it not only across America but to every corner of the Earth the challenge of continuing to lead the world toward peace and freedom and continuing to build one America here at home. Now, I think that's what we ought to do with this magic moment of possibility. In large measure, the decision about what to do and whether we continue on that course is what the budget debate in Congress is all about and what the election of 2000 is all about. There are those who say, "Well, even if the tax burden as a percentage of income is the lowest it's been in 35 years for most Americans, we still ought to give some of this money back to the American people." We can do that, but I believe the tax cuts should be responsible and targeted, to help working families raise their children, provide for long term care for their parents, tax deductibility for college tuition, and better child care. I think there should be incentives to wealthier Americans to solve our common problems, for example, to invest in new technologies, to help us combat global warming and promote environmental protection, and to invest in our global vaccine initiative to help eradicate AIDS, TB, and malaria from the world, and especially to invest in the poor areas of America which have not yet fully benefited from our recovery. We can do all that, and it will actually reinforce our efforts to meet our long term challenges. But I believe the budget now being debated in Congress and put forward by the majority takes us in the wrong direction and risks safeguarding this unique moment in our history, primarily because the tax cuts that are proposed in the aggregate would take us back to the policy that I have worked for over 7 years to reverse. I vetoed their tax bill last year because it would have ended the era of fiscal discipline that has served our economy so well. This year Congress is working on last year's tax bill page by page, piece by piece. In separate measures, it has already voted to spend in the aggregate nearly half a trillion dollars, more than half the surplus. And we don't know how much is on the way because their budget, unlike the projections I try to do, only covers the next 5 years rather than 10 years. Last year their tax cut cost about 150 billion over 5 years, but it would have exploded to nearly 1 trillion over 10 years. This year, from Capitol Hill to the campaign trail, we're hearing positive statements about investing in health care and prescription drug coverage and education. But after a 1 trillion tax cut and I believe the one they're running on this year is even bigger there will be no room left for these investments or for saving Social Security and Medicare, unless we're prepared to go back to the bad old days of deficits. Congress has a responsibility now to show us how all these separate proposals add up, how the choices made today will affect our ability to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Before we talk about massive tax cuts that would derail our hard won economic prosperity, I say again, we should put first things first. First, we should strengthen the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. These two programs represent the bedrock of our commitment to seniors and to millions of Americans with disabilities. Fiscal responsibility has been the foundation to keep these programs strong. When I came to office, Medicare was projected to go broke last year, 1999. We have taken action to put Medicare and Social Security on a better path to the future. Just last month the Social Security trustees announced that the economy has now added 3 years to the life of the Social Security Trust Fund it is now solvent until 2037. The Medicare trustees announced that Medicare is now solvent until 2023, 24 years beyond where it was projected to be in 1993. That's the strongest Medicare has been in 25 years. Now, to be fair, there is a consensus in Congress that we should use all the Social Security surplus for debt reduction, and that is a good thing. But my budget goes one step further. It's an easy step, I believe, but one the congressional majority has not yet embraced. Debt reduction produces interest savings. Rather than using those savings to pay for an exploding tax cut or a spending increase, my budget locks away the interest savings from the Social Security surplus to lengthen the life of Social Security to at least 2054. This would cover all but the most fortunate baby boomers. I'd have to live to be 108 to run out the Social Security Trust Fund. My proposal also lengthens the life of the Medicare Trust Fund to at least 2030, by investing a significant portion of the surplus while also making Medicare more competitive and efficient. For example, we'd allow seniors to shop around for health plans that meet their needs. If they find a plan that saves money, they'd pay a lower Medicare premium. This would increase competition, give us better quality and lower costs. We would also modernize Medicare by creating a voluntary prescription drug benefit, something we plainly would provide if we were creating Medicare in the first place today. Medicare was created at a time when it was basically designed for acute care, for hospital and doctor costs. Today, the average person who lives to be 65 has a life expectancy of 83, and the crying need is for chronic and preventive care. And today, unlike 35 years ago, pharmaceuticals can very often dramatically increase not only the length but the quality of life. So one of my problems is that the budget pushed by the congressional majority this year would not extend the life of Social Security or Medicare by a single day. It is very important that everybody understands it. It's one thing to say you're saving the Social Security surplus and you're not spending it. That does not add a day to the life of the Trust Fund. It does help you pay down the debt, and I like that. And I'm glad we've got bipartisan, virtually, unanimous support for it. But if you really want to solve the problem of the aging of America, you have to take the interest savings that come from paying down the debt from Social Security taxes, which all of you are paying in excess of what we're paying out every month, and put it into the Trust Fund so we can take Social Security out beyond the life of the baby boom generation. The second thing we ought to do, I believe, is to stay on course to eliminate all of our publicly held debt by 2013. By the end of this year alone, we will have repaid 300 billion in our national debt. This is having a real impact. For our economy, it's set in motion a virtuous cycle of reduced interest rates, more capital for private investment, more people investing in new businesses and new technologies. For families, debt reduction has meant more money on average, 2,000 less in home mortgage payments every year for the typical family, 200 less in car payments, 200 less in student loans, than would have been the case had we not reduced the debt. That amounts to a sizable tax cut for American families. We need a fiscally responsible budget, not one that risks economic growth and makes it impossible for us to continue to pay down the debt. Third, we need to continue to invest in key priorities that are clearly essential to our future education, health, law enforcement, science and technology. The budget proposed by the Republican majority has nearly a 10 percent average cut in virtually all domestic priorities. This would lead to serious cutbacks in everything from reducing class size to cleaning up toxic waste dumps to putting more police on our streets. Furthermore, the budget is based on the assumption that the cuts will grow even deeper over time. This is very important for all Americans to understand. It is one thing to go out and propose all these programs that cost money, and quite another to say, "But we have to have a tax cut first. And somehow, I'm sure it will work out." We tried it that way before, and it didn't work out. So if you have a trillion dollar, or even a larger, even bigger than a trillion dollar tax cut over a decade plus, keep in mind, their defense spending increases proposed are even bigger than the ones I have proposed, and I proposed an increase in defense every single year I've been here, and they've never failed to do that, to fund that then you're either going to have to drastically cut all these programs, education, health, the environment, or go back and start running deficits, or have a combination of both. In other words, as I found out the hard way when I put together the budget in 1993, if you're going to be fiscally responsible, sooner or later arithmetic intrudes on politics. Laughter And this is very important. Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but I hope that arithmetic will be part of this year's campaign debate as well. The proposal, from my point of view, defies common sense. I think the argument is over. We had a test run. We had 12 years of their proposals do the big tax cuts first, and it will all work out and we had 8 years of arithmetic in public policy. And I think if you compare the results, the argument should be over. Our commitment is to fiscal discipline and to investment to move the country forward. Still, in spite of all this hard evidence, later today the Republican majority will vote on a budget resolution that is loaded with exploding tax breaks and untenable cuts in critical investment. It will take us back to an approach that failed before and will fail again back to ideas that didn't work before and won't work now back to putting Medicare and Social Security on the back burner, instead of up front where they belong. So I say again, we cannot afford to veer from the proven path onto a trail of unmet obligations, unrealistic cuts, and unnecessary giveaways. We can't squander the moment by squandering the surplus. We can't go back to the rosy scenario of the 1980's. The new scenario bases tax cuts we can't afford under the assumption that unrealistic spending cuts will be made, at the very time they're out there in the election season telling us that they want to spend more on education and health care and the environment. But the bottom line is this The choices Congress will make this spring are fundamentally the choices that Americans will make this fall. What are our priorities? Will we maintain our commitment to fiscal discipline? In a larger sense, what is our vision? There is room in the vision I have outlined for the best ideas from both parties. When we have determined to do it, we have worked together in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which passed both Houses by big majorities from both parties in the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, which passed both Houses by big majorities in both parties in the fundamentally education budgets of 1998 and 1999, which passed both Houses by big majorities in both parties. We can do this, but we have to make up our mind to stay within the framework of what has served us so well for the last several years. When I started, I quoted President Johnson, who said, "We should plan for tomorrow in the immediacy of the moment." And I told you that when he spoke those words in the early sixties, it was in the full flush of what was at that time the longest economic expansion in history. In February, when we celebrated the longest economic expansion in history, I asked my economic team when the last longest expansion was, and they told me it was '61 to '69. And I got to thinking about that. We tend to think about yesterday, I suppose, as we get older. But while I think we should keep focused on the future, we shouldn't forget the past. There is a tendency, when you're in the middle of a boom like this, to think that you have to do nothing to shore it up, that it will last forever, and that there are relatively few consequences to whatever you decide to do or not to do. So indulge me just for a moment, before I take your questions, and let me remind you of what happened to the last longest economic expansion in history. Johnson was here speaking to this group in the early sixties, about the time I graduated from high school in 1964. Unemployment was low inflation was low growth was high. Vietnam was somewhere in the outer range of our consciousness. No one really doubted that we would win the cold war because our ideas were superior and our values were superior, and no one expected the country to be rendered by that conflict. And at the time we had a serious civil rights challenge, but most people believed then, in the optimism of the moment, that it would be solved in the Congress and in the courts in a peaceful manner. A year later, we had Bloody Sunday in Selma. Two years later, we had riots in the street. Four years later, I was here in Washington, graduating from college 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for President anymore because the country was split right down the middle over the Vietnam war. And so we had a Presidential election with three candidates amidst all the turmoil of the moment, and in a few months, the longest economic expansion in American history was over. If I seem insistent about this, it's because not as President but as a citizen, I have waited for 35 years for my country to have the chance to build the future of its dreams for our children and to have the kind of positive role in the world I believe we can now have. I have worked as hard as I can to turn the situation around and get us pointed in the right direction. And I just don't want us to do anything to squander this moment, as it was once squandered before in my youth. We have a chance that none of us may ever see again in our lifetimes. And we have to make the most of it for our children. Thank you very much. N. Christian Anderson III. Thank you, Mr. President. The President's time is very limited, but he has graciously agreed to take three questions. So, following our usual well, I don't need to give you the rules, because I see who's at the microphones. So let's begin with Margaret Margaret M. Sullivan, Buffalo News , please. Possibility of Pardon Q. Mr. President, first of all, as a New Yorker, although Chappaqua is a few miles from Buffalo, where I'm the editor of the Buffalo News, I wanted to say welcome to the neighborhood. Laughter Yesterday Vice President Gore, before this group, answered a question about whether he would, if elected, use the power of the Presidency to pardon you in relation to the investigations being pursued by the independent prosecutor. He said you had said that you would not accept such a pardon by your successor. It turns out you didn't exactly say that yourself, not publicly. So we seem to have a rather public forum here. Would you request or accept such a pardon? The President. Well, the answer is, I have no interest in it. I wouldn't ask for it. I don't think it would be necessary. I think it's interesting that you would ask that question without going through the facts here. Let me remind you that there was a truly independent review of the whole Whitewater matter, which was concluded 4 years ago, in 1996, by a predominantly Republican law firm for the Resolution Trust Corporation, that said neither my wife nor I did anything wrong. If you want to know what's really been going on, you have a good book here, Mr. Toobin's book you have the Joe Conason and Gene Lyons book, which explains how this all happened. There are independent counsels and then there are special counsels. The independent review was over in '96. So I won't be surprised by anything that happens. But I'm not interested in being pardoned. We had if you remember, during the House Judiciary Committee hearings, there were five prosecutors, former prosecutors, including two Republicans, who said that no prosecutor would even entertain bringing any kind of criminal charges against an ordinary citizen like this. But there is something fundamentally changed in the last 7 years about how the counsels were appointed and who they were and what their priorities were. And no one has yet written the full story. I can imagine why you wouldn't particularly given the way a lot of this has been covered. But the answer is no. I don't have any interest in that. I don't want one. And I am prepared to stand before any bar of justice I have to stand before. But I would like just once to see someone acknowledge the fact that this Whitewater thing was a lie and a fraud from the beginning and that most people with any responsibility over it have known it for years. Next question. Presidential Library Q. Mr. President, Brian Stallcop from the Sun in Bremerton, Washington over here in the middle. You spent the last several minutes talking about what I think you hope will be your legacy as President. And I wonder if you could think ahead 5 years from now, when you open your Presidential library and all the living Presidents are there with you. Will there be a wing in your Presidential library to your impeachment trial and to that whole era of your Presidency? The President. Yes, we'll deal with it, and I will deal with it we'll have to deal with it. It's an important part of it. But I have a slightly different take on it than many of you do or at least than the Washington media does. I made a terrible personal mistake. I think I have paid for it. I settled a lawsuit I didn't that I won. I won that lawsuit, remember. I won that lawsuit. I settled it anyway because of the political nature of the people that were reviewing it, and because so I gave away half of my life's savings to settle a lawsuit I had won because I wanted to go back to work being President. And we now know that the questions asked were asked in bad faith, because they knew the answer and they knew it had nothing to do with the lawsuit something hardly anybody ever points out. So I think I've paid quite a lot. I struggled very hard to save my relationship with my wife and my daughter. I have paid quite a lot. But on the impeachment, let me tell you, I am proud of what we did there, because I think we saved the Constitution of the United States. I think first of all, I had to defeat the Republican revolution in 1994, when they shut down the Government, and we beat back the contract on America. Then we had to beat it in the impeachment issue. Then we had to beat it when I vetoed the tax cut last year. Then the voters had their verdict in the 1998 election and in the 1996 election. But as a political matter, you have no idea I'm not ashamed of the fact that they impeached me. That was their decision, not mine. And it was wrong. As a matter of law, the Constitution, and history, it was wrong. And I am glad I didn't quit, and I'm glad we fought it. And the American people stuck with me, and I am profoundly grateful. That has nothing to do with the fact that I made a terrible mistake, of which I am deeply regretful. But I think that an average, ordinary person reviewing the wreckage left in that would say that I paid for that. And I should have paid for it. We all pay for our mistakes. But I'll deal with the impeachment. But you have to understand, I consider it one of the major chapters in my defeat of the revolution Mr. Gingrich led, that would have taken this country in a very different direction than it's going today and also would have changed the Constitution forever, in a way that would have been very destructive to the American people. Elian Gonzalez Q. Mr. President, Edward Seaton, the Manhattan, Kansas, Mercury. I want to turn to the news events of today. The Attorney General has set a 2 p.m. deadline for the Miami relatives to turn Elian Gonzalez over to his father. Is your administration prepared to send Federal marshals in if that happens? The President. Well, first of all, let me say this. Attorney General Reno has done her best to try to resolve this in a peaceable way. This has been a very painful situation for her, personally, because she was the prosecuting attorney in Dade County for 12 years. She knows a lot of the people involved in this. And she went there to try to handle this personally. And she hopes, and I still hope, it won't come to that. Since she's on site and events are unfolding almost by the minute, I think I should let her address what we're going to do and when we're going to do it from the site. I think that's the best thing to do, because I haven't talked to her today about it. Let me just say, I think the issue here for me is the rule of law. We have a system. The system has if you don't think it's right, then you can say, well, we ought to change the laws. But we have a legal system, and it has been followed. And the decision that was made, that Elian Gonzalez's father was a devoted and fit father and could proffer to speak for his son and, therefore, to make decisions for his minor son, was ratified in a district court and is now on appeal to a court of appeals. But none of the courts have granted any kind of interim relief which would justify opposition to the plain rule of law. So, to me, this case is about the rule of law. I've done everything I could to stay out of it to avoid politicizing it. But I do believe that it is our responsibility to uphold the law, and we're doing our best to do that. Constructive Criticism of the Press Q. Mr. President, I'm Tom Koenninger, editor of the Columbian at Vancouver, Washington. This organization, ASNE, takes pride in receiving constructive criticism from its readers. As a reader of America's newspapers, I would like to offer you the opportunity now to provide your constructive criticism. And I'm speaking of newspaper and wire service coverage, not broadcast media. The President. Well, the only difference in me and somebody writing a letter to the editor to give you constructive criticism is that what I'll get from my constructive criticism is a bomb on the head. Laughter I know I'm not running for I realize I'm not running for anything, but I'm not totally dumb here. Laughter Q. Well, this is your last opportunity, though, to address us. The President. No, it's not my last opportunity, it's just the last opportunity I'll have when anybody will pay any attention to me. Laughter It's ironic, you know, when I can say what I think and nobody will care anymore. Laughter I think the most I should say first of all, I think it's interesting I think it's hard to run a newspaper today in an environment in which you're competing with television news, Internet news sources, radio news, and entertainment which abuts on the news, and all the lines are being blurred, both the technological lines and the categorical lines. And I think the but I think there is a special role for the old fashioned newspaper in daily life, although I think it's interesting the papers that are being made smaller or more readable or also put on the net and all that, I think that's very good. I think you ought to maximize that. But it seems to me that one of the things that you have to fight against I've often felt happened here over the last 7 years is sort of getting stuck in a place that amplifies the sensational and the emotional, which carves out a certain market share in the short run, but may undermine the fundamental and the purpose of a newspaper over the long run. And I think that but I think that it's very hard I mean, I think it's really quite challenging to run a good old fashioned newspaper, where you've got the news stories on the front page and the editorial opinion on the editorial page, and you don't really mix the two, and you don't try to get caught up in sort of a given point of view on a big story and then have to keep grinding it and pushing it, no matter what, because that's what's driving the place you've marked out for yourself in an increasingly competitive market. I don't know what the answer to that is. But I believe and I'm an old fashioned person I don't even I hate to say this it will get me in trouble with the networks because and I need the exposure still. Laughter But because of my schedule, usually my only source of news is the newspaper. I'm sort of a troglodyte media person. I actually sit down and read the papers. Normally I'm not home at the time of the evening news, but I watch CNN a lot because I can get it any time of the day or night. But I have thought about their dilemma. The networks also have real challenges. And I think this whole communications revolution, which I think on balance is an exceedingly positive thing, runs the risk of giving people more information than they have ever had before without adequate perspective or framework or balance or background or back and forth. I still think the editorial page and the oped pages of newspapers, where the editorial pages may be consistent and forthright, but you've got people on the other pages with different opinions or even writing about subjects different from the ones that the editors have time to write editorials about I think that is a great thing. I think it's very helpful. The thing I worry most about is that people will have all the information in the world they won't have any way of evaluating whether it's true or false, A and B, even if it's true, how to put it in proper perspective. That's what I consider to be the single most significant challenge presented to all of you by the explosion of media outlets and competitive alternatives in the information age. On balance, I think it's a plus. And people are smart, and they nearly always get it right, which is why our democracy's around here after over 200 years. They nearly always kind of get it right, if they have enough time. But still, you've got how much will it cost your paper? I'll just give you an example. When the full sequencing of the human genome is announced in a few months, how much will it cost you to run a long series on exactly what that is, what its implications might be, how it came to be, and where we're going from here? And how many people have to read it for it to have been worth the investment? What opportunity costs did you forgo? And then when things start to happen, spinning out of the human genome, how are you going to deal with that? That's just one example. I think newspapers actually are going to become more and more important again, because so much of what people will have to absorb about the new century will be advances in science and technology, that it's very hard to put into the time constraints of an evening news program. And I think they will have all kinds of political and social ramifications as they unfold. So I think in a funny way, even if you feel beleaguered now, the nature of what is unfolding may make newspapers and old fashioned newspaper work more important in the next few years. But I think the information revolution and the sort of changes in the media structure have presented you with a lot of very difficult challenges. And if I were you, rather than asking me what my criticism is, I'd sit around and I'd really try to have an organized, honest discussion about how the fundamental purpose of the newspaper can be maintained and you can still make enough money to stay afloat. Because somebody needs to organize and give perspective to all this information and opinions and all the stuff we're flooded with. I think it's very, very important. I wish I were in your position. I wish I could do it, because I've thought about many times how hard it is for you. But I wish you well, because it's really important. People need more than facts. They need to know the facts are accurate, and they need to understand in some perspective about what it means and where it's all going. Thank you very much. Mr. Anderson. Mr. President, on behalf of all of these troglodytes, thank you so very much. One more little bit of trivia, and that is that every year you have been in this country you have come to this convention, during your 8 years in office. We're very grateful for that and grateful for the time you've spent with us today. Please stay in your places while the President leaves. Thank you very much, Mr. President. The President. Thank you. April 12, 2000 The President. Thank you. Thank you so very much for making me feel welcome. And I thank you for reminding me again what this is all about. I want to thank my long time friend Wellington Webb for his leadership in this fight and his leadership of Denver. I thank Tom Mauser for having the courage not to be broken by his loss but to give his son the legacy he deserves. I thank John Head and Arnie Grossman for reminding us that this is not about party politics it's about saving people's lives. And I also want to thank my longtime friend, your former Governor, Dick Lamm, who's here, and former Governor John Love, who's not here, for also reminding us this is not about party politics. I thank Attorney General Ken Salazar and Governor Bill Owens, who is also not here, but I want to thank them both for what they tried to do in the legislature and for what they're trying to do to help you pass this referendum. I want to thank the other SAFE board members who are here on stage. And I want to acknowledge it's already been mentioned by Arnie, but I want to tell you that I had the privilege of meeting with the SAFE students, David Winkler, Ben Gelt, and their other colleagues, in Washington. They told me today, David and Ben, that they've now been to 30 States, and they have 10,000 young people across America enlisted in this cause. So I want to thank them. I think we ought to give them a big hand. Applause Finally, I will say more about this in a moment, but as you know, I'm trying to pass some legislation on this subject in Washington, and there are three people I want to acknowledge. First of all, a former Congressman from Maryland, Mike Barnes, who's the president of Handgun Control, who came with me, and he's up here today. Mike, thank you for coming. Secondly, Representative Diana DeGette from Colorado, who is supporting our legislation in Washington. Thank you, Diana, for what you're doing. Thank you. Thank you. And someone who's not on the platform, I don't think, today, but who came all the way from Washington with me because he believes so strongly in this, and he wanted to express his solidarity with you. The Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, Dick Gephardt from Missouri, came all the way from Washington to be here today. And I want to thank him for doing that. Let me say that not only Denver but the whole State of Colorado is a mile high in the eyes of your fellow Americans today. You come from all backgrounds, different communities, and surely different political parties, to speak with a single voice for common sense and safety and the future of our children. I want to tell you, first, you are not alone and second, America is listening. All across America, people like you are speaking up here, where you're taking the lead, working to close the gun show loophole because the legislature wouldn't do it for you, in spite of the leadership of Governor Owens and Attorney General Salazar in Maryland, another State with a lot of hunters and sport shooters, which yesterday became the first State to require built in safety locks for all new handguns in California, which banned junk guns, a new generation of assault weapons, and limited handgun sales to one a month in Massachusetts, now enforcing consumer product safety rules for guns, banning junk guns, requiring child trigger locks and other devices to prevent children from firing guns. All these steps have helped to protect more of our children. But every child in America deserves these protections. Reducing gun violence is a national challenge. I came here, first, to say I support what you're doing. And in spite of all the attempts to put roadblocks in your way, you must not be deterred. Your leaders told me you need 62,000 signatures to put this initiative on the ballot. The purpose of all these delaying tactics is to put off the day when you can start gathering the signatures. I want every one of you who is here today to sign up with these folks when you leave, because you ought to be able to get 62,000 signatures in 2 hours if everybody who is for this will sign up and go get the signatures. The second thing I wanted to do is to say that you deserve a National Government that follows your lead, and Congress is the only body that can provide the kind of national approach we need to protect all the children in every State. That's why I asked At this point, there was a disturbance in the audience. The President. That's why I asked The disturbance continued. The President. Sir, this meeting is not about you and not about me. So would you please let me give the speech? Applause I'll be glad to speak to him out there, but you came here to talk about something else. Now, let me say to all of you, the thing I'm very proud of the fact that you've made this a bipartisan effort. And as John said when he spoke, it is true that even in Washington not every Democrat is for this legislation, and not every Republican is against it. This is largely a matter of political organization and power among the opponents of this legislation here, too and a matter of culture. One of the reasons I wanted to come here is that I grew up in a State not all that different from Colorado. I was 12 years old when I first shot a can off a fencepost with a .22. Unlike most elected officials in Washington, I've actually been to gun shows. I understand what is going on here. But I will say this The message you are sending the country is not that this is the only answer but that it's an important answer. The message you are sending the country is not that we shouldn't have stronger enforcement of the laws we should not that we shouldn't teach firearms safety we should not that we shouldn't have community efforts like our national campaign against youth violence is promoting, to strengthen the role of parents and families and schools and community groups we should. But that is not an excuse for saying that guns are the only area of our national life where there will be no prevention. That is their position, and that is wrong. We punish reckless drivers, but we still have seatbelts in our car and child safety seats for our kids. We punish people who hijack airplanes and terrorists who blow them up, but we still thank God have got airport metal detectors. Every one of us, just about, at least my age, were raised by usually our mothers telling us that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Gun safety cannot be the only area of our national life where we say no to prevention. Colorado is here to say we have lost enough of our children it's time to have prevention, too, in this important area of our national life. When I signed the Brady bill into law in 1993, a law which had been vetoed by the previous President, the same people who are fighting you said the Brady bill would do no good because all the criminals bought their guns at gun shows and urban flea markets laughter and out of the back of trunks from one another. And therefore, this prevention would do no good it would just be a terrible burden for hunters and sports people. Well, 6 years later and a few months, over half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers have been unable to get handguns gun crime down more than 35 percent homicide down to a 31year low. It worked. But no one believes this country is safe enough. I don't want any future President to have to go to Columbine, or to Springfield, Oregon, or to Jonesboro, Arkansas, or to all the other places I have been. It's tough enough to comfort the families of our service men and women who die in the line of duty. Children have no duties, except to their studies and their families. Our duty is to protect their lives and give them futures. I know I'm talking to the converted here, but I want the evidence to get out. This gun show loophole is now a serious problem. Last year a study by the Departments of Justice and Treasury of 314 gun show investigations showed the following 34 percent of the sales investigated involved guns later used in serious crimes, a total of 54,000 gun crimes. This is a serious problem. Now, should we have I will say again should we have a comprehensive strategy? Of course we should. Does the media have a responsibility? Do communities have a responsibility, schools, parents? Absolutely. Is teaching people gun safety an important part of this responsibility? Of course it is. When the NRA was focusing on teaching young people gun safety in my home State, I supported them in every way I could. But it is no excuse not to have prevention. Let me tell you something. I come from a State where factories in small towns shut down on the first day of deer season every year. And when we were debating the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban, I heard all this stuff, and I told them, I said, "If you miss a day, even an hour in the deer woods, I'll be against this bill." Of course they haven't. That's not what this is about. So I say to you, you have to go out and say this. Now, people say the same people who said 6 years ago that all these criminals were getting their guns at gun shows and urban flea markets, and therefore the Brady bill wouldn't work, now say you can't have background checks at gun shows because it would be so burdensome. Well, let me tell you what the burden is. More than 70 percent of these checks can be done within minutes 95 percent can be done within a day. The 5 percent that can't be done within a day should still be done. Why? Because they are 20 times more likely to be rejected because of a criminal background or another problem. Those are the facts. Now, I don't know about you, but I think it's worth a little bit of inconvenience to save a few thousand lives over the next few years. Now, should we enforce the law? Yes, we should. Gun crime prosecutions are up by 16 percent since I've been President. The average person convicted is serving 2 years longer. Gun crime down, as I said, by 35 percent. Here in Colorado, your U.S. Attorney, Tom Strickland, is working with local officials on Colorado's Project Exile. They're enforcing the laws more vigorously, including against those who violate the Brady bill. But I will say again, the real question is, with the children's lives at stake, with the accidental gun rate of kids under 15 in this country the accidental gun rate 9 times higher than that of the next 25 biggest economies combined, how can we say prevention has no role? You all believe this, but I want you to have these facts to argue. And I want you to understand that the country is looking very closely at Colorado. We know it's a State that has Republicans and Democrats. We know it's a State that has a strong culture that favors hunting and sport shooting. We know it's a State with a broken heart over Columbine. We know it's a State where people can put aside their partisan differences and maybe even their lifetime culture to look at the facts. Now, other States will follow your lead. I hope and pray Congress will follow your lead, as well. But you must not get tired or frustrated. You must not even get angry. You've got to go talk to these people. Believe me, not every member of the National Rifle Association is dead set against you. They get this stuff in the mail they hear this stuff over the airwaves, but they love their children, too. I wouldn't give up on anybody. But the main thing you have got to do is win here. So I will say again, if you haven't signed up to be with SAFE, sign up on your way out, and find out when those petitions get circulated, and do your part. Look how many people are here. If everybody in this room everybody in this room there's about 3,000 people here, right? if you got 20 signatures, it would be a done deal. In the end, change is always difficult. But you must understand how important it is for your children and people all over the country. If you do this, you will give so much energy to people who have been sitting around in other States like yours, thinking it was a hopeless battle, thinking they couldn't win. If you do this, you will give enormous impetus to our efforts in Congress to try to provide national protections. And most important, if you do this, you will say, we're going to treat this area of our life like every other area of our national life. America is the country that respects the rights of people. But we've still got our rights over 200 years later, since we started, because we also exercise our responsibility, especially for our children and their future. I admire you. I support you. Don't quit until you win. Thank you very much. April 02, 2000 The President. Let me, first of all, say I'm glad to be back. I never get tired of coming here. And most of you know that Brian and I went to college together in spite of the fact that he now looks younger than me, we did. Laughter What can I say? I've had a harder life. Laughter And he and Myra have been wonderful to us. And Amy has been good enough to work for me at the White House and for Mrs. Gore, and we feel that she's a part of our family. Arnold and Rachel have taken me in in Arizona, as well as always coming up here when I show up. And I'm just so grateful to all of you. And Jane always whispers in my ear and tells me what I should really be working on as President and how I should be doing it. Laughter Janie Greenspun Gale. Have I been wrong? Laughter The President. And the thing I really hate about it is that she's normally right. Laughter So I feel very much at home here. I'll be quite brief, but I want you to think about a few things. First, I am very, very grateful to the people of Nevada for supporting me and Hillary and Al and Tipper through two Presidential elections. It's highly unusual for a Democrat to carry this State. And we did it not by much, but we did it twice. And a lot of you in this room helped. I am very grateful for the support that you have given all my policies. The nuclear waste issue is very important. I will say this to you I was not wrong when I said last year and Brian ran an article in the paper that we needed Harry Reid back in the Senate, so we would have a veto proof minority. And we also got and that was really important. And Shelley Berkley also worked very hard on that, and we now have my veto can be sustained. And that's very, very encouraging, and I want to thank all of you for that. But I'd also, in a larger sense, just like to thank you for 7 years and a couple of months of genuine support for a new direction for our country. I want to particularly thank Congressman Bilbray, who would still be in Congress if he hadn't supported me. But I want you to know that. We didn't have a vote to spare in August of 1993, when I asked the Congress to cut the deficit by at least 500 billion. And I knew if we didn't do it, we'd never get the economy turned around. And it passed by a single vote in the House and the Senate. And Al Gore cast the tie vote in the Senate, and as he said, whenever he votes, we win. Laughter That broke the tie, I mean. And every single Member of the House that voted for that bill can claim a large share of responsibility for the economic prosperity this country has enjoyed ever since. And many of them laid their jobs down to do it, and I will never forget it. And I want you to know that I never forgot, and I thank you. Now, here's what I want to say, and I say this to you partly as your President and partly as a citizen, because I'm not running for anything this year. I'm the only person I know, practically, who's not running for anything. Laughter And most days, I'm okay about it. We're in a position today that is highly unusual for any nation. You know, we're in the middle of the longest economic expansion in history. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, lowest minority unemployment rates ever recorded, lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, lowest poverty rates in 20 years, lowest crime rates in 25 years. And the question before the citizens of our country in this election is, now what? What are we going to do with what is truly an unprecedented moment? If you saw my State of the Union Address, you know what I think we ought to do. I think that we ought to say, this is not a time for relaxing, this is a time for bearing down that this is a chance of a lifetime, and we ought to identify every major challenge and every major opportunity our country's got out there and go after it, because we will never have a better chance to do it. That's what I believe. I think that this is the time to build the 21st century education system. This is the time to help all these families, where both mothers and fathers work, balance work and family. This is the time to help deal with the aging of America, with families who provide long term care to their parents, for disabled members of their families, to save Social Security and Medicare and add a prescription drug benefit. It's time to pay the country out of debt. We can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835. And if we do, we'll give a whole when Amy's my age, this country will be more prosperous than it otherwise would have been, if we do that. It's a time to deal with the big environmental challenges. It's a time to deal with the possibility we now have of making this the safest big country in the world. When I became President, most people didn't think the crime rate could go down. It's gone down now 7 years in a row. But no one believes America's as safe as it ought to be. It's a time to make a major commitment to 21st century science and technology. We were talking at the other table about energy technology and how, if we can just make one more discovery with biofuels, we'll be able to create 8 gallons of ethanol with 1 gallon of gasoline. And when you have cars getting 70 miles per gallon, which will be soon, it would be like getting over 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline. It will change the whole future of the world when this happens. In a few weeks, we'll have the honor of announcing that the consortium that the United States and Great Britain have been part of for some years, to unlock the mysteries of the human genome, will be completed. And 3 billion genes in 80,000 sequences will all be out there, thanks to computer technology. And when that happens, it won't be long until somebody figures out how to stop people like me when we get old from getting Alzheimer's. Two people in my family have had it. They'll be able to figure out how to block the gene that causes Parkinson's, that the Attorney General and many other well known people, including Michael J. Fox, now are dealing with. They will be able to figure out and Muhammad Ali. They'll be able to figure out how to identify all kinds of cancers when there are just a few cells collected, and it will dramatically increase the cure rate. All this stuff is right around the corner. Not to mention the fact that I think within a couple of years, you'll actually know what's in those black holes in the universe. This is going to be a very interesting time to be alive. We also see, in a more sort of tangible way, the role the United States still has for peace and freedom around the world, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland, fighting against terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the work I tried to do when I was in India and Pakistan recently. And I guess what I would like to say to you is that beyond all of the specifics, the simple question of this election is, what are we going to do with this money? And the American people have big choices. And the reason that I support Vice President Gore, quite apart from my personal loyalty to him and affection to him, is that I've worked with him for 7 years, and I know that he understands the future and has the knowledge and experience and the strength to take us there. And that swamps every one of the specifics. The second reason is that I believe that the Republicans' advocacy of a tax cut even bigger than the one I vetoed last year for it to become law would mean we could not get the country out of debt we would not have the money to save Social Security and Medicare we would not have the money to invest in 21st century schools. All of you would be better off, but only for a little bit. And I think, far better to have a more modest tax cut that helps people educate their children, provide decent child care, deal with this long term care crisis, which is going to become bigger and bigger and bigger for all of our families, and get the country out of debt, keep interest rates down, and keep the economy going. That's what I believe. But these are huge choices. And underneath it all there is something that I have basically has been the great passion of my life, and that is whether we're going to go forward as one America or we're going to go back to politics as usual, where we just divide up in camps and see which camp is bigger. A couple of Sundays ago more than that now, but just recently, on a Sunday, I had an opportunity to go to Selma, Alabama, to commemorate the 35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, where Congressman John Lewis, then just a young man, and Reverend Hosea Williams and comedian Dick Gregory and a lot of others marched across a bridge over a river at Selma on their way to Montgomery. They were beaten and beaten back. But a few days later, they marched to Montgomery, and 6 months later we got the Voting Rights Act. And it was one of the for me as a southerner, it was one of the great moments of my life. And most of the people who walked over that bridge are still alive, and most of them walked over that bridge with me again. But I was thinking about the 35 years that have some of you are too young to remember most of you are around my age. Let me tell you something about 35 years ago. We celebrated the longest economic expansion in history this February. So we were sitting around talking about it one day, and I had all my economic advisers there. And I said, "Now, before we broke this record, when was the last longest economic expansion in history?" Nineteen sixty one to 1969. So in '64, I graduate from high school low inflation low unemployment high growth Lyndon Johnson is President high optimism that he will be able to lead the country away from the heartbreak of President Kennedy's assassination, and we'll solve all the civil rights problems in the Congress and in the courts. We've got some people in Vietnam, but nobody thinks it's going to tear the country apart, and everybody believes America will prevail in the cold war '64. And even in the bloody conflicts like Selma, it was all part of progress, you know. Things were happening. Okay. Four years later, 1968, we're graduating from college, Brian and I are. June 8, 1968, we're at Georgetown finishing college 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for President anymore because the country was just split right down the middle on the Vietnam war. A few weeks later, President Nixon is elected on one of these "us" and "them" campaigns. I call them "us" and "them" campaigns. He represented the Silent Majority that was his slogan which meant those of us that weren't for him, we were in the loud minority, and there was something wrong with us. A few weeks after that, the longest economic expansion in American history came to an end. Now, what's that got to do with this? You know, I'm not trying to be a downer here I'm an inherently optimistic person. But this is a moment for making tomorrows. This is not a moment for indulging ourselves in all this good stuff that's going on today. And the only way to really ensure that it continues to happen is to keep thinking about tomorrow and keep trying to make them and to take on these big challenges we know are out there. There are going to be twice as many people over 65 in 30 years as there are today. It's a big challenge. We can fix it right now. We can basically prepare ourselves for it right now. That's just one example. But that's the decision the American people are going to have to make. More than anything else is the general thing Are we going to go back to an approach that is more satisfying in the short run that we know doesn't work, or are we going to try to keep building on the change of the last 7 years? Are we going to pick leaders that we know understand the future and can take us there, or are we going to pick people who say things we like to hear and may make it easier for us in the next month or two? That's really what's going on here. And I guess what I would like to tell you it hit me with Selma and I say this more as a citizen than as President. I have waited now for 35 years for my country once again to have a chance to build a future of our dreams for our kids. It's a long time. It may not happen again in our lifetime. That's why this election is so important. So if they ask you why you came here today, I hope you can give them that answer. Thank you very much. March 25, 2000 As salaam aleikum. It is an honor to be the first President of the United States to address all the people of Pakistan, and the first to visit your country in more than 30 years. I'm here as a great admirer of your land's rich history, of its centuries of civilization that stretch as long as the Indus River. I'm here as one whose own Nation has been greatly enriched by the talents of Americans of Pakistani descent. But most of all, I am here as a friend, a grateful friend who values our long partnership, a concerned friend who cares deeply about the future course of your country, a committed friend who will stand with the people of Pakistan as long as you seek the stable, prosperous, democratic nation of your founders' dreams. More than half a century ago, Mohammed Ali Jinnah shared that vision as he addressed Pakistan's Constituent Assembly. "If you work together," he said, "in a spirit that every one of you is first, second, and last a citizen, with equal rights, privileges, and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make." The Quaid e Azam ended that speech by reading a telegram he had just received. The message expressed hope for success in the great work you were about to undertake. That message was from the people of the United States. Despite setbacks and suffering, the people of Pakistan have built this nation from the ground up, on a foundation of democracy and law. And for more than 50 years now, we have been partners with you. Pakistan helped the United States open a dialog with China. We stood together when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Our partnership helped to end the cold war. And in the years since, we have cooperated in the fight against terrorism. Our soldiers have stood together in missions of peace in every part of the world. This is your proud legacy, our proud legacy. Now we are in the dawn of a new century, and a new and changing world has come into view. All around the globe a revolution is taking hold, a revolution that is tearing down barriers and building up networks among nations and individuals. For millions it has made real the dream of a better life with good schools, good jobs, a good future for their children. Like all key moments in human history, this one poses some hard choices, for this era does not reward people who struggle in vain to redraw borders with blood. It belongs to those with the vision to look beyond borders for partners in commerce and trade. It does not favor nations where governments claim all the power to solve every problem. Instead, it favors nations where the people have the freedom and responsibility to shape their own destinies. Pakistan can achieve great things in this new world, but real obstacles stand in the way. The political situation, the economic situation, the tensions in this region, they are holding Pakistan back from achieving its full potential in the global economy. I know I don't have to tell you all this. This is something you know, something you have seen. But I do have hope. I believe Pakistan can make its way through the troubles and build a future worthy of the visions of its founders a stable, prosperous, democratic Pakistan, secure in its borders, friendly with its neighbors, confident in its future a Pakistan, as Jinnah said, "at peace within and at peace without." What is in the way of that vision? Well, clearly, the absence of democracy makes it harder, not easier, for people to move ahead. I know democracy isn't easy it's certainly not perfect. The authors of my own country's Constitution knew that as well. They said that the mission of the United States would always be, and I quote, "to form a more perfect Union." In other words, they knew we would never fully realize our ideals, but that we could keep moving closer to them. That means the question for free people is always how to keep moving forward. We share your disappointment that previous democratic governments in Pakistan did not do better for their citizens. But one thing is certain Democracy cannot develop if it is constantly uprooted before it has a chance to firmly take hold. Successful democratic government takes time and patience and hard work. The answer to flawed democracy is not to end democracy but to improve it. I know General Musharraf has just announced a date for local elections. That is a good step. But the return of civilian democratic rule requires a complete plan, a real roadmap. Of course, no one from the outside can tell Pakistan how it should be governed. That is for you, the people of Pakistan, to decide, and you should be given the opportunity to do so. I hope and believe you want Pakistan to be a country where the rule of law prevails a country where officials are accountable a country where people can express their points of view without fear a country that wisely forsakes revenge for the wounds of the past, and instead pursues reconciliation for the sake of the future. If you choose this path, your friends in the United States will stand with you. There are obstacles to your progress, including violence and extremism. We Americans also have felt these evils. Surely we have both suffered enough to know that no grievance, no cause, no system of beliefs can ever justify the deliberate killing of innocents. Those who bomb bus stations, target Embassies, or kill those who uphold the law are not heroes. They are our common enemies, for their aim is to exploit painful problems, not to resolve them. Just as we have fought together to defeat those who traffic in narcotics, today I ask Pakistan to intensify its efforts to defeat those who inflict terror. Another obstacle to Pakistan's progress is the tragic squandering of effort, energy, and wealth on policies that make your nation poorer, but not safer. That is one reason we must try to resolve the differences between our two nations on nuclear weapons. Again, you must make the decision. But my questions to you are no different from those I posed in India. Are you really more secure today than you were before you tested nuclear weapons? Will these weapons make war with India less likely or simply more deadly? Will a costly arms race help you to achieve any economic development? Will it bring you closer to your friends around the world, closer to the partnerships you need to build your dreams? Today, the United States is dramatically cutting its nuclear arsenal. Around the world nations are renouncing these weapons. I ask Pakistan also to be a leader for nonproliferation. In your own self interest, to help us to prevent dangerous technologies from spreading to those who might have no reservations at all about using them, take the right steps now to prevent escalation, to avoid miscalculation, to reduce the risk of war. As leaders in your own country have suggested, one way to strengthen your security would be to join the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The whole world will rally around you if you do. I believe it is also in Pakistan's interest to reduce tensions with India. When I was in New Delhi, I urged India to seize the opportunity for dialog. Pakistan also must help create conditions that will allow dialog to succeed. For India and Pakistan this must be a time of restraint, for respect for the Line of Control, and renewed lines of communication. I have listened carefully to General Musharraf and others. I understand your concerns about Kashmir. I share your convictions that human rights of all its people must be respected. But a stark truth must also be faced. There is no military solution to Kashmir. International sympathy, support, and intervention cannot be won by provoking a bigger, bloodier conflict. On the contrary, sympathy and support will be lost. And no matter how great the grievance, it is wrong to support attacks against civilians across the Line of Control. In the meantime, I ask again Will endless, costly struggle build good schools for your children? Will it make your cities safer? Will it bring clean water and better health care? Will it narrow the gaps between those who have and those who have nothing? Will it hasten the day when Pakistan's energy and wealth are invested in building its future? The answer to all these questions is plainly no. The American people don't want to see tensions rise and suffering increase. We want to be a force for peace. But we cannot force peace. We can't impose it. We cannot and will not mediate or resolve the dispute in Kashmir. Only you and India can do that, through dialog. Last year the world watched with hope as the leaders of India and Pakistan met in Lahore on the road to better relations. This is the right road to peace for Pakistan and India, and for the resolution of the problems in Kashmir. Therefore, I will do all I can to help both sides restore the promise and the process of Lahore. A few months ago we had a ceremony at the White House to mark the end of Ramadan. An imam shared a message from the Koran which tells us that God created nations and tribes that we might know one another, not that we may despise one another. During the years of my Presidency, I have tried to know the Muslim world as part of our common humanity. I have stood with the people of Bosnia and Kosovo, who were brutalized because of their Muslim faith. I have mourned with Jordanians and Moroccans at the loss of their brave leaders. I have been privileged to speak with Palestinians at their National Council in Gaza. Today I am proud to speak with you because I value our long friendship, and because I believe our friendship can still be a force for tolerance and understanding throughout the world. I hope you will be able to meet the difficult challenges we have discussed today. If you do not, there is a danger that Pakistan may grow even more isolated, draining even more resources away from the needs of the people, moving even closer to a conflict no one can win. But if you do meet these challenges, our full economic and political partnership can be restored for the benefit of the people of Pakistan. So let us draw strength from the words of the great Pakistani poet Muhammad Iqbal, who said, "In the midst of today's upheaval, give us a vision of tomorrow." If the people of Pakistan and South Asia are driven by a tolerant, generous vision of tomorrow, your nation and this entire region can be the great success story of the world's next 50 years. It is all in your hands. I know enough about the ingenuity and enterprise and heart of Pakistani people to know that this is possible. With the right vision, rooted in tomorrow's promise, not yesterday's pain, rooted in dialog, not destruction, Pakistan can fulfill its destiny as a beacon of democracy in the Moslem world, an engine of growth, a model of tolerance, an anchor of stability. Pakistan can have a future worthy of the dreams of the Quaid e Azam. If you choose that future, the United States will walk with you. I hope you will make that choice. And I pray for our continued friendship, for peace, for Pakistan. Zindabad. March 24, 2000 Thank you. Thank you, President Goenka. Chief Minister Deshmukh my good friend Ambassador Wisner my colleague and longtime friend Ambassador Celeste Secretary Daley our distinguished crowd here. We thank you for welcoming us. I have brought quite a group from the United States, including six Members of our Congress. And we were just down in Hyderabad, and I asked the crowd to acknowledge them, because I always got to give the speech, they always have to listen, but when we go home, they control all the money. Laughter So I would like to acknowledge the presence here of Congressman Jim McDermott, Congressman Gary Ackerman, Congressman Ed Royce, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Representative Nita Lowey, and Representative Jan Schakowsky, all Members of the United States House of Representatives. We thank them for coming. This has been a remarkable week and, I think, a wonderful week for me and my daughter, Chelsea, who is here, and for our entire American delegation. We came as friends to a changing India, to gain a better understanding of your country, your views, in order to build a new partnership on a higher level than that which we have experienced over the last 22 years. If you imagine the world you would like to see 10 years from now or 20 years from now, if you imagine how you would like India to be 10 or 20 years from now, it is difficult to believe that the world you would like and the India you would like can be achieved without a deeper and better partnership of mutual respect and common endeavor with the United States. I can also say grateful for the presence of the American Ambassador, one former American Ambassador to India, and the Indian Ambassador to the United States, Ambassador Chandra that I cannot imagine the world that I want for my children's generation in America that does not include a deeper and better partnership with India. And so I came here to try to build it, or at least to have the foundations there before my time as President is done. Already, as all of you well know, America is the largest trading partner and investor for India. This week American companies signed about two dozen agreements to create or advance projects worth another 4 billion. And I'm very pleased that our Export Import Bank will make available a billion dollars in new financing for small and mediumsized businesses in India to export to the United States. This week we have strengthened our commitment to work together to protect the environment, to promote clean energy, to fight against deadly diseases, to use science and technology to help people rise from poverty. I visited a small village in Rajasthan yesterday you probably saw the pictures in the paper where I was dancing with the village ladies. Laughter It was pretty good odds there were about 30 of them and one of me. Laughter And they were throwing the children were throwing flowers, petals of flowers on us. But the reason we were dancing was because of the time we had shared before. And I saw the work that was being done in the poor village to lift the lives of women, to give them access to credit, to give them support in the workplace, to keep their children, including their girl children, in school. I saw the role of men and women and people of different tribes and castes working together in the local government units. And so there was cause for celebration. Today in Hyderabad, when I was there, I talked to representatives of all 23 districts of the State in a teleconference about the same sorts of activities that are occurring. I say that because I believe that while there is plainly a digital divide in India and a digital divide in the United States, not just from place to place but within every city where there is a strong business group well connected to the new economy, the truth is that the information age gives us the chance to eliminate poverty more quickly for more people than ever before in all of human history. I saw that yesterday when I was in this little village of Naila. And there was a computer hookup to the State and Federal Government so that all the people could come in and find out what all the services were that were available to them. And there were printouts so that the women could get actual prints that they could take home that would tell them how to take better care of their children. And someday every village will have all the educational software available anywhere in the world on it, so that in the poorest villages of India or Africa or China or Latin America, people will be able to print out for their schoolchildren the most modern educational materials available anywhere, so that people in the poorest villages of the world will have access to the same learning materials that the people in the richest schools in the United States or any other country have today. If we do this right, we will find that doing what is morally right, consistent with the values of India that's a sense of community and mutual responsibility, also turns out to be very good economics in the information age because you need more education, you need more people with the capacity to make the most of this new economy. The same thing is true with the environment. All over the world today there's a general consensus that the climate is warming too quickly and that the consequences are likely to be disastrous. I met with a man doing malaria research shortly before I came here tonight. And we talked about how troubling it was that malaria is now being found at higher and higher altitudes in countries all across the globe where it manifests, so that it's attacking people in villages that have never seen it before. And they're much more vulnerable and likely to have many more problems, all the consequences of changing environment. But in the information age, no nation has to grow rich by putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And in fact, there will be enormous opportunities for India millions and millions of jobs, a trillion dollar global market in developing alternative energy sources, maximizing the use of new energy technologies, the development of fuel for automobiles from farm sources all over the world. It will change the world in the next 5 years about as much as the Internet has changed it in the last 5, and it will do nothing but help India. It would reduce the pressures on your people to continue practices that lead to soil erosion or the loss of precious species. Yesterday I went to the Ranthambhore National Park and I saw two magnificent Bengal tigers, one, a vast male tiger named Boomerang interesting name for a tiger laughter and the other a female tiger. Rather like often happens, the female was doing all the work in this setting. Laughter She was stalking a herd of deer. And it was an amazing sight to behold. Already this year, 20 tigers have been killed in India, even though it is not legal to do so. All of these competing economic pressures. I hope all of you will help to preserve your tiger population. It's an important part of India's heritage. But I think we all understand that the stronger and more diversified the economy gets, the easier it will be to preserve the species, to preserve the environment, to restore the magnificent historical and cultural artifacts that dot the countryside in every part of this magnificent country. So we have a lot at stake in this. So does the United States. We have in Silicon Valley alone 750 companies started by Indian Americans 750 in Silicon Valley alone. We have seen the country literally transformed because of the infusion of new talent from people from all over the world. But we have been especially blessed by people from India and, indeed, from throughout South Asia. And as I look at the world of tomorrow, a world that I hope will be characterized by peace and prosperity, by a genuine commitment to the dignity of all people, by societies which celebrate their ethnic, their racial, their tribal, their religious diversity, but are bound together by a common acceptance that the humanity we all share is even more important than the differences among us I know the world will never be that way unless South Asia is that way. And I have seen in these local experiments in India something I wish for all the world. Yesterday, in that little village where I am known now only for dancing not very well with the village women, I talked to people on the local government council who told me that they now had 10 of their tribes and castes represented in their local government, that for the first time in the history of the village, people from different groups were regularly dining together. Now, it seems like a little thing, but if you consider the fact that 800,000 people, more or less, were killed in the Rwandan tribal wars in the space of 100 days, that a million people were driven from their homes in Kosovo simply because they were Muslim in a country that was mostly Serbian and Orthodox Christian, that the Irish Troubles have been going on for 30 years, and in the Middle East people still die because of their faith and ethnic background, and I could go on and on and on it was a truly remarkable thing to see that in a local community in India, people were worried about how they could get clean water, and it didn't matter much what your caste or tribe was. And they were rather proud of the fact that women as well as men were in the government and that their positions were, to some extent, guaranteed. And they couldn't even remember why they didn't want to have dinner together anymore. This may seem small to you, but if you have seen people like I have seen them a widow in Rwanda who woke up to see her husband and six children cut to death all around her, just because of the tribe they were in if you had been in the refugee camps that I've been in, in the Balkans, in Bosnia and Kosovo, to see people run out just because of their religious faith it is not something to be lightly discarded. If you can figure out how to take what I saw yesterday at the village level and keep working until you reach some sort of acceptable accommodation on the other larger problems on this subcontinent, there's no stopping you. I really do believe that if India and of course, as I said in my speech to the Parliament, you'll have to make all these decisions yourself. And we don't agree on every issue, and we shouldn't. And friends don't have to agree on every issue. They just have to have an honest relationship about it, and then whoever is supposed to make the decision has to make the decision. But I do believe if we can lead the region or you can away from the proliferation of dangerous weapons, toward the proliferation of new ideas, new companies, and new technologies away from the kind of racial and ethnic tensions that we see now in the trouble spots in South Asia, toward the sort of harmony I saw in that little village yesterday, then the dreams that your Chief Minister spoke of are well within your grasp. I believe that if we work together to turn our common vision into common progress, to educate our children as partners, to fight disease as partners, to protect our environment as partners, to expand commerce as partners, to lift the lives of the poorest among us as partners, to fight terrorism and work for tolerance as partners, I believe if we do that, then what Gandhi said of India so long ago will certainly be true. He once said, "It is my conviction that India, numbering one fifth of the human race, can be a great force of service to the whole of mankind." If we have the right kind of partnership and the best of India that I have seen in these last few days becomes the guiding force for all of India, then Gandhi's cherished hope will become the accepted reality for your children and America's children in this new century. Thank you, and God bless you. March 22, 2000 Mr. Vice President, Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, I am privileged to speak to you and, through you, to the people of India. I am honored to be joined today by members of my Cabinet and staff at the White House, and a very large representation of Members of our United States Congress from both political parties. We're all honored to be here, and we thank you for your warm welcome. I would also like to thank the people of India for their kindness to my daughter and my mother in law and, on their previous trip, to my wife and my daughter. I have looked forward to this day with great anticipation. This whole trip has meant a great deal to me, especially to this point, the opportunity I had to visit the Gandhi Memorial, to express on behalf of all the people of the United States our gratitude for the life, the work, the thought of Gandhi, without which the great civil rights revolution in the United States would never have succeeded on a peaceful plane. As Prime Minister Vajpayee has said, India and America are natural allies, two nations conceived in liberty, each finding strength in its diversity, each seeing in the other a reflection of its own aspiration for a more humane and just world. A poet once said the world's inhabitants can be divided into, and I quote, "those that have seen the Taj Mahal and those that have not." Laughter Well, in a few hours I will have a chance to cross over to the happier side of that divide. But I hope, in a larger sense, that my visit will help the American people to see the new India and to understand you better. And I hope that the visit will help India to understand America better and that by listening to each other we can build a true partnership of mutual respect and common endeavor. From a distance, India often appears as a kaleidoscope of competing, perhaps superficial images. Is it atomic weapons or ahimsa a land struggling against poverty and inequality or the world's largest middle class society? Is it still simmering with communal tensions or history's most successful melting pot? Is it Bollywood or Satyajit Ray Shweta Shetty or Alla Rakha? Is it the handloom or the hyperlink? The truth is, no single image can possibly do justice to your great nation. But beyond the complexities and the apparent contradictions, I believe India teaches us some very basic lessons. The first is about democracy. There are still those who deny that democracy is a universal aspiration, who say it works only for people of a certain culture or a certain degree of economic development. India has been proving them wrong for 52 years now. Here is a country where more than 2 million people hold elected office in local government, a country that shows at every election that those who possess the least cherish their vote the most. Far from washing away the uniqueness of your culture, your democracy has brought out the richness of its tapestry and given you the knot that holds it together. A second lesson India teaches is about diversity. You have already heard remarks about that this morning. But around the world there is a chorus of voices who say ethnic and religious diversity is a threat, who argue that the only way to keep different people from killing one another is to keep them as far apart as possible. But India has shown us a better way. For all the troubles you have seen, surely this subcontinent has seen more innocents hurt in the efforts to divide people by ethnicity and faith than by the efforts to bring them together in peace and harmony. Under trying circumstances, you have shown the world how to live with difference. You have shown that tolerance and mutual respect are in many ways the keys to our common survival. That is something the whole world needs to learn. A third lesson India teaches is about globalization and what may be the central debate of our time. Many people believe the forces of globalization are inherently divisive, that they can only widen the gap between rich and poor. That is a valid fear, but, I believe, wrong. As the distance between producers large and small and customers near and far becomes less relevant, developing countries will have opportunities not only to succeed but to lead in lifting more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in human history. In the old economy, location was everything. In the new economy, information, education, and motivation are everything, and India is proving it. You liberated your markets, and now you have one of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world. At the rate of growth within your grasp, India's standard of living could rise by 500 percent in just 20 years. You embraced information technology, and now, when Americans and other big software companies call for consumer and customer support, they're just as likely to find themselves talking to an expert in Bangalore as one in Seattle. You decentralized authority, giving more individuals and communities the freedom to succeed. In that way, you affirmed what every successful country is finding in its own way Globalization does not favor nations with a licensing raj it does favor nations with a panchayat raj. And the world has been beating a path to your door. In the new millennium, every great country must answer one overarching question How shall we define our greatness? Every country, America included, is tempted to cling to yesterday's definition of economic and military might. But true leadership for the United States and India derives more from the power of our example and the potential of our people. I believe that the greatest of India's many gifts to the world is the example its people have set, "From Midnight to Millennium." Think of it Virtually every challenge humanity knows can be found here in India. And every solution to every challenge can be found here as well confidence in democracy, tolerance for diversity, a willingness to embrace social change. That is why Americans admire India, why we welcome India's leadership in the region and the world, and why we want to take our partnership to a new level, to advance our common values and interests, and to resolve the differences that still remain. There were long periods when that would not have been possible. Though our democratic ideals gave us a starting point in common and our dreams of peace and prosperity gave us a common destination, there was for too long too little common ground between East and West, North and South. Now, thankfully, the old barriers between nations and people, economies and cultures, are being replaced by vast networks of cooperation and commerce. With our open, entrepreneurial societies, India and America are at the center of those networks. We must expand them and defeat the forces that threaten them. To succeed, I believe there are four large challenges India and the United States must meet together, challenges that should define our partnership in the years ahead. The first of these challenges is to get our own economic relationship right. Americans have applauded your efforts to open your economy, your commitment to a new wave of economic reform, your determination to bring the fruits of growth to all your people. We are proud to support India's growth as your largest partner in trade and investment. And we want to see more Indians and more Americans benefit from our economic ties, especially in the cutting edge fields of information technology, biotechnology, and clean energy. The private sector will drive this progress, but our job as governments is to create the conditions that will allow them to succeed in doing so and to reduce the remaining impediments to trade and investment between us. Our second challenge is to sustain global economic growth in a way that lifts the lives of rich and poor alike, both across and within national borders. Part of the world today lives at the cutting edge of change, while a big part still exists at the bare edge of survival. Part of the world lives in the information age. Part of the world does not even reach the clean water age. And often the two live side by side. It is unacceptable. It is intolerable. Thankfully, it is unnecessary. And it is far more than a regional crisis. Whether around the corner or around the world, abject poverty in this new economy is an affront to our common humanity and a threat to our common prosperity. The problem is truly immense, as you know far better than I. But perhaps for the first time in all history, few would dispute that we know the solutions. We know we need to invest in education and literacy, so that children can have soaring dreams and the tools to realize them. We know we need to make a special commitment in developing nations to the education of young girls, as well as young boys. Everything we have learned about development tells us that when women have access to knowledge, to health, to economic opportunity, and to civil rights, children thrive, families succeed, and countries prosper. Here again, we see how a problem and its answers can be found side by side in India, for every economist who preaches the virtues of women's empowerment points at first to the achievements of India's State of Kerala I knew there would be somebody here from Kerala. Laughter and applause Thank you. To promote development, we know we must conquer the diseases that kill people and progress. Last December India immunized 140 million children against polio, the biggest public health effort in human history. I congratulate you on that. I have launched an initiative in the United States to speed the development of vaccines for malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS, the biggest infectious killers of our time. This July, when our partners in the G 8 meet in Japan, I will urge them to join us. But that is not enough, for at best, effective vaccines are years away. Especially for AIDS, we need a commitment today to prevention, and that means straight talk and an end to stigmatizing. As Prime Minister Vajpayee said, no one should ever speak of AIDS as someone else's problem. This has long been a big problem for the United States. It is now a big problem for you. I promise you America's partnership in the continued struggle. To promote development, we know we must also stand with those struggling for human rights and freedom around the world and in the region. For as the economist Amartya Sen has said, no system of government has done a better job in easing human want, in averting human catastrophes, than democracy. I am proud America and India will stand together on the right side of history when we launch the Community of Democracies in Warsaw this summer. All of these steps are essential to lifting people's lives. But there is yet another. With greater trade and the growth it brings, we can multiply the gains of education, better health, and democratic empowerment. That is why I hope we will work together to launch a new global trade round that will promote economic development for all. One of the benefits of the World Trade Organization is that it has given developing countries a bigger voice in global trade policy. Developing countries have used that voice to urge richer nations to open their markets further so that all can have a chance to grow. That is something the opponents of the WTO don't fully appreciate yet. We need to remind them that when Indians and Brazilians and Indonesians speak up for open trade, they were not speaking for some narrow corporate interest but for a huge part of humanity that has no interest in being saved from development. Of course, trade should not be a race to the bottom in environmental and labor standards, but neither should fears about trade keep part of our global community forever at the bottom. Yet we must also remember that those who are concerned about the impact of globalization in terms of inequality and environmental degradation do speak for a large part of humanity, those who believe that trade should contribute not just to the wealth but also to the fairness of societies, those who share Nehru's dream of a structure for living that fulfills our material needs and at the same time sustains our mind and spirit. We can advance these values without engaging in rich country protectionism. Indeed, to sustain a consensus for open trade, we must find a way to advance these values as well. That is my motivation and my only motivation in seeking a dialog about the connections between labor, the environment, and trade and development. I would remind you and I want to emphasize this the United States has the most open markets of any wealthy country in the world. We have the largest trade deficit. We also have had a strong economy, because we have welcomed the products and the services from the labor of people throughout the world. I am for an open global trading system. But we must do it in a way that advances the cause of social justice around the world. The third challenge we face is to see that the prosperity and growth of the information age require us to abandon some of the outdated truths of the industrial age as the economy grows faster today, for example, when children are kept in school, not put to work. Think about the industries that are driving our growth today in India and in America. Just as oil enriched the nations who had it in the 20th century, clearly knowledge is doing the same for the nations who have it in the 21st century. The difference is, knowledge can be tapped by all people everywhere, and it will never run out. We must also find ways to achieve robust growth while protecting the environment and reversing climate change. I'm convinced we can do that as well. We will see in the next few years, for example, automobiles that are 3, 4, perhaps 5 times as efficient as those being driven today. Soon, scientists will make alternative sources of energy more widely available and more affordable. Just for example, before long, chemists almost certainly will unlock the block that will allow us to produce 8 or 9 gallons of fuel from biofuels, farm fuels, using only one gallon of gasoline. Indian scientists are at the forefront of this kind of research, pioneering the use of solar energy to power rural communities, developing electric cars for use in crowded cities, converting agricultural waste into electricity. If we can deepen our cooperation for clean energy, we will strengthen our economies, improve our people's health, and fight global warming. This should be a vital element of our new partnership. A fourth challenge we face is to protect the gains of democracy and development from the forces which threaten to undermine them. There is the danger of organized crime and drugs. There is the evil of trafficking in human beings, a modern form of slavery. And of course, there is the threat of terrorism. Both our nations know it all too well. Americans understood the pain and agony you went through during the Indian Airlines hijacking. And I saw that pain firsthand when I met with the parents and the widow of the young man who was killed on that airplane. We grieve with you for the Sikhs who were killed in Kashmir, and our heart goes out to their families. We will work with you to build a system of justice, to strengthen our cooperation against terror. We must never relax our vigilance or allow the perpetrators to intimidate us into retreating from our democratic ideals. Another danger we face is the spread of weapons of mass destruction to those who might have no reservations about using them. I still believe this is the greatest potential threat to the security we all face in the 21st century. It is why we must be vigilant in fighting the spread of chemical and biological weapons. And it is why we must both keep working closely to resolve our remaining differences on nuclear proliferation. I am aware that I speak to you on behalf of a nation that has possessed nuclear weapons for 55 years and more. But since 1988, the United States has dismantled more than 13,000 nuclear weapons. We have helped Russia to dismantle their nuclear weapons and to safeguard the material that remains. We have agreed to an outline of a treaty with Russia that will reduce our remaining nuclear arsenal by more than half. We are producing no more fissile material, developing no new land or submarinebased missiles, engaging in no new nuclear testing. From South America to South Africa, nations are forswearing these weapons, realizing that a nuclear future is not a more secure future. Most of the world is moving toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. That goal is not advanced if any country, in any region, it moves in the other direction. I say this with great respect. Only India can determine its own interests. Only India can know if it truly is safer today than before the tests. Only India can determine if it will benefit from expanding its nuclear and missile capabilities, if its neighbors respond by doing the same thing. Only India knows if it can afford a sustained investment in both conventional and nuclear forces while meeting its goals for human development. These are questions others may ask, but only you can answer. I can only speak to you as a friend about America's own experience during the cold war. We were geographically distant from the Soviet Union. We were not engaged in direct armed combat. Through the years of direct dialog with our adversary, we each had a very good idea of the other's capabilities, doctrines, and intentions. We each spent billions of dollars on elaborate command and control systems, for nuclear weapons are not cheap. And yet, in spite of all of this and as I sometimes say jokingly, in spite of the fact that both sides had very good spies, and that was a good thing laughter in spite of all of this, we came far too close to nuclear war. We learned that deterrence alone cannot be relied on to prevent accident or miscalculation. And in a nuclear standoff, there is nothing more dangerous than believing there is no danger. I can also repeat what I said at the outset India is a leader, a great nation, which by virtue of its size, its achievements, and its example has the ability to shape the character of our time. For any of us, to claim that mantle and assert that status is to accept first and foremost that our actions have consequences for others beyond our borders. Great nations with broad horizons must consider whether actions advance or hinder what Nehru called the larger cause of humanity. So India's nuclear policies, inevitably, have consequences beyond your borders, eroding the barriers against the spread of nuclear weapons, discouraging nations that have chosen to forswear these weapons, encouraging others to keep their options open. But if India's nuclear test shook the world, India's leadership for nonproliferation can certainly move the world. India and the United States have reaffirmed our commitment to forgo nuclear testing. And for that I thank the Prime Minister, the Government, and the people of India. But in our own self interest and I say this again in our own self interest, we can do more. I believe both nations should join the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, work to launch negotiations on a treaty to end the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons, strengthen export controls. And India can pursue defense policies in keeping with its commitment not to seek a nuclear or missile arms race, which the Prime Minister has forcefully reaffirmed just in these last couple of days. Again, I do not presume to speak for you or to tell you what to decide. It is not my place. You are a great nation, and you must decide. But I ask you to continue our dialog on these issues, and let us turn our dialog into a genuine partnership against proliferation. If we make progress in narrowing our differences, we will be both more secure, and our relationship can reach its full potential. I hope progress can also be made in overcoming the source of tension in this region, including the tensions between India and Pakistan. I share many of your Government's concerns about the course Pakistan is taking, your disappointment that past overtures have not always met with success, your outrage over recent violence. I know it is difficult to be a democracy bordered by nations whose governments reject democracy. But I also believe I also believe India has a special opportunity, as a democracy, to show its neighbors that democracy is about dialog. It does not have to be about friendship, but is it about building working relationships among people who differ. One of the wisest things anyone ever said to me is that you don't make peace with your friends. That is what the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told me before he signed the Oslo accords with the Palestinians, with whom he had been fighting for decades. It is well to remember I remind myself of it all the time, even when I have arguments with members of the other party in my Congress laughter you don't make peace with your friends. Engagement with adversaries is not the same thing as endorsement. It does not require setting aside legitimate grievances. Indeed, I strongly believe that what has happened since your Prime Minister made his courageous journey to Lahore only reinforces the need for dialog. I can think of no enduring solution to this problem that can be achieved in any other way. In the end, for the sake of the innocents who always suffer the most, someone must end the contest of inflicting and absorbing pain. Let me also make clear, as I have repeatedly I have certainly not come to South Asia to mediate the dispute over Kashmir. Only India and Pakistan can work out the problems between them. And I will say the same thing to General Musharraf in Islamabad. But if outsiders cannot resolve this problem, I hope you will create the opportunity to do it yourselves, calling on the support of others who can help where possible, as American diplomacy did in urging the Pakistanis to go back behind the Line of Control in the Kargil crisis. In the meantime, I will continue to stress that this should be a time for restraint, for respect for the Line of Control, for renewed lines of communication. Addressing this challenge and all the others I mentioned will require us to be closer partners and better friends and to remember that good friends, out of respect, are honest with one another. And even when they do not agree, they always try to find common ground. I have read that one of the unique qualities of Indian classical music is its elasticity. The composer lays down a foundation, a structure of melodic and rhythmic arrangements, but the player has to improvise within that structure to bring the raga to life. Our relationship is like that. The composers of our past have given us a foundation of shared democratic ideals. It is up to us to give life to those ideals in this time. The melodies do not have to be the same to be beautiful to both of us. But if we listen to each other and we strive to realize our vision together, we will write a symphony far greater than the sum of our individual notes. The key is to genuinely and respectfully listen to each other. If we do, Americans will better understand the scope of India's achievements and the dangers India still faces in this troubled part of the world. We will understand that India will not choose a particular course simply because others wish it to do so. It will choose only what it believes its interests clearly demand and what its people democratically embrace. If we listen to each other, I also believe Indians will understand better that America very much wants you to succeed. Time and again in my time as President, America has found that it is the weakness of great nations, not their strength, that threatens our vision for tomorrow. So we want India to be strong, to be secure, to be united, to be a force for a safer, more prosperous, more democratic world. Whatever we ask of you, we ask in that spirit alone. After too long a period of estrangement, India and the United States have learned that being natural allies is a wonderful thing, but it is not enough. Our task is to turn a common vision into common achievements, so that partners in spirit can be partners in fact. We have already come a long way to this day of new beginnings, but we still have promises to keep, challenges to meet, and hopes to redeem. So let us seize this moment with humility in the fragile and fleeting nature of this life, but absolute confidence in the power of the human spirit. Let us seize it for India, for America, for all those with whom we share this small planet, and for all the children that together we can give such bright tomorrows. Thank you very much. March 21, 2000 Prime Minister Vajpayee. I am delighted to welcome President Clinton to India. His visit provides us a unique opportunity for historic confirmation in our relations. We have just concluded a very productive meeting. President Clinton and I have had an indepth exchange of views on many subjects. Our two delegations have also held extensive discussions. Our discussions have been warm, friendly, and candid, reflecting our common desire to build a new relationship of mutual trust and respect. Our objective is to forge a durable, politically constructive and economically productive partnership between the world's two largest democracies. I think with President Clinton's visit and our meeting today, we have laid a firm foundation for the future. President Clinton and I have just signed a vision statement. The statement outlines the contours of and defines the agenda of our partnership in the 21st century. We both agreed that our commitment to the principles and practice of democracy constitutes the bedrock of our relations and for our cooperative efforts internationally for peace, prosperity, and democratic freedom. We have also concluded agreements and understandings on the establishment of very wideranging dialog architecture. Closer contacts between our business and scientific communities will be encouraged. Both countries will endeavor to enhance trade and investment, cooperate in energy and environment, and to draw upon the vast array of talent, especially in the area of information technology and frontier sciences, for the betterment of the lives of their peoples. We share a common concern at the growing threat of terrorist violence and its links with religious extremism and illegal trade in narcotics. Both of us expressed our firm opposition to the use of any form of violence, whether as an instrument of terror against democratic society or as a means of realizing territorial ambition. Nothing justifies the use of such matters against innocent people. We expressed our determination to intensify our cooperation in this area. President Clinton and I had a frank discussion on the issues of disarmament and nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The dialog which is in progress between our two countries on these issues has enhanced the mutual understanding of our respective concerns. I've explained to President Clinton the reasons that compel us to maintain a minimum nuclear deterrent. I have reiterated our firm commitment not to conduct further nuclear explosive tests, not to engage in a nuclear arms race, and not to be the first to use nuclear weapons against any country. We have resolved to continue a dialog and to work together in cooperation with other countries to help bring about a peaceful and secure world completely free of the threat of all weapons of mass destruction. In our discussion of regional issues, I reiterated our policy of developing friendly and cooperative relations with all our neighbors in accordance with established principles of good neighborly relations, respect for each of their sovereignty and territorial integrity, and on the basis of agreements solemnly entered into. India remains committed to resolving its difference with its neighbors through peaceful bilateral dialog and in an atmosphere free from the thought of force and violence. We agreed that problems between countries of the region should be resolved peacefully by the concerned countries themselves. As a means of implementing our agenda, a partnership in the 21st century, we have agreed to regular summit meetings. President Clinton has invited me to Washington I am delighted to accept. The President will have the opportunity over the next few days to see the rich cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity of our country, to experience the warmth and friendship of our people, to witness the delicate blend of tradition and modernity in our society, and to feel the democratic pulse of our large nation. I wish the President and the members of his delegation a very pleasant stay in India. In that end, I would like to make some remarks on the tragic events in Jammu and Kashmir yesterday. The brutal massacre of 36 Sikhs in Jammu and Kashmir last night is further evidence of the ethnic cleansing that has been underway for a decade and is part of a pattern that we have experienced earlier, including during my visit to Lahore last year. The nation and the entire civilized community is outraged at this premeditated act of barbarism and joins us in condemning this act. The attempt at cloaking ethnic terrorism in the guise of jihad carries no conviction. We and the international community reject the notion that jihad can be a part of any civilized country's foreign policy. None should doubt the determination of the people of India to safeguard the secular unity of our society. Together we have defeated all of the challenges in the past, and we shall do so again. We have the means and the will to eliminate this menace. Thank you. President Clinton. Thank you, Prime Minister, for your remarks and for the warm welcome that you, your delegation, and the people of India have given to me and my family and the Americans who have come with me. It has been 22 years since a United States President has visited this country. Of course, that is not much time in the grand sweep of India's civilization, but it is close to half your history since becoming independent. That is far too long, and this day is therefore long overdue. I am glad to be here. As the world's two largest democracies, we are united in believing that every person's dignity should be respected and every person's potential fulfilled. There is no better example of the power of freedom and opportunity to liberate human potential than the success that Americans of Indian heritage have enjoyed in our Nation. I have come to India because I want us to build a dynamic and lasting partnership, based on mutual respect and mutual benefit. India and America should be better friends and stronger partners. In a world of increasing globalization, our futures plainly are intertwined. Today we have agreed to hold regular meetings between our heads of government and top officials. I thank the Prime Minister for accepting my invitation to visit the United States later this year. We have just signed, as you know, a joint vision statement that outlines the goals we share and the challenges we face. The world has become a better place as more nations have joined us on the unfolding path of democracy. We want democracy to spread and deepen, to protect human rights, including the rights of women and minorities. This June our two countries will convene the Community of Democracies meeting in Warsaw. I thank the Prime Minister for the leadership of India in this important endeavor. And I'm pleased that our National Endowment for Democracy, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and the Bureau of Parliamentary Studies here will organize the Asian Center for Democratic Governance, based here in New Delhi, to share our common experience with the hope of advancing freedom across Asia. Both our nations now enjoy strong economic growth. Both are pioneering the information revolution. Today we've reached agreement to bring more jobs and opportunities to our people, to accelerate trade between us, to help India's financial markets and assist its small businesses, to institute a regular economic dialog between our Governments. We both face, still, the challenges of better educating our children, lifting them from poverty, protecting them from disease and environmental peril. Today, these are global challenges what happens in one nation affects others across their borders. We have agreed to face these challenges together. And together we can succeed. Finally, both our nations want a peaceful future. I recognize that India has real security concerns. We certainly share your outrage and heartbreak over last night's brutal attack in Kashmir. We offer our profoundest sympathies to the people, especially to the families of the victims. It reminds us of what tremendous suffering this conflict has caused India. The violence must end. This should be a time for restraint, for respect for the Line of Control, for renewed lines of communication. I also stressed that at a time when most nations, including the United States and Russia, are making real progress in moving away from nuclear weapons, the world needs India to lead in the same direction. While I am here, I will have the opportunity to speak with Indians about these issues and listen, as I have today, to the concerns of India's leaders and its people. Then our discussions will continue after I leave. I say again, we have neglected this relationship for more than two decades. It is too important to ever fall into disrepair again. I am committed to building a stronger partnership. And we are committed to building a better world. I look forward to spending the next 4 days here, meeting with your people, learning more about a rich history and culture I have long admired, and strengthening a friendship that, indeed, is critical to the future of the entire planet. Thank you very much. Q. Inaudible President Clinton. Thank you. I'll come get it when we finish the questions, how's that? India U.S. Relations Q. This question is addressed to the Prime Minister. How did your one to one talks go, and what are your expectations of the future of India U.S. relations? Prime Minister Vajpayee. I'm glad you asked that question. As you can see, our talks have gone very well. We discussed substantive issues relating to bilateral relations. We discussed the situation in South Asia in a very frank and candid manner. I'm sure, as a result of this visit and as a result of the discussion, a new chapter is being added into our bilateral relations. Nuclear Nonproliferation Q. Mr. President, did you make any progress, did you achieve any progress today in persuading Prime Minister Vajpayee to take any of the specific steps that you have urged to restrain India's nuclear program, specifically, signing the CTBT, banning the production of fissile materials, and tightening export controls? If you didn't make any progress today and if you don't in the future, how close can this new relationship that you both have spoken of become? President Clinton. Well, first of all, on this whole nonproliferation issue, we have had a dialog that has gone on for some time now under the leadership of Mr. Singh and Mr. Talbott. And I would like to thank the Indian Government for that work. Secondly, I felt today that there was a possibility that we could reach more common ground on the issues of testing, on the production of fissile material, on export controls, and on restraint, generally. With regard to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, you heard the Prime Minister's statement about his position on testing. I would hope that the democratic process will produce a signing and, ultimately, a ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban in India, just like I hope the democratic process will ultimately produce a ratification of the Test Ban Treaty in America that I signed. These are contentious issues. But I'm actually quite optimistic about our ability to make progress on them. And again, I thank the Prime Minister for sanctioning what I think has been a very honest and thoroughgoing dialog. We've been working on this for some time, and we will continue to do it. And I believe we will wind up in a common position. Situation in Kashmir Q. This question is addressed to both President Clinton and Prime Minister Vajpayee. Thirty five people were massacred in the valley yesterday, and both of you have expressed outrage at the incident. In the context of ongoing India U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism, what are your reactions to this, and did this come up during your discussions on terrorism? President Clinton. Would you like to go first, Prime Minister? Let me ask you this, could you just repeat just the question you asked? Did this come up in our discussions yes, it did. Ask me the previous question you asked. I want to make sure I understood it. Q. In the context of ongoing India U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism, did you discuss this issue in terms of did you discuss this in the context of international terrorism? And did this question come up just in terms of the violence? President Clinton. Well, first of all, we discussed it at some length, and I expressed privately to the Prime Minister my outrage about it apparently the first targeting of the Sikhs in Kashmir. I don't think the answer to your question is, I don't suppose it came up in the context of overall terrorism in the sense that it just happened last night. We have to know who did it before there could be a conclusion about that. But I think that the targeting of innocent civilians is the worst thing about modern conflicts today. And the extent to which more and more people seem to believe it is legitimate to target innocent civilians to reach their larger political goals, I think that's something that has to be resisted at every turn. There should be less violence in Kashmir, not more. And when people take on others, they ought to be those that have the responsibility for defending if somebody wants to fight, at least they ought to leave the civilians alone. I think this is a horrible development in Kashmir, but unfortunately it's becoming all too common around the world. And one of the things that I hope we'll be able to do together is to reduce the incidence of violence against innocent civilians, not only here but in other parts of the world as well. Q. Mr. Prime Minister, if you'd like? Prime Minister Vajpayee. I have nothing more to add. Q. Thank you. Mr. President, you said in February that South Asia was perhaps the most dangerous place in the world today. Given the massacre yesterday and the increasing nuclear tensions, do you think that the risk of another war is increasing? And to the Prime Minister, sir, who do you hold responsible for the massacre yesterday, and what do you mean when you say, "We have the will and the means to eliminate this menace"? President Clinton. Your turn. Laughter Prime Minister Vajpayee. I'll take my turn. Laughter I'm sure after visiting this part of the world, the President will come to the conclusion that the situation is not so bad as it is made out to be. There are differences there have been clashes there is the problem of crosscountry terrorism innocent people are being killed. But there is no threat of any war. India is committed to peaceful means. We are prepared to solve all problems, discuss all problems on the table. We do not think in terms of war, and nobody should think in those terms in this subcontinent. So far as the massacre is concerned, it's a brutal act, an outrage. This is not for the first time it has been going on. And whenever there are chances of both countries coming together and at the people to people level our relations are very good, as I realized when I visited Lahore but there is a deliberate design to foment trouble, to encourage killing, mass murders, to sabotage any attempt to bring about normalcy in this part of the world. This policy is not going to pay. And I hope this question will be discussed by the President in Islamabad. Q. Mr. President. President Clinton. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press , to go back to the questions you asked me. First of all, I was encouraged by what the Prime Minister said to me in private, which was just what he said to you in public, that he did not want any of the difficulties that we have been discussing today to become the occasion for war. I have basically four beliefs about this whole thing, and I can state them very concisely. First, I think that that sort of restraint is something that everyone on the subcontinent should practice. Second, I think there must be a respect for the Line of Control. Third, I think some way must be found to renew the dialog. The Prime Minister did, I thought, a brave thing in participating in the Lahore process. He took some risks to do it. He'd always said that just the facts of geography and shared history called upon him to do that. But you cannot expect a dialog to go forward unless there is an absence of violence and a respect for the Line of Control. And the last thing that I would say is, I doubt very seriously that there is a military solution to the difficulties that the Kashmiris face. And that makes the death of these Sikhs all the more tragic and the importance of trying to restart the dialog all the more important, not just over this but other issues as well. And the Prime Minister said he hoped I would say that in Islamabad, and I will. I don't believe one of the nice things about having you folks with us all the time is that we can't get away with saying one thing in one place and a different thing in another. We almost have to say the same thing everywhere, or you'll find us out. So I can tell you that this is my same message Respect the Line of Control show restraint stand against violence restore the dialog. Thank you. March 21, 2000 India Pakistan Dispute Over Kashmir Mr. Jennings. Prime Minister Vajpayee said that you will conclude, now that you're here, that the situation Kashmir, between India and Pakistan is not as bad as they say it is. Is that what you conclude? The President. Well, I think that I've concluded that he is going to do everything he can to avoid having it escalate into a war with Pakistan. And that is encouraging. But I still think it's a difficult situation, to say the least. I think it's important that they both show restraint. I think it's important that they respect the Line of Control, both sides do. And then, over the long run, I think what really matters, in terms of an ultimate resolution, is that the people of Kashmir feel that their legitimate interests are being addressed in some formal fashion. But I do feel better about his determination to avoid a war, at least what you might call a full scale war. But I don't I'm still very troubled by the fact there's so much violence there. A lot of it obviously is propagated beyond the borders of Kashmir, and I don't think the Line of Control is adequately respected. And I think you know, what happened at Kargil was very troubling to me, because I supported strongly the dialog between India and Pakistan in the Lahore process. I still think it's a difficult situation, and I don't think they should take it lightly, either side. Mr. Jennings. Moreover, Prime Minister Vajpayee is much more militant with the Indian press than he was with you today. The President. That's good, though. That means that maybe that means my trip here has a beneficial impact. And I hope I can have some impact on the Pakistanis when I go there. Mr. Jennings. What do you mean by "impact," Mr. President? The President. You know, I spent last July 4th trying to persuade former Prime Minister Sharif to withdraw back behind the Line of Control. He did. I think it weakened him when he did, frankly, but it was the right thing to do. I think that they these countries need to be thinking about reducing violence and increasing cooperation and dialog and freeing up their immensely talented people for different pursuits. If you look at how well the Indians and the Pakistani Americans have done, how well they're doing in the information economy in the United States, how well they're beginning to do here, it's truly a tragedy that they're basically trapped in this position which, even if it doesn't lead to war, leads to big expenses on defense, which could be spent on education and health care or the development of a modern economy. So I hope that my trip here and the longterm rekindling of the relationship with India that I'm committed to for our country can basically, slowly, over time, take this in a different direction. Mr. Jennings. Forgive me for being more pointed. You know as well as I do that you're talking, to a very large extent, in generalities. What do you think the United States can really do here, especially given the fact that the Indians say the United States has no role? The President. Well, I think that what they say is that we have no role in Kashmir. And they have every right to say that. Every place in the world I've been involved in the peace process you know, it's because we have been able to inspire the confidence and have a relationship with both parties. But I think the United States does have an interest in trying to avert a larger conflict and trying to reduce the tensions between the two countries. I think we do have a clear interest there. Mr. Jennings. So? The President. We've worked with the Pakistanis for years. We want it and obviously we've got a big interest in India's future. So therefore, I think anything I can do to get them to focus on what it would take to reduce the tensions is important. And I think right now the important thing is respecting the Line of Control, reducing violence, and find a way to resume the dialog. Now, beyond that, it's up to them. Mr. Jennings. You'll tell the Pakistanis they should respect the Line of Control, the de facto cease fire line? The President. Absolutely. Mr. Jennings. And what will you tell those Kashmiris, or Pakistanis, who believe they're fighting to free the Muslim Kashmiris from Indian control? The President. First of all, I think that the same thing I said to the Indians. I don't think there can be a military solution to Kashmir. And the tangled history of it does not admit of a simple solution. I think that the best chance that the Pakistanis have, if they want to have a positive impact on what they believe the legitimate concerns of people who live in that part of Kashmir that's in India, is through a dialog, not through acts of violence and supporting acts of violence. And I think for many years they thought that might get us involved, and it won't. I'm not going to be dragged into something that first of all, that India doesn't want us to be part of and, secondly, that I got dragged into from deliberate acts of violence. I just don't think that's right. Mr. Jennings. So what is America's Kashmir policy? The President. Our policy is First, respect the Line of Control second, do not promote violence by third parties in Kashmir third, negotiate and fourth, with respect to India, that there's not a military solution to Kashmir's problems by India, either, that the Kashmiris deserve to have their own concerns addressed on the merits. But I don't think we ought to get in the position of saying that we think that an ethnically diverse country like India can't exist anymore. I don't agree with that. Mr. Jennings. Do you support the Kashmiris' right to a referendum on their own independence? Do you support the right as it was laid out by the United Nations in 1948, for them to have a plebiscite on their future? The President. Well, there's been a lot of changes since 1948, including what happened in 1971 and a number of things since. What I support is I support some process by which the Kashmiris' legitimate grievances are addressed, and I support respecting the Line of Control. And I think the Pakistanis and the Indians have to have some way of talking about it. And the Indians have to have some way of talking to their own Kashmiris about it that recognizes there's not a military solution. But the most I can do right now is to oppose violence, particularly oppose violence propagated by third parties within Kashmir, and to support reaffirming the Line of Control. And Prime Minister Vajpayee just said today that if the Pakistanis would reaffirm the principles of the Lahore Declaration and not promote or support violence on the other side of the Line of Control and respect the Line of Control, that he thought a dialog could be resumed. I think that is the best hope, ultimately, for resolving this. Mr. Jennings. Who are these third parties you're referring to, involved in Kashmir? The President. Well, we know that there have been instances of violence within Kashmir that were propagated by people who were not from there, but they weren't necessarily elements of the Pakistani Government. I don't want to accuse Pakistan of something it didn't do. Mr. Jennings. Do you believe the Pakistan Intelligence Service facilitates the infiltration of fighters to Kashmir? The President. I believe that there are elements within the Pakistani Government that have supported those who engaged in violence in Kashmir. Mr. Jennings. And what will you tell General Musharraf about that? The President. Just exactly what I said to you. And I want to talk with him, as I did with Prime Minister Vajpayee, about the future. I think that in order to get out of a fix when you get into a fix like this and you feel paralyzed by your past practices, the only way to change it is to have a vision of the future which convinces you that if you want to achieve a certain goal, you've got to do it in a different way. And I'll do my best to persuade him of that. I just don't think that this is the way to deal with Kashmir, and I don't think it's a good enough reason to drive, in effect, the whole existence, the whole policy of the Pakistani Government. The Pakistanis are great people, too. They've been good allies of ours. They've helped us even in my time, since the end of the cold war, to get terrorists, the terrorists involved one involved in the World Trade Center, one involved in the CIA killing. They've helped us in other contexts. I want to continue to be a good ally for them. But I think they have to have a plan for restoring democracy, and they have to have a nonviolent plan for resolving their differences with India. Mr. Jennings. Just so I understand, then, Mr. President, you want the United States on the sidelines in this, giving advice but not involved in any three way attempt to settle the Kashmir issue? The President. I don't think the United States can be involved in a three way attempt to settle the Kashmir issue, unless and until they both want us. I think that that is the evidence you know, if you look at, we're in the Middle East because they both want us, not to say that either side agrees with everything I say and do, but we have a certain credibility there born of years and years and years of labor and a welcoming into the process. The same thing is true in the Irish peace process. So I think that right now what I need to do is to try to convince both sides to avoid the worst and there's something to be said for avoiding the worst here and then to adopt some common principles which will allow the resumption of the dialog. If we can get them to renounce violence as a way of resolving this and to restore their dialog, respect the Line of Control so the dialog can be restored, then who knows what will happen and what they decide to do and how they decide to do it. But if they stay sort of hunkered down in unapproachable positions, then I think we'll have to work very hard to avoid a more difficult situation. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia Mr. Jennings. I have a nuclear question. The United States tells people in the rest of the world to be like us. And the Indians say, "Right. We're just like you. We're a democracy. We're a free market economy, and we have nuclear weapons in order to protect our national security." What's wrong with that? The President. Well, what's wrong with it is that we're trying to lead the world away from nuclear power and away from the threat of nuclear war. And when the Indians took this position, they basically said, "We don't think we can be secure without nuclear weapons, and it's our right as a great nation to have them." And we, first of all, don't believe it does we don't believe it enhances their security. We think countries like Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, South Korea, that walked away from the prospect of nuclear programs, are more secure and have more funds to support their own national security and the development of their people and their economy. And we believe that it sends a bad signal when a great democracy like India, in effect, is telling the world that we ought to get into another arms race. I've tried to reduce the arms of the United States. I hope this year we'll make another effort to reduce the arms of the United States and the arms of Russia. I've tried to support the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Non Proliferation Treaty, the restriction of the distribution of fissile material. So I think India it sounds great to say, "Well, the United States has nuclear weapons, and they're a democracy. We ought to." But if you look at the whole history of this thing, what they're saying is, "We want to reverse the move toward reducing the nuclear threat because we say we ought to have nuclear weapons." Mr. Jennings. Well, they also say, sir, that these are weapons of self esteem and this is a U.S. The President. Self esteem, that's right. If they're weapons of self esteem for India, then every nation in the entire world has the same right to self esteem. So therefore, however many countries there are in the world, everyone that can afford one ought to have a nuclear weapon. I do not believe that that would make the world safer. I believe that that would make the world more dangerous. So I respect what the Indians say. They say, "Look, it's not just Pakistan. China has nuclear weapons. You know, it wasn't so many decades ago we had a border war with China. We have our problems there." But I think that most people believe and have studied this believe that all nations would be more secure if we reduce the overall nuclear threat and reduce the number of people that had access to nuclear weapons. And also keep in mind, the more nuclear weapons you have, the more nuclear material you have, the more risk you have that that nuclear material will be subject to pilfering. So you have to worry about not only about other states becoming nuclear states but even terrorists getting ahold of small scale nuclear weapons. I just think that it takes the world in the wrong direction. It's an honest disagreement we have with the Indians. Mr. Jennings. Yes, because the Indians say to you, "You Americans say well, you just don't trust us" The President. That's not true. Mr. Jennings. "It's okay for you, but you don't trust us." The President. No, that's not true. Actually, I do trust them. I believe Prime Minister Vajpayee when he says, "I will never be the first to use nuclear weapons." So it's not a question of trust. What I don't agree with is that a country needs nuclear weapons to manifest its esteem or its national greatness. Nor do I agree that India is actually more secure with these nuclear weapons. I think that in some ways it reduces one's security. Mr. Jennings. Trust the Pakistanis with control of nuclear weapons, too? The President. I feel the same way about them. I think they probably think they have a better argument since they know they couldn't win a conventional war with India, because India is so much bigger and because Lahore, for example, one of the most important places, is so close to the Indian border. But it just seems to me again, if you look at if you ask yourself, where is there greater security? In Brazil, in Argentina, or even in South Africa, or even in South Korea, where they renounced nuclear weapons? Are those people less secure than the people of Pakistan and India? I think you would have to say they are not less secure. So my argument is, any country can say to us, any country, particularly another democracy, "Oh, you're a hypocrite. You've got nuclear weapons. You don't want us to have any." Well, I'm trying to reduce the store of nuclear weapons the United States has, the store Russia has. The Russians have supported this. And we're trying to make the world more stable. I just think I don't think they're more secure by having nuclear weapons. Cancellation of Visit to Joypura, Bangladesh Mr. Jennings. On the subject of security, I'm really curious. You travel all the time in this extraordinarily tight security envelope. And yet, it wasn't secure enough yesterday to go to a small village in Bangladesh. Did you really feel a personal risk in Bangladesh? Did you end up telling Chelsea, or, if you talked to her, Mrs. Clinton, "I'm going off on a trip in which I am at personal risk"? The President. Well, I think it's better for me not to discuss it, except to say this. Insofar as there was a risk, it had nothing to do with the Bangladeshis, nothing to do with the Government or the people of Bangladesh, and they were not in any way at fault. I did my best to take account of the analysis of our security people and to act accordingly, and it worked out just fine. We had a wonderful trip. President's Security Mr. Jennings. Do you ever have your way with the security people? The President. Do you mean, do I ever disagree with them? Mr. Jennings. No. Do you ever have your way? The President. What do you mean? Mr. Jennings. In other ways, do you ever have your you can disagree with them do you ever prevail? The President. Sometimes I do. I have from time to time disagreed with them and actually done what I wanted to do. But when that happens, I try to do it the way they want to do it, because if I disagree with them, I realize I've assumed a greater risk, and I should do it in the way they want to do it. Middle East Peace Process Mr. Jennings. Last question, sir. You're going to see President Asad in Geneva on Sunday. That's a pretty big meeting. Does this mean a deal is close? The President. I wouldn't say that. But I will say this. Ever since they met in Shepherdstown the first of the year, and then the talks sort of were stalled, I've been working very hard with both sides. I now think I'm in a position to have a sense of what it will take for both sides to get an agreement. So it's an appropriate time for me to discuss this with President Asad, in the hope that we can start the talks again. I'm encouraged by the decisions that have been made by the Israelis and the Palestinians. I think they are committed to going forward, and they have a pretty good timetable. They're going to have to work hard to make it. And I think that the only way we'll ever have this thing the way it ought to be in the Middle East is to finish with the Syrians and then with the Lebanese, as well. So I think this is time. Whether it will lead to a breakthrough, I don't know. I hope it will lead to a resumption of talks. Mr. Jennings. Is it safe to assume that President Asad doesn't leave the country easily and would not agree to go to Geneva to see you were you not to have something pretty good to offer? The President. I think it's safe to assume that I wouldn't waste his time, either. I think that we have it's time for us to talk about what we think it would take to resume these talks and move to a resolution. And I'm going to give him my honest opinion about where we are and where I think we can go. And then we just need to make a decision, all of us, about whether to go forward. But principally, it's a decision for the Israelis and the Syrians. Mr. Jennings. Does this involve a comprehensive settlement, one that involves the Syrian Golan Heights, the Israelis, and the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon? The President. Well, I want to talk to President Asad. There isn't an agreement, yet. But if there is an agreement, I would hope it would lead to a resolution of both the Syrian issues and the Lebanese issues, which is very important in Israel. The Israelis care a lot about that, and well they should. And of course, the Lebanese do. We'll see. Keep your fingers crossed Mr. Jennings. You're enthusiastic. The President. I'm hopeful. March 20, 2000 Prime Minister Hasina. Distinguished members of the press, on behalf of the Government and the people of Bangladesh, I would like to extend a very warm and special welcome to the President of the United States of America, His Excellency Mr. Bill Clinton, and distinguished members of his delegation. This is the firstever visit of a U.S. President to Bangladesh, and it reflects the warm and friendly ties between our two countries, as well as the qualitative formation that has been taking place in our relationship. Let me also thank President Clinton for his decision to begin his tour of South Asia from the soil of Bangladesh. We are truly honored, Mr. President. At this moment, I recall with gratitude the warm hospitality that was extended to me by the President and the First Lady during my brief visit to the White House in 1997. I'm proud to say that the father of the nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, imbued by deep and abiding values of freedom, democracy, and equality, achieved for us this nation. He laid the foundation of Bangladesh U.S. relationship. We value the relationship. It is a matter of satisfaction that these ties have grown substantially. It was, therefore, a singular honor for me today to meet President Clinton. He's an outstanding leader and statesman of our times. We discussed our bilateral relations and issues of common concern, and I am happy to say that our meeting was fruitful and productive. We reiterated to the President that the Government of Bangladesh shares the U.S. commitment to democracy, rule of law, human rights, and free market policy. Like the U.S., Bangladesh also believes in peace, security, and in proactive efforts to defuse tension everywhere. We appreciate the President's efforts and initiative to bring the Middle East closer to a lasting peace and realize the important role played by the U.S. in achieving peace in Bosnia, Kosovo, and other regions. We also discussed our bilateral trade with the U.S., which is our number one export market. Nearly 2 billion worth of goods were exported to the U.S. in 1998 and '99. In this context, we explained to President Clinton the liberal economic policies and programs of the Government, and also discussed our proposal for increase of Bangladesh's quota of Government exports, as well as duty free and quota free access of Bangladeshi products to U.S. Regarding cooperation in energy, both our countries acknowledge the immense potential in this sector and have decided to intensify our cooperation. We have initialed two productionsharing agreements with Unocal and Pangea. Bangladesh and the U.S. also signed a strategic objective agreement, under which the U.S. would provide an amount of U.S. dollar, 30 million grant to achieve increased institutional capacity to make decisions in clean energy development, improve environment, and increase public support for energy sector reform. In addition, we thank the President for the agreement signed between our two countries for reduction of debt and use of interest for local development activities under the Tropical Forest Conservation Act of 1998. This is a good beginning, and we requested the President for further action for cancellation of our debt under P.L. 480. A number of other agreements have also been finalized where U.S. aid would be funding for this in Bangladesh. On the question of export of gas, our position remains that after fully meeting our domestic requirements and ensuring gas for 50 years for use of future generations, the remaining surplus gas will be available for export. Similarly, on the question of export of power, we maintain that with new gas fields being discovered and developed, we must find good use for the gas. We will, therefore, welcome proposals that are commercially viable for the export of power, based on our natural gas. We also apprised President Clinton that Bangladesh could emerge as an important center of IT industry in South Asia. Bangladeshi programmers, computer engineers, and IT professionals could provide IT product services, taking advantages of the time difference between Bangladesh and the U.S. The U.S. could also provide necessary technical assistance and institutional support to Bangladesh for development of IT industry. This could help create employment opportunities for the educated youth of the country. We requested the President to expedite the deportation of the killers of the father of the nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. We stressed that the killers have terrorist links and that they should not be given refuge in the greatest democracy of the world, a country that upholds the rule of law. I am touched by President Clinton's sympathetic response. We requested President Clinton to take steps to regulate the status of Bangladeshi nationals living in the U.S. without proper documents. I'd like to thank President Clinton for the deep personal interest he has taken in the welfare and well being of the people of Bangladesh. I am sure that the President's visit will be a milestone in our relationship and serve to highlight the many achievements of Bangladesh and enhance its stature and standing in the world community. President Clinton extended an invitation to me to visit his great country, which I gladly accepted. A date in October this year will be worked out for this visit. May I now request His Excellency William Jefferson, President of the U.S.A., to say a few words now. Thank you, and the floor is yours. President Clinton. Thank you very much. Prime Minister, ladies and gentlemen, I am proud today to be the first American President to visit Bangladesh. But I am quite sure I will not be the last. Though far apart geographically, our nations grow closer every day, through expanding trade, through the Internet revolution, and through our shared interest in building a world more peaceful, more tolerant, more prosperous, and more free. Twenty nine years ago this month, against extraordinary obstacles, Bangladesh began a lonely fight for existence that did not receive the support it deserved from many countries around the world. That struggle was led by the Prime Minister's father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, whose passion and commitment united a people. Despite many challenges since then, you have come together to build a nation that has won the respect of the world. The United States admires Bangladesh as a nation proud of its Islamic heritage, proud of its unique culture, proud of its commitment to tolerance and democracy, and proud of its participation in the world community. We are grateful for your leadership in the United States and your courageous example in sending peacekeepers to end the conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo. We particularly honor Bangladesh as the first nation in South Asia to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Finally, we are grateful for the Bangladeshi Americans who are doing so much to enrich and to enliven both our nations. Today is only the beginning of a stronger partnership. The Prime Minister and I discussed ways to strengthen our economic ties, while ensuring that future prosperity is built upon respect for decent labor practices, the magnificent natural environment of Bangladesh, and a sense of responsibility toward the children who will inherit the future. Today I am pleased to announce that our Agency for International Development will provide 50 million to Bangladesh and other nations in South Asia to harness clean energy resources, reduce air pollution, and fight climate change. Bangladesh also will be the very first nation to receive funding under a United States program that converts old debt to new funding to protect tropical forests. I'm also happy to announce that our Agency for International Development and Department of Agriculture will provide 97 million in food assistance here. And today I'm sending to our Congress the renewal of our agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation with Bangladesh. Anyone who looks at the map can see that this is a nation of great rivers from many sources merging together as they approach the Bay of Bengal. Today, from many sources of our different national traditions, we meet in Dhaka to build our common future. Thank you very much, Prime Minister. Prime Minister Hasina. Thank you. President Clinton. Would you like to call on a journalist, and then I will? Should we go to the Americans first or the Bangladeshis first? It's your call. Visit to Bangladesh Q. Mr. President, what political and economic factors have convinced you to undertake your first visit to Bangladesh? And would the United States consider favored nation to Bangladesh as a favored nation, when India, Pakistan, and South Asia are engaged in nuclear arms threats? President Clinton. Well, first of all, you ask what political and economic factors encouraged me to come here. I think this is a nation with a very big future. This is a nation that chose to sign and to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty a nation that has used its soldiers to go around the world to help others make peace a nation that, I believe, is committed to democracy, with a vigorous level of political debate inside this country, as nearly as I can see, and a real commitment to the long term welfare of its children, and one in which we feel a great deal of common interest. So to me, this was an easy decision to come here. I wanted to come here. And I look forward to a longer and richer future between the United States and Bangladesh. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Syrian President Hafiz al Asad Q. Mr. President, there has been a lot of speculation that you'll conclude this trip by going to Geneva to meet with President Asad of Syria. What is the likelihood of that? And would it be your expectation, if that happens, that your meeting would lead to a resumption of the Syrian Israeli talks that were suspended in January? President Clinton. Well, I do intend to do that. When I leave, when I conclude my visits in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, I do intend to go to Switzerland to meet with President Asad. And we'll just have to see what comes out of the talks. But we have, now, we've worked very hard with the parties to get the Palestinian and Israeli track back going, and they're doing very, very well indeed. And I think they have a lot of energy and a real plan for the future. And I think this is the next logical step. I don't want to unduly raise expectations, but I think that this is an appropriate thing for me to do, to try to get this back on track, so that our objectives of having a comprehensive peace can go forward. Politics in Bangladesh Bangladeshis in America Q. My question is, how do you look at the Bangladesh politics? Thank you. Q. Mr. President, do you think that this is your first visit to Bangladesh, where people are hard working and sincere. Do you want to make your visit memorable by declaring a general amnesty for undocumented citizens of Bangladesh who are living in your country? President Clinton. I think you asked about the Bangladeshis living in the United States. And I think one of you asked about what I thought about your local politics. I think that the less I say about it, the better, except it certainly seems to be vigorous. And I hope it will be peaceful, because you may know that I have a few opponents back in the United States. We have vigorous political systems that's what democracies are about. But in the end you have to find constructive ways to resolve your differences and go on. Now, on the Bangladeshis in America, I have done what I could to make sure that none were unfairly treated. We have laws that govern this. And it is true that we have allowed significant populations from places where there were virulent civil wars and they were driven into our country because they could not safely remain at home, and then they stayed in our country and began to establish families and earn a living, and there were the Congress passed blanket provisions to allow them to stay. Other people who come to our country in large numbers are basically governed by our more general immigration laws. And there's a limit to what I can do. I have already taken some steps there. But I said in my opening statement, and I will say again, I think our country has been greatly enriched by the presence of Bangladeshis, and we have many Bangladeshi American citizens. One of them is here with me today, Osman Siddique, who's our Ambassador to Fiji. And so I feel very good about the presence of Bangladeshis within the United States. But I have to observe the laws that we have. Lori Lori Santos, United Press International . Cancellation of Visit to Joypura Q. Sir, can you tell us what security concerns prompted you to cancel your trip to the village today? And are you confident it will not happen again on this trip, particularly in Pakistan? President Clinton. The answer to the first part of your question is, no, I won't, because I don't think I can, I should. But let me that I thought it was very, very important for me to come here. And I think it's important for the United States to see its friends and to work for a future. I regret that I could not go to the village. And I'm delighted that the villagers are coming to see me because it will give me a chance to highlight something the American press has heard me talk about many times, which is that the whole microcredit movement in the world basically began here in Bangladesh with the Grameen Bank nearly 20 years ago maybe more than that now. And the Prime Minister and I talked about this. I am honored that I will have a chance to see Muhammad Yunus again, to see some of the villagers, and to try to highlight the important role that, I believe, microcredit should have not only here in Bangladesh but throughout all developing countries in the world. The United States, through AID, supports about 2 million microcredit loans a year in other places. So I'm delighted I'm going to be able to see the people from the village and to support this very, very important initiative in which Bangladesh is truly the world's leader. Q. Sir, and about the security on the rest of the trip? Prime Minister Hasina. I think we can we can stop here. Four questions already have been asked. And thank you very much. Thank you very much. And President, thank you very much. President Clinton. Thank you. March 17, 2000 The President. Good afternoon. For 7 years, our administration has worked on every front to reduce violence and to keep our communities safer. That's why we've pushed for commonsense gun safety legislation, why I've taken executive action to crack down on bad gun dealers, and why in December I said we would engage gun manufacturers in ways to seek changes in how they do business. Today I am pleased to report that a key member of the industry has decided to set a powerful example of responsibility. Earlier today Smith Wesson signed a landmark agreement with the Federal Government and States and cities across our Nation. For the very first time, a gun manufacturer has committed to fundamentally change the way guns are designed, distributed, and marketed. Under the agreement, Smith Wesson will include locking devices and other safety features and will develop smart guns that can be fired only by the adults who own them. The company will cut off dealers who sell disproportionate numbers of guns that turn up in crimes and will require all its dealers not to sell at gun shows unless every seller at the shows conducts background checks. The company has also agreed to design new firearms that do not accept large capacity magazines and will work with ATF to provide ballistics fingerprints for all its firearms. This agreement is a major victory for America's families. It says that gunmakers can and will share in the responsibility to keep their products out of the wrong hands. And it says that gunmakers can and will make their guns much safer without infringing on anyone's rights. It has taken courage and vision for Smith Wesson to be the first manufacturers to negotiate. And I applaud their determination to do right by their company and their country. As I've said all along, there are responsible citizens in the gun industry who do want to make progress on this issue. I hope today's announcement will encourage others to respond in kind. This agreement could not have come to pass without the leadership of many mayors, city attorneys, and State attorneys general. I'm glad to be joined today by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York and Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, as well as Mayors Alex Penelas of Miami, Bill Campbell of Atlanta. In a moment, I'll be telephoning some other mayors, Joe Ganim of Bridgeport, Dennis Archer of Detroit, Roosevelt Dorn of Inglewood, California, Marc Morial of New Orleans, Jimmy Yee of Sacramento, as well as city attorneys Jim Hunt of Los Angeles and Louise Renne of San Francisco and the city attorneys of Berkeley, California, Camden, New Jersey, and St. Louis, to congratulate them as well on joining this agreement and to urge them to continue to work to keep our children safe. I would also like to express my appreciation to former Congressman Mike Barnes, the new president of Handgun Control. I thank them all, as well as the members of our administration team who worked so hard on this Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Deputy Secretary Eizenstat, Attorney General Reno and Deputy Attorney General Holder, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo, and my Domestic Policy Adviser, Bruce Reed. They have also worked very hard to bring us to this historic moment. Let me say again today, the effort to reduce gun violence, to protect our children, to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children, is not about politics. It is about saving lives. This agreement shows we can get so much done when we find the courage to find common ground. Thank you very much. Q. What's the chance of other companies falling in line? The President. Well, I don't know. You know, Smith Wesson is a real giant in this field. And as I said, it took a lot of courage for the company and its leader to do this. But I think the American people will have such an overwhelmingly positive response to what they have done, that I would hope the other manufacturers would follow suit. We have had some success, you know. A number of other manufacturers are already embracing the idea that new handguns ought to have child trigger locks. So I hope that they will do these things, the continuing to work on smart gun technology. And I think saying that they won't continue to allow their guns to be sold by dealers that don't clearly follow the law and that they won't participate in gun shows that don't do background checks, that's a big deal. That's a very important thing. So I really I'm very pleased by what they've done, and I think, as I said, I hope the American people will express their appreciation to Smith Wesson, and I hope that others will follow suit. Oil Prices Q. Mr. President, on the issue of oil, do you expect to announce any of the measures that you talked about yesterday that you hope to do in the next couple of days to reduce the effect of high oil, gas, and diesel prices before leaving for India? And the second question, if I may, on the same subject, did you discuss the oil market with Saudi King Fahd when you spoke to him yesterday or with any other Saudi officials, and did they give you any assurances regarding production increases in the March 25th OPEC meeting? The President. Well, the answer is yes, I expect to have something to say before I leave for India, and yes, I talked about the markets with His Majesty King Fahd. And I think it's appropriate for me to let the OPEC members make their own decisions. But the Saudis have already expressed their support publicly for a production increase. I think everybody's struggling now to find a consensus. The point I've been trying to make is that it is necessary, in order to get the oil prices down to an acceptable level but still have them at a high enough level to earn a fair return to the producing countries and to keep them from precipitously falling and destabilizing the world economy again as they did a couple of years ago it's necessary to have a substantial production increase that will not only close the gap between production and consumption on a daily basis but also enable the stocks to be rebuilt, because a lot of the oil price stocks have been drawn down too low, and that's one of the things that spiked the market so significantly. But I think that in terms of the decision they will make, that's for them to make, and they'll have to announce it. I think they're struggling to try to get a consensus. But they are, I think, concerned because the last time they increased production, there was this really big fall in the oil prices to a level that even those of us in the consuming countries thought was too low. But the problem is, that time they increased production just as the global economy went down, the Asian financial crisis and other problems. This time, we had the reverse effect. Just as the global economy was coming up in Asia and the Europeans were growing, they cut production, which had exactly the reverse impact. So first, prices went too low. Now, they've gone way too high. In our country, for example, lower income motorists, other motorists who live in rural areas and places where they have to drive a long way to work, and a lot of truckers, particularly independent truckers, have really, really been hurt by this situation. So there is a stable, win win situation here that where the fuel prices will be affordable by the American people and others, and they will still be able to have a fair return on their production and not risk the precipitous fall that they endured over the last couple of years. So they've got to find the right balance. They can do that, but as I said, we need to have enough to meet daily consumption requirements and to rebuild the stocks. China and Taiwan Q. Mr. President, any thoughts on China and the elections, on Taiwan? The President. Well, we've already said publicly that we want to see a resumption of the cross state dialog as soon as the election is over. But the election in Taiwan is for the Taiwanese people, and I don't think I should comment on it until they have all their votes in. And they'll elect a new President, and then we'll go from there. Northern Ireland South Asia Q. Mr. President, from a foreign policy standpoint, what is your best hope for this series of meetings this afternoon with Irish leaders, and what is your best hope on your upcoming trip to India and Pakistan? The President. First of all, the good news about Ireland is that even though the institutions have been taken down over the difference between the parties on decommissioning, no one wants to go back to the way it was or give up the peace process. The voters in Northern Ireland in both communities have overwhelmingly voted for it. And I think there's no sense that I got yesterday, in my first round of encounters with the leaders, that there's any desire to go back to the way it was. I think what we've got to do is to find a formula by which the institutions can be restored, the people can get back to governing. They actually found out they were quite good at working together, and they were getting a lot done. And we need to restore that process, and we need to restore a process that will eventually lead to all the requirements of the Good Friday accord being observed. And we'll just keep working on it until we find that answer. And on South Asia, obviously what I hope to do first is to rekindle the relationship between the United States and India. It's the world's largest democracy. No President has been there in 22 years. We have a lot of things that we can do together, a lot of mutual interests. I want to do what I can to reduce tensions on the Indian subcontinent to reduce the likelihood of weapons proliferation and the likelihood of conflict. And I want to do what I can to support the restoration of democratic rule in Pakistan and to continue our cooperation with them against terrorism and in many other ways that we have both profited from over many decades. I also will be going to Bangladesh, and I'm looking forward to that. I have seen a lot of the initiatives taken in Bangladesh, particularly for the empowerment of poor people, that I think are important there and throughout the world. And if you look at the size and the potential of the Indian subcontinent, if they could find a way to manage their difficulties, there's probably no other place in the world with the capacity for growth and modernization over the next two decades that you will find there. If you look at the success of Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis in the United States, that's clear evidence of that. So I'm going to do the best I can. Syria Q. Do you have a meeting coming up with the Syrian President? The President. I don't have anything else to say about my foreign policy agenda today. But I will, in the next several days, continue to talk to you about all this stuff. And I thank you. March 16, 2000 President Glucksman, Mr. Aikins, Senator Mitchell, members of the administration and Congress who are here, and our distinguished Ambassadors of the United States to Ireland and Ireland to the United States. To all the leaders of the parties from Northern Ireland who are here Secretary Mandelson and in his absence, from his video, I would also say I very much appreciate what Tony Blair said earlier. And most of all, to you, Taoiseach, I thank you. I thank you for the award, and I thank the American Ireland Fund for all it has done for peace and progress in Ireland. And I want to say that this is about the most beautiful piece of Irish crystal I've ever seen. It also bears, as my wife said, a remarkable resemblance to a golf ball. Laughter And it is only for that reason, and because he does not play, that I do not feel constrained to let it reside for half a year with George Mitchell laughter to whom we are all profoundly indebted. You know, basically, I don't believe that Presidents should get awards. The job itself is reward enough. But I'm honored and pleased to have this one, because, for me, the work for peace that I have done and our administration Hillary, through the Vital Voices networks it's been a labor of love at all hours of the day and night and through many months of frustration, through all of the efforts I've made just to understand, sometimes, the fights which seem to me to be inexplicable. So much has been accomplished in the last 2 years especially, but really over the last almost 8 years. At the moment, we wish that the institutions were up, not down we wish that everybody was in agreement, not feeling frustrated but we must never forget that the ceasefires now are measured in years, not weeks, that people now shop in their downtowns without fear of bombs going off, that the gradual return to normal life was again reflected today in the announcement of the British Government that further troops will be redeployed for duty outside Northern Ireland, leaving no army battalion resident in Belfast for the first time in 31 years. More than 300 prisoners from both sides have been released. Human rights and equality commissions have been formed. Police reform is underway, and we are looking forward to the reform of the criminal justice system. A peace dividend has begun to take hold in Northern Ireland's economy more people employed there than ever before, unemployment the lowest in 20 years. tourists up by 11 percent last year alone, American visitors doubling in the last decade, rising investment in trade, an economy becoming as modern as that of her Irish and British counterparts. I am very proud of the role the United States has played in this economic rebirth as well. The International Fund for Ireland, to which we are the largest donor, has leveraged a billion and a half dollars of direct investment, helping to create over 30,000 jobs. The Walsh visa program will bring thousands of young Irish men and women to the United States for education and training, especially in high tech areas. Our new microlending program, Aspire, is inspiring small business and entrepreneurs at a rapid rate. And as the Taoiseach said, a year ago at this time, the people of Northern Ireland did not enjoy self rule. Last year, the assembly was established, the executives, the bodies were put to work, and lo and behold, the Irish were pretty good at self government in the North as well. Ministers from both sides met together, worked together, took care of constituents together, made mistakes together and learned together, just the sort of thing democratic governments ought to do everywhere. They were successfully tackling some of their toughest shared problems and building structures for cross border cooperation with the Irish Republic. Now what? Well, we must begin by respecting the will of the people. After all, they voted in record numbers not for stalemate and delay but for progress and peace. The threat of violence from whatever source must be removed forever from Northern Ireland's politics, clearly and unequivocally. At the same time, the people have the right to expect their leaders, with the support of the Irish and British Governments, to show vision and good will, to come together to establish a basis upon which the new institutions can be restored and the Good Friday accord can be implemented in full, just as the people voted. The United States and all the friends of peace must do all we can to assist, to honor the heroic efforts of Senator Mitchell, to reaffirm our lasting pledge that so long as the people of Northern Ireland walk the road of peace, we will walk with you. Tomorrow at the White House I will be discussing this with the parties and listening and working for an answer. The last century began with bloodshed across Ireland, and across the United States in our cities, signs that read, "No Irish need apply." This one begins with the best hope for Irish peace in our lifetimes and with Irish and Americans of every background gathered in Washington to rejoice in Ireland's rich contributions to America's national life. I don't know that I've had so much to do with this, the progress that has been made. Tonight I am more burdened by the fact that I have not found an answer for the present stalemate. But I will say this I have loved Ireland. My wife and my daughter have loved Ireland, North and South. We love the music, the dance, the language, the land. If Mr. Yeats was right when he said, "Our glory begins and ends in our friends," I can say truly, I have simply tried to be a friend. But as a friend who, unlike Taoiseach here, has a term limit and, therefore, who no longer has to stand for election, I must honestly say that I have spent an enormous amount of time as President comforting the victims of violence, mostly Americans, the people who died in Croatia trying to help overcome ethnic and religious hatred in the Balkans, the people who died in a terrorist bombing in the Middle East trying to help the people of that land and region find a different way, Irish victims of the Omagh bombing, the children's families who died in the school shootings in America, and on and on. And I have spent a great deal of time trying to decide exactly what it is that makes people define the meaning of their lives in terms of their difference their religion, their racial, their ethnic, their tribal differences and how those differences come to be magnified in our minds along with the accumulated grievances of past wrongs, so that we are paralyzed to turn the clenched fist into the open hand, and how even when we start and what a start we have made in Ireland it is just hard to go on and easy to stop. I must confess, as your friend, I still do not know the answer to these things. But I do know that life is fleeting, and opportunities come and also go. We have the chance of a lifetime here. You have done it all of you, the Irish parties, have done this. The British have done it. We Americans, we've just been friends. But good friends tell each other the truth, the loving truth. Whatever the differences, it's not worth another life not one. It's not worth another day's delay, much less a year. We're all just passing through this old world with an amount of time which we know not. We're really happy and proud to be here tonight because we sense that good things have happened because people rose above their fears, their hatred, their honest wounds, their deep scars, to give a better future to their children. They're still out there, and they're still waiting. We have to find a way to put this back on track. And if we do, everyone will win. And that beautiful crystal piece there, it'll be a crystal ball, showing a way to our children's tomorrow. Thank you, and God bless you. March 15, 2000 Thank you very much. Peter, Mrs. Angelos, thank you for this incredible evening. Thank you all for coming and for your support. Thank you, Governor, for the kind words you said and for the great work you're doing in Maryland to try to protect people from gun violence. And I want to say, I agree with you you do have the best Lieutenant Governor in the United States in Maryland. Thank you, Kathleen, thank you very much. And I'm something of an expert on that subject, having served as a Governor for a dozen years, served with 150 different Governors. And I think it's amazing to me how many times the team of Glendening and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend have put Maryland first in all kinds of reforms, from education to what's good for children to community service, and now in your attempts to do everything you can to protect your children from violence. And you should be very proud of this. This State is very, very well governed, and I'm grateful to you. I want to thank the other leaders who have come here your State treasurer your secretary of state speaker of the house, who invited me to come back to address the delegates one last time before I leave. That's good. When people come up to me and start thanking me for what I've done, I feel like it's a eulogy, and I have to pinch myself to make sure I'm still alive. Laughter I'm always kind of surprised anybody wants me to show up anymore. Laughter So I thank you very much for that. President Dixon, Commissioner Daniels, I thank all of you for being here. I want to say a special word of appreciation to the Congress Members who are here, Ben Cardin and Elijah Cummings, who have been great friends and allies of ours throughout these last 7 years. I thank you. And Peter Franchot, thank you for your support. And Pete Rawlings, before he was the head of your fortunes with his legislative position, we used to work together on the education commission of the State. And whenever I needed somebody who'd stand up and say I was right when I was challenging people to change 15 years ago, he was there. And I thank you for that. Mayor D'Alesandro came up to me tonight, and he said you may know that his sister is Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and one of the ablest people in the Congress he came up to me tonight and said, "Well, I want you to know there's life after politics." Laughter For which I thanked him. Laughter And I hope I'll be around to see the evidence. Laughter And I want to thank Dr. Richardson, the president of Morgan State. I want to acknowledge him. Morgan State gave me an honorary degree a couple years ago, and I got to speak there. It's the only commencement I've ever attended where there were five different musical selections, and every one was better than the one before. You've got a lot to be proud of, having that fine institution here. Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you and Katie for coming out to meet me at Fort McHenry and standing in the wind. And I'm glad the Irish saved Baltimore. Laughter I wish the same could be said of Washington laughter which the British did burn. And every night when I go home to the White House, there's a big block we've left unpainted that still has the burn marks from where the British assaulted it in 1814, and I always periodically, at least, I remind the people who work with me just to be humble because you never can tell what's coming up the river there. Laughter And generally in life, that's a good lesson to remember. Laughter I'm thrilled by your election. I enjoyed working with your predecessor, Kurt Schmoke. I was jealous when you got over 90 percent of the vote. I couldn't get over 90 percent of the vote if my name were the only one on the ballot. Laughter And I am, particularly in this week, profoundly grateful for what you said about Ireland. My people are from Fermanagh, in County Armagh, which is right on the border of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. And I have a little watercolor in the Residence at the White House of the oldest known residence of my mother's people, the Cassidys. It's an early 18th century farmhouse which still is in existence. I've never been able to trace my roots, beyond speculation, back before that. And it has been a great honor. And we're having a little trouble in Ireland now, but we're working through it, and I think it's going to be all right. And if it hadn't been for the Irish American community, the United States never would have been able to do that. And so it means a lot to me that you said that tonight, and I thank you for that. I want to finally, by way of introduction, beyond thanking Ed Rendell for agreeing when he left the mayoralty of Philadelphia, which has been fabulous to me and given me massive margins I said, "I've got a little part time job I'd like for you to do. Would you become chairman of the Democratic Party?" And he had earned a rest, and he didn't take it, because he knows how important these elections are to our future, for the same reason Peter Angelos said. So I want to thank him. Now, I'd like to say some things tonight in a fairly straightforward way. You can do that when you're not running for anything. Most days I'm okay with that. Laughter First of all, I feel profoundly indebted to Baltimore and to the State of Maryland for how good you've been to Hillary and me and Al and Tipper Gore. You've given us your electoral votes. You've always been there to support us. And through this administration of the Governor, you've been an ardent partner for us in so many of the things that I've tried to do for America. I don't know how many times in the last 7 years I've come to Maryland to give the country evidence that this or that or the other thing could be done, whether it was in law enforcement or education or the economy or the environment. And so I thank you for that. I am very, very grateful. Tomorrow somebody might ask you why you came here tonight, and so I want to ask you to think about what answer you would give. I hope you will say, as has been said, "Well, you know, when President Clinton and Vice President Gore were elected in 1992, they said they wanted to change America for the better, to give the Government back to the American people, not just to restore the economy but to bring our society together, to build a more united community, and to enhance responsibility on the part of all citizens. And the economy is the best it's ever been. And the crime rate is down. The welfare rolls are down. Adoptions are up. Ninety percent of our kids are immunized for the first time 150,000 of our kids have served in AmeriCorps, serving their communities in Maryland and every other State and earning money for college. America has been a force for peace and prosperity around the world. We've got cleaner air, cleaner water. We've cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps as the previous administrations did in 12 years. We've had the first back to back balanced budgets in 42 years." So the first answer is, you know, "They did what they said they'd do. They did what they said they would do." And one of the most personally rewarding things that has happened to me since I've been President occurred actually fairly early in my first term, when a professor I had never met, who was a scholar of the Presidency, wrote me and said I had already kept a higher percentage of my promises to the American people than the previous five Presidents had. And that was in the first term. I believe in laying out a program and sticking to it. I think it's a great mistake to ask for a job if you don't know why you want it. So that's the first thing I hope you'll say. The second thing I hope you will say is, there's an answer to Governor Bush's question about what Al Gore has been doing in Washington for the last 7 years. And again, I can say this I haven't been Vice President, but I have made quite an extensive study in my life, intensified in the last 7 years, of every one of my predecessors and the Office of Vice President. Much as I love and revere Franklin Roosevelt, he did not pick Harry Truman expecting he would be President or with some great thought for why he would be. And when he tragically died, then Vice President Truman did not know about the existence of the atomic bomb. He did not even know that. And thank the good Lord, we were lucky Harry Truman turned out to be a great man and a great President who made the tough decisions that were necessary to build the next 50 years. President Eisenhower gave some more thought, and President Kennedy did, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon both had more influence as Vice President than anyone before them. Then President Carter inaugurated a whole different way of dealing with Vice Presidents with Walter Mondale, who met with him every week, would come to every meeting. And to be fair I don't want to be like our friends in the Republican Party one of the things that Ronald Reagan did was to give then Vice President Bush more responsibility, because the Carter Mondale model had worked so well and because any President in his right mind knows that anything can happen in life and you might not be here tomorrow. I had a different idea. I thought Why would you want to be Vice President unless it was a real job, all day, every day? Who wants to hang around waiting for something bad to happen to the President? Laughter And I believed that the role that had been given to Vice President Mondale and then Vice President Bush was a good thing but only the beginning. So in 1992, when I asked Al Gore to run with me, I defied all political convention. Some people thought I was too young I picked a guy who was a year younger than me. Some people thought I was too southern I picked a guy from a border State. Some people thought I was too much of a New Democrat I picked a guy who basically agreed with me on the issues. But I also picked someone who knew about things that I did not know about, who had experience in the Congress, who knew a lot about science and technology, who understood a lot about the environment, who knew an enormous amount about arms control and foreign policy. And I picked someone who I thought had strengths that I didn't have, because I thought we could work together in harmony. And I can tell you that if you look at the whole history of the United States and you ask any objective historian who has really studied it, Vice President Gore has been, by far not even close, by far the most influential, productive Vice President in the history of our Republic, without regard to party. No one has ever been close. He broke the tie that passed the economic plan in 1993, without which we wouldn't be here celebrating tonight, because it drove the interest rates down and got this economy going again. He recently, as you just heard, broke the tie on the gun safety legislation. In between, he headed our empowerment program designed to bring economic opportunity to designated poor cities and rural areas in this country. He headed our partnership with Detroit to develop new generation vehicles, some of which are now at the Detroit auto show, that we developed over a 6 year period, working with the auto companies and the auto workers, getting 70, 80 miles a gallon. They'll be in the showroom in the next couple of years. He headed a special commission with Russia and helped to continue to reduce the number of nuclear weapons had a special commission with South Africa to try to make sure that once they got real freedom and democracy after 300 years, it had a good chance to work. And every tough decision I've had to take, whether it was a decision to try to restore democracy to Haiti or stop the slaughter in Bosnia or stop the slaughter in Kosovo or give financial aid to Mexico on a day when a poll came out saying the people were 81 15 against it every single tough decision, he backed it to the hilt. When we took on the tobacco interest and the NRA in a way that no previous administration of either party had ever done, he backed it to the hilt. So if somebody asked you the Governor Bush question, what's Al Gore been doing for the last 7 years, give them an earful, will you, because it's a good story. It's a good story. The third thing I hope you will say is, you agree with the fights we're waging now. You can thank me later, when I'm a former President, if you're still so inclined, but I'm interested in what we're doing today. We're trying to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. We're trying to pass a bill to build 6,000 schools and modernize 5,000 a year for the next 5 years very important issue. We're trying to double the number of children in after school and summer school programs and pass a budget in Congress which would give every child in every disadvantaged school in the entire United States the chance to be in an after school mentoring program. We're trying we have opened the doors of the first 2 years of college to all Americans through the HOPE scholarship. We've got 5 million people in college now getting the tax credits that were in the '97 Balanced Budget Act for college. I want to give people a tax deduction of up to 10,000 for college tuition so we'll open the door for 4 years of college to all Americans. This is what we're trying to do now. These are important things. We're working on the peace processes, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, and I'm going to the Indian subcontinent at the end of the week. We're moving. The country is on the move. We're fighting attempts by the other party to pass tax cuts so big that we wouldn't be able to save Social Security and Medicare and pay the debt down and do the things that need to be done for our country. So you ought to say, "The last 7 years have been good. They did what they said they'd do. Governor Bush wants to know what Vice President Gore has been doing the last 7 years. I think he's been doing good, real good. And third, I agree with the fights that they're waging." The most important thing that we're doing right now, of course, is we're embroiled in this fight over gun safety. And I always I suppose I should be glad because they're kind of unmasked, but it's always kind of sad to me when one of these fights turns real mean and personal. I have a pretty thick hide after all these years, and it's not really very effective when they say things like they've been saying the last few days, the gun lobby. But it obscures the reality. Sometimes people just don't like you, and you don't know why. Have you ever had that happen to you? One of my favorite stories is this story about this guy that's walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, and he slips off, and he's careening to his certain demise. And all of a sudden he sees this little twig sticking out of the canyon, and he grabs onto it, and it breaks his fall. And then all of the sudden the roots start coming out of the twig. And he looks up in the sky and he says, "God, why me? I'm a good man. I've taken good care of my family. I've worked hard, and I've paid my taxes all my life. Why me?" And this thunderous voice comes out of the sky and says, "Son, there's just something about you I don't like." Laughter Now, everybody has been in that situation. I know why the NRA, however, doesn't like me. They don't like me because I was shooting cans off a fencepost in the country with a .22 when I was 12 years old. They don't like me because I governed for 12 years in the State where half the people had a hunting license. And therefore, I know how to talk to people they try to scare up against us, those of us that want to have a safer world. But the real issue is not the spokesman for the NRA saying that I want more deaths in America, or that somehow we're responsible for the death of that wonderful former basketball coach from Northwestern, and all these absurd claims which they will doubtless use to raise money on. The real issue is, we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the lowest gun death rate in 30 years, but no one in their right mind believes America is as safe as it ought to be or could be. And no one believes we should stop until we make America the safest big country in the world. Now, that's what I believe. You know, when people start batting around responsibility for people's lives one of the jobs that I was not prepared for as President I never dreamed about and I confess I never thought about it was the responsibility to comfort the grieving when their loved ones had died. I never thought when I was running for President I'd be meeting a plane carrying the body of my friend and brother, Ron Brown, and all those people who died in Croatia, trying to give those people a better life. I never thought I'd have to go down to one room after another at a military base and greet 19 families of 19 airmen that were killed by terrorists because they were serving us in Saudi Arabia. I never thought I'd have to go to a place like Oklahoma City, where nearly 170 people were killed by a man consumed by his hatred for our Government. I never thought I'd have to have parents like the grieving mother and stepfather of young Kayla Rolland sit in the Oval Office. And what can you tell them, if you've got a little girl and their little girl is gone? So I don't really think we should be talking about this debate in these terms. When they fought me on the Brady bill, because they said it would be so burdensome to hunters and sports people, and I said it wouldn't, and we won. We had evidence now 500,000 people have been kept from getting handguns because they were felons, fugitives, and stalkers. Unfortunately, the man who killed Ricky Byrdsong in Chicago and a young Korean Christian walking out of his church and several other people was able to get a gun illegally in another way. Well, one of the ways people get guns, as the NRA said way back in '93, when they were against the Brady bill, they said, "Oh, well, people don't buy these guns at gun stores. They get them at these gun shows and these urban flea markets." So I said, "Well, let's just do a background check there." That's what this is about child safety locks, money for smart gun technology, banning the importation of large ammunition clips assault weapons are illegal in this country then we let people import the ammunition clips that can convert legal weapons into assault weapons and closing the gun show loophole. And oh, there's been the awfullest outcry about how terrible this is and how burdensome this will be. And one of the reasons they don't like me is I've actually been to these country gun shows. You're the Governor of Arkansas, you've got to get out there and hustle around and go where the people are. And I've got a lot of friends that have bought hunting rifles at these country gun shows. And it's true, if you're out in the country and somebody has to go someplace else, it's a little bit of an inconvenience if you have to wait a day to get your gun. But every one of these places has a nearby police office or a sheriff's office where those guns could be deposited while a background check is done. Most people I know of good conscience, that love to go into the deer woods, would do anything to keep another child alive. This is not what this is about. And 95 percent of these people could be checked in a day, and the other 5 percent that I want to wait 3 days to make sure we can check their denial rate, because of their background problems, is 20 times the denial rate for the 95 percent to clear in a day. We're going to hold up the whole United States Congress, go 8 months after the Columbine slaughter? I didn't even talk about that, going to Columbine High School, going out to Springfield, Oregon, calling those people in Jonesboro, Arkansas, where I knew the people in the school. You know, I'm sorry, but I think it's worth a little inconvenience to save a lot of lives, and I think you do, too. Ben Cardin was with me today when they won a great legislative victory over a tiny thing, because the NRA was trying to beat a resolution by Representative Zoe Lofgren from California, that simply said Look, the Senate passed a good gun safety bill 8 months ago, and the House passed one that wasn't so good, but at least they passed a bill and what Congress does when the Senate and House pass different bills, they get together, just like you do in Maryland, and you have a conference committee, and you work out a compromise, and you send it to the chief executive, and he signs or vetoes it. They haven't met in 8 months. And the reason is, they know that our friends in the media back there cannot run a headline story every day for 8 months saying they haven't met I mean, they can't. They've got a lot of work to do tomorrow there will be something else on the news. So they thought, "This thing will just go away if we just don't meet. But if we meet and we have to say what our position is, we'll get hurt, or something might happen." So they just never met. So Zoe Lofgren introduced a resolution in the House today that simply said one thing Meet. Laughter You draw a paycheck every 2 weeks earn it. Meet. Do something on this bill. Even if it's wrong, do something. That's all it said. Well, the NRA acted like we were going to go confiscate guns. And they were up there pressuring people, handing out these awful pamphlets, running all these ads and everything. So a bunch of them came down to the White House today, a bunch of the Members of the House, including about three Republicans, including Connie Morella from Maryland, who spoke. And Carolyn McCarthy spoke, whose husband was killed and whose son was nearly killed by the man who was using an automatic weapon on the Long Island subway 7 years ago. She was a lifelong Irish Catholic Republican. She switched parties, ran for Congress, became one of our Members. And I can tell you, we're really proud of her. She got up and talked about how callous it was for people who disagree with us on the issue to act like we don't care whether people die or not. And the point I made was that I was trying to get a little levity in the situation because it's so profoundly sad, but I also wanted people to think. I said but these people at the NRA, what their position is is that guns are different from every other single safety threat. Every other threat, we do as much prevention as possible, and then if somebody does something wrong and we catch them, we punish them. But we try to prevent. I mean, every one of us was raised with that old "ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," right? But they say, "No, no, no, no prevention. Just throw the book at them if they do something wrong." And I asked the crowd, and I'll ask you, how would you feel if I called a press conference tomorrow morning and I said the following "My fellow Americans, I have been really concerned about how difficult it is in crowded airports, with airplanes already delayed, for people to have to go through these metal detectors. And you've got a money clip in your pocket or a belt buckle that's too big, and you have to go through 2 or 3 times, and it's just a pain. Now, most people who fly on airplanes are completely honest. And 99.999 percent of them are being terribly burdened by these metal detectors. So I'm just going to take them out. And the next time somebody blows up a plane, if I catch them, I'm going to throw the book at them." Laughter You guys would think I had completely lost it, wouldn't you? What if somebody said to you, "You know, most people who drive cars are really good people. They're responsible drivers. They're never drunk when they drive. They're just as good as they can be. And I'm just tired of them being burdened with having to get a license and having to observe the speed limit. And by the way, we're going to rip all the seatbelts out of all the cars, because most people do the right thing anyway." I mean, it's absurd, right? You know it's absurd. That is the argument no prevention, only punishment. So this is a huge deal, much bigger than just the issue at hand. Look, I know what the Constitution says. And quite apart from the Constitution, the American people believe they ought to have the right to hunt they ought to have the right to sport shooting. But the death rate from accidental gun shootings is 15 times higher in this country than it is in the next 25 biggest countries combined, for kids. I had a fellow call me yesterday when he saw all the press about this, an old friend of mine, just to remind me that once in his garage many years ago his little boy and his little boy's best friend were playing with a gun that they got somewhere else. The gun went off and killed his little boy's best friend. I've known this guy forever. He said, "I just want to remind you of that don't forget that." He said, "It took my son years to get over that. He had no wounds, no burdens himself, but he had to live with seeing his friend die, and in front of him, as a kid, in a game they were playing together with something they had no business in their hands." So I say to all of you, these are not issues to be taken lightly. And there are huge differences here between the parties and their leadership and between our nominees for President. And that's going on this year. Now, the last thing I would like to say to you is, we've got what I hope this election will be I hope and pray that there will be no votes on this gun issue in November. But the only way there can be no votes in it is if Congress does the right thing and starts saving kids' lives and putting the lives of our children first. But I want you to think about this. I want you to think I want you to lift your sights now. I want you to say, "So I came here because they did good. I came here because Al Gore was the best Vice President in history. I came here because I agree with them on the fights they're waging now." The fourth thing I hope you'll say is, the big issue, "This is the best time this country has ever known in many ways, and we have to make the most of it." That's what I tried to say at the State of the Union Address. You know, when I became President, everybody was just worried about keeping the ship afloat and turning it around. Well, we've got it turned around now. What are we going to do with it? How many times in your life have you made a mistake if you're over 30, you have, whether you admit it or not how many times in your life have you made a mistake not because times were bad but because times were good in your life, because you thought everything was in a business or in a family situation or just in your personal situation, you thought things were rocking along so well there was absolutely no questions to be asked and no consequences to breaking your concentration or indulging yourself a little when you should have been thinking down the road? That's what I want you to think about. We have a chance to save Social Security and Medicare for when the baby boomers retire, so we don't bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. We've got a chance to get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835, so we keep interest rates low for a generation and the economy hot. We have a chance to give an excellent education to every child in this country by working with the schools and the States. We have a chance to meet the enormous environmental challenge of global warming and our local environmental challenges and to do it in a way that actually increases the rate of growth of the economy, not undermine it. We have a chance to help people balance work and family by doing more for child care, by broadening family leave, by raising the minimum wage, by providing more health insurance coverage to lower income working people who can't afford it. We have a chance to do these things. We have a chance to be the world's leading force for peace and freedom and justice, to help people solve their racial, their tribal, their religious conflicts. And we have a chance to truly build one America at home and to stop the prejudice against people just because of their race or their religion or just because they're gay or just because of their politics. You know, the difference between us and our friends in the Republican Party is, I don't have any problem with people on the so called religious right practicing their religion and taking their religion into politics. That's their business. I've never tried to demonize them. But if they were in power, they would demonize us, just like they did before. They don't think we should have the same rights that we're willing to give to them. They want us to live according to their rules. We're perfectly willing to let them live according to their rules. They want us to live according to theirs. And that's the difference. And I just want you to think about that, because this is such a hopeful time for our country, but it will only work if we are very serious about this election. Now, you heard Peter talking about the money involved. The only reason the money is important is it costs money to communicate with people. The American people nearly always get it right if they have enough information and enough time. They've got a great internal compass, and they nearly always get it right. That's why we're still around here after over 200 years. And it doesn't matter if they have more money than we do. They had 100 million more than we did in 1998, and we still picked up seats in the House of Representatives, in the sixth outyear of a President's term, for the first time since 1822. But we have to have enough. So I want you to think about this is the most important thing you can say. When you talk to people when you go home, more important than "They kept their promises," more important than "Al Gore was the greatest Vice President," more important than "I agree with them on the fights," more important than the specific issues going toward the future, the most important thing is this We have got to be one united country, committed to making the most of this moment. Sunday, a week ago, I went to Selma, Alabama, for the 35th anniversary of the voting rights march on Bloody Sunday across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And for me as a white southerner, it was a moment of a lifetime. Unless you were part of all that back then, you can't imagine what it meant to me, the honor I felt just to be there, to be with John Lewis, who I admire and love, and Coretta Scott King and Hosea Williams, getting up out of his wheelchair to walk across the bridge, and Dick Gregory and Reverend Jackson and all these other people. Kids find it hard to believe that 35 years ago you could get killed white or black you could get killed for fighting for the right to vote. And what's that got to do with this? Here's what it's got to do with this. We're now in the longest economic expansion in American history 20 year low in poverty, record lows in African American and Hispanic unemployment the longest one we've ever had. Do you know when we broke the record? Do you know what record we broke? The economic expansion of 1961 through 1969. I finished high school in 1964. President Kennedy had just been killed. President Johnson was in office. The country had rallied behind him. Unemployment was low. Growth was high. Inflation was low. And I'll tell you something, we thought it would go on forever and not just the economy. We thought we'd win the cold war without incident, and we thought our President and our Congress would solve the civil rights problems of America through legislation in the Congress. And we thought we were going to rock on forever. In 1965 we had Bloody Sunday. In 1966 we had riots in our streets. By 1968 I graduated from college on June 8. It was 2 days after Senator Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for President anymore. Our country was split right down the middle. Richard Nixon was elected President, saying he represented the Silent Majority, which meant those of us who weren't for him were in the loud minority. It was just a version of what you see today. It was, "This old country is divided between 'us' and 'them."' And we've had these "us" and "them" elections. I've done my best to end it, but that's what you see, "us" and "them," "us" and "them." And a few months after that, the longest economic expansion in American history was gone. I've been waiting for 35 years not as President, ever since I was a young man I have waited for 35 years for my country to be in a position to build the future of our dreams for our children. Now, that is fundamentally what this election is about. And when you hear the gun debate, the education debate, the tax versus pay down the debt and save Social Security and Medicare debate, you need to be asking yourself every single time Which decision is more likely to allow us to come together as one America and to build the future of our dreams for our children? Because when I was a kid, we thought all this was going on automatic. And then one day it came off, the wheels came off, and it was gone. And for 35 years I have waited. I have worked as hard as I can for 7 years to give you this chance. And it is in your hands. Don't let anybody you know vote in this election without asking themselves that question How do we build the future of our dreams for our children? Thank you. God bless you. March 13, 2000 Thank you very much. And thank you all for being here. I'm sure the fire marshal is nervous. Laughter You're all packed in here, and I'm very glad to see you. I want to thank Jan, thank you for that wonderful, wonderful introduction and for your commitment to handgun safety and to keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and children. Thank you, Senator Durbin. Thank you, Congressman Blagojevich. Thank you, Mayor Rendell and Janice Griffin and Joe Cari. I want to thank I asked Phil and Karen Stefani to come up here because we're in their wonderful place. This is the 20th anniversary of the opening of their restaurant. So let's give them a big hand, the Stefanis. Thank you very much. Applause They have been wonderful friends to me and to Hillary, and I'm very grateful to them, and I thank them again. I will be brief, but I want to, first of all, thank you so much for being here and for your contributions. I want to thank the people of Illinois for being so wonderful to me and to Hillary and the Vice President and Tipper, for voting for me overwhelmingly in the '92 primary and giving us your electoral votes in '92 and '96. I thank you for that. You know, I had a lot of advantages, running for President, in Illinois. I had Hillary. Laughter I had wonderful friends here in Chicago. I had David Wilhelm as my campaign chairman. I had served as the chairman of the Lower Mississippi Delta Commission, which included all the counties in southern Illinois, and I'd spent a lot of time there. I was from Arkansas, and there's an enormous number of African Americans in Chicago from Arkansas, and that was a big help something which stunned my opponents in '92 when they found out only too late. Laughter So I've had a lot of advantages here. And Illinois has been so good to me. Chicago has been so good to me. And I have now Bill Daley, who is making a wonderful Secretary of Commerce and doing you proud every day. But I want to talk to you tonight about where we go from here and why you came here. I'm grateful that I've had the chance to serve as President, and I'm grateful for those of you who said tonight going through the line you wish I could serve a little more. This is the first election in decades I haven't been a candidate. Most days I'm okay with it. Laughter So I come tonight to say to you, as your President, as a fellow citizen, as somebody who is profoundly grateful for how good you've been to me, we have worked a long time to turn this country around, to get the economy growing, to get the poverty rate down, to get the welfare rolls down and the crime rate down, to get people coming together and moving forward, to make America a respected force for peace and freedom around the world several of you talked about my upcoming trip to India and Pakistan tonight. And this election gives us a chance to build the future of our dreams for our children. It is very important. We have a chance, now, because the unemployment rate's at a 30 year low, because we've got back to back surpluses for the first time in 42 years, to give all our children the education they deserve to provide health insurance for low income working children and their parents to provide the kind of tax relief that would enable every family to be able to tell their children when they're young, "If you stay in school and do your lessons, no matter how poor we are, you can still go on to college" to prove that we can grow the economy and improve the environment at the same time to meet the big challenges out there. We can get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835. We can save Social Security before the baby boomers retire. I'm the oldest of the baby boomers, and I can tell you that everybody in my generation, the people who I grew up with at home, most of whom have very modest incomes, they're very worried that when we all retire and there are only two people working for every one person on Social Security, that we'll impose a burden on our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. We can get rid of that burden right now. We can take Social Security out beyond the lifespan of the baby boom generation. We can lengthen Medicare. We can add a prescription drug benefit, which should have been there all along, so that our seniors who can't afford their medicine will be able to afford it. We can do these things. And we can make America a safer place. You know, it's amazing to me that I get in these tussles with the NRA. They've been after me for a decade now. Laughter You know, I once got a lifetime membership to the NRA I think it's been revoked now laughter because I worked with them when they were trying to educate children to go hunting without hurting themselves, when they were trying to help me solve a lot of other problems. But now their main mission in life seems to be to stop any kind of collective action that will help us to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children. You know, we do this in all kinds of other ways. Most of us are safe drivers, but we still don't object to getting a driver's license or having to wear our seatbelts. Most of us are not terrorists, but we don't object to going through those metal detectors at airports. In fact, we kind of like them now because we think they keep us alive but at some inconvenience, especially if you've got something that jangles in your pants and you keep you know, your money clip keeps setting it off and you go through four or five but we do it, right, because it makes us a safer country. Now, their position is that guns are the only thing that we should impose no inconvenience on the law abiding majority to protect us from the law breaking minority or the dangerous people. They said when we passed the Brady bill, we'd just interfere with hunters' rights and wouldn't get any criminals. There hasn't been a hunter missed a day in the deer woods, but we kept 500,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers from getting handguns, and a lot of people are alive in this country because of that. And the same with the assault weapons ban. I really regret that the NRA leader I guess he was frustrated, and sometimes when you don't have a defense for your position, the best thing to do is just attack your opponent, and that's what he did. But you know, it's pretty hard for me to take somebody saying I really want a certain level of killing in America so I can beat up on the NRA. You can say that on television, but I sat with the mother and the stepfather of that beautiful little 6 year old girl that was killed in Michigan, and I didn't like that. I went and met with the families that lost their children at Columbine, out in Springfield, Oregon, and Jonesboro, Arkansas I didn't like that. I've met with a lot of people who died from violence or whose loved ones died from violence. I'm just trying to keep more people alive. And I'm not interested in fighting with anybody, but I'm interested in fighting for this young man's future with his "No Guns" sign here. And I was thinking today, coming into Chicago, one of the most meaningful days I ever had here was out in one of your neighborhoods, near a rehab unit where we had, I don't know, a half dozen, maybe a dozen people who were wounded severely by gun violence. And that day there was a Chicago police officer who had done 2 tours in Vietnam and survived them without a scratch and had 11 bullets in his body because he'd been assaulted doing his job as a law enforcement officer. And the police and the gun safety groups gave me a beautiful plaque, a very heavy plaque with a model of Abraham Lincoln that was the same used for the penny. And it's still in my office in the White House. If you came there, you could see it today. And I keep it to remember all those young people I saw in wheelchairs, paralyzed for life, who shouldn't have been there. And I say that because there are big stakes here. And there are big differences between what the House and Senate Democrats would do and what their Republican counterparts would do. There are big differences between what Vice President Gore and Governor Bush would do. And I don't feel the need to attack them the way they attack us. I think they actually believe what they say. I just think they're wrong. And I think that you know, if we gave the kind of tax cut that the Republicans have embraced, starting with their nominee, we couldn't save Social Security we couldn't save Medicare we couldn't invest in education and we'd start running deficits again. And I think you like it when we pay down the debt and these interest rates are low, and you can buy cars and homes and keep borrowing money and keep this economy going. And we still have the money to invest in schools and education and trying to help people work their way out of poverty. There are real differences on these gun safety issues. I don't think that anybody ought to sell a handgun without a child safety lock on it. I don't think that we ought to import these big ammunition clips that allow you to convert weapons into assault weapons when we've banned them here at home. And I don't think that we ought to require background checks if you go buy a handgun in a gun store, and then if you show up at a gun show or an urban flea market, you can get out of the background checks. And I think Americans ought to be willing to undergo a certain amount of inconvenience, if they're law abiding people buying a gun at a gun show or an urban flea market, to wait a day or so until this background check is done. And if it has to be 3 days because the records aren't there, it's over the weekend, I think that's okay, too. And I don't think people ought to be bellyaching about that. If it saves the life of one child, it is worth it it is worth it. So what I want you to do is to tell people these things. If they ask you, why did you go last night, tell them that "I went because this country is in better shape than it was 7 years ago. They had good ideas, and they turned out to be right. I went because, more important, because they've got a better plan for the future." And the last thing I want to say is this. A week ago yesterday I had one of the great days in my life. I got to go to Selma, Alabama, for the 35th anniversary of the voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And I was thinking I see all these young people here I was thinking, when I was a young man in college, people were still being killed for the right to vote. Whites and blacks marching together in the South lost their lives so that everybody could vote in my adult lifetime. And I thought about what a long way we have come since 1965. In 1964, when I finished high school, we were sad because President Kennedy had been killed, but the country united behind Lyndon Johnson. We thought we would have an economy that would go on forever. We thought we would solve the civil rights problems through the Congress. We thought we would win the cold war without dividing the country. We thought things would be just hunky dory. Within a year, people were getting killed at Selma. Within 2 years, we had riots in the street. Within 4 years, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were dead, and Lyndon Johnson couldn't run for reelection, and the country was split right down the middle over the war. And within a few months, we had elected a President on a campaign of "us" against "them" called the Silent Majority. Do you remember that? If you weren't in the Silent Majority you were, by definition, in the loud minority. That's what I was in. Laughter And we've been "us ing" and "them ing" ourselves to death for 30 something years now. Laughter And by the way, that's when we had the longest economic expansion in history until this one. And soon after that election, expansion disappeared. And I say that because it is important that you not let the American people, the people of Illinois, the people of Chicago be casual about this election. Because 35 years ago, when we had the same sort of economy by those terms in those years, we thought it would just go on forever, and we thought everything was going to be hunky dory, and the wheels ran off. And I have waited as an American citizen for 35 years to give our people the chance to build one America and to build the future of our dreams. That's what I've been working for these whole 7 years. I knew we could never get it all done in my term of service, but I knew if we could turn America around, if we could point America in the right direction, if we could keep going and unleash the energies of all of our people, we could actually build one country and deal with these big challenges. Now, that's what this election is about. It is very important. You cannot assume any good thing that is happening today is on automatic. Martin Luther King said, "Progress does not roll along on the wheels of inevitability. It is brought by people who are willing to work hard, to be coworkers with God." You have to work. You have to work. You've got a Presidential nominee you can be proud of. You've got a Senator, you've got Members of Congress you can be proud of. This is worth fighting for. When people ask you tomorrow why you were here don't even wait for them to ask tell them why you came. Laughter Tell them the country's better off than it was 7 years ago. Tell them we've got better ideas for the future. Tell them you have got the chance of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams for our children, and you are determined to do it, and you know that the best way to do it is to support the Democrats in November. Thank you, and God bless you. March 09, 2000 The President. Thank you very much. Good morning. Thank you, Senator Daschle. Thank you, Senator Akaka, Senator Breaux, Senator Bryan, Senator Dorgan, Senator Sarbanes, and Senator Wyden, for joining us today. And thank you, Secretary Shalala, for the leading role you've played in the development of our proposal to provide a voluntary prescription drug benefit for seniors under Medicare. Minimum Wage Legislation I want to make a few comments on Senator Daschle's very fine statement and the principles he outlined. But first I'd like to say a word about another debate going on in the House today over the minimum wage. Once again, the Republican leadership has derailed what should be a simple vote on the minimum wage, with a maximum of political maneuvering. The vote is yet to be taken, but we all know the results are already in. The special interests will win, and the national interests will wait. We will raise the minimum wage but not with the Republican bill that stacks the deck against our workers. It is loaded with poison pills that penalize workers and with risky tax cuts that threaten our prosperity and the future of Social Security and Medicare. The combined actions of the majority in the House and the Senate on all their tax cuts is now far in excess of what I have recommended and in excess of what we can afford and still pay down the debt and reform Social Security and Medicare and continue to invest in education. Congress should send me a bill I can sign, not one I'll have to veto, a clean, straightforward bill that raises the minimum wage by a dollar over 2 years. If you remember the incredible day we had yesterday with Cheryl Costas, there are 10 million people that deserve this, and they ought to get it. By the end of the day, two things will be clear about the minimum wage We do have the votes to pass it, but the Republicans still have the votes to kill it. Today's vote, however, is not the final word, and I will continue to work with a bipartisan majority in the Congress that supports a real increase in the minimum wage. Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit Now, with regard to the statement Senator Daschle just made, the Senate Democrats have come today to say that they are together on principles for a voluntary Medicare prescription drug benefit, something so many seniors need and far too few have. There have been a lot of proposals on the table, a good number of good ideas. Today we are moving forward together by uniting around common principles, setting standards that any prescription drug plan should meet. That is a significant step, moving us further toward the day when every older American has the choice of affordable prescription drugs. More than three in five seniors and people with disabilities still lack prescription drug coverage that is dependable, coverage that could lengthen and enrich their lives. Our budget would extend them that lifeline and create a reserve of 35 billion to build on this new benefit to protect those who carry the heavy burden of catastrophic drug costs. Most important, our plan, as Senator Daschle said, embodies the essential principles articulated here today and embraced by the Senate Democrats. I think any plan Congress passes should do the same. It should be optional, affordable, accessible to all. It should use price competition, not price controls. It should boost seniors' bargaining power to get the best prices possible. It should be part of an overall plan to strengthen and modernize Medicare. I think the bargaining power issue is especially important when we read story after story of American senior citizens crossing the border into Canada to buy drugs, made in America, in Canada at much less cost. And if this is not done, then sooner or later, the voters of this country will vote with their feet, and the Congress will have a follow suit, and you will see huge numbers of people bringing those drugs in from Canada. No American can understand why you can go to Canada and buy a drug made in America for dramatically less than you have to pay for it in America. And if our seniors had the bargaining power they deserve under this proposal, that gap in prices would evaporate quite quickly. We owe it to our people, especially to our seniors, to pass a good prescription drug plan. We shouldn't be satisfied with half measures. Keep in mind that a tax deduction would help only the wealthiest seniors, and a block grant, which some in the majority have proposed, would help only the very poorest. Neither alternative would do anything for the seniors with modest middle incomes between 15,000 and 50,000 a year. As Secretary Shalala reminded me today, over half of the seniors who lack prescription drug coverage, especially a lot of them in rural areas and you have a lot of these Members here who represent these Senators States with significant rural areas over half of those without the coverage have incomes in excess of 150 percent of the poverty rate. So I would like to, again, urge the majority to work with us on something that covers everyone, that people can buy into. There is no better time to get this done. The economy is strong. People have a sense of purpose over this. People talk to me about this everywhere I go. And we have an opportunity now not just to pay down the debt and extend the life of Social Security and Medicare but to extend the lives of a lot of seniors by adding this prescription drug benefit. And I certainly hope we'll do it. Thank you. Elian Gonzalez Q. Mr. President, today is the day that the case of Elian Gonzalez, after many delays, is being heard in a courtroom in Miami. I would like your opinion on the subject. You've always said it must go to the courts. Do you think we'll get a solution soon? The President. Well, I hope so. I can't believe it's in the young man's interest for this to be dragged out much longer. But it is in the courts, and I think while it's in the courts, we shouldn't comment. John John Palmer, NBC News . 2000 Presidential Election Q. We'd like to get your comments on the Bradley decision to pull out of the race and his decision to not release his delegates. We're curious to what you think about that. The President. Well, I thought, first of all, he made a very fine statement. I heard most of it this morning before I had to pull away, and I was very moved by his statement and very grateful for the tone and tenor of it and for his support for the Vice President. The second thing that occurred to me was that if you looked at the issues he raised and the way in which he raised them, it recalled again how very much more substantive, in my judgment, the debate was on the Democratic side on the issues and how much more agreement there was. On the Republican side, there was far more disagreement, I think, and it was far less rooted in issues that will really affect the American people and move forward. So I'm very grateful. As to the delegates, I think that he knows the Vice President will have enough votes to win on the first round. He wants those people to be able to go to the convention pledged to him. They ran pledged to him. And then what typically happens at a convention is that if there is a united party, is at the appropriate time the vote is made unanimous. But I can understand why a lot of them probably I imagine he was talking to a lot of them called him and said, "Look, we'd just like to go pledged to you. We're all going to be together. We're going to honor your wishes. We're going to support the nominee of our party." But this is, I think, a matter of pride for what they have accomplished to date. I don't think you should read too much into that. I certainly didn't. I thought he gave a very fine statement, and I wish him well. President's Upcoming Visit to Pakistan Q. Mr. President, your trip to Pakistan, is this some kind of an endorsement to the military government? That's what he said in Karachi. And also, if it's support for his government, how can you still, Mr. President, answer to Nawaz Sharif, who's in jail, and he came specially on a special trip to Washington on the Fourth of July? And he did say that and I think Mrs. Sharif also wrote a letter to you, and you have spoken with all these leaders. Sir, what do you expect from this visit also? The President. Well, first of all, it's certainly not an endorsement of the military coup. I've made that clear. We made it clear yesterday. But it is a recognition, in my judgment, that America's interests and values would be advanced if we maintained some contact with and communications with the Pakistani Government. And I think that our ability to have a positive influence on the future direction of Pakistan, in terms of the restoration of democracy, in terms of the ultimate resolution of issues in the Indian subcontinent, and in terms of avoiding further dangerous conflicts will be greater if we maintain our cooperation. After all, Pakistan was our ally throughout the cold war. Since I've been President, Pakistan on more than one occasion has helped us to arrest terrorists, often at some risk to the regime. And as you pointed out, the then Prime Minister, Sharif, pulled the Pakistani troops back across the line of control after a July 4th meeting with me last year. So I think it would be a mistake not to go, but it would be a grave mistake for people to think that my going represents some sort of endorsement of a nondemocratic process which occurred there. That's not true. You, and then the little boy there. Minimum Wage Legislation Q. You said that there will be some room for negotiation on the minimum wage issue in terms of obviously, your plan, the Democrats plan is for 2 years, the Republicans is for 3 years with a tax cut. Do you think ultimately we'll see a compromise? The President. I would like to see a bill we can all sign. Our side not just me but our Members of Congress we offered them some very helpful small business tax cuts. We're not unmindful of the fact that one of the reasons we've had this recovery is that every year we've had a record number of new small businesses starting, that not all of them make a lot of money, especially in the early years. And we responded to their desire to have small business tax incentives and cuts with a rather generous proposal, and we got nowhere. They, instead, put this highly regressive, overly expensive program through that would increase inequality in America at a time when we're trying to reduce it and having nothing to do with the minimum wage. There are also let me say, there are other provisions in this bill which actually try to make the rest of America's work force pay with reductions in worker protections in return for the minimum wage workers getting a pay increase, and I don't think that's right, either. We shouldn't be pitting one group of workers against another. And are we willing to talk? Of course. Always. Keep in mind, I had the conferees here on the gun safety issues this week, and we're trying to get the conference up and going there, and we're working our hearts out on it. But we have to yes, we're willing to work on it. But I'm telling you, it is wrong, as well as this country is doing, with the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, more wealth being created than any time in history, any time in the history of this country, any time in the history of the world, not to raise the minimum wage. It's wrong. Young man, did you have a question? President's Autograph Q. May I please have an autograph for my little sister? The President. Absolutely. Laughter Gays in the Military Q. There is a report this morning that there is a rise in the military of harassment, both physical and verbal, of gay and lesbian members of the military. First of all, are you concerned about that report? And do you believe that the military is doing enough to prevent this from happening? The President. Well, I'd like to make a couple of points. I'm concerned about the report. I haven't read it. Secretary Cohen hasn't read it. We will read it and take appropriate action. I do want to point out that in the last several months the Pentagon has issued new guidelines for implementing the policies related to gays in the military, specifically designed to reduce harassment. They have started new training programs, and the Secretary of Defense has made it absolutely clear what the policy is and is not. So if I expect let me just say, if this report is accurate, I would expect to see a substantial improvement this year substantial. But I also want to make sure that we study the report in the White House, that the Secretary of Defense studies it, and that we take any appropriate action that might be called for. But I knew nothing about the report until I read the morning press reports, so I can't comment further than that. Yes. 2000 Census Q. Mr. President, the census has started, after being politicized over the last couple of years. At some point, should this debate of statistical sampling versus pure enumeration be resolved so that there's a consistency between congressional funding between Government funding and the congressional redistricting? The President. Well, of course, it should be. But I think it ought to be resolved in favor of what will give us the most accurate count. Look, the only reason I favored statistical sampling is because the National Science Foundation said that was the most accurate way to count people and that we undercounted large numbers of Americans in many States last year. I'm for whatever's most accurate. And I don't think it should be a political deal. I remember one prominent House Member, who should remain unnamed, I think, once suggested to me that I was taking a foolish position here, that I ought to be for hiring 2, 3, 4, million people who were overwhelmingly Democratic voters, in an election year, to go out and knock on doors and count people, that this didn't make any sense. And I said, if he thought that was such good politics, why was he on the other side of it? And he confessed that it was because he thought they would count fewer than were actually there, that the statistical sampling would give us larger numbers. I don't think this ought to be a political issue, not for us, not for them. We ought to try to find what is the most accurate way. And of course, then these constitutional issues have been raised, but I can't believe that can't be dealt with. Go ahead, John John Roberts, CBS News . White House E Mail Q. Sir, what's your response to Congressman Burton on the issue of these E mails? The President. Well, I just got the letter, and my understanding is that there will be a response to him, and that it will all be handled in an appropriate way. And I have referred all the questions to the Counsel's Office, but I think they will handle it just fine. Yes, go ahead. Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit Q. On prescription drugs, have you had any, in light of the principals here, have you had any conversation with the Republican leadership, either in the House or Senate, on this, and do you have any sense of how close you might be? The President. I haven't talked to them in the last couple of weeks. But earlier, I did when we were getting the year started off. And I think that we might be able to do something. There is some interest there in doing something. Now, some of the Republicans said they wanted to do a very limited program only for very low income seniors, and the problem for that, as I said, is that half the people that can't get coverage are above 150 percent of the poverty line. If you've got a substantial drug bill and you're 75 years old and you're living on 15,000, that's not all that much money. Look, this is, again, this is like this gun issue. This is something that, if we want to get an agreement that moves the American people forward and makes this a more just and a more healthy society, we can get an agreement. Everybody wanted an agreement in '96 on welfare reform. We got it. We wanted an agreement on the minimum wage. We got it. We wanted an agreement on the balanced budget in '97, which had substantial tax cuts that benefited middle class American families, and we got it. If they want an agreement, we'll sit down, and we'll work through this, and we'll get an agreement. We can do this. Q. Will the pressures of an election year work for or against getting something done on prescription drugs? The President. I think, on balance, in favor, if we all work at it. That is that's what I think. Do you agree with that? I'm not see, I haven't given up on Medicare reform yet. I haven't given up on getting big things done here. Minimum Wage Legislation Q. Mr. President, do you think that most Republicans who do vote for a higher minimum wage will do so confident in the knowledge that you would veto the bill, and that, in fact, they don't really want the higher minimum wage? The President. First of all, I've always been reluctant in politics to evaluate other people's motives. I think you have to judge their actions and evaluate what they do. I think it's a very hazardous thing, talking about people's motives. But my belief is based on what I have heard said, is, I think some of them may be doing that, and some of them may really believe in both the weakening of worker protections that's in this bill and the shape and structure of their tax cut. But I have to add up all these tax cuts they're passing, as well as evaluate them on the merits, and as I said, I can't allow one group of American working people to be pitted against another. I don't think a price for raising the minimum wage should be weakening worker protections for others in the work force. So they may believe these things, but I don't, and I can't let it happen. I don't think it's right. And so if they believe in the minimum wage, the best thing to do is to send a straightforward minimum wage bill. If they want tax relief for small business, the best thing to do is sit down and negotiate with us, and we'll give it to them, but it will be at a more affordable level in a more targeted way. But it will be very helpful, generous, and positive. So I'd like to see that done. But it's not just me the Congress, the Democrats in Congress have offered a small business tax relief package that I thought was quite good and one that wouldn't undermine our goal of paying the debt off and having the funds to save Social Security and Medicare. Thank you. Judicial Nomination Q. Mr. President, do you have anything to say to Congress on the Paez vote? The President. It's time, he's waited long enough. It's 4 years, and it must be a happy day for all of us. I hope that, and I believe, we have the votes. February 29, 2000 Thank you. Well, I was looking out at the beautiful vista first, I was looking down on you. Did you see me up there? And I was looking at this magnificent home and thinking how fortunate we are, all of us, to be in this country at this moment, to be free citizens, to be able to come here to support someone in whom we believe. I want to begin by thanking Phil and Pat Frost. They have been with me a long time, too, and I am honored to be here in their magnificent home. I want to thank all of you who helped to spearhead this immensely successful event for Elaine tonight. I want to say that I'm glad that her children, David and Anne, are here, and I'm sorry the judge couldn't come. But far be it for us to get him in trouble. We want him to stay on the bench and make good decisions. Laughter I want to say how grateful I am for the friendship and support I have enjoyed from Congressman Peter Deutsch and his wife, Lori, who is here. And I thank them so much for their service to the United States. And Representative Sally Heyman, we're glad you're here. And I want to say a special word of thanks to my longtime personal friend Bill Nelson. I am thrilled that he is running for the Senate and thrilled he is doing so well. I want you to know why I'm here tonight, besides the fact that I've been dying to see Phil and Pat's house. I'm here for three reasons. One is, Elaine was there for me when only my mother thought I could be elected. Laughter And she reminded me tonight that when we first met, she said, "Now, look, I'm going to ask you some questions, but I want you to know in advance I'm going to be for you anyway, so you don't have to tailor your answers. Just shoot me straight." And we've been shooting each other straight now for, well, more than 8 years. I'll never forget when the first significant victory I won was in the Florida Democratic Convention when they had this straw poll. And Elaine and some of my other supporters hauled Hillary and me from meeting to meeting to meeting. I thought New Hampshire was tough till I met these people in all these little caucuses, you know. I had to answer 400 questions. When I got through with that caucus, I said, "I hope we did well, but I'm so tired, I don't care whether we win or not anymore." Laughter It was an amazing experience. And we had a lot of opponents, a lot of good people running for President in 1992. And we got a majority of the Florida Democrats at that caucus, and I feel profoundly indebted to Elaine Bloom. The second reason I'm here is because she embodies the philosophy that we call the New Democratic philosophy, that is conservative in part but also liberal in part. I believed, when I ran for President, that there was something really wrong with the way things were going in Washington. I felt that it bore no reasonable relationship to the work I had done for a decade as Governor, the work that she was trying to do here in the legislature with people like Governor Chiles and Governor, now Senator Graham before him, the work of getting people from different walks of life together, defining goals, defining opportunities, defining problems, then figuring out what to do about them. Washington was a place where, maybe because people felt they were so far from their constituents and it was so hard to get that 15 seconds on the evening news at night, they seemed to me to be more interested in sort of lobbing rhetorical bombs at one another and putting each other in little boxes and repeating over and over and over again the fights of yesterday as America kept moving into tomorrow. I was absolutely convinced then that there was nothing wrong with this country that couldn't be fixed by what was right with it. And so, with Elaine's help, with the Frosts' help, with a lot of you in this room, I asked the American people to give me and then give me and Al Gore a chance to see if a unifying philosophy of opportunity for every American and responsibility from every American and a community including all the people of this country could lead us to new ideas and a new direction. And now it's worked out pretty well. And I am immensely gratified to have been a part of the progress this country has made. I'm proud of it, and I know I am not solely responsible for it. If it hadn't been for applause Thank you. It wouldn't have been possible if this country weren't the greatest environment for entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the world. It wouldn't have been possible if the American people weren't committed to working harder and smarter, and as the economy grew they didn't ask for inflationary pay increases. They understood they were in a world economy, and they ought to be tied to the growth of their enterprises. It wouldn't have been possible without the support of the members of my party in Congress, who, without any help from the Republicans, voted to bring the deficit down in 1993, got interest rates down, and started this long job creating boom. So I am very grateful. But the third reason I'm here is the most important of all, and that is that in 11 months or so I'll be just another citizen, but the work of America goes on. We've turned this country around. We're moving in the right direction. But if you really think about what you'd like America to be, there's a great deal yet to be done. Yes, we've turned deficits to surpluses. But I think we ought to take this country completely out of debt, for the first time since 1835, to keep interest rates down for a new generation. Yes, the schools are getting better and more of our kids are going to college. But I don't think we ought to stop until we've got the certainty that every child, without regard to race or income, can get a world class education and every person can go on to college and stay there for 4 years and not have to drop out because of the cost. I don't think we should stop until we find a way for every American to have affordable health care, until we find a way to applause Thank you. And Florida I don't think we should stop until we know that when the baby boom generation retires and I'm the oldest of the baby boomers that's everybody born between 1946 and 1964 when we all get into our retirement years, there will only be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. And I don't believe we should stop until we have modernized Social Security and Medicare for the 21st century and secured it so that the baby boomers can retire without the gnawing worry that we will be an awesome burden to our children and our children's ability to raise our grandchildren. And I can tell you, the people my age, we think about this a lot. And I'm trying to get this Congress to lengthen the life of Social Security, to lengthen the life of Medicare, to add a prescription drug benefit, but we can't stop until that's done. I'm proud of the fact that we've done a lot to save the Everglades, but I don't think we should stop until we reverse the tide of global warming and prove we can grow the economy as we improve the environment. I'm proud of the fact that we've made progress for peace and freedom around the world, but there are still threats from biological and chemical and nuclear weapons. There are threats from terrorists. And there are still profound problems in every corner of the world that people have because of their racial, religious, ethnic, and tribal differences. And we shouldn't stop. And I can tell you that it profoundly matters who is in the Congress. It's a big deal whether Bill Nelson gets elected to the Senate or not, more than you can imagine. There's going to be somewhere between two and four Justices appointed to the Supreme Court. I hope that Vice President Gore will be making those appointments, but the ultimate backstop is the Senate. That's another reason I'm so interested in the Senate race from New York one of many. Laughter And I want to thank so many of you tonight said something nice about Hillary or said you were helping her, and I'm very grateful to you for that. It matters because we're going to have to decide whether to follow the path of fiscal responsibility or not. We have doubled spending on education and training in my term, while getting rid of the deficit. And we did it by giving you the smallest Government in 40 years, by eliminating hundreds of programs. Was that a conservative decision or a liberal decision? Well, it was conservative We got rid of the deficit. It was liberal We doubled spending on education and training. That's the kind of discipline and values and vision we need. It matters. And finally, I'd like to thank all the law enforcement people who are here for supporting Elaine Bloom. One of the reasons I wanted to be identified with her is that she knew you could be a Democrat and still believe we ought to drive the crime rate down and that you could be tough and smart about crime. That's very important to me. I don't know if you had a chance to watch the news tonight, but a 6 year old child near Flint, Michigan, shot another 6 year old child and killed her today. Now, I don't know all the facts yet. I thought I had them, and I didn't. The first version I had wasn't right, but anyway, somehow what's a 6 year old kid doing with a gun, anyway? And what can we do about it? I've supported putting 100,000 police on the street. I've supported more efforts in the drug war. I've supported putting 50,000 more police out there now in high crime areas. But we've got to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and away from children. We just do. There's a huge difference there. Is that conservative or liberal? The NRA crowd says that's liberal. I think that I'm trying to conserve life. I think it's conservative in the best sense, and I think it's the right thing to do. So I'm here because I feel obligated to a woman I love, not only because she supported me, because when she disagreed with me or was worried about it, she'd call and chew me out about it. And I like that. Too many people are afraid to tell Presidents what they think, and that's what gets Presidents in trouble. She was a true friend. She always told me exactly what she thought. I'm here because she shares my philosophy. But mostly I'm here because of you, and because when I'm just a citizen and I'm not President anymore, I want my country to do well. I said something today at lunch I'd just like for you to think about, and I'll say it much briefer tonight. The last time we had we now have the longest economic expansion in history. The last longest economic expansion in history was 1961 to 1969, the years in which I grew up, graduated from high school, went to college, and finished college. When I graduated from high school in '64, Lyndon Johnson was President, passing civil rights legislation. We thought the economy would boom forever. We thought the civil rights problems would be solved in law, not in the streets. We thought we would prevail in the cold war without any division in our country. When I graduated from college 4 years later, it was 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for reelection. The streets of Washington had burned after Dr. King was killed, and this country was divided right down the middle on the Vietnam war. And we were divided in a Presidential election where President Nixon said he represented the Silent Majority, which meant those who disagreed were in the loud minority, people like me. And we've been having these "us" and "them" elections ever since "us" and "them" politics. Now, the country has been turned around, but we have big challenges out there. And what I want to say to you is that, in 1964, if anybody had told us the wheels would run off by 1968, no one would have believed it. This is not just a time for celebration this is a time for humility and for resolve. As a citizen not as President, as an American I have been waiting for 35 years for my country to be in a position to build the future of our dreams for our children. That work will have to be done by the people who will be here after the 2000 election. That's the most important reason I am here. I trust Elaine Bloom with my daughter's future, with my grandchildren's future, with the future of America. And I ask you all to be vigilant and disciplined and active in this election. Just because we're doing well doesn't mean you can relax. You should feel a heavier obligation. And whenever you are tempted to think it doesn't matter, you remember this story I told you tonight. I have waited 35 years. We've got a second chance, and we need to make the most of it. Thank you very much. February 29, 2000 Thank you very much. First of all, Bren, thank you for your wonderful remarks and for opening your home to us today, giving those of us who suffered through an unusually long, cold Washington winter a chance to gaze out on the Atlantic under different circumstances, and for always being there for us. I also want to thank you for what you have done for the most important U.S. Senate candidate in the country to me. Hillary had a wonderful time here, and I thank you and the rest of you who helped her. I thank you for that. I'd like to join with Joe Andrew in expressing my appreciation to all the other officers of the Democratic Party and the Florida officials that are here. Congressman Peter Deutsch and Lori flew down with me today. We had a good time, and I was glad to be able to ferry them back home, for a few hours anyway. I'd like to thank Danny Abraham, Cynthia Friedman, the Carters, all the others who have done this fine work today, and I'd like to put in a special plug for my longtime friend Representative Elaine Bloom, who is running for Congress here. She was for me in December of 1991, when only my mother thought I could be elected President. Laughter And I am for her in 2000. I'm going to do what I can to help. But I thank you for running for Congress. Thank you. Let me just say a few words today about this millennial election and about why we're where we are. Eight years ago, when I ran for President, I did so because I thought Washington had become a place that was almost turned in on itself, obsessed with itself, and stuck in the thinking and the debate of a time that was long gone. It was obvious then that we were moving into a global economy, into a global society, that the whole way we work, the way we earn a living, the way we relate to each other and the rest of the world was undergoing a profound change. And yet, in Washington, we just kept repeating over and over and over again the same debates. Each party took the same sides, staked out the same opposite position. Paralysis occurred, and the results were not particularly satisfying to the American people. And so I decided that I would ask the American people to give me a chance to try a different approach to try to have a politics that would unite and not divide to try to have a budget policy that would restore basic arithmetic to the American budget and to stop pretending that we could ever get rid of high interest rates and low investment and slow growth until we got rid of the Government deficit to put the American people first in profound ways, so that it would no longer be about Washington but about how people lived out here. And we've been working at it pretty steady now for 7 years and a month, and the results have been good. We have the longest expansion in history and the lowest unemployment rate and welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, lowest crime rates in 25 years. Adoptions are up. Ninety percent of our kids are immunized for the first time. The collegegoing rate's increased a lot. We've got 150,000 young Americans who are doing community service through the AmeriCorps program, 1,000 colleges with their kids out, going into grade schools every week to teach people to read. The country is coming together and moving forward. And that is the good news. But I think the most interesting thing about this election is, in my judgment, that the winner will be determined by what the election is about in the President's race, in the Congress races, in the Governors' races. And you have to help decide what the election is about. And there's more latitude now because things seem to be going well, so we're under the illusion that there is more latitude to decide what the election is about. I always tell people the Presidential election is the world's greatest job interview, except that the job interview, unlike most jobs, this job interview has two components. First of all, people have got to be able to look at you and size up, "Can I imagine this person having this job?" And then they have to decide what the job is about. And they are two different things. If you don't pass the first test, you don't get to take the second one. Now, I think all four of the candidates that are left passed the first test. The American people can look at them and imagine them being President. But the winner will be determined by, what is the job about? What is the election about what is the charter what do you want what are we to do with this enormous amount of prosperity, this historic moment where we can make peace? Very often, democracies mishandle good times, because people are under the illusion that it's just sort of on automatic and it goes on forever. And when I gave the State of the Union Address, I asked the American people to work with me this year and the Congress to try to overcome the partisan divides and to take a long look ahead at the big challenges facing America. I asked them to pay the debt off, get America out of debt for the first time since 1835. I asked them to deal with the aging of America. We're going to double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years. I released a Medicare report today that said the fastest growing group of seniors are people over 85. They will spend almost a quarter of their lives on Medicare. And since 70 percent of our seniors don't have access to affordable quality medicine, I'd like to see them get it under the Medicare program. But we also have to change the program so it will last longer. We have to lengthen the life of Social Security. I persuaded this Congress to save the Social Security surplus that is the surplus that we get because you pay more in Social Security taxes than we pay out now but I haven't persuaded them to do anything with it. So the good news is we're paying down the debt. But the bad news is we haven't saved Social Security yet. Because if they would just take the interest savings we get from a lower debt and put it into the Social Security Trust Fund, we could run it out to 2050, which would take it beyond the life expectancy of all but the most fortunate baby boomers. We have to deal with this. We've got to face the fact that we have the largest and most diverse student population in our history, and we no longer have an excuse for not making our schools excellent. We now know how to do it. We were talking the other night with the Governors, who just left town, in Washington. And there were a couple of people, one in my Cabinet, the Secretary of Education, and one retiring Governor, the Governor of North Carolina, who has the best school improvement record in America, and we were laughing about what it was like when we started as young men together 22 years ago as Governors. Everybody wanted to make the schools better, but we didn't really know how. Now we know. We have mountains and mountains and mountains of evidence of what works. And the National Government should play a role in that. There's nothing more important than giving all our kids a good education. Is that going to be a part of this election, or not? We've got the crime rate down 7 years in a row. It's the lowest it's been in 25 years. But nobody seriously believes this country is as safe as it ought to be. We can make America the safest big country in the world. Columbine happened a year ago, and I'm still waiting for Congress to close the gun show loophole, to stop the importation of these large capacity ammunition clips, and to require child safety locks on guns. Today in Michigan in a school, a 6 year old boy, with a gun that his brother gave him, shot a 6 year old girl. And she died. The child was 6 years old. How did that child get that gun? Why could the child fire the gun? If we had the technology today to put in these child safety locks, why don't we do it? I don't know what the facts were in this case, and I don't want to prejudge it or condemn anyone. But I know this I know that the accidental gun death rate of children the accidental gun death rate of children in America is 9 times higher than that in the other 25 biggest countries combined combined. So we know what to do. We just don't have any excuses. Is that going to be a subject of this election, or not? You have to decide that. And the same is true with health care. The same is true with the environment and whether we can grow the environment and improve the economy. The same is true with our obligations around the world. How do we define America's responsibility to fight biological and chemical and nuclear warfare, to fight terrorism, to advance the cause of peace, to fight against the racial and ethnic and tribal turmoil around the world, to advance the cause of peace through expanding trade? I strongly believe and our party's divided about it, I know but I strongly believe we ought to let China in the World Trade Organization. Everything I've learned as President and everything I've learned in 53 years of living is that you get a lot more from people if you give them a chance to work with you than you do if you tell them you don't want to fool with them any more. And we've got a big stake in how China turns out. I don't know how they will and neither does anybody else, but I know this If we put them in this trade organization, they'll have to open their markets to us just like our markets are open to them. So it's a no brainer economically. But politically, it's important, because they will have an incentive to make good choices in the future about their role in the world. If we keep them out, they'll still keep selling stuff here, they'll relate more closely to others, and they'll have no incentives to be responsible partners in the world. If we do this, 20 years from now we'll wonder why we ever debated it. If we don't do it, 20 years from now we'll be still kicking ourselves. That's what I believe. So I'm going to fight for it. But these things ought to be the subject of this election, because you know the world will grow smaller, not larger. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, much lower than anybody thought we could have without exploding inflation. But there are still people and places that have been left behind. Should they be the subjects of this election? There are rural areas, Indian reservations, and inner city neighborhoods where there are still people willing to work where there is no free enterprise, no investment where we could, by changing our tax laws and giving people like you the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America you have today to invest in poor areas in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia I'm for that, by the way. I'm trying to get America to invest more money overseas, but we ought to have the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America. Does this matter to you? I think it should. By the way, it's not only morally right it's a good way to keep the economy growing without inflation. There are Indian reservations in this country where the unemployment rate is still 70 percent. If you cut it to 20 percent, just to 20 percent, all those people would become consumers as well as workers. It's noninflationary growth. I'll just mention one other issue. You have to decide. I have found it incredibly ironic that in this most modern of ages, where I meet all these young people that have made fortunes in their twenties off dot com companies you know, I'm too old to make a living in this flourishing sector of our economy. And it is growing like crazy, you know. I just was at the Business Roundtable, and all these heads of these Fortune 500 companies were trying to figure out why the Dow was going down while the NASDAQ was going up. And we're doing all these incredible things. I went in a little African village, and I saw a hookup from an American cable company and what they were putting in there so these kids could get modern maps to learn geography. I went into a favela in Rio with Pele , the great soccer player, and saw what an American company was doing there, through technology, to try to get these poor children in Rio a chance to have a different life. I have seen all these efforts to bridge the digital divide in America, all this neat stuff and a lot of more mundane things. I have a cousin in Arkansas who plays chess once a week with a guy in Australia. I mean, you know, it's the modern world out there. I know in a couple of months, I'll have an announcement that will be one of the great honors in my life. I'll be part of we will announce that the human genome has been fully sequenced, and we can now set about the business of analyzing the very blueprint of life and why we turn out the way we do and how we deal with various things. We may be able to block broken genes with gene therapies to stop people from ever developing diabetes, to stop people from ever developing Alzheimer's, to stop people from ever developing breast cancer, all of these things. It's just going to be unbelievable. Now, don't you think it's interesting, with all this stuff going on, that the biggest problem we face as a society is still the oldest one? We're still scared of people who are different from us. And it's easy, once you are frightened or uncertain, to turn that into distrust, to turn that into dehumanization, to turn that into violence, and then to have no conscience about it because they didn't matter anyway. I mean, it's interesting you look around the world, and you see tribal wars in Africa where hundreds of thousands of people die in a few days. You see continuing religious and ethnic tensions in the Middle East, and religious tensions continue in Northern Ireland, where I thought we had the door closed, and it got knocked open again. And what this is outrageous what happened in the Balkans, the problems they're having in Russia in Chechnya. You just look around the world, on any given continent. And in America you say, "Well, look at us. We're the most successful, diverse democracy in history." That's true, but we had a shooting at a Los Angeles Jewish center, where Jewish kids were shot at because they were Jewish. A Filipino postal worker was killed because he was both Asian and a Federal employee, and the guy that killed him thought that was a double shot. Matthew Shepard was killed because he was gay. The guy in the Middle West killed the former African American basketball coach at Northwestern, killed a Korean Christian walking out of church, and three or four other people, and he said he belonged to a church that didn't believe in God but did believe in white supremacy. And I could go on. You know all these issues. What I want to say to you is that times are good, but we should be humble about this. We should be grateful, and we should be humble, because we have, number one, not repealed all the laws of human nature, which means there is still the darkness of the heart to deal with, and number two, good times are either made the most of or squandered. And I just want to leave you with this. A lot of you here are younger than me, but a lot of you are about my age, maybe a little older. When we celebrated earlier this month the longest economic expansion, peace or war, in our history, I was very interested in that, because I love economics and I study it every month. I read all the numbers and everything and try to keep up with what's going on. So I went back and studied the last longest economic expansion in our history. Do you know when it was? Nineteen sixty one to 1969, the years of my childhood and youth, when I should have been doing dot com companies. Laughter But let me tell you about them. In 1964, the height of the expansion, I graduated from high school. My President had been killed a few months before, and the country was heartbroken. But contrary to a lot of the Monday morning quarterbacks that look back, it was not the beginning of American cynicism. That's not true. We united behind President Johnson. He got off to a great start. He was leading us toward passing civil rights legislation, legislation to help the poor. And in 1964, when I finished high school, there was this enormous sense of optimism and confidence in the country that, A, the economic good times would go on forever B, we would resolve in a lawful way, through our Congress, our civil rights challenges and C, we would certainly prevail, without controversy in our country, in the cold war against communism. Those things would happen. Everybody thought so. Two years later, we had riots in our streets. The country was already divided over Vietnam. Four years after I graduated from high school, I was graduating from college 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn't run for election. And the country was totally divided. And there were more riots in the streets, and the National Capital was the scene of a riot in which block after block burned to the ground. A few months afterward, we had a Presidential election, the first Presidential election in modern times fought on the grounds of "us" versus "them," where President Nixon, a man of immense talent, I might add, was elected on a theme of the Silent Majority. Now, some of you remember that. Now, if there's a Silent Majority, there must, by definition, be a loud minority, right? I was one of them I know. Laughter So it was "us" and "them." A few months after that, the economic expansion was over. And we've been having "us" and "them" politics ever since. And for 7 years, I have worked to end that, I think with greater success out here in the country than in the Capital, but nonetheless, it's been an honor to try. I'm telling you this as a citizen now, why I'm glad you're here. You have to help us define what this election is about. And that's what we're going to use your contribution for. But those of you who are older, like me, you remember what it was like in the mid sixties. As a citizen, I have waited for 35 years for my country to be in a position to build the future of our dreams for our children. That's what this is about. It's not just about choosing a person. We have to define the job and the direction. Then the choice will take care of itself. You know what I think. But just remember how quickly these things can get away and what a heavy responsibility we have to make the most of a truly magic moment. Thank you, and God bless you. February 28, 2000 Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm welcome. Thank you for this wonderful book. Governor Patton, Mrs. Patton, Governor Davis, Governor O'Bannon to B.J. Thornberry and all the officers of the DGA and especially my great friend Mark Weiner. I want to acknowledge also the presence Mark Weiner did a good job tonight, and all the rest of you did, raising this money. I thank you for that. I want to acknowledge the presence in this audience of the man who was the executive director of the DGA when I was a member, my good friend Chuck Dolan. I thank you for being here and for all you did for us. And all my colleagues I know there are five or six Governors out there who are former Governors with whom I served thank you for being here. I want to acknowledge the Governors who are retiring. Governor Rossello, thank you for everything you've done. And Governor Carper and Governor Carnahan are going to be Members of the United States Senate, and that will be a good thing for the Senate, a bad thing for the Governors. I want to say a special work of thanks to the man who nominated me to be vice chairman of the DGA in 1979, Governor Jim Hunt, one of the finest people I ever met in my life. Thank you, Jim Hunt, for what you did. You know, I will treasure this book. I have a first edition of "Profiles in Courage," but not one signed by John Kennedy. Hillary says that the reason I admire John Kennedy so much is, he's the only person to ever serve as President whose handwriting was even harder to read than mine. Laughter But I can recognize the signature, and I thank you. President Kennedy once said, "The party which, in its drive for unity, discipline, and success, ever decides to exclude new ideas, independent conduct, or insurgent members is in danger." Well, thanks to the Democratic Governors, to your new ideas, your independent conduct, and your willingness always to try to do better and to be different, the Democratic Party is in no danger. We're stronger tonight than we have been in many, many years, thanks to you. As President, I have been deeply indebted to my service as Governor. It has stood me in good stead. And I have been deeply indebted to so many of you for the friendship, the advice, the counsel you have given me, and to so many who were members of this organization with me who continue all during these years to call with a helpful word or sometimes just a word of friendship and support. Thanks to our partnership and the hard work of the American people, our country is in good shape at the dawn of the new millennium. We have 21 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in 25 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest Hispanic and African American unemployment rate ever, and the longest economic expansion in history. We are well positioned for this new century. And I am very proud that there is in this country, embodied in the service of the Democratic Governors, a new Democratic Party, committed to new ideas and the old principles of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans. I am proud of what we have done together. But you came here tonight because we're raising money for the elections of 2000. And as dearly as I loved every single word Paul Patton said, and I'll treasure it for a lifetime and he'll never be able to get away from it because everywhere I go, the White House Communications Agency captures things on film. I've got a movie, a color movie of Paul Patton, and the next time he gets mad at me, I'm going to play it for him. Laughter I will treasure everything he said for a lifetime. As much as I treasure and as much as I have loved being President, elections are about the future. And in this election season, those of you who are running and those of you who are serving and not running must be very active in defining the choices for the future. Last night at the dinner at the White House, I reminded all the Governors that we are now in the longest economic expansion in history, and it's easy to feel comfortable and confident, maybe even a little complacent. But the last time we had the longest economic expansion in history was in the decade of the 1960's, between 1961 and 1969. In 1964, when I graduated from high school, America was still profoundly sad about the loss of President Kennedy, but very optimistic and very united behind President Johnson absolutely convinced we'd just have high economic growth with low inflation from now on absolutely convinced that we would solve the civil rights challenges of our age through the Congress absolutely convinced that we would prevail in the cold war as a united nation. Within 2 years, we had riots in the streets, and the country was divided. Within 4 years, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been killed. Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn't run for reelection. The country was split right in two. We had a Presidential election which for the first time in a long time was about the politics of division. You remember the election of 1968? "Vote with the Silent Majority." And it was "us" and "them." If you weren't in the Silent Majority, presumably, you were in the loud minority. I know I was one of them. And in just a few months, we lost the longest economic expansion in history. And we've had decades of "us" and "them" elections and "us" and "them" politics in Washington, DC. I ran for President because when I was a Governor, I could not have survived practicing politics the way it was done here every day, and I was sick and tired of people all caught up in the Washington political game, deaf to the voices of the people like those in Appalachia that Paul Patton introduced me to. On that hot day in Hazard, Kentucky, which I'll never forget because it was so hot, I saw people like the people I grew up with. They don't want much from us. They get up every day and go to work, and they obey the law, and they pay their taxes. All they want us to do is to work as hard at our job as they work at theirs and to pay attention to what their concerns are and to think about how their children are going to do better. And I came to Washington determined to do that. I am profoundly indebted to every Governor who served with me, who helped me, and to all of you since. But what I want you to remember is, elections are about the future, and so is governance. And don't you dare be complacent about this. I have waited for 35 years for my country to be in shape again to build the future of our dreams for our children. Our party can lead the country to do that. We're going in the right direction. We have the right ideas. We have the right values. And you have to lead to make sure it happens. And you have to be willing to do things that may not grab the headlines all the time. We have to take what Theodore Roosevelt said at the dawn of the century "A growing country with a young spirit should always take the long look ahead." Today some of you came in to see me, including Governor Carper and former Governor Dukakis, who is here tonight, to talk about my Amtrak budget. Well, that's not a headline grabber, but it's important to the future that America have a high speed rail system that guarantees our energy security and our safety and our strength. It's part of our long look ahead. It's part of our long look ahead that we recognize that we've got the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years. That is the good news. The challenge is that nearly every family in nearly every income group is having some difficulty balancing the burdens of raising their children and succeeding at work, and whenever this country has to make a choice any family we lose. And we have to do more to help people to succeed at home and at work. We have to do more to bring economic opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind. If we can't bring free enterprise to Appalachia, to the Mississippi Delta, to the inner cities, and to the Indian reservations of this country now, we'll never get around to it. And the Democrats ought to lead the way. Everybody deserves a chance to work who is willing to do so. Jim Hunt said something today I want to emphasize. We started out together in 1979, and we all wanted especially in the South, where we knew we had to do it we all wanted to make education better. But we really didn't know how to do it, especially with all the kids from all the different backgrounds, the different economic and racial and religious and ethnic backgrounds, with all their different burdens that they carried from home to school. But we don't have an excuse anymore. Now, we know what works. We know how to turn around failing schools. We know all our kids can learn. And we know how to invest in it. We know how to demand high standards. We know what to do. We in the Democratic Party have to lead America to excellence in education for every single child in this country, across all the lines that divide us. When I became President, there were a lot of people that never thought the crime rate would go down again. But we know how to do it. We know you've got to put more police on the street, people who are trusted by folks in a community, who work with them, who know how to prevent crime as well as catch criminals. And we know even in the South, we know we've got to do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and away from children. We know what works. The Democratic Party ought to lead the country to making this the safest big country in the world. We owe that to our children. We know that in the digital economy the Governors came here to talk about, you do not have to weaken the environment to improve the economy. In fact, we know that we can improve the environment and the economy at the same time. There is a 1 trillion market in the world today for environmental technologies that avoid the worst consequences of global warming and clean up local air and water systems and preserve the land 1 trillion market. We know that. And a lot of our friends in the other party don't know that yet. The Democratic Party ought to lead the way to a 21st century economy that proves we can have the strongest economy in history and the cleanest environment in history. We ought to lead the way to that sort of future. And we know, even those of you that come, as I do, from a landlocked State in the middle of the country, that there is no more artificial dividing line between foreign policy and domestic policy. We know that our welfare is tied to the welfare of people all around the world. That's why I've worked so hard for peace in every region of the world and why I've worked to expand trade and why I believe we ought to take advantage of an agreement that finally opens China's markets to us, the way our markets have been open to China for decades now why I believe we ought to continue to work to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological terrorism why we ought to adopt the test ban treaty even though the Senate voted against it last year because we have got to make a safer world if we want our kids to live on safer streets and have a safer future in every State in the United States of America. And, finally you know, I get apprehensive when people start giving me gifts, even one like this that I treasure. That's the kind of thing that they ought to do for you when you're not around anymore. I have to pinch myself. I'm still alive I'm still here. Laughter I hope to be a useful citizen when I'm no longer living in the White House. But if the good Lord came to me tonight and said, "I'm sorry, you can't finish your term. You're out of here tomorrow morning. And I'll only give you one wish. I'm not a genie you get one wish, not three," I would set aside everything I just said to you and pray that America could find a way to overcome the profoundly ingrained tendency of people everywhere to distrust people who are different from them by race, by religion, people who were gay, all these things that are different. Why? You've been here talking about the Internet economy. I've got a cousin in Arkansas who plays chess once a week with a guy in Australia over the Internet. People are being drawn together as never before. I was in poor villages in Africa where the school buildings had maps that still had the Soviet Union on it. But because they're getting computer hookups, pretty soon they'll just be able to print out maps that are new, and those poor little kids in those little villages will be able to learn the same geography our kids do in our finest schools. We are being drawn together as never before, and yet we are bedeviled by the oldest problems of humankind. Sunday I'm going to Selma to be with Governor Siegelman and the veterans of the Selma march 35 years ago. For me, particularly because I'm from the South, it is a signal honor. And we will celebrate all the great things that have happened in the last 35 years to bring us together. I see Governor Barnes out there from Georgia. He went in on a great vote that carried in two African Americans to statewide elected office in Georgia. And there are things like that happening all over America Governor Locke out there, the first Chinese American Governor our country ever had Governor Cayetano from Hawaii, a Philippine American. But it is still true that even in America we had kids at a Jewish community center in California, little kids shot at just because they were Jewish a Filipino postal worker killed just because he was Asian and worked for the Federal Government all those fine people killed in the middle of the country by that man who said he belonged to a church that didn't believe in God but did believe in white supremacy Matthew Shepard stretched out on a rack in Wyoming. Now, most of the news in America is good. But I am telling you, we're a smart people. You can't keep us down no matter what, as long as we've got our heads on straight. But the Democratic Party ought to take the lead in reminding us that one of the things that we have learned as we've unlocked the mysteries of the human gene is that we are genetically 99.9 percent the same and that the differences among individuals within racial groups are different are greater than the differences from group to group. Whether we like it or not, we're all in this boat together. And those of you who have been in the Oval Office know that I keep on the table there a Moon rock that Neil Armstrong gave me on the 30th anniversary of the landing on the Moon. It's a lava rock that is 3.6 billion years old. And whenever anybody gets all hot and lathered up in the Oval Office in a meeting and they act like the whole world is about to come down, I say, "Time out. See that rock? It's 3.6 billion years old. Now, we're all just passing through. Chill out." Laughter But even though we're all just passing through, every minute, every hour, every day is precious. So I ask you all, apart from everything you do on all these issues I mentioned Model that, model one America. Remind people that if you believe everybody counts and everybody ought to have a chance, then you've got to believe we're all better off when we help each other instead of look down on one another. That's another thing the Democratic Party has stood for. We lost a lot of Presidential elections because we stood for it, but we're coming back now because we stand for it. You've got 13 seats up in 2000 and 36 up in 2002. I'm going to help you with the 13, and when I'm just a citizen, I'll help you with the 36 if you want me to. But we will never have a national Democratic Party that's as strong as it ought to be until we have a majority of the governorships again and until we can prove, where people live, that we care about them, that we can produce for them, that we reflect their fondest hopes and deepest values. You can do that. You have helped me to help America. You have immeasurably enriched my life. You've been good to me and Hillary and Al and Tipper. And for all that, I am profoundly grateful. I will treasure this book for the rest of my days and my friendships and, seriously, what Paul Patton said. But America is always about tomorrow. So be proud of what we've done, but keep your eye on tomorrow, and lead the American people where we ought to go. Thank you, and God bless you. February 24, 2000 Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Doug. I want to thank you and Traie for hosting us, and all the rest of you, thank you so much for coming tonight. I thank my good friend Mayor Rendell for agreeing to become the chair of the Democratic Party, a little part time job that he can do on the side. Laughter Thank you, Carl McCall, for being here. And thank you, Carolyn Maloney, for being here and for always being there for me and for our country in Washington. I would, just following up on what Doug said, I want to say to all of you who have made such immense contributions to the economic prosperity and to the quality of life our country has enjoyed over the last few years I want to express my gratitude to you. For me, it's been a great privilege to serve. As I've told all the young people who work for us, even the bad days are good days if you have a chance to do something good for our country, and a lot of the static should be looked at as part of the cost of doing business in the modern environment in which we all labor. But it's been a wonderful thing to see our country grow and prosper and deal with a lot of our non economic challenges over the last few years. And I would just like to ask you briefly to think about how you would answer the question tomorrow if someone asked you why you came here tonight and spent all that money to hear Bill Clinton give a speech, since you could have heard a much longer one at the State of the Union for free on television. Laughter And you need to have an answer for that, for yourselves and because this is a long year. There will be a big election, and there will be many ups and downs and twists and turns in the road, not only the Presidential elections but in the congressional elections, the Senate elections, and others, one of which I have a particular interest in here. Laughter The central question before our country today is, what are we going to make of these unprecedented good times of the longest peacetime expansion, the longest expansion in our history, including wartime, now, the longest economic expansion ever of a 20 year low in poverty and a 30 year low in welfare rolls and a 40 year low in female unemployment, and a 40 year low now, Doug, in the size of the Federal Government. What are we going to do now? It seems apparent to me that one of the ways we got to where we are is that the Government has followed policies that created the conditions and gave people the tools and removed the impediments so that the incredible creative enterprise of America could flourish. And we did it by understanding that we live in a very, very dynamic time, fueled principally by globalization and the explosion of technology, particularly information technology, but also in the biomedical area, in material science, and a whole array of other areas. That seems to me to make the argument that what we need is to change, to keep changing, to be very dynamic, but to do it consistent with the principles and the direction that we followed for the last 7 years. I say all the time, and it normally gets a laugh, that if someone were running for President this year and said, "Vote for me. I'll do just what Bill Clinton did," I would vote against that person because we're not standing still we're moving. But I think, just to pick up on some of the things you said, among the questions I think that should be asked and answered, that I tried to answer in the State of the Union are How are we going to keep this economic growth growing? And how are we going to spread it to people in places that haven't been part of it? We have a moral obligation to do that, and it also will help to keep the economy growing. We've got some people here today who don't live in parts of New York City that have flourished, who live in other parts of New York that haven't participated fully in the economic expansion. I think we ought to continue to pay this debt down, to keep the economy going. And I think we ought to give special incentives and make special efforts to get people to invest in the areas that have been left behind. What are we going to do to give all of our kids a world class education? What are we going to do to open the doors of college to all? I think we ought to, at a minimum, do what Senator Schumer and Hillary have suggested and give people a tax deduction for college tuition. We've got the college going rate up 10 percent over the last 6 years. It needs to go up some more, and we need to make sure when people go, they stay. What are we going to do to help people balance work and family better? We saw Doug and Traie's beautiful daughter here tonight. I just signed cards for five kids over here, that said, "My Dad had dinner with the President," and I affirmed that that, in fact, happened and signed my name. And I hope my penmanship will not be taken as a model for the children. Laughter But most of you who can afford to come here tonight may not have to worry about that. But the truth is that most families in this country today have to work for a living, both parents or a single parent household. And even if they make good incomes, they worry about where their children are when they're working, particularly if they're in preschool years. Do they have adequate care? What happens if the parents can't get off work to go to the parentteacher conferences at school? What do they do if the children get sick? What do they do if they have a sick parent? And we haven't done enough to help people balance work and family. What are we going to do to help to continue to grow the economy and meet these big environmental challenges that are out there? The truth is, this is a gold mine if we'll look at it as an opportunity, not a problem. There's a 1 trillion global market for environmental technology to defeat global warming, if we embrace it instead of run away from it. What are we going to do to continue to be a force for peace and freedom and against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction around the world? And do we understand that our economic interests around the world and our national security interests are increasingly merging? I believe China, for example, should be taken into the WTO because it's great economics for America in the short run, but I'm convinced it's the only way to really assure a stable, peaceful Asia and a stable transformation within China over the long run. What are we going to do to maintain and improve the basic fabric of life here at home? I think it's interesting, as I say continually, that in this most modern of ages, where we talk about the wonders of the Internet and bridging the digital divide, which is very important, that we continue to be bedeviled by the oldest of human society's problems, people who can't get along with people who are different from them. We're horrified when we read about the tribal wars in Africa, the continuing problems in the Middle East, the killing in the Balkans, and on and on and on. But in this country, in just the last couple years, we've had people killed because of their race, their religion, or their sexual orientation. How are we going to get beyond that? I think part of it is passing legislation like the hate crimes legislation and the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. Part of it is enforcing the laws, but part of it is setting the right tone and showing a devotion to the differences among Americans and relying on our common values. You mentioned the court appointments. That could well be I'll just mention two issues that I think are very important, about how you strike the balance between individual liberties and community responsibilities. The Democratic candidate for President will support maintaining a woman's right to choose and will act accordingly. The Republican candidate for President, whoever it is, won't and will act accordingly, according to both political obligation and conscience. You know, it's fashionable now, and it has been for several years, unfortunately probably two decades now for people who run against one another basically to try to convince the voters that their opponents are bad people. I just don't believe that. I think you here have a difference of conscience. But you should not be naive and expect that if someone who differs with us and whose political allegiances are different gets elected, that they will abandon their conscience. And we shouldn't ask them to. And the next President is going to appoint somewhere between two and four judges on the Supreme Court, and it will have a huge impact on America. And so the American people should think about that. On the other hand, there's another big party difference that's very important to me, where, in effect, we've changed sides, where they believe individual liberty means that they shouldn't adopt even the most commonsense measures to keep guns away from children and criminals. And we believe our common responsibility to one another means that we ought to close the gun show loophole in the Brady bill, means that we ought to do other things. For me and for the Vice President and for Senator Bradley, we believe at least we ought to license handgun owners. That's what we believe. We license cars and drivers. Somebody steals your car while you're here tonight and they drive it to New Jersey and leave it in the parking lot and you call the police, you can be notified within a minute or two, once it's found, because we have records of it. And I think we have and I say this as someone who comes from a culture where half the people have a hunting or a fishing license or both. I'm proud of the fact that we've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years. And don't kid yourself, one of the reasons is the Brady bill, which has kept a half a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from buying handguns. I signed the bill. The last President vetoed it. I've tried to strengthen it. That's what our party believes. They don't believe that. They actually agree with the NRA. I'm not going to tell you that I think they're bad people. That's what they think. They are willing to pay a price, in a country that's less safe, that I'm not willing to pay. And I don't think it has anything to do with individual liberties. And I do not believe the 2d amendment says that you ought to be able to get an assault weapon with a huge magazine that we ought to continue to import. We have differences here, and you can see it in the votes of the last 7 years. And these are big decisions the American people ought to make. But what I want to say to you tonight is, we have an unusual responsibility, all of us in this room, individually because we've been successful and blessed, but also as a nation. And a lot of people have heard me say this, and they may think I'm a broken record, but one of the nice things about not running for office is you can just say what's on your mind. Laughter I have thought a lot and done many interviews, and you've seen some of them, about why this expansion has gone on as long as it has. And I think there are many reasons. I think our economic program had a lot to do with it, but I think the unbelievable impact of high technology on productivity throughout the American economy kept it going longer and stronger than anyone had imagined. And there are lots of other reasons. The important thing to me, though, is not what caused it but what are we going to do with it. And I told the group that I was with earlier tonight, and I try to say this everywhere because I think it's important for you to think about. Some of you, like Doug and Traie, are a lot younger than me some of you about my age some of you a little bit older. The last time we had the longest economic expansion in history was in the 1960's, 1961 through 1969. When I was a child, a young man graduating from high school, 1964, John Kennedy had just been assassinated. Lyndon Johnson was the President of the United States. Unemployment was low inflation was low growth was high. The country had rallied behind a new President. We were passing civil rights legislation. Most people, in spite of the heartbreak of the loss of the President, felt pretty good about things. They thought we were going to solve our civil rights problems peacefully. They thought this economy would go on forever. They thought we would prevail in the cold war, and they didn't think Vietnam would tear the country apart. Within 2 years, we had riots in some of our streets. And within 4 years, when I graduated from college, it was 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 2 months after Martin Luther King was killed, 9 weeks after Lyndon Johnson said he couldn't run for reelection. Washington, DC, was in flames. The country was split right down the middle over the Vietnam war. The expansion was a few months away from being over, and we had our first presidential election based on in modern times based on the politics of real division, the Silent Majority. That means that those who weren't in it, like me, were in the loud minority "us" and "them." And we've been "us ing" and "them ing" ourselves to death for a long time now. And when I ran for President in '92, I said I wanted to create a country of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans. I have tried to end the politics of division. I think I've been more successful outside Washington than inside, but nonetheless, I think we've made a lot of headway. The reason I'm telling you this is, we thought it was going to go on in 1964. If anybody had told most Americans that within 4 years the wheels would have completely run off, no one would have believed it. And as an American citizen, not President, as a citizen, I have waited 35 years for my country to be in a position for us to build the future of our dreams for our children 35 years. And we've got a second chance. We should be happy about it, but we should be humble. And we should understand that life is a fragile and fleeting thing. Nothing lasts forever nothing good and, thank God, nothing bad. And if somebody asks you why you came here tonight, you tell them, because you like what happened but because you feel a heavy responsibility to make sure that we make the most of a truly magic moment. Thank you very much. February 23, 2000 Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome His Majesty King Juan Carlos and Majesty Queen Sofia members of the Spanish delegation to all the rest of you. It is a great honor in this house of the American people to welcome a King and Queen who are truly of their people. Your Majesties, on behalf of all Americans, let me begin by expressing my condolences to the families of the two victims of yesterday's car bombing in northern Spain. We stand with Spain in condemning this cowardly act and call on those responsible to renounce the violence and terrorism which have taken too many innocent lives in recent years. In a democracy, we must settle our differences through dialog, not destruction. One of the greatest pleasures of the last 7 years has been the opportunity that Hillary and I have had on many occasions to be with King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia. Five years ago, I welcomed them to the White House on the occasion of their son's graduation from my alma mater, the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. On that day, the King and Queen also received honorary doctorates. The King joked that day that the reason the university had given him the degree was that if his son started bragging about his masters, he could always say, "Yes, but I am a doctor." Laughter Two years later, the King and Queen hosted Hillary, Chelsea, and me just a few weeks after Chelsea graduated from high school. For me, it was the fulfillment of a long dream. When I was a young graduate student, more than 30 years ago, I first went to Spain in the spring of 1969. I went to Granada to visit the Alhambra. I never got over it, and I promised myself that one day, somehow, I would return. Well, thanks to the King and Queen, I was once again able to see the Sun set over the plains of Granada, in a style slightly better than that which I enjoyed as a graduate student. Laughter It is a special honor for us to have the King and the Queen here today on the anniversary of the day in which the courage of the King literally saved democracy for Spain. Our friendship is just the latest chapter in a long history of friendship between our two nations. Five centuries ago, the vision of Queen Isabella guided sailors across vast oceans to discover a new world. The Spanish of that day left their language, their religion, and much of their culture on these shores. The State in which I was born once was part of the Spanish Empire. And I suppose, Your Majesties, I am, in a sense, one of your subjects. Laughter Today, five centuries later, Christopher Columbus is the only foreign citizen America honors with a national holiday. For some time now, Spanish has been our second most spoken language, and all across America, Spanish speaking men and women, many of whom are here tonight, enrich our Nation and our lives. Today, five centuries after Spain helped to lead the world through the age of exploration, it is the vision of a direct descendant of Queen Isabella, His Majesty King Juan Carlos, who is helping to lead this new world through a new age of information. Spain is spreading the values of democracy, respect for human rights, and free markets across the globe, from Latin America to the Balkans, Europe to the Middle East. Your Majesties, we are proud in America to be your partners, your allies, and your friends. Saint Isidore once wrote, "Spain is the most beautiful of all the lands extending from the West to India, for through her, East and West receive light." Today, may the light of our friendship continue to inspire and enlighten nations from East to West as we work to build a world that is more democratic, more open, more free, and at peace. I ask you all to join me in a toast to the King and Queen of Spain and the people of their wonderful country. February 23, 2000 Your Majesties, members of the Spanish delegation, ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the people of the United States, I am delighted to welcome the King and Queen of Spain back to America. A quarter century ago, the very first trip King Juan Carlos made overseas after his proclamation as King was to the United States. Your Majesty, we are honored that you have decided to celebrate the anniversary of that journey and the friendship between our nations by making America your first stop overseas in the new century. In the life of every democracy there are defining moments that stand above the rest Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg Lech Walesa raising a fist in a Polish shipyard students standing with sledgehammers atop the Berlin Wall Nelson Mandela taking the oath of office as President of South Africa. Nineteen years ago, on this very day, Spain had one of those moments. In the early evening hours of February 23, 1981, 200 armed militia in Madrid stormed the Parliament in a coup. They fired automatic weapons. They took every major elected figure in Spain hostage. Many feared Spain's 2 year old experiment with democracy was over. But when angry generals urged King Juan Carlos to join their rebellion, he replied defiantly, "Your coup will succeed over my dead body." He rallied the people of Spain. He appealed to the military sense of honor. He stood strong, and less than 24 hours after it began, the coup was over. Freedom was secure in Spain. And less than a decade later, when freedom was reborn in Eastern Europe, the newest democracies could look to Spain as their example. When the task of building an undivided, democratic, peaceful Europe is completed, all friends of freedom will owe a very great debt to King Juan Carlos. Your Majesty, for more than five centuries now, our two nations have been united by a common history. Today, we also are united by common values and common responsibilities. In Kosovo, Spanish pilots, soldiers, and police have performed with great bravery, and in April, a Spanish commander will assume the command of KFOR. In Latin America, we have stood together, supporting hurricane victims in Honduras and Guatemala and flood victims in Venezuela, promoting a better life for the people of Colombia, advancing the cause of human rights in Cuba. Your Majesty, on this lawn almost a quarter century ago, you said that your greatest wish then was that your visit, and I quote, "would contribute to reinforcing the bonds of friendship between us, for the good of our two countries and all those who aspire to attain the same ideals of faith, freedom, and justice." Your Majesty, your visit then and all your work since have strengthened our bonds of friendship. As you continue to lead your nation and to stand against the forces of terror and the enemies of peace and freedom, may your words be our hope and our guide as we walk together in this new century. Again, we thank you for the honor of your visit, and we welcome you warmly your friends in the United States. February 17, 2000 Thank you very, very much. It's a wonderful thing to be introduced by an old friend. Old friends and people you have appointed to office will tell false, good stories about you every time. Laughter Africa never had a better friend in America than Andrew Young, and I thank him. I want to say I'm honored to be in the presence today of so many distinguished Africans. Secretary Salim, thank you for your visionary remarks and your leadership. President Moi, thank you for coming to the United States and for giving me another chance to visit with you and for the work we have done together. Vice President Abubakar, thank you for what you are doing in Nigeria to give that great country its true promise at long last. We thank you, sir. I welcome all our distinguished guests from Africa Mrs. Taylor, Foreign Ministers, Ambassadors. I thank all the Americans who are here, beginning with Andy's wife, who puts up with this relentless travel of his around Africa. Mayor Williams, thank you for welcoming us to Washington. There are three Members of our Congress here today representing what I hope will be a stronger and stronger bipartisan commitment to the future of Africa, Congressman Royce and Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, I thank you for being here. I want to thank Leonard Robinson and Herschelle Challenor and all the people responsible for this remarkable conference. Thank you, Noah Samara, and thank you, Bishop Ricard, for being here. And I want to say a special word of appreciation to all the people in our administration who have worked so hard to give us an Africa policy that we can be proud of, that I hope will light up the path for America's future. I know that Secretary Slater has already spoken here. Our AID Director, Brady Anderson, will speak. Our Vice President will be here. You said, Secretary Salim, you hope future administrations will follow our lead in Africa. I know one that would. Laughter I want to thank Susan Rice at the State Department, Sandy Berger, Gayle Smith, all the people in our White House, all the ones who have helped us here. Secretary Salim said Africa lacks a strong constituency in the United States. Well, I open this National Summit on Africa with a simple message Africa does matter to the United States. Of whatever background Americans claim Leonard Robinson told me when I came here, we even have 17 delegates from Utah here. Laughter and applause There they are, you see? Africa matters, not simply because 30 million Americans trace their heritage to Africa though that is profoundly important not simply because we have a strong interest in a stable and prosperous Africa though 13 percent of our oil comes from Africa, and there are 700 million producers and consumers in sub Saharan Africa, though that is important. Africa's future matters because the 21st century world has been transformed, and our views and actions must be transformed accordingly. For most of history, the central reality in international relations was that size and location matter most. If you were a big country or on a trade or invasion route, you mattered. If not, you were marginalized. The average American child growing up in the past saw African nations as colorful flags and exotic names on a map, perhaps read books about the wonderful animals and great adventures. When colonialism ended, the colors on the flags were changed and there were more names on the map. But the countries did not seem nearer to most Americans. That has all changed now, for the central reality of our time is globalization. It is tearing down barriers between nations and people. Knowledge, contact, and trade across borders within and between every continent are exploding. And all this globalization is also, as the barriers come down, making us more vulnerable to one another's problems to the shock of economic turmoil, to the spread of conflict, to pollution, and, as we have painfully seen, to disease, to terrorists, to drug traffickers, to criminals who can also take advantage of new technologies and globalization, the openness of societies and borders. Globalization means we know more about one another than ever before. You may see the Discovery Channel in Africa. I was thinking of that when that little film was on. The Discovery Channel followed me to Africa and talked about how they were building communications networks in African schools to share knowledge and information. We can find out within seconds now what the weather is in Nairobi, how a referendum turned out in Zimbabwe, how Cameroon's indomitable Lions performed in the latest soccer match. Laughter We can go online and read the Addis Tribune, the Mirror of Ghana, the East African, or dozens of other African newspapers. We sit in front of a television and watch people in a South African township line up to vote. We also now bear witness to the slaughter of innocents in Rwanda or the ravages of AIDS in scores of lands or the painful coincidence of remarkable growth and abject poverty in nation after nation. In other words, it is no longer an option for us to choose not to know about the triumphs and the trials of the people with whom we share this small planet. Not just America and Africa I would imagine millions of Africans identified with the Muslims of Kosovo when they were run out of their country, all of them at one time. We know about each other. We can no longer choose not to know. We can only choose not to act, or to act. In this world, we can be indifferent or we can make a difference. America must choose, when it comes to Africa, to make a difference. Because we want to live in a world which is not dominated by a division of people who live on the cutting edge of a new economy and others who live on the bare edge of survival, we must be involved in Africa. Because we want to broaden global growth and expand markets for our own people, we must be involved in Africa. Because we want to build a world in which our security is not threatened by the spread of armed conflict, in which bitter ethnic and religious differences are resolved by the force of argument, not the force of arms, we must be involved in Africa. Because we want to build a world where terrorists and criminals have no place to hide and where those who wish harm to ordinary people cannot acquire the means to do them harm, we must be involved in Africa. Because we want to build a world in which we can harness our natural resources for economic growth without destroying the environment, so that future generations will also have the chance to do the same, we must be involved in Africa. That is why I set out in 1993, at the beginning of my Presidency, to build new ties between the United States and Africa, why we had the first White House conference, the ministerial, and that wonderful trip in the spring of 1998 that I will remember for the rest of my life. I went to Africa as a friend, to create a partnership. And we have made significant progress. There are challenges that are profound, but in the last 2 years we have seen thousands of triumphs, large and small. Often they don't make the headlines because the slow, steady progress of democracy and prosperity is not the stuff of headlines. But for example, I wish every American knew that last year the world's fastest growing economy was Mozambique Botswana was second Angola, fourth. I wish every American knew that and understood that that potential is in every African nation. It would make a difference. We must know these things about one another. People know all about Africa's conflicts, but how many know that thousands of African soldiers are trying to end those conflicts as peacekeepers and that Nigeria alone, amidst all its difficulties, has spent 10 billion in these peacekeeping efforts? For years, Africa's wealthiest country, South Africa, and its most populous, Nigeria, cast long, forbidding shadows across the continent. Last year South Africa's remarkable turnaround continued as its people transferred power from one elected President to another. Nigeria inaugurated a democratically elected President for the first time in decades. It is working to ensure that its wealth strengthens its people, not their oppressors. These are good news stories. They may not be in the headlines, but they should be in our hearts and our minds as we think of the future. No one here, no one in our Government, is under any illusions. There is still a lot of work to be done. Hardly anyone disagrees about what is needed genuine democracy, good government, open markets, sustained investment in education and health and the environment and, more than anything, widespread peace. All depend, fundamentally and first, on African leadership. These things cannot be imported, and they certainly cannot be imposed from outside. But we must also face a clear reality Even countries making the right policy choices still have to struggle to deliver for their people. Each African government has to walk down its own road to reform and renewal, but it is a hard road. And those of us who are in a position to do so must do our part to smooth that road, to remove some of the larger barriers so that Africa can fully share in the benefits and the responsibilities of globalization. I tell the American people all the time, and they're probably tired of hearing it now, that I have a very simple political philosophy Everybody counts everybody has a role to play everybody deserves a chance and we all do better when we help each other. That is a rule we ought to follow with Africa. There are five steps in particular I believe we must take. First, we must build an open world trading system which will benefit Africa alongside every other region in the world. Open markets are indispensable to raising living standards. From the 1970's to the 1990's, developing countries that chose trade grew at least twice as fast as those that chose not to open to the world. Now, there are some who doubt that the poorest countries will benefit if we continue to open markets, but they should ask themselves What will happen to workers in South Africa and Kenya without the jobs that come from selling the fruit of their labors abroad? What will happen to farmers in Zimbabwe and Ghana if protectionist farm subsidies make it impossible for them to sell beyond their borders? Trade must not be a race to the bottom, whether we're talking about child labor, harsh working conditions, or environmental degradation. But neither can we use fear to keep the poorest part of the global community stuck at the bottom forever. Africa has already taken important steps, forming regional trade blocks like ECOWAS, the East Africa Community, and SADC. But we can do more. That is why our Overseas Private Investment Corporation in Africa is working to support 3 times as many business projects in 1999 than it did in 1998, to create jobs for Africans and, yes, for Americans as well. That is why we are working with African nations to develop the institutions to sustain future growth, from efficient telecommunications to the financial sector. And that is why, as soon as possible, we must enact in our Congress the bipartisan "African Growth and Opportunity Act." This bill has passed in one version in our House and another version in our Senate. I urge the Congress to resolve the differences and send me a bill for signature by next month. Applause And I ask every one of you here who just clapped and those who didn't, but sympathize with the clapped laughter to contact anyone you know in the United States Congress and ask them to do this. This is a job that needs to be done. We must also realize the trade alone cannot conquer poverty or build a partnership we need. For that reason, a second step we must take is to continue the work now underway to provide debt relief to African nations committed to sound policies. Struggling democratic governments should not have to choose between feeding and educating their children and paying interest on a debt. Last March I suggested a way we could expand debt relief for the world's poorest and most indebted countries, most of which are African, and ensure the resources would be used to improve economic opportunity for ordinary African citizens. Our G 7 partners embraced that plan. Still, I felt we should do more. So in September I announced that we would completely write off all the debts owed to us by the countries that qualified for the G 7 program, as many as 27 African nations in all. The first countries, including Uganda and Mauritania, have begun to receive the benefits Mozambique, Benin, Senegal, and Tanzania are expected to receive benefits soon. Mozambique's debt is expected to go down by more than 3 billion. The money saved will be twice the health budget twice the health budget in a country where children are more likely to die before the age of 5 than they are to go on to secondary school. Last year I asked Congress for 970 million for debt relief. Many of you helped to persuade our Congress to appropriate a big share of that. Keep in mind, this is a program religious leaders say is a moral imperative and leading economists say is a practical imperative. It's not so often that you get the religious leaders and the economists telling us that good business is good morals. It's probably always true, but they don't say it all that often. Laughter We must finish the job this year. We must continue this work to provide aggressive debt relief to the countries that are doing the right thing, that will take the money and reinvest it in their people and their future. I ask you, especially the Americans in this audience If you believe in what brought you here, help us to continue this important effort. A third step we must take is to give better and deeper support to African education. Literacy is crucial to economic growth, to health, to democracy, to securing the benefits of globalization. Sub Saharan Africa has the developing world's lowest school enrollment rate. In Zambia, over half the schoolchildren lack a simple notebook. In rural parts of Tanzania, there is one textbook for every 20 children. That's why I proposed in our budget to increase by more than 50 percent the assistance we provide to developing countries to improve basic education, targeting areas where child labor is prevalent. I ask other nations to join us in this. I'll never forget the schools I visited on my trip to Africa, the bright lights in the eyes of the children, how intelligent they were, how eager they were. It is wrong for them to have to look at maps of nations that no longer exist, without maps of nations in their own continent that do exist. It is wrong for them to be deprived of the same opportunities to learn that our young people have here. If intelligence is equally distributed throughout the human race and I believe it is then every child in the human race ought to have a chance to develop his or her intelligence in every country in the world. A fourth step we must take is to fight the terrible diseases that have afflicted so many millions of Africans, especially AIDS and also TB and malaria. Last year 10 times as many people died of AIDS in Africa as were killed in all the continent's wars combined. It will soon double child mortality and reduce life expectancy by 20 years. You all laughed when Andy Young said that I was going to get out of the Presidency as a young man. Depending on the day, I sometimes feel young, or I feel that I'm the oldest man my age in America. Laughter The life expectancy in this country has gone from 47 to 77 in the 20th century. An American who lives to be 65 has a life expectancy in excess of 82 years. AIDS is going to reduce the life expectancy in Africa by 20 years. And even that understates the problem, because the people that escape it will live longer lives as African economies grow and strengthen. The worst burden in life any adult can bear is to see a child die before you. The worst problem in Africa now is that so many of these children with AIDS have also already lost their parents. We must do something about this. In Africa there are companies that are hiring two employees for every job on the assumption that one of them will die. This is a humanitarian issue, a political issue, and an economic issue. Last month Vice President Gore opened the first ever United Nations Security Council session on health issues, on a health issue, by addressing the AIDS crisis in Africa. I've asked Congress for another 100 million to fight the epidemic, bringing our total to 325 million. I've asked my administration to develop a plan for new initiatives to address prevention, the financial dimensions of fighting AIDS, the needs of those affected, so that we can make it clear to our African partners that we consider AIDS not just their burden but ours, as well. But even that will not be enough. Recently, Uganda's Health Minister pointed out that to provide access to currently available treatments to every Ugandan afflicted with AIDS would cost 24 billion. The annual budget of Uganda is 2 billion. The solution to this crisis and to other killer diseases like malaria and TB has to include effective, inexpensive vaccines. Now, there are four major companies in the world that develop vaccines, two in the United States and two in Europe. They have little incentive to make costly investments in developing vaccines for people who cannot afford to pay for them. So in my State of the Union Address, I proposed a generous tax credit that would enable us to say to private industry, "If you develop vaccines for AIDS, malaria, and TB, we will help to pay for them. So go on and develop them, and we'll save millions of lives." But I have to tell you, my speech and I don't want anybody else but me to be responsible my speechwriters were so sensitive, they didn't put this in the speech, but I want to say this AIDS was a bigger problem in the United States a few years ago than it is today. AIDS rates are not going up in African countries all African countries they're actually going down in a couple of African countries. Now, I know that this is a difficult and sensitive issue. I know there are cultural and religious factors that make it very difficult to tackle this issue from a preventive point of view. We don't have an AIDS vaccine yet. We have drugs that will help to prevent the transmission from pregnant mothers to their children, which I want to be able to give out. We have other drugs that have given people with AIDS in our country normal lives, in terms of their health and the length of their lives. I want those to be available. But the real answer is to stop people from getting the HIV virus in the first place. I got to see firsthand some of the things that were being done in Uganda that were instrumental in driving down the AIDS rate. Now, I don't care how hard or delicate or difficult this is this is your children's lives we're talking about. You know, we who are adults, when our children's lives are at stake, have to get over whatever our hangups or problems are and go out there and do what is necessary to save the lives of our children. And I'll help you do that, too. That's not free that costs money. Systems have to be set up. But we shouldn't pretend that we can give injections and work our way out of this. We have to change behavior, attitudes, and it has to be done in an organized, disciplined, systematic way. And you can do more in less time for less money in a preventive way, to give the children of Africa their lives back and the nations of Africa their futures back, with an aggressive prevention campaign than anything else. And there is no excuse for not doing it. It has to be done. Finally, let me say there is one more huge obstacle to progress in Africa, that we are committed to doing our part to overcome. We must build on the leadership of Africans to end the bloody conflicts killing people and killing progress. You know the toll tens of thousands of young lives lost in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea thousands killed and disfigured at unbelievably young ages in the civil war that nearly destroyed Sierra Leone 2 million killed by famine and war in Sudan, where government sees diversity as a threat rather than a strength and denies basic relief to citizens it claims to represent. Most of the world's conflicts pale in complexity before the situation in the Congo. At least seven nations and countless armed groups are pitted there against each other in a desperate struggle that seems to bring no one victory and everyone misery, especially the innocent people of the Congo. They deserve a better chance. Secretary Albright has called the Congo struggle Africa's first world war. As we search for an end to the conflict, let us remember the central lesson of the First World War the need for a good peace. If you mess up the peace, you get another World War. A year ago I said if the nations of the region reached an agreement that the international community could support, I would support a peacekeeping operation in the Congo. The region has now done so. The Lusaka cease fire agreement takes into account the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Congo, the withdrawal of foreign forces, the security of Congo's neighbors, the need for dialog within the nation, and most important, the need for the countries within central Africa to cooperate in managing the region's security. It is more than a cease fire it is a blueprint for building peace. Best of all, it is a genuinely African solution to an African problem. There is still fighting in Congo. Peace will not happen overnight. It will require a steady commitment from the parties and the unwavering support of the international community. I have told our Congress that America intends to do its part by supporting the next phase of the U.N.'s peacekeeping operation in the Congo, which will send observers to oversee the implementation of the agreement. We need to think hard about what is at stake here. African countries have taken the lead, not just the countries directly affected, either. They are not asking us to solve their problems or to deploy our military. All they have asked is that we support their own efforts to build peace and to make it last. We in the United States should be willing to do this. It is principled and practical. I know I see the Members of Congress here. I say again I see Congressman Payne, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Congresswoman Barbara Lee, Congressman Royce we need to stand by the people of Africa who have decided how to solve this most complex and troubling problem. We have learned the hard way in the United States, over decades and decades, that the costliest peace is far cheaper than the cheapest war. And we need to remember that as we approach our common responsibilities in central Africa. Finally, let me say that I intend to continue to work hard on these things for every day that I am President. For me, the remarkable decade of the 1990's began with the liberation symbolized by Nelson Mandela's first steps from Robben Island. In a few days, I will have the opportunity to join by satellite the conference in Tanzania that President Mandela is organizing to build peace in Burundi. A lot of people look at Africa and think, oh, these problems are just too complicated. I look at Africa, and I see the promise of Africa and think, if the problems are complicated now, think how much worse they'll be if we continue to ignore them. Other people grow frustrated by bad news and wish only to hear good news. But empty optimism does Africa no more service than groundless cynicism. What we need is not empty optimism or groundless cynicism but realistic hope. We need to see the promise, the beauty, the dreams of Africa. We need to see the problems clear and plain and stop ignoring the evident responses. We in the United States need to understand that our obligations to be good partners with Africa are not because we are certain that everything will turn out all right but because it is important. Because we're human beings, we can never expect everything to turn out all right. Africa is so incredibly diverse. Its people speak nearly 3,000 languages. It is not a single, monolithic place with single, monolithic truths. A place of many places, each defined by its own history and aspirations, its own successes and failures. I was struck on my trip to Africa by the differences between Ghana and Uganda, Botswana, and Senegal, between Capetown and Soweto. I was also struck by what bound people together in these places. In George Washington's first draft of his Farewell Address, he wrote, "We may all be considered as the children of one common country." The more I think about globalization and the interdependence it promises and demands, the more I share that sentiment. Now we must think of ourselves as children of one common world. If we wish to deepen peace and prosperity and democracy for ourselves, we must wish it also for the people of Africa. Africa is the cradle of humanity, but also a big part of humanity's future. I leave you with this thought When I think of the troubles of Africa, rooted in tribal differences when I think of the continuing troubles in America across racial lines, rooted in the shameful way we brought slaves here from West Africa so long ago, and our continuing challenges as we integrate wave after wave after wave of new immigrants from new places around the world, I am struck by the fact that life's greatest joy is our common humanity, and life's greatest curse is our inability to see our common humanity. In Africa, life is full of joy and difficulty. But for too long, the African people have lacked for friends and allies to help the joys overcome the difficulties. The United States will be a friend for life. Thank you. February 14, 2000 2000 Presidential Election Mr. Blitzer. Thank you very much, Lou. We are in the Oval Office here with President Clinton. Mr. Clinton, thank you so much for doing this historic, first ever on line news interview with CNN.com. I just want to set the scene for you and for our audience. This is not only being put forward on CNN.com and other Internet users, but also it will be seen simultaneously on CNN and CNN International. Fifteen minutes after we're completed, there will be an on line video that people will be able to see, whenever, if they missed it. There will also be a transcript. They will be able to stream and see this as it goes on, on the Internet. So it's a historic moment for the new technology. I know you've been fascinated by this, so let's get right at it. We have some E mail questions. First one from Frank Williams in Tinley Park, Illinois Mr. President, understandably, you're supporting the Presidential candidacy of Vice President Al Gore. But please share your personal political opinions of Senator John McCain and Governor George W. Bush. The President. I think I should pass on that. I think I've tried to stay out of this Presidential election. I'm not a candidate, and I don't think any headlines that I make should interfere with the ability of Senator McCain or Governor Bush to make their point. They're going to have an election in South Carolina, and then they'll go on to other States. And I think that and at some point it might become appropriate for me to say something, maybe at the Democratic Convention or something, or if they make a specific statement about my administration or my record. But I really believe that the American people this is their year, their time. And I am going to vote for the Vice President, and I do support him, because I think he's been the best Vice President in our history by far. And I think he's got a good program for the American people, and I know him to be a good man who will make good decisions. But I just don't think I should get in the middle of this Presidential race. It only interferes with the voters' ability to draw their own conclusions. And I trust them they almost always get it right. Mr. Blitzer. But you do know Senator McCain and Governor Bush? The President. Sure. Mr. Blitzer. You've met them, and you have your own opinions of both of them. The President. I do, and I follow this campaign closely. I'm interested. It's the first time in over 20 years when I've just been an onlooker, so it's been fascinating to me as a citizen. But I don't think that I should say anything right now. And I don't mean to dodge the gentleman's question, but I just think that anything I do would only complicate their lives. And they're making their case to the people, and they're arguing with each other as they should be. And that's the way it ought to be done right now. Hillary Clinton's Senate Campaign Mr. Blitzer. All right, we have another Email question from Peggy Brown Do you find it difficult, Mr. President, watching, listening to criticisms of the First Lady as she attempts to capture the Senate seat in New York? The President. Sure. I mean, of course, I do. I now know how she felt all those years. You know, I love her very much, and I think I know her better than anybody else, and I believe she'd be a great public official. And I hope the people of New York will put her to work. But if she's criticized, particularly if somebody says something I know is flatout wrong, it drives me nuts. I want to be able to say, "Gosh, I wish I could answer that one." Middle East Peace Process Mr. Blitzer. All right. We have a chat room that's going on even as we speak right now. There's a question from one person Are you optimistic, Mr. President, about the future for Middle East peace? The President. Yes, I am. This is we're in a little tough patch right now, because a lot of things are going on in the Middle East, the trouble in Lebanon right now. And we're down to the last strokes, if you will. We're down to the hard decisions. But I believe it is so clearly in the interests of the long term security of Israel and the long term interests of the Palestinians and the Syrians and the Lebanese to have a comprehensive peace. And I think we're so close on the substance that I am optimistic. Now, it will require courage. And it will require courage not just by the leaders, but the people of those countries have to recognize that you cannot make peace unless you're willing to give as well as to get. But they ought to do it, and they ought to do it sooner rather than later. I think that the longer you delay something like this, when you have a moment of opportunity, the more you put it at risk. But I am basically optimistic. Mr. Blitzer. You've invested a lot of your personal time and energy in the Israeli Palestinian and the Israeli Syrian peace process. Is it time for you, once again, to personally get involved and bring the parties together, do something to make sure this opportunity is not lost? The President. Well, I am personally involved, even when I'm not in a public way. I'm always on the phone, always working this issue. But I think that there will have to be some forward progress here in the next few weeks, and I'll do whatever I can to facilitate it in whatever way I can. But beyond that, I don't want to say anything right now. We're working it, and the parties are working it. Internet Security Mr. Blitzer. Okay. Let's take another question from an E mail that we received Do you think, Mr. President, the Federal Government could do more for Internet security? I know you have a big conference, a big meeting coming up here at the White House tomorrow to deal with this sensitive issue, especially given the hacker problem that we saw in the last few weeks. The President. Well, the short answer to that is, we probably can. And I'm bringing in a group of people to meet with me tomorrow, a lot of people from the high tech community and from all our Government agencies. These denial of service attacks are obviously very disturbing, and I think there is a way that we can clearly promote security. I think it's important that the American people not overreact to this. That is, we're into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it. So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history, and we'll figure out how to do it and go forward. But I think on balance, no one could dispute what a great thing the Internet has been for our country and for the world. There are now over 200 million people that use it every day, about half of them here in the United States. And we just need to keep pushing it. National Economy Mr. Blitzer. And we're using it right now. Let's take another question from our chat room, from our CNN.com chat room Mr. President, how will you advise Vice President Gore to keep this economy growing? The President. Well, I think he's got a pretty good idea because he's been here with us and has been part of all the decisions that have been made the last 7 years. But if you look at where we are, the question is we have the longest economic expansion in history how do we keep it going? I think we need to remember the fundamentals. We need to keep the debt being paid down, because that allows people in the private sector to borrow money not only to invest in new businesses or in their existing business but also to purchase things. So the continuing debt repayment is important. Keeping our markets open, to make us competitive and keep inflation down, is important. Investing in science and technology and research and in education and training and closing the digital divide to make sure access to the Internet is available to all Americans, those are the kinds of things that will keep this economy going. Especially, I would say, we have both the moral obligation and an economic opportunity by increasing investment in the areas which have been not so helped by the economic recovery, in the Indian reservations, the inner city communities, the rural communities where there haven't been a lot of new jobs. If you get growth there, it is by definition noninflationary, because you get they haven't had much. So you can lower the unemployment rate there, and you create new businesses, new employees, and new consumers at the same time. Mr. Blitzer. Mr. President, there's another Email question that we have How would you respond to arguments that you personally have had very little to do with the economic boom that the country has experienced during your administration? The President. Well, I would respond by asking them to remember what it was like before we announced and implemented our deficit reduction plan and remember what a direct impact that had on interest rates, on investment, and on the stock market. The American people deserve the lion's share of the credit. The high tech community we're part of it today they deserve a lot of the credit. High technology companies employ only 8 percent of our people they're responsible for 30 percent of our growth. The companies that restructured in the eighties deserve a lot of credit. Everybody who's kept our markets open, guaranteeing low inflation and more competition, they deserve a lot of credit. But nonetheless, we had a completely jobless recovery, what some people called a "triple dip" economy, until we finally said we're going to do something about this deficit. And when we did it, it was like breaking a dam, and the interest rates came down, and people started being able to get money and investing at an unprecedented rate, and the stock market started its upward march. So I think the critical things we did we had a good fiscal policy we had a good policy on the markets and we had a good policy on investing in technology and in people and education and training. And I don't think there's any question that had we not taken that first big bite out of the deficit, then the growth would have been much slower than it has been. Mr. Blitzer. Okay. I guess the person asking this question was also suggesting that the Republicans in Congress, Alan Greenspan, and the Internet economy, all of that combined to help you. The President. And I agree with that. I agree. I think Chairman Greenspan did a good job. The main thing he's done, that I think he deserves a lot of credit for, is that he has been able to look at the evidence of the new economy and act on the evidence, instead of what you might call the old theology. Otherwise, he could have killed this recovery by raising interest rates too much too frequently in the past. I think the Republicans in Congress not a one of them voted for the economic plan in '93. But we did have a bipartisan majority in both Houses in '97 for the Balanced Budget Act, which continued what we were doing, and they deserve credit for that. And I have never I try never to deny anybody else credit. This is an American achievement, not just mine. But if we hadn't taken that first big bite out of the deficit, I don't think we'd be where we are today. Situation in Chechnya Mr. Blitzer. All right, Mr. President, we have another question, an E mail question Why are the Western nations why have they not done enough for Chechnya like they did for Kosovo? The President. Well, first of all, I don't think the situations are parallel. But I think the Western nations have spoken out against the excesses. We believe I think I speak for all the Western leaders I certainly will speak for myself that Russia had a right to take on the paramilitary forces who were practicing terrorist tactics, but that it was a mistake to adopt the position that, in effect, ruled out negotiations with the elected officials in Kosovo, who weren't part of the terrorism, and to adopt tactics that cause a lot of civilian losses without any kind of corresponding gain. So I think we've been pretty clear about that. That's different from what happened in Kosovo, where Milosevic basically ran the whole country out based on their ethnic origin and had no intention of letting them come back until he had crushed anybody's ability to say anything. So I don't think that the situations are parallel. But I think we have spoken out against the excesses in Chechnya and tried to get humanitarian aid in there and will continue to try to help the people of Chechnya and the legitimate political forces there. That's very different from what the paramilitary forces did. They have to bear their share of responsibility for what happened as well. I think some of them actually wanted the Chechnyan civilians attacked because they thought it would help improve their political views. Russia U.S. Relations Mr. Blitzer. Okay, we have a followup question from our chat room. Let me read it to you as it's coming in How can Americans know that America is really at peace with Russia? The President. Because we're neither fighting with them nor on the edge of fighting. We've detargeted the nuclear weapons against each other. We are working to secure the nuclear weapons in Russia, to help them destroy nuclear weapons, to help safeguard the materials that remain. And I hope very much that after the next Russian election, we'll be able to make further progress on reducing the nuclear weapons there that we both hold. Mr. Blitzer. And Vladimir Putin, the Acting President, is he someone that you can deal with? The President. Based on what I have seen so far, I think that the United States can do business with this man. I think he's obviously highly intelligent he's highly motivated he has strong views. We don't agree with him on everything, but what I have seen of him so far indicates to me that he's capable of being a very strong and effective and straightforward leader. Taxes and the Internet Mr. Blitzer. All right, let's go back to another issue involving the Internet. This is a question Mr. President, what role will you play in the debate on taxing Internet commerce? The President. Well, we've played some role already. I signed a bill last year to have a 3year moratorium on any kind of discriminatory or transactional tax, if you will, on the commerce on the Internet. I don't think that there should be any access or any other kind of discriminatory taxes, from my point of view, ever on the Internet. The tough question is the whole question of what happens to sales that if they were not on the Internet would be subject to State and local sales tax. And the Governors are trying to work through that. I know Governor Leavitt has taken a particular interest in that, the Governor of Utah. I think that's something that we have to work through because we need there are whole questions about the need for States to simplify their tax structures, and there are other questions there that have to be resolved. And I think that's going to take some time to resolve. But I don't think we should have access taxes on the Internet or any other kind of discriminatory taxes, because this is an important part of our economy, and we want it to grow. I think that for the States and the localities, they're going to have to keep working until they work through what the operational problems are. Mr. Blitzer. Doesn't that discriminate, though, against stores a bookstore, for example The President. Of course it does. Mr. Blitzer. that you have to pay tax The President. Absolutely, it does. Mr. Blitzer. but if you go to Amazon.com you don't have to pay taxes? The President. It does, and that's the argument that the Governors are making and the argument a lot of the merchants are making. Mr. Blitzer. Well, where's your position on that? The President. Well, what I'm trying to do is get them together. There are also the Internet people point out that there are also a lot of complications in the way State taxes are. And they have on their side the weight of Supreme Court law which basically was made from mailorder sales. The same argument was made against mail order sales. And the prevailing legal position is that if you don't have enough connections to a State, you don't have the obligation to collect and remit the sales tax. Keep in mind, the sales taxes do it's just that the seller doesn't have to collect and remit it. So most of the people I know who have Internet businesses are concerned about trying to make sure they get a simplified system, and they know what the drill is. Their main concern, however, is not having access to the Internet itself taxed. And I'm with them on that. And I'm trying to support the process that now exists to resolve the issue of how State taxes, the sales taxes, can best be collected in the way that's not too burdensome on the Internet. You don't want to burden the Internet, but you don't want to put people who aren't making sales on it out of business. And we've got to find that right balance, and that's what we're working on. Austria Mr. Blitzer. We have another question from our chat room, an international question involving the political situation in Austria given the fact that Joerg Haider is now his party is part of the Austrian Government. Let me read to you the question What does the United States plan to do to make sure that Austria knows that Nazi sympathy will not be accepted? The President. Well, I think we've made it quite clear that we do not support any expression of either sympathy with the Nazis in the past or ultranationalist race based politics, antiimmigrant politics in the future. That, I think, is equally important here. And we've also tried to stay pretty close to where the European Union has been because, after all, Austria is a part of Europe, and they've been very tough in condemning what the Austrians have done here. So I think we're on the right track. There is a delicate balance, however. You know, Austria is a democracy this man's party got a certain percentage of the vote. He did it based on appeals that went well beyond a narrow race based appeal. And we don't want to say or do anything that builds his support even further. But I think it ought to be clear to every Austrian citizen that we in the United States do not approve of his political program or his excessive rhetoric. Iran U.S. Relations Mr. Blitzer. Let's stay overseas. We have another E mail question about U.S. Iranian relations I'd like to know, Mr. President, your view on the recent developments of Iranian American relations as we, the Iranian youth, are really anxiously following political developments between the two countries and no doubt willing to finally see a healthy and mutually respectful relationship between the two. The President. Well, that's what I want. You know, I said several weeks ago now, maybe a few months ago, that the United States had not been entirely blameless in the past in our relationships with Iran, and that we wanted a good relationship with Iran, that we did not support and did not condone anyone who would support terrorist actions, and that we had some difficulties with Iran, but we were viewing with interest affairs within Iran. We wanted the Iranian people to have a good democracy. We like to see these elections, and we want to be supportive of better relationships if we can work them out on ways that are mutually agreeable. I think that one of the best things we could do for the long term peace and health of the Middle East and, indeed, much of the rest of the world, is to have a constructive partnership with Iran. And I'm still hoping that that can materialize. A lot of that is now in the hands of the Iranian people and their elections and also the leaders of Iran. Some of them don't want that, but I think some of them may want that. And I think it's important that the genuine reformers there not be, in effect, weakened because of their willingness to at least talk to us, because I think the United States should always remain open to a constructive dialog to people of good will. And I think that the estrangement between these two countries is not a good thing. I think it would be better if we could have a relationship. Mr. Blitzer. As you know, Mr. President, in this regard, 13 Iranian Jews were accused of spying, and they're being held. Is this an irritant in this? What do you want the Iranian Government to do on that front? The President. Well, I have been assured by the Israelis that they were not spies. And I've done quite a bit of work on it. I'm very, very concerned about this, because people cannot it is an irritant. The American Jewish community is very, very concerned about it, and we've done a lot of work on it. And I'm hopeful that justice will be done there and that no one will be punished for being a spy who isn't. That's not a good thing to do. And that, obviously, is a real it's one of the sticking points. But I think that there are other people of good will who the Iranians recognize are their friends, who want better relationships with them, who have also talked to them about this, and I'm hoping that it will be worked out in a satisfactory manner. Media Mergers Mr. Blitzer. Okay, Mr. President, I think we have another question from our chat room. Let's see what it is How can we keep the media giants from squashing the little guy? I guess they might be referring to the recent merger of our own CNN Time Warner AOL. What's your answer to that? The President. Well, I think the main things to me are there are two sets of little guys, I guess. The one thing is you don't want to and Steve Case has talked about this for many years, himself Mr. Blitzer. He's the chairman of AOL. The President. The chairman of AOL that it's important not to have access choked off. We want all these if these mergers go through, we want them to lead to greater access to greater options to consumers at more affordable prices. Then the second thing is, you want other competitors to be able to get into the game. That's what all the big controversy was over the antitrust suit involving Microsoft. And that's handled in the Justice Department, strictly apart from the White House, so we had no role in that one way or the other. And without expressing an opinion on that case one way or the other, I think what I favor is an American economy where people who have good ideas and new messages they want to get out ought to have some way to do that, if they can generate a following. So that's what needs to be monitored here. Some of this amalgamation I think is inevitable, given the possible synergy that could exist, for example, between a company like AOL and Time Warner, with all of its myriad publications and programs and networks. But you've got to have there has to be some room for people who want to compete, and then there has to be a guarantee that consumers will not be choked off and their prices hiked and, in fact, they will have more access to more programs at more affordable prices. And I think those are the touchstones that ought to guide Government policy. Small Business Mr. Blitzer. All right. Let's take another question from our chat room, CNN.com chat room What will the current and future administrations do to keep small business alive? Sort of related to the last question. The President. One of the things that I'm very proud of about this economy and again, I don't take total credit for this this is part of our prosperity but in every year I've been President, we've set a new record for starting small businesses every single year. I think that the Small Business Administration has an important role to play. I think that we have dramatically increased the number of small business loans that we finance, and we've concentrated on women and minorities, others who have been traditionally denied credit. We have promoted aggressively for the first time what we call community development financial institutions, where we put Federal money into banks to try to help them make small loans to people who never could have gotten credit before. Just as we do around the world, we're now doing that here. And that's helping. We've tried to continue to minimize the burden of Government regulations on small business. And I think that's important to keep an entrepreneurial environment in America, so people can get access to venture capital if they've got an idea and start it. So I think having the right conditions and then having specific access to capital and technical support through the Small Business Administration and the community financial institutions that's the best thing we can do for small business. President's Legacy Mr. Blitzer. We have another question about the future in our chat room What will the history books say about the Clinton Presidency? The President. Well, I'm not sure, because that's for the historians to decide. But I think they will say, among other things, that we had a we came into office with a different approach that was attuned better to the changes that were going on in the economy, in the society and in the world, and that we helped America get through this enormous period of change and transition in the metaphor I use, to build our bridge to the 21st century and that our country was stronger when we finished than it was when we began. I hope that's what they'll say, and I believe they will. President's Future Plans Mr. Blitzer. All right, we have a follow up question from our chat room. Let's take a look at that one Mr. President, what are you going to do when you leave office? Which is now less than a year away. You probably are you counting the days? The President. No, not in a negative way. I mean, I'm not eager for them to be over. In fact, one of the problems I have is, I want to work even harder now to try to get as much done as I can. When I leave, I'm going to establish a library and a public policy center. Mr. Blitzer. That will be in Little Rock. The President. And that will take a couple years to do. And I'm going to try to maintain a high level of activity in the areas that I'm particularly interested in. I've spent a lot of my life working on reconciliation of people across racial, religious, and other lines. I'm very interested in using the power of technology, like what we're doing now, to help poor countries and poor areas overcome what would ordinarily take years in economic development and education. I'm very interested in continuing my work to try to convince Americans and the rest of the world that we can beat global warming without shutting down the economy, that it's no longer necessary to use more greenhouse gases to grow economically. I'm very interested in promoting the concept of public service among young people and trying to get more young Americans to take some time off to serve in our National Government or the State and local government. Those are four things I'll do. Basically, I want to try to be a good citizen. America's given me a lot, and more than I could have ever dreamed. I've loved being President. And I feel that I've acquired a certain level of experience and knowledge, that I owe that to my country. And along the way, I hope to write a few books and have a little fun, too. And I hope I'll be a member of the Senate spouses club. I'm going to do my best to support my wife in every way I can. But I just want to be a good citizen. I want to try to put what I've learned in a lifetime to use in a way that benefits the people of America and others around the world who I care about. Mr. Blitzer. And you'll commute between Chappaqua, New York, and Little Rock, sort of? The President. Yes, I'll spend some time in Little Rock for the next couple of years, you know, like I said, getting the facility up. And I'll spend some time with Hillary, as much as I possibly can, in New York. And then I'll probably travel some. And I hope we'll be able to travel some together. It depends on what happens in the next year. But I'm really looking forward to it. I love this job. I don't know if I'll ever do anything again that I love the work as much as I love this. John Kennedy described it well. He said, basically, it challenges all your abilities. It challenges your mind, your emotions, even your physical strength. But I think that I can do a lot of things that will help other people when I leave here, and I'm going to do my best to do that. President's Favorite Websites Mr. Blitzer. All right, Mr. President, if you'll take a look at our chat room, the people who are participating in the CNN.com chat, they're participating in huge numbers right now. Let's take another question, though, from an E mail person named Seth. He says this Mr. President, I have heard that you are an avid web surfer and on line shopper. What are your favorite websites? The President. Well, I wouldn't say I am avid. I did do some Christmas shopping for the first time on line this year, though. And I even I bought some things from the Native American craftspeople up in South Dakota, at Pine Ridge, which was really interesting to me. But I love books, so I like Amazon.com. And I'm fascinated by eBay, because I like to swap and trade, and it reminds me of the old kind of farmer's markets and town markets I used to visit when I started out in politics in Arkansas so many years ago. I think the whole concept of people being able to get on line and sort of trade with each other, and almost barter, is utterly fascinating to me. Issues of the New Millennium Mr. Blitzer. All right, we have another question, Mr. President. We only have a little time left. Let's take this from the chat room Mr. President, what is the biggest issue facing Americans in the new millennium? The President. Well, I think the most important thing that we have to do is to make up our minds that we are actually going to build a more united country out of our diversity and out of our groundbreaking technology and advances in science and technology. That is, I think that if you look around the world today, the biggest problems seem to be rooted in racial, ethnic, religious strife. If you look at America and how well we fit with a positive vision of the 21st century world and you look at the continuing problems we've had here, with these hate crimes, for example, the most important thing we could do is get our minds right and get our spirits right and realize that we have to learn to live with people who are different from us. We have to learn to keep our conflicts with them within proper bounds, so that our common goals override the differences between us. If we build one America, that's the most important thing. The American people are so innovative, so creative, and we're so well positioned for the future, everything else will work out. But if we allow ourselves to fall into these deep divisions over including political ones differences of opinion are healthy demonization is destructive and self indulgent. And that's basically what we've got to work on. If we can keep working together enough in creative tension, then everything else will work out. I'm confident of it. Social Security Mr. Blitzer. All right, Mr. President. We have time for one final question. It's from Wolf in Washington, DC that would be me, by prerogative, as the moderator of this discussion, this on line interview we're having You know the Republicans today in the House of Representatives are pushing legislation that would remove the limits, ease the limits on Social Security recipients as far as their earnings after they reach 65 until 70 a very sensitive subject, affects a lot of people watching right now, how much money they could earn and still be eligible for Social Security. Will you work with the Republicans, support them in eliminating those caps on earnings? The President. Absolutely. I'm thrilled by this. I hope this is just the beginning of a signal from them that they're willing to work on this whole Social Security area. I think we should lift the earnings limit for two reasons. One is, I don't really think it's fair for people if you're 65 today in America, your life expectancy is 83. And you want to be alert you want to be physically strong. And we know as people stay more active, they're going to live better, not just longer. So I don't think we should penalize them. Secondly, I think as the baby boomers retire, it's going to be important to have a higher percentage of people over 65, if they want to, working. This will be good for our society. I'm strongly in favor of it. If they will send me a bill what we call in Washington speak, a clean bill that is, doesn't have a lot of other things unrelated to that littered to it I will be happy to sign it. Then the second thing I'd like to urge them to do is to think about my proposal to dedicate the interest savings that we get from paying down the debt because of the surplus in the Social Security tax to the Social Security Trust Fund to do two things Number one, put the life of the Trust Fund out to 2050 that will take care of most of the baby boom generation and number two, do something about a single woman's poverty on Social Security. Married women's poverty on Social Security, about 5 percent overall, seniors over 65, under 10 percent now. Single women on Social Security tend to live longer, tend to have less money their poverty rate is somewhere between 18 and 20 percent. So I like getting rid of the earnings limitation. It's the right thing to do. Let's just do it. But then let's lengthen the life of the Trust Fund and do something about the poverty rate among women who are retired. Mr. Blitzer. Mr. President, thank you so much for joining us from the Oval Office. Always, of course, great to be in the Oval Office. And one day when you're not in the Oval Office, you'll probably be excited coming back here as well. The President. I will be. I'll always be excited to come here. And maybe I'll even get to do a web chat with you afterward. February 09, 2000 Thank you. First of all, Fred, thank you for what you said. And I thank you and Lisa for being wonderful friends to me and Hillary and to Al and Tipper Gore and to our party. I thank Jess and Betty Jo for being here tonight. I can't help but say, Betty Jo is the niece of former Speaker Carl Albert, who passed away in the last couple of days, a great Democrat. And I had a wonderful talk with his wife today, and it reminded me of why I have been a Democrat all my life. And our thoughts and prayers are with your family. I thank "B" and Audre Rapoport and Garry Mauro for their work here. And I wanted to acknowledge not only the mayor, who I think has done a superb job, and Senator Cain, thank you for being here, and Sally, thank you for being here and for being our regional Department of Education person, for all the good work you do. But I also want to introduce a former very important person on my White House staff, Regina Montoya, who is now a candidate for the House, who is here. I want you all to help her get elected to Congress. We need to win this seat. Applause Thank you. She's here, I think. I got tickled I started laughing all over again when Ed Rendell was up here talking about the rap that the Republican chairman laid on him after the New Hampshire primary. He said we were the candidate of special interests, and he mentioned what did he say trial lawyers, labor, gays, and Hollywood. Laughter Let me take you back to 1992. In 1991, I was having the time of my life living in Arkansas in the 11th year of my governorship. I had had a new lease on life. I loved my job. I could have done it now to kingdom come. But I was really worried about my country, because that's the kind of stuff that everybody in Washington said, what Ed just said. And there was a Republican line and a Democratic line. There was a liberal line and a Republican line. And everybody was struggling to be politically correct and to be as confrontational as possible, because that is the only way you would get your 15 seconds on the evening news. I suppose it was perfectly good for the people who got on the talk shows all the time and the people who could raise funds for their reelection and stay in, but the country was in the ditch. Even when we were nominally in a recovery, we couldn't generate any jobs. And we had quadrupled the debt in 12 years, and we didn't have much to show for it, because we were spending less in real terms on things that we needed, like education. The reason I ran for President is that I had been working on all this stuff for a long time, and it became clear to me there were limits to what any Governor or any people could do, or people in their private lives could do, to turn America around until we had a National Government that had it right that had the right philosophy, that was dynamic and change oriented and was interested in bringing people together and was committed to creating the conditions and giving people the tools to succeed in a very different world. So I admit that what the chairman of the Republican Party said is right, but I don't think he got it right. That is, I'm not ashamed of the fact we've got a lot of trial lawyers here. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I think, if people have been shafted, they ought to be able to go to court and pursue their remedy. I also want to say this I'm also proud of the fact that we've had a real relationship. This has not been a political deal. We haven't 100 percent agreed on everything. We've had a relationship. It's like being in a family or an organization or anything else. It's real here. You know, I hear all these our friends in the other party talk about how terrible the trial lawyers are. All I want to know is, if you guys are so destructive, why do we have 21 million jobs and the best economy we've ever had? And the same thing about the labor unions. Labor enrollments went up last year for the first time in many years. I think that's a good thing for people to be organized, to be able to not only vent their grievances but, more importantly, build partnerships for the future. And if it's so bad, why do we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years? And why do we have the highest productivity that we can ever remember? I plead guilty to believing that we should not deprive people of jobs or subject them to violence just because they're gay. I'm guilty of that I believe that. I think anybody that shows up for work and pays their taxes and are willing to do whatever it takes to be a good citizen of their country ought to be treated with the same amount of respect as anybody else. That's what I believe. And I think the evidence is that that's right. In terms of Hollywood, that's sort of the last refuge of the rightwing arsenal there. Laughter I was the first person not a member of the Republican Party I was the first political leader, in 1993, to go to Hollywood and ask them to give me a ratings system for television for children and to reduce the amount of inappropriate material our children were exposed to. And not everybody agreed with it, but again, we're in I have a relationship with a lot of people out there, and we got a rating system. I wish it worked better now because it's kind of practically, it's difficult because you've got to worry if you're a parent, you've got to worry about the video games and the TV and the movies and all that. And we're trying to work through that. But the point I want to make is, my whole idea about politics is that we ought to run it the way we our country the way we would run we would sensibly run a family or a business or any other common enterprise if you were part of a big charitable endeavor here in Dallas. I just think that if you look at the way the world works and how it's changing, all these trends toward globalization, all the threats that are out there from people who are trying to take advantage of globalization for their own ends if you look at all the opportunities that are out there through scientific and technological advances, it does not make sense for us in this year to revert to the patterns that I have spent 7 years trying to break. Everybody has got we're going to divide up sides now, and if you're a liberal, you've got to be over here and if you're a conservative, you've got to be over here. And here's your line attacking them, and here's your line attacking the other. And let's don't worry about whether we ever get anything done or not. I think this is nuts. None of you live like this, and none of you have any role at all like this except when you vote, we're supposed be like this. I have worked for 7 long years, with the help of people in my administration, people like you, to prove that we could have a unifying vision that would bring this country together, not in the middle of the road but in a dynamic movement forward. And look, 7 years ago we had a terrible economy, and now we've got the longest economic expansion in history. Seven years ago we had worsening social problems, and now we've got the lowest welfare and crime rates in 30 years and the lowest poverty rates in 20 years. This works, and it's not rocket science. And if somebody asked me, "Well, what is the difference? What did you really do that was different as President," and you only get a sentence or two, I would not say our economic policy, although we have a good one, I think, and it's different or our crime policy, although we have a good one, and it's different or our welfare policy, although we have a good one, and it's different or even our education policy, which is profoundly different from what was done before. I would say, I believe that everybody counts everybody deserves a chance and we all do better when we try to help each other. And I believe that we don't get anywhere by denying the challenges that are before us so that we can continue the comfortable arguments that we've been making in the past, instead of taking the uncomfortable but exhilarating march into the future. That's what this whole deal has been about, and that's what I tried to say in the State of the Union Address. Anybody that's over 30 years old we've got a few people who aren't in this room, so they will have to learn this but anybody that's over 30 years old can remember at least one time, if not more, in your life when you made a real bad mistake, not because times were tough but because times were so good, you didn't think anything could go wrong. And so you just didn't want to do what you knew that you ought to do, keep planning, keep thinking about the future, make the tough decisions now. Better to be diverted. Better to lay down and rest. Better to just indulge yourself for the moment. Anybody who has lived any length of time has made a mistake under those circumstances. That is the question that is facing the United States today. And the consequences are far greater for the Nation than they are for any of us in our personal lives, because we have never had this kind of chance before. So what I tried to say at the State of the Union, what I want to say again to you, I hope you will hammer home to everyone you can talk about this year is that if there was ever a time when we ought to have an election that was a unifying referendum on our common future, it is this one, because the economy is in good shape the society is in good shape we've got a lot of confidence we have relatively few internal crises or external threats. There is nothing to prevent us from saying, "Okay, what's out there that's a big problem or a big opportunity? And let's go deal with it." And if we do both, we will be able to literally make the future of our dreams for our children. That's what I think the Democrats ought to be saying this year. And that is what we represent. We shouldn't be denying that we ought to change. If somebody who was running for President said, "Vote for me. I'll do just what Bill Clinton did," I'd vote against that person because we live in a dynamic time. But if somebody says, "Vote for me. I'd like to go back to the way it was in 1992 and before," I would certainly vote against that person. Laughter So the question is not whether we're going to change it is how. So I think if you know the number of people over 65 is going to double, you have to meet the challenge of the aging of America. Putting it off will only make it more expensive and more painful. Today we can save Social Security for the baby boom generation, extend the life of Medicare, and add a prescription drug benefit for the 60 percent of the seniors that don't have access to one. We can do it today. We have the money, and we have the reforms to save money, and we ought to do it. If we know that education is more important than ever before and we've got more kids from more diverse backgrounds, we should act today to make sure all our kids start school ready to learn and graduate ready to succeed Head Start, after school programs, school repairs and building and modernizing schools, hooking them all up to the Internet, training the teachers better, the whole nine yards. There is no excuse for us not doing this. Test scores are up, graduation rates are up, college going rates are up, but not near where they ought to be but enough so that we know what to do. It would be different if we didn't know what to do. We know what to do now. We don't have an excuse. So to squander this moment in education would be a great error. In health care, I was always one of my friends in the Congress came up to me the other day, and they said, "You know, they told me, the insurance companies did, if I voted for your health care plan back in 1994, the number of uninsured people would actually go up." And he said, "They were absolutely right. I voted for it, and there's more uninsured people today than there was when I voted for it." Laughter So we had to find a different approach. The only social indicator, just about, that's worse today than it was in '93 when I took office is that there are more Americans who work for a living without health insurance. So we got this program, and I wish you would look at this. Some of you, by the way, who work with the agencies in Texas, we've got this program that will enroll 5 million kids in the Children's Health Insurance Program of lower income working people who can't get health insurance on the job. We've got 2 million enrolled now. We've got money for 3 million more. A lot of the ones who aren't enrolled are still in Texas for a lot of good reasons. I'm not criticizing anybody, but we just need to go out there and get those kids in there. And I'd like the Congress to say their parents can be enrolled, too. And I'd like the Congress to let people between 55 and 65 who don't have insurance it's the fastest growing group of uninsured people, people who take early retirement. They're not old enough for Medicare they don't have insurance. I think they ought to be able to buy into Medicare, and we ought to give them a modest tax credit so it's affordable. Now, this is a big issue. We know that more and more parents will work. Either they will be single parents working or two parent households where both people will be working. If we know that and we know right now that for all of our success, America does less to support work and family that is, to help working parents succeed as childrearers, which is the most important job anybody can have if we know we don't do enough, we should do more. We know more and more families, as people live longer, are going to be taking care of aging or disabled relatives. We should do more. So I recommended to the Congress to increase our support for the child care tax credit, to give families a long term care credit for caring for elderly or disabled loved ones, to give parents a tax deduction for college tuition up to 10,000 a year so we can open the doors of 4 years of college to all Americans. These are big things. Why? Because we know there will be big problems 10 or 20 or 30 years from now if we don't deal with them right now. And I could go on and on. I don't want to give you the whole State of the Union Address, but the point I'm trying to make is, the Democratic Party is now in a position to say, we have the resources. We've worked very hard to get rid of this deficit. We've worked very hard to pay the debt down. And we've now got the resources to deal with the aging of America, the challenge of the children and their education, the challenge of health care, the challenge of balancing work and family. We can do it and still get this country out of debt in 13 years and still provide extra incentives to places like where I was this morning, in the Rio Grande Valley, to give people extra incentives to invest in urban neighborhoods, rural areas, Indian reservations, where our prosperity hasn't reached. And why do we do all that? Because we believe everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance and we all do better when we help each other. That's what I believe. Nobody believes the Democrats anymore are weak on the budget, weak on the economy, weak on welfare, weak on crime. But we do believe that if somebody is trying, we ought to help them make the most of their lives. And we now have 7 years of evidence that that's not only a morally defensible thing to do, it not only makes us feel better, it actually works. So I will close with this, and I don't want to be maudlin, but I can pretty well say what I want to because I'm not running for anything. Laughter First time in over two decades I haven't been on the ballot for anything. Some of those guys on the other side may write me out just to laughter they may feel deprived that they're being cut out of one more chance to vote against me, but I'm not on the ballot. So I'm just telling you this as a citizen. Once before in my lifetime, I thought we had a chance to build the future of our dreams. In the last economic expansion that was, until this month, the longest one in history it ran from 1961 to 1969. I graduated from high school in 1964. And I think it's appropriate that I say this here. Most of the people who now look back at that period date the onset of American cynicism to the assassination of President Kennedy. That is dead wrong. That is wrong. The country was heartbroken, but they rallied. They united. They tried to lift themselves up. Lyndon Johnson did a good job of moving the country forward. And we believed, when I graduated from high school, that we were going to solve the civil rights crisis and the poverty problems of America through the orderly legislative process in Congress and working with people. We believed we were going to be able to stand against communism without having an unacceptable cost at home or around the world. We believed that we could do this. Four years later, I was at my college graduation, 2 days after Robert Kennedy was killed, 90 days after Martin Luther King was killed, 94 days after Lyndon Johnson said he wouldn't run for reelection. The economy was beginning to shut down. The country was torn apart over Vietnam, and we had had riots in the streets of America. I have waited, as an American, over 30 years for my country to get another chance to build the future of our dreams for our children. Most of us get at least one second chance in life, and if we didn't, we'd be a long way behind where we are. Our country, in our lifetime, has this chance in even better circumstances than existed 30 years ago, with science and technology changes that are breathtaking. I believe that the young women here may very likely give birth to children who will have a life expectancy of 100 years. They will come home from the hospital with genetic roadmaps of their children's lives. And if they give birth to young daughters that have one of those two broken genes that are high predictors of breast cancer, they'll be able to take gene therapies that will block them from ever developing in the first place. I believe that will happen. I believe the young people here will soon be driving automobiles that get probably 80, 90 miles a gallon, and within 5 years they'll be running on biofuels that will be the equivalent of getting 500 miles to the gallon because they require so little oil to produce. I believe we'll find out what's in those black holes in outer space. I believe we'll be able to keep people with diabetes, adult onset diabetes, alive and healthy to a normal lifespan. I believe that we will actually develop computers the size of a teardrop that use DNA for computer memories more powerful than any human chip, so that you will have tiny little computers with a computing power of all the super computers today. I believe all this is going to happen. I think we'll also have to deal with highly sophisticated terrorists and organized criminals and drugrunners that have access to chemical and biological and other weapons. There will always be enemies of civilization out there. But we'll do just fine if we understand that it still comes down to whether you believe everybody counts everybody ought to have a chance we're all going to do better if we work together. For 30 years I have waited for this moment. If I contributed at all to it, I am grateful. But as a citizen, I implore you, don't let America turn away from what works when we've finally got a chance to redeem the whole promise of our Nation. Thank you. February 08, 2000 Thank you very much. Thank you, John. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here tonight and for your support for our party. I wanted to just say a few words, and then we'll visit a little. I did put out the budget yesterday. And I've had a great week. We had the State of the Union, and then I went to Switzerland, to Davos, to the international economic forum, to talk about what I believe our policy ought to be on trade in the 21st century. And before I issued my budget, I got to hear my wife make a great speech on Sunday when she announced for the Senate in New York. I was very proud of her. I thought she did a wonderful job. Today I took action on another item I discussed in the State of the Union over at the American academy of sciences. I signed the first Executive order of the 21st century, protecting the genetic privacy of all Federal employees and asking Congress to do that for all employees throughout the country. I think that is a very important issue. We're going to have all this huge explosion of knowledge when we finish the mapping of the human genome. And we want people to participate to the maximum possible degree in all benefits that will flow out of that. And if we expect that, then we're going to have to make sure that they don't lose the right to a job, lose the right to get insurance, lose the right to be considered for promotion because their genetic map shows that they might have some propensity to some problem. We want people to participate in every conceivable way in learning about it so that we can develop blocking gene therapies for all the problems people have. So this is a very, very exciting time for our country. For me, it's actually rather interesting. For the first time in probably 24 years to see an election season come and go when I'm not on anybody's ballot anywhere laughter it's rather interesting. I'm having a good time. Laughter I feel like the cat that ate the canary some days. But one of the things I would like to say to all of you that I hope you will keep in mind throughout this year as you support us, as you talk to your friends, as you make arguments for our candidates, from the White House to the Senate and the House and the governorships is that the Democratic Party now has had 7 years of testing our dominant philosophy. And I think it's pretty clear, number one, that it works, and number two, that it's shared by a majority of the American people. Seven years ago when we began, we just had a roadmap for the future. We said, "Look, we believe that there is a reason the country is suffering from economic stagnation and social division and political gridlock and that Government's been discredited, that we were operating under a philosophy that said Government was the problem, that pitted people against one another, and that was very good about talking about problems like the deficit but not very good about doing anything about it." And we came to this town our whole administration did, beginning with the Vice President and me with a philosophy that said we were going to unify this country, that we were going to try to create opportunity for everybody, challenge everyone to be responsible, and bring everybody together in one community. And we were actually going to try to bring Washington together. I must say, we've had more success in the country than we have in Washington. Laughter But still, it's been an exhilarating effort here, and still a challenge every day. So now we've had 7 years of these results. And I just want to say what I said in the State of the Union Address. I think it is imperative that we not squander this moment under the illusion that because things are going well for this country there are no consequences to what we say, what we do, and what we advocate. We live in a very dynamic world. Things are changing very rapidly. We have never had this kind of opportunity to shape the future. A few of you in this room are as old as I am. I was telling somebody the other day that when we passed the milestone to having the longest economic expansion in history, the last one that was this long the next to longest one now was the one that occurred in the decade of the sixties. And you probably all remember that it played out under the inflationary pressures of what was then known as guns and butter, the Vietnam war and our obligations at home. When I graduated from high school in 1964, even though the country was still hurting over President Kennedy's assassination, we had actually come together and lifted ourselves up out of that. And there was this sense that there was nothing we couldn't do. Within 2 years, we had riots in the streets. The country was deeply divided over the war in Vietnam we had over a half a million people there. Within a couple more years, the economy was in terrible shape. And the politics of division, basically, began to rule our national campaigns. As an American citizen, I have waited now about 35 years for my country once again to be in a position to basically be a nation of builders and dreamers, where we could shape the future. That's why in the State of the Union Address I said we've got to, number one, remember what brought us to the dance here. We've got to stay with an economic policy that has given us the ability to deal with these things. And I know I'm being criticized somewhat, from the right and the left, for paying the debt down. But we've got to keep this economy going. To do that, we've got to keep interest rates down and confidence sky high. And if you want businesses and individuals to be able to borrow more, then the Government should borrow less. And it will generally tend to be more efficient borrowing. Number two, we've got to invest in education we've got to expand health care we've got to help families balance their roles at home and at work and we've got to continue to stay in the forefront of science and technology and meeting the new security challenges of the 21st century, especially the challenges of terrorism and biological and chemical weapons. We have to do these things. But it is within our grasp to shape a future that would have been undreamed of just a few years ago. I believe that the Democratic Party is the right party to lead this country. Even though it's flattering to see the Republicans sort of edging more and more toward our economic policy I think that's a good thing. I think it would be a great thing for our country if we had a bipartisan economic policy. It's an important part of our national security in the 21st century. But we still have radically different approaches to things like sensible efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and away from children to matters like making educational opportunity real and available to all, matters like our obligation to make available the access to health care. We've provided because of the provision that Hillary and I and others fought so hard for in the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, we got 2 million more children in poor working families with health insurance today than we had just 2 years ago 2 million more. I made a proposal and we got funding already, you've already paid for this, you don't have to we have funding already for 3 million more. But I think now if we bring those children's parents into the program, we could take care of 25 percent of the uninsured people in America, and they're the 25 neediest percent. The second fastest big group are people between the ages of 55 and 65 who leave the work force, lose their health care, aren't old enough for Medicare. And you'd be amazed how many people that I grew up with in Arkansas we're all moving into this age group who are affected by this. You're talking about a very large number of people. I think we ought to just buy them into Medicare pay the cost, whatever the real cost is, give them a modest tax credit so it's more affordable. These are big issues. We've got to keep people coming together, meeting these basic needs if we want to keep people focused on the future. People stop focusing on the future when they have to worry about how they're going to keep body and soul together or when they feel threatened. So we have to keep the momentum up. And believe me, no matter what we do and as I said, I would be elated if we wound up with a bipartisan consensus on our economic policy this year there are going to be profound differences in our responsibilities to each other to build a strong society. And I cannot tell you how strongly I believe that a big part of our economic success has come because we were also doubling our investment in education and training and making it clear to ordinary people, through increases in the minimum wage, the Family and Medical Leave Act, things like this, that we cared about what happened to them and we thought they ought to be a part of America's future. So you stay with us. Stay with us as we try to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights and the other things we've got on the plate now. And tell people the story, that we had a set of ideas, we had a core philosophy, and it has worked. And we do need to keep changing America, but we don't need to forget what brought us to this point we need to build on it. With your help, we will. Thank you very much. February 08, 2000 Thank you very much, and good afternoon. I want to begin by thanking all the people at AAAS for having us here today. My longtime friend Dr. Shirley Malcolm, thank you and thank you, Dr. Richard Nicholson. I thank Dr. Francis Collins what a remarkable statement he made. I was thinking, when he said that line that I'm beating to death now that we're all genetically 99.9 percent the same, that the one tenth of one percent difference between him and me is all the intellectual capacity for the sciences laughter regrettably. That's a great thing for people who care about the future of the human genome. I'm delighted to be joined here by several members of our administration and by three Members of Congress, showing that this is a bipartisan issue it's an American issue. I thank Representative Louise Slaughter from New York, who was with me yesterday talking to me about this, and Representative Fred Upton from Michigan, and Representative and Dr. Greg Ganske from Iowa. Thank you all for being here. We appreciate you very much and your concern for this. I thank again all the people in the administration who worked on this, my Science Adviser, Dr. Neal Lane, and all the people from OPM and the EEOC and others. This is really a happy day for me. For years, in our administration, I was a sort of political front person, and now we've got the first election in a quarter century that I can't be a part of. And people are always coming to me saying, "Oh, this must be a real downer for you, you know, that the Vice President and Hillary, they're out there 7 o'clock in the morning hitting all these coffee shops you must be" laughter "how are you dealing with this terrible deprivation?" Laughter And I went out to Caltech the other day to talk about my science and technology budget, and I said, "Well, I'm using this opportunity to get in touch with my inner nerd" laughter "and to really sort of deal with these things that I have repressed all these years, that I'm really, really trying to get into this." We're laughing about this. But you know, it is truly astonishing that we are all privileged enough to be alive at this moment in history and to be, some of us, even a small part of this remarkable explosion in human discovery to contemplate not only what it might mean for us and our contemporaries, in terms of lengthening our lives and improving the quality of them and improving the reach of our understanding of what is going on both within our bodies and in the far reaches of space, but what particularly it will mean for the whole structure of life for our children and grandchildren. And I am profoundly grateful to all of you who have been involved and who will be involved in that march of human advance in any way. That quest for knowledge has defined what the AAAS has done for, now, more than 150 years. We are here today, as the previous speakers have said, to recognize that this extraordinary march of human understanding imposes on us profound responsibilities to make sure that the age of discovery can continue to reflect our most cherished values. And I want to talk just a little about that in somewhat more detail than Dr. Collins did. First and foremost, we must protect our citizens' privacy the bulwark of personal liberty, the safeguard of individual creativity. More than 100 years ago now, Justice Brandeis recognized that technological advances would require us to be ever vigilant in protecting what he said was civilization's most valued right, the fundamental right to privacy. New conditions, he said, would often require us to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. And indeed, much of the 20th century jurisprudence of the Supreme Court has dealt with that continuing challenge in various contexts. So, once again, Justice Brandeis has proved prophetic for a new century. Today, powerful waves of technological change threaten to erode our sacred walls of privacy in ways we could not have envisioned a generation ago not just the ways, by the way, we're discussing here today. Will you ever have a private telephone conversation on a cell phone again? Can you even go in your own home and know that the conversation is private if you become important enough for people to put devices on your walls? What is the nature of privacy in the 21st century, and how can we continue to protect it? But clearly, people's medical records, their financial records, and their genetic records are among the most important things that we have to protect. Last year we proposed rules to protect the sanctity of medical records we'll finalize them this year. Soon I will send legislation to complete the job we started in protecting citizens' financial records. Today we move forward to try to make sure we do what we can to protect, in an important way, genetic privacy. Clearly, there is no more exciting frontier in modern scientific research than genome research. Dr. Collins did a good job of telling us why. And when this human genome project is completed, we can now only barely imagine, I believe, the full implications of what we will learn for the detection, treatment, and prevention of serious diseases. It will transform medical care more profoundly than anything since the discovery of antibiotics and the polio vaccine, I believe, far more profoundly than that. But it will also impose upon us new responsibilities and, I would argue, only some of which we now know only some of which we now know to ensure that the new discoveries do not pry open the protective doors of privacy. The fear of misuse of private genetic information is already very widespread in our Nation. Americans are genuinely worried that their genetic information will not be kept secret, that this information will be used against them. As a result, they're often reluctant to take advantage of new breakthroughs in genetic testing making a point, I think, we cannot make too often If we do not protect the right to privacy, we may actually impede the reach of these breakthroughs in the lives of ordinary people, which would be a profound tragedy. A Pennsylvania study, for example, showed that nearly a third of women at high risk for inherited forms of breast cancer refused to be tested to determine whether they carry either of the two known breast cancer genes because they feared discrimination based on the results. That is simply wrong. We must not allow advances in genetics to become the basis of discrimination against any individual or any group. We must never allow these discoveries to change the basic belief upon which our Government, our society, our system of ethics is founded, that all of us are created equal, entitled to equal treatment under the law. The Executive order I will sign in just a couple of minutes will be the first Executive order of the 21st century to help meet this great 21st century challenge. It prohibits the Federal Government and its agencies from using genetic testing in any employment decision. It prevents Federal employers from requesting or requiring that employees undergo genetic tests of any kind. It strictly forbids employers from using genetic information to classify employees in such a way that deprives them of advancement opportunities, such as promotion for overseas posts. By signing this Executive order, my goal is to set an example and pose a challenge for every employer in America, because I believe no employer should ever review your genetic records along with your resume. Because by Executive order I can only do so much, we also need congressional action this year. In 1996 the Congress passed, and I signed, the Kassebaum Kennedy bill, the health insurance portability law, which made it illegal for group health insurers to deny coverage to any individual based on genetic information. That was an important first step, but we must go further. Now I ask Congress to pass the "Genetic Non Discrimination in Health Insurance and Employment Act" introduced in the Senate by Senator Daschle and in the House by Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, who is with us today. What this legislation does is to extend the employment protections contained in the Executive order that I will sign today to all private sector employees as well, and to ensure that people in all health plans, not just group plans, will have the full confidence that the fruits of genetic research will be used solely to improve their care and never to deny them care. There is something else we should do right away. We must make absolutely sure that we do not allow the race for genetic cures to undermine vital patient protections. Like many Americans, I have been extremely concerned about reports that some families involved in trials of experimental gene therapies have not been fully informed of the risks and that some scientists have failed to report serious side effects from these trials. I support the recent action by FDA and NIH to enforce reporting in patient safety requirements. Today I'm asking Secretary Shalala to instruct FDA and NIH to accelerate their review of gene therapy guidelines and regulations. I want to know how we can better ensure that this information about the trials is shared with the public. I want to know whether we need to strengthen requirements on informed consent. If we don't have full confidence in these trials, people won't participate, and then the true promise of genetic medicine will be put on hold. We cannot allow our remarkable progress in genomic research to be undermined by concerns over the privacy of genetic data or the safety of gene therapies. Instead, we must do whatever it takes to address these legitimate concerns. We know if we do, the positive possibilities are absolutely endless. I said this the other day, but I would like to reiterate I think maybe I am so excited about this because of my age. I was in the generation of children who were the first treated with the polio vaccine. And for those of you who are much younger than me, you can't imagine what it was like, for our parents to see that the literal terror in our parents' eyes when we were children, paralyzed with fear that somehow we would be afflicted by what was then called infantile paralysis and the sense of hope, the eagerness, the sort of nail biting anticipation when we learned of the Salk vaccine and all of us were lined up to get our shots. Unless you were in our generation, you cannot imagine. And the thought that every other problem that could affect the generation of my grandchildren could be visited with that level of relief and hope and exhilaration by the parents of our children's generation is something that is almost inexpressible. We have to make the most of this. And we know, we have learned from over 200 years of experience as a nation, knocking down physical and intellectual frontiers, that we can only spread the benefits of new discoveries when we proceed in a manner that is consistent with our most ancient and cherished values. That is what this day is all about. So to all of you who have contributed to it, I thank you very, very much. Now I would like to ask the Members of Congress who are here and members of the administration who are here who have been involved in this to come up with me. And all I have to do is write my name. Laughter That's a pretty good deal. You can write the human genome code, and I'll write my name laughter and that takes full account of the onetenth of one percent difference in our genetic makeup. Laughter Thank you very much. February 03, 2000 Thank you, and good morning. Senator Mack, Senator Lieberman, Mr. Speaker, Congressman Doyle, other distinguished head table guests, and the Members of Congress and the Cabinet, my fellow Americans, and our visitors who have come from all across the world. Let me thank you again for this prayer breakfast and for giving Hillary and me the opportunity to come. I ask that we remember in our prayers today a people who are particularly grieved, the men, women, and children who lost their loved ones on Alaska Airlines flight 261. And let me say to all of you, I look forward to this day so much every year, a little time to get away from public service and politics into the realm of the spirit and to accept your prayers. This is a special year for me because, like Senator Mack, I'm not coming back, at least in my present position. And I have given a lot of thought to what I might say today, much of it voiced by my friend of 30 years now, Senator Joe Lieberman, who did a wonderful job for all of us. The question I would hope that all of my fellow citizens would ask themselves today is What responsibilities are now imposed on us because we live at perhaps the greatest moment of prosperity and promise in the history of our Nation, at a time when the world is growing ever more interdependent? What special responsibilities do we have? Joe talked about some of them. We I sometimes think in my wry way, when Senator Mack referred to his cousin, Judge Arnold, a longtime friend of Hillary's and mine, as being on his far right and that making it uncomfortable, I laughed to myself. That's why Connie wanted him on the bench, so he would get one more Democrat out of the public debate. Laughter But I wonder how long we'll be all right after this prayer breakfast. I wonder if we'll make it 15 minutes or 30 or an hour. Maybe we'll make it 48 hours before we'll just be back to normal. So I want to ask you to think about that today What is underneath the fundamental points that Senator Lieberman made today? For us Christians, Jesus said, the two most important Commandments of all were to love the Lord with all our heart and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The Torah says that anyone who turns aside the stranger acts as if he turns aside the most high God. The Koran contains its own powerful version of the Golden Rule, telling us never to do unto others what we would not like done to ourselves. So what I would like to ask you in this, my last opportunity to be the President at this wonderful prayer breakfast Who are our neighbors, and what does it mean to love them? His Holiness John Paul II wrote us a letter about how he answered that question, and we are grateful for that. For me, we must start with the fact that "neighbors" means something different today in common language than it did when I was a boy. It really means something different in common language than it did when I became President, when there were 50 websites on the World Wide Web. Today, there are over 50 million, in only 7 years. So that we see that within our borders we are not only growing more diverse every day in terms of race and ethnic groups and religion, but we can talk to people all across the world in an instant, in ever more interesting ways that go far beyond business and commerce and politics. I have a cousin who is from the same little town in Arkansas I am, who plays chess a couple of times a week with a man in Australia, 8,000 miles away. The world is growing smaller and more interdependent. And I guess the point I would like to make to you today is, as time and space contract, the wisdom of the human heart must expand. We must be able to love our neighbors and accept our essential oneness. Now, globalization is forcing us to that conclusion, so is science. I've had many opportunities to say in the last few months that the most enlightening evening I had last year was one that Hillary sponsored at the White House where a distinguished scientist and expert in human genome research informed us that we are all genetically 99.9 percent the same and, furthermore, said that the differences among people in the same racial group genetically are different, are greater the individual differences among people in the same racial and ethnic groups are greater than the differences from group to group. For some that is reassuring for some that is disturbing. When I said that in the State of the Union, the Republicans and Democrats both laughed uncomfortably. Laughter It seemed inconceivable. But the truth is that modern science has taught us what we always learned from ancient faiths, the most important fact of life on this Earth is our common humanity. Our faith I love what Representative Doyle said our faith is the conviction of things unseen. But more and more, our faith is confirmed by what we know and see. So, with all the blessings we now enjoy, what shall we do with it? If we say, "Okay, we accept it, God, even though we don't like it every day, we are one with our brothers and sisters, whether we like them or not all the time. We have to be bigger. Our hearts have to grow deeper. Time and space contract help us to expand our spirits," what does that mean? We know we can't build our own future without helping others to build theirs. But many of us live on the cutting edge of a new economy, while over a billion people live on the bare edge of survival. And here in our own country, there are still too many poor children and too many communities that have not participated in our prosperity. The Christian Bible says that Jesus warned us that even as we do it unto the least of these, we have done it unto our God. When times are tough and all of our fellow citizens are having a hard time pulling together, we can be forgiven if we look at the welfare of the whole. Now the welfare of the whole is the strongest it has ever been, but people within our country and beyond our borders are still in trouble, people with good values, people with the values you have held up here today, people who would gladly work. We dare not turn away from them if we believe in our common humanity. We see all over the world the chorus of denial about our common responsibility for the welfare of this planet, even though all the scientists say that it is changing and warming at an unsustainable rate, and all great faiths have reminded us of our solemn obligation to our earthly home. Even more troubling to me, our dazzling modern world is witness to a resurgence of society's oldest demon, the inability to love our closest neighbors as ourselves if they look or worship differently from the rest of us. Today, the Irish peace process is strained by a lack of trust between Republican Catholics and Protestant Unionists. In the Middle East, with all its hope, we are still having to work very hard to overcome the profoundest of suspicions between Israeli Jews and Palestinian and Syrian Arabs. We have people here today from the Indian subcontinent, perhaps the most dangerous place in the world today because of the tensions over Kashmir and the possession of nuclear weapons. And yet, when people from the Indian subcontinent come to America, they do better than nearly anybody because of their family values, their work ethics, and their remarkable capacity, innate capacity, for absorbing all the lessons of modern science and technology. In Bosnia and Kosovo, Christians thought they were being patriotic to cleanse their lands of Muslims. In other places, Islamic terrorists claim their faith commands them to kill infidels, though the Koran teaches that God created nations and tribes that we might know one another, not that we might despise one another. Here at home, we still see Asians, blacks, gays, even in one instance last year, children at a Jewish school, subject to attacks just because of who they are. And here in Washington, we are not blameless, for we often, too, forget in the heat of political battle our common humanity. We slip from honest difference, which is healthy, into dishonest demonization. We ignore, when we're all hyped and in a fight, all those Biblical admonitions we profess to believe that "we all see through a glass darkly" that, with Saint Paul, we all do what we would not, and we do not do what we would that "faith, hope, and charity abide, but the greatest of these is charity" that God says to all of us, not just some, "I have redeemed you. I have called you by your name. You are Mine," all of you. Once Abraham Lincoln responded to some friends of his who were complaining really bitterly about politicians who would not support him. And he said to them, and I quote, "You have more of a feeling of personal resentment than I have. Perhaps I have too little of it. But I never thought it paid." Well, we know it doesn't pay. And the truth is, we're all here today because, in God's timetable, we're all just like Senator Mack and me. We're all term limited. In my lifetime, our Nation has never had the chance we now have to build the future of our dreams for our children, to be good neighbors to the rest of the world, to live out the admonition of all our faiths. To do it, we will have to first conquer our own demons and embrace our common humanity with humility and gratitude. I leave you with the words of a great prayer by Chief Seattle. "This we know All things are connected. We did not weave the web of life. We are merely a strand in it. And whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves." May God bless you all. January 29, 2000 President Clinton. Thank you very much. President Schwab, I think that it is an indication of the importance of the topic and the importance of the World Economic Forum that you have so many leaders from around the world here today. I see, just scanning the audience, the President of Colombia, the President of South Africa, Chairman Arafat, the Prime Ministers of Spain and Turkey, and a number of other leaders. We have here with me today the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Energy, and our Trade Ambassador. There's no one home in Washington to take care of things. Laughter We have a large delegation from the United States Congress here leaders from all over the world in business, public life the leader of the American union movement, John Sweeney, whom I know has spoken to you. So I think that maybe the presence of all these distinguished people in the crowd is evidence of the importance of our being here and shows, in my mind, one of the things we need to determine to do as a people. The World Economic Forum has been at it, as you pointed out, for 30 years now. The thing that I have appreciated most about your deliberations is your consistent focus on the future. For example, you spotted the networking of society before the Internet was out of its infancy. Both Vice President Gore and my wife, Hillary, have spoken here, and I am glad, even though I am late, to finally get in on the act. Laughter Your theme, "New Beginnings Making a Difference," it seems to me, is the right theme. What I want to ask all of you to think about today is, what does making a difference and new beginnings mean in an era of globalization? What are the opportunities? What are the obligations? What are the hazards? What new beginnings will make a positive difference? And, perhaps the most difficult question of all, do we have the institutional and organized mechanisms to make them? As we know, in many ways the global economy was almost as integrated as it is today 100 years ago. But after World War I, leaders in the United States and Europe made what all now recognize were false and shortsighted choices. Instead of partnership, they chose protectionism and isolationism. And for decades, globalization went in reverse, with utterly disastrous consequences. After the second war, the leaders were given a second chance. This time it was clear that what was at stake was not simply the return of prosperity but the defense of freedom. They chose the path of economic and political partnership and set the stage for 50 years of growth across the globe. No one can seriously argue that the world would be a better place today if they had reverted to the old isolationism. So today, at the start of a new century, the entire world, not simply Europe and the United States and the wealthiest nations of Asia, the entire world finds itself at a crossroads. Globalization is revolutionizing the way we work, the way we live, and perhaps most important, the way we relate to each other across national boundaries. It is tearing down doors and building up networks between nations and individuals, between economies and cultures. The obvious consequence is that we are growing ever more interdependent, driven to be part of every vital network, understanding we cannot build our own future without helping others to build theirs. Today, we know that because of scientific and technological advance, we can change the equation between energy use and economic growth. We can shatter the limits that time and space pose to doing business and getting an education. But the openness and mobility, the flexible networking and sophisticated communications technologies that have made globalization what it is, so totally consuming all these factors have also made us more vulnerable to some of our oldest problems. Terrorism, narcotraffickers, and organized criminals, they can use all this new technology, too, and take advantage of the openness of societies and borders. They present all of us with new security challenges in the new century. The spread of disease ethnic, racial, tribal, religious conflicts, rooted in the fear of others who are different they seem to find ways to spread in this globalized era. And the grinding poverty of more than a billion people who live on less than a dollar a day and live for a year on less than what it costs to stay in a nice hotel at night they, too, are part of the globalized world. A few of us live on the cutting edge of the new economy too many of us live on the bare edge of survival, without the means to move up. Those who wish to roll back the forces of globalization because they fear its disruptive consequences, I believe, are plainly wrong. Fifty years of experience shows that greater economic integration and political cooperation are positive forces. Those who believe globalizaton is only about market economics, however, are wrong, too. All these new networks must lead to new arrangements that work for all, that work to spur growth, lift lives, raise standards, both around the world and within nations. Now, leaders from business, government, and civil society, therefore, must come together to build a future that can unite, not divide, us. We must recognize, first, that globalization has made us all more free and more interdependent. Those of us who are more fortunate must be more responsible and work harder to be good neighbors and good partners. The United States has a special responsibility in that regard, because we have been so fortunate in our history and so very fortunate over the last decade. I came here today in the hope that by working together, we can actually find a way to create the conditions and provide the tools to give people on every continent the ability to solve their own problems, and in so doing, to strengthen their own lives and our global economy in the new century. I would like to make just a few points. First, I think we have got to reaffirm unambiguously that open markets and rules based trade are the best engine we know of to lift living standards, reduce environmental destruction, and build shared prosperity. This is true whether you're in Detroit, Davos, Dacca, or Dakar. Worldwide, open markets do create jobs. They do raise incomes. They do spark innovation and spread new technology. They do coupled with the explosion of international communications through the Internet, which is the fastest growing network in history. For example, when I became President 7 years ago, there were only 50 pages on the World Wide Web. Today, there are over 50 million in 7 years. Trade broadens the frontiers of possibility for all of those who have access to its benefits and the tools to claim them. As I said a couple of days ago in my State of the Union Address, for me there is only one direction forward on trade, and that is to go on with what we're doing, recognizing that this is a new and very different world, that the idea that we would be better off with less trade, with less rule based trade by turning away from our attempts to find international ways within which we can work together, I think is dead wrong. Now, having said that, what does that mean? Well, for me, it meant that when, first our neighbors in Mexico and then our friends in Asia were in turmoil and crisis, the United States had to keep our markets open, even though it led to record trade deficits. For me, it means it's very important to get China into the World Trade Organization, to ensure that China's markets are open to us even as we have our markets open to China and to advance peace and stability in Asia and increase the possibility of positive change in China. The changes in our markets are only beginning. You know, people have been trading goods across borders as long as there have been borders. But communications technology and the Internet are expanding trade in unprecedented ways many of you understand better than I. Today, everything from data processing to security monitoring to stockbrokering and advanced degrees can be bought and sold all over the world. E commerce creates enormous potential for growth anywhere, and it will continue to do so if we can resist the temptation to put up barriers to this important part of our new economy. Trade is especially important, of course, for developing nations. Listen to this this is something that I think people from the developing nations who oppose the WTO should think about from the 1970's to the early nineties, developing countries that chose growth through trade grew at least twice as fast as those who chose not to open to the world. The most open countries had growth that was 6 times as fast. Think about what Japan or the nations of southeastern Europe were like 50 years ago. They were poor, largely rural societies. Today, they are prosperous global leaders, in no small measure because of trade. Look at South Korea, Mexico, or Thailand, which built their growth on openness. Even after the recent traumas of financial crises, their national incomes are still more than double the 1970 levels, when they were more closed. And their gains in literacy, education, and life expectancy are truly extraordinary, far outpacing countries that chose not to open to the world. Certainly, many of the people who have questioned the wisdom of open trade are genuinely concerned about the fate of the poor and the disadvantaged, and well they should be. But they should ask themselves, what will happen to a Bangladeshi textile worker or a migrant from the Mexican countryside without the prospect of jobs and industry that can sell to foreign as well as domestic consumers? What happens to farmers in Uruguay or Zimbabwe, in Australia, Europe, the United States, if protectionism makes it impossible to market products beyond their borders? How can working conditions be improved and poverty be reduced in developing countries if they are denied these and other opportunities to grow, the things that come with participation in the world economy? No, trade must not be a race to the bottom, whether we're talking about child labor, basic working conditions, or environmental protection. But turning away from trade would keep part of our global community forever on the bottom. That is not the right response. Now, that means, it seems to me, that we must face another challenge. The second point I want to make is that developing countries will only reap the benefits of integration in the world economy if the industrialized countries are able to garner enough domestic support for policies that are often controversial at home. It is easier for us to gather here, in vigorous agreement and I'm glad you brought Mr. Sweeney over so we could have an occasional voice of occasional disagreement. But most of us here agree with everything I just said. Why? Well, we have seen and personally felt the benefits of globalization. But convincing our publics to go along, to go for greater integration in a rule based system which might require them to change further and might require some of them, unlike most of us, to change what they do for a living, remains a challenge. How shall we meet it? In the United States, we must overcome resistance to our groundbreaking trade agreements with Africa and the Caribbean Basin even though if they both pass, their impact on our economy will be very small, while their impact on the African nations that participate and those in the Caribbean will be very large indeed. I am determined to pass both measures this year, and I think we'll succeed, but it's an indication of what kinds of problems every country faces. Indeed, you probably have noted this, but one of the most ironic and, to me, disappointing consequences of our unprecedented prosperity, which has given us over 20 million new jobs in my country in the last 7 years, is that it seems to me that protectionist sentiment, or antitrade sentiment at least, is greater now than it was 7 years ago when I took office, in the United States Congress. I want to talk a little about that today and how it relates to what's going on in other countries. But we all have an obligation to work through that, nation by nation. Part of what countries have to do is to be able to point to what other countries are doing and to say, "Well, look what they're doing we ought to do this. We ought to do our part." That means we are significantly affected in the United States by the policies of Europe, Japan, and other wealthier countries. I think for its part, Europe should put its agricultural subsidies on the table. If even one third of the world's subsidies and tariffs in agriculture were eliminated, the poorest developing countries that could export would gain more than 4 billion in economic benefits every single year. We can also, I must say, do better in the developed countries if we are able to make a more forceful case for the value of imports. None of us do this enough, and I must say, I haven't done this enough. We all go around talking about every time we talk about trade agreements in our countries, we always talk about how many jobs will be created at home because we're opening markets abroad, and we make ourselves vulnerable to people who say, "But it may not reduce the trade deficit, and look how big it is." So I just want to say, I wish everyone here would look at yourselves and ask yourselves if you are wearing anything made in a country other than the country where you live. There are benefits to imports. We don't just do a favor to developing countries or to our trading partners in developed countries when we import products and services from them. We benefit from those products. Imports stretch family budgets. They promote the well being of working families by making their dollars go further. They bring new technology and ideas. They, by opening markets, dampen inflation and spur innovation. In a few days, we will have the longest economic expansion in the history of the United States. I am convinced one of the reasons that it will happen is that we have kept our markets open, even in tough times, so that there has always been pressure to keep inflation down as we continue to generate jobs and growth. I am convinced of it. And those of us in wealthier countries need to make the case that even when we have trade deficits, if we're growing jobs and we're gaining ground and the jobs are growing in areas that pay better wages, we are getting the benefits of imports. I think all people in public life have been insufficiently willing to say that. And we must do more. The third point I would like to make is that we simply cannot expect trade alone to carry the burden of lifting nations out of poverty. It will not happen. Trade is essential to growth in developing countries, but it is not sufficient for growth in developing countries. Sustained growth requires investment in human capital, education, health care, technology, infrastructure. Particularly in an economy that runs more and more on brainpower, no investment pays off faster than education. The international community has set 2015 as a target for giving every child access to basic education. I'm asking our Congress for more funding to help nations get more children out of work and into school. I hope others in the public and private sectors will join us. Each year in the developing world, we see millions of lives lost and billions of dollars lost dollars that could be spent in many more productive ways to killer diseases like AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. Last year in Africa, AIDS killed more people 10 times more than all the wars did. We have the technology to find vaccines for those diseases. We have medications that can lengthen and improve the quality of life. But let's face a fact. The pharmaceutical industry has no incentive to develop products for customers who are too poor to buy them. I have proposed a tax credit to say to our private industry, if you will develop these vaccines, we'll help to pay for them. I hope the World Bank, other nations, and the corporate world will help us in meeting this challenge. If we could get the vaccines out to the people who need them in time, we could save millions and millions of lives and free up billions of dollars to be invested in building those lives, those societies into strong, productive partners, not just for trade but for peace. We can also help countries help themselves by lifting their crippling burden of debt, so they'll have more to invest in their people and their future. The Cologne debt initiative commits us to reducing the foreign debt of the world's poorest and most indebted nations by as much as 70 percent. Last fall I pledged that the United States would forgive 100 percent of the debts those countries owe to us. This year I will work to fund our share of the multilateral debt relief. I am pleased that so many others have made similar pledges and look forward to the first countries benefiting from this initiative very soon. If we keep working on this, expanding it, and we all pay our fair share, we can turn a vicious cycle of debt and poverty into a virtuous cycle of development and trade. The last point I'd like to make on this is that I think the developed countries who want an open trading system that has the trust and confidence of developing countries should also contribute to indigenous trade, which may not be directly related excuse me, indigenous economic development, which may not be directly related to trade. Just for example, the United States Agency for International Development each year funds about 2 million microenterprise loans in poor communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I will never forget going to small villages in Senegal and Uganda and seeing people who had gotten their first business loan sometimes as small as 50 show me their businesses, show me the people they were doing business with in their villages, who had also gotten such loans. I'll never forget the man in Senegal who was this designated village accountant, making me wait outside his front door while he went into his house to bring me back all of the accounts he had carefully kept for the last month, to prove that the money we were investing was being spent wisely. Does this have any direct impact on international trade? Of course not. Did it make that society stronger? Did it make the economy stronger? Did it increase the stability and longterm prospects of the nation? Of course it did. So I believe we should all be thinking about what more we can do on the indigenous economic development issues. The President of Colombia is here. I've asked the Congress to pass a very ambitious program to try to help Colombia deal with the narcotraffickers and the guerrillas and all the problems that he faces perhaps the oldest democracy in Latin America. But one part of it is for economic development. It is one thing to tell people they should stop growing crops that can be turned into drugs that can kill our children, and quite another to tell people, if you do this, by the way, here's a way to support your children. And so I think that we can never lose sight of the fact that if we want to build an integrated economy with more and more trade, we have to build an economy from the grassroots up in places that want to have a balanced, stable society. The fourth point I would make is that developed and developing countries alike must ensure that the benefits of trade flow widely to workers and families within our nations. Industrialized nations must see that the poor and those hard hit by changes are not left behind. And all nations need to ensure that workers have access to lifelong learning benefits, they can move between jobs without being unemployed for too long and without having their standard of living dropped. We have to work with corporate leaders to spur investment also in the people and places that have been left behind. We have to find the new markets within our own Nation. For example, I will tell you something that might surprise many of you. The national unemployment rate in the United States is 4.1 percent. On many of our Native American Indian reservations, the unemployment rate is about 70 percent. In isolated rural areas in America, the unemployment rate is sometimes 2, 3, 4 times as high as the national average. So we have not figured out how to solve this. When you have these eyesores in a country, when the development is not even, they can easily become the symbols with which those who do not want us to open our markets more and build a more integrated world can use to defeat our larger designs, even if they're right. And as I said to the American people in Congress a couple of nights ago, we in the United States, I think, have a terrifically heavy responsibility to reach out to our poor communities, because we've never had an expansion this long, and if we can't help our people now, we will never get around to it. I am convinced that even though this has nothing directly to do with trade, if we succeed, we will build more support for a more integrated global economy. Leaders of developing nations have their responsibilities as well, to narrow the gap between rich and poor by ensuring that government institutions are open and accountable, honest and effective, so they can get foreign investment, have widely shared growth, uproot corruption, and solve social problems. There is a limit to what wealthy nations can do for people who will not take the necessary steps to make their own societies work. Even in this heyday of global free enterprise, many people suffer not because their governments are too strong but because their governments are too weak. Fifth, since globalization is about more than economics, our interdependence requires us to find ways to meet the challenges of advancing our values without promoting protectionism or undermining open trade. I know that the words "labor and environment" are heard with suspicion in the developing world when they are uttered by people from the developed world. I understand that these words are code for "rich country protectionism." So let me be as clear as possible on this. We shouldn't do anything to stunt the economic growth and development of any developing nation. I have never asked any developing nation, and never will, to give up a more prosperous future. But in today's world, developing countries can achieve growth without making some of the mistakes most developed countries made on worker protection and the environment as we were on our path to industrialization. Why is that? Why can they get richer without doing the same things we did? And since, when countries get richer, they lift labor standards and clean up the environment, why do we care? I think there are two answers to that. First, the reason they can do it is that the new economy has produced scientific and technological advances that absolutely disprove the old ideas about growth. It is actually now possible to grow an economy faster, for example, with a sensible environmental policy and by keeping your kids in school instead of at work, so that you build more brainpower to have more rapid, more long term, more balanced growth. Secondly, we all have an interest particularly in the environmental issue, because of global warming, because of greenhouse gas emissions, and because it takes somewhere between 50 and 100 years for those emissions to go away out of our larger atmosphere. So if there is a way for us to find a path of development that improves, rather than aggravates, the difficulties we have with climate change today by reducing rather than increasing greenhouse gases, we are all obligated to do it. That is why, after the Kyoto Protocols, I recommended to all the advanced nations that we engage in emissions trading and vigorous investment of new technologies in developing countries, with an absolute commitment to them that we would not ask them to slow their economic growth. We will see within the next few years automobiles on the streets all over the world that routinely get somewhere between 70 and 90 miles a gallon. In South America, many countries run on ethanol instead of gasoline. The big problem is that the conversion is not very good it takes about 7 gallons of gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol. Within a matter of a couple of years, scientists almost certainly will unlock the chemical block that will enable us to produce 8 gallons of fuel from farm products or grasses or even farm waste like rice hulls, for 1 gallon of gasoline. When that happens, you will see people driving cars that effectively are getting 400 or 500 miles to the gallon of gasoline. These things are before us. All these technologies should be disseminated as widely as possible, as quickly as possible, so that no nation gives up any growth to be a responsible environmental partner in the world. And on the human development side, I will say again, the globalized economy prizes human development above all else. It is in the longterm and the short term interests of developing countries not to abuse their workers and to keep their children in school. Now, do we have all the answers to this? No, partly because the circumstances and the possibility, even for trade engagement, from nation to nation vary so much but partly because we don't have more forums like this within which we can seek common understandings on worker rights, the environment, and other contentious issues. We have suggested that the Committee on Trade and the Environment be invited to examine the environmental applications of WTO negotiations in sessions where developing countries form the majority. We cannot improve cooperation and mutual understanding unless we talk about it. That is our motivation that is our only motivation in seeking to open a discussion about the connections between labor and trade and development, in the form of a new WTO working group. And I will say this again, the consequence of running away from an open dialog on a profoundly important issue will be it won't be more trade it'll be more protection. The consequence of opening up a dialog and dealing honestly with these issues will show that in the new economy, we can have more growth and more trade with better treatment for people in the workplace and more sensible environmental policies. I believe that. You have to decide if you believe that. My experience in life and I'm not as young as I used to be let me just say, at Thanksgiving a 6 year old daughter of a friend of mine asked me how old I was. She looked up at me and she said, "How old are you, anyway?" And I said, "I'm 53." She said, "That's a lot." Laughter Well, it looks younger every day to me. But I have lived long enough to know this In the words of that slogan that people my daughter's age always use, denial is not just a river in Egypt. Laughter And the more we hunker down and refuse to devote time systematically to discussing these issues and letting people express their honest opinion, the more we are going to fuel the fires of protectionism, not put them out. We have to make some institutional accommodation to the fact that this is a part of the debate surrounding globalization. Now, I feel the same way about labor standards. And there is a win win situation here. Let me just give you one example. We had a pilot program through our Agency for International Development, working with the garment industry in Bangladesh to take children out of factories and put them back in schools. The program got kids to learn and actually boosted garment exports and gave jobs to adults who would otherwise not have had them. We can do more of this if we lower the rhetoric and focus more on results. Common ground means asking workers in developed countries to think about the future of workers in Asia, Africa, or Latin America. It means governments finding the courage to rise above short term political interest. It means corporations taking responsibility for the effects of their actions, whether they're in an African delta or a New York highrise. It means a new, more active idea of corporate responsibility, stepping up to the plate to pay for vaccines or educate a new generation of workers in another country as a part of the globalization economic strategy. Finally, let me say that the lessons from our history are clear We will we must support the rules based system we have, the WTO, even as we seek to reform and strengthen it. I think those who heard a wakeup call on the streets of Seattle got the right message. But those who say that we should freeze or disband the WTO are dead wrong. Since World War II, there have been eight separate rounds of multilateral trade negotiations, hundreds of trade agreements signed. What's happened? Global trade has increased fifteenfold, contributing to the most rapid, sustained, and, yes, widely shared growth ever recorded. There is no substitute for the confidence and credibility the WTO lends to the process of expanding trade based on rules. There's no substitute for the temporary relief WTO offers national economies, especially against unfair trade and abrupt surges in imports. And there is no substitute for WTO's authority in resolving disputes, which commands the respect of all member nations. If we expect public support for the WTO, though I'll get back to my main point we've got to get out of denial of what's happening now. If we expect the public to support the WTO the way I do and I think almost all of you do we have to let the public see what we're doing. We have to make more documents available, faster. We have to open dispute panel hearings to the public. We have to allow organizations and individuals to panel their views in a formal way. And we all have to play by the rules and abide by the WTO decisions, whether we win or whether we lose. Let me be clear. I do not agree with those who say we should halt the work of the WTO or postpone a new trade round. But I do not agree with those who view with contempt the new forces seeking to be heard in the global dialog. Globalization is empowering people with information, everywhere. One of the most interesting things I did on my trip to China was visit an Internet cafe. The more people know, the more opinions they're going to have the more democracy spreads and keep in mind, more than half the world now lives under governments of their own choosing the more people are going to believe that they should be the masters of their own fate. They will not be denied access. Trade can no longer be the private province of politicians, CEO's, and trade experts. It is too much a part of the fabric of global interdependence. I think we have to keep working to strengthen the WTO, to make sure that the international trade rules are as modern as the market itself, to enable commerce to flourish in all sectors of the economy from agriculture to the Internet. I will keep working for a consensus for a new round, to promote development, to expand opportunity, and to boost living standards all around the world. We will show flexibility, and I ask our trading partners to do the same. But I would like to just close by trying to put this dilemma that you've all been discussing, and that was writ large in the streets of Seattle, in some context. Now, keep in mind, arguably a lot of the demonstrators in Seattle have conflicting objectives themselves, because of the interests that they represented. The thing they had in common was, they felt that they had no voice in a world that is changing very rapidly. So I want to make two observations in closing. Number one, we should stop denying that there is in many places an increase in inequality, and we should instead start explaining why it has happened and what we can do about it. Every time a national economy has seen a major change in paradigm, in the beginning of the new economy those that are well positioned reap great gains those that are uprooted but not well positioned tend to suffer an increase in inequality. In the United States, when our economy, the center of our economy moved from farm to factory 100 years ago and many people left the farm and came to live in our cities and many people from your countries came to our shores and were living in unbelievably cramped conditions in tenement houses in New York City and elsewhere, working long hours, breathing dirty air there was a big increase in inequality, even though there was an increase in wealth, in the beginning. Why? Because some people were well positioned to take advantage of the new economy, and some people weren't. But then political and social organizations began to develop the institutions which would intermediate these inequalities. And the economy itself began to mature and disperse the benefits more broadly, and inequality went down. When we saw, beginning about 20 years ago in most advanced economies, a shift from the industrial economy to the digital economy, in many places there was an increase in inequality. In our country, we had a 25 year increase in inequality, which seems to have halted and been reversed only in the last 2 to 3 years. So a part of this is the change in the paradigm of the global economy which puts a huge, huge, huge premium on education, skills, and access to information technology, which is even more burdensome to developing economies seeking to come to grips with these challenges. Now, having said that, it should be obvious to all that the last thing in the world we want to do is to make the global economy less integrated, because that will only slow the transition to the digital economy in the poorest countries or in the poorest neighborhoods of the wealthy countries. The answer is to look at what happened in the transition from the agricultural economy to the industrial economy, develop a 21st century version of that, and get it done much, much faster not to run to the past but not to deny the present. The second point I'd like to make is this. We have a well developed WTO for dealing with the trade issues. We don't have very well developed institutions for dealing with the social issues, the environmental issues, the labor issues, and no forum within which they can all be integrated. That's why people are in the streets they don't have any place to come in and say, "Okay, here's what I think, and here's the contribution I have. Here's the beef I have. How are we going to work all this out?" That's why you're all here talking about it. That's why you've got a record crowd here. And we all know this intuitively. So I think if I could offer any advice, there are there's thousands of times more experience and knowledge about all these things in this room than I have in my head. But I do understand a little bit about human nature and a little bit about the emerging process of freedom and democracy. We have got to find ways for these matters to be dealt with that the people who care about them believe are legitimate. And we cannot pretend that globalization is just about economics and it's over here, and all these other things are very nice and we will be very happy to see somebody over here somewhere talk about them. You don't live your life that way. You don't wake up in the morning and sort of put all these barriers in your head and you know, it's all integrated. It's like I say, we've got the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority here. We're working very hard to find a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. We can't find that peace if we say, "Well, here's what we're going to do on these difficult issues and, oh, by the way, there's economics, but it's over here and it doesn't have anything to do with it." We have to put all these things together. So I ask you, help us to find a way, first, to explain to the skeptics and the opponents of what we believe in why there is some increase in inequality as a result of an economic change that is basically wonderful and has the potential, if we make the changes we should, to open possibilities for poor people all over the world that would have been undreamed of even 10 years ago. And second, find a way to let the dissenters have their say and turn them into constructive partners. If you do that, we will continue to integrate the world economically and in terms of political cooperation. We have got a chance to build a 21st century world that walks away not only from the modern horrors of terrorists and bio and chemical terrorism and technology but away from ancient racial, religious, and tribal hatred. Growth is at the center of that chance. It gives people hope every day. But the economics must be blended with the other legitimate human concerns. We can do it not by going back to the past but by going together into the future. Thank you very much. World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, we have just time for one or two questions. But before raising these issues, Mr. President, I can tell you and the applause has shown you what support you have for your plea for an open, rules based trading system and for globalization. But at the same time, what we take home and what suddenly will influence our discussions very much over the next days, I think we have and we are all aware here in this hall that we have to change our attitudes and that we have to create this human and social dimension to globalization. It's in our own interest. And your speech, I think, will be reminded and will be translated into the necessary action. Now, Mr. President, just two questions. The first one In your reference to free trade and the WTO, you didn't mention China. And my question is President Clinton. Yes, I did. President Schwab. You mentioned it? President Clinton. I did, but I don't have I speak with an accent, so laughter President Schwab. No, no. Laughter President Clinton. I did, but I President Schwab. The question which I would like to raise is, will you actually rally the support in your country and internationally to get China integrated into the WTO? President Clinton. I think so. In the United States, in the Congress, there are basically two blocks of people who oppose China's accession to the WTO. There are those who believe we should not do it because even though everyone has to recognize, if you look at our trade deficit with China, everyone recognizes it's huge, by far the biggest part of our trade deficit. Everyone recognizes that we have kept our markets open to China and that if we had greater access to Chinese markets, it would be a good thing for us. So no one could seriously argue that the openings from agriculture and for other opportunities are massive, and that it would mean more to the United States than any other country since we buy we're about 22 percent of the world's economy, and every year we buy between 33 and 40 percent of all China's exports, and we have a major, major trade deficit. So on the economic argument, the people who are against it say, "Yes, that may be true, but if you put China in the WTO, it's basically a protectionist country, and then America will never get any real action on labor and environmental standards and all that because China will thwart every reform we want." That's what people say. Then, there is another group of people that don't want to vote for it because of the actions the Chinese have taken to try to preserve stability at the expense of freedom. They believe that even if China's economy has grown more open, political crackdowns, crackdowns against the Falun Gong and others have gotten more intense, more open, and that it puts the lie to the argument that integrating China into the international system will lead to a more open, more democratic, more cooperative China. Those are basically the two arguments that will be made. Those both raise serious issues, but I think it would be a mistake of monumental proportion for the United States not to support China's entry into the WTO. I believe that because, again, my experience is that you're almost 100 percent of the time better off having an old adversary that might be a friend working with you, even when you have more disagreements and you have to stay up a little later at night to reach agreement, than being out there wondering, on the outside wondering what you're doing and being absolutely sure whatever it is, it's not good for them. So I believe that having them in the WTO will not only pad the economic benefits for the United States and other countries I mentioned but will increase the likelihood of positive change in China and, therefore, stability throughout Asia. Let me say, you know, China and Russia both are still going through big transitions. The Russian economy is coming back a little better than most people think it is. No one knows what China and Russia will be like 10 years from now for sure, and you can't control it, unless you're Chinese or Russian but you can control what you do. And I don't know about you, but 10 years from now, whatever happens, I want to know that I did everything I could to increase the chance that they would make good choices, to become good, constructive neighbors and good, constructive partners in the global community. You know, we don't agree with the Russian policy in Chechnya, but we've gotten rid of 5,000 nuclear weapons, and we got our soldiers working together in the Balkans. So I think the argument we've got to try to have these big countries integrated, for the same reason we have to keep trying to work with India and with Pakistan to resolve those difficulties and get them fully integrated. At every turn, we have to ask ourselves we cannot control what other people do we can only control what we do. But when all is said and done, if it works out well or it works out poorly, we want to know that we have done everything we possibly could to give people a chance to make good decisions. And that's what drives me, and that's why we're going to do everything we possibly can under the leadership of Secretary Daley, who's going to coordinate our efforts to implement the agreement that our Trade Ambassador, Charlene Barshefsky, negotiated we're going to try everything we can to get China permanent trading status so we can support their entering the WTO. And my guess is that we'll do it. But it's going to be a big fight, and you can watch it with interest and, I hope, with support. Thank you. President Schwab. Mr. President, you mentioned debt relief in your speech, and you also mentioned it in your State of the Union message. Do you think the G 7 are really doing enough in this respect? President Clinton. No, I don't. But if we do I'm trying to focus on doing what we promised to do. And again, let me tell you what the debate is. We had an intense effort, in the last session of Congress, to pass what the Congress was finally, at the end of the session, good enough to do, and do on a bipartisan basis I want to give credit to the Republicans, as well as the Democrats, who voted for this to support our forgiving 100 percent of our bilateral debt for the poorest countries. And we're going to have another intense debate to support our contributions to the multilateral debt reduction effort, which is even more important. The debate at home basically, the people who are against this are old fashioned conservatives who think when people borrow money they ought to pay it back, and if you forgive their debt, well, then, no one else will ever loan them money, because they'll think they'll have to forgive their debt, too. There's something to that, by the way. There's something to that. In other words, when we get into negotiations of whether debt should be rescheduled or totally forgiven, there are many times when I have confidence in the leader of a country and I know they're going in the right direction, I would almost always rather forgive it, assuming I could get the support in Congress to do so. But we do have to be sensitive to the way the world investor community views all these things, so that when all is said and done, countries that genuinely will have to continue to borrow money can get the money they need. But with that caveat, I favor doing more and more than the Cologne debt initiative. But my experience is, we do these things on a step by step basis. We already have broadened the Cologne debt initiative, and we're going to broaden it again. And I think if we get the Cologne debt initiative done and it works and people see that it works, then we can do more. But it is really it is quite pointless, it seems to me, to keep these poor countries trapped in debt. They're having to make debt service payments, which means that they can't educate their children, they can't deal with their health care problems, they can't grow their economy, and therefore they can't make any money to pay their debts off anyway. I mean, it's a totally self defeating policy we've got now. So I would like to see us do as much as possible, but at the same time, I want to remind you of another point I made. A lot of countries suffer not because they have governments that are too strong they suffer because they have governments that are too weak. So we have to keep trying to build the governance capacity for countries so, when they get their debt relief, then they can go forward and succeed. So I don't think you should forget about that, either. All of us have a real obligation to try to help build capacity so our friends, when they get the relief, can make the most of it. President Schwab. Mr. President, to conclude our session, you have in front of you the 1,000 most influential business leaders. What would be your single most important wish towards them at this moment? President Clinton. My most important wish is that the global business community could adopt a shared vision for the next 10 to 20 years about what you want the world to look like, and then go about trying to create it in ways that actually enhance your business, but do so in a way that helps other people as well. I think the factor about globalization that tends to be underappreciated is, it will only work if we understand it genuinely means interdependence. It means interdependence, which means we can none of us who are fortunate can any longer help ourselves unless we are prepared to help our neighbors. And we need a more unifying, more inclusive vision. Once you know where you're going, it's a lot easier to decide what steps to take to get there. If you don't know where you're going, you can work like crazy, and you would be walking in the wrong direction. That's why I think this forum is so important. You need to decide. The business community needs to decide. You may not agree with anything I said up here today. But you have to decide whether you really agree that the WTO is not just the province for you and me and the trade experts. You have to decide whether you really agree that globalization is about more than markets alone. You have to decide whether you really agree that free markets even in an age of free markets, you need confident, strong, efficient government. You have to decide whether you really agree that it would be a good thing to get the debt off these countries' shoulders if you knew and could require that the money saved would go into educating children and not building weapons of destruction. Because if you decide those things, you can influence not only the decisions of your own government but how all these international bodies, including the WTO, work. So the reason I came all the way over here on precious little sleep, which probably undermined my ability to communicate today, is that collectively, you can change the world. And what you are doing here is a mirror image of what people are doing all over the world. This is a new network. But don't leave the little guys out. You know, I come from a little town in Arkansas. I was born in a town of 6,000 people, in a State that's had an income just about half the national average. I've got a cousin who lives in Arkansas. He's a small business man he works for a small business who two or three times a week plays chess on the Internet with a guy in Australia. Now, they've got to work out the times how they do that, I don't know. But the point I want to make to you is, he thinks he knows as much about his life and his interests and how he relates to the Internet and the world as I do. He thinks he knows just as much about his interests as his President does, who happens to be his cousin. So we need these networks. And you are in an unbelievably unique position. So my one wish for you you might think I'd say China or this or that and the other it's nothing specific Develop a shared vision. When good people with great energy have shared vision, all the rest works out. Thank you very much. January 27, 2000 Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, honored guests, my fellow Americans We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history. Never before has our Nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats. Never before have we had such a blessed opportunity and, therefore, such a profound obligation to build the more perfect Union of our Founders' dreams. We begin the new century with over 20 million new jobs the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years the lowest poverty rates in 20 years the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates on record the first back to back surpluses in 42 years and next month, America will achieve the longest period of economic growth in our entire history. We have built a new economy. And our economic revolution has been matched by a revival of the American spirit crime down by 20 percent, to its lowest level in 25 years teen births down 7 years in a row adoptions up by 30 percent welfare rolls cut in half, to their lowest levels in 30 years. My fellow Americans, the state of our Union is the strongest it has ever been. As always, the real credit belongs to the American people. My gratitude also goes to those of you in this Chamber who have worked with us to put progress over partisanship. Eight years ago, it was not so clear to most Americans there would be much to celebrate in the year 2000. Then our Nation was gripped by economic distress, social decline, political gridlock. The title of a best selling book asked "America What Went Wrong?" In the best traditions of our Nation, Americans determined to set things right. We restored the vital center, replacing outmoded ideologies with a new vision anchored in basic, enduring values opportunity for all, responsibility from all, a community of all Americans. We reinvented Government, transforming it into a catalyst for new ideas that stress both opportunity and responsibility and give our people the tools they need to solve their own problems. With the smallest Federal work force in 40 years, we turned record deficits into record surpluses and doubled our investment in education. We cut crime with 100,000 community police and the Brady law, which has kept guns out of the hands of half a million criminals. We ended welfare as we knew it, requiring work while protecting health care and nutrition for children and investing more in child care, transportation, and housing to help their parents go to work. We've helped parents to succeed at home and at work with family leave, which 20 million Americans have now used to care for a newborn child or a sick loved one. We've engaged 150,000 young Americans in citizen service through AmeriCorps, while helping them earn money for college. In 1992, we just had a roadmap. Today, we have results. Even more important, America again has the confidence to dream big dreams. But we must not let this confidence drift into complacency. For we, all of us, will be judged by the dreams and deeds we pass on to our children. And on that score, we will be held to a high standard, indeed, because our chance to do good is so great. My fellow Americans, we have crossed the bridge we built to the 21st century. Now, we must shape a 21st century American revolution of opportunity, responsibility, and community. We must be now, as we were in the beginning, a new nation. At the dawn of the last century, Theodore Roosevelt said, "The one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight . . . it should be the growing Nation with a future that takes the long look ahead." So tonight let us take our long look ahead and set great goals for our Nation. To 21st century America, let us pledge these things Every child will begin school ready to learn and graduate ready to succeed. Every family will be able to succeed at home and at work, and no child will be raised in poverty. We will meet the challenge of the aging of America. We will assure quality, affordable health care, at last, for all Americans. We will make America the safest big country on Earth. We will pay off our national debt for the first time since 1835. We will bring prosperity to every American community. We will reverse the course of climate change and leave a safer, cleaner planet. America will lead the world toward shared peace and prosperity and the far frontiers of science and technology. And we will become at last what our Founders pledged us to be so long ago One Nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. These are great goals, worthy of a great nation. We will not reach them all this year, not even in this decade. But we will reach them. Let us remember that the first American Revolution was not won with a single shot the continent was not settled in a single year. The lesson of our history and the lesson of the last 7 years is that great goals are reached step by step, always building on our progress, always gaining ground. Of course, you can't gain ground if you're standing still. And for too long this Congress has been standing still on some of our most pressing national priorities. So let's begin tonight with them. Again, I ask you to pass a real Patients' Bill of Rights. I ask you to pass commonsense gun safety legislation. I ask you to pass campaign finance reform. I ask you to vote up or down on judicial nominations and other important appointees. And again, I ask you I implore you to raise the minimum wage. Now, 2 years ago let me try to balance the seesaw here laughter 2 years ago, as we reached across party lines to reach our first balanced budget, I asked that we meet our responsibility to the next generation by maintaining our fiscal discipline. Because we refused to stray from that path, we are doing something that would have seemed unimaginable 7 years ago. We are actually paying down the national debt. Now, if we stay on this path, we can pay down the debt entirely in just 13 years now and make America debt free for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. In 1993 we began to put our fiscal house in order with the Deficit Reduction Act, which you'll all remember won passages in both Houses by just a single vote. Your former colleague, my first Secretary of the Treasury, led that effort and sparked our long boom. He's here with us tonight. Lloyd Bentsen, you have served America well, and we thank you. Beyond paying off the debt, we must ensure that the benefits of debt reduction go to preserving two of the most important guarantees we make to every American, Social Security and Medicare. Tonight I ask you to work with me to make a bipartisan downpayment on Social Security reform by crediting the interest savings from debt reduction to the Social Security Trust Fund so that it will be strong and sound for the next 50 years. But this is just the start of our journey. We must also take the right steps toward reaching our great goals. First and foremost, we need a 21st century revolution in education, guided by our faith that every single child can learn. Because education is more important than ever, more than ever the key to our children's future, we must make sure all our children have that key. That means quality preschool and afterschool, the best trained teachers in the classroom, and college opportunities for all our children. For 7 years now, we've worked hard to improve our schools, with opportunity and responsibility, investing more but demanding more in turn. Reading, math, college entrance scores are up. Some of the most impressive gains are in schools in very poor neighborhoods. But all successful schools have followed the same proven formula higher standards, more accountability, and extra help so children who need it can get it to reach those standards. I have sent Congress a reform plan based on that formula. It holds States and school districts accountable for progress and rewards them for results. Each year, our National Government invests more than 15 billion in our schools. It is time to support what works and stop supporting what doesn't. Now, as we demand more from our schools, we should also invest more in our schools. Let's double our investment to help States and districts turn around their worst performing schools or shut them down. Let's double our investments in after school and summer school programs, which boost achievement and keep people off the streets and out of trouble. If we do this, we can give every single child in every failing school in America everyone the chance to meet high standards. Since 1993, we've nearly doubled our investment in Head Start and improved its quality. Tonight I ask you for another 1 billion for Head Start, the largest increase in the history of the program. We know that children learn best in smaller classes with good teachers. For 2 years in a row, Congress has supported my plan to hire 100,000 new qualified teachers to lower class size in the early grades. I thank you for that, and I ask you to make it 3 in a row. And to make sure all teachers know the subjects they teach, tonight I propose a new teacher quality initiative, to recruit more talented people into the classroom, reward good teachers for staying there, and give all teachers the training they need. We know charter schools provide real public school choice. When I became President, there was just one independent public charter school in all America. Today, thanks to you, there are 1,700. I ask you now to help us meet our goal of 3,000 charter schools by next year. We know we must connect all our classrooms to the Internet, and we're getting there. In 1994, only 3 percent of our classrooms were connected. Today, with the help of the Vice President's E rate program, more than half of them are, and 90 percent of our schools have at least one Internet connection. But we cannot finish the job when a third of all our schools are in serious disrepair. Many of them have walls and wires so old, they're too old for the Internet. So tonight I propose to help 5,000 schools a year make immediate and urgent repairs and, again, to help build or modernize 6,000 more, to get students out of trailers and into high tech classrooms. I ask all of you to help me double our bipartisan GEAR UP program, which provides mentors for disadvantaged young people. If we double it, we can provide mentors for 1.4 million of them. Let's also offer these kids from disadvantaged backgrounds the same chance to take the same college test prep courses wealthier students use to boost their test scores. To make the American dream achievable for all, we must make college affordable for all. For 7 years, on a bipartisan basis, we have taken action toward that goal larger Pell grants, more affordable student loans, education IRA's, and our HOPE scholarships, which have already benefited 5 million young people. Now, 67 percent of high school graduates are going on to college. That's up 10 percent since 1993. Yet millions of families still strain to pay college tuition. They need help. So I propose a landmark 30 billion college opportunity tax cut, a middle class tax deduction for up to 10,000 in college tuition costs. The previous actions of this Congress have already made 2 years of college affordable for all. It's time make 4 years of college affordable for all. If we take all these steps, we'll move a long way toward making sure every child starts school ready to learn and graduates ready to succeed. We also need a 21st century revolution to reward work and strengthen families by giving every parent the tools to succeed at work and at the most important work of all, raising children. That means making sure every family has health care and the support to care for aging parents, the tools to bring their children up right, and that no child grows up in poverty. From my first days as President, we've worked to give families better access to better health care. In 1997, we passed the Children's Health Insurance Program CHIP so that workers who don't have coverage through their employers at least can get it for their children. So far, we've enrolled 2 million children. We're well on our way to our goal of 5 million. But there are still more than 40 million of our fellow Americans without health insurance, more than there were in 1993. Tonight I propose that we follow Vice President Gore's suggestion to make low income parents eligible for the insurance that covers their children. Together with our children's initiative think of this together with our children's initiative, this action would enable us to cover nearly a quarter of all the uninsured people in America. Again, I want to ask you to let people between the ages of 55 and 65, the fastest growing group of uninsured, buy into Medicare. And this year I propose to give them a tax credit to make that choice an affordable one. I hope you will support that, as well. When the baby boomers retire, Medicare will be faced with caring for twice as many of our citizens yet, it is far from ready to do so. My generation must not ask our children's generation to shoulder our burden. We simply must act now to strengthen and modernize Medicare. My budget includes a comprehensive plan to reform Medicare, to make it more efficient and more competitive. And it dedicates nearly 400 billion of our budget surplus to keep Medicare solvent past 2025. And at long last, it also provides funds to give every senior a voluntary choice of affordable coverage for prescription drugs. Lifesaving drugs are an indispensable part of modern medicine. No one creating a Medicare program today would even think of excluding coverage for prescription drugs. Yet more than three in five of our seniors now lack dependable drug coverage which can lengthen and enrich their lives. Millions of older Americans, who need prescription drugs the most, pay the highest prices for them. In good conscience, we cannot let another year pass without extending to all our seniors this lifeline of affordable prescription drugs. Record numbers of Americans are providing for aging or ailing loved ones at home. It's a loving but a difficult and often very expensive choice. Last year, I proposed a 1,000 tax credit for long term care. Frankly, it wasn't enough. This year, let's triple it to 3,000. But this year, let's pass it. We also have to make needed investments to expand access to mental health care. I want to take a moment to thank the person who led our first White House Conference on Mental Health last year and who for 7 years has led all our efforts to break down the barriers to decent treatment of people with mental illness. Thank you, Tipper Gore. Taken together, these proposals would mark the largest investment in health care in the 35 years since Medicare was created the largest investment in 35 years. That would be a big step toward assuring quality health care for all Americans, young and old. And I ask you to embrace them and pass them. We must also make investments that reward work and support families. Nothing does that better than the earned income tax credit, the EITC. The "E" in the EITC is about earning, working, taking responsibility, and being rewarded for it. In my very first address to you, I asked Congress to greatly expand this credit, and you did. As a result, in 1998 alone, the EITC helped more than 4.3 million Americans work their way out of poverty toward the middle class. That's double the number in 1993. Tonight I propose another major expansion of the EITC to reduce the marriage penalty, to make sure it rewards marriage as it rewards work, and also to expand the tax credit for families that have more than two children. It punishes people with more than two children today. Our proposal would allow families with three or more children to get up to 1,100 more in tax relief. These are working families their children should not be in poverty. We also can't reward work and family unless men and women get equal pay for equal work. Today the female unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 46 years. Yet, women still only earn about 75 cents for every dollar men earn. We must do better, by providing the resources to enforce present equal pay laws, training more women for high paying, high tech jobs, and passing the "Paycheck Fairness Act." Many working parents spend up to a quarter a quarter of their income on child care. Last year, we helped parents provide child care for about 2 million children. My child care initiative before you now, along with funds already secured in welfare reform, would make child care better, safer, and more affordable for another 400,000 children. I ask you to pass that. They need it out there. For hard pressed middle income families, we should also expand the child care tax credit. And I believe strongly we should take the next big step and make that tax credit refundable for low income families. For people making under 30,000 a year, that could mean up to 2,400 for child care costs. You know, we all say we're pro work and pro family. Passing this proposal would prove it. Ten of millions of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck. As hard as they work, they still don't have the opportunity to save. Too few can make use of IRA's and 401k plans. We should do more to help all working families save and accumulate wealth. That's the idea behind the Individual Development Accounts, the IDA's. I ask you to take that idea to a new level, with new retirement savings accounts that enable every low and moderate income family in America to save for retirement, a first home, a medical emergency, or a college education. I propose to match their contributions, however small, dollar for dollar, every year they save. And I propose to give a major new tax credit to any small business that will provide a meaningful pension to its workers. Those people ought to have retirement as well as the rest of us. Nearly one in three American children grows up without a father. These children are 5 times more likely to live in poverty than children with both parents at home. Clearly, demanding and supporting responsible fatherhood is critical to lifting all our children out of poverty. We've doubled child support collections since 1992. And I'm proposing to you tough new measures to hold still more fathers responsible. But we should recognize that a lot of fathers want to do right by their children but need help to do it. Carlos Rosas of St. Paul, Minnesota, wanted to do right by his son, and he got the help to do it. Now he's got a good job, and he supports his little boy. My budget will help 40,000 more fathers make the same choices Carlos Rosas did. I thank him for being here tonight. Stand up, Carlos. Applause Thank you. If there is any single issue on which we should be able to reach across party lines, it is in our common commitment to reward work and strengthen families. Just remember what we did last year. We came together to help people with disabilities keep their health insurance when they go to work. And I thank you for that. Thanks to overwhelming bipartisan support from this Congress, we have improved foster care. We've helped those young people who leave it when they turn 18, and we have dramatically increased the number of foster care children going into adoptive homes. I thank all of you for all of that. Of course, I am forever grateful to the person who has led our efforts from the beginning and who's worked so tirelessly for children and families for 30 years now, my wife, Hillary, and I thank her. If we take the steps just discussed, we can go a long, long way toward empowering parents to succeed at home and at work and ensuring that no child is raised in poverty. We can make these vital investments in health care, education, support for working families, and still offer tax cuts to help pay for college, for retirement, to care for aging parents, to reduce the marriage penalty. We can do these things without forsaking the path of fiscal discipline that got us to this point here tonight. Indeed, we must make these investments and these tax cuts in the context of a balanced budget that strengthens and extends the life of Social Security and Medicare and pays down the national debt. Crime in America has dropped for the past 7 years that's the longest decline on record thanks to a national consensus we helped to forge on community police, sensible gun safety laws, and effective prevention. But nobody, nobody here, nobody in America believes we're safe enough. So again, I ask you to set a higher goal. Let's make this country the safest big country in the world. Last fall, Congress supported my plan to hire, in addition to the 100,000 community police we've already funded, 50,000 more, concentrated in high crime neighborhoods. I ask your continued support for that. Soon after the Columbine tragedy, Congress considered commonsense gun legislation, to require Brady background checks at the gun shows, child safety locks for new handguns, and a ban on the importation of large capacity ammunition clips. With courage and a tie breaking vote by the Vice President laughter the Senate faced down the gun lobby, stood up for the American people, and passed this legislation. But the House failed to follow suit. Now, we have all seen what happens when guns fall into the wrong hands. Daniel Mauser was only 15 years old when he was gunned down at Columbine. He was an amazing kid, a straight A student, a good skier. Like all parents who lose their children, his father, Tom, has borne unimaginable grief. Somehow he has found the strength to honor his son by transforming his grief into action. Earlier this month, he took a leave of absence from his job to fight for tougher gun safety laws. I pray that his courage and wisdom will at long last move this Congress to make commonsense gun legislation the very next order of business. Tom Mauser, stand up. We thank you for being here tonight. Tom. Thank you, Tom. Applause We must strengthen our gun laws and enforce those already on the books better. Federal gun crime prosecutions are up 16 percent since I took office. But we must do more. I propose to hire more Federal and local gun prosecutors and more ATF agents to crack down on illegal gun traffickers and bad apple dealers. And we must give them the enforcement tools that they need, tools to trace every gun and every bullet used in every gun crime in the United States. I ask you to help us do that. Every State in this country already requires hunters and automobile drivers to have a license. I think they ought to do the same thing for handgun purchases. Now, specifically, I propose a plan to ensure that all new handgun buyers must first have a photo license from their State showing they passed the Brady background check and a gun safety course, before they get the gun. I hope you'll help me pass that in this Congress. Listen to this listen to this. The accidental gun rate the accidental gun death rate of children under 15 in the United States is 9 times higher than in the other 25 industrialized countries combined. Now, technologies now exist that could lead to guns that can only be fired by the adults who own them. I ask Congress to fund research into smart gun technology to save these children's lives. I ask responsible leaders in the gun industry to work with us on smart guns and other steps to keep guns out of the wrong hands, to keep our children safe. You know, every parent I know worries about the impact of violence in the media on their children. I want to begin by thanking the entertainment industry for accepting my challenge to put voluntary ratings on TV programs and video and Internet games. But frankly, the ratings are too numerous, diverse, and confusing to be really useful to parents. So tonight I ask the industry to accept the First Lady's challenge to develop a single voluntary rating system for all children's entertainment that is easier for parents to understand and enforce. The steps I outline will take us well on our way to making America the safest big country in the world. Now, to keep our historic economic expansion going, the subject of a lot of discussion in this community and others, I believe we need a 21st century revolution to open new markets, start new businesses, hire new workers right here in America, in our inner cities, poor rural areas, and Native American reservations. Our Nation's prosperity hasn't yet reached these places. Over the last 6 months, I've traveled to a lot of them, joined by many of you and many far sighted business people, to shine a spotlight on the enormous potential in communities from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta, from Watts to the Pine Ridge Reservation. Everywhere I go, I meet talented people eager for opportunity and able to work. Tonight I ask you, let's put them to work. For business, it's the smart thing to do. For America, it's the right thing to do. And let me ask you something If we don't do this now, when in the wide world will we ever get around to it? So I ask Congress to give businesses the same incentives to invest in America's new markets they now have to invest in markets overseas. Tonight I propose a large new markets tax credit and other incentives to spur 22 billion in private sector capital to create new businesses and new investments in our inner cities and rural areas. Because empowerment zones have been creating these opportunities for 5 years now, I also ask you to increase incentives to invest in them and to create more of them. And let me say to all of you again what I have tried to say at every turn This is not a Democratic or a Republican issue. Giving people a chance to live their dreams is an American issue. Mr. Speaker, it was a powerful moment last November when you joined Reverend Jesse Jackson and me in your home State of Illinois and committed to working toward our common goal by combining the best ideas from both sides of the aisle. I want to thank you again and to tell you, Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with you. This is a worthy joint endeavor. Thank you. I also ask you to make special efforts to address the areas of our Nation with the highest rates of poverty, our Native American reservations and the Mississippi Delta. My budget includes a 110 million initiative to promote economic development in the Delta and a billion dollars to increase economic opportunity, health care, education, and law enforcement for our Native American communities. We should begin this new century by honoring our historic responsibility to empower the first Americans. And I want to thank tonight the leaders and the members from both parties who've expressed to me an interest in working with us on these efforts. They are profoundly important. There's another part of our American community in trouble tonight, our family farmers. When I signed the farm bill in 1996, I said there was great danger it would work well in good times but not in bad. Well, droughts, floods, and historically low prices have made these times very bad for the farmers. We must work together to strengthen the farm safety net, invest in land conservation, and create some new markets for them by expanding our programs for bio based fuels and products. Please, they need help. Let's do it together. Opportunity for all requires something else today, having access to a computer and knowing how to use it. That means we must close the digital divide between those who've got the tools and those who don't. Connecting classrooms and libraries to the Internet is crucial, but it's just a start. My budget ensures that all new teachers are trained to teach 21st century skills, and it creates technology centers in 1,000 communities to serve adults. This spring, I'll invite high tech leaders to join me on another new markets tour, to close the digital divide and open opportunity for our people. I want to thank the high tech companies that already are doing so much in this area. I hope the new tax incentives I have proposed will get all the rest of them to join us. This is a national crusade. We have got to do this and do it quickly. Now, again I say to you, these are steps, but step by step, we can go a long way toward our goal of bringing opportunity to every community. To realize the full possibilities of this economy, we must reach beyond our own borders to shape the revolution that is tearing down barriers and building new networks among nations and individuals and economies and cultures globalization. It's the central reality of our time. Of course, change this profound is both liberating and threatening to people. But there's no turning back. And our open, creative society stands to benefit more than any other if we understand and act on the realities of interdependence. We have to be at the center of every vital global network, as a good neighbor and a good partner. We have to recognize that we cannot build our future without helping others to build theirs. The first thing we have got to do is to forge a new consensus on trade. Now, those of us who believe passionately in the power of open trade, we have to ensure that it lifts both our living standards and our values, never tolerating abusive child labor or a race to the bottom in the environment and worker protection. But others must recognize that open markets and rule based trade are the best engines we know of for raising living standards, reducing global poverty and environmental destruction, and assuring the free flow of ideas. I believe, as strongly tonight as I did the first day I got here, the only direction forward for America on trade the only direction for America on trade is to keep going forward. I ask you to help me forge that consensus. We have to make developing economies our partners in prosperity. That's why I would like to ask you again to finalize our groundbreaking African and Caribbean Basin trade initiatives. But globalization is about more than economics. Our purpose must be to bring together the world around freedom and democracy and peace and to oppose those who would tear it apart. Here are the fundamental challenges I believe America must meet to shape the 21st century world. First, we must continue to encourage our former adversaries, Russia and China, to emerge as stable, prosperous, democratic nations. Both are being held back today from reaching their full potential Russia by the legacy of communism, an economy in turmoil, a cruel and self defeating war in Chechnya China by the illusion that it can buy stability at the expense of freedom. But think how much has changed in the past decade 5,000 former Soviet nuclear weapons taken out of commission Russian soldiers actually serving with ours in the Balkans Russian people electing their leaders for the first time in 1,000 years and in China, an economy more open to the world than ever before. Of course, no one, not a single person in this Chamber tonight can know for sure what direction these great nations will take. But we do know for sure that we can choose what we do. And we should do everything in our power to increase the chance that they will choose wisely, to be constructive members of our global community. That's why we should support those Russians who are struggling for a democratic, prosperous future continue to reduce both our nuclear arsenals and help Russia to safeguard weapons and materials that remain. And that's why I believe Congress should support the agreement we negotiated to bring China into the WTO, by passing permanent normal trade relations with China as soon as possible this year. I think you ought to do it for two reasons First of all, our markets are already open to China this agreement will open China's markets to us. And second, it will plainly advance the cause of peace in Asia and promote the cause of change in China. No, we don't know where it's going. All we can do is decide what we're going to do. But when all is said and done, we need to know we did everything we possibly could to maximize the chance that China will choose the right future. A second challenge we've got is to protect our own security from conflicts that pose the risk of wider war and threaten our common humanity. We can't prevent every conflict or stop every outrage. But where our interests are at stake and we can make a difference, we should be, and we must be, peacemakers. We should be proud of our role in bringing the Middle East closer to a lasting peace, building peace in Northern Ireland, working for peace in East Timor and Africa, promoting reconciliation between Greece and Turkey and in Cyprus, working to defuse these crises between India and Pakistan, in defending human rights and religious freedom. And we should be proud of the men and women of our Armed Forces and those of our allies who stopped the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, enabling a million people to return to their homes. When Slobodan Milosevic unleashed his terror on Kosovo, Captain John Cherrey was one of the brave airmen who turned the tide. And when another American plane was shot down over Serbia, he flew into the teeth of enemy air defenses to bring his fellow pilot home. Thanks to our Armed Forces' skill and bravery, we prevailed in Kosovo without losing a single American in combat. I want to introduce Captain Cherrey to you. We honor Captain Cherrey, and we promise you, Captain, we'll finish the job you began. Stand up so we can see you. Applause A third challenge we have is to keep this inexorable march of technology from giving terrorists and potentially hostile nations the means to undermine our defenses. Keep in mind, the same technological advances that have shrunk cell phones to fit in the palms of our hands can also make weapons of terror easier to conceal and easier to use. We must meet this threat by making effective agreements to restrain nuclear and missile programs in North Korea, curbing the flow of lethal technology to Iran, preventing Iraq from threatening its neighbors, increasing our preparedness against chemical and biological attack, protecting our vital computer systems from hackers and criminals, and developing a system to defend against new missile threats, while working to preserve our ABM missile treaty with Russia. We must do all these things. I predict to you, when most of us are long gone but some time in the next 10 to 20 years, the major security threat this country will face will come from the enemies of the nation state, the narcotraffickers and the terrorists and the organized criminals who will be organized together, working together, with increasing access to ever more sophisticated chemical and biological weapons. And I want to thank the Pentagon and others for doing what they're doing right now to try to help protect us and plan for that, so that our defenses will be strong. I ask for your support to ensure they can succeed. I also want to ask you for a constructive bipartisan dialog this year to work to build a consensus which I hope will eventually lead to the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. I hope we can also have a constructive effort to meet the challenge that is presented to our planet by the huge gulf between rich and poor. We cannot accept a world in which part of humanity lives on the cutting edge of a new economy and the rest live on the bare edge of survival. I think we have to do our part to change that with expanded trade, expanded aid, and the expansion of freedom. This is interesting From Nigeria to Indonesia, more people got the right to choose their leaders in 1999 than in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. We've got to stand by these democracies, including and especially tonight Colombia, which is fighting narcotraffickers, for its own people's lives and our children's lives. I have proposed a strong 2 year package to help Colombia win this fight. I want to thank the leaders in both parties in both Houses for listening to me and the President of Colombia about it. We have got to pass this. I want to ask your help. A lot is riding on it. And it's so important for the long term stability of our country and for what happens in Latin America. I also want you to know I'm going to send you new legislation to go after what these drug barons value the most, their money. And I hope you'll pass that as well. In a world where over a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, we also have got to do our part in the global endeavor to reduce the debts of the poorest countries, so they can invest in education, health care, and economic growth. That's what the Pope and other religious leaders have urged us to do. And last year, Congress made a downpayment on America's share. I ask you to continue that. I thank you for what you did and ask you to stay the course. I also want to say that America must help more nations to break the bonds of disease. Last year in Africa, 10 times as many people died from AIDS as were killed in wars 10 times. The budget I give you invests 150 million more in the fight against this and other infectious killers. And today I propose a tax credit to speed the development of vaccines for diseases like malaria, TB, and AIDS. I ask the private sector and our partners around the world to join us in embracing this cause. We can save millions of lives together, and we ought to do it. I also want to mention our final challenge, which, as always, is the most important. I ask you to pass a national security budget that keeps our military the best trained and best equipped in the world, with heightened readiness and 21st century weapons, which raises salaries for our service men and women, which protects our veterans, which fully funds the diplomacy that keeps our soldiers out of war, which makes good on our commitment to our U.N. dues and arrears. I ask you to pass this budget. I also want to say something, if I might, very personal tonight. The American people watching us at home, with the help of all the commentators, can tell, from who stands and who sits and who claps and who doesn't, that there's still modest differences of opinion in this room. Laughter But I want to thank you for something, every one of you. I want to thank you for the extraordinary support you have given, Republicans and Democrats alike, to our men and women in uniform. I thank you for that. I also want to thank, especially, two people. First, I want to thank our Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen, for symbolizing our bipartisan commitment to national security. Thank you, sir. Even more, I want to thank his wife, Janet, who, more than any other American citizen, has tirelessly traveled this world to show the support we all feel for our troops. Thank you, Janet Cohen. I appreciate that. Thank you. These are the challenges we have to meet so that we can lead the world toward peace and freedom in an era of globalization. I want to tell you that I am very grateful for many things as President. But one of the things I'm grateful for is the opportunity that the Vice President and I have had to finally put to rest the bogus idea that you cannot grow the economy and protect the environment at the same time. As our economy has grown, we've rid more than 500 neighborhoods of toxic waste, ensured cleaner air and water for millions of people. In the past 3 months alone, we've helped preserve 40 million acres of roadless lands in the national forests, created three new national monuments. But as our communities grow, our commitment to conservation must continue to grow. Tonight I propose creating a permanent conservation fund, to restore wildlife, protect coastlines, save natural treasures, from the California redwoods to the Florida Everglades. This lands legacy endowment would represent by far the most enduring investment in land preservation ever proposed in this House. I hope we can get together with all the people with different ideas and do this. This is a gift we should give to our children and our grandchildren for all time, across party lines. We can make an agreement to do this. Last year the Vice President launched a new effort to make communities more liberal livable laughter liberal, I know. Laughter Wait a minute, I've got a punchline now. That's this year's agenda last year was livable, right? Laughter That's what Senator Lott is going to say in the commentary afterwards laughter to make our communities more livable. This is big business. This is a big issue. What does that mean? You ask anybody that lives in an unlivable community, and they'll tell you. They want their kids to grow up next to parks, not parking lots the parents don't have to spend all their time stalled in traffic when they could be home with their children. Tonight I ask you to support new funding for the following things, to make American communities more liberal livable. Laughter I've done pretty well with this speech, but I can't say that. One, I want you to help us to do three things. We need more funding for advanced transit systems. We need more funding for saving open spaces in places of heavy development. And we need more funding this ought to have bipartisan appeal we need more funding for helping major cities around the Great Lakes protect their waterways and enhance their quality of life. We need these things, and I want you to help us. The greatest environmental challenge of the new century is global warming. The scientists tell us the 1990's were the hottest decade of the entire millennium. If we fail to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, deadly heat waves and droughts will become more frequent, coastal areas will flood, and economies will be disrupted. That is going to happen, unless we act. Many people in the United States, some people in this Chamber, and lots of folks around the world still believe you cannot cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. In the industrial age, that may well have been true. But in this digital economy, it is not true anymore. New technologies make it possible to cut harmful emissions and provide even more growth. For example, just last week, automakers unveiled cars that get 70 to 80 miles a gallon, the fruits of a unique research partnership between Government and industry. And before you know it, efficient production of bio fuels will give us the equivalent of hundreds of miles from a gallon of gasoline. To speed innovation in these kind of technologies, I think we should give a major tax incentive to business for the production of clean energy and to families for buying energy saving homes and appliances and the next generation of superefficient cars when they hit the showroom floor. I also ask the auto industry to use the available technologies to make all new cars more fuel efficient right away. And I ask this Congress to do something else. Please help us make more of our clean energy technology available to the developing world. That will create cleaner growth abroad and a lot more new jobs here in the United States of America. In the new century, innovations in science and technology will be key not only to the health of the environment but to miraculous improvements in the quality of our lives and advances in the economy. Later this year, researchers will complete the first draft of the entire human genome, the very blueprint of life. It is important for all our fellow Americans to recognize that Federal tax dollars have funded much of this research and that this and other wise investments in science are leading to a revolution in our ability to detect, treat, and prevent disease. For example, researchers have identified genes that cause Parkinson's, diabetes, and certain kinds of cancer. They are designing precision therapies that will block the harmful effect of these genes for good. Researchers already are using this new technique to target and destroy cells that cause breast cancer. Soon, we may be able to use it to prevent the onset of Alzheimer's. Scientists are also working on an artificial retina to help many blind people to see and listen to this microchips that would actually directly stimulate damaged spinal cords in a way that could allow people now paralyzed to stand up and walk. These kinds of innovations are also propelling our remarkable prosperity. Information technology only includes 8 percent of our employment but now accounts for a third of our economic growth along with jobs that pay, by the way, about 80 percent above the private sector average. Again, we ought to keep in mind, Government funded research brought supercomputers, the Internet, and communications satellites into being. Soon researchers will bring us devices that can translate foreign languages as fast as you can talk, materials 10 times stronger than steel at a fraction of the weight, and this is unbelievable to me molecular computers the size of a teardrop with the power of today's fastest supercomputers. To accelerate the march of discovery across all these disciplines in science and technology, I ask you to support my recommendation of an unprecedented 3 billion in the 21st century research fund, the largest increase in civilian research in a generation. We owe it to our future. Now, these new breakthroughs have to be used in ways that reflect our values. First and foremost, we have to safeguard our citizens' privacy. Last year we proposed to protect every citizen's medical record. This year we will finalize those rules. We've also taken the first steps to protect the privacy of bank and credit card records and other financial statements. Soon I will send legislation to you to finish that job. We must also act to prevent any genetic discrimination whatever by employers or insurers. I hope you will support that. These steps will allow us to lead toward the far frontiers of science and technology. They will enhance our health, the environment, the economy in ways we can't even imagine today. But we all know that at a time when science, technology, and the forces of globalization are bringing so many changes into all our lives, it's more important than ever that we strengthen the bonds that root us in our local communities and in our national community. No tie binds different people together like citizen service. There's a new spirit of service in America, a movement we've tried to support with AmeriCorps, expanded Peace Corps, unprecedented new partnerships with businesses, foundations, community groups partnerships, for example, like the one that enlisted 12,000 companies which have now moved 650,000 of our fellow citizens from welfare to work partnerships to battle drug abuse, AIDS, teach young people to read, save America's treasures, strengthen the arts, fight teen pregnancy, prevent violence among young people, promote racial healing. The American people are working together. But we should do more to help Americans help each other. First, we should help faithbased organizations to do more to fight poverty and drug abuse and help people get back on the right track, with initiatives like Second Chance Homes that do so much to help unwed teen mothers. Second, we should support Americans who tithe and contribute to charities but don't earn enough to claim a tax deduction for it. Tonight I propose new tax incentives that would allow low and middle income citizens who don't itemize to get that deduction. It's nothing but fair, and it will get more people to give. We should do more to help new immigrants to fully participate in our community. That's why I recommend spending more to teach them civics and English. And since everybody in our community counts, we've got to make sure everyone is counted in this year's census. Within 10 years just 10 years there will be no majority race in our largest State of California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in America. In a more interconnected world, this diversity can be our greatest strength. Just look around this Chamber. Look around. We have Members in this Congress from virtually every racial, ethnic, and religious background. And I think you would agree that America is stronger because of it. Applause You also have to agree that all those differences you just clapped for all too often spark hatred and division even here at home. Just in the last couple of years, we've seen a man dragged to death in Texas just because he was black. We saw a young man murdered in Wyoming just because he was gay. Last year we saw the shootings of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Jewish children just because of who they were. This is not the American way, and we must draw the line. I ask you to draw that line by passing without delay the "Hate Crimes Prevention Act" and the "Employment Non Discrimination Act." And I ask you to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Finally tonight, I propose the largest ever investment in our civil rights laws for enforcement, because no American should be subjected to discrimination in finding a home, getting a job, going to school, or securing a loan. Protections in law should be protections in fact. Last February, because I thought this was so important, I created the White House Office of One America to promote racial reconciliation. That's what one of my personal heroes, Hank Aaron, has done all his life. From his days as our all time home run king to his recent acts of healing, he has always brought people together. We should follow his example, and we're honored to have him with us tonight. Stand up, Hank Aaron. Applause I just want to say one more thing about this, and I want every one of you to think about this the next time you get mad at one of your colleagues on the other side of the aisle. This fall, at the White House, Hillary had one of her millennium dinners, and we had this very distinguished scientist there, who is an expert in this whole work in the human genome. And he said that we are all, regardless of race, genetically 99.9 percent the same. Now, you may find that uncomfortable when you look around here. Laughter But it is worth remembering. We can laugh about this, but you think about it. Modern science has confirmed what ancient faiths have always taught the most important fact of life is our common humanity. Therefore, we should do more than just tolerate our diversity we should honor it and celebrate it. My fellow Americans, every time I prepare for the State of the Union, I approach it with hope and expectation and excitement for our Nation. But tonight is very special, because we stand on the mountaintop of a new millennium. Behind us we can look back and see the great expanse of American achievement, and before us we can see even greater, grander frontiers of possibility. We should, all of us, be filled with gratitude and humility for our present progress and prosperity. We should be filled with awe and joy at what lies over the horizon. And we should be filled with absolute determination to make the most of it. You know, when the Framers finished crafting our Constitution in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin stood in Independence Hall, and he reflected on the carving of the Sun that was on the back of a chair he saw. The Sun was low on the horizon. So he said this he said, "I've often wondered whether that Sun was rising or setting. Today," Franklin said, "I have the happiness to know it's a rising Sun." Today, because each succeeding generation of Americans has kept the fire of freedom burning brightly, lighting those frontiers of possibility, we all still bask in the glow and the warmth of Mr. Franklin's rising Sun. After 224 years, the American revolution continues. We remain a new nation. And as long as our dreams outweigh our memories, America will be forever young. That is our destiny. And this is our moment. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America. January 26, 2000 State of the Union Mr. Lehrer. Mr. President, welcome. The President. Thank you. Mr. Lehrer. Can we assume, sir, that tomorrow night in the State of the Union, you're going to declare the state of the Union to be in pretty good shape? The President. It's in good shape. And I'm very grateful. But I'm also going to challenge the Congress and the country to make it better. Mr. Lehrer. The things that are good about this country right now, how much of that do you believe you deserve credit for? The President. Well, I think most of the credit, as always, goes to the American people. This is a country where citizenship is the most important job anybody can have, and I think we should start with that. I think the Members of Congress who have worked with us deserve a lot of credit. But if you look at where we are now, compared to where we were 7 years ago, I think the fact that we got rid of the deficit and are running surpluses the fact that we changed the philosophy of the National Government on welfare, on crime the fact that we have formed unprecedented partnerships with people in the private sector to deal with all kinds of social problems teen pregnancy, which is down, adoptions, which are up the fact that we have protected more land than any administrations in the country's history, except those of the two Roosevelts I think that those things are things that our Government did. I also believe that people have a lot more confidence now, that we can actually do things as a nation. In '92 we didn't just have economic distress and social decline. We had this political gridlock and discredited Government. The national Republicans had badmouthed the Government for 12 years, and they'd done a pretty good job of convincing America that it couldn't do anything. Now we have cut the size of Government by over 350,000. It's the smallest it's been since John Kennedy was here, and it really works to empower people and to create these partnerships. So I think that we have played a role in the recovery of the economy and in the improvement of the situation with crime, with welfare, with education. We've opened the doors of college to virtually all Americans. And I think all these things count for something. And of course, our country has been a great force for peace and freedom around the world. And I'm very grateful for the chance we've had to all of us to serve here. President's Historical Legacy Mr. Lehrer. Do you believe that history is going to give you credit for all those things you've just enumerated? The President. Well, I think that's up to the historians. I think that history will be very much more that people who do serious histories of this administration will be amazed at the amount of energy and effort that went into the wide variety of areas that we worked in. And I think that it will show that in virtually every area we had progress, from helping to reduce poverty to improving the plight of our children, to creating an environment with the reform of telecommunications, the reform of banking, and getting rid of the deficit and major investments in science and technology, to this exploding new economy. I think it will show that we helped America to make this major transition into a new economy and an era of globalization. Mr. Lehrer. Are you worried about what the historians are going to write about you? The President. No, I can't control that. But I think time will tend to accelerate the positive and put what negative there is into proper perspective. And I feel quite comfortable about that. But the main thing is, I don't think too much about it because I know that the only thing I can do to impact on it is to do the right thing today by the American people. I mean, my philosophy has been, ever since I got here, is that in the modern political world, the most important thing you can do is get up and go to work and concentrate on your job and always keep thinking about tomorrow. And all the pressures that operate on you are designed to prevent you from doing that, to hobble you, to distract you, to divide you, to get you to obsess about what somebody said or wrote or is doing. And so my whole theory has been from the beginning that if we could start and give first 4 years and then 8 years of unbridled, concentrated effort, no matter what else happened, the American people would be all right. And that's really all I hired on to do, is to try to help them do better. Mr. Lehrer. Let me read what the New York Times said in its lead editorial on Monday. They're talking about you, your legacy, and your Presidency as you go into this last year. It said, "historians are beginning to categorize Mr. Clinton as a politician of splendid natural talent and some significant accomplishments who, nonetheless, missed the greatness that once seemed within his grasp." What's your reaction to that "what might have been" kind of thing? The President. I think that well, first of all, I think it's not productive to talk about what might have been. But I think if you the question is how you keep score, what is this time like, how will you measure it? The time that this is most like is the turn of the last century. Did we manage the transition of America in the new economy and an era of globalization well, or not? I think the answer is, we did. Did we make social progress? Did we actually change the way we approach social issues? If the issue is crime, welfare, national service, the answer is, we did. Were we good stewards of the environment? We were. And then, what were the forces you stood against, and what did you stop? And if you look at the forces we stood against from 1994 forward and what we stopped, I think the answer is, what we did was, A, successful, and B, good for America. And then, did we work with contending forces when we could to reach common agreement? I think the answer is, we did. So I believe that, first of all, there is no such thing as history, because this is still going on. We shouldn't worry about that. You know, in 5 years, 10 years, 20 years I got a book the other day on President Nixon's Presidency, and then I got one a week afterward on President Kennedy's Presidency that are still being written. I just read a new book, a great book, on Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency. And I think the further away you get from it, the more perspective you get and the more you're able to look at all the evidence. So all of us frankly, my view is not much better than the New York Times' on this. Neither one of us really can properly evaluate how this will be viewed in the light of history. I think that we have, given what we could have accomplished within the framework of possibility that was there and the job that was there before us, I think we've done pretty well. But all I can tell you is, I've worked every day, and I did the best I could, and I'm going to let the historians make their judgment after I give it one more hard year. President's Agenda for Last Year in Office Mr. Lehrer. All right, let's talk about the one more hard year. Is there one particular thing that you really want to do before you leave this office? The President. Well, there are many things that I really want to do before I leave this office. Obviously, I'm still heavily engaged in the search for peace in the Middle East. But whether we can do that or not depends Mr. Lehrer. What's the problem there, Mr. President? Particularly Syria and Israel, what's the problem? The President. I think the main problem is they haven't talked in a long time. There's still a fair measure of distrust. And the decisions which have to be made will require of both parties actions which will cause difficulty for them with some constituencies in their country. But let me say, I'm convinced that both the leaders of Syria and Israel want peace, and I'm convinced that substantively they're not that far apart. So we have a chance to do that. But you asked me what I wanted to do. That's something I would like to be involved in if they want to do it. I'm prepared to do whatever I can. I want to continue to do everything I can to protect the natural treasures of this country. I want to lay the foundation for America dealing with climate change. And I want to lay the foundation for America dealing with what I think will be the biggest security challenges of the 21st century. I believe you know, all the attention today is on whether we can develop a missile defense and, if so, whether we can deploy it without falling out with the Russians and our friends and other countries who question this. But the likeliest threat, in my view, is brought on by the intersection of technology and the likelihood that you'll have terrorists and narcotraffickers and organized criminals cooperating with each other, with smaller and smaller and more difficult to detect weapons of mass destruction and powerful traditional weapons. So we've tried to lay in a framework for dealing with cyberterrorism, bioterrorism, chemical terrorism. This is very important. Now, this is not in the headlines, but I think it's very, very important for the next 10 or 20 years. I think the enemies of the nation state in this interconnected world are likely to be the biggest security threat. And then, of course, you know the things that are really close to my heart I'm going to try to get a lot done in education, in health care, in bringing opportunity to poor people and reducing poverty in this country. Health Care Mr. Lehrer. What about health care? What is it that you would like your legacy to be on health care? The President. Well, I wish I could have given health insurance to all Americans, because I still think it's inexcusable that we are the only advanced country in the world that doesn't do that. But I feel good about many of the things we have done, in medical research, in letting people keep their health insurance when they change jobs, in providing much more preventive screening for older people with illnesses or potential illnesses, and of course, in the Children's Health Insurance Program. So I'm going to focus now on what I think I can get done this year. I want to try to increase the number of people with health insurance dramatically by letting the parents of children in the Children's Health Insurance Program buy into it, by letting people between the ages of 55 and 65 buy into Medicare. And I want to have another big investment in biomedical research. Education Mr. Lehrer. Now, what about education? What mark can you leave in this next year on education? The President. Well, let's first of all, if you look at what we have done we've already helped almost all the States to develop higher standards. And we've got test scores in reading, math, and college entrance exams are up. Mr. Lehrer. And you feel you've done that? You feel the administration has done that? The President. No, I I think our administration has contributed to it. No, the people that did it were the kids and the parents and the teachers. But I think, consistent with our philosophy, which is to be a catalyst for new ideas and to be a partner to help people achieve it, there's no question we've had an impact. Now, one thing we've had a really direct impact on is we've done more than any administration ever has to open the doors of college to everyone we with big increases in Pell grants the direct student loan program, which lets people borrow money at less cost and pay it off at a percentage of their income. We've got a million work study grants. We've got AmeriCorps, 150,000 young people there. And the HOPE scholarship tax credit and the lifetime tax credit really means people have no excuse for not going to school. Now, I have also proposed this time, for the first time in history, that we make college tuition tax deductible, up to 10,000 a year, which will mean that we have guaranteed access to 4 years of college for all Americans. I think that is a huge achievement. Since I became President, the number of the percentage of high school graduates going to college has gone up to 67 percent. That's an increase of 10 percent. But we need for everybody to be able to go. And so I think that this will be a major achievement. Now let's go back to the beginning. The next big challenge, besides making this is the last piece, making college universally available. The next big challenge is to make sure that everybody's diploma means something. And we've been working on this all along, starting in early childhood, the increases we made in Head Start. We now have 1,000 colleges sending mentors into grade schools to make sure kids learn to read by the third grade. And I think we've increased the emphasis on that you probably noticed that Jim Barksdale gave 100 million to the University of Mississippi, to do nothing but focus on how we can teach grade school kids to read. This is a huge deal it's great. So what else do we need to do? I think we need a national strategy to turn around failing schools or shut them down. I think we need to institutionalize reform with more charter schools. And I think we ought to make preschool available to everybody. And everybody that needs it ought to have access to after school. I think if you get those things done, and we continue to train the teachers, especially in how to use the computers as you hook up all the schools to the Internet, I think you're going to see really big, continuing improvements in education. Mr. Lehrer. But you can't do all that this next year, can you? The President. Sure we can. We can no, but we can take big steps toward it. If you look at the whole history of our country I read something President Johnson said the other day, and he got through Medicare and the Medicaid and the first steps of major Federal aid to education. He talked about how most of our big progress comes in deliberate, discrete steps. And if you take enough steps in the right direction, you turn back around, you see you've come quite a long way. So what I'm going to try to do in my speech tomorrow night is to outline what I think the long term goals for the Nation in the 21st century should be and then what steps I think we can realistically hope to achieve in this year and urge the Congress to join me in it. Bipartisanship on the Legislative Agenda Mr. Lehrer. Now, you're doing this, of course, in a Presidential election year. In whose interest is it to help you do this, in terms of simple politics of getting it done, to help you improve your legacy or get things done before you leave office? The President. Well, first of all, it's in none of their interest to help me improve my legacy. That's not why they should do it. It is in their interest to do the job they were hired to do, which is to help the people they represent. And I think the people that they represent, whether Republicans or Democrats, would find it amazing that someone could suggest they ought to take a year off. I mean, anybody who wants to take a year off ought to give up their paycheck and say, "I'm sorry. I'm not going to work this year, but I'm not going to take your money." Secondly, in a more mundane way, it is clearly in the interests of all the people in Congress to do things that are good for America, because the American people will appreciate it. I think it helps the Democrats, but I don't think it hurts the Republicans I mean, a bunch of them have to run next time, too. And people are going to know want to know, what did you do last year? If you look, it's quite interesting. We had a very good year in '96, where I had to veto the welfare reform bill twice because the Republicans wouldn't agree with me to guarantee child care and health care and more nutrition and medical care and transportation for the welfare families. And then they did it at the end, and we got this big welfare reform. And now we've got 7 million fewer people on welfare. In '98 we passed a lot of very important legislation at the end, because it was election year. So what you might see in terms of Congress now is not an enormous amount of activity at the beginning, although I do believe there's a good chance we can fairly early pass my proposal to help Colombia fight off narcotrafficking and preserve its democracy and work with its neighbors along the border. And I think there's a good chance they'll pass the China trade normal trade relations bill I hope that's true. But I think at the end of the year, when people will be held accountable by the voters, I think there's a chance we'll get quite a lot done. We did in '96. We did in '98. I think we will this year. 2000 Elections Mr. Lehrer. Mr. President, what do you make of Governor Bush's comment the other night after he had won the caucuses in Iowa? He said, this is the beginning of the end of the Clinton era, and everybody in the room cheered. The President. Well, they would. Laughter I think if he were I think if he said that he would reverse what we were doing, I think he would. And I think that's the choice before the American people. I mean, he's offered a 1.4 billion tax cut. And the only thing I'd ask the American people is to remember, you know, we've now had 20 years of experience. We tried it their way for 12 years, and they quadrupled the national debt. And when I took office, we had high unemployment, a massive deficit, a huge debt, and totally neglected our domestic affairs. We had rising crime, rising welfare rolls, all the social indicators going the wrong way. Now, we've tried it our way for 7 years. We've got the biggest surpluses in history, the first back to back surpluses in 42 years. We can get this country out of debt now in 13 years out of debt for the first time since Andy Jackson was President in 1835. And all the social indicators are going in the right direction. So it seems to me that he was being honest with the people, that he said that he will reverse this course. And I do think the American people ought to vote for change in this election, because things are changing so fast around us in this globalized world, we have to keep changing. The issue is Are we going to build on what works or revert to what didn't? And that's what I think the issue is. Assessment of the Administration Mr. Lehrer. You've given kind of your definition of the Clinton era, and he has his. Now, what he is the interpretation of what he's talking about is that it's just a continuation of what all the Presidential candidates have mentioned to some degree, that Republicans like Governor Bush, more than the Democrats, but even Vice President Gore and Senator Bradley have said about returning the Presidency back to a nobler office, to words like promising to restore dignity and respectability, decency and trust to the Presidency. They're talking about you, aren't they, Mr. President? The President. Well, first of all, I made one mistake. I apologized for it. I paid a high price for it, and I've done my best to atone for it by being a good President. But I believe we also endured what history will clearly record was a bogus investigation, where there was nothing to Whitewater and nothing to these other charges, and they were propagated, and tens of millions of dollars were spent, and we got a clean bill of health on that. And in terms of trust, let me just tell you a story. I went back to New Hampshire for the seventh anniversary of the New Hampshire primary in 1991 or the eighth anniversary, excuse me, last year in 1992 so it was the seventh anniversary. I went back there last year. And it was raining, and there were children standing in the rain and people standing in the rain. And the thing that meant the most to me not the Democratic Party event, just going around, because they heard the campaign in the most detail was people saying, you know, "We're so much better off now, but the thing that really matters is, you did exactly what you said you would do." And it seems to me that all of us in life, we can spend all of our time pointing our finger at other people and saying we're better than they are, or we can work as hard as we can on our own character, on our own lives. And if we're in public life, we need to tell people what we're going to do and then we need to do it. And if we don't do it, it ought to be because we tried and couldn't. I think that's what people know about me and this administration. We laid out the most detailed set of commitments anybody ever had in '92. We've accomplished virtually everything we set out to do. What we haven't accomplished, we tried and failed to accomplish. And even there, in the health care area, we made a lot of progress. And people know that. So I'm satisfied that the American people will make a judgment in this election based on what's best for them and their families, on whatever factors they choose. They're in control again. We're back into the biggest job interview in the whole world. And whatever they decide and however they decide it, I think they'll get it right. They nearly always do. Mr. Lehrer. Do you get angry, though, when somebody like Alan Keyes said recently, "We are coming to the end of the most disgraceful, the most immoral Presidency in the history of this country"? The President. No, because he's a far rightwinger who probably thought Iran contra was a good thing for America. And you know, there's just no evidence to support it. I mean, you know so it doesn't make me mad at all. How could you take that seriously? This is about one of the things that I had to learn when I moved to Washington is, before I ever got angry at anybody anything anybody said, was to ask myself whether it was about the subject they were discussing or whether it was really about power. And I remember once, I had a conversation with a Republican Senator in the middle of the D'Amato hearings when he was trying to convince people, or at least the Republican Senators were, that my wife had done something wrong in this Whitewater thing, which was totally absurd. And so I asked this Senator, I said, "Do you think either one of us did anything wrong? Not illegal, just wrong, even wrong?" And he started laughing. He said, "You've got to be kidding." He said, "Of course you didn't do anything wrong. That's not the purpose of this. The purpose of this is to convince the American people you did. It's all about power." Now, I made a mistake. I acknowledged it. I've done my best to atone for it. But all this broad brush stuff, you know, people see that for what it is. And when I'm criticized now, I try to remember Benjamin Franklin's admonition that our critics are our friends, for they show us our faults. So, you know, I'm just trying to be a better person and a better President every day. I don't know what else to do. And I'm trying not to let this stuff get in the way. Again let me say, the job of a President is to have a vision and a strategy and pursue it to show up every day and, insofar as possible, to think about the American people and their welfare, and to not think about himself. The environment in which a President operates is designed to prevent him from doing that as much as possible, to make him torn up and upset, full of recriminations and anger, and have his attention divided. So what I've tried to do is to create a frame of mind and a climate around here with our people, so we could do our job. I hope I've succeeded. I think the results speak for themselves. Impeachment and Independent Counsel's Investigation Mr. Lehrer. Difficult question on a matter of history that I feel compelled to ask you, Mr. President. We sat, you and I, 2 years ago almost to the day, and I it was the day that the Monica Lewinsky story broke in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. And I and you denied that you had had an improper sexual relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. In retrospect, if you had answered that differently right at the beginning, not only just my question but all those questions at the beginning, do you think there would have been a different result and that, in fact, you might not have even been impeached? The President. I don't know. I don't know. I just don't know. I wish I knew the answer to that, but I don't. But the thing I regret most, except for doing the wrong thing, is misleading the American people about it. I do not regret the fact that I fought the Independent Counsel. And what they did was, in that case and generally, was completely overboard. And now rational retrospectives are beginning to come out, where people have no connection to me, talking about what an abuse of power it was and what a threat to the American system it was. And I'm glad that our people stuck with me, and that the American people stuck with me, and I was able to resist what it was they attempted to do. But I do regret the fact that I wasn't straight with the American people about it. It was something I was ashamed of and pained about, and I regret that. Mr. Lehrer. There was another interview that we did before that, in which I asked you if you agreed with Susan McDougal that Kenneth Starr was out to get you. And your answer was interpreted by Mr. Starr and others that, "well, the facts speak for themselves," is what you said. There have been many facts since then. That interview was even before 2 years ago. Do you think the facts have spoken on that? The President. Oh, absolutely. I mean, it's not even close anymore. Everybody knows what the deal was. And more and more, there will be people who didn't have a vested interest in trying to promote some view they had previously taken who will evaluate this and come to the same conclusion. And as I said, even though I'm sorry about what I did and sorry about the developments there, I really felt, once the last chapter of this played out, that I was defending the Constitution and the Presidency. And I feel that more strongly today. I think they knew for a long time there was nothing to Whitewater. They knew it was a bunch of bull. They had no evidence. In fact, if even the law we had, or the one we had before the independent counsel law had been in place, there never would have been a special counsel because it didn't meet the standard. The only reason I agreed to ask Janet Reno to appoint one in the first place was I really believed that the people that were talking about it wanted to know the truth, and I knew that they'd just look into Whitewater and find out it was a big bunch of bull and go on. And what I found out was that a lot of the people who wanted it didn't want to know the truth. And they wanted somebody that could hang on until they could find something that they could find about me or Hillary. But they knew for a long time. You know, they knew before 1996 that there was nothing to it, which is why they had to get rid of Mr. Fiske and get Mr. Starr in there, so it would drag past the '96 election. And I think history will show that, too. So I'm relaxed about that, and I don't spend much time thinking about it. Again, to me, I had to make amends to the American people, and to my family and to my friends and my administration. I've done my best to do that. Now, the only way I can do that is just keep looking toward the future, to stay excited, to stay upbeat, and to stay focused. And that's what I'm trying to do. Mr. Lehrer. Do you have moments, private moments, of pleasure and satisfaction knowing that if, in fact, there was a conspiracy to run you out of office, it didn't work, you're still sitting in the Oval Office? The President. I don't spend much time thinking about it like that. You know, maybe when I'm gone I will. I'm grateful that for whatever reason, my friends and my family stayed with me the American people stayed with me. I believe I defended the Constitution against a serious threat. I'm sorry I did something wrong, which gave them an excuse to really go overboard. I'm very sorry about that. But mostly what I try to do is to focus on trying to be a better President, trying to be a better person, trying to be a better husband and father, just trying to do the things that I can do. You know, you can't none of us ever gets ahead in life, I don't think, by taking big satisfaction in victories or looking down on other people or keeping our anger pent up. One of the things I learned in this whole deal is you've got to let all that go. Life will always humble you if you give in to your anger or take some satisfaction that you defeated somebody or some satisfaction that, well, no matter how bad I am, at least I didn't do this, that, or the other thing. Life will always humble you. And I have just tried to be grateful and to keep serving and to just worry about myself and not think about other people I mean in terms of whether you're doing right or wrong. That's all I can do. But I'm actually what I feel every day is just, I'm just happy. My family was all here at Christmas. We had this fabulous Christmas. My administration, I've been fortunate by having all these people stay with me. The ones that leave are going off to do exciting things. And we've got I feel that when I took office, the country had so many problems in it. It's like we've turned it around now, and we're going in the right direction. And now we've got a chance to really dream big dreams for our children. And that's a great thing to be doing in your last year in office it's great and not only to dream those dreams but actually take some big steps toward achieving them. So I'm just happy. I just you know, I can't be mad or it's hard for me to think about all that stuff. It just happened. I've come to terms with it, and I'm just trying to go on. President's Future Plans Mr. Lehrer. When this next year is over, you'll leave office, and you'll be the youngest former President since Teddy Roosevelt. You'll be in your fifties. You'll still have a lot of time and energy. Are you worried about that at all, about staying connected? The President. No, I'm excited about it. No, no, I'm so excited about it. I have I mean, I'm worried I'll have to go back to learning basic things. You know, I'll but I'm excited about that, too, driving a car, shopping for food, paying the bills when the house the pipes freeze, you know, all that kind of stuff. You've got to go back to living your life like an ordinary person. I think that's good. But Theodore Roosevelt had an interesting life when he left office. And I of course, I've said this many times I think President Carter has basically set the standard for what Presidents should do in terms of his public service at home and around the world. And that shows you that there's just worlds of possibilities out there. I'm very excited about it. There are all kinds of things that I'll have to do. Of course, I'll have to make a living, and I hope I'll have to make a living to support a wife who's continuing our family's tradition of public service. But Hillary Clinton's Senate Campaign Mr. Lehrer. Do you think she's going to win? The President. I do, yes. I do. Mr. Lehrer. Why? Why do you think so? The President. Well, I think they're both very strong, formidable people and strong, formidable candidates. You know, you get all these elections, where you've got to bad mouth one candidate to like another, and you'd think I'd certainly be there in the race involving my wife. But the truth is, the mayor and Hillary are both strong, formidable people. They have impressive achievements in their lives that relate to public service. But I think that she's much better suited for the work of a Senator and this whole legislative process. And I think that the passions of her life, 30 years of work and achievement in education and health care and the challenges that children and families face, and the whole philosophy she has about community are more consistent with where New York is today and what they need in the future. And so that's why I think she'll win, not because I think he's the bad guy or something, because I think they're both very strong people. But I think that New York will believe that, in the end, that what she represents and where she wants to go and what her skills are and what she knows and cares most about is a little closer to where they are than what he his whole approach. And I think she'll win. So I'll have to worry about that. But once I figure out how to support my wife's public service she's supported mine for many years and fulfill my other family obligations, I want to find a way, through the center I'm going to build in Arkansas, with my library, and in other ways, to be a public servant. You don't have to be an elected official to be a public servant. You can be a servant in other ways. And I can help others and do things, and that's what I want to do. Mr. Lehrer. Mr. President, thank you very much. The President. Thank you. January 25, 2000 The President. Hello. Q. Good morning. The President. I think it's just afternoon. Laughter I'm glad you all got here I thought school was canceled today. Laughter Seven years ago, when I came to Washington, our Nation was burdened with a 290 billion annual deficit, and our national debt had quadrupled in 12 years. Interest rates were high and growth was low. Vice President Gore and I set our Nation on a new path of fiscal responsibility, opening markets, investing in our people and new technologies. We passed strong deficit reduction packages in both 1993 and in 1997 and made tough choices in each and every budget. This put the Nation on a course of fiscal discipline, while continuing to invest in our people and our future. Last year I asked the Congress to use every single dollar of our Social Security surplus to pay down the debt and to use the interest savings from that debt reduction to lengthen the life of Social Security. Now we see the results of the last 7 years the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years last year's surplus of 124 billion, the largest in our history. The latest numbers from the Treasury indicate the surplus for this year will be even larger. In just the last 2 years, we've already paid down 140 billion of the national debt. Through unprecedented debt buybacks in the last few weeks, we're able to finance the debt on the most favorable possible terms. Over the last 2 years, there have been repeated efforts to push us off the path of fiscal discipline, with large and irresponsible tax cuts. Because we've resisted these efforts, our debt is 1.7 trillion less this year than it was projected to be back in 1993. Now is not the time to let up on a strategy that is plainly working. Today I am announcing that because of the choices we have made, the budget I will submit for 2001 accelerates the date that we will be able to pay off our debt to 2013, 2 years earlier than we had originally planned. We will do this by protecting Social Security funds and dedicating the interest savings to Social Security, allowing us, in addition to paying off the debt, to extend the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund to 2050. We will also be able to make Medicare secure now, through 2025. And we will be debt free for the first time since 1835, when our Nation just had 24 States and fewer than 15 million people. Our children and their children will not inherit the crippling burden of interest payments that we faced 7 years ago. What does this mean for Americans in their daily lives? Already, the debt reduction means that American families pay, on average, 2,000 less per year on their home mortgages, 200 less on a loan for school or for a car. This new initiative will help even more with loans and credit card payments. Debt reduction helps everyone by getting the Government out of competition for loans, which makes interest rates lower overall. More investment, more jobs, higher wages for Americans result. It makes us much more competitive in the global economy and less vulnerable to shocks elsewhere. It helps other nations which really need to borrow the money to get their economies going, and, in turn, they will be better trade partners with us. All of this is good news. But as I have said over and over again, there is no room for complacency. We got here by making hard choices and sticking to a strategy that works, that builds opportunity and reinforces responsibility. I remain committed to that strategy. I ask the Republican majority in Congress to put politics aside and join me. We've got so much work to do in the weeks ahead to make sure that we seize this historic opportunity. Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program I also, before I take your questions, and because of the remarkable weather you can see outside, would like to say just a word about relief for the thousands of families that are struggling with increased heating bills and cold this winter. We've been monitoring the situation daily, and based on the most recent data it is clear that a release of emergency funds from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is warranted. Therefore, today I am directing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to expedite the release of LIHEAP funds to Alaska and States in the Northeast which have experienced the greatest hardship. These funds will help keep more American families safe and warm this winter, and we'll get them out there just as quickly as we possibly can. Q. How much? The President. I don't know yet. We're working on it. We'll put it out as quick as we know. Fiscal Year 2001 Federal Budget Q. Mr. President, why isn't it right for the next President and the next Congress to put forward such a long term plan as you're doing today? The President. Why isn't it right? Q. Yes, why shouldn't Senator Lott says it ought to be for the next President and the next Congress to do programs like this. This is a very long term initiative that you're putting forward today. The President. You mean the debt relief? Q. That's exactly right. The President. Well, I think they ought to follow it. But you've got to understand, even if we commit to this path, since every year the Congress will meet, they'll have to recommit to it. But it will be much easier what we could do is derail them. If we had adopted, for example, the tax cut last year, we would have stopped that. What we're doing, by taking this position, is maximizing the choices that the next Congress and the next President will have. Except on the Social Security thing, on debt relief. On Social Security, what I propose will take Social Security from 2034 to 2050. That is well beyond the life of most baby boomers. I would like to take it out 75 years. But I presume, based on what happened last year, that we won't be able to get enough bipartisan agreement to do that. So there will be plenty for the next President and the next Congress to do. And they will have to do that, because the life expectancy is going to go up so exponentially. And we've already gotten Medicare out 25 years keep in mind, Medicare was projected to go broke last year, when I took office. Now we've got it out to 2025. I think that it is appropriate to add the voluntary prescription drug benefit, and to take it out a little further by taking some of the reforms that all of us apparently agree on, based on the Medicare Commission that had heavy involvement by Senate Republicans and Democrats. And the Finance Committee's going to take that up. So there will be plenty for America to do next year and the years beyond. There always will be. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Iowa Caucuses Q. Mr. President, what do you what's your read on the results from Iowa? Were you surprised by the margins on both the Democratic and the Republican side? Can you give us your take? The President. Well, I think the Republican race was about as I thought it would be. And I think that the Vice President had a terrific victory last night in Iowa and, I think, all the more impressive because he and Senator Bradley, I thought, both ran very substantive campaigns, very idea oriented campaigns, and had that whole series of debates, which I think served the people very well. And I think he should be very proud of that, his strong effort. And I was very pleased to see that. But I don't have any real analysis of what happened in the insides of either one of the campaigns because I didn't follow it that closely. Q. Well, you've been through this. I mean, as they go into New Hampshire, how does it affect the dynamic there? The President. I think it's a plus, but I agree with what the Vice President said last night, it's important not to overread it. The people of New Hampshire are very independent. They want to make a good choice. They understand that to some extent the choice they make affects the choices that the country has after the New Hampshire primary. And I think that you'll see all the candidates there really bearing down and trying to reach the voters, which is what they ought to do. Elian Gonzalez Q. Mr. President, are you inclined to sign or veto any possible bill out of Congress that would grant Elian Gonzalez U.S. citizenship? And do you think it was a good idea for the two grandmothers to come here to meet with Congress, or are you concerned that might further politicize the process as you inaudible . The President. Well, first, I have done my best, as all of you know, to handle this in a nonpolitical way and to make the judgments for which the law provides. The judgment that the law provides for the INS to make is whether the father can properly be declared the guardian of the child, since the mother was, unfortunately, killed. And the case is now in court, and I would like to see at a minimum, I would like to see this court case played out before the Congress takes action. I think we ought to try to let the legal system take its course. I understand that the strong feelings that exist in this country about the Castro government complicates this. And I know that that little boy has some relatives in this country who feel very strongly about that. And I guess his grandmothers, in coming up here, were reacting to what they thought about the extent to which the case had already been politicized. More than anything else, I wish that somehow I mean, no one can really know for sure, I suppose, what terrible and probably not fully conscious burdens that child has already sustained because he lost his mother and because now he's being competed for in a way that is unusual for a 6 year old child. And I know that maybe it's just because I'm not running for anything, but I just somehow wish that whatever is best for this child could be done. And I know there are people who genuinely disagree about that, because plainly he would have more economic opportunity in this country. But all the evidence indicates that his father genuinely loved him and spent a great deal of time with him back in Cuba. So I think that you know, what I have tried to do is to set up a circumstance where the people who were in a position to know the most and be the least influenced by whatever the political considerations are would at least have the maximum opportunity to wind up doing what was right for the child. I hope that somehow we can still find a way to do that. Q. For better or worse though if I could follow up for better or worse, though, politics is a reality in this situation. The President. Yes, it is. Q. Could you possibly veto any bill that would grant Elian Gonzalez U.S. citizenship? The President. I have not decided what to do, and I wouldn't rule that out. I just haven't decided what to do. Let me just say for the moment, if you take it out of the combustible, emotional nature of our relationship with Cuba and particularly the Cuban American community in south Florida's relationship with Cuba, and you think about the issue, one of the things that I think we all need to think about is, this could happen again. I mean, this sort of thing could happen again, because you have so many people coming to our shores from all these different countries and then shifting governments, shifting policies within countries. And what we do need is an analysis of whether we have the tools to maximize the chance that the kids involved and the families involved will be treated fairly, based on the merits of, particularly, the best interests of the child. And I think, again I'm happy to talk to anybody about this and really try to think this through. I'm just trying to minimize the politics of it, because I think if you take this one decision out of context it's not just Cuba, and it's not just this little boy. There are likely to be a lot of these things in the future as immigration flows increase, as upheavals increase elsewhere, and as we know more and more about what goes on in other countries. This is something that ought to be thought about. But in my I suppose I have tended to think of this child more from a point of view of a parent than anything else, and I wish I knew more about the facts even than I do, because I just this poor kid has already lost his mother, and whatever happens, I'm sure he's going to carry certain burdens into his early adolescence that most of us did not carry. And somehow, whatever happens, I just hope it turns out to be best for him. He's a beautiful child. Yes. 2000 Election Q. Mr. President, in his victory statement yesterday, Governor Bush seemed to be throwing down the gauntlet against you. He seemed to be kicking off his major campaign against you. What do you have to say about that, and do you have a rebuttal? Are you going to do anything about it? The President. Well, I have, I guess, two responses. One is, this campaign is between the candidates and the American people, and they will evaluate all claims and charges, and they usually get it right. That's why we're all still around here, after 224 years. They almost always get it right. And so I'm going to leave most of that to them. Now, it is an unusual claim that we ought to somehow reject an approach that has given us the longest economic expansion in history and the lowest unemployment, welfare, and crime rolls in 30 years, not to mention the benefits of the family and medical leave law and the Brady law, which were vetoed in the previous administration. And I agree that the tax program he's proposed might well undo a lot of that, and he can make the claim that that's the basis on which the campaign ought to proceed. But I don't really want to get into an argument with him. He ought to I think that ought to be something between him and the other candidates and the American people. But I do think it's an unusual thing to say that what we really ought to do is change what has given us an unprecedented level not just of economic prosperity but of social progress and social cohesion, restored credibility of Government, proof that ideas really can matter to move the people forward. I think that that's a pretty hard argument to make. Fiscal Year 2001 Federal Budget Q. Mr. President, what's your projected surplus for the new budget, and doesn't that allow room for at least a modest tax cut? The President. Well, yes. First of all, I'm not you will see I think the Congressional Budget Office, I believe, when they're going to propose what they think, I think they will show you what the difficulty here is, because my understanding is, they're going to give you options. They will show you that is, they'll show you like every projected surplus, it depends on what you think the so called baseline is. We believe that there has been greater growth, and there will be a larger surplus than we thought. But we believe and I intend to propose, as I did last time, a set of tax cuts that I think are targeted to the middle class, targeted to sustain our economic growth, targeted to help lower income people and areas move into the middle class, that will keep America's economic expansion going. But I think the most important thing I will say again, the most important thing is to keep our fiscal discipline, to keep paying down the debt, to get the country out of debt, to keep the interest rates down. Keep in mind, this is saving the average family 2,000 a year on home mortgage costs. We're next month, we'll have the longest economic expansion in history, and long term interest rates are lower now than they were in the bad economy of 1991 I mean, 1992. They're lower. So yes, we can have tax cuts. And yes, every year, and including next year when I'm not here and the years ahead, we can evaluate what the situation is. But I do not believe we should have very big tax cuts that will explode in the second 5 years of a 10 year period and that ignore what the real investment needs of the country will be. And that's what I think of this so called baseline. You know, to use the '97 baseline and spending caps, when they were totally shredded last year, as a basis for estimating how you should spend everything else on a tax cut, means you're going to get back in deficit problems just for example. So yes, we can have a tax cut. It ought to be modest. It ought to be targeted. It ought to be in the context of fiscal discipline. It ought not to explode in the second 5 years in a much bigger trajectory than it takes in the first 5 years. And again I say one of you mentioned about decisions that could be made in the years ahead. You can always make those decisions. If things keep getting better, then you can do more. But you should always do it with an eye, in my judgment, toward conservative economic policies and toward always understanding that those things are easy to do, but they're difficult to undo if times get tough. Yes. Indian Airlines Flight 814 Hijacking Q. Mr. President, do you now have reason to believe that the Pakistani Government may have been involved in that airplane hijacking? The President. No, we don't. We do not, no. I guess the simplest thing I can tell you is that we do not have evidence that the Pakistani Government was in any way involved in that hijacking we don't. State of the Union Address Q. Mr. President, on the State of the Union, we know how pumped up you get for the State of the Union, and I was wondering, considering that this is your last one, whether there's also a sense of bittersweet, that it's a bittersweet moment, too. The President. No, it's not bittersweet it's nostalgic. One of the wonderful Navy stewards who works for me said this morning, he said, "I can't believe we've been doing this for 7 years." Laughter And the time flies when it's a busy time and you're absorbed excuse me absorbed in what you're doing. I don't feel bittersweet I do feel some nostalgia. And I think it's something I'm very much trying to fight off, because I think the important thing is to keep the attention of the country focused on the future and to keep my attention and the attention of the administration focused on the future and the energy level very high. So I am working with that in mind, and I've worked very hard on the speech, and I'm still working on it. Bipartisanship on the Legislative Agenda Q. Mr. President, you have a long list of things that you'd like to do. You've been rolling them out for the last couple weeks. There are things that weren't done last year. Realistically, what are the chances of any real bipartisan agreements with the Republican Congress? The President. I think that we have some significant chance of getting some of the substantive issues through, the Patients' Bill of Rights, the minimum wage, the gun reforms, the Brady background checks at the gun shows. I think that there is a better than 50 50 chance that a lot of the investments I have recommended will eventually prevail. And I am immensely hopeful about the new markets initiative, which is more than twice as big in this budget as it was last time, largely because there is a lot of bipartisan support for it, beginning with the Speaker of the House. So I'm very, very hopeful. You know, there's a part of that that has a special initiative for the Mississippi Delta, I believe, Senator Lott will support. So I'm hopeful. I'm going to do everything I can to get as much done as I can for the American people, and I'm quite hopeful. Super Bowl XXXIV Q. Mr. President, we think we know how the Vice President feels, but what's your pick for the Super Bowl and why? Laughter The President. He can say and get in no trouble, can't he, because he's from Tennessee. I'm not going to pick one. But I'll tell you this, I've followed it this year very closely. There were two great games last Sunday. And what I thought was going to happen 2 weeks ago I'm no longer so sure will. Q. Can you say what? The President. I don't think you can tell which one of them will win. You've got one that's a very powerful defensive team, Tennessee, with a capacity for real offense. And then you've got the most powerful offensive team playing against them, that was stymied last Sunday and played better defense than I thought they could. So I don't think you can predict which one of them is going to win this race. Q. Will you send a play to one of the coaches? Laughter The President. Would I what? Q. Send a play to one of the coaches? The President. No, I think they're perfectly capable of doing that without me. That's kind of like this campaign. You all want to get me involved in it, but I think the Vice President, Senator Bradley, Governor Bush, and Senator McCain, they can all do this without me. They're doing fine. Hillary Clinton's Senate Campaign Q. Is your wife going to win? The President. I think so. I think she's done a good job with this, and she's getting into it. I certainly hope she does. I think it will be a good thing for New York and a good thing for our country. Colombia Q. Mr. President, in regards to the Colombian aid package, are you worried at all about sending arms down to a country who is now in a civil war and there's no real guarantee about who will be in power even in the next 3, 4 years? The President. Well, I wouldn't go that far. I think, for one thing, we want to try to preserve and strengthen democracy in Colombia. It's a very old democracy that's under the greatest stress perhaps in its history. And there's always a risk, when you go out on a limb to try to save a neighbor and help people to help themselves, that it won't work. But I think that I believe the risks and the investment is something that we ought to do. And again, I believe that there will be significant bipartisan support here. I'd be surprised if we don't have large numbers of Republicans and Democrats supporting this. And I think we're going into this with our eyes wide open. One of the things that we have to do is to try to help them gain some measure of control over their own country again. And if you look at Colombia, sort of the intersection of the narcotraffickers and the political rebels, you see a picture of what you might see much more of in the 21st century world, with sort of the enemies of nation states forming networks of support across national borders and across otherwise discrete interests, like narcotraffickers, organized criminals, and political terrorists, weapons dealers. So this will be an interesting test run for what I predict to you not only our Nation but others in our position will have to face over the next two decades. And it is something, again, I'm going to work very hard to build a bipartisan consensus on this, to take this out of politics, because I believe that this is not only something we should do for our friend and neighbor and the country that is either the production or transit point for about 80 percent of the cocaine that gets dumped in this country but also, if you will, a test run for the kind of challenges that my successors and our people will face in the years ahead. Thank you. Iowa Caucuses Q. Did you miss being in Iowa? I'll bet you did. The President. A little bit. I did. I love it there. They've been good to me. But I was interested in it. It's interesting to me to watch it unfold and watch how the decisions they make which is why I don't want you guys to get me into it. This should be their campaigns, and they should make the decisions. And we should trust the people. They'll get it right. They always do. Thank you. January 18, 2000 Elian Gonzalez Q. Mr. President, I know your time is valuable. Let me start my recorder here. The first thing I wanted to ask you, there have only been a couple of times in this century that Congress has come together, got their heads together enough, both sides of the Congress, to come together and pass legislation to give somebody citizenship. It happened with Winston Churchill, a few other people. I wanted to know if Congress does it looks like the first thing they're going to do when they come back into town is work on the Elian Gonzalez case. If they did pass a private bill in both Houses and they feel like politically they've got enough backing to do that, what would you do with that bill if it got to your desk? The President. I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I think it would be this is not Winston Churchill, for one thing. You know, I don't think that Congress should put its unless they know more about the facts than I do, I don't think they should put themselves in the position of making a decision that runs contrary to what the people who have had to do all the investigation have done. I think that, obviously, if they believe the INS made a mistake, their decision is subject to challenge in Federal court. And the Congress even Members of Congress can petition to be heard there. But I think that we're setting a I think that it would irrevocably lead people to the conclusion that this was much more about politics than it was whether that little boy ought to be taken away from his father. They're basically taking a position that if you live in Cuba, if we can take you away from your father, you're better off your parents. And I think that's the INS reached a different decision, having exhaustively looked at what was best for that child. As you all know, I have no sympathy for the Castro regime. I signed the present bill. I think it is tragic how they have blown every conceivable opportunity to get closer to the United States. Just as we were making progress, they murdered those pilots. So I'm not sympathetic there. But I think that we need to think long and hard whether we're going to take the position that any person who comes to our shores who is a minor, any minor child who loses his or her parents should never be sent home to another parent, even if that parent is capable of doing a very good job, if we don't like the Government of the country where the people lived. And again, I say I am not I have no brief for the Castro government or for many of their policies. I think the way he has attempted to politicize this is also terrible. It's not just the Cuban Americans that have attempted to politicize it. He has responded by attempting to politicize it. So this poor little boy is 6 years old. He has scars from his mother's death of which he can only be dimly aware. And making a judgment about what is in his best interest and what is most likely to give him a stable, healthy, whole childhood and allow him to grow into an adult as a solid person, I'm sure, may not be free of difficulty. And I just think that the decision ought to be made, insofar as possible, independent of countervailing political pressures. State of the Union Address Q. Mr. President, the State of the Union is right around the corner, so I guess is the State of the Union part of the interview. In the previews that you all have made available of what's coming up, it seems like most of it is beefing up programs that you already have, like today's announcement, and returning to The President. It's quite a beef up. This is the biggest thing ever done yes Q. Quite a beef up which is or trying to get back to unfinished business. And I was wondering whether you were planning on trying to go for some new breakthrough issue this year, or whether that's not really possible in a last year. The President. Oh, I think that when you see everything we recommend in the aggregate, you might think that in terms of specifics, it's the most ambitious set of proposals since my first year. Last year was a very ambitious speech, but in terms of what I asked the Congress to do, it required some willingness on their part to meet with me and work through a joint position on Social Security, for example, or joint position on Medicare. I still think we may get a joint position on Medicare, and we may get part way there on Social Security. I'm still going to try to persuade them to take all the interest savings that we get from not spending the Social Security surplus and putting that in the Trust Fund that will take Social Security out to 2050, beyond the life of the baby boom generation. So I'm still not sure we won't make that, but if you just look at the specific policy proposals I will make, not just in the unfinished business area but in the new area and the unfinished business is important. I mean, you've got the Patients' Bill of Rights, closing the gun show loophole, and banning the import of large ammunition clips. You've got the minimum wage. You've got the hate crimes legislation, the "Employment Non Discrimination Act," the prescription drug for Medicare. So we've got a huge even though we got a great deal done at the very end of the last Congress, there's a big unfinished business list. And then, as you know, I've been rolling out a lot of these new proposals. And actually, there will be a couple of things that will be quite new that I'm not prepared to release yet. But I will have a couple of new proposals. But I think that the most important thing to me is to keep the country moving in this direction and aggressively embracing change, the right kind of change. That, I think, is critical to keep the recovery going, to keep bringing more people into the process of prosperity, and to keep bringing the country together. I think that's very important. So a lot of what I will recommend that is new is certainly consistent with what I've been doing for 7 years. I came to office with a very clear idea of where I thought America was off base, what I thought we ought to do, what kind of governing strategy I would have. And I believe that it's working. And I think people some people will say, "Well, he does things in increments." But if you walk down the road 7 years and you look back I mean, if I told you 7 years ago, after 12 years of quadrupling the national debt, I'll give you in year 6 and 7 the first back to back balanced budget surpluses in 42 years, from a 300 billion debt, you'd say that's not an incremental change that's a big change. But you do those things in small steps. If you look at the millions of people we've cut the welfare rolls about in half it happened in incremental steps. But it's a huge thing in the aggregate. And all the economic changes we've got the lowest African American, Hispanic unemployment rate ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, lowest poverty rate in 20 years, lowest single parent household poverty rate in 46 years. So you take it in steps, but if you keep walking in the same direction, all of a sudden your steps constitute a giant leap forward. Federal Budget Q. In that larger mosaic, how do you of your record and your legacy in what you've done incrementally down the road, how important will it be if, 15 years from now, we haven't made significant advances on the debt? I mean, already your budget soon will break the '97 Balanced Budget Act. And certainly the surpluses are far greater than was predicted at that time. But how will history judge this generation of leadership if significant The President. I think we should pay the debt off. And I think we should do it in 15 years. And the proposals that I will make are consistent with that, based on our latest numbers. Now, I have two things to say about the '97 budget caps. They were very severe, and they were thoroughly shredded by the Republican majority last year by turning everything into an emergency. I mean, the census was an emergency Head Start was an emergency continuing defense expenditures were emergencies. So the caps are not disappearing this year the caps were shredded last year. So the real question is the question I asked our people to look at, and we spent lots of time on it the end of last year is whether we could present to the Congress a budget that was not full of gimmicks, that reflected what the Congress spent last year, inflation in areas where with had that for example, in the defense area where we know they intended and still could we do that based on what we now believe the figures are and what our costs are in health care programs and other things and still get this country out of debt in 15 years and still not spend the Social Security surplus. And the answer, we believe, is yes, that you can avoid spending the Social Security surplus, continue to get the country out of debt in 15 years, and have a spending program for the next 5 years that reflects the decisions made by the Congress in the last year, without all those gimmicks. And you could still have a modest tax cut, nothing anywhere near the high end of what people had talked about in the campaign and what the Congress tried to do last year, but you could still have a modest one. So I think this is an honest budget that is fiscally responsible and still gets us out of debt. And I believe that we ought to embrace these big challenges, and I think that our children will judge us very well if we do and somewhat harshly if we don't. Because in my lifetime you've heard me say this over and over again, but I'm not young any more. I'm 53 years old. In my lifetime we've never had this combination of economic prosperity, social progress, national self confidence, with the absence of internal crisis or external threat. Not that we have no problems at home or no threats abroad, but none of it is sufficient to derail us from trying to imagine the future and then go after it. And it seems the one that one of the elements of that future ought to be a commitment to take America out of debt. Another element of the future ought to be a commitment from going to what I said today trying to make our country the safest big country in the world. Another element of that future ought to be trying to prove that we can grow the economy and dramatically reduce the global warming by maximizing technology. We ought to be able to prove that we can equalize the economic opportunity, that we can without holding anybody back, that we ought to be able to bring economic opportunity to these poor people in poor places that haven't had it. And I think in all those areas, in the education area, in the health care area, I think we will be judged by whether we made the most of what is truly a magic moment. The last time we had this sustained rate of economic growth with low inflation was in the early sixties, about 40 years ago. And if you look at the indicators now, compared to then in the aggregate, I think you would say our economy is stronger today, but there were a couple of years there where unemployment averaged under 4 percent and without much inflation. And it all came apart, first trying to come to grips with the civil rights crisis at home and then trying to pay for the war on poverty and the war for equal opportunity and civil rights and the war in Vietnam abroad. So that, basically, we had a moment there that we lost, not only because we became divided as a people politically but because our system simply could not accommodate building the America of our dreams. Q. So what do you see as a threat to that? I mean, if the Vietnam period and all of that was a threat, what's the threat to that now? The President. I don't think there is one. That's why I think we have no excuse not to really this should be a truly historic moment in America. I can't think of any time in our history when we've had this sort of opportunity. You might argue that it was similar, that the times which produced Theodore Roosevelt's administration, and then Woodrow Wilson's, were similar, where we were an emerging global power, we were basically at peace, where the world was becoming more integrated. You go back and read McKinley's speeches around the turn of the century he was the first President of the last century he said a lot of this. It's quite interesting. And so you might argue that that was a time like this. But I think that and I think it is a time in our history that most closely parallels this. If you go back to the early 19th century, you can find historical parallels in the exploration of Lewis and Clark and the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory. But the world was so different then, it's hard to do. So I just don't think we ever have had a time like this. It's not to say we have no foreign crises or security threats. We do. But they can all be managed. And the cost of managing them now is not inconsistent with what our obligations are in science and technology, in education, in economic opportunity, across the range of other areas. Agenda on Race Q. Mr. President, you spoke a while ago about how you wanted to keep pushing for change. And I was thinking what's happened to minorities under your administration, that they have seen a pretty drastic improvement in their standard of living because of the strong economy. But one could also say that attitudes toward race maybe haven't changed that much. And I was wondering whether there was something that you thought you could still do about attitudes towards race in your last year. The President. Well, I think they have first of all, I dispute the premise. I think they have changed. I think that we continue to see evidence that it's still a real problem. I mean, the unfortunate comments that the Atlanta baseball player made, that's really troubling. On the other hand, the fact that Hank Aaron and Andy Young met with him is encouraging. I mean, you know, 30 years ago that wouldn't have happened. I think last night I watched I was working on the State of the Union last night, and I had basketball on, on TV, muted. And I was watching the Minnesota Timberwolves play the Indiana Pacers. And they beat them on a buzzer beater shot. And then they interviewed Kevin Garnett, who is a very young man. I think he's the highest paid player in basketball, but he's very young, didn't finish college. And they asked him what Dr. King meant to him, and how his life had changed, and you could just see of course, 30 years ago no young African American would be making that kind of money and would have the kind of slant he had. So I think things are changing. But I think what I have to do I think there are three things generally I should be doing. Number one, I think we have to continue to try to close the differential in education and economic advancement. For example, the African American high school graduation rate right now is about equal to the white, non Hispanic high school rate, which is quite extraordinary. But the college going rate is different. And the Hispanic dropout rate is still quite a bit higher, largely because of the immigrants, first immigrants. So I think that this economic empowerment agenda I have, and the education agenda, the Hispanic education initiative, all those things, closing those gaps, that's important. Number two, I think we need to continue to have a vigorous enforcement of the law and highlighting those things we do not agree with. And number three, I think we have to continue the activities of the President's Office on One America. I think we need to continue to appoint more people from different backgrounds. We need to continue to have more meetings. We need to continue to highlight the problems. And I need to continue to speak out and work on this in America. I said three, but I like to say the fourth thing is I think that when our country continues its mission to try to end racial and ethnic and tribal and religious conflicts around the world, I think that has a reverberating effect here at home. I can give you just one very concrete example. Chelsea and I went to Kosovo together, and we went to the military camp. And you have this highly racial and ethnically diverse American military, very conscious of what they were doing in Kosovo and trying to end ethnic cleansing, and also very aware that insofar as they work together and live together and create a genuine community where everybody was treated equally, the power of their example could have as big an impact on the people of Kosovo as the force of their arms. So I don't think this this is the sort of work that may never be done, since in all of human history we haven't succeeded in rooting out people's fear or suspicion of those who are different. And there always will be those radicals which seek to advance themselves by demonizing groups of others. But I think we're doing better there. I think we're doing and I think there is a lot more we can do. Cyberspace Warfare and Cyberterrorism Q. The Chinese Army's daily newspaper has signaled its willingness to aggressively use the Internet as a venue for warfare, to attack our military websites and our military attack us through on line methods. You in your critical infrastructure report recently sort of achieved parity with that and with your ROTC Corps idea and that sort of thing. But I'm wondering what precedents that sets. Even what we did in the conflict with Serbia, the precedents that that sets is sort of like fighting each other, attacking each other's satellites. Are you concerned about the precedent that using on line warfare in any form will have for future generations, since we are the most vulnerable set on the planet from E commerce to a lot of our Government installations? The President. Because we're more open, you mean? Q. Yes sir, because we're more open. The President. And more Internet Q. So we bring down in a hypothetical conflict, we bring down the PLA's air defense system, and they just take out our 911 systems and all that turn out all the lights at every 7 Eleven in the country. The President. Well, I think, first of all, it is unrealistic to think that such systems would not be the targets of our adversaries. I think they're far more likely to be the targets of terrorists, organized criminals, narcotraffickers, than other countries. I believe that the answer is that we have got to be as strong as we possibly can be in the whole area of cyberspace safety. We've got to be as resistant to cyberterrorism and assault as we possibly can. And interestingly enough, this is something we get to practice on every day a lot, because every day there are always people trying to break into our computers, break into the Defense Department computers, break into various security computers. And so we get to work at it every day. And we've given a lot of thought to how you protect power systems, how you protect telephone systems, how you protect financial records. And so all I can say is that the question you asked confirms what I said at the National Academy of Sciences, I guess over a year ago. I think that's when I spoke there. We have got to be prepared to deal with the explosion of technology in ways that could threaten our security, not only on data systems themselves. Another thing you're going to see everything involving technology is getting smaller, the miniaturization of everybody. Everybody's got their little notepads now. Q. I just got the Palm Pilot. Q. He's way ahead. The President. You ought to see old Kris's Palm Pilot. It's got everything from his great grandfather's birthplace I just saw the newest AT T and Nokia telephone that fits right inside the palm of the hand. Now, that same miniaturization process is bound to go on with weapons. So you're not only going to have the attempt that you mentioned to invade, to invade telecommunication systems and computer systems, but you're also going to have a miniaturization system that will affect chemical and biological weapons and other sophisticated traditional weapons, which will make them harder to detect, easier to use, easier to comport. You may have composite materials that don't show up on airport scanners. All these things are going to happen. That's why we're going to make cars out of different materials, make weapons out of different materials. And in the whole history of combat among nation states and before that, feudal groups or tribal groups, the normal thing that happens is a weapons system will be developed, and it will enjoy a period of success, and then a defense will be developed to it, and then there will be equilibrium until a new weapons system is developed that will give some dominance, and then you'll have some equilibrium. What we're trying to do with this massive investment we're making against bioterrorism, chemical terrorism, nuclear terrorism, cyberterrorism, is to collapse the timespan between offense and defense. One of the things, for example, that we really hope that will come out of the human genome is that we'll be able to develop software programs that will immediately adjust the antidote for certain viruses. If there's a biological warfare attack and you've got a mad scientist somewhere who changes the I'm just making this up but who changes the anthrax virus, for example, in some way it's never before been changed, and so then this person and then they spread it over 400 people in some town, and they begin to come around what we're attempting to do with the human genome project, what I think one of the corollary benefits will be is that you'll have software packages developed so that you will be able to immediately analyze that, and someone will tell you exactly how you would have to modify the antidote to anthrax to meet the new strain that is resistant to all known antidotes. So this whole struggle, as things change faster and faster and faster and you have the miniaturization of weapons systems to parallel with the miniaturization of other communication systems, will be to keep closing the gap between offense and defense until there is close to no difference as possible. That is the struggle for security in the 21st century. And I have tried to put America on that path. Without frightening the American people, without raising alarm bells, I've tried to make sure that when I left office we would have in place a properly funded, properly staffed system to prepare for the security threats of the 21st century. All the press goes to the highdollar hardware systems should we have a strategic defense initiative, a missile defense. Q. Mr. President, we're running out of time here, so do you mind if we move on to some other topic? The President. This is a big issue. All I'm saying is I'm not missile defense is important if we can do it. And missile threat is important. But you should know that I consider both the cyberthreats and the miniaturization of these other threats very significant. But I do believe when I leave office we'll have for my successor and for our country a system that will enable us to deal with it. President's Spiritual Growth Q. Since you are talking to the Christian Science Monitor, we are interested in your spiritual journey, which you've mentioned a couple times. And you've talked about how amazed you've been by the power of forgiveness, especially in the last 18 months. And I was wondering if you could share with us what your own spiritual growth has been. Have you found any Bible passages particularly dear? Have you found any concepts that you've held onto that have helped promote your own spiritual growth? Could you just describe what's been happening with your own growth in the last 18 months? The President. Well, this is a subject I think people in public life should address with some amount of humility and reluctance, not because people shouldn't be willing to affirm their faith but because we should remember the story that Christ told, in effect, bragging about the people that prayed in their closets instead of on the street corner. So I say that with all but having said that, I think the thing that has struck me is that in this journey I have made to try to that really has been a lifetime journey for me, and it's certainly something that's deepened since I've been President and something that I had to really focus on the last 2 years I think the thing that I have really had to work on is trying to gain some spiritual anchor that will enable me to give up resentments and disappointment and anger and to understand that in seeking forgiveness I had to learn to forgive. It's easy to ask for forgiveness. A lot of people think it's hard, but I think it's when you plainly need it, it's easy enough to ask for. But we're taught over and over again that we can't get it unless we give it. And I think what is you know, there's the wonderful Scripture where people are admonished to forgive those not just in the same measure that they're forgiven but 70 times 7. I think that what I have gained more than anything else is a certain humility in recognizing how important forgiveness is, but how it doesn't count and it can't count unless you can give it as well as ask for it. And that basically I used to see life as a struggle for always learning more things, cramming more things in my head, anywhere I could do more things, you know. Now I see the search for wisdom and strength is also a process of letting go. A lot of things you have to let go of. And I've been helped a lot by a lot of these ministers that have met with me and the Scriptures they've given me to read by a lot of Christians and even sects of Christians have written me around the country with tracts on forgiveness, how you merit it in what you do and how you have to give it in turn and also a number of people with whom I have worked as President. I learned a lot I've had on more than one occasion the opportunity to talk to Mr. Mandela about how he came to forgive those who were his oppressors, you know, and how he felt about it and how he what kind of forgiveness he ever sought for himself. I've really tried to deal with this in a very serious way, and I think I've learned quite a lot about myself in the process. And it's an ongoing effort. But I have to remember every day that human nature is so prone to find self respect in some element of one's character that you think is superior to someone else, and a lot of this is a matter of letting go. You just have to learn to let that go, just get up every day, try to do the best you can, be the best person you can be, and continue that individual journey of growth. And I work on it hard. And it's been a very humbling experience, but I think very much worthwhile for me, personally. Chelsea Clinton Q. Mr. Lockhart is giving me the one morequestion signal, so I thought what I might do is use an old Wolf Blitzer trick which is The President. Which is what ask three questions? Q. Ask a question with the second question. Laughter Well, briefly, you mentioned Chelsea just a moment ago. And as you know, the White House can be a pretty tough place on first kids. But the thing you always hear everybody talk about is the poise and the grace that she has now as a young woman. I'm wondering basically what you attribute that to, and how you feel the press has been on her if they've kind of been giving her a fair shake as the kind of parameters were laid out from the very beginning? And secondly, not at all related to that, is you were heavily criticized for the FALN commutations, and there's a lot of irony in that, in that you're the least pardoning President in the modern history. You've issued fewer pardons that any President in the modern era. I'm wondering why you haven't availed yourself of that Presidential power more, since aside from the FALN thing, there's typically very little fallout for that, using that power. The President. Well, let me say first, I think let me answer the first question first. Say exactly what you asked me about Chelsea again. Q. The thing you hear everybody talking The President. Oh, how the press treated her. Q. How the press treated her, but how she, under the hothouse environment that the White House can be, with all the looking in The President. I feel, first of all, very grateful that even though I don't agree with everything first of all, I think it's impossible to generalize about "the press," and it will become harder and harder to refer to something called "the press." Where is the press in the publications in the merger of America Online and Time Warner, right? So I'm always reluctant I sort of knew what that was, I thought, when I got elected. I'm not sure I know what that is anymore. But I think that, by and large, all elements of the press, with some very few exceptions, have been willing to let my daughter have her life and try to grow up and deal with all the challenges that entails and the extra burdens of her parents being in public life and all the controversies and ups and downs we've exhibited, without trying to shine the glare on her. And I am profoundly grateful for that, because I think every young person needs the chance to find his or her own way to maturity. And it's very difficult when your parents are as publicly exposed and prominent in daily life as her parents are. And it's made more difficult if you are prematurely turned into a public figure. I think to some extent she is one anyway, whether she's in the press or not. But I think basically the press has been sensitive to that. And I am profoundly grateful for that. And I hope that the life that her parents have lived in public life has been has offered more good than bad for her, as a child growing up. And she's a young woman now, and I hope that, on balance, it's been a positive thing. We love her very much, and we hope that it's and believe that, on balance, it's been good. Now Presidential Pardons Q. On the related question of the pardons laughter . The President. Let me say about Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. She's going to get a pardon. Laughter The President. I want to say something here that nobody has ever given me a chance to say in public before. This is important to me. And I've been working on this hard. I did not know until ironically, until the controversy over the FALN thing that I had, apparently, both commuted fewer sentences and issued fewer pardons than my predecessors. I did not know that, but you should know what my generic attitude is. Generically, I believe a President should rarely commute sentences and should have good reasons for doing so if he does, knowing that that will always be somewhat controversial that is, if you attenuate a jury or a judge's sentence. That's what I did in the FALN case. I did it after Chuck Ruff, my lawyer, did an extensive survey. I thought it might be controversial. I regret it became as controversial as it was. I still think, based on the facts of those cases, I did the right thing. I still believe strongly that I did the right thing. And I can tell you categorically there was no politics in it, that Chuck Ruff handled this, and everything he says about it is true. I think everyone knows him as being an extremely truthful person. He handled it entirely, and only he handled it. And then he dealt with me on it. Now should we do some more commutations? Perhaps we should. But I think I would probably always be on the low side of that. On the other hand, I tend to have a much more generous attitude on pardons, particularly because under the Federal system I think people ought to get their voting rights back I don't think they ought to be discriminated about in getting jobs or keeping jobs or getting contracts if they have discharged their sentence and they've been out in law abiding society. Now, over time, before I ever got there, there developed a whole apparatus in the Justice Department which is its own independent bureaucracy for evaluating these things. And the tradition is that the President doesn't rule on them, one way or the other, until you get all these recommendations sent to you. And I think what I believe is that although this operation has a life of its own, I've asked I've tried to review it now because my instinct is that we should be granting more pardons. I don't mean we should just be cavalier. I mean if you still think somebody might be involved in something wrong not so much to wipe away the past as to free people up to live in the present and future. There are all kinds of suppose when you're 18 you commit some offense which gets you a 5 year sentence. And suppose and let's suppose under the sentencing guidelines then applicable, you served 2 years of the sentence. Well, my view is if you served the 2 years, then you get out, and you've got 3 years on parole. So the 5 years is discharged. Then you have to serve then you live a couple more years, and you have a totally exemplary life. I don't think that your past mistake should unduly cramp your present and future life. If you do something really terrible, you're going to be in prison for a long time. But I mean, people are just getting out all the time 90 percent of the people who go to jail get out. When they get out, we do not have a vested interest in seeing them continue to be punished. Our interest as citizens, after they pay their debt to society, is to see them be successful. I mean, when somebody pays, then when they get out, surely we don't want them to keep on paying. If they have to keep on paying, that's why you end up with more crime and a less successful, less healthy society. So my instinct is that again, I speak for myself each President will be different on this is that the President should be pretty reluctant to shorten sentences but should be willing to do so in appropriate cases but that the President should be more forthcoming in being willing to grant pardons when it's not really for the purpose of pretending that it didn't happen but of liberating people to make the most of their todays and tomorrows, because every single American has a big stake in people who actually do get punished later going on and living their lives in a straight and effective way. So that's my take on this. And we're looking to see whether there are any kind of changes we can make to be more effective in that regard. Q. Thanks. The President. I'm glad you asked me. You're the only person who ever asked me that. January 13, 2000 Thank you. The reason we were scurrying around up here is that Reverend Jackson had taken my speech. Laughter That's okay. I've taken a lot of his over the years. Laughter Sandy, thank you for that wonderful introduction. I'm glad one of us made money out of this administration. Laughter I want to congratulate Robert Knowling and my longtime, wonderful friend Berry Gordy on their awards. I thank Mr. Ivester and Mr. Seidenberg for supporting this important work. I thank Secretary Slater and our SBA Administrator, Aida Alvarez, for being here with me. And I think Secretary Cuomo spoke here earlier today. He and the Vice President have done a wonderful job with our empowerment zone program and the other HUD economic development initiatives. I want to say a special word of appreciation here today to the Members of Congress who are here Congressmen Rangel, Vela zquez, Owens, Maloney, Engel, and Jackson. And my personal thanks to two former Members of Congress who are here, the leader of the NAACP, Kweisi Mfume, and my good friend Reverend Floyd Flake, who went home to his mission in life. And I thank him. I saw my friend Mayor Willie Brown from San Francisco, and we congratulate him on his reelection. And former Mayor David Dinkins of New York, thank you, Mayor Dinkins and our comptroller, Carl McCall and so many others who are here. I want to thank Hugh Price for the Urban League's work. And I'd like to thank all the business leaders here who have helped the whole effort that Reverend Jackson has made over the last several years, but I would like to say a special word of appreciation to three who have been close to me and also close to Reverend Jackson Willie Gary and Ron Burkle and Dennis Rivera. Thank you all very much for what you have done. Now, we've got a lot of folks here who have done things, but I want to say also how much I appreciate Reverend Jackson's family, Jackie and all their wonderful children. They've been great friends to Hillary and to Chelsea and me, and I just get a big rush every time they stand up and get introduced. It's quite exciting. Reverend, you've done a lot of important things in your life, but those kids are the most important, by a long, good way, and I want to thank you. Let me say, I always look forward to this event, but it keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. If it gets any bigger, we've going to have to start holding it in Yankee Stadium laughter and that's a good thing. I would like that very much. You know, I'm just practicing for my did you see the way I got Berry up here and I took out the stand and then I picked up his glasses when he dropped them? I'm practicing for my role as a Senate spouse. Laughter Did you catch my wife on "Letterman" last night? Was she great, or what? Applause You know, it's bad enough that I have to give up being President now I've got to give up being the funny one in my family. Laughter Life is always teaching you lessons of humility. Laughter Although the press, you know, they keep saying I'm a lame duck. I think what a lame duck is, you know, you show up for one of these things, and nobody else comes. Laughter So I want to thank all of you for making me feel like I'm still President today. Now, to the business at hand. We all know why we're here, and we all know what we're supporting. I am profoundly grateful, not only as President but as a citizen, for the work that Reverend Jackson has done with this Wall Street Project. I am profoundly grateful that so many business leaders have supported it. I want to say, also, a special word of appreciation to the Members of the Congress that I have already introduced and to the current and former leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Representatives Waters, Clyburn, Roybal Allard, and Becerra. I want to thank Senators Sarbanes, Kerry, Robb, Rockefeller, and Congressman LaFalce from New York, because they've been especially supportive of this new markets initiative. Now, you heard Sandy Weill say some very kind things about the economic record of the administration, but I would like to put it in a little different context. It is true that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, that in just a few weeks we'll have the longest economic expansion in the history of America. We'll then be over 20 million new jobs, surpassing the expansions that occurred in World War II when we were fully mobilized for war. It is true that we have the lowest recorded Africa American and Hispanic unemployment rates, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years. That's all true. But it's also true that the minority unemployment rate and the minority poverty rate is still about twice the national average. I was just in Brooklyn with Nydia Vela zquez to kick off a small business center with Aida Alvarez. You heard her talking about it. In Brooklyn, a borough in New York City that has been very good to me and to the Vice President the national unemployment rate is 4.1 percent the Brooklyn unemployment rate is still over 9 percent. The national poverty rate down to about 11 percent the Brooklyn poverty rate way over 25 percent. The national homeownership rate, 66 percent Brooklyn homeownership rate about 28 percent. A lot of good things are happening there. And the whole area has been reborn on the energy of new immigrants, and I feel very good about it long term. But I want to make a point here. If we're in a position which we weren't in 7 years ago because the whole country was in a mess, economically and otherwise. But if now it is true that we have perhaps the best economy we've ever had instead of having the biggest debt in history, we're now paying the debt off for the first time in the history of the country. The Treasury Department started buying the debt in early, so we could provide more capital for the private sector at lower interest rates, and our goal is to have America debt free, the Government debt free in 15 years. Now, if we're in a position to do that, there will never be, number one, a better time for us to bring economic opportunity to people and places that have been left behind. Number two, it has to be done in a partnership with the public and private sector, because we've still got a debt to pay off and an economy to keep strong, and the Government can't do this alone. This needs to be driven by private sector investment, private sector expertise, the kind of thing that will change for the long term not only people but whole neighborhoods and rural areas, Native American reservations, by empowering them to shape a different future for themselves. If we can't do this now, we will never do this. We will never get around to doing this if we don't do it now. So, point number one, we have a moral obligation to use our prosperity at this moment, especially, to lift up the areas not only of New York City but upstate New York, which would rank 49th of all our States in job creation if you took the city and the suburbs out, the rest of New York would be 49th of the 50 States in job creation. And there are lots of things that need to be done there that creative entrepreneurs can deal with, in terms of transportation and investment, lots of other issues and all over America. The second thing I want to say is, this is in the economic self interest of the people who are doing very well, the people whose stock has gone from 5 bucks to 55 bucks. Why? Why is that? Well, Sandy stole Bob Rubin from me, and he probably figures that now he's bulletproof from whatever we do in the Government, you know. But let me tell you, you would be astonished at the time we spent both when Secretary Rubin was there and after he left, in the White House and a few blocks down, the time Chairman Greenspan and his staff spend at the Federal Reserve thinking about the following question How can we keep this going? How much longer can this go on, after we even eclipse the record of expansion in wartime in just a couple of weeks? How can we do it? How do economic expansions end? Well, sometimes they just run out of steam. There's nobody left that doesn't have any loose money to buy more stuff. You know? And then, sometimes they run out of steam because everybody starts making so much money that they ask for higher pay, or supplies get tight and they become so expensive they could get inflation in the economy. And then you have to raise interest rates to stop inflation, and the cure for stopping inflation also breaks the economic growth. Unemployment goes up, growth goes down, and it happens over and over again. Have we sort of repealed the laws of the private economy? No, we haven't repealed it, but technology and open markets and competitiveness and productivity have changed it and made new things possible. But how are we going to keep this going? Well, I would argue the only way to keep the growth going without inflation is to find both new businesses and new employees and new customers at the same time. If you have new people with money to spend and jobs to hold, then you can have growth without inflation so that if the unemployment rate in Brooklyn drops from 9.4 percent to 4.1 percent, where it is nationwide, because you've got a whole lot of new jobs there, and then those people that have the jobs spend their money there, that won't contribute to inflation it will keep the economy going. And the same thing is true all across the country. And don't forget, folks, this is not just an inner city problem. One of the best things Jesse Jackson ever did was go to Appalachia. We were out there in Appalachia with this new markets tour last summer, in this little courthouse town in West Virginia, and he got a bigger hand than I did because he had been there before. Laughter The face of today we celebrate the fact that the face of wealth is colorblind and that there is an equal distribution of talent in our country. You also see that the face of poverty and deprivation and the lack of opportunity is colorblind. This is an American challenge. We were in Appalachia we visited a company called Mid South Electronics that now makes communications equipment some of you might buy it that makes its way onto the desktops of many Fortune 500 companies represented in this room. Ten years ago, in a distant place in Appalachia that's hard to get to, they had 40 employees. And now, thanks to the availability of capital, they have 850 way back in the hills in Appalachia. In East St. Louis, with the great Mel Farr, Jesse Jackson and I visited a large new Walgreens store, first store that had been built in this distressed neighborhood in 30 years. And the manager of the store was a 24 year old woman who just graduated from college a couple of years ago running that store with 30 employees. And I believe every one of them but two were older than her, and they thought she was great. And the neighborhood was coming alive because of capital. In Mississippi we met a woman who had been working for years in a small computer store and never made any money at all just in this little, bitty store in a town in Mississippi. She had no money in the bank, and they were going to close her store. But she got an equity capital investment, and then she could get some loans. And she bought her business, where she had just been an employee all these years, but within a year she had more than doubled the size of the business and was making good money. She went from modest wages to being a proud business owner. And there are lots of stories like this everywhere. But for every story like it, in these distressed places there are 10 more people who could be this story and aren't yet. And that's why people like you come to events like this. This country owes a lot to visionary business people who are part of this movement. We owe a lot to the Members of Congress who are trying to help me pass my initiative, without which I could do nothing, and I thank them for being here. And we owe a lot to you, Jesse Jackson, for understanding that this was the next great frontier in the civil rights movement, years and years ago, and fighting for it all these years. Now, here's what I'm going to try to do this year, in our last year in office, to set up a framework that will enable us to bring opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind. First, I will resubmit, with certain changes, my new markets initiative. The general idea is that I want to give people the same incentives to put money in underdeveloped neighborhoods and towns in America that we give them today to put money into poor areas in Latin America and Africa and all over the developing world. Now, I strongly support that, too. I believe that when Americans give people in distant villages a chance to build a decent life, they're more likely to be good citizens and to support democracy and less likely to join the narcotraffickers or the people that are trying to corrupt governments and end freedom or later try to cause problems in the world that the United States will have to deal with. So we need to keep reaching out there. But we can't say, at this moment of heightened prosperity and a real challenge to keep our growth going, that we're not going to give the very same opportunities to our own people. Now, what are we going to do? First, I will propose a major expansion of the new markets and empowerment zones tax credits, to give investors tremendous incentives to give a long look to the underdeveloped areas in urban and rural America. I want to thank especially Representative Charles Rangel for the very large role that he has played in leading the charge on both these tax credits. I'll ask for more than twice the funding I asked for last year for this tax credit to spur 15 billion in new investment. I'm also going to ask Congress to authorize two new components of our new markets agenda. First, our New Markets Venture Capital Firms, a program geared toward helping small and first time entrepreneurs and then America's private investment companies, modeled, as I said earlier, on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, to help larger businesses expand or relocate to distressed inner city or rural areas. Now, together, all these components of the new markets initiative will leverage over 20 billion of new equity investment in our underserved communities. Here's how it works. Through our New Markets Venture Capital initiative and the American Private Investment Corporation, we'll spur new investments in both small and large businesses by telling investors the following If you put up 1 of equity capital for new markets investments, we'll provide 2 of Government guaranteed loans. In some cases, we'll even defer interest payments for up to 5 years. What is the practical impact of this? It says, if you're willing to take the chance of seeking a profit in the new markets with new partners, we'll help to lower your financing costs and some of your risks. Then, on top of that, the new markets tax credit will give investors a 25percent tax credit on investments in the Private Investment Corporation, in the New Market Venture Capital Group, in community development banks, and other funds that invest in our new markets. This will enable us, alone, to increase the amount this tax credit serves, from 6 to 15 billion dollars. Now, is anybody going to, all of a sudden, put money into a sinkhole where they think they'll lose it? No, not unless we give you a 100 percent tax credit. But if you know there is a marginal increased risk but a potential big reward, not only for your investment but for our country as a whole, what these initiatives will do will say, hey, take a look at these places in America that have been left behind. And they're out there, and they're gifted people. I ordered Christmas presents, a few Christmas presents on the Internet this year for the first time. But you know who my seller was? One of America's Indian tribes. When we went to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota do you think it's tough in Brooklyn do you know what the unemployment rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation is, because it's so far from everyplace? One of the most noble places in America, the home of the Oglala Sioux, the tribe of Crazy Horse their unemployment rate in this economy is 73 percent. I met I was taken around through this neighborhood by this young woman who had had a very difficult childhood, but she was one of the most impressive, self possessed, articulate people I have met in a long time for her age. And I thought to myself, there is an equal distribution of talent and intelligence everywhere in our country, and it is wrong for these people to be denied good jobs, good education, good housing, decent businesses, and the opportunity to build a different kind of 21st century community. Now, this is wrong. So I say to all of you again, I want you to help me pass this new markets initiative. I want you to help me increase the empowerment zone tax credits. And I want you to help me keep doing the things that are working. I want you to help me work with Vice President Gore and Secretary Cuomo to get a whole other round of empowerment zone communities, so we can put even more intense efforts there. And I want you to help me make it a nonpartisan deal. The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, joined Reverend Jackson and me and Congressman Bobby Rush and some others in Englewood, Illinois, recently, and he pledged to work with us to find common ground on these proposals. Economic opportunity should not be the political province of any particular party. Economic opportunity should be the birthright of every American. Let me just mention one other thing I'm going to do, which is related to this, because I think it's important. Our new budget will carry a new initiative we call First Accounts to expand access to financial services to low income Americans an idea long championed by Maxine Waters and many other leaders in Congress. Today, it's hard for some of you to believe, but far too many families have no bank accounts at all. They wind up spending a lot of their precious money on unnecessary fees, therefore, when they pay bills or cash checks. Under this First Accounts initiative, we're going to work with financial institutions to encourage the creation of low cost bank accounts for low income families to help bring more ATM's to safe places in low income communities, like the post office to provide training to help families manage household finances and build assets over time, which will work very nicely with the financial education efforts you're launching at this conference. And then, finally, I want to convene a roundtable at the White House to build even greater awareness in the corporate community of the benefits of the Community Reinvestment Act. You've already heard a lot of talk about that, but we had to work hard to ensure that when we passed the financial modernization bill and expanded the powers and opportunities for banks, we expanded the CRA, as well, and kept it instead of weakening it. That law has been on the books for over 20 years, with more than 95 percent of all the money loaned under it has occurred in the last 5 years. And I'm very proud of that because more than a 1 trillion in long term commitments have been made to invest in our communities. So I say to you, we've got to do more of this. Especially when you put the responsibilities of financial institutions on the Community Reinvestment Act with all these incentives if we can pass them through Congress, we can have a flood of money into areas that have never before had it, to people that have never before been able to get a loan, in ways that are good for all the rest of us, because they'll keep this engine going with no inflation. Anyway, that is the idea. And I loved all this new markets tours we've done. And Reverend Jackson and I, many Members of Congress, we've stopped at a lot of places where Presidents never go. And I'm having such a good time, we're going to do another one this spring. So, Reverend, you've got to clear your calendar we're going to go. And we're going to specifically focus on something that I hope all of you will help us on. We're going to focus on the digital divide. This very conference is being broadcast live over the Internet to people all over the world. But a lot of the people you're trying to reach don't have a computer, can't afford the hookup. We have worked very hard, under the Vice President's leadership, to get something called the E rate as a part of reform of the telecommunications system, which gives a couple of billion dollars in subsidies to schools and libraries around the country that are in low income areas, so everybody can afford to be hooked up. When we started 5 years ago we had only about 14 percent of the schools in our country were connected to the Internet now over 80 percent are. We're really working hard, and we've had a wonderful partnership with the private sector. But it's not enough for the schools. I went to Hudson County, New Jersey, which has a lot of first generation immigrants, in a school that had so many problems it was almost closed by the State. And then the principal of this high school not only started making sure all the immigrant kids whose first language was not English were trained on the computer, they started putting computers in the parents' home and showing them how to do it, so that all these low income working people could E mail their parents, teachers, and their principals every day. The dropout rate went way down and the performance of these kids in a low income neighborhood, most of them immigrant kids, rose about the State average of New Jersey. We can do this if we close the digital divide. Your company had a lot to do with that, and I thank you. So again I say, you know, when you know something works and you know you ought to do it, you know, by the way, it will help you as well as help other people, you need your head examined if you don't do it. I see this as a part of America making the most of this precious moment. This week I'll just close with this this week I had one of the great sort of personal encounters with beauty in my whole life. I flew to the Grand Canyon, and I got there late at night. And I stayed in this old lodge built in 1905 which is right out on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Thirty years ago, when I was a young man, not long after I met Hillary, I drove all the way to California to see her. And I stopped at the Grand Canyon late in the afternoon. And back then, you had greater access, before we lawyers got hold of everything. And I crawled out on a ledge, and I watched the Sun set over the Grand Canyon for 2 hours. And you know, that canyon was formed over millions of years, and there are lots of layers of rock and lots of different shapes. So when the Sun sets, the light comes out of the Canyon until it disappears, and it changes everything. So for the first time in my life, this week I got to see the Sun rise over the Grand Canyon. So when it rises, it goes down into the Canyon and has the same impact. And I went there to set aside another million acres to protect it there, under authority that Presidents have had since Theodore Roosevelt got Congress to pass something called the Antiquities Act in 1908. And really, 100 years ago the times were bore a lot of similarities to today. We were becoming a nation of immigrants we changed from being an agricultural country to an industrial country just like we're going from being an industrial country to an information based global society now. And Theodore Roosevelt said that the great hallmark of every young and growing society must be that it takes the long look ahead. It's a nice phrase, isn't it? So if we are what we dearly want our children and grandchildren to believe we are, we will take the long look ahead. We'll deal with the challenge of the aging of America, the children of America, the need to balance work and family, the need to prove that we can improve the environment as we grow the economy, the need to put a human face on the global economy, the need to stand against the new threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and the old demons of racial and ethnic and religious hatred around the world. But we need to start in the long look ahead with the clear understanding that this is the only time in the lifetimes of most of us here when we ever had a chance to give everyone their shot at the American dream. When Martin Luther King was preparing to go to Chicago a long, long time ago, and Jesse Jackson was not still in high school but he was very young laughter in preparation for Dr. King's arrival, Jesse launched Chicago's Operation Breadbasket, an effort to open the dairy, the grocery, the other segregated industries to African Americans. In just 2 years, he helped more than 3,000 men and women secure good jobs and an income that totaled over 22 million a year. So decades ago, Chicago got a glimpse of how good business could be when more people could play, to use the Reverend's phrase. Now, everyone in America knows this. You are all here in recognition of this. In a little more than a year, I'll just be a citizen again. And when I leave, I want to know that my country took the long look ahead, to give every poor person a chance to have the dignity that comes when your mind and your body and your spirit are engaged in productive labor for yourself and your family and your children. Thank you very much. January 12, 2000 Thank you. Well, first of all, I think we ought to acknowledge that public speaking is not something Jessica does every day, and I think she did a terrific job. I thank her for coming here. I want to thank Tommy and Sarah and Maggie and Aliza and Grandmother for coming also, so that you would have a human, real example of the subject I want to address today and one of the biggest reasons I ran for President. I thank my old friend Senator Joe Lieberman for his leadership of the Democratic Leadership Council. President and Mrs. Trachtenberg, thank you for welcoming me back to George Washington. I want to acknowledge two other people in the audience today without whom many of us would never have been able to do what has been done, and particularly I am indebted to them first, Will Marshall, who runs the Progressive Policy Institute of the DLC, who has been at this for well over a decade and come up with so many of the ideas that have been hallmarks of our administration. And I want to thank my long time friend Eli Segal, who actually gave birth, in fact, to two of our most important ideas. AmeriCorps, our national service program he set AmeriCorps up, and then he set up the Welfare to Work Partnership, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being hired by private business from the welfare rolls. So thank you both for coming here and for what you have done for our country. I always get nervous when people start talking about legacies, the way Senator Lieberman did. You know, alliteration having the appeal it does, it's just one small step from legacy to lame duck. I keep hearing that. Laughter And I've finally figured out what a lame duck is. That's when you show up for a speech and no one comes. Laughter So thank you for making me feel that we're still building on that legacy today. I want to put the issue I came here to discuss today, which directly affects the Cupp family and so many tens of thousands like them all across America, in the larger context of what we have been about since 1993, in January. Eight years ago, when I ran for President, I came here to Washington and asked for change in our party, change in our national leadership, and change in our country, not change for its own sake but because in 1992 our Nation was in the grip of economic distress, social decline, political gridlock, and discredited Government. The old answers plainly were obsolete, and new conditions clearly demanded a new approach. By 1992, we in the DLC had been working for some years on a new approach, rooted in the basic American values of opportunity, responsibility, and community dedicated to promoting both work and family here in the United States and to promoting America's leadership around the world for peace and freedom, security, and democracy. We believed that Government was neither the primary problem, as the new Republicans had been telling us for a decade by then, or the primary solution, as many New Deal Democrats still earnestly believed. Instead, we asked for a new direction for our National Government, with a focus on creating the conditions and providing people the tools to make the most of their own lives and a commitment to a partnership with the private sector and with State and local government, so that the Federal Government would be a catalyst, promoting and experimenting vigorously with new ideas. It would be a smaller and less bureaucratic but a more active Government. Those of us who were in the vanguard of this movement called ourselves New Democrats, and we said our agenda was a third way, a way to create a vital center that would bring people together and move our country forward. But we were also quick to acknowledge that labels don't define a politician or a political movement, ideas do. Our new ideas were first built on the premise that we had to discard the false choices that then defined politics here in our Nation's Capital. We believed, for example, that we could both eliminate the deficit and increase our investment in education, in science and technology, in the truly significant national priorities. We believed we could be pro business and pro labor. We believed we could be pro growth and pro environment. We believed we could reform welfare to require those who are able to work and still do more for poor children and poor families. We believed we could improve education both by raising standards and accountability and investing more where it was urgently needed. We believed we could help Americans succeed both at work and at home, rather than forcing them to make a choice, as so many, regrettably, still have to do every single day. We believed we could lower the crime rate both with more effective punishment and with more effective prevention. We believed we could lead the world with greater military strength and more diplomatic aid and cooperative efforts with other nations. We had a whole lot of new policy ideas that we implemented. I'll just mention a few the empowerment zone program and the reinventing Government program that the Vice President's led so brilliantly community development financial institutions AmeriCorps, which now has given over 150,000 young Americans the chance to serve in their community and to earn some money for a college education the HOPE scholarships, which along with our other college incentives have effectively opened the doors of college to all Americans the V chip trade, with environmental and labor considerations taken into account after school programs 100,000 police the Brady bill the family and medical leave law the assault weapons ban housing vouchers for people on welfare to move closer to where the jobs are environmental right to know laws and many, many other ideas, all within this basic framework of opportunity, responsibility, and community, all with a view toward a Government that was less bureaucratic but more active. Today, we're in a position to make an assessment very different from 1992. In 1992 Al Gore and I went around the country and made an argument to the American people, and they took a chance on us. And our friends in the Republican Party said, even after I got elected President, that none of it would work. They said our economic plan would explode the deficit and bring on another recession. They said our crime bill, with 100,000 police and the assault weapons ban and the Brady bill, would do nothing to lower the crime rate or the murder rate. And I could go on and on and on, through issue after issue after issue. Well, back in 1992, it was, after all, just an argument, and the American people took a chance. Now I think we can safely say the argument is over, for one simple reason It has been put to rest by the record. We have been fortunate enough to implement virtually all the ideas that were advocated in the 1992 campaign and most of those advanced in the '96 campaign. And we now have 7 years of measurable results. Some of them were mentioned by Senator Lieberman, but I think it's worth going over again, to set the stage for the point I want to make, which is the more important one. We have the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years, the lowest unemployment rate and the smallest welfare rolls in 30 years, over 20 million new jobs, the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the lowest murder rate in 30 years, the first back to back surpluses in our budget in 42 years, the highest homeownership in history. And in just a few weeks, now, we'll have the longest economic expansion in the history of the country, including those when we were fully mobilized for wartime. In addition to that, there has been a definite improvement in the social complexion of America. We have the lowest child poverty rate in more than 20 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, the lowest African American unemployment and poverty rates ever recorded, the lowest Hispanic unemployment rate ever, the lowest Hispanic poverty rate in 25 years, the lowest poverty rate among singleparent households in 46 years. Along the way, we have immunized 90 percent of our children against serious childhood diseases for the first time in the history of America. We have 2 million more kids out of poverty and 2 million more children with health insurance. Twenty million people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law. Over 450,000 people have been denied the right to buy a handgun because they were felons, fugitives, or stalkers, under the Brady bill. We have cleaner air, cleaner water. We have cleaned up 3 times as many toxic waste dumps as in the previous 12 years. And yesterday I had the privilege to go to the Grand Canyon to set aside another million acres of land. Now, in the lower 48 States, we have protected more land than any administration in American history, except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. Our country has helped to further the cause of peace from Northern Ireland to the Middle East to Bosnia and Kosovo to Haiti established new partnerships with Latin America, Asia, and Africa for economic cooperation restrained the nuclear missile programs of North Korea fought against Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program worked to reduce the threat of terrorism, chemical and biological weapons cut thousands of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of Russia and the United States expanded NATO increased our debt relief and economic assistance to the poorest countries of the world. We have helped to minimize economic problems in Asia and Mexico and concluded over 270 trade agreements, all with a view toward implementing the basic ideas that were articulated in 1992 and developed in the years before through the Democratic Leadership Council. Now what does that mean in practical terms to all of you and especially to the young people in this audience? It means for the first time in my lifetime, we begin a new century with greater prosperity, greater social progress, greater national self confidence, with the absence of an internal crisis or an external threat that could derail our further forward movement. This has never happened in my lifetime. The first time I came to George Washington University was in September of 1964, to a Judy Collins concert in Lisner Auditorium. Laughter I remember it well. Some of you were not alive then, maybe more than half of you. That's the last time we had this sort of economic growth and this kind of range of interest in our country toward helping people who had been left out and left behind or were in distress. But we were unable to resolve the civil rights challenge at home without major crises, including riots in our cities, and our efforts to deal with that came a cropper with the costs and the burden of carrying on the war in Vietnam. In my lifetime, we have never had a chance like this never. And I would argue to you that the most important question today is not what we've done for the last 7 years in turning the ship of state around and moving America forward, but what are we going to do now that we have the chance of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams for our children? That's the most important thing. I am gratified by all the results that I just recounted to you, but after all, that's what you hired me to do. And that's what our administration signed on to do. The question is, what are we going to do now? What will you do, as citizens, when I am no longer here and I'm just a citizen like you? As a country, what will be our driving vision? The thing I worry about most is that when people have been through tough times and they've achieved a lot, the first thing that you want to do is sort of relax. And most everybody here who's lived any number of years can remember at least once in his or her life when you made a mistake by getting distracted or short sighted because things seemed to be going so well you didn't think you had to think about anything else. That can happen to a country just as it can happen to a person, a family, or a business. So the great challenge for us today is to make up our minds, what are we going to do with this magic moment of promise? What I want us to do is to put our partisan divisions aside to complete the unfinished business of the last century, including things like the Patients' Bill of Rights, sensible legislation to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children, the hate crimes legislation, all the things that were still on the agenda when Congress went home, but to deal with these big, long term challenges. What are they? The aging of America the number of people over 65 will double in the next 30 years. I hope to be one of them. Laughter The children of America, the largest and most diverse group ever in a globalized information society, education is more important than ever, and we must give all of them a worldclass education. We can make America yes, we've got the lowest crime rate in over 25 years, the lowest murder rate in 30 years no one believes it's the safest safe as it ought to be here. We ought to dedicate ourselves to making America the safest big country in the world. We've proved that we can improve the environment and grow the economy, but we still aren't taking the challenge of global warming seriously. And we still not have said explicitly, "The world has changed it is no longer necessary to grow rich by despoiling the environment. In fact, you can generate more wealth over a longer period of time by improving the environment." America ought to prove that, instead of continuing to be a problem and having our heads in the sand on the issue of climate change. We ought to dedicate ourselves not just to running surpluses but to getting America out of debt for the first time since 1835, so that all the young people here will have lower interest rates and a healthier economy throughout their adult lifetime. We ought to dedicate ourselves to bringing opportunity to the people and places who have been left behind. We ought to dedicate ourselves to building a world in which there is a more human face on the global economy and in which we work with our friends and neighbors to deal with the new threats of terrorism, ethnic, racial, and religious warfare, and chemical and biological weapons. And we ought to recognize that in a world in which we know the most important job is still is still the job that Jessica and her husband have taken on of raising these three children, we cannot allow we cannot allow our country to be a place where you have to make a decision about to whether succeed at home or to succeed at work. Because if we ever get to the point where a significant number of our people have to make that decision, we are in serious trouble. And too many have to make it every day, anyway, because they can't afford child care, or because of the burdens of the basic cost of raising their children in dignity and good health imposed on their limited ability to earn money, even in this prosperous economy. And that's the thing I want to focus on today, because I think when the American family is doing well, the family of America does well. In the State of the Union Address, I will put forth my last but still a new agenda, rooted in responsibility, designed to create a wider, stronger, more inclusive American community and to create new opportunity. Today I want to talk about one important element of the new opportunity agenda. We know that we are now in a position to do more to create opportunity or, as Senator Lieberman and Al From say, to expand the winner's circle, to include men, women, and children still at the margins of society who are willing to work and ought to be rewarded for it. The ideas that I will advance in the State of the Union will be built on what we have been talking about since 1992, advancing our understanding of what opportunity means in the information age. For example, once textbooks were central to a child's understanding in education today, computers are. Once a ninth grade education was all anyone needed for a job, then a high school education today, the only people who have good chances of getting jobs which will grow over time in income, over a longer period of time, are those who have at least 2 years of some sort of post high school education and training. One new opportunity agenda tries to take account of these new demands but also the new pressures on working families, including the need for quality, affordable child care and the importance of being able to access health care. The main idea here is still the old idea of the American dream, that if you work hard and play by the rules, you ought to have a decent life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That's been the basic goal of so much of what we've done, from the earnedincome tax credit to the empowerment zone program the Vice President ran, to the microcredit program the First Lady's done so much to advance, to increasing the minimum wage, to greater access to health care and child care, to the partnerships that we have made with so many American businesses to help people move from welfare to work. Now, I will have more to say about all these other ideas later. But I just want to talk a little bit today, in closing, about what we should do with the earned income tax credit, something that you've heard Jessica say has already helped the Cupp family to raise their children but something that is not as helpful now as it was when they first drew it. In my State of the Union Address and in my budget for 2001, I will propose a substantial increase in the earned income tax credit. It's a targeted tax cut for low income working families. In 1992, as has already been said, one of the first things that I did as President was to ask Congress to dramatically expand the EITC. It had been on the books for some time. It had been broadly supported by Democrats and Republicans. President Reagan had hailed it. Everybody seemed to like it, because basically it involved a tax credit for people who were working and had children almost all of them have children and who just didn't have enough to get along on. It is not just another acronym. The EITC was anonymous, I think, in America until a previous Congress tried to do something to it, and then all of a sudden it became something we all knew about and liked, which was immensely gratifying to me. But the EITC stands for, again I will say, the E is about "earned." It's about working. It's about a fundamental American value. It's about rewarding people who do what they're supposed to do. I think every one of you, when Jessica was up here talking, describing the conditions of their children's birth, their work histories, how they had worked hard to provide a decent home for their kids, every one of us was sitting here pulling for them. Every one of you identified with their struggle. Every one of you could imagine what it would have been like to be the father in the delivery room and see these kids come out, one, two, three. Laughter Every one of you. That's what this country is all about, the dignity, the struggles, the triumphs, the joys of daily life that we all share. And I think our Government has a responsibility, as part of our basic compact with the American people, to make sure that families like the Cupps find that work does pay, to make sure that we reward work and that we enable them to succeed at their even more important job, raising those three little girls. It is still, I will say again, society's most important job. And I suspect that every parent in this room today agrees with me about that. So these incentives to work are just as important to how life plays out for millions of Americans as the rate of economic growth or interest rates or debt reduction. Studies from Harvard to Wisconsin have confirmed that the EITC is an enormously powerful incentive to work. It encourages people who are on welfare, who are unemployed, to move into the work force, even in modest paying jobs, because their income will be, in effect, increased they'll get a check at the end of the year as a credit against the taxes they pay, because they're working hard for modest income. Now, in 1998 the EITC helped more than 4.3 million people make that move. That's double the number that were being helped in 1993, when we advocated the expansion. This tax credit is a major reason, along with the strength of the economy, the rise in the minimum wage, and the movement from welfare to work, that there are fewer people in poverty today than there have been in over 20 years. It explains why the child poverty rate is lower than it's been in over 20 years and why poverty among African American children is the lowest on record and the lowest among a quarter century among Hispanic children. Now, because we know this works, and we know there are still far too many families and children in or near poverty and far too many people struggling and working, having a tough time taking care of their children, we know there is more to do. Today I am proposing the following changes in the EITC. First, I want to eliminate the marriage penalty exacted by the EITC to make sure that the tax credit rewards marriage and family just as it rewards work. It's a big problem. Second the next two are very important to the Cupp family they will affect all the families in our country like them, and there are a lot of them I am proposing to expand the EITC for families with three or more children. The pressures on these families rise as their ranks increase. Twenty eight percent of them let me say that again 28 percent of them are in poverty, more than twice the rate for smaller families. Our plan would provide these families tax relief that is up to 1,200 more than what they now receive. The way the EITC works now, it's a really good deal if you're working for a very modest income and you have two kids. But the benefits drop off dramatically after that. And I don't think we ought to make these folks choose among those little girls and others in their situation. Now, the third thing we're going to do is to give more people more incentives to continue to work their way into the middle class. You heard Jessica say that when her husband's income reached 30,000, the EITC benefit dropped off dramatically. We set these ceilings back in 1993, and they haven't been really adjusted since then. What we want to do now is to phase the EITC credit out more gradually. It has to be phased out, but if it's phased out too sharply, then there is, in effect, for families with a lot of kids, almost no net gain to earning a higher income. And if he's going to work longer than 40 hours a week and he's going to miss more hours at home with those kids, then we want him to receive the benefits of that. And again, I say, this is not just about this one family they represent millions of people in this country. So that's what we're going to do Eliminate the marriage penalty, increase aid to families with three or more kids, and phase the credit out more gradually, so there's always an incentive to keep working to improve your income and your ability to support your children. Now, for families like the Cupps, these new initiatives would mean an additional tax credit of 850. That would help them to provide for their children or own a home or buy a car that makes it easier to get to work and, therefore, to work. We dedicate 21 billion to these priorities over 10 years, increasing our investment in people without in any way undermining our commitment to a balanced budget and to getting us out of debt over the next 15 years. Opportunity for all is a measure of not only how far we've come and where we're going but what kind of people we are. Robert Kennedy once said, "Our society, all our values, are views of each other and our own self esteem." The contribution we can make to ourselves, our families, and the community around us all these things are built on the work we do. The young people here, the students here, are probably beginning to think about the work you will do. I hope because you're getting a good education, more than anything else, you'll be able to do something that you love. And if you do something that you love, I believe that you ought to be properly rewarded for it and that you ought also to have the freedom to raise a strong family while you're doing it. That's what today is all about. And if there is anything that America ought to be about in the 21st century, it ought to be about finally really creating opportunity for all, a responsible nation of all citizens, and a community in which everyone has the chance to do the most important work of all raise strong, healthy, happy children. Thank you very much. January 11, 2000 Thank you very much. Thank you good morning. I know we're doing the right thing, because look at the day we've got. Laughter We've got the good Lord's stamp of approval on this great day. Ann, thank you for your words and for your life and your example. Superintendent Arnberger, thank you and all the staff at Grand Canyon National Park. And through you, I'd like to thank all the people who work for all of our national parks. I have spent quite a good deal of time as President in the national parks of America, and I grew up in one. I am, I suppose, therefore, more personally indebted to the people who give their lives to the Park Service than perhaps any of my predecessors. But I want to thank you. I also want to thank all the people here from the Bureau of Land Management for the work they do and for the remarkable partnership that will be launched here. We have worked very hard these last 7 years to try to get these two agencies to work together, to support each other, to believe in each other, and to have common objectives. And I think we've made a lot of progress. So I want to thank the BLM people who are here, as well. Give them all a hand, thank you. Applause I want to thank the environmental groups who are here. I want to welcome the children who are here. We have children from Grand Canyon Middle School and St. Mary's Middle School, and we welcome them. They are a lot about what today is all about. I want to thank Congressman Ed Pastor, of Arizona Congressman Sam Farr, from California, for joining me and former Congresswoman Karan English, from Arizona, for being here. Thank you. And I want to thank all the people from the White House who supported me in this decision my Chief of Staff, John Podesta, who is here and the head of our Council of Environmental Quality, George Frampton. I want to thank someone I want to acknowledge particularly who worked with Secretary Babbitt on this, his Counselor, Mollie McUsic, who played a big role in what we celebrate today. She's not here because she's celebrating an even bigger production yesterday she gave birth to her son, Benjamin, so she couldn't be here, but I want to acknowledge her and her service. And finally, I want to say this is, as you can see, a special day for Bruce Babbitt, not only because he has been a devoted champion of the Antiquities Act and of protecting land but also because he is the former Governor of Arizona. And when we served together as Governors, we made it a habit, Hillary and I did, at least once a year at these Governors' meetings to have dinner with Bruce and Hattie Babbitt. And he was giving me the speech that he gave here today 15 or 20 years ago. Laughter I've heard Bruce's speech a lot now, but it gets better every time he gives it. Laughter Our country has been blessed by some outstanding Secretaries of the Interior, Gifford Pinchot, Harold Ickes. But I'll make a prediction I believe when our time here is done and a fair analysis of the record is made, there will be no Secretary of the Interior in the history of the United States who has done as much to preserve our natural heritage as Bruce Babbitt, and I thank him for that. Secretary Babbitt talked about Theodore Roosevelt's role. You might be interested to know that it was exactly 92 years ago today, on January 11, 1908, that he designated the Grand Canyon as one of our Nation's first national monuments. Now the first light falls on the 21st century and this breathtaking landscape he helped to protect. None of you who can see what is behind me can doubt the wisdom of that decision. And so it is altogether fitting that on this day and in this place we continue that great journey. This morning, on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, I designated three new national monuments and the expansion of a fourth to make sure more of the land that belongs to the American people will always be enjoyed by them. What a remarkable place this Canyon is. It is in so many ways the symbol of our great natural expanse, our beauty, and our spirit. Thirty years ago, for the first time, I watched the Sun set over the Grand Canyon for over 2 hours. This morning I got up and for about an hour I watched the Sun rise over the Canyon for the first time. In both cases, watching the interplay of the changing light against the different layers and colors of the Canyon left me with a lifetime memory I will always cherish. Millions and millions of Americans share those memories and a love of our natural treasure. In fact, I believe maybe if there's one thing that unites our fractious, argumentative country across generations and parties and across time, it is the love we have for our land. We know, as President Roosevelt said, we cannot improve upon this landscape. So the only thing we can add to it is our protection. President Roosevelt challenged us to live up to that ideal, to see beyond today or next month or next year. He said, "The one characteristic more essential than any other is foresight. It should be the growing nation with a future which takes the long look ahead." I am very grateful for the opportunities that Vice President Gore and I have had to build on President Roosevelt's legacy, to take that long look ahead, to chart a new conservation vision for a new century. From our inner cities to our pristine wild lands, we have worked hard to ensure that every American has a clean and healthy environment. We've rid hundreds of neighborhoods of toxic waste dumps, taken the most dramatic steps in a generation to clean the air we breathe, to control emissions that endanger the health of our children and the stability of our climate. We have made record investments in science and technology to protect future generations from the threat of global warming. We've worked to protect and restore our most glorious natural resources, from the Florida Everglades to California's redwoods and Mojave Desert, to Escalante, to Yellowstone. And we have, I hope, finally put to rest the false choice between the economy and the environment, for we have the strongest economy perhaps in our history, with a cleaner environment, cleaner air, cleaner water, more land set aside, safer food. I hope finally we have broken the hold of an old and now wrong idea that a nation can only grow rich and stay rich if it continues to despoil its environment and burn up the atmosphere. With new conservation technologies and alternative energy sources, that is simply no longer true. It has not been true for quite some years now, but it is only now coming to be recognized. And I can tell you that in the next few years, no one will be able to deny the fact that we will actually have more stable, more widespread, more long term economic growth if we improve the environment. We are on the verge the Detroit auto show this year is going to showcase cars that get 70 and 80 miles a gallon, with fuel injection and dual fuel sources. Before you know it, we will crack the chemical barriers to truly efficient production of biomass fuels, which will enable us to produce 8 or 9 gallons of biomass fuels with only 1 gallon of oil. That will be the equivalent of getting cars that use get 160 miles to a gallon of gasoline. And this is just the beginning. We built a low income working family housing project in the Inland Empire out in California, in cooperation with the National Home Builders, with glass in the windows that lets in 4 or 5 times as much light and keeps out 4 or 5 times as much heat and cold. And we promised the people on modest incomes that if they moved into these homes their energy bills would be, on average, 40 percent lower than they would have been in a home of comparable size. I can tell you that after 2 years, they're averaging 65 percent below that. So, therefore, their usage is much lower. We are just beginning. So I ask all of you not only to celebrate this happy day but to see it in the larger context of our common responsibility and our opportunity to preserve this planet. Applause Thank you. Now to the matter at hand. We began this unforgettable morning on the edge of this magnificent park. The deep canyons, rugged mountains, and isolated buttes of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon tell a story written over the course of billions of years, illustrated in colorful vistas and spectacular detail. It is a lonely landscape, a vast and vital area of open space which, as Secretary Babbitt said, includes a critical watershed for the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Today we protect more than a million acres of this land. That is an area larger than Yosemite Park. For America's families, we designate it as the Grand Canyon Parashant National Monument. This effectively doubles the size of protected land around the Grand Canyon. Second, we act to promote some of the most significant late prehistoric sites in the American Southwest. In the shadow of Phoenix there lies a rough landscape of mesas and deep canyons rich in archaeological treasures, distinctive art etched into boulders and cliff faces, and stone masonry pueblos once inhabited by several thousand people centuries ago. As the suburbs of Phoenix creep ever closer to this space, we act to protect history and heritage. For America's families, we designate this land the Agua Fria National Monument. Third, we are protecting thousands of small islands, rock outcroppings, and exposed reefs along California's splendid coastline. These are natural wonders, and they're also the habitat and nesting ground for sea mammals and hundreds of thousands of sea birds, forced from the shore because of development. Today we act to protect all the coastal islands, reefs, and rocks off California now owned by the Federal Government, designating them the California Coastal National Monument. Help Congressman Farr there. Clap! Applause Fourth and finally, we will expand California's Pinnacles National Monument, created by President Roosevelt in 1908. Pinnacles is about 2 hours from Silicon Valley, but it's a world away. It includes soaring spires from an ancient volcano. Its mountain caves, desert, and wilderness are home to abundant wildlife and a haven for campers, climbers, and hikers. For one and all, Pinnacles is a sanctuary from sprawl. And for one and all, we act to keep it that way. Now let me say again, all these areas are now owned by the Federal Government. Secretary Babbitt's recommendation that they be protected came as a result of careful analysis and close consultation with local citizens, State and local officials, Members of Congress. Clearly, these lands represent many things to many people. In managing the new monuments, we will continue to work closely with the local communities to ensure that their views are heard and their interests are respected. This is not about locking lands up it is about freeing them up from the pressures of development and the threat of sprawl, for all Americans, for all time. I have said many times that the new century finds America with an unprecedented opportunity and therefore an unprecedented responsibility for the future, an opportunity and a responsibility rooted in the fact that never before, in my lifetime anyway, has our country enjoyed at one time so much prosperity, social progress, with the absence of internal crisis or external threat to our existence. Can you imagine the sacrifices laid down by our ancestors, generation after generation after generation, in the fond hope that one day our country would be in the shape we are now in? Now, when we're in this sort of position, we have a heavier responsibility even than our forebears did a century ago to take that long look ahead, to ask ourselves what the next century holds, what are the big challenges, what are the big opportunities, to dream of the future we want for our children, and then to move aggressively to build that future. So I say again, there are these big challenges in the long look ahead The aging of America we'll double the number of people over 65 in the next 30 years I hope to be one of them. The children of America, the largest and most diverse group ever they all have to have a world class education, whether they live in remote areas in Arizona or the poorest inner city neighborhoods across America. The families of America most of them are working they need more help to balance work and parenting, and they all need access to affordable health care and child care. The poor of America it is well to remember that there are people in places that have been left behind by this recovery. We have a strategy of economic empowerment that should be brought to every person willing to work. If we don't do it now, when will we ever get around to doing it? The world we live in is ever more interdependent, not just on the environmental front but in many other ways. We have to build a more cooperative world. America is in a unique position now, with our economy, our military strength, our political influence. It won't last forever, and it's almost impossible for us to avoid having people resent us. But we have done our best to be responsible partners for peace and prosperity and for bridging the racial, religious, and ethnic gaps that tear apart so much of the world. It is time for us to work with others, against the dangers of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism and the other threats, and to build a better world together and to build one America here at home across the lines that have divided us too deeply for too long. But a big part of all of this, in my opinion, the long look ahead, is making an absolute, firm commitment that going forward here at home in America and with friends and partners throughout the world, we will build a 21st century economy that is in harmony with the environment that we will continue to improve and protect even as we grow. And we have to keep working until we convince people all over the world, in countries that long for the level of prosperity we take for granted, that they do not have to grow rich the way countries did in the 19th and the 20th century, that the fastest way to grow the economy today is the most environmentally responsible way. We owe that to the future. Taking the long look ahead, as manifest in the protections we give today to the land around the Grand Canyon and in these other monuments, is fundamentally an act of humanity, and I might add also, an act of humility. I think it's interesting that I'll close with this I had two rather interesting experiences today only proliferally related to what we're doing. One is, the press asked me whether I saw this as a legacy item, as if that was the reason for doing it. I said, "Well, I've been working on this stuff for 7 years now. And I grew up in a national park. I believe in what I'm doing today." But I'll say again, this is an act of humility for all of us. When we were flying today over the North Rim, when we got further west along the Canyon, Bruce looked at me and he said, "See, there's some dormant volcanoes, and you can see the residue of the ash." And I said, "When did that volcano erupt?" He said, "Oh, not very long ago, 10 or 20,000 years." And if you look out here, you see, 10 or 20,000 years from now, if the good Lord lets us all survive as a human race, no one will remember who set aside this land on this day. But the children will still enjoy it. So I say to all of you, I hope you will go forth from this place today with a renewed dedication to the long look ahead, with a renewed sense of pride and gratitude, with a sense that we have reaffirmed our humanity as well as our devotion to our natural home, and a sense of humility that we are grateful, we are fortunate, and we are obligated to take the long look ahead. Thank you, and God bless you. January 07, 2000 The President. Good morning. I want to thank Secretary Daley and President Rose of James Madison University, who has worked with eight other institutions of higher education to do information technology security training, and Dick Clarke from the NSC and all the others who worked on this project. I want to talk just a moment about steps we are taking today to defend our citizens from those who would use cyberspace to do us harm. There has never been a time like this in which we have the power to create knowledge and the power to create havoc, and both those powers rest in the same hands. We live in an age when one person sitting at one computer, can come up with an idea, travel through cyberspace, and take humanity to new heights. Yet, someone can sit at the same computer, hack into a computer system and potentially paralyze a company, a city, or a government. Thanks to the hard work of many people, our computer systems were ready for Y2K. But that experience did underscore how really interconnected we all are. Today, our critical systems, from power structures to air traffic control, are connected and run by computers. We must make those systems more secure so that America can be more secure. Today we are releasing a national plan to defend America's cyberspace, the product of a 3year effort. This plan is not the end of the discussion, but the beginning of a dialog with Congress, with the American people, and especially with the private sector. We need to do more to bring people into the field of computer security. That's why I am proposing a new program that will offer college scholarships to students in the field of computer security in exchange for their public service afterward. This program will create a new generation of computer security specialists who will work to defend our Nation's computers. We also need to accelerate and broaden our research into computer security. Today I am proposing to create a new institute that will fill research gaps that neither public nor private sectors are filling today. The Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection will bring to bear the finest computer scientists and engineers from the private sector, from universities, and from other research facilities to find ways to close these gaps. As part of the 2001 budget, I am requesting 91 million for these and other reforms as part of an overall 2 billion budget to help meet our security challenges. I will work hard to get these measures passed. I will continue to work equally hard to uphold the privacy rights of the American people, as well as the proprietary rights of American businesses. As I said before, it is essential that we do not undermine liberty in the name of liberty. Information technology has helped to create the unprecedented prosperity we enjoy at the end of the 20th century. This morning we will announce that the unemployment rate for all of this past year was 4.2 percent. That's the lowest in 30 years, the lowest annual unemployment rate since 1969, the lowest annual minority unemployment rates for African Americans and Hispanics ever recorded. It is important to recognize the role technology has played in this remarkable economic prosperity. But it is also important to recognize the challenges that we face out there in the security area. I hope that this will be a completely nonpartisan issue and that we will work together to ensure that information technology will create unprecedented prosperity in the 21st century, in an atmosphere and environment that makes all Americans more secure. Thank you very much. Q. Mr. President The President. One each. Go ahead, John John Roberts, CBS News . Elian Gonzalez Q. Governor Bush of Florida is appealing to you to rescind the INS order regarding Elian Gonzalez. Is that something you would even consider? The President. I believe that they followed the law and the procedures. This is a volatile and difficult case. And those who want to challenge it will have to follow the law and the procedures. I think that's the only way to do this. We need to keep this out of the political process as much as possible, within the established legal channels. Israel Syria Peace Talks Q. Are you satisfied with the cooperation that you've been getting from the Israeli and Syrian negotiators in Shepherdstown? The President. Yes. This is difficult stuff. This is very hard. But let me say, they're working hard, and they're trying to find ways to resolve their differences. And they're trying to imagine the end of the road here. It's a difficult, difficult set of negotiations, but we're working in a steady way, and I'm satisfied that everybody is working in good faith. Q. How long do you expect this to take? The President. I don't know until we finish. Q. Mr. President, how do you see your role in Shepherdstown to get these talks moving? The President. Oh, I don't want to characterize that. I just try to get people together and identify what they have in common and identify what their differences are, try to get people to keep in mind the big picture at the end, what we want the in this case, what we hope and pray the Middle East will look like in 5 years or 10 years from now. And then try to work these things through to the end. But we're just trying to be helpful, and I hope we are, and we're working at it. I hope you'll wish us well, and I've got to get up there. Thank you very much. January 02, 2000 The President. Gathered in the spirit of truth and hope, in unity and peace, at the beginning of the new year, the dawn of a new century, and at the turn of the third millennium, let us offer before God our prayers and thanksgivings. We give You thanks, O God, for the goodness and love You have made known to us in creation. You fill the world with beauty. Open our eyes to see Your handiwork in all creation and in one another. Audience members. We thank You and praise You, O God. The First Lady. We give You thanks, O God, for Your church throughout the world, and for religious faith and freedom in this country. Grant that all who seek You by many names may be united in Your truth, live together in Your love, and reveal Your glory in the world. Audience members. We thank You and praise You, O God. The President. We give You thanks, O God, for our Nation for the gifts of liberty, freedom, and peace for the women and men who have made this country strong. Give us, like them, a zeal for justice and truth, and grant that we and all the people of this land may, by Your grace, be strengthened to maintain our liberties and righteousness and peace. Audience members. We thank You and praise You, O God. The First Lady. We pray also for the world, for the leaders of the nations and for those who strive and work for peace, that all swords may be turned into plowshares and none may hurt or destroy. Audience members. We thank You and praise You, O God. The President. We give You thanks, O God, for creating all humanity in Your image, for the wonderful diversity of Your children, of Your races and creeds, cultures and tongues. Enrich our lives by ever widening circles of fellowship, and show us Your presence in those who differ most from us. Audience members. We thank You and praise You, O God. The First Lady. In offering You thanks, O God, we become aware of our failings and shortcomings. Time after time, we fail to strive for the vision and world You hold out to us. We do not honor one another. We abuse Your creation. We take for granted our resources, and we fail to recognize Your gracious hand in the harvests of land and sea. Grant us a respect for your whole world. Audience members. Forgive us, heal us, and restore us, O God. The President. Time after time, O God, we fail to follow Your ways and to live up to the hopes of our Founding Fathers and Mothers. We turn from the path of justice and peace to follow the way of hatred and anger. So move our hearts that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease, and that, in Your wisdom and love, we may live with our world family in true justice and peace. Audience members. Forgive us, heal us, and restore us, O God. The First Lady. Time after time, O God, we hoard the bounty of Your goodness. We store up goods for ourselves and ignore the cry of the poor and hungry. We store up liberty and justice for ourselves and ignore the cry of the oppressed. Look with favor upon the people of this and every land who live with injustice, terror, poverty, disease, and death, and grant that we who are so richly blessed may, with Your help, respond with costly love and compassion. Audience members. Forgive us, heal us, and restore us, O God. The President. Let us pray. Dear Lord, as we awaken to this second morning of a new millennium, help us to remember that all we are and all we do begins with You, for whom a thousand years are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. So we begin this jubilee year in humility, with profound thanks for the divine light first revealed 2,000 years ago that has brought us now to this sacred place today. Each in our own way, we thank You for the blessings of this life. For me and my family, I give You thanks for good health, good fortune, and the opportunity to serve the American people. We thank You for the amazing grace You have shown in getting us through and beyond our individual and collective sins and trials. Through the darkest hours of the 20th century, the shameful trauma of racial oppression, the pain and sacrifice of war, the fear and deprivation of depression, when all we could do was walk by faith, it was Your guiding light that saw us through. We thank You for the promise of the new century and ask Your guidance and grace in helping us to make the most of it to free our children of hunger, neglect, and war to ease the burdens of the less fortunate to strengthen the bonds of family to preserve and protect our earthly home to use new advances in science and technology to lift all the human family and draw us all closer together. Finally, we thank You for the rich and wonderful diversity of human life with which You have graced this planet and ask You to give us the strength and wisdom to give up our fear, distrust, and hatred of those who are different. Teach us instead to learn from each other and celebrate our differences, secure in the knowledge that we are all Your children. Our Constitution tells us You created us all equal. Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves. The Koran says we must do unto all men as you wish to have done to you and reject for others what you would reject for yourself. The Talmud instructs us, should anyone turn aside the right of the stranger, it is as though he were to turn aside the right of the most high God. By Your grace, we have survived in spite of our blindness to this, Your truth. Help us now to accept at long last the enduring truth that the most important fact of life is not wealth or power or beauty or scientific advance but our kinship as brothers and sisters and our oneness as children of God. This, Holy Father, is our prayer for the new millennium. Audience members. Amen. January 01, 2000 The President. Good morning, and happy New Year or, we should say, happy new millennium. Last night Hillary and I joined thousands of Americans on the National Mall to bid farewell to the remarkable century just past and to welcome the new millennium. The feelings of good will and hope that overcame us all will be among our most treasured moments, and we're deeply grateful that the celebrations were both jubilant and peaceful here and all around the world. The First Lady. But our celebration didn't just begin at the stroke of midnight, nor will it end today. Two years ago the President and I launched the White House Millennium Project to inspire all Americans to reflect on where we have been as a nation, who we are, and what we want to be, a project "to honor the past and imagine the future." I've traveled all across our country, encouraging citizens and communities to think of the gifts that America can give to the future, whether it's saving our historic treasures such as the Declaration of Independence or Thomas Edison's invention factory or the pueblos of the American Southwest, opening trails and planting millions of trees for future generations to enjoy, or teaching our schoolchildren to value their own families' and America's immigrant past. The President and I invite you to join these and so many other efforts to extend our celebration far into the new year and the new century. The President. What is perhaps most remarkable about last night's celebration is the way it was shared all around the world. Millions of Americans, and billions of others across the globe, watched on television as midnight broke first in Asia, then in Europe, then Africa, South America, finally here in North America. That people all over the planet could experience the same events at the same time would have been impossible for anyone to imagine 1,000 years ago, even 100. Yet, the growing interconnectedness of the world today, thanks to a global economy and technologies like the Internet, is more than just a mark of how far we've come. It's the key to understanding where we're going and what we must do in the new millennium. It's clear that our fate in America increasingly will be tied to the fate of other nations and other people around the world. We must have prosperous partners to trade with, secure democracies to share the burdens of peacekeeping, and mutual effort to combat challenges that know no borders, from terrorism to environmental destruction. To advance our interests and protect our values in this new, interconnected world, America clearly must remain engaged. We must help to shape events and not be shaped by them. The First Lady. Yet, it is not just by our exertions abroad but by the example we set here at home that we can influence the world for the better. For in the new millennium, the world will be looking to America for leadership in meeting our great common challenges. If we in America can extend prosperity to people and places in this country that have not yet felt it, then perhaps the global economy can bring a better life to the 1.4 billion people who live on less than one dollar a day. If we in America can provide all of our children with a world class education, then perhaps it will be possible in the not too distant future for every child in the world to have a good education. And if we can build one America and make our diversity our greatest strength, then perhaps other nations will see the advantage of working to overcome their own ethnic and religious tensions. The President. We begin the 21st century well poised to be that guiding light. Seldom in our history and never in my lifetime has our Nation enjoyed such a combination of widespread economic success, social solidarity, and national selfconfidence, without an internal crisis or an overarching external threat. Never has the openness and dynamism of our society been more emulated by other countries. Never have our values of freedom, democracy, and opportunity been more ascendant in the world. Nearly 55 years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt said that "we cannot live alone at peace . . . our own well being is dependent on the well being of other nations far away," and, therefore, that we must be "citizens of the world, members of the human community." I believe his words will prove even truer in the 21st century. With America fulfilling our ideals and responsibilities, we can make this new century a time of unprecedented peace, freedom, and prosperity for our people and for all the citizens of the world. Thank you. Happy New Year, and God bless America. December 31, 1999 Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we celebrate. The change of centuries, the dawning of a new millennium are now just minutes away. We celebrate the past. We have honored America's remarkable achievements, struggles, and triumphs in the 20th century. We celebrate the future, imagining an even more remarkable 21st century. As we marvel at the changes of the last hundred years, we dream of what changes the next hundred and the next thousand will bring. And as powerful as our memories are, our dreams must be even stronger. For when our memories outweigh our dreams, we become old, and it is the eternal destiny of America to remain forever young, always reaching beyond, always becoming, as our Founders pledged, "a more perfect Union." So we Americans must not fear change. Instead, let us welcome it, embrace it, and create it. The great story of the 20th century is the triumph of freedom and free people, a story told in the drama of new immigrants, the struggles for equal rights, the victories over totalitarianism, the stunning advances in economic well being, in culture, in health, in space and telecommunications, and in building a world in which more than half the people live under governments of their own choosing for the first time in all history. We must never forget the meaning of the 20th century or the gifts of those who worked and marched, who fought and died for the triumph of freedom. So as we ring in this new year, in a new century, in a new millennium, we must, now and always, echo Dr. King in the words of the old American hymn "Let freedom ring." If the story of the 20th century is the triumph of freedom, what will the story of the 21st century be? Let it be the triumph of freedom wisely used, to bring peace to a world in which we honor our differences and, even more, our common humanity. Such a triumph will require great efforts from us all. It will require us to stand against the forces of hatred and bigotry, terror and destruction. It will require us to continue to prosper, to alleviate poverty, to better balance the demands of work and family, and to serve each of us in our communities. It will require us to take better care of our environment. It will require us to make further breakthroughs in science and technology, to cure dread diseases, heal broken bodies, lengthen life, and unlock secrets from global warming to the black holes in the universe. And perhaps most important, it will require us to share with our fellow Americans and, increasingly, with our fellow citizens of the world the economic benefits of globalization, the political benefits of democracy and human rights, the educational and health benefits of all things modern, from the Internet to the genetic encyclopedia to the mysteries beyond our solar system. Now, we may not be able to eliminate all hateful intolerance, but we can develop a healthy intolerance of bigotry, oppression, and abject poverty. We may not be able to eliminate all the harsh consequences of globalization, but we can communicate more and travel more and trade more, in a way that lifts the lives of ordinary working families everywhere and the quality of our global environment. We may not be able to eliminate all the failures of government and international institutions, but we can certainly strengthen democracy so all children are prepared for the 21st century world and protected from its harshest side effects. And we can do so much more to work together, to cooperate among ourselves, to seize the problems and the opportunities of this ever small planet we all call home. In short, if we want the story of the 21st century to be the triumph of peace and harmony, we must embrace our common humanity and our shared destiny. Now, we're just moments from that new millennium. Two centuries ago, as the framers where crafting our Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was often seen in Independence Hall looking at a painting of the Sun low on the horizon. When, at long last, the Constitution finally was signed, Mr. Franklin said, "I have often wondered whether that Sun was rising or setting. Today I have the happiness to know it is a rising Sun." Well, two centuries later, we know the Sun will always rise on America, as long as each new generation lights the fire of freedom. Our children are ready. So again, the torch is passed to a new century of young Americans. December 31, 1999 Good afternoon. I must say, after listening to them, I don't know that there's anything I have to add. I want to thank all of you for being here. I thank the First Lady for her conception of this millennium celebration and for all those who helped to make it possible. I thank Secretary Albright for her work for world peace. Governor Gutierrez and the people of Guam, we thank you for sponsoring this event. And we welcome Congressman and Mrs. Underwood, Mrs. Gutierrez and members of your family, Governor. Guam is where America's day begins, you know, and today it's where our millennium begins. I'd also like to thank the Environmental Protection Agency and its Administrator, Carol Browner the GSA and its Administrator, Dave Barram, who is here with his family and all others who helped to make this day possible. I'd like to ask you to express our appreciation to the World Children's Choir and the United States Army Brass Quintet. We thank them. We wanted to spend a part of this day with diplomatic representatives from around the world and with children from around the world to signal the importance of strengthening our global community in the new millennium. On this day 200 years ago, in 1799, our second President welcomed the 19th century. It then took 6 weeks by boat to get news from Europe. On this day 100 years ago, when President William McKinley marked the start of the 20th century, it took 6 seconds to send a text by telegraph. Today, satellites and the Internet carry our voices and images instantaneously all around the world. Never before have we known as much about each other. Never before have we depended so much on each other. Never before have we had such an opportunity to move toward what the generations have prayed for, peace on Earth and a better life for all. We must both imagine a brighter future and dedicate ourselves to building it, and I ask you all here today to reaffirm the clear understanding that we must do it together. Two thousand years ago, the calendar that turns at midnight began with the birth of a child on straw in a stable, with a single, shining star in the sky. It attracted no notice at the time. Today, as we meet in this international center, though all the world is now a part of this millennial calendar change, we must recognize that for more than half the world, because they are not Christians, the number 2000 has less significance for Muslims, this is the year 1420 for Hindus, it is 1921 for Buddhists, it is 2543 Mayans honor the year 5119 and the Hebrew calendar marks this year as 5760. So what we celebrate here today is not so much a common calendar of history or faith but a common future for all people of good will, a future of peace and harmony, a future rooted in the forces of freedom and enterprise and globalization and science and technology that have powered so much of the 20th century, but a future which now now may reflect timeless lessons as well, the lessons of all religious faiths Love your neighbor as yourself do unto others as you would have done to you do not turn aside the stranger see the spark of divine inspiration in every person. As long as we have had philosophers and prophets on this Earth, this lesson has been taught. Yet, it still seems the hardest for us to learn. The past 100 years have seen the victory of freedom over totalitarianism. For that, we can all be grateful. They have seen us coming together more and more so that it is possible to have a stage with this beautiful, brilliant array of children, and for that, we can all be grateful. But still all around us, we see the failure to use our freedom wisely, as too many people still give in to primitive hatreds, and we still face the oldest problem of human society the fear of those who are different from us. History shows that people do tend to be afraid of those who don't look the same or practice religion the same way or come from different tribes or have different lifestyles. Those fears, when ignited and organized by unscrupulous leaders, have led to terrible violence in the modern world. Even in the most open societies, including our own, children who learn to look down and dehumanize those who are different and perhaps to blame them for their own problems continue to grow up to commit awful hate crimes. Still, we must begin a new century with great hope. Think of this 100 years ago not a single country in the world recognized the right of all its citizens to choose their leaders and shape their destinies. Now, for the first time in history, more than half the world's people live under governments of their own choosing. Sixty years ago many people thought that nothing could stop dictators from imposing their will on the world through violence. But since then, democratic countries have risen, not just once but time and time again, to defeat fascism, to help nations free themselves from totalitarianism, to help stop racial apartheid and ethnic cleansing, to uphold and advance human rights. In freedom's century, we have learned that open societies are more just, more resilient, more enduring. Even today, we see our newest discoveries bringing us closer to goals humanity has shared for centuries, to eradicate disease, educate all our children, clean our environment, provide economic support for families, and lift up nations. The forces of science, technology, and globalization have shattered the boundaries of possibility, and in the new century, our achievements will be bounded mostly by the limits on our own imagination, understanding, and wisdom. There are, to be sure, tremendous challenges ahead. The old problems are there leaders all too willing to exploit human difference to preserve their own power places where freedom still is silenced and basic rights denied outdated, unnecessary industrial practices endangering our global environment abject poverty, with more than a billion people living on less than a dollar a day. And then there are the new problems the organized forces of crime, narcotrafficking, terror governments too weak to handle the sweeping forces of globalization and their impact on their people ordinary people across the world who have yet to see the benefits of democracy and free enterprise but have borne the burden of the economic and social changes some can delay but none can avoid. Still I say again, we must be hopeful. It is a good thing that we are more and more free and more and more interdependent. It is possible to have prosperity while preserving the environment, and it is possible to share prosperity more broadly with those who have been too long denied. It is possible to thwart the organized forces of destruction. In short, it is possible to listen to the children in this room, who come from over 100 nations of the world, and give them a chance to live their dreams. When we see threats to peace and dignity abroad, we can choose not to speak we can choose not to act. But no longer can we choose not to know. That is why there was such a similarity in the vision these children from all over the globe shared with us today. The explosion in information and the technology for getting it to people everywhere at the same time has enabled us to build a common sense of community, that is already taking shape in ways large and small. When there's a flood in Venezuela that kills thousands and thousands of innocent people, when we see the plight of young war victims in Sierra Leone who have lost their limbs, when we see hundreds of thousands of people displaced by ethnic cleansing from their homeland in Kosovo, we can choose to do nothing, but we can't pretend we don't know, and we can no longer shield our conscience or our interest from their impact. So now we care about one another in ways we never did before. On our ever smaller planet, one way or another, sooner or later, what happens anywhere may be felt everywhere. So I'd like to make a few new year's predictions. In the new century we may not be able to eliminate hateful intolerance, but we will see the rise of healthy intolerance of bigotry, oppression, and abject poverty in our own communities and across the world. We may not be able to eliminate all the harsh consequences of globalization. But still, we will trade more and travel more and communicate more and learn to do it in ways that advance the lives of ordinary people and lift the quality of the environment. We may not be able to eliminate all the inadequacies of government and our global institutions, but we will see more and more governments able to protect their people from the harshest side effects of globalization and able to prepare their children all their children, boys and girls for the 21st century world and we will see more much, much more cooperations among nations to meet common challenges and seize common opportunities. In short, the children you see on this stage, in the new century, will become more and more part of the same community, not by giving up their national, tribal, racial, ethnic, and religious differences but by honoring them and by affirming our common humanity and our shared destiny. It is happening already. I say again, you see it in our response to an earthquake in Turkey or a hurricane in the Caribbean. Earlier this year, the last time so many nations were represented in this room, it was on the 50th anniversary of NATO when the Allies gathered there to stand against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Today, from southeastern Europe to the Middle East to South Africa to Northern Ireland to East Timor, the century is ending with a clear message that there is no place in the 21st century for power rooted in hatred and dehumanization. People everywhere want peace and harmony and the chance to live with their dreams not at their neighbor's expense but, instead, with their neighbor's help. We owe it to the children here to begin this new millennium ready to take on our problems together, an unrelenting battle against poverty, sharing the promise of the new economy, leaving no one behind, deepening our democracies, preserving our shared earthly home. Today we celebrate more than the changing of the calendar. We celebrate the opportunity we have to make this a true changing of the times, a gateway to greater peace and freedom, for prosperity and harmony. If we listen to our children, they will tell us the future we should build. Last week I received a letter from a sixthgrade class in northeastern Connecticut, who knew I would be speaking to you here today. Here's what they said "Never forget, God didn't put us here to fight, but to live in harmony. If we can help our children, our future leaders to find their way to love for all mankind and to teach them there is no future in racism, then we can find that the success and glory of world peace will grow and blossom into a never dying flower." I said at the opening of my remarks that 2000 years ago those of us who are Christians believe the new era began with a bright light in the sky. You should all know that when darkness falls tonight for the very last time in this millennium, the brightest light in the sky will be the constellation Orion. From December to April, it is the only star system visible from every inhabited point on Earth. Scientists tell us that the light from one of those stars began its journey almost exactly 1000 years ago. In the time it took the light from Orion to reach Earth, Leif Erikson sailed Gutenberg printed Galileo dared Shakespeare wrote Elizabeth ruled Mozart composed Jefferson drafted Bolivar liberated Lincoln preserved Einstein dreamed Ataturk built Roosevelt led Gandhi preached Mother Teresa healed Mandela triumphed. A pretty good space of traveling light. Now that light shines upon all of us. For all the billions of people who came before, it has been left to this generation to lead the world into a new millennium, to use our freedom wisely, to walk away from war and hatred toward love and peace. When people look back on this day a hundred years from now, may they say that is exactly what we did, that in the 21st century our children went further, reached higher, dreamed bigger, and accomplished more because love and peace proved more powerful than hatred and war. One of America's most popular authors of children's books is Theodor Geisel, who wrote under the name of Dr. Seuss. One of the very last books he wrote was called, "Oh, The Places You'll Go." I want to end today with words he wrote in that book, looking ahead at the world our children should inherit. Listen to this and help to make it so. "And will you succeed? Yes, you will, indeed, ninety eight and threequarters percent guaranteed. Kid, you'll move mountains. So be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea, you're off to great places. Today is your day. Your mountain is waiting, so get on your way." Good luck to the children here, and Godspeed in the new millennium. Thank you very much. December 22, 1999 Terrorism During Millennium Celebrations Mr. Rose. Mr. President, because of the recent arrest and heightened security concerns at airports, do you expect, worry that there will be an incident of terrorism before the first of the year? The President. Well, we are on a heightened state of alert, and we're doing a lot of work on this. But I would say to the American people, they should go on about their business and celebrate the holidays as they would, but they should be aware. You know, this whole millennial idea draws out a lot of people who are maybe, by our standards, deranged, and other people maybe want to use it for their own political ends. So if people see anything suspicious, they should report it to the authorities as quickly as possible. But otherwise, I should say, they should go on about their business. We're working very, very hard on this. Mr. Rose. It worries you? The President. No, I'm concerned, but I think we have, I think, the best law enforcement folks we could have, and they are working very hard. And we're doing quite well so far. So I have every hope that we'll get through it. But I think that what I would ask the American people to do is not to stay at home and hide but just to keep their eyes open. If they see something that looks fishy, tell the authorities and we'll get on it. But they should know that we're working this very hard. Last Year of President's Term Mr. Rose. All right, let me I look around this office, and I see a desk over there that President Kennedy sat at. And I remember the story he said about the Presidency, and one of the great things about the Presidency was he could walk to work. As you think about leaving this building, what will you miss the most? The President. I think what I'll miss the most is the work, the job, the contact with all kinds of people and all kinds of issues, the ability to make a difference, to solve problems, to open up opportunities for other people. There's almost no not almost, I suppose there is no job like it in the world. It's been an unbelievable thrill and a profound honor, and I will miss it very much. I'll miss a lot of the other things. I love living in the White House. Hillary, I suppose, has done more work on the White House than anybody since the Truman administration, redoing rooms and building a sculpture garden and doing things like that. And we love living here. I love going to Camp David I love Air Force One I love all of the perks of the job. But the thing I love most is being President, doing the job every day. It just to me, it's an almost indescribable honor. I would never grow tired of it, and I feel graced every day. Term Limits Mr. Rose. If you could change the 22d amendment, would you? The President. I don't know. It's probably not fair to ask. On balance, I think the two term tradition has served us well. I'm glad President Roosevelt served the third term, because of the war. But on balance, I think it's served us well. Now, you know, I'm young, and I'm strong, and I'm, as far I know, in good health. I love the job. And so if I could serve again, I probably would. But I think that's the reason we have this limit, so that people like me don't get to make that decision. Laughter Mr. Rose. Are you going to leave a note in that desk over there for your successor, and what will you say? The President. I will, and I don't know what I'll say. But probably most of what I'll say will be predictable. I'll be wishing my successor well and talking a little bit about the job and offering to be available if I can ever be of any help. National Economy Mr. Rose. Prosperity. Economic prosperity and growth has been a hallmark of this Presidency. How long can it last, and will it be a part of our future, our near future? The President. Well, it certainly will be part of our future. Now, how long it will last? The truth is no one knows. I believed when I got here that there was a chance that we could have a very long period of economic growth. Now I couldn't have known, when we started and we started slashing the deficit and investing more in technology, that we would have the longest economic expansion in history that would even outstrip wartime when we had been fully mobilized. And in February we will. But I think that there are some fundamentally different things now. If the Government can follow good policies and the Federal Reserve will follow smart policies, there is this enormous power of productivity we're getting out of the revolution in technology and information technology. It's just now working its way into every sector of the economy, and it's also continually advancing itself. So I think if we can keep that going and if we can keep our markets open, that's very important, not just the exports we sell but the imports we buy, the open market keeps the American economy highly competitive and tends to keep inflation down. And I think that's one of the things that's been under appreciated about this. I never will forget, back in '94 I got really alarmed when lumber prices went way up in a hurry, and I thought homebuilding prices were going to explode. And then all of a sudden, we had this big infusion of less costly imports. Now, we have to work on fair trade rules we've got to have we can't be taken advantage of, as some tried to during the Asian financial crisis, but on balance, these open markets are very good for us. They give us growth and competition, keeps inflation down. And I think that's very good. Globalization and the Technology Gap Mr. Rose. What we want to do here in this conversation is really focus on the future. You've done a number of conversations about this century and your term in office. Thinking about the future and the economic health of the country, there is also this process. In 10 years 10 years ago the wall came down 5 years ago the web went up. Globalization is part of our life. The President. It is. Mr. Rose. Some worry and Seattle might be an indication that we're looking at the possibility of a great gap between a two tier system, between the haves and the have nots of the world, those who get it with technology and those that don't. The President. Well, first of all, the worry is well founded, but it's a constant. That is, we have had a great gap in opportunity, even though it's sometimes closed and sometimes open, but there has been a huge gap between the haves and have nots since the dawn of the industrial revolution and the creation of middle class societies with mass wealth. Some have had it, and others have not ever created it. There is a chance that what will happen now is that it will become more pronounced across countries and within countries because of the advantages that technology literate people and entrepreneurs with access to money will have in a rapidly changing world. That is, it's liable to accelerate. But I would remind you that in the United States we had an increasing gap between the rich and the poor for about 20 years, as we moved into this new economic phase. The same thing happened when we changed from being an agricultural economy to an industrial economy. In the last 2 or 3 years, we started to see the gap close again. And the answer is not to run away from globalization. The answer is to make change our friend. The answer is to have broad access to information and information technology, to have broad based systems of education and health care and family supports in every country, and to continue to try to shape the global economy. You mentioned Seattle. I think that you had a lot of people out there protesting globalization, but they can't reverse it, and it's done a lot more good than bad. It's created over the last 50 years, as the world has become more interconnected, we've moved away from the specter of war as holocaust, even though there have been a lot of smaller wars, and we've seen millions, hundreds of millions of people lifted into the middle class. So the answer is how to make this globalization more human, more humane, and how to shape it so that everybody has a chance to be a part of it. Response to American Hegemony Mr. Rose. Do you hear around the world now, as I'm sure you've heard from heads of state and others, this kind of unilateralist America in the future is too strong, too dominant, and the fear of a backlash against us. The President. I agree with that. And I think I've tried to be very sensitive to that I think we have and to make sure that we fulfilled our responsibilities. I think that, on the one hand, people are glad that we won the cold war, if you will they're glad that the forces of freedom won. All over the world people are embracing democracy and market economics. But if you enjoy the level of military and economic strength we have and the level of political influence, people are going to resent you. And I must say and again, I don't mean to be partisan here, but I think the resentment is deeper when the Congress takes as long as they did to pay our U.N. dues and puts the conditions on it they did, when we don't ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, when we basically preach to other people around the world, you ought to do this, that, or the other thing. But instead of helping them, we continue to have a very large military budget, but we spend the smallest percentage of our income on assistance to other countries to help them succeed economically and politically of any advanced country in the world. So we do some things that breed this resentment. Now, a lot of them resented me at Seattle because they think that when the United States says we ought to have core labor standards and we ought to have good environmental standards in a world trading system, that I'm trying to keep poor countries down, that I just want them to open their markets to us, but they won't get rich because I'm going to try to force them to give up their comparative wage advantage or their ability to grow. That's not true. So some of the resentments against America are not fair. But it's all perfectly understandable. I mean, look how fortunate we are compared to most other countries. and when people get in a tight spot, they want us to come help Bosnia, Kosovo, the Middle East, you name it. Prospects for the 21st Century Mr. Rose. Do you think this century coming up will be America's century, as the 20th century has been described? The President. Well, I think it can be. But I think we have to think very carefully about how we want to define that. I mean, look what we know will happen. We know that, barring some completely unforeseen event, China and, sometime thereafter, India will have economies that look bigger than ours, because they've got so many more people than we do, 4 times as many people in the case of China, even more. We know that Europe will grow more integrated, I think, in the 21st century. And the European Union will be more and more a union. And they have 50 percent more people than we do, and they could have a lot more than that if they continue to bring in other countries. So I do not believe that we will have the relative economic dominance we have today. We've got about 4 percent of the world's people and almost 22 percent of the world's income. But I think we can be still very prosperous. I think we can still be the strongest individual country in the world in many ways. But I think we will have to build partnerships with some of those who resent us now. We will have to have an increasingly interdependent world. Because, whether we like it or not it's like globalization interdependence is another word for globalization we will become more interdependent, and we'll have to learn to be adroit at that. We won't be able to just say, "Well, if we like it, we're here, and if we don't, we'll walk away." We'll have to really work on our partnership skills. Future Allies Mr. Rose. You touched on something that I've thought about. This century was marked by our friends becoming our enemies France and Germany our enemies becoming our friends. Is that going to be part of the 21st century, people we now look on as rivals become friends, friends become The President. I think it is highly likely that some of the people that have been our most recent rivals will be our friends. Mr. Rose. Like? The President. Well, I know a lot of people are very skeptical about Russia now, because of the problems they've had. But they just had a genuinely democratic election with a lot of debate, vigorous opposition, brutal campaign ads, you know, the whole 9 yards. Mr. Rose. Did the results surprise you? The President. No. It's about what I thought they'd be. You know, still only 25 percent of them are voting for the old Communist Party the rest of them are for something else, in spite of the economic hardship that they have faced in the last few years. So I still think there's a chance that if the leaders of Russia define their national greatness in 21st century terms, that is in terms of their ability to unleash the creative capacity of their people rather than their ability to dominate their neighbors, which was their 19th and 20th century definition of greatness, that they will be we'll have a real partnership there. It's also possible that we'll have one with China. Mr. Rose. A partnership? The President. Absolutely. It just depends on how they view us and their own self interest. Future Rivals Mr. Rose. Do you see, on the other hand, people who we might consider friends, like Western Europe, becoming more rivals because The President. I think the only way that would happen is if it were provoked by greater protectionism, economic protectionism outside the borders of Europe. That is Europe could get so big, and they could integrate the economy of Europe, and they'll have a lot of poor countries coming in just like we have poor States and poor regions. If they close their economy, rather than open it, that could be a difficult thing. But I think it's far more likely that our former enemies will become at least friendlier, if we're not friends, and that all of us together will face the enemies of the nation state in the 21st century. Mr. Rose. The enemies of the nation state? The President. Yes. The organized enemies of the nation state that have vast money and vast access to weapons and technology and travel the organized crime syndicates the narcotraffickers the terrorists. And I think the likelihood that all these people will be integrated there may be some rogue states that will support them, but I think you're more likely to see the nation states trying to uphold stability in their national lives, increasingly open and democratic. Even China, I think, will become more open and more democratic. They're already electing mayors in a million little towns, literally. Mr. Rose. In democratic elections? The President. Yes. And so I think by their standards. They don't have a Republican or a Democratic Party like we do, but they are having these elections. I think in the future the likelihood is that nation states will be allied against the enemies of the organized society and the open society. Chemical and Biological Threats Mr. Rose. Do you expect in the next 10, 20 years to be a terrorist attack in the United States, thinking about the recent events, thinking about the potential for germ warfare, the potential for biological attacks, and the potential The President. Oh, absolutely. I think that's a threat. Mr. Rose. A likelihood? The President. Well, I think it's highly likely that someone will try. And keep in mind, the World Trade Center was blown up just a few years ago. We were fortunate to catch the people who did it. Oklahoma City had the terrible explosion. What I think will happen let me back up a minute. I have done everything I could as President to try to organize the permanent Government, the people who will be here when I am gone, and the Congress to deal with the long term threat of biological, chemical, and small scale nuclear war, as well as the increasing sophistication of traditional weapons. And we are doing a massive amount of work now in preparation to try to minimize the chances that it will occur and God forbid if it should occur to try to minimize the impact of it. I think, parenthetically, one of the benefits of our research into the human genome is that we'll be able to analyze these viruses much more quickly and come up with antidotes much more quickly than we used to be able to. Even now, when new strains of diseases whether it's AIDS or anything else come up, we can identify them so much more quickly than we used to be able to. So what I think will happen let me just make this point the organized forces of destruction will take maximum advantage of new technologies and new scientific developments just like democratic societies do. So I think, just like the computers are all being miniaturized and people carry these little pads around that have and now you've got these gadgets where you can use as a telephone or a typewriter, do E mail, and all that. Well, the same miniaturization will apply to biological and chemical weapons. And if people should get nuclear materials that can be made into a bomb, to nuclear materials, which is why we've worked so hard with Russia to control access to that stuff. So we've just got to be ready. There will always be bad guys out there in the world who will try to take advantage of people's vulnerabilities. Mr. Rose. But aren't the odds against us, when you describe that kind of technological advantage I mean, and just recently two people trying in separate cases trying to get inside America's borders with explosives it gets more and more easier to conceal, and more and more the likelihood that an American city The President. Well, if you go back through all of human history and you look at conflicts in weapons systems and that's what we're talking about, biological, chemical weapons offense always precedes defense that is you've got to know what you're defending against. So my goal in this whole thing, trying to mobilize the country on biological, chemical weapons, and make sure the Government is doing everything possible, is to close the gap between offense and defense. And the answer to your question is we won't be severely there might be incidences. I mean, the World Trade Center was blown up Oklahoma City was blown up. We've got a guy in the laboratory in the Middle West, almost 5 years ago, who was trying to develop biological agents, political extremist. Mr. Rose. And there are scary ideas coming out of science, where viruses can attack certain ethnic groups? The President. Yes, there are people that Mr. Rose. The potential of science to do harm is alarming. The President. But you know, it's always been that way. I mean, it's always been that way. And I think that I'm actually more optimistic than keep in mind, no one believes that someone's going to come in and kill everybody in America. That's what we worried about during the cold war. And we still have to deal with these traditional threats. That's why India and Pakistan is perhaps the Kashmiri issue is perhaps the most dangerous one in the world today because you've got two nuclear powers there who are somewhat uncertain about one another and why we have to work hard to avoid that. But yes, there will be problems. Yes, there could be terrible incidences. But I would say to the American people, they should, on balance, be hopeful. But what they should do is to support the leadership of this country in putting maximum resources into research and development so that we're prepared. And I think we will grow increasingly sophisticated in picking these people up, increasingly sophisticated in detecting these weapons, and what we can't afford is to have a long period of time where these offensive capabilities of the new age are better than the defensive capabilities. If we can close the gap between offense and defense, we'll be fine. Mr. Rose. What's interesting about a conversation about the future with you is that because of this office and your curiosity, you see and know more than almost anyone. I mean, you are aware because you talk to the scientists you talk to people responsible. The President. I think about it a lot. Mr. Rose. You do? The President. Sure. I have to. See, I think one of the jobs of the President, because of the unique opportunity of the office you just described it, is to always be thinking about what will happen 10, 20, 30 years from now, and to allocate some time and effort to make decisions for which there will be almost no notice. You know, right now, I mean, hardly anybody reports on or thinks about the work we're doing in biological warfare or chemical warfare the speech I gave at the National Science Foundation but it's fine. It's what my former national security aide, Tony Lake, used to call "the dog that doesn't bark." And there is a sense in which there's a bunch of dogs in this old world you don't want to bark. Mr. Rose. It's the old notion about if the tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did the tree fall? Can you are there things that we don't know about that alarm you, this sense of science and where it's at and what's coming down the pike, that gives you great pause? The President. Well, there are a lot of things that concern me. You know, we've done a lot of work the other thing that, besides the chemical and biological weapons trying to protect computer systems. Year 2000 Problems Mr. Rose. Speak to Y2K. Where are your concerns, and do you think that most of those The President. My concerns, well, they're much more traditional in Y2K. I think we've done a good job here. We've spent a lot of money I say we, the American people, not just the Government, the private sector we've spent a lot of money, tried to be ready. I feel a high level of confidence. It wouldn't bother me a bit to get on a commercial airline, for example, on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day and fly around. I think our systems are in order here. My concerns really are for some of our friends around the world that have more rudimentary computer networks and capacities and whether they will have a shutdown that they won't be able to immediately fix or get around. Mr. Rose. And make them vulnerable to what? The President. Well, if there were problems in the financial system, what if records disappeared and people lost money? That would be destabilizing in some countries. If power systems Mr. Rose. And make them vulnerable to outside forces, to kinds of elements you mentioned earlier? The President. Well, maybe, but I think more internal destabilization. What if a power system shuts down in a big country with a hard winter? How long will it take to get back up before anyone would freeze to death? I mean, these are the kinds of practical problems that I'm concerned about. But I think that I'm talking about something far more insidious, though. What we have to this is, again, offense and defense. What we have to do this technology of computers is changing so fast, and we've got a lot of whizbangs out there, and they can make a ton of money working for bad guys. So what we've got to do is to continuously work on protecting the cyber security, the infrastructure of the information economy, just like we're trying to deal with chemical and biological warfare and the miniaturization of weapons and all this. But most people are good people. We've got plenty of talented people. We just need to be imagining the future, thinking about all the problems as well as all the opportunities, and then prepare. Society always has problems there are always misfortunes. But basically, I believe the future is quite promising and far more exciting than any period in history. I wish I were going to live to be 150 I'd love to see what happens. Possibilities of the Future Mr. Rose. Would you like to be cloned? The President. No. I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Laughter Mr. Rose. There is this thing, too. I mean, think about Chelsea's children, your grandchildren, say the year 2050, whatever the appropriate time might be. What's this world going to look like? Is it going to be more interesting, more challenging? How will we travel what kind of food will we eat will we go to other planets? The President. I think we'll be eating food that's like what we eat now. I think it will be safer. I think we'll know a lot more about it, even safer than it is now. I think that in big, urban areas, I think we'll still have our love affairs with cars. I think they will be much more safe. They'll be made of composite materials that are much more resistant to wrecks. And I think where there is a lot of heavy traffic, I think that we'll all travel by a computerized plan. I also think there will be a lot more rapid rail transit. I think it will be safer. It'll be better, and I think we'll be able to do things while we travel and spend more time. I think we will go into outer space, and at sometime in the next century, I think there will be large, permanent platforms sustaining life in outer space that will basically be jumping off places to distant planets and maybe even beyond. That's what I think will happen. Q. Hold on one second. I know you've got to change tape. Okay. Mr. Rose. You said computerized plan The President. No, I meant cars. You want me to say it again? Mr. Rose. How much time do we have? The President. I just misspoke myself. Mr. Rose. How much time do we have here? The President. I don't know, 10 minutes, 5 minutes? You want to do that again? Mr. Rose. The last question? All right. Okay. Think about the future of your grandchildren, Chelsea's children, the year 2050. What will life be like then? What kind of food what kind of transportation will we be living on other planets? Will we still be concerned about things that concern us now, like overweight, stuff like that? The President. I don't think all of the problems will go away. I think the food will be pretty much like it is now, but even safer. I think that on Earth, we'll travel in automobiles, still, but in traffic jams, we'll have automated systems. I think there will be a lot more high speed rail. I think we'll travel in ways that give us more free time to do things while we travel. I think that there will be large platforms in outer space that will be jumping off places to distant planets, and I think that the biomedical advances will be stunning. I think a lot of cancers will be cured. I think there will be a vaccine for AIDS. I think that the research in the human gene and the revolution, the continuing revolution in microchips will enable people to probably cure spinal cord injuries by having a programmed chip that goes into the spine and replicates all the nerves that were damaged. I think that it'll be a fascinating time. And I think there will be lots and lots of continuous daily communication with people across national and cultural lines. Mr. Rose. Would you go to space if you had the opportunity? The President. I might. I'm real interested in it. I like it a lot. I think it's important. Post Presidential Plans Mr. Rose. What one thing do you most want to accomplish I've got to go when you leave this office? What's the single most important thing for you to accomplish when you leave? The President. You mean, after I'm not President anymore? Mr. Rose. After you're not President. The President. I think the most important thing is for me to be a useful citizen of this country and of this world, because I've had opportunities here only my other living predecessors have had. And I think that for me to be able to continue the work I've done in racial and religious and ethnic reconciliation and trying to convince people that we can grow the global economy and still preserve the environment and trying to empower the poor and the dispossessed, in trying to spread the universal impact of education and use technology to benefit ordinary people, these kinds of things I think I should continue to do this work and trying I want to get young people into public service. I want them to believe this is noble and important work. So I think, in a word, I have to be a good citizen now. That's the most important thing I can do when I leave office is to use the maximum to the maximum extent I can, the knowledge that I have, the experience that I've gained to be a really good citizen. Mr. Rose. Thank you, Mr. President. The President. Thank you. December 22, 1999 Cabinet Room Mr. King. Good evening. We're in the Cabinet Room at the White House in this Christmas season. It's a great pleasure to have as our special guest, as part of our millennium month, the President of the United States, Bill Clinton. Do you spend a lot of time do you have a lot of Cabinet meetings? The President. I do. And I have a lot of other meetings in here, like with individual Cabinet members. I met this week with three or four different Cabinet members and extended staff here. So we have large meetings in here. Mr. King. This room is, like, right off the Oval Office? The President. That's right, right off the Oval Office. Mr. King. Did they plan it that way so the President could run right in and meet with how often do you have Cabinet meetings? The President. I don't have too many full Cabinet meetings, because we have 23 members of the Cabinet plus Chief of Staff. So I have a few of those a year, when we have to do a review and get all geared into one issue or another. But I have a lot of meetings with various Cabinet officials in this room and with maybe more than one who are all working on a common project. Year 2000 Problems Mr. King. We have a lot to talk about, and I want to get an overview as we look ahead to this millennium but cover some current things. I guess the thing everybody is talking about is, should we be frightened? That's the basis of the State Department yesterday should we travel should we stay home? We're told the Cabinet members have been asked to stay home or stay in Washington. Is that true? The President. The Cabinet members are staying here, but it's really just as a precaution, because we feel a high level of confidence about where we are with the Y2K problems. We've been working on this for years. We've spent a lot of money on it we've tried to get all the private sector involved. All the big systems in this country, I think airline travel, banking systems, electrical systems, Social Security checks all those things I think are in good shape. We're here partly as a precaution and partly so, if any of our friends in other parts of the world have any trouble, we can all be there to give whatever help we can. Year 2000 Terrorism Mr. King. And how about the terrorism threat, where people are asked to be careful, especially overseas, and we have these arrests occurring in Washington and Vermont? The President. Well, what I would say to the American people about that is that we know that at the millennium, a lot of people who may even be a little crazy by our standards or may have a political point to make, may try to take advantage of it. So we are on a heightened state of alert. We're working very hard on it. No one can guarantee that nothing will happen. But all I can say is we're working very hard. And my advice to the American people would be to go on about their business and do what they would intend to do at the holiday season but to be a little more aware of people and places where they find themselves. And if you see something suspicious, well, call us and let us know. Call the authorities. We're working very, very hard on this. And if it were me, I would not just refrain from activities. I'm going to go out and do my Christmas shopping. I'm going to do what I normally do. Mr. King. Are you saying if you have a hunch about something, go to the hunch? The President. If you have a hunch about something, if you see something that's suspicious, you should report it, just to make sure that we do everything we possibly can to maximize our protection. But I wouldn't just hunker down until it was all over. Mr. King. Colin Powell says that maybe by doing all this, you've scared them off. You know, if you make people fear the alert so much, that might cause terrorists to have a second thought. The President. Well, they should have a second thought, because we're working it hard. Mr. King. In cooperation with other nations? The President. Absolutely. Vice President Al Gore's Offer To Debate Mr. King. All right. Let's discuss some things political one of your main you know that. Do you agree with Al Gore's request to have debates? "Forget all the advertising. Let's debate." The President. Well, I think it's an interesting idea. I don't want to get into handicapping the campaign. I think that the more debates they have, the better. I'm very proud to be a member of my party when I see those two debate. They're smart. They have their ideas. You know I favor the Vice President and not just because I feel personally loyal to him. I think he's been by light years the best Vice President this country has ever had, by a long, long way. But I think the fact that he and Bill Bradley are out there talking about education they're talking about health care they're talking about biomedical research and they know what they're talking about and they've thought about these things I think it's a very substantive, good thing. And that's what I think elections ought to be about, so I'm proud of that. Mr. King. Were you surprised at the idea, though, to say, let's forget you know, Goldwater and Kennedy were going to do that. The President. I was surprised. And I must say I find it quite interesting. I was intrigued by it. If someone had offered me that in 1992, I probably would have done it. Mr. King. Would have taken it? The President. Yes, probably, because I think we need to find out whether we can have elections without the kind of money that they cost today, and we can't have them without that kind of money unless people can have access, the candidates can have access to the voters. That is, what costs all the money is access to the voters. Mr. King. Barry Goldwater had told me that he and John Kennedy had arranged that if Goldwater would be the nominee in '64, had Kennedy lived, they were going to travel around together. The President. I think it would have been wonderful. I still think it would be great. And I'd like to see it happen in a general election. I don't think it's necessary for the voters to be for one person but think that the other person is a bad person. And I think it's very bad development in our politics. I think it's one reason that the voting percentage goes down people think, ugh. So if there could be a way to be more and more debates, not only now but in the general election, I think it would be a good thing for American democracy. I did three last time and three the time before, but I would have done six or seven or however many. I believe in this. Candidate Bill Bradley Mr. King. You say, of course, you're supporting your Vice President. What do you think of Bill Bradley, though? The President. Oh, I've known him for many years. I like him. He's a very smart man. He's had a very interesting life, and he's got an interesting take on things. Mr. King. Do you ever think they might run together? The President. They'd be a good ticket. Laughter It would be a good ticket. Challenges of a Vice Presidential Campaign Mr. King. Kennedy could run with Johnson. You picked a man from a neighboring State to run with you. Do you understand the difficulty of a Vice President running? The President. Yes. Mr. King. That's not easy, is it? The President. No. But it gets easier as time goes on and people focus on it. And it's easier now than it was 100 years ago, I think. But I think that, as I said, when Harry Truman became President, he didn't even know about the atomic bomb. Mr. King. Did not. The President. And we had already lost five or six Presidents in office by the time he became President. Since then, there has been an increasing level of seriousness given to the job. Lyndon Johnson was a major figure, and Richard Nixon was a major figure. Both of them had responsibility in office. Then President Carter upped the ante more Vice President Mondale had far more responsibility than anybody had before. President Reagan, to his credit, gave President Bush a lot of responsibility. But no Vice President has ever had the range of responsibility and the level of achievement, accordingly, that Al Gore has had, whether it was in our technology policy, our environmental policy, our foreign policy, the economic empowerment of poor areas. I could just go on and on. Mr. King. So there is nothing he isn't abreast of? The President. No. Mr. King. If something happened to you, there's not surprise we have to tell him? The President. No. There would be nothing if something were to happen to me tonight, he could become President, and there would be nothing he wouldn't know, no person he hadn't met, no issue he hadn't dealt with. Mr. King. We'll be right back with the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, at this Christmas season. Don't go away. At this point, CNN took a commercial break. Trade Debate and the Seattle Round Mr. King. Speaking of debates, it was Vice President Gore's idea, we just reminded each other, to debate Perot. And I understand you were the only one here that agreed with that. The President. In the beginning. Mr. King. There was a lot of disagreement. The President. They all thought there was a lot of downside to it. But I wish we had more debates in recent years on trade policy, because it's such a controversial thing. Everybody is for selling more of our exports. Everybody has the feeling, because we have a big trade deficit, that people take advantage of us. People are worried about losing their jobs, even though the unemployment rate is at a 30 year low. And I think we need to continue to debate this. I wish we had more of them. I hope there will be some trade debates in this election. Mr. King. Did Seattle throw you, Mr. President? I ask that because Governor Bush was with us last week, and he agrees completely with you on the trade issue, but he said he thought I'm paraphrasing that you kind of copped out, that you didn't forcefully attack those people who were demonstrating you sort of rode the middle. The President. Well, first of all, I attacked those who were violent in no uncertain terms. And I said to those who were demonstrating for a cleaner environment or for decent labor standards that I thought their concerns were legitimate but their opposition to the trade agreement was wrong. And that's what I believe. And I think that we're a little different on that. I mean, I strongly agree, and most Republicans that apparently agree with me that we ought to have expanded trade. We benefit, not just from the exports we also benefit from the influence. You've got an time, so do I. We benefit in that an open market enables us to grow and still have to compete, and that keeps inflation down. One of the reasons in February we're going to have the longest economic expansion in the history of the country, and we did it with three things. We did it with getting rid of the debt deficit we did it with investing in technology and people and we did it with opening our borders in trading and continuing to compete, because usually, when you have this kind of economic growth, inflation takes over and kills the recovery. That hasn't happened. So I think this is very important. But the difference between me and most Republicans is that I believe that globalization is inevitable. But people are scared of all this change, and what we have to do is to convince them that change can be their friend. And the way to do it is to say, "Okay, we're going to compete, and we're going to win over the long run, and we're going to win in the short run. But we should grow the economy in a way that improves the environment, and we should do it in a way that respects core labor standards no forced labor, no child labor, no abusive working conditions." Mr. King. Did Seattle surprise you? The President. No. I think I knew there would be a lot of people there. I was surprised the first night at the level of violence. I didn't know that there would be so many, basically, creeps there who would try to Mr. King. Who instigated it, you mean? The President. Yes, throw rocks there was just a very small percentage of those thousands of people who were doing this. There were probably a couple of hundred people who were prepared to throw rocks at stores and take other violent action. Most of them were there to express their opposition to some aspect or another of this process of globalization, but they cannot turn the clock back. The world is better off than it would have been if we hadn't had 50 years of increasing economic integration, and America has won big these last 7 years by being involved. And we are making a huge mistake, in my judgment, if we don't continue to both expand trade and work for better core labor standards in a better environment. Mr. King. Do the unions then not understand this? They're the biggest supporters your party has the trade unions in America have been. The President. They're divided. If you look at Seattle, for example, there are 170,000 union members in and around Seattle. And most of them have jobs in part because their companies are so tied to trade. I went to York, Pennsylvania, the other day to the Harley Davidson motorcycle factory, something most at least most guys and an increasing number of women can identify with. They've got a year's backlog, and 25 percent of the Harleys are sold overseas, and the biggest foreign market is now Japan, which makes the only competitors to Harley and motorcycles. So I think it just depends. Some unions feel that their jobs might be undercut by the importation of textile or clothing goods or shoes or whatever, but on balance, we have won big as a country by opening our markets, showing we're not afraid to compete, and asking others to open their markets, too, to be fair, whether it's farmers or manufacturers or people in entertainment or people in the information technology business. Final Year of the President's Term Mr. King. Is it tough going into a last year? I ask that because we sat together here quite a few times. I remember once we were looking out, and you said to me, "You know, my bad days are good days." The President. Absolutely. I love this job. Mr. King. You love this job. The President. I do. Mr. King. You The President. And I'll miss it. People ask me all the time, "What will you miss most? Will it be living in the White House, going to Camp David, getting on Air Force One?" The job is what I'll miss most, the work. There is no place in the world where you can come in contact with so many different kinds of people and so many different kinds of issues and have so much opportunity to do good or stop bad things from happening. But the hard thing about it now is you want to do everything, and you have to be disciplined. You have to figure out what can I do? What can I put out there that the country ought to do that maybe can't be done while I'm here? I never want to sleep. I realize the days are going by, and I just want to keep working. I just want to do everything I can. Mr. King. We'll be back with the working President right after this. At this point, CNN took a commercial break. Gays in the Military Mr. King. We are reevaluating, are we, "don't ask, don't tell?" The President. Well, I think the candidates are. A lot of them are saying it should be changed. Mr. King. What do you think? The President. I tried to have a different policy. I tried to say gays should be able to serve in the military Mr. King. Period? The President. Without lying about it. But if the military code of justice says that homosexual acts are illegal, if they keep it, then they'd have to observe that. But when we went to "don't ask, don't tell," it was all we could get through the Congress. The Congress had a vetoproof majority to reverse the policy I recommended. Now a new administration and new Members of Congress, they're free to do something different. What we're doing now in August, we issued some new guidelines to try to correct some of the abuses, because the policy, as it was articulated in '93, has been often abused, and that's what's led to some of these expulsions, some of this harassment. The Secretary of Defense is absolutely committed to faithfully implementing the policy. It's really "don't ask, don't tell," don't pursue, under those circumstances. Mr. King. So it's not the policy that's wrong? The President. No, I didn't say that. I recommended a different policy, but the policy is better than the results. That is, if the policy were faithfully applied, we would not have many of the problems that we've had these last few years. And I think the Secretary of Defense and the leadership of the Pentagon is now with these new guidelines and with the work they're doing to try to make sure people are trained and they understand they're not supposed to go in and harass people and what can and cannot trigger an inquiry, I think we can make it better now. Gay and Lesbian Rights Mr. King. How much we know about your interest and the gains we've made in the racial area and still a long way to go. How are we doing in that area, in the homosexual area in this country, with regards to acceptance, do you think? The President. I think we've come a long way. We're a long way from where we were just in '92 and '93. I think vast majorities of the American people support hate crimes legislation that protects gays as well as people with different racial and religious backgrounds. I think most Americans strongly support nondiscrimination in the workplace and would vote for the employment nondiscrimination act if they were in Congress. I hope that the Congress will vote for it this year, this next year. I think that the real problem, I still believe, is the absence of open, personal contact. I think Mr. King. We don't know it The President. I think there are too many people who don't know gay men and lesbian women in the ordinary course of their lives, and they don't see that there are people who their friends, their sisters, their brothers, their sons, their daughters, their co workers, and that it is my judgment is it's not a lifestyle people choose. It is the way people are. It's too hard it's too hard a life for people to just up and Mr. King. Why choose it? The President. up and choose it. I think that and I think that my view is that every American that works hard, obeys the law, plays by the rules ought to be treated with dignity and respect and have a part in our American family. That's what I believe. Mr. King. Do you agree with the Vermont judiciary that while marriage may be wrong, they are entitled, couples who live together who are gay, to equal benefits? The President. I do. I think that's a good thing. That's always been my position, that you've got gay couples that, for example, have been together for years now. One of them and I'm beginning to think about this, because I'm moving into this age bracket now one of them has a heart attack one of them gets sick one of them is in the intensive care unit in the hospital and only family members can come in and sometimes they're not allowed in that kind of thing. You know, I think that, in terms of health care coverage at work or in terms of property and willing of property to your closest family member, that sort of thing, I think they ought to be able to do that. Mr. King. But not marry? The President. Well, marriage in our culture and to me has a certain connotation, meaning for me, that has not gotten me to where I could accept that, because I think it's basically a union for the purpose of, among other things, having children, and so that's why I've never supported the term of marriage, although there are a lot of increasing numbers of people, even in the clergy, who believe that they should be able to do that. Mr. King. We'll be back with more of President Clinton. We've got an overview here on the millennium and some other things after this. At this point, CNN took a commercial break. Reimbursement of Legal Fees Mr. King. We're in the Cabinet Room at the White House with President Clinton. Touch some other bases. The Washington Post said that you're applying to the Government to reimburse for legal fees. True? The President. That's not true. Mr. King. Not true? The President. Not true. I've never I've never considered doing that. Mr. King. So where did that story come from? The President. I think it was leaked from the Independent Counsel's Office. That's the way the story read to me. But Mr. King. You don't want The President. I think that they've cost the taxpayers enough money already. Mr. King. So even if you were entitled legally The President. I may be entitled to it, but my instinct is not to do it. But I've really never had a discussion about it. My instinct is not to do it. I've been very fortunate. I've had this legal defense fund people have helped me pay for my legal fees. The travesty in this thing is the way the law is written. You can only get your legal fees if you're a target of an investigation but you're not charged. So if you're charged and acquitted, you can't get them, and if you never were a target, you can't get them. So the thing that I think is just tragic is you have no idea how many completely innocent people that were harassed repeatedly and called into hearings and called into this, that, and the other thing. Everybody knew they never did anything wrong, but I mean, not just one interview which you could understand but over and over and over again, so that they have these massive legal bills, and they're not eligible for any reimbursement at all. So I've been trying to figure out how to help them pay their legal bills. That's what I wish I could apply for. I wish there was some fund where I could get some money for them to pay their bills, because a lot of these people, they're not President they're not like me they can't have a legal defense fund that would pay their bills off. Independent Counsel's Investigation Mr. King. How did you emotionally hold up through all that? The President. I'm here. Laughter Mr. King. I know. What is it? Some sort of inner thing in you, get up off the floor, the comeback kid approach? Is that part of your structure? Where does that come from? The President. I think there are two things, really. One is what you said. All my life, I was raised to believe that you should never give in and never give up. If somebody hits you and knocks you down, you were supposed to get up, not give up. And I also deeply believed one thing I knew, the Whitewater thing was a total fraud, and I thought the people who were pursuing it knew it was a fraud at some point. They had to, especially 4 something years ago, when the Government report came out, the RTC report saying that neither my wife or I had done anything wrong and had detailed millions of dollars in explanations showing that. The other thing was that I'm in the last couple of years, I had to come to terms with a lot of things. I prayed a lot I thought a lot I sought a lot of advice. I had a lot of help from really good people, here and around the world. A lot of the people I served with, world leaders, called and talked to me. Mr. King. Are you surprised at that? The President. I was touched by it beyond belief. Some of the conversations I had with people like Nelson Mandela, I've carried with me all my life. It's just unbelievable. Mr. King. They were there for you? The President. Yes. Mr. King. And that was part of the The President. But here but also, letters I got from, you know, kids around America. You wouldn't believe the letters I got from Mr. King. Really? The President. Yes, unbelievable letters. And letters I got from religious leaders and people that taught philosophy and thought about these things. It was just and I also had a lot of counseling, a lot of help from these ministers who came in and met with me, and my wife and daughter had a lot to do with it. Hillary and Chelsea had a lot to do with it. Former Advisers in the Media Mr. King. Are you hurt by the Dick Morrises, the Stephanopouloses who write books, who write columns, become part of the media sometimes, in Morris's case, often a very critical a guy you were pretty close to? Does that hurt you? The President. Well, first of all, I am very grateful for the overwhelming loyalty that I've enjoyed from people who could have made a lot of money by dumping on me because that's what sells and the kind of media culture they were in. And I have enjoyed an extraordinary degree of it. I've also had a lot of stability. A lot of people have stayed with me the whole time. So let me start with my gratitude. When Dick first started going on television and saying those things, he used to call somebody here in the office and apologize in advance and just say, "You know, I've got to do this. It's the only way I can get on television." Mr. King. Really? The President. Oh, sure. I mean, it's a game. It's a game. I know that. And so it's hard for me to take it seriously. I think that a lot of the things that he has said, he knows downright aren't true, and I feel bad for him because I think you pay a terrible price when you do that over and over and over again. Mr. King. You feel bad for him? The President. Yes, I do. I feel really bad for him. Mr. King. He's attacked your wife a lot, too. The President. Yes. And he's said a lot of things that he just knows aren't so. And so I feel badly for him. But I don't I can't be mad at him. With George, it's a different story. I think he's a brilliant man and basically a good person. But when George entered politics, he entered as a boy wonder. He came right in with Dick Gephardt, you know, and he assumed great responsibilities because he's a person of he works like crazy, and he's smart, and he's basically good hearted in a lot of ways. But he was, I think, always affected by being basically a Washington politician. I remember when I was attacked in the New Hampshire primary, and everybody said, "He's dead, and he ought to get out," and all that, George was asking, "Well, should we withdraw?" And James Carville and I, who grew up in the country, you know, out there with the folks, we looked at him and said, "George, if the people want me to withdraw, they will withdraw me at election time. That's what you've got elections for." And I think that I think he's probably more comfortable now being a part of the professional critics of the Washington establishment, the media establishment. I think that's where he's I think he's comfortable there. That's where he started in politics, and I think that's just where he is. Criticism of the President Mr. King. Do those pundits in general bother do they get at you? Some guy Truman wrote that famous note when he got mad. Some people let it slide off. The President. I've got that note, you know. Mr. King. You have the actual note? The President. Yes. One of the great little stories of my Presidency is Steve Forbes gave me that letter that Truman wrote. Mr. King. Steve Forbes? The President. I've always been grateful to him. Mr. King. SOB he called that writer. The President. Yes, he said, "You'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a" laughter Mr. King. Do you ever watch "Larry King Live" or "Meet The Press" or somebody do you get mad? The President. No, the truth is I never watch them. I never watch the Sunday talk shows. Mr. King. You don't watch Sunday morning? The President. Never. And the only time I ever see any of these other programs is if I'm channel surfing late at night and I happen to run into them. I watch your program sometimes when you're interviewing somebody I want to hear from. Mr. King. But basically, you don't turn on "Meet The Press" or The President. Never. Never. And if I did, what good would that do me? I mean Mr. King. Except make you mad. The President. Yes. If someone if I read a column, like an op ed column, of someone who says, I think the Clinton administration policy is all wet on this for these reasons, I read that, because Benjamin Franklin said, "Our critics are our friends. They show us our faults." But I cannot you can't afford to be angry as President. If you're angry all the time over things people say about you you can be angry about what happens to the American people. But if you're angry about what happens to you, then you're wasting a lot of time and emotional energy that belongs to the American people. And you're not going to make good decisions. So nothing really good can come with that. Mr. King. You really feel like an employee of the people? The President. Yes. Mr. King. We'll be back with some more moments with President Clinton from the Cabinet Room in the White House. Don't go away. At this point, CNN took a commercial break. President's Legacy Mr. King. We're back with President Clinton. I want to read something that was given to me today. The last time not the last time, we've been together many times, but the night Vince Foster died, you were on television together, in this building. We were the last two to know about it. The President. Yes. We were going to go another half hour, and McLarty came on and said, "You can't do it." Mr. King. Mack McLarty came in and said, "You've got to get off now." And you were mad. Why? Because you even said, "Am I not doing well?" But anyway, that aside, the last question to you that night was called in by someone asking you, even though you had only been a year, less than a year in office, what do you think your legacy will be? Here's what you said "I'll be happy to tell you. Number one, I'd like to get the economy moving again." This is 6 years ago. "Number two, I'd like to provide health security for all Americans. Number three, I want my national service plan to pass to open doors of college education to millions of Americans. Number four, I strongly want to pass a welfare reform bill that will move people from welfare to work. And five, I want to reform the political system." Reading this, how have you done? The President. We've done well. Mr. King. Three out of five. The President. Yes. And we've made we've done some really good things in health care we just haven't been able to have universal access. And I finally got I'm very proud of this we had 100 percent of my party vote for the McCain Feingold campaign finance reform. So we now have unified the Democratic Party for our campaign finance reform, and it's just a question of whether the other party will come along now. So I think that will happen. I feel very good about what's happened these last 6 years. We've done a lot of other things as well, and we've been able to advance the cause of peace in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Balkans. President's Disappointment Mr. King. Biggest disappointment? The President. I don't know what the biggest disappointment is. I'm sorry we were not able to have more progress in health care, but we may have some this year. The main thing is I feel this enormous gratitude because I think our country is ending this century on such a high note, and I really do think we built our bridge to the 21st century. Hillary Clinton's Senate Campaign Mr. King. And are you going to campaign for Hillary? The President. If she wants me to, and if I can be helpful, I am. But I think that there's a time for that. I think in the beginning people want to know who she is, what she believes, what she will do as a Senator, and they'll want to see her. And I need to be as supportive of her as I can. There will come a time when I can perhaps help her in the campaign. The people of New York have been wonderful to me, and I'm very grateful for that. But they want to make an independent judgment about her, so I have to be careful about when I do it and how I do it. But if and when I can help, I will do whatever I can to help, because first of all, for her, I want her to win. But secondly, she would be absolutely unbelievable if she were a Senator. I mean, it would be unbelievable. It would be such a gift for the people of New York and America. I've never known anybody, ever, who had her combination of intellect and passion and organizing ability and absolutely consuming devotion to public service. Mr. King. Our common friends in California tell me you were going to move to New York, you and Hillary, no matter what. The President. That's correct. She told me when we got elected in '92, I said, "Okay, ever since we've been married, we've lived where I wanted to live we've done what I wanted to do. Now, when we get out of here, I've got to go home I'm going to build my library and build my center, but that's my gift to my State. And I'm going to spend some time there, and we'll spend the rest of the time wherever you want to say." And she said, "I want to go to New York." That's what she told me when we moved up here. I bet it was the first week or 2 we were here. Mr. King. Seven years ago. The President. Yes. Mr. King. Happy holidays. The President. Thank you. December 22, 1999 Terrorist Activities Q. Mr. President, how concerned should Americans be about terrorist attacks in the U.S. as we approach the new year? The President. Well, because of the incident which has been widely reported, we, the authorities, are on a higher level of alert. For the citizens, I would say they ought to go about their holidays and enjoy themselves and make the most of it. But I would ask them to just be aware of their circumstances, and if they see anything suspicious to report it immediately, and meanwhile, to know that we are doing everything we possibly can. We're taking extraordinary efforts in the Government to act, based on the incident out in the Pacific Northwest and what we know, and we're going forward. I don't think the American people should stop their holiday activities. I think they ought to go on and enjoy the season. But because we, the Government, are taking extra steps and we're on alert, I think it would be good for them and good for us if they would just be careful and not suspicious but aware aware of their circumstances, and if they see anything that doesn't look right, to report it to us. And if they do that, I think we'll have a good holiday, and I think we'll maximize our safety. December 10, 1999 Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Shelby and thank you, Joe, for your leadership. They've both been friends of mine a long time, and it's good to see this chamber so well led. And thank you, Joe, for your pledge of support. Congratulations to Bob and to Beverly on the well deserved award. I'm delighted to be up here with Dr. Reed and Jesse and Janet, and to be here with all of you. I thank Senator Pryor and Congressman Snyder for joining me, and Mayor Dailey. I think our speaker, Bob Johnson, is here, and I was accompanied this morning by Secretary Riley, the Secretary of Education, from Washington, and Rodney Slater, the Secretary of Transportation. I thank them for coming with me. I want to thank you for this award. Herschel Friday was a friend of mine. I was sitting here, racing through my mind, over all the things he asked me to do over the 12 years I was Governor, all the time there was one more emergency at Oak Lawn Park, which he and I had a vested interest in. I don't know if Beth Friday is here, but I want to thank them both for their friendship, and thank you for this award. And Beth, if you're here, I love you, and I'm glad to see you. Thank you. I also want to thank the Philander Smith choir. You know, whenever I have to take a trip, I stay up late the night before, and I try to get all the work done that I might have done in the office if I had stayed there. I talked to Hillary last night for the last time about 1 o'clock in the morning. She said to tell you hello, and she's doing well, and Chelsea's doing fine. But anyway, when I got up this morning, I was a little tired. I walked in here, and I heard the Philander choir singing, and I'm ready to speak now. Laughter U.S Military Aircraft Tragedies Let me say something I'm sure a lot of you know, but this is my first opportunity to speak to the press today. I want to express my profound sadness for the crash of the C 130 that flew out of the Little Rock Air Force Base, crashed in Kuwait last night with 96 people were on board 3 were killed 21 were injured. They were trying to land in terrible, terrible weather. And I thank them for their service, and I extend my deepest condolences to the families of those who were lost. We also lost a helicopter off the coast of San Diego yesterday with 18 people aboard 11 were recovered safely. We have not recovered the other seven, and our thoughts and prayers are with them. I say this just to make a simple point, that you might mention the next time you see someone in uniform. We do not have to be at war for that to be dangerous work. Most people have no earthly idea how dangerous it is to fly those fast planes and to fire those powerful weapons and to undergo the rigorous training that they have to undergo. We are richly repaid for it. We didn't lose a single pilot in combat in the action in Kosovo, but it is inherently dangerous work. So when you see some people from the air base, thank them for putting their lives on the line for the rest of us every day. Chamber of Commerce Shelby mentioned a couple of times that I have worked very closely with this chamber for a long time. I don't know how many times I went to your old building trying to hustle some business for the greater Little Rock area or deal with some issue that was before us in common. I think you picked the right changes there are big I mean, the right theme. There are big changes coming. And the pace of change will only accelerate in the years ahead. I love the logo. I asked Shelby who designed the logo, and he told me, and congratulations to you. I think that what I would like to do today is to talk a little about the library and, first, a little about the last 7 years and the next 14 months that I have left to serve as your President. I want to begin by thanking the people of Arkansas who gave me the chance to serve for a dozen years as Governor, without which I could never have become President, who gave me the chance to learn over those dozen years what makes things really work, which is very often not what dominates the headline, the time, and the energy and the emotions of people in Washington. I want to thank those who serve in this administration. We have been so blessed. I want to begin by mentioning Mack McLarty, who came down with me today. He was my first Chief of Staff he oversaw the passage, by a single vote in both Houses, of the '93 economic plan, which was the single most important thing that gave us this economic boom, that got rid of that deficit, that drove the interest rates down, and got investment up in this country. He also oversaw the passage of NAFTA, the Brady bill, the family and medical leave law, and set in motion a teamwork that, according to one Harvard scholar, he said I had the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second administration. That is in no small measure because of the leadership that Mack McLarty gave to the White House in those early days. And I thank him for it, and equally, for his later work as our Special Envoy to Latin America, where we have reestablished ties that had been too long neglected with so many countries. I want to thank Secretary Slater, who is here with me today James Lee Witt, the most popular FEMA Director in the history of the country Bob Nash Bruce Lindsey Nancy Hernreich, who came down with me today Mel French, our Protocol Ambassador Janis Kearney Carl Whillock, who came with me today, the farmers' advocate in the Department of Agriculture Mike Gaines now runs the Federal Parole Commission my scheduler, Stephanie Streett Carol Rasco, my former Domestic Policy Adviser, now runs the national America Reads program, has over a thousand colleges in America with young people volunteering to go into the grade schools and make sure every child can read independently by the age of 8 Brady Anderson from Helena a lot of you know him is now the Director of the Agency for International Development, the most important agency in the Federal Government in dealing with the poor countries of the world Craig Smith was my political director and had a number of other important jobs in the White House probably the least political person to work with us from any State Hershel Gober, the Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs young Kris Engskov from Berryville is here with me today. I first met him when he was 4 years old. Now he's my personal aide. So between Kris and Nancy, at least Arkansas still runs most of my life. There are literally scores of others I might mention from our State who have come to Washington, who are never noted in the press but who serve with real distinction, and I am grateful for them. And you should be proud of them. Now let me just take a minute to sort of walk back through memory lane. In October of 1991, when I declared for President on the steps of the old State House, I did it because I became convinced that there was a limit to what Arkansas could do unless America changed direction and because I really felt that our country had an enormous potential to make the most of these big changes we've been talking about. But it was a time of economic distress, social decline, deep political division, and the whole enterprise of Government had been profoundly discredited. It's almost impossible to remember what it was like just a few short years ago. I felt, based on what I had learned working with you, that the country ought to work more like we tried to work. Yes, we'd have our political differences yes, we'd fight at election time sometimes, we'd fight in between but that we ought to have a unifying theory of the public's business. And so I asked the American people to give me a chance, along with Vice President Gore, to implement a vision of opportunity for every responsible American, to challenge every citizen to be responsible, and to build a community that involved all of our people in a world where America was still the leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity. And we battled through the politics we battled through a whole flurry of special interests we battled through our fair share of mistakes but we never forgot who we were working for or what the mission was. And I hope that all of you, without whom I would never have become President, can take some pride in the results. We have the longest peacetime expansion in our history. In February it will become the longest economic expansion ever, including that which embraced World War II. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the highest homeownership in history. We have the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded, the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, the lowest poverty rate among single parent households in 46 years, the first backto back balanced budgets and surpluses in 42 years, and the Federal Government is now the smallest it's been in 37 years. It worked, and I thank you. Along the way, the society got stronger. We have the lowest crime rate in 25 years, and I might add the Brady bill background checks stopped 470,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers who shouldn't have gotten handguns from buying them, and not single Arkansan missed a day in the deer woods because of it. About 20 million people have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law. I meant to ask Secretary Riley and forgot to, how many millions, but as many millions of young people are now getting the HOPE scholarship, the 1,500 tax credit, which effectively makes community college available for 100 percent of the people in America today. Ninety percent of our kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases. In 1994, when the Vice President and I said we wanted to connect all our classrooms and schools to the Internet, 3 percent of our classrooms and 14 percent of our schools had some Internet connection. Today, over 50 percent of our classrooms and over 80 percent of our schools are connected, and we'll be over 90 percent in the new millennium. This is changing the nature of opportunity in America. I also know that something that's been very interesting here that the Governor and others have been interested in this State is providing health insurance to children. There are 2 million more children with health insurance under the Child Health Insurance Partnership we formed with the States in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, something that's very important to Hillary. In the last budget, we provided funds to help the hospitals who are unduly burdened by the Medicare cuts and provide special funds to train young doctors at children's hospitals throughout America, something that will really help the Arkansas Children's Hospital here, and we're very proud of that. While the economy got better, the air got cleaner the water got cleaner. We set aside more land in protected areas than any administration in the entire history of the country except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. And here's something you might like to know that you deserve more credit for, the people do, than our particular administration, although we have accelerated it quite a bit The United States, in the production of the volume of waste of all kinds, whether it's what you throw away in the garbage at home or in industrial prospects, is at a 20 year low, even though we have 50 million more people than we had 20 years ago. We are the number one recycling nation in the entire world now, and you can be proud of that. We've also had 150,000 young people serve our communities in AmeriCorps, like those I met just down the block from the Governor's mansion when the terrible tornado whipped through Little Rock not very long ago. America has been able to be a force for peace and prosperity in the world. We've had over 270 trade agreements. We just saw another successful move in our long efforts to bring peace to Northern Ireland. I announced a couple of days ago that the Israelis and the Syrians would come back to the United States next week, after 4 long years of not talking, to try to finish the work of making a lasting peace in the Middle East. That's a pretty good Christmas legacy to give, and I'm thrilled about that. We have worked to make our children safer from the kind of problems that will dominate the 21st century the ethnic and racial cleansing and religious cleansing you saw in Bosnia and Kosovo the presence of terrorism and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. And I can say to you today, after 7 years, I am grateful that I've had the chance to serve. I am more convinced than I was when I went there that we had the right mission with the right ideas. And I am absolutely convinced that I never would have been able to do what I have done to play my part in this remarkable renaissance if I hadn't had the dozen years I had working with all of you as Governor. And I thank you for that. Now I'd also like to say that I get a little nervous when I get awards. Normally, I don't think Presidents should get awards, at least when they're alive. Laughter I mean, the job is honor enough. Although, I must say, I like this one. I'm going to put it up in the White House. But I think it's important to remember that a significant chunk of the time that I have been given to serve is still out there. They said we wouldn't get anything done this year, and then at the end of the budget session we had 100,000 more teachers to bring smaller classes to the early grades we had 50,000 more police to keep the crime rate coming down we had 60,000 housing vouchers to help people move from welfare to work and find a place to live, to keep the welfare rolls coming down we doubled the amount of funds for after school programs, something that's really important to increase learning and keep our kids off the street when they may not have any adult supervision. For the first time I got the Congress to give me some money to give States to identify schools that are failing and turn them around or shut them down, something I think is very important. There are a lot of things I tried to do I didn't pass the Patients' Bill of Rights, the minimum wage, the hate crimes legislation, aid for school construction. I'll try to get them next year. I think Arkansas has done well in these last 7 years. You know, the whole time I was Governor, we went through that terrible time in the eighties when we had a bicoastal economy and the country looked like it was doing well, but the middle of the country wasn't. And then we had the recession that everybody suffered through. Not a single month I had one month the whole time I was Governor, until 1992 when I ran for President, only one month when our unemployment rate was below the national average. Then it got down below the national average in 1992 because, I think, of the accumulated efforts that a lot of us made over many years. In 1992 we ranked first or second I never saw the final figures in job growth in the entire country. But the unemployment rate was 6.7 percent when I took office, and it's 4.3 percent today here. And in many other ways I think you've done well. I could mention some specific things, but I'd like to talk about the general things. The average Arkansas family now has 25,000 less Federal debt than you would have had if we hadn't passed the economic plan in '93 and the Balanced Budget Act in '97. The average family in this State and throughout the country, paying a home mortgage, has interest costs that are about 2,000 a year lower. The average car payment or college loan payment is about 200 a year lower. This had made a difference in real people's lives. And as I look at the next 14 months, and as you as citizens look at the coming election season, I just want to ask you, without regard to your party, to think about this What are we going to do with our prosperity? Over Thanksgiving, Hillary and I gathered up everybody in our flung families we could we brought them all in, and then after Thanksgiving, we had some more friends come in to Camp David and had a bunch of little kids there. I just love having them all around, my two nephews and a bunch of other little kids. And this 6 year old girl looked at me on Saturday after Thanksgiving she looked at me and she said, "Now, Mr. President, how old are you, really?" Laughter And I said, "I'm 53." And she said, "That's a lot." Laughter And regrettably, I had to agree with her. Here's what I want to say about that. In my lifetime, in those 53 years, there has never been another time, not one, when our country had this level of economic prosperity, this level of social progress, this level of national self confidence, with the absence of a crisis at home or a threat from abroad. Never. Now, a lot of us who are old enough to remember the 1960's, remember how good the economy was in the early sixties in the country, and how it was torn apart because of our inability to fully integrate the civil rights challenge at home and deal with Vietnam abroad. This has never happened before. So the question before us is, what are we going to do with it? And as a citizen, I care about that as well as a President. I think there is a heavy responsibility on us, not just the President and the Congress and not just people in Government but the whole country. We have never had this happen, and you know as well as I do that nothing lasts forever. It keeps you going through the tough times, but it's important to remember in the good times. Here we are, on the edge of a new millennium with the first opportunity in our lifetime as a country to really shape the future of our dreams for our children. And I hope and pray that I can devote every waking minute of the last 14 months of my Presidency and that the American people will devote their energies and concentration in their own lives and their vote as citizens to making a decision based on shouldering the responsibility to shape that future for our children. And that means big changes. What are they? I'll just mention three or four and end with what I'm going to do when I leave you today. Number one, we've got to deal with the aging of America. The number of people over 65 is going to double in the next 30 years. I hope to be one of them. It's going to double in the next 30 years. That will be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. Social Security Trust Fund is projected to run out of money in 2034. The Medicare Trust Fund, when I took office, was scheduled to run out of money this year. We've pushed it back to 2015 now. We've got to do something about this. Now, let me say there is a big difference of opinion about whether between the two parties about whether Medicare I mean Social Security should have individual accounts, and if so, how should they be designed, and should we partially or completely privatize the system. And most Republicans think we should do some of that, and most Democrats think we shouldn't. But let me just tell you one little simple thing If we took the interest savings we have from paying down the national debt because we're not spending the Social Security surplus anymore, if we just took the interest savings and put it back in the Trust Fund, we could put that Trust Fund out to 2050, which would take us out beyond the life expectancy of almost 100 percent of the baby boomers, after which the demographics start to get better again. Now, we've got the money to do that now. We don't have to raise your taxes. We don't have to stop spending money on anything else. We don't have to do anything. It'll never be this easy again. And believe me, it hasn't been this easy for our predecessors, and we ought to do this. On Medicare, we ought to make some structural reforms that will put some more life into the Medicare Trust Fund, take it out over 20 years. We ought to let people over 55 and under 65 buy into it. It doesn't cost the Treasury any money, and you know, there's tons of people in this country who retire at 55 now, and then something happens to them they're not covered by a health insurance policy at work anymore and they can't get any health insurance. It's a huge problem. And we ought to provide a voluntary prescription drug benefit, because 75 percent of the seniors in this country cannot afford the drug regimen their doctors say they need. So I think we ought to do that. Now, number two, we ought to recognize that more and more parents are working and do more to help balance work and family. I gave the States the option to use their workers' compensation and their unemployment compensation funds if they wanted to, to experiment with paid family leave. There are lots of other things that can be done, but you know, only 10 percent of the people in the country eligible for Federal assistance for child care are getting it, and I've increased child care funding by 70 percent. And a lot of people go to work every day, really worrying about whether their kids are in quality child care facilities. And it's a big problem. The family and medical leave law has been a godsend, but I think we ought to broaden it some. And of course, we have to be sensitive not to hurt the economy. But if you want people to succeed at work, they can't be eaten up inside worrying about their kids, whether they're all right. If you have to make a choice, we lose before we start, because the most important job of any society is raising children. It is still the most important job of any society, including ours, and we forget that at our peril. So we've got to find a way, since all parents either want to work or have to work, just about, at least the majority, we've got to find the way to balance these things better. The third thing we have to do, I think, is to work even harder to give every child a worldclass education. We have the largest and most diverse student body in history the first time in the last 2 years we've got a student body bigger than the baby boom generation. And they are going to do great if we give them the tools to do it. I don't want to keep you here all morning, and you know how I like to pontificate about education, so I won't do that. But you need to make that a factor in your decisions, just as I make it a factor in mine. The next thing we need to do is to find better ways to balance the preservation of the economy and the preservation of the environment. A big thing has happened in the last 5 to 10 years that most people don't believe has happened. It is now possible to grow the economy and reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That's a fancy way of saying you don't necessarily have to burn more coal and oil and put it out in the atmosphere to get rich. Most people don't believe it, but it's true. The Agriculture Department had a seminar the other day on biomass fuels, ethanol being the most prominent one now. Right now, it's a problem. It takes 7 gallons of gasoline to make 8 gallons of ethanol, so the conversion ratio is not too good. They're very, very close to coming up with the technology to make 8 gallons of ethanol with one gallon of gasoline. When that happens, it will change the future of America. In the next year or so, you're going to be able to buy cars that get 70 to 80 miles a gallon with fuel injection engines, some that are blended. They start off on electricity, then go to gasoline, then go back to electricity, and it's just the beginning. You can get windows in houses now that keep out 5 times as much heat or cold and let in 5 times as much light. You can buy lamps that just in the life of the lamp, will save one ton of greenhouse gas emissions. With the changes in the White House we have made in the last 6 years, just in the White House, we've taken the equivalent of 700 cars off the highways. This is a big deal, and it is not a question of, in the popular vernacular, hugging trees or growing the economy it's a question of how to do the self interested thing, which is to improve the environment and the economy at the same time, and I predict to you it will be a major, major focus for the next 20 years. The last thing I'd like to mention very briefly is this, because it really applies to Arkansas We have to find a way to keep the economy going and then to bring the benefits of the economy to the people in places who haven't been a part of this prosperity. And I just want to mention three things. Number one, first things first we've got to keep paying down this debt. If we stay on the track we're on now, just on the budget path that came out of this last budget session, this country will be out of debt in 15 years for the first time since 1835. Now, what does that mean? What does that mean? Well, let's take ALLTEL doing reasonably well. We passed the Telecommunications Act. It's led already to hundreds of thousands of high wage jobs at great, high tech companies. If the country's out of debt and we're not borrowing money, that means there's more money for everybody else to borrow. That means lower interest rates for business loans, faster expansion, more jobs, higher incomes. It means the average family pays less for home mortgages and car payments and college loans. This is a big deal. It's a progressive thing to do. The second thing we ought to do is work through and keep working at it until we reach a national consensus on this trade issue. If you watched the so called battle in Seattle, you know that I said I understood why some of the people in the streets wanted to make sure the concerns of working people and the environment were taken account of in trade. But I think they're dead wrong to believe that you can walk away from trade. Let me tell you, this country is better off today because for 50 years we have worked harder and harder and harder to integrate the global economy. And yes, if we buy stuff that's made somewhere else, it's very sensitive in Arkansas, because we were 50 years ago our per capita income was only 56 percent of the national average. So we had a lot of low wage workers. And sure, if we buy stuff made somewhere else, where people don't have the incomes we do, it puts more pressure on our low wage workers. But it also creates a lot more high wage jobs. And the answer is to give everybody lifetime training and to have the kind of environment where you can get the kind of investments to give good jobs to everybody. But we are better off both economically and in terms of our security because, for 50 years, we have continued to expand trade. And if you don't believe it, just look at all the places in the world that are in trouble. You know that problem we've had in Bosnia and Kosovo I had to send the military to solve. Do you seriously believe we would have had to go to war in the Balkans if their per capita income were not the lowest in Europe? If it were the highest in Europe, would they be fooling around with each other would they care whether they were Muslims or Orthodox Christians or Roman Catholics if they were all well educated and they were used to working together and they had more in common than driving them apart? Or in the Middle East, one of the problems is the abject poverty of the Palestinians. And one of the problems for the Israelis is the limits on their growth because they've got to spend so much on defense. If we were in better shape there economically and everybody were more integrated, don't you think we'd be closer to peace? Do you think people would still be fighting there? And I'm very proud of the role that I played in the Irish peace process and the role America played and the role George Mitchell played. But let me tell you something. One big reason they made peace in Ireland is that the Republic of Ireland had the fastest growing economy in Europe. A lot of American companies were shipping data processing raw files to be processed over to Northern Ireland every day and flying them back, and all these kids were growing up saying, "Hey, that's the future we want. We've got to let this other stuff go." So we have got to you've got to help me on this. As Americans, we have got to form a new consensus between business and labor and the environmental community and everybody else that allows us to continue to expand trade. And we ought to put China in the World Trade Organization. It's good for our farmers, good for our manufacturers, good for our investors, and it will make a safer world for our children and our grandchildren. It's a big deal. And I hope you will help me do that as well. Finally, we ought to give people the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America, like the Arkansas Delta, we give them to invest in poor areas in Latin America or Asia or Africa. And I'm very proud of the fact that this Congress supported my position to relieve the debt of world's poorest nations. I want Americans to invest in poor countries. I believe if you lift people out of poverty, you minimize their profound and primitive racial and ethnic and religious hatreds, and you give them something to live for and look forward to when they get up in the morning. But our people deserve the same thing. Let me ask you this, again If we don't do this now, if we can't bring more entrepreneurs and more investment and more jobs to the poorest counties in this State and in our neighboring States and in Appalachia and in upstate New York and rural New England, which is pretty depressed, or on the Indian reservations the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the unemployment today is 73 percent and if we can't figure out something to do about this now, when in the world will we ever get around to it? And when I leave you, I'm going over to West Memphis and to Earle and announce that I'm going to propose in my new budget more than 110 million to create a Delta regional authority. This will be new investment to fund a bill sponsored by Representative Blanche Lambert Lincoln and Senator Lincoln and Representative Marion Berry, supported by Congressman Snyder and the entire Arkansas delegation. I think we'll have big bipartisan support for this. We've got to do something about this. I headed that Delta Commission more than a decade ago. Maybe the time wasn't right maybe the economy was too tough. We're in good shape now. If we can't bring opportunity to these people in our State and Nation I'm telling you I've been there. People are dying to go to work. And intelligence is evenly distributed education is not, but intelligence is. We can get this done now. And I ask for your support for that. Now because I believe this is a time of big changes, to use your theme, and because I believe these big questions can't possibly be resolved, when I come home to build the library and my policy center, I want to deal with a lot of these big questions How do you close the digital divide and use these high tech advances to benefit every American? How do you create good jobs and a clean environment? How do you leave behind the ethnic and religious hatreds, the other kind of hatred that is manifested in hate crimes in America and the tribal slaughters in Africa and all the wars in between? How do you create genuine economic opportunity and empowerment for people who have been poor a very long time? These are the questions, the kinds of questions that I intend to work on down to the last hour of the last day of my Presidency, and the kind of questions that will be central to me when I come home to build the library and the policy center. I'd like to begin by just thanking all of you who have supported this. I thank the mayor, the city board of directors and staff, and I'm sorry for the heat you've taken, but it will be a good investment. I thank Paul Harvel and the greater Little Rock chamber. I thank Shelby and Joe and the Downtown Partnership. I thank Dr. Alan Sugg and the university system. I thank Skip Rutherford for being my point person down here all of you who have worked on this. From the day I was elected President, I was determined that when it was over, I would try to use this library and policy center not only to continue my own interests and passions but to give something back to this State and this community that have given so much to me. Like I said over and over again, if it hadn't been for you, I never would have had the chance to serve. And if it hadn't been for the experiences you gave me and the lessons I learned, I wouldn't have been prepared to serve at this moment in our history. So I want to make some dreams come true here in Little Rock. This library can be an energizing force in the life of the city and the broader community. It will attract people from all across the Nation and all across the world. Lots of visitors and lots of people from business and labor and the nonprofit groups in government and journalism. It can play an important role in the growth and development of greater Little Rock and all of central Arkansas. I am determined that it will be, first, a beautiful place. The site is wonderful, and so will the building be. It will be architecturally important, and it will be state of the art, environmentally and technologically. I've talked to Dr. Sugg and the university about starting a graduate program in public policy that's what they want to do to prepare more of our young people for careers in public service. And I also want to develop partnerships with corporations all across America to bring their young executives here, to get them to agree to let their young people take a little time off to be in public service without being prejudiced in their rise up the corporate hierarchy. Let me tell you, there is a program called the White House Fellowships you may know about it and we just give a few every year, enough for all the Cabinet Secretaries and one for me, one for a couple of other people in the White House. Hundreds of people apply for them hundreds and hundreds get turned down who would be about as good as the handful, the less than 20 we select every year. And so I got this idea. Now, I realized how dependent we were on the White House Fellows, what fabulous work they did, what great ideas they gave. And think of it, if every company of any size would establish a policy that every year, one or two or three people, depending on the size of the company, could take a year off to serve in State Government, to serve in local government, to serve in the Federal Government, in Washington or at the regional level, to have the experience of government and then come back to the company and continue that career, we could change the nature of government, the quality of the ideas, the quality of the work, and the quality of the partnership. And we could end a lot of the kind of battles that we've seen here over too many decades. So this is one of the things that I hope we can do, thanks to Dr. Sugg and his leadership on the education issue. I want to try to find some ways to, as I said over and over, to help to bridge the racial and other divides in our society and throughout the world. I want to bring here people from Northern Ireland and the Middle East and Bosnia and Kosovo. I want people to see members of these different African tribes. I'll never forget being in Rwanda after they killed over threequarters of a million people in a 100 days with machetes in a tribal war, and Rwanda had been a coherent country for about 500 years. I talked to a woman, a beautiful woman Hillary and I were sitting there talking to her all dressed up in her fine native dress. And I listened to this wonderful woman, who was still a young woman, talk to me about how her neighbors had turned her in as a member of the other ethnic group, along with her husband and her six children, and how they had come after them with these machetes, and how she was convinced she was going to die. And she woke up covered in blood, and saw her husband and her six children dead around her, all because they were from another tribe. And that would be enough to break most of us, but this woman was devoting her life to trying to help other people let it go and get beyond it. We could, in this State, in this place, become a beacon of hope for those kind of people. We could train people in societies where these problems exist to get rid of them. I think it is truly amazing, at a time when we're talking about uncovering the mysteries of the human genome, when a lot of my friends in the profession believe that sometime early in the next century newborn babies will come home from the hospital with a life expectancy of 100 years, when we'll probably find out what's in the black holes in the universe, and we're talking about all this stuff, you know, that the biggest problem of human society is the oldest one We're still scared of people that are different from us, and we've got to find a way to let it go. I want to do more on education. I want to do more on all these issues I mentioned. I also want this library to be a great place of history, and I want to make it interactive, especially for our children, with the latest technologies. I want to help our children and our grandchildren understand the times and the forces that took me to the White House and that I tried to shape and move forward, and then I want them to understand how that relates to tomorrow. I want this to be a museum but not a mausoleum. I want it to be a place with a lot of touch and involvement and learning. I want to give our young people a window on the new millennium. And I want them to believe when they walk out of there, based on the story of my life and the people we tried to help, that every one of them also has a chance to make their own history. These are the things I want to do with the library here in Little Rock, not only to glimpse the future but to shape it and share it with our neighbors and our families. So I say to all of you, again, thanks for helping me get here thanks for giving us a great 7 years, and thanks for your support of the future. But remember, the most important thing of all is your theme is right Big changes are coming. It's the only time in our lifetimes we've ever had a chance to make the most of them, and we'd better do it. Thank you very much. December 09, 1999 The President. Good morning. I just thought we ought to come out here in the brisk morning sunshine and wake up together. Laughter I want to thank the representatives here from all parts of the communications industry, from the foundation world, from various civil rights and other civic groups for being here, and coming in and giving me a chance to make this statement, because I had intended to go to Secretary Daley's conference today on bridging the digital divide, and because I'm going to Worcester, I couldn't do that. So they came in this morning, and we had a visit. I want to thank them for being here and for their commitment and for all those who aren't here but who are at the conference. This conference is about closing the digital divide. And we have worked hard on that for the last several years in very specific contexts. Under the Vice President's leadership, we have worked to make sure that eventually a digital divide will not deprive business of the technology savvy workers they need and will not hurt our educational systems today. We started with the first NetDay in California, back in 1994, when only 3 percent of our classrooms were wired and only 14 percent of our schools were. And we've been working ever since. Now we know that, through the public private partnerships that have been established all over America, through the Telecommunications Act and the E rate, which the FCC set to make sure our poorest schools could afford to be connected, we're now up over 50 percent of the schools, from 3 percent, and over 80 percent of the classrooms, from 14 percent, since 1994. And I think that's pretty good. I'm very pleased by that, and we're on our way to meeting our goal sometime next year of having all of our schools wired and, soon after that, all of our classrooms wired. I want to thank the Vice President and all the people in various industries who have supported us and helped us in this regard. But as Secretary Daley's most recent "Falling Through the Net" report shows, there is still a lot more to do. We must connect all of our citizens to the Internet not just in schools and libraries but in homes, small businesses, and community centers. And we must help all Americans gain the skills they need to make the most of the connection. So this morning, as they go back to their meeting, I want to announce a series of new plans and partnerships that will expand on both these efforts to use the combined forces of public, private, and nonprofit sectors, finally to slam shut the digital divide. First, I have decided to lead a prominent delegation, including top CEO's, on a new markets tour this spring to focus specifically on the digital divide out in America. As we've done on our previous tours, we will visit communities that have not fully participated in our Nation's economic growth. And yet, in the communities we'll also see how partnerships between the public and private sectors can unleash the power of the Internet to link children and adults to a lifetime of learning, to provide access to distant medical care, to empower parents, to assist job seekers, to enhance safety, and foster economic development. Second, I am signing an executive memorandum to ensure that closing the digital divide will be a vital goal not just for Secretary Daley and for us here in the White House but throughout the Federal Government. For example, I'm directing Secretary Daley to work with the private sector to develop a national strategy for connecting all Americans to the Internet and directing Secretaries Daley, Riley, Herman, Cuomo, and Shalala to expand our growing network of community technology centers. I just ask you all to think about this one thing. What do you believe the economic impact would be if Internet access and usage were as dense in America as telephone access and usage? I think it's clear that we need to keep working until we achieve this goal. Third, with the help of many other groups, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is launching an initiative to empower the entire civil rights community through an expanding civilrights.org website, through leadership forums and even modern day freedom riders who will bring high tech training to the doorsteps of nonprofit organizations. As the Congress of National Black Churches has said, the digital divide is a key civil rights issue of the 21st century. That's why our civil rights organizations must be ready, wired, and able to lead the change. Fourth, the Benton Foundation is bringing together companies from across the computing, telecommunications, software, and Internet industries, as well as the Urban League and several other large private foundations, to create the Digital Divide Network, an enormous clearinghouse of information for information on public and private efforts to bring technology to underserved communities. For the first time, we'll have one stop shop for tracking our progress in every community and for learning exactly what's worked and what hasn't. Now, these are the steps we'll take immediately. I want to thank all the leaders who are here today who are making these initiatives possible and all of those who are going to announce specific things that they and their companies and organizations are doing at the conference. I thank them for the other major commitments they will make, because there is no single, big silver bullet here, but we know we have to have a national commitment to closing the digital divide. I also want to send out an invitation to all of your counterparts around the country who are not able to be with us today but who should join with us in this great national endeavor. Together we have the power to determine exactly what we want the Internet to become. And what we want it to do is to be an instrument of empowerment, education, enlightenment, and economic advance and community building all across America, regardless of the race, the income, the geography of our citizens. And thanks to these people, we're going to be closer to achieving that goal. Thank you very much. Russia and the Situation in Chechnya Q. Mr. President, there seems to be a divide with President Yeltsin this morning. He has given you something of a long distance tongue lashing, saying that you've forgotten that Russia is a great power and has a nuclear arsenal. And he accuses you of taking an anti Russian position. The President. Well, I'll say again what I said yesterday. I don't think what they're doing will help them to achieve their goal. Their goal, their legitimate goal, is to defeat the Chechen rebels and to stop their terrorism within Russia, to stop their invasion of neighboring provinces like Dagestan. And I don't think displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians will achieve that goal. I don't know what else to say. I haven't forgotten that. You know, I didn't think he'd forgotten that America was a great power when he disagreed with what I did in Kosovo. I mean, we can't get too serious about all the let's not talk about what the leaders are saying and all these words of criticism. Let's focus on what the country is doing. Is it right or wrong? Will it work or not? What are the consequences? I think I don't agree with what's going on there. And I think I have an obligation to say so. Thank you. I've got to go. December 08, 1999 The President. Good afternoon. Before I take your questions, I have a statement to make. We are at a pivotal moment in the Middle East peace process, one that can shape the face of the region for generations to come. As I have said on numerous occasions, history will not forgive a failure to seize this opportunity to achieve a comprehensive peace. We've made good progress on the Palestinian track, and I'm determined to help Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat move forward in accordance with their very ambitious timetable. We've also been working intensely, for months, for a resumption of negotiations between Israel and Syria. Today I am pleased to announce that Prime Minister Barak and President Asad have agreed that the Israel Syrian peace negotiations will be resumed from the point where they left off. The talks will be launched here in Washington next week with Prime Minister Barak and Foreign Minister Shara. After an initial round for 1 or 2 days, they will return to the region, and intensive negotiations will resume at a site to be determined soon thereafter. These negotiations will be high level, comprehensive, and conducted with the aim of reaching an agreement as soon as possible. Israelis and Syrians still need to make courageous decisions in order to reach a just and lasting peace. But today's step is a significant breakthrough, for it will allow them to deal with each other face to face, and that is the only way to get there. I want to thank Prime Minister Barak and President Asad for their willingness to take this important step. And I want to thank Secretary Albright who has worked very hard on this and, as you know, has been in the region and meeting with the leaders as we have come to this conclusion. Before us is a task as clear as it is challenging. As I told Prime Minister Barak and President Asad in phone conversations with them earlier today, they now bear a heavy responsibility of bringing peace to the Israeli and Syrian people. On the Palestinian track, Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat are committed to a rapid timetable a framework agreement by mid February, a permanent status agreement by mid September. I'm convinced it is possible to achieve that goal, to put an end to generations of conflict, to realize the aspirations of both the Israeli and the Palestinian people. And I will do everything I can to help them in that historic endeavor. It is my hope that with the resumption of Israeli Syrian talks, negotiations between Israel and Lebanon also will soon begin. There can be no illusion here. On all tracks, the road ahead will be arduous the task of negotiating agreements will be difficult. Success is not inevitable. Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, and Lebanese will have to confront fateful questions. They face hard choices. They will have to stand firmly against all those who seek to derail the peace, and sadly, there are still too many of them. But let there also be no misunderstanding. We have a truly historic opportunity now. With a comprehensive peace, Israel will live in a safe, secure, and recognized border for the first time in its history. The Palestinian people will be able to forge their own destiny on their own land. Syrians and Lebanese will fulfill their aspirations and enjoy the full fruits of peace. And throughout the region, people will be able to build more peaceful and, clearly, more prosperous lives. As I have said, and I say one more time, I will spare neither time nor effort in pursuit of that goal. Today the parties have given us clear indication that they, too, are willing to take that path. Peace has long been within our sight. Today it is within our grasp, and we must seize it. Thank you very much. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Elian Gonzalez Q. Mr. President, on another matter involving a foreign government, as a father, do you sympathize with the demand of Elian Gonzalez for the return of his 6 year old son to Cuba, now that the boy's mother and stepfather were drowned in a boating accident on the way to Florida? The President. Well, I think, of course, all fathers would be sympathetic. The question is and I think the most important thing is what would be best for the child? And there is a legal process for determining that. I personally don't think that any of us should have any concern other than that, that the law be followed. I don't think that politics or threats should have anything to do with it, and if I have my way, it won't. We should let the people who are responsible for this, who have a legal responsibility, try to do the right thing by the child. These decisions are often difficult, even in domestic situations, but I hope that is what would be done, and it should be done without regard to politics. Helen Helen Thomas, United Press International . Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, did both sides make a lot of concessions to get to this breakthrough point? And also, are you aware that Amnesty International says that Israel is continuing the demolition of Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem and on the West Bank and also the expansion of the settlements? Are all these part of a package? The President. Well, Prime Minister Barak made a very important statement about settlements yesterday, which I think was quite welcome. And it's a good first step. As you know, we believe that nothing should be done which makes it more difficult to make peace or which prejudges the final outcome. But I do think that the statement yesterday is a step in the right direction. As to your question about Syria, I think it's very important at this point that we maximize the chances for success, which means it would not be useful for me to get into the details. But the negotiations are resuming on the basis of all previous negotiations between the United States and Syria I mean, between Syria and Israel, and with the United States. I think it is clear that both parties have sufficient confidence that their needs can be met through negotiations, or they would not have reached this agreement today. Steve Steve Holland, Reuters . Russia and the Situation in Chechnya Q. On Chechnya, you used sanctions to punish Yugoslavia and Indonesia for repression why aren't sanctions being considered against Russia? The President. Well, there are two categories of aid here in question or, at least let's talk about the aid. A sanctions regime has to be imposed by the United Nations, and Russia has a veto there. But I'm not sure that would be in our interest or in the interest of the ultimate resolution of the crisis. Let me just say, with regard to the aid, because I've been asked about that, I think it's important to point out to the American people that two thirds of the aid that we spend in Russia is involved in denuclearization and safeguarding nuclear materials. And I think it is plain that we have an interest in continuing that. The other third goes to fund democracy, the things that we Americans believe would lead to better decisions. It goes to an independent media it goes to student exchanges it goes to NGO's, helping people set up small businesses. I don't think our interests would be furthered by terminating that. And as of now, there is no pending IMF transfer because of the general opinion by the IMF that not all the economic conditions have been met. So that's a bridge we'll have to cross when we get there. Yes. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, when Israel and Syria do sit down, they obviously are going to have to confront the issue of the Golan Heights almost immediately. How are they going to resolve that? What will the U.S. role be? Will you see the administration Secretary Albright, yourself possibly being a mediator? And finally, why isn't President Asad sitting down with Prime Minister Barak at this point? The President. I think they're sitting down because they want to make peace, and they have now concluded that they can do it on terms and that will meet both their interests. You've asked good questions, but any answer I give would make it unlikely that they would be successfully resolved. Frankly, we all took a blood oath that we wouldn't talk beyond our points today, and I'm going to keep my word. Q. Sir, maybe you misunderstood. I was asking why President Asad is not personally involved in the talks at this point. The President. Oh, he is very personally involved. I think that I believe that he felt it was better and maybe you should ask the Syrians this but let me just say, he is very personally involved in this. I think he thinks it better, for whatever reason, he's made the decision that Foreign Minister Shara, who, thankfully, has recovered from his recent stroke and is perfectly able to come here, to do so. And I'm quite comfortable that this is as close to a personto person talk that they could have without doing it. Yes, go ahead. Elian Gonzalez Situation in Chechnya Q. Mr. President, can I follow up about Cuba and Chechnya? With regard to Cuba, you said that politics ought to stay out of this decision regarding the boy. Are you saying, sir, that you can envision a circumstance where, in your mind, it would be appropriate to return this young boy to Communist Cuba? Second question, regarding Chechnya Given the fact that two thirds of the aid goes to denuclearization, a third to democracy effects, do you envision no circumstances, sir, under which the United States would cut off that aid? And how does that square with your statement that Russia will pay a heavy price for its war against Chechnya? The President. Okay, the first question first. I do not know enough about the facts, so you can draw no inferences to what I might or might not do because it's not a decision for me to make. There is a law here. There are people charged with making the decisions. I think they ought to do their best within the parameters of the law do what seems to be best for the child. That is all I have to say, and you shouldn't read anything into it. I don't know enough about the case, and I don't think that any of us should interfere with what is going to be a difficult enough decision as it is. Now on Russia, I have stated what my present view is, and that is all I have done. I think Russia is already paying a heavy price. I think they'll pay a heavy price in two ways. First of all, I don't think the strategy will work. As I said, I have no sympathy for the Chechen rebels I have no sympathy for the invasion of Dagestan and I have no sympathy for terrorist acts in Moscow and none of us should have. But the people of Chechnya should not be punished for what the rebels did. They don't represent the established government of Chechnya. They don't represent a majority of the people there. And the strategy, it seems to me, is more likely to hurt ordinary citizens than the legitimate targets of the wrath of the Russian Government. So I think that first of all, I think the policy will not work, and therefore, it will be very costly, just like it was before when it didn't work. Secondly, the continuation of it and that amassing of hundreds of thousands of refugees, which will have to be cared for by the international community we've already set aside, I think, at least 10 million to try to make our contributions for it will further alienate the global community from Russia. And that's a bad thing, because they need support not just from the IMF and the World Bank, they need investors. They need people to have confidence in what they're doing. They're about to have elections. And so there will be a heavy price there. And I don't think there's any question about that. I think it's already yes, go ahead. Elian Gonzalez Q. Sir, regarding the Cuban boy, you say you don't know enough about the facts. A lot of people in South Africa think the facts are pretty simple. They say that even though the boy's father's in Cuba, this boy would be better off growing up in the United States than in Cuba under Castro. What would you say to those people? The President. Well, I think the decisionmakers will take into account all the relevant facts. But I don't think I should make the decision. First of all, I can't make the decision under the law. And I don't think I should tell them how to make the decision because I don't know enough about the facts. I believe they will do their best to make the right decision. Q. What about growing up in Cuba as opposed to growing up in the United States? The President. Well, of course, I'd rather grow up in the United States. But there may be other considerations there, and one was asked in the previous question about it. So we'll just have to evaluate it. You know, there are times in the United States when judges have to make decisions. The legal standard governing domestic cases is the best interest of the child. There's a slightly different characterization, I think, of what will determine the international decision here. This is, you know, an unusual case for us. But even here, sometimes it's very hard to say. You know, will children be better off with their parents in America? Almost always, but not always. So you just can't I don't think I can't serve any useful purpose by commenting on it, because I don't know enough about the facts of the family life or even the governing law on this. I just know that I think we ought to let the people make the decision, urge them to do their best to do what's best for the child, and try to take as much political steam out of it as possible so that the little child can be considered. Yes. Federal Action Against Gun Manufacturers Q. Sir, on another legal matter, your threat of a class action against gun manufacturers, is this an attempt, sir, through either coercion or, ultimately, the judicial branch, to get accomplished what you couldn't get accomplished through legislation? And with the difficulties that you've had recently getting some of your initiatives passed in Congress, as you head into this last year of your Presidency, is this the hint of a new tactic to get those initiatives passed, when you can't get them through Congress? The President. Let's talk about the gun suit first, and then I'll respond to the general question. The litigation, which is being initiated by public housing authorities, has a good grounding in fact. There are 10,000 gun crimes every year in the largest public housing authorities. Now, they spend a billion dollars on security. And I think it's important that the American people know they're not asking for money from the gun manufacturers they are seeking a remedy to try to help solve the problem. They want, first of all, more care from the manufacturers and the dealers with whom they deal. Senator Schumer released a study, you may remember, that said that one percent of the gun dealers sell 50 percent of the guns involved in gun crimes. Now, if that study is accurate and he believes it is that is a stunning fact. And there ought to be something done about that. And if there is a way that the court could craft a resolution of that, that would be a good thing, I think. The second thing we want to do is to stop irresponsible marketing practices. You all remember that one company advertised an assault weapon by saying that it was hard to get fingerprints from. You know, you don't have to be all broke out with brilliance to figure out what the message is there. And the third thing they want is some safety design changes. Now, let me hasten to say that we have a lot of gun manufacturers in this country who have been, I think, immensely responsible. You'll remember the majority of the gun manufacturers signed on to our proposal for child trigger locks. I still would like legislation to cover them all. But this should not be viewed if you look at the nature of the release, they're not trying to bankrupt any companies they're trying to make their living spaces safer. And I think it's a legitimate thing. Now to your general question, I think if you go back over the whole reach of our tenure here, I have always tried to use the executive authority in areas where I thought it was important. We're doing it on medical privacy. We're doing it on yesterday we had the press conference on prevention of medical errors. We're doing it with the paid family leave initiative we offered to the States. We did it when we set aside the roadless areas in the forests. So I think this is an appropriate thing to do. But I would also remind you at the end of this legislative session from the Congress, we got 100,000 teachers, 50,000 police, 60,000 housing vouchers to help people move from welfare to work. We passed the Kennedy Jeffords bill to allow people with disabilities to move into the workplace and keep their medical care from the Government. We passed the Financial Modernization Act, which will dramatically, I think, improve financial services, grow the economy. And we've protected the Community Reinvestment Act. We doubled funds for after school programs. We provided, for the very first time ever, funds to help school districts turn around failing schools or shut them down. So I'm continuing to work with Congress, and I will do so vigorously. But I think this was an appropriate thing to do on the merits. Yes. Seattle Round Q. Mr. President, some of your critics have suggested that the reason that you pressed the issues of the environment and labor at the WTO meeting in Seattle is to benefit the Presidential candidacy of Vice President Gore, knowing that there might be a backlash from the developing nations. How do you respond to that? The President. That's wrong. And I would like to make two comments, one on the WTO ministerial meeting and, secondly, on that general issue. The Uruguay round was launched in 1986. The trade ministers started trying to launch it in 1982. It took them 4 years to get it off the ground. The fundamental reason a new round was not launched here had, in my judgment, very little to do with my philosophy of trade, which I'll talk about in a moment. There were the big blocks here were the Europeans and the Japanese, on the one hand. The United States and the developing nations, we all had positions that couldn't be reconciled. The Europeans were not prepared at this time to change their common agricultural policy, which accounts for 85 percent of the export subsidies in the world. The Japanese had their own agricultural and other issues to deal with. The United States was not prepared to change its policy on dumping, because and I think the recent Asian financial crisis justifies that, I might add. Even though we did finally move under our dumping laws, and we had to move, to try to keep our steel industry, which took down 60 percent of its employment and modernized during the eighties and the early nineties, we still bought 10 times as much steel during that crisis as the Europeans did. The recent WTO agreement we made with China protects us from surges and unfair dumping. We have the largest trade deficit in the world. Now, we get a lot of good out of it We get low inflation we get goods from all over the world. But there has to be some sense of fairness and balance here. And the developing nations, for their part, felt that they had not yet gotten enough benefits from the last trade round and the entry into the WTO. They think that we and everybody else the Europeans, the Japanese, everybody they think we ought to have more open markets for agricultural products, which doesn't affect America so much, and for textiles, which does affect us. That's the big issue being negotiated still with the Caribbean Basin and the Africa trade initiative. So it's very important that you understand that there were real differences that we thought we could bridge, unrelated to labor and the environment, which we couldn't and which I think would have been clearer but for the backdrop of the demonstrations in Seattle over these other issues. Now, to your second question. When I ran for President in 1992 and the big issue being debated was NAFTA, I said that I wanted to be for NAFTA, I would fight hard for it, but I felt strongly there ought to be provisions on labor and the environment in the agreement, and those provisions were included. I have always had what I guess you would call a Third Way position on trade. I think the position of Americans, including some in my party, that trade is bad for America and bad for the world is just dead wrong. I think that the world is more prosperous, and I know America is more prosperous because of the continuing integration of the world's economy and the mutual interdependence of people and people being able to produce what they produce best in a competitive environment, including costs. And I think we benefit, not just from our exports but from the imports. That's what I believe. I believe we will have both a more prosperous and a more peaceful world if we have more of the right kind of globalization. I read one of the many, many articles that's been written in the last several days in the aftermath of Seattle pointed out that many of the world's most troubled places, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Africa, to some extent the Middle East, suffer because they have too little economic interconnection with the rest of the world. I believe, even though I'm proud of the role that we've played and especially proud of the role George Mitchell played in the Irish peace settlement, I think it is unlikely that we would have done that if, also, Ireland didn't have the fastest growing economy in Europe and Northern Ireland weren't growing and people didn't imagine that they could have a totally different life if they just let go of what they've been fighting over. So the people who don't believe that trade is good, I just think they're wrong. Now having said that, I think that as the world grows more interdependent, it is unrealistic to think that there will be an international economic policy with rules unrelated to an emerging international consensus on the environment and an international consensus on labor. That does not mean that I would cut off our markets to India and Pakistan, for example, if they didn't raise their wages to American levels. I know that's what the sort of stated fear was. I never said that, I don't believe that. But I think that let me give you an analogy. Several years ago, the Europeans did this, and I applaud them They were actually the impetus for protecting intellectual property more than the United States was. And people debated that for years. Why, intellectual property has no place in trade bills. Who cares if people are pirating books and selling them for 60 cents apiece when they cost 20 somewhere else? And now, we just take it as a given. And it's a good thing for the United States. You think about all the software we're exporting, all the CD's we're exporting, all the things. Intellectual property is a big deal to us now. It was just as alien a subject a few years ago to trade talks as questions of labor and the environment are today. So I think I've got a good position here. It has nothing to do with this campaign. It's a position I've had for years. And I believe the world will slowly come to it. We do have to be sensitive to the developing countries. We cannot say that, you know, you're out of here because you can't have the same labor environment we do. But we also have to all we ask for was to start a dialog within the WTO on trade issues. On the environment, all we ask is is that the decisionmaking process not degrade the environment when countries have environmental policies and interests, and just blithely override them because there's an immediate, short term economic benefit. I think that's right. And I believe that 10 years from now, somebody will be sitting here, and we'll all take it for granted that we've come a long way in integrating trade and the environment I mean, trade and labor. That's what I think, and that's what I believe. Man of the Century Q. Mr. President, I'm afraid this is in the pop quiz category of questions, but I'll try to make it easy for you. Every year, this time of year, we pick a Man of the Year. Maybe one day it will be Person of the Year. I'd like to know what your pick of the Man of the Century would be and note that I'm not asking you for the millennium. Laughter The President. Well, if it were for the millennium, it might be someone different. Well, this century produced a lot of great men and women. But as an American, I would have to choose Franklin Roosevelt, because in this century our greatest peril was in the Depression and World War II and because he led us not only through those things and laid the building blocks for a better society with things like Social Security and unemployment insurance, which was, interestingly enough, first recommended by his cousin Theodore Roosevelt when he was President, but he also looked to the future, endorsing the United Nations and a lot of the other international institutions which were subsequently created under President Truman. Finally, I think Roosevelt was an example to Americans of the importance of not giving up and of the dignity inherent in every person. And when Franklin Roosevelt was first elected, Oliver Wendell Holmes was still in the Supreme Court he was 92 years old. And President Roosevelt was taken to see Oliver Wendell Holmes who was still reading Plato in his nineties and all that. Holmes was a pretty acerbic fellow when he said, after meeting Roosevelt, that he thought he might not have had a first class mind, but he certainly had a first class temperament. And he did. He understood that reality is more than the facts before you it's also how you feel about them, how you react to them, what your attitude is. That was the advice that "only thing we have to fear was fear itself" was much more than just a slogan to him. He had lived it before he asked the American people to live it. So for all those reasons, if I had to pick one person, I would pick him. Yes, sir. Colombia and Venezuela Q. Mr. President, I'd like to ask you two questions on two very important South American countries that are vital to U.S. foreign policy, Colombia and Venezuela. First of all, on Colombia, sir. President Pastrana has been extraditing people, and they're still waiting for the help that he is expecting from the United States. Will you fight, will you go to the mat for this, starting in the year 2000, for President Pastrana? That's the first question. The second question The President. You're all asking two questions. That's pretty impressive. Laughter Q. We're just following the others. You met President elect Chavez when he first came to Washington, and then you met him as President in New York. He will be Venezuela will be holding a very unique plebiscite a week from today, which has polarized the country. Some people that back President Chavez thinks it's great others think it will cause damage to democracy. I'd like your opinion on both subjects, sir. The President. My opinion on the second question is that I'm not a citizen of Venezuela, and I think that they ought to make their own decisions. But I'm glad that they're getting to vote on it. My opinion on the first question is I should point out remember, now, Colombia is already the third biggest recipient of American aid. But I do think we should do more. And President Pastrana has, number one, extradited drug criminals to this country, which is important number two, is facing a terribly difficult situation where he has both a longstanding civil insurgency in Colombia and all the problems of the drug cartels and the possible interrelation of the two. It's a terrible situation. Colombia is a very large country. They've been our ally for a long time. They had a long period of steady economic growth. They have suffered terribly in the last couple of years. And I think we should do more. I had a talk with Speaker Hastert about it, who is also, by the way, very interested in this, when we were together in Chicago recently. And I hope that early next year, we will have a proposal to provide further assistance to Colombia that will be substantial, effective, and have broad bipartisan support. That is my goal. Ken Ken Walsh, U.S. News World Report . Vice President Al Gore Q. Vice President Gore has made a point of saying that his candidacy for President now will take precedence over his duties and activities as Vice President. I wonder, how has his role diminished in your administration, and how much has he missed? And does a diminished role by a Vice President in your administration hamper what you're trying to do in any way? The President. Well, obviously, he's not around as much. We don't have lunch every week, and I miss that terribly. But he was there all day today. He had the meeting with President Kuchma. He knows that the future of Ukraine is very important to our interests and to what we're trying to accomplish in that part of the world. And he came to our meeting this morning, and then, after our meeting was over, he ran a whole series of meetings for several hours after that. So in his critical functions, he's still performing them. And I would say, first of all, I strongly support what he's doing. I think he has the right to run. I'm glad he's running, and you know I think he'd be a great President. But he even having said that, whenever there's an important decision in an area that he's been very active in, I always call him we still talk about it. And his role is probably still larger than that of any previous Vice President, even though he's out campaigning. But it's just less than it used to be, because he's not here all the time. But I have no criticism of it. I think he's doing what he ought to be doing, and I think it's in the best interests of the country for him to do it. Mara Mara Liasson, National Public Radio . Accomplishments and Disappointments of 1999 Q. You're ending a tumultuous year that began with impeachment and closed with tear gas in Seattle. Could you tell us what you're proudest of this year, and what events or accomplishments of yours that you're the least proud of? The President. Well, I'm very happy what I'm proudest of is that it turned out to be a very productive year. If you look at I'll just mention them again. I did before, but we wound up after a year in which almost nothing was accomplished in the Congress, we wound up with a recommitment to the 100,000 teachers, to the 50,000 police. We passed the financial modernization bill. We passed an historic 60,000 housing vouchers to new people from welfare to work. We passed the bill to give disabled people the right to take health care into the workplace. We doubled after school funding. We passed this fund that I've been pushing hard for, for a long time, to help the States turn around or shut down failing schools. We had quite a lot of accomplishments. On the foreign front, we had the China WTO agreement progress with the Middle East peace the Northern Ireland peace agreement Kosovo, which I am very, very proud of. I still believe our country did the right thing there. And we've got talks starting on Cyprus now. We've got a Caspian pipeline agreement, which I believe 30 years from now you'll all look back on that as one of the most important things that happened this year. We had the Conventional Forces in Europe agreement with Russia, which will result in the removal of their forces from Georgia and Muldova. We had the debt relief for the poorest countries in the world, something I'm immensely proud of and deeply committed to. We made a big dent in our U.N. arrears issue. And we have worked with North Korea to end their missile program. So I'm very proud of what happened this year. What I'm most disappointed in is what still got left on the table. I'm terribly disappointed that we still haven't passed a Patients' Bill of Rights, that we still haven't raised the minimum wage, that we still haven't passed hate crimes legislation, that we still didn't pass that commonsense gun legislation, which was crying out for action after what happened at Columbine and we had another school incident this week. I am disappointed that we didn't pass the school construction bill. I'm hoping we will pass the new markets initiative next year. If we don't do something now to bring economic opportunity to the areas of this country which have been left behind, we will never forgive ourselves. And I'm profoundly disappointed that we still haven't done anything to take the life of Social Security out beyond the baby boom generation and extend the life of Medicare and add a prescription drug benefit. So my only disappointments are what we didn't get done. But I'm gratified by what was accomplished. Q. Do you blame yourself for that, that you didn't put forward a plan on Social Security, to make it more substantive? Is there something you're inaudible . The President. No, I gave them first of all, I asked them there's no point in putting forward look, I tried it the other way with health care. I put forward a plan. And everybody said, you put forward I remember Senator Dole saying, "You put forward your plan, then I'll put forward my plan. We'll get together. We'll agree, and we'll pass a plan." And so, you know, I've had experience with that. That didn't work out too well. So I had all these meetings on Social Security. You remember, I worked very hard on it, and I asked if we could get together and work out something. I still haven't given up on that, by the way. And I know the conventional wisdom is that these things are less likely to be done in election years, but in some ways they may be more likely. And I did give them a plan which, if they had embraced it which would simply require them not only to save the Social Security surplus but to take the interest savings from paying down the debt, with the Social Security surplus, and if you just put that back into Social Security, you could take Social Security out beyond the life of the baby boom generation. And I offered to do more with them. But in order to pass something like that, we've got to have a bipartisan process. And I will do whatever it takes to get that done. But I worked as hard as I could this year to keep working in a very open and collegial spirit with not only the Democrats without whom I wouldn't have passed any of those things I just mentioned, and all of you know that they hung in there at the end we got those things done but also with the Republicans, with whom I began to have, I think, some real progress there along toward the end of the legislative session. And I hope we will continue it. Yes, go ahead. Russia and the Situation in Chechnya Q. Mr. President, on Chechnya, it seems as though the Russians don't feel they will pay a heavy price, and perhaps they don't care. I'm wondering if between now and Saturday's deadline you plan to try to directly contact President Yeltsin to once again convey your feelings on this matter. The President. Well, I haven't decided what else I can do. I do think first of all, they may believe that because of their position in the United Nations and because no one wants them to fail and have more problems than they've got, that they can do this. But most of life's greatest wounds for individuals and for countries are self inflicted. They're not inflicted by other people. And I will say again, the greatest problems that the Russians will have over Chechnya are one is I don't think the strategy will work. I have never said they weren't right to want to do something with the Chechen rebels. But I don't think the strategy will work, and therefore, it will be expensive, costly, and politically damaging, internally, to them. Secondly, it will affect the attitude of the international community over a period of time in ways that are somewhat predictable and in some ways unpredictable, and that is a very heavy price to pay, because it works better when everybody's pulling for Russia. It's a great country, and they have all these resources and talented, educated people, and they need to and yet, they've got a declining life expectancy as well as all these economic problems. And I think it's a bad thing for this to be the number one issue both inside the country and in our relationships with them. So I do think it's going to be a very costly thing. Yes. Panama Canal China and Taiwan Q. Mr. President, with China building a second short range missile base, allowing them to take Taiwan with little or no warning, are you concerned about America's ability to defend that island, especially with a Chinese company taking over the Panama Canal's ports at the end of this month? The President. Well, let's talk about the Panama Canal, and then I'll come back to Taiwan. And to be fair, I think I may have misstated this earlier. It's important for the American people to understand that the canal itself will be operated and controlled entirely by the Government of Panama, through the Panama Canal Authority. That is the locks, ingress and egress, access, openness, the canal is completely and totally within the control of the Panamanians. Now, the Hong Kong company which got the concession to operate the ports will be responsible for loading and unloading ships. They also do this in three or four ports in Great Britain. It's one of the biggest companies in the world that does this. The managing director is British. Most of the employees will be Panamanian. So I feel comfortable that our commercial and security interests can be protected under this arrangement. That's the first question. Now, the second question is China is modernizing its military in a lot of ways. But our policy on China is crystal clear We believe there is one China. We think it has to be resolved through cross strait dialog, and we oppose and would view with grave concern any kind of violent action. And that hasn't changed. There has been a lot of buildup of tension on both sides that I think is unnecessary and counterproductive. If you look at the amount of Taiwanese investment in China, for example that goes back to my Irish example if you look at the Taiwanese investment in China, it's obvious that eventually they're going to get this worked out because they're too interconnected by ties of family and, increasingly, by ties of the economy, and the politics of neither place should lead either side into doing something rash. And I hope that this will not happen. But our policy is clear, and you know what I've done in the past. And I think that's all I should say about it right now. Yes. Hillary Clinton's Senate Campaign Q. There is some confusion in people's minds about the First Lady's plans for the coming year. She has referred to the new house in New York as "my house" and indicated she plans to make that her primary residence. I'm wondering if you could tell us how much time you think the two of you will be apart in the coming year and how you feel about this arrangement? The President. Well, first of all, I am happy for her, for the decision that she made. She was encouraged to run by many people, and she decided she wanted to do it. And if she's going to do it, she's got to spend a long time in New York. So she'll be there a lot. She'll be here when she can. I'll go up there when I can, and we'll be together as much as we can. We always make it a habit to talk at least once, if not more, every day. It's not the best arrangement in the world, but it's something that we can live with for a year. I love the house. We picked it out, and we like it, and I'm looking forward to living there when I leave here. But I've got a job to do, and she now has a campaign to run, and so we'll have to be apart more than I wish we were. But it's not a big problem. She'll be here quite a lot, and I'll go up there when I can, and we'll manage it, and I think it will come out just fine. I'm very happy for her. Wendell Wendell Goler, Fox News Channel . Responsibility for Impeachment Q. Mr. President, just a couple of minutes ago you said that most of life's greatest wounds are self inflicted. If I can paraphrase a recent request by Ken Starr, sir, I wonder if now you can tell us how much of the pain you went through last year was self inflicted and how much due to excesses by other people, political, and Mr. Starr's excesses himself, sir? The President. The mistake I made was selfinflicted, and the misconduct of others was not. Yes. Golden Parachutes Q. Mr. President, in the case of on the subject of corporate golden and platinum parachutes, particularly in the case of mergers and change of controlled packages, tens of millions, and more in most cases, are awarded to corporate officers. Directors just rubberstamp most of these sales to the detriment of other stockholders. The President. What's the question? Q. I'd like to know, what can and will the administration do to put a ceiling on this acrimonious alimony? The President. Well, first of all, unless it's an abuse of the stockholders and if it is, then we have Federal agencies which have jurisdiction over it there's nothing we can do. We have made some changes in the tax laws we did back in '93 that I thought were appropriate. But I don't think beyond that there's anything else we can do. April April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks , and then John John M. Broder, New York Times . Go ahead. No. April. I'll call on all of you, but April first. Q. Okay. The President. April first. Laughter That's the way I feel up here sometimes. Laughter Q. It should be that way, though. Laughter Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Differences Mr. President, America is ending the century with resurfacing scars of racism. And where does the issue of race, in terms of your agenda for 2000, stand? And are you still prepared to release your book on race by the end of your term? And what do you think about the comments that there's internal fighting over this book in the White House? The President. There really isn't much. I have a draft now, and I'm working on it. And I do plan to release it. And it will stay at the center of my concerns not only now but after I leave the White House. I think that after the cold war and with the sort of end of the ideological battles, you've seen, I think that the biggest problem the world faces today is the conflict people have over their racial and ethnic and their related religious differences. And I plan to be heavily involved in it at home and around the world for the rest of my life. Q. When do you think the book will come out, though? The President. I don't know. I've got a day job, you know, and I'm not going to I've got a library full of books on race, and almost all of them are quite good. But I don't want to put it out unless I think it could make a difference, even if it just says what other people have said, somehow it can make a difference. And I'm trying to make sure how it ought to be done. I don't want to just put it out because I said I would put it out I want to make sure when I do it, it at least achieves the objectives I'm trying to achieve. John. Health Care Coverage Q. Mr. President, the number of Americans who are not covered by health insurance has increased since you took office by about 7 million. Do you agree with Vice President Gore that Senator Bradley's plan for covering most of those people is irresponsible and unaffordable, even though we're enjoying the healthiest economy in decades? The President. First of all, I'm not going to get in the middle of the Gore Bradley campaign I know you want me to, but I'm not going to do that for you laughter because I want you to write about Syria and Israel tomorrow. Let me say, first of all, Hillary and I said when the health care plan went down that the number of people uninsured would go up. And you would all draw the same conclusion. You would have drawn the same conclusion back then if you spent as many years and as much time studying it as we have. So what happened is exactly what we've predicted would happen. Ironically, all those people who attacked me and said I was trying to socialize medicine, which was a ridiculous charge, trying to have the Government take over health care, which is a ridiculous charge, they got their way in that debate, and the consequence is now, we now have a higher percentage of Americans whose health care is funded by the Government than we did in 1993. But we also have a higher percentage of people without insurance. Now, I'm not going to get in the middle of that, but I'll tell you what questions you ought to ask. First of all, anybody who makes any proposal, you have to make certain choices. If you want to cover people who don't have coverage and you accept the premise that they all can't afford it, you have to decide Are you going to make them buy insurance are you going to make their employers to pay in? If not, are you going to have the Government do it, or are you going to have a big tax subsidy? All of those choices have problems with them. You know what the employer mandate problem was we couldn't pass it, because a lot of people said it's too burdensome, even though we exempted small businesses and tried to give them subsidies. If you give all taxpayers subsidies, the problem is you have to give subsidies to people who already have insurance, and it may operate as an incentive for employers to drop people even faster. So there is no perfect plan. Let's start with that. There is no plan without difficulty. If it were easy, somebody would have done it already. Second question is how much are you going if you're going to have the taxpayers involved, either in a tax incentive or expenditure program, how much does it cost, and what do you give up? And I think this is the way this thing ought to debate. People ought to actually try to figure out what the consequences of these plans are and evaluate them and decide. You talked about the prosperity of the country. That's true. We are prosperous. But do we want to how much do we want to spend on that as compared with eliminating child poverty or continuing to improve education? Are we willing to get into the Social Security surplus? If we're not, are we willing to raise taxes for it? In other words, I think whatever the choice is, I think it's important that we be as honest as possible about what it costs, everybody be as honest as possible that there is no perfect plan. And then you be as honest as possible about what else you're giving up if you do it. It's a very complicated issue. I did my best on it. I am gratified that we finally passed the Child Health Insurance Program. And we might get those numbers down again. We've now I think we're at about 2 million. I think we've gone from 1 million to 2 million just in the last several months in the number of people covered under CHIP. And if we can get up to 5 million with CHIP and extra Medicare kids and the States are really gearing up, now they're really trying now then maybe we can drive that number back down some. And what the Vice President is trying to do is to target discrete populations, on the theory that you can cover more people for relatively less money. And that's his position, and he believes he can pass that. Let me just say one other thing. It makes me proud to be a Democrat. I am proud that, number one, that my party is debating this. And as near as I can see, there is no debate going on in the other party. And if they pass the size tax cut plan, they're talking about, they not only won't have any money to help more people get health care they'll either have to get into the Social Security surplus, or they won't have any more money for education or the environment or anything else. That's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say is I'm grateful that my country is doing so well that these kinds of issues can be debated in this way and be seriously debated, but I'm not going to get into handicapping the campaign. I can tell you what questions I think you should ask, how you should analyze it. But there is no perfect solution here. And I'm glad that the two candidates in the Democratic Party are debating it. Yes, go ahead. I promised these people. Space Program Q. Mr. President, in the decade that's just closing, the American people have seen around 1.5 billion of their tax dollars lost in space, most recently either up in smoke in the Martian atmosphere or trashed on Mars itself. Does NASA need better quality control or better management? And sir, how do you answer Americans who say that that money could be much better spent on more urgent needs here on this planet? The President. Well, let me try and answer all those questions. First of all, I think Dan Goldin has done a great job at NASA. He's adopted a lot of economy measures and gone for small and more discreet missions, including more unmanned missions, that I think make a lot of sense. Secondly, we all use the slogan, "Well, this isn't rocket science." Well, this is rocket science. We're trying to take a spaceship the size of a boulder and throw it 450 miles into a very uncongenial atmosphere and hit a target, and it isn't easy. I regret that both of those things didn't succeed as much as we all the first Mars mission we got quite a lot out of because I think it's important. I think it's important not only for the American tradition of exploration, but it's important if we want to know what's we have to keep doing this if we ever hope to know what's beyond our galaxy. We now know there are billions of them out there, and we know there are all these big black holes in the universe. We know all these things, and I think it's important that we find out. The third point I'd like to make is that we actually do get a lot of benefits here on Earth from space travel. We get benefits in engineering advances, in material science, in environmental protection, and in medical science. We've made quite a lot of interesting healthrelated discoveries. I remember going down to the Space Center in Houston and talking to people who were from the vast medical complexes in Houston about all the interesting joint work they were doing. So I think the American people get things out of it right now. I think we have gotten a lot out of it in the past, and I think we'll get more out of it in the future. So I have always been a big proponent of the space program. They need to analyze what went wrong and figure out how to fix it. But just think of all the problems we've had along the way with the space program. This is too bad, but this is nothing compared to the tragedy when those astronauts burned to death when their spaceship was still on the ground. I'll never forget that as long as I live. But they didn't quit, and America didn't quit, and I'm glad. And I don't think we should quit now. Go ahead. WTO China Agreement Q. Mr. President, one of the things left on your plate for next year is pushing the historic trade agreement with China on Capitol Hill. China's labor standards are clearly not what you and the world community would wish for. And the question is will it be difficult for you to sell that to members of your own party in Congress? And more broadly, what do you think are the prospects for Congress approving the WTO accord with China? The President. Well, in our caucus some are for it some are against it and some have questions. We have a good deal of support for it and a good deal of opposition to it, and then some have questions. But I'm going to make an all out effort to pass it. And I'll come back to your labor question in a minute. I think it is plainly in America's interest. We gave up nothing, in terms of market access, to get this. It's very important that you understand that. What we gave in this was our assent to China's joining the WTO. What we got in return is much more market access on everything from farmers to people in the telecommunications industry. This is a huge economic benefit to the people of the United States. Plus, we have a big and growing trade deficit with China. We've got specific protections on dumping and antisurge protections. So it is in the economic interest of the United States. Secondly, it is in the strategic interest of the United States. One of the great questions of the next several decades, as China's economy grows to match the size of its population, is whether China and the United States will have a constructive relationship or be at odds. I believe that, just as we worked together in the United Nations, even though we sometimes disagree, we will work together in the WTO. I think having China in a rule based system for the international economy is profoundly important. And I think it would be a terrible mistake not to do it. Now, do I agree with all their labor standards? No. But we shouldn't impose conditions on membership on China that we don't impose on any other country to get into the WTO. What we should do, in any judgment, is to go back to the American position. We ought to begin a dialog on these labor initiatives within the WTO that's all we ask for and then we ought to get everybody to ratify the International Convention on Child Labor and observe it and deal with the other most egregious forms of labor abuses in the world. That is the right way to proceed here. Last question. National Sovereignty and Internationalism Q. Mr. President, in future years, what do you see taking great precedence, sir, national sovereignty or international institutions? And how does the world prevent such slaughters as you've had recently in the Balkans, in Africa, or East Timor, without violating national sovereignty or interfering in international affairs? The President. Well, first of all, at least from the International Declaration of Human Rights, 50 years ago, the world community recognized that sovereignty was not the only value in human society. The Russians, even though they've criticized our intervention in Kosovo although now I might say the Russian soldiers are doing a very good job there, working with all the other allies recently acknowledged in their signing off of the new charter of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, that the internal affairs of a country can become the legitimate concern of others, whether it's in East Timor now, wait a minute. So what I think will happen is national sovereignty is going to be very, very important for a very, very long time. But countries are becoming more interdependent, and they will still have to make decisions about the kinds of internal systems they will have for how their people live together and work together they will still be able to make decisions about when they will or won't cooperate worldwide in many areas. But if you want the benefits of interdependence, you have to assume the responsibilities of it. And we've all recognized that from the beginning of the United Nations, nobody, no country in the United Nations, has given up its sovereignty, even though some people still allege that's true. But the more interdependent the world grows, the more likely we are, in my judgment, to have more broadly shared prosperity, fewer wars, and a better life for everyone. That does not require us to give up our national sovereignty, but it does require us to act in our real national interests. Last question. Minorities on the White House Staff Q. Thank you. I have another question on the issue of race, and it's on your record of appointing minorities to top level jobs in your administration. You've talked throughout your career about the importance of diversity and inclusion, and setting aside your Cabinet and Federal bench appointees, the top seven West Wing jobs in your administration have all been held by whites. Twenty six people have had the jobs. The President. I disagree with that. What are they? Q. Well, Chief of Staff, National Security, Domestic Policy, Economic Adviser, White House Counsel, Press Secretary, Senior Adviser, Counselor all those jobs have been held by not a single person of color has held any of those jobs. And I wonder if you could tell us why? The President. Well, first of all, you might be interested to know there were a couple of people of color that I tried to get to do those jobs but preferred other jobs in the administration. And they had jobs they liked better. And I have you didn't point out that a lot of those jobs have been held by women, who also had never held those jobs before I came along. And I think that all I can tell you is I have never not tried to recruit minorities for any job that was open in the White House. And I have never followed a quota system. I have had more blacks who have served in my Cabinet, more Hispanics who served in my Cabinet, more people from Asia have been appointed to my administration than any previous administration by far. It's not even close. So there was never a decision made. I now have a Hispanic woman who is my Deputy Chief of Staff. So I never thought about those seven jobs to the exclusion of others. I've tried to make sure that the senior jobs my political director is an African American woman. Alexis Herman, before she became Secretary of Labor, was head of public liaison. I was unaware that those were the seven most important jobs in my Cabinet and in the White House in the way that you said them. Thank you very much. December 06, 1999 The President. Thank you very much, Belquis. Congressmen Gilman, Lewis, Jackson Lee Reverend and Mrs. Jackson Deputy Attorney General Holder Harold Koh Bob Seiple Julia Taft Hattie Babbitt Bette Bao Lord, thank you for coming back. School Shooting in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma Ladies and gentlemen, before I begin, I need because this is my only opportunity before the press today just to say a brief word about this school shooting this morning in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms are on the scene now working with the local authorities. I expect to get a detailed briefing shortly. Meanwhile, our prayers are with each of the children and their families, and the entire Fort Gibson community is right now there are no fatalities, only people who are wounded, and we hope and pray it will stay that way. Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights It occurs to me that at some point tonight someone will be doing what some of us Hillary says it's mostly a male thing somebody will be channel surfing tonight. Laughter And they will just come upon Belquis speaking. And they may stop and listen, or they may not. They may know what the Taliban is, or they may not. But I wonder if even someone who hears her will recognize that in nearly half the world today in spite of the fact that for the first time in history more than half the people of the world live under governments of their own choosing in nearly half the world, doing what Belquis just did, simply standing up and speaking freely, could get her arrested, jailed, beaten, even tortured. That's why we're here today. I wonder if someone who just happened along her remarks tonight would understand that until people like Eleanor Roosevelt came along, the rest of the world didn't even recognize that the right to speak out is more than something enshrined in the American Constitution. It is truly an international human right. Sometimes we forget how long it took the world to agree on a common definition, a universal declaration of what freedom actually means. Half a century ago the Universal Declaration on Human Rights said it in very simple words "All human beings are free and equal in dignity and human rights. All have the right to life, liberty, and security. All are endowed with reason and conscience. All have the right to a standard of living adequate to health and well being." The real genius of the Declaration of Human Rights is that it affirmed that basic human rights are not cultural, but universal that what a country does to people within its own borders is not its business alone, but the business of all of us. We in the United States know how hard it is to achieve the aspirations of that declaration. We've been living with it since our Founders, and living with our flaws in failing to meet up to its standards. A hundred years ago Eleanor Roosevelt was a 15 year old girl growing up in a country where women could not vote. Half a century ago, if the standards of the Universal Declaration were held up to segregated schools and lunch counters in the United States, we would have failed the test resoundingly. This century has taught us that even though human rights are endowed by the hand of our Creator, they are ensured by the hearts and hands of men and women among us who cannot bear to see it otherwise. Inch by inch, such people have moved the world forward. Today we honor five brave Americans whose lives have made a difference. And we ask that all of us remember, in their triumphs, the struggles of people like Belquis, the continuing tensions in Africa, the continuing tensions in the Balkans, and elsewhere in the world where human rights are not yet secure. It is said that when Burke Marshall first met Robert Kennedy, they sat across a table for 10 minutes and didn't say a single word. Those of us who had Burke Marshall in law school can believe that story. Laughter Perhaps now he will tell us who spoke first. But from that silent moment sprang a truly extraordinary partnership. As Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division in the Kennedy administration, Burke Marshall was a bridge between Government and those activists fighting every day to end Jim Crow. Congressman John Lewis, who received this award last year, once recalled that whenever Martin Luther King or James Farmer needs to talk to somebody in Washington needed to talk to someone in Washington, they would simply say, "call Burke." His work was crucial to passing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. After he had helped shape a new America, he later worked equally hard to shape young minds at Yale Law School. I made a joke about Hillary and I being students. But I can tell you, I never will forget the first time I saw him. And I imagined how this man of slight stature and such a modest demeanor could almost shake with his passion for justice. It was quite something to see for the first time, and we are all in his debt. When Leon Sullivan was 8 years old, he walked into a grocery store, slapped a nickel on the counter and said, "I want a Coke." The place being in segregated South Carolina, the shopkeeper threw him out. That moment was the beginning of his life's work. The pastor of two churches by the time he was at the ripe old age of 17, Reverend Sullivan went on to write the Sullivan principles, which called upon companies all around the world to act in a socially responsible manner. By compelling dozens of businesses to desegregate their plants in South Africa, his work helped to pull down apartheid. Today, as the author of the new global Sullivan principle, Leon Sullivan is still changing the world. He's too big for anyone to deny him a Coke laughter but he has helped to win that right for millions of others who aren't so large. Reverend Sullivan, thank you for keeping your eyes on the prize for nearly 80 years now. Thank you. For those of you who wonder from time to time about whether there really could be a divine plan guiding our lives, consider this In Spanish, the name, Dolores Huerta, means "sorrowful orchard." But if Dolores has her way, her name will be the only sorrowful orchard left in America. She began her career teaching young migrant children but couldn't stand seeing them come to class hungry. So in 1962 she and Cesar Chavez cofounded the United Farm Workers. While Cesar Chavez worked the fields, she worked the boardrooms and the statehouses, negotiating contracts and fighting for laws that lifted the lives of thousands and thousands of Americans. In the process, she found time to raise 11 children. Dolores, we thank you for all you have done and all you still do to promote the dignity and human rights of your family and America's family. Thank you. It is no accident that when America opened its arms to Kosovar Albanians early this year, one of the first calls that went out was to a Dominican nun in the Fordham section of the Bronx. Scripture tells us that "if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your life will rise in the darkness and your night will become like noonday." If that is true, there are few people who live their lives in more sunshine than Sister Jean Marshall. Disturbed by the sight of refugee families picking up garbage off the street to feed their children, in 1983 Sister Jean founded St. Rita's Center for Immigrant and Refugee Services. In the days since, it has helped thousands of refugees, from Vietnam to Cambodia to Bosnia, to find jobs, learn English, live better lives. Sister Jean, we thank you for all you are doing to make our democracy real and dreams come true for thousands who flee human rights abuses and come here expecting the Statue of Liberty to live up to her promise. Thank you. Lastly, there are few people who have done more to directly build on Eleanor Roosevelt's work on women's rights around the world than Charlotte Bunch. Gloria Steinem once observed that for every question that comes up regarding women's rights, sooner or later someone asks, what does Charlotte think? Laughter As the founder of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, she has worked to build a worldwide network of activists. As a result, when the World Conference on Human Rights was held in Vienna in 1993, for the first time there was a network in place to raise international awareness of issues like violence against women and gay and lesbian issues. And for the first time, the U.N. acknowledged that women's rights are human rights. Today I think the best way to thank Charlotte Bunch is for the Senate to finally ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Thank you. We honor these five Americans today with the thanks of a grateful nation. But let me say again, to echo what Hillary said earlier, if we truly want to honor their work, we must stay committed in the places where the glory has not come and continue to speak out for human rights around the world, from Burma to Cuba to Sudan, from Serbia to North Korea and Vietnam. We must do so because it's the right thing to do and the surest path to a world that is safe, democratic, and free. In Afghanistan, we have strongly condemned the Taliban's despicable treatment of women and girls. We have worked with the United Nations to impose sanctions against the Taliban, while ensuring that the Afghan people continue to receive humanitarian assistance. We are Afghanistan's strongest critic, but also its largest humanitarian donor. And today we take another step forward. I am pleased to announce that we will spend, next year, at least 2 million to educate and improve the health of Afghan women and children refugees. We are also making an additional 1 1 2 million available in emergency aid for those displaced by the recent Taliban offensive. And we're dramatically expanding our resettlement program for women and children who are not safe where they are. But, as Belquis said, these are but temporary solutions. The Taliban must stop violating the rights of women and respect the human rights of all people. And we must continue to work until the day when Afghanistan has a government that reflects the wisdom of its people. The whole world is also concerned about the plight of innocent people in Chechnya. Two weeks ago, at the OSCE summit in Turkey, I raised the issue directly with President Yeltsin. The people of Chechnya are in a terrible position, beleaguered by paramilitary groups and terrorists on the one hand and the Russian offensive on the other. I made clear that Russia's fight against terrorism is right, but the methods being used in Chechnya are wrong. And I am convinced they are counterproductive. We've seen rocket and artillery attacks on largely civilian areas, with heavy losses of life and at least 200,000 people pushed from their homes. I'm deeply disturbed by reports that suggest that innocent Chechens will continue to bear the brunt of this war, and not the militants Russia is fighting. Russia has set a deadline for all inhabitants, now, to leave Grozny or face the consequences. That means that there is a threat to the lives of the old, the infirm, the injured people, and other innocent civilians who simply cannot leave or are too scared to leave their homes. Russia will pay a heavy price for those actions with each passing day, sinking more deeply into a morass that will intensify extremism and diminish its own standing in the world. Another country about which we must continue to express concern is China. China is progressing and opening to the world in many ways that are welcome, including its entry into the WTO. Yet its progress is still being held back by the Government's response to those who test the limits of freedom. A troubling example, of course, is the detention by Chinese authorities, of adherents of the Falun Gong movement. Its targets are not political dissidents, and their practices and beliefs are unfamiliar to us. But the principle still, surely, must be the same freedom of conscience and freedom of association. And our interest, surely, must be the same seeing China maintain stability and growth at home by meeting, not stifling, the growing demands of its people for openness and accountability. For all these challenges, we have to say that we enter the new millennium more hopeful than we have been at any time in the past century. The second half of this century began with delegates from 18 nations, including the United States, coming together to write the Universal Declaration. The century ends with 18 nations having come together with the United States to reaffirm those basic rights in Kosovo with progress from Indonesia and East Timor to Nigeria. Now, as I've said, more than half the world's people live under governments of their own choosing. Shortly before the Congress went home, the United States Senate unanimously ratified the International Convention against Child Labor, and I became the third head of state to sign the convention. We are moving, but we have much to do as we enter a new century. And again I would say to my fellow Americans, we all know that our efforts have to begin at home. On the 10th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Eleanor Roosevelt dedicated a book called "In Your Hands." On that day she said, and I quote, human rights begin "in small places, close to home . . . Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world." Today we honor that message by honoring five people whose work close to home has made the whole world a better place. May their work continue to inspire us all for generations yet to come. Lieutenant Colonel, read the citations. At this point, Lt. Col. Carlton D. Everhart, USAF, Air Force Aide to the President, read the citations, and the President and First Lady presented the awards. The President. Thank you for coming. Thank you for honoring these great people. Thank you for reminding us of all the important work still to be done, Belquis. We're adjourned. Thank you. December 01, 1999 Thank you very much. Ambassador Barshefsky, thank you for your remarks and your work. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a very large delegation from our administration here today, and I hope it's evidence to you of our seriousness of purpose. I thank the Commerce Secretary, Bill Daley the Agriculture Secretary, Dan Glickman our SBA Administrator, Aida Alvarez, my National Economic Councilor, Gene Sperling Ambassador Esserman and my Chief of Staff, John Podesta, all of whom are here, and I thank them. I want to say that I agree that Mike Moore is the ideal person to head the WTO, because he has a sense of humor, and boy, do we need it right now. Laughter Did you see the gentleman holding up the big white napkin here before we started? He was doing that to get the light for the television cameras. But he was standing here holding the napkin, and Mike whispered to me, he said, "Well, after yesterday, that could be the flag of the WTO." Laughter We'll have rolling laughter as the translation gets through here. Let me begin by saying welcome to the United States and to one of our most wonderful cities. We are honored to have you here on a very important mission. Today I want to talk a little bit about the work that we're all here to do launching a new WTO round for a new century, a new type of round that I hope will be about jobs, development, and broadly shared prosperity and about improving the quality of life, as well as the quality of work around the world, an expanded system of rule based trade that keeps pace with the changing global economy and the changing global society. Let me begin by saying that 7 years ago when I had the honor to become President of the United States, I sat down alone and sort of made a list of the things that I hoped could be done to create the kind of world that I wanted our children to live in, in the new century, a world where the interests of the United States I thought were quite clear in peace and stability in democracy and prosperity. To achieve that kind of world, I thought it was very important that the United States support the increasing unity of Europe and the expansion of the European Union that we support the expansion of NATO and its partnership with what are now more than two dozen countries, including Russia and Ukraine that we support the integration of China, Russia, and the Indian subcontinent, in particular, into the large political and economic flows of our time that we stand against the ethnic and religious conflicts that were still consuming the Middle East and Northern Ireland, then Bosnia and later Kosovo that we do what we could to help people all over the world to deal with such things, including the tribal wars in Africa. And I thought it was important that we give people mechanisms by which they could work toward a shared prosperity, which is why we wanted to finish the last WTO round why we are working hard with our friends in Europe on a Stability Pact for the Balkans why we know economics must be a big part of the Middle East peace process why we have an Asian Pacific economic forum where the leaders meet why we've had two Summits of the Americas with our friends in Latin America why we're trying to pass the Africa and Caribbean Basin trade initiatives and why I believe it is imperative that we here succeed in launching a new trade round that can command broad support among ordinary citizens in all our countries and take us where we want to go. There are negative forces I have tried to combat, in addition to the forces of hatred based on ethnic or religious difference the terrorists, the problems of disease and poverty, which I hope that the large debt relief initiative that we are pushing will help to alleviate. But in the end, all of these changes in my view will only give us the world we want, where the poorest countries have children that can at least live through childhood and where the boys as well as the girls can go to school and then have a chance to make a decent living where countries with governance problems can work through them where wealthy countries can continue to prosper but do so in a way that is more responsible to helping those who still have a long way to go economically and where, together, we can meet our common responsibilities to human needs, to the environment, to the cause of world peace. We will not get that done unless we can prove, for all of our domestic political difficulties and all of our honest differences, we still believe that we can have an interdependent global economy that runs alongside our interdependent international information society. And we are called upon here to meet against a background of a lot of people coming here to protest. Some of them, I think, have a short memory, or maybe no memory, of what life was like in most of your countries not so very long ago. So let me say again, I condemn the small number who were violent and who tried to prevent you from meeting. But I'm glad the others showed up, because they represent millions of people who are now asking questions about whether this enterprise in fact will take us all where we want to go. And we ought to welcome their questions and be prepared to give an answer, because if we cannot create an interconnected global economy that is increasing prosperity and genuine opportunity for people everywhere, then all of our political initiatives are going to be less successful. So I ask you to think about that. When I hear the voices outside the meeting rooms, I disagree with a lot of what they say, but I'm still glad they're here. Why? Because their voices now count in this debate. For 50 years one of the reasons I said we needed a leader like Mr. Moore, with a sense of humor, because for 50 years global trade, even though there were always conflicts you know, the United States and Japan, they're our great friends and allies we're always arguing about something. But to be fair, it was a conflict that operated within a fairly narrow band. For 50 years, trade decisions were largely the province of trade ministers, heads of government, and business interests. But now, what all those people in the street tell us is that they would also like to be heard. And they're not so sure that this deal is working for them. Some of them say, well and by the way, they're kind of like we are a lot of them are in conflict with each other, right? Because a lot of them say, "Well, this is not a good thing for the developing countries. They haven't benefited as much as they should have, while the wealthy countries have grown wealthier in this information society." Others say, "Well, even if you're growing the economy, you're hurting the environment." And still others say, "Well, companies may be getting rich in some of these poorer countries, but actual working, laboring people are not doing so well." And others have other various and sundry criticisms of what we have done. I would like to say, first of all, I think we need to do a better job of making the basic case. No one in this room can seriously argue that the world would have been a better place today if our forebears over the last 50 years had not done their work to bring us closer together. Whatever the problems that exist in whatever countries represented here, whatever the legitimacy of any of the criticism against us, this is a stronger, more prosperous world because we have worked to expand the frontiers of cooperation and reduce the barriers to trade among people. And we need to reiterate our conviction that that is true. If we were all out here going on our own, we would not be as well off in the world as we are. Secondly, at the end of the cold war, I am sure everyone in this room has been struck by the cruel irony that in this most modern of ages, when the Internet tells us everything, as Mr. Moore said, when we are solving all the problems of the human gene, and we will soon know what's in the black holes in the universe, it is truly ironic that the biggest problems of human society are the oldest ones, those rooted in our fear of those who are different from us different races, different ethnic groups, different tribes, different religions, all over the world, people consumed by differences. When people are working together for common prosperity in a rule based system, they have big incentives to lay the differences down and join hands to work together. So if we just make those two points to our critics, I think it's very important Number one, the world is a better place than it would have been, had we not had the last 50 years of increasing economic cooperation for trade and investment and number two, the world of the future will be a safer place if we continue to work together in a rulebased system that offers enormous incentives for people to find ways to cooperate and to give up their old hatreds and their impulses to violence and war. Now having said that, we now have to say What next? I think we have to acknowledge a responsibility, particularly those of us in the wealthier countries, to make sure that we are working harder to see that the benefits of the global economy are more widely shared among and within countries, that it truly works for ordinary people who are doing the work for the rest of us. I think we also have to make sure that the rules make sense and that we're continuing to make progress, notwithstanding the domestic political difficulties that every country will face. We all benefit when the rules are clear and fair. I think that means we have to cut tariffs further on manufactured goods and set equally ambitious goals for services. I think we should extend our moratorium on E commerce. I think we should treat agriculture as we treat other sectors of the economy. But we all have domestic political constraints. Everybody knows that. I think we have to leave this luncheon saying, in spite of that, we're going to find some way to keep moving forward because the world will be a better place, and the world will be a safer place. Now, let me offer a few observations of what I hope will be done. First, I think we have to do more to ensure that the least developed countries have greater access to global markets and the technical assistance to make the most of it. Director General Moore has dedicated himself and this organization to extending the benefits of trade to the least developed countries, and I thank you for that, sir. Here in Seattle, 32 developing nations are moving toward admission to the WTO. EU President Prodi and I have discussed this whole issue, and I have assured him, and I assure you, that the United States is committed to a comprehensive program to help the poorest nations become full partners in the world trading system. This initiative, which we are working on with the EU, Japan, and Canada, would enhance market access for products from the least developed countries consistent with our GSP preference access program and our Africa and Caribbean Basin initiatives, which, I am glad to report, are making good progress through the United States Congress. Building on our recent collaboration with Senegal, Lesotho, Zambia, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, we would also intensify our efforts to help developing countries build the domestic institutions they need to make the most of trade opportunities and to implement WTO obligations. This afternoon I will meet with heads of international organizations that provide trade related technical assistance and ask them to help in this effort. And I will say this. I do believe, after the Uruguay round, when we set up this system, that we did not pay enough attention to the internal capacity building in the developing nations that is necessary to really play a part in the global economy. And I am prepared to do my part to rectify that omission. We also must help these countries avert the health and pollution costs of the industrial age. We have to help them use clean technologies that improve the economy, the environment, and health care at the same time. And I will just give one example. Today is World AIDS Day, and today the USTR our Trade Representative and the Department of Health and Human Services are announcing that they are committed to working together to make sure that our intellectual property policy is flexible enough to respond to legitimate public health crises. Intellectual property protections are very important to a modern economy, but when HIV and AIDS epidemics are involved and like serious health care crises, the United States will henceforward implement its health care and trade policies in a manner that ensures that people in the poorest countries won't have to go without medicine they so desperately need. I hope this will help South Africa and many other countries that we are committed to support in this regard. More generally, this new round should promote sustainable development in places where hunger and poverty still stoke despair. We know countries that have opened their economies to the world have also opened the doors to opportunity and hope for their own people. Where barriers have fallen, by and large, living standards have risen, and democratic institutions have become stronger. We have to spread that more broadly. So secondly, I want to say what I said at the WTO in Geneva last year. I think it is imperative that the WTO become more open and accessible. While other international organizations have sought and not shied from public participation when that has happened, public support has grown. If the WTO expects to have public support grow for our endeavors, the public must see and hear and in a very real sense actually join in the deliberations. That's the only way they can know the process is fair and know their concerns were at least considered. We've made progress since I issued this challenge in Geneva last year, but I believe there's more work to be done from opening the hearing room doors to inviting in a more formal fashion public comment on trade disputes. Now look, let me just say, I know there's a lot of controversy about this. And as all of you know, I'm about to enter the last year of my Presidency. I will not be around to deal with the aftermath. But I'm telling you, I've been in this business a long time, and in the end, we all serve and function at the sufferance of the people, either with their active support or their silent acquiescence. What they are telling us in the streets here is, this was an issue we used to be silent on. We're not going to be silent on it anymore. We haven't necessarily given up on trade, but we want to be heard. The sooner the WTO opens up the process and lets people representing those who are outside in, the sooner we will see fewer demonstrations, more constructive debate, and a broader level of support in every country for the direction that every single person in this room knows that we ought to be taking into the 21st century. So we can do it a little bit now and a little bit later. We can drag our feet, or we can run through an open door. But my preference is to open the meetings, open the records, and let people file their opinions. No one, no sensible person expects to win every argument, and no one ever does. But in a free society, people want to be heard, and human dignity and political reality demand it today. Third, as I have said repeatedly, I believe the WTO must make sure that open trade does indeed lift living standards, respects core labor standards that are essential not only to worker rights but to human rights. That's why this year the United States has proposed that the WTO create a working group on trade and labor. To deny the importance of these issues in a global economy is to deny the dignity of work, the belief that honest labor fairly compensated gives meaning and structure to our lives. I hope we can affirm these values at this meeting. I am pleased that tomorrow I will sign the ILO convention to eliminate the worst forms of child labor. And I thank the United States Senate on a bipartisan basis for supporting us in this. I believe the WTO should collaborate more closely with the ILO, which has worked hard to protect human rights, to ban child labor. I hope you will do this. Let me say in all candor, I am well aware that a lot of the nations that we most hope to support, the developing nations of the world, have reservations when the United States says we support bringing labor concerns into our trade debate. And I freely acknowledge that, if we had a certain kind of rule, then protectionists in wealthy countries could use things like wage differentials to keep poorer countries down, to say, "Okay, you opened your markets to us. Now we'll sell to you. But you're selling to us, and we want to keep you down, so we'll say you're not paying your people enough." The answer to that is not to avoid this labor issue, not when there's still child labor all over the world, not when there are still oppressive labor practices all over the world, not when there is still evidence in countries that ordinary people are not benefiting from this. The answer is not to just throw away the issue. The answer is to write the rules in such a way that people in our position, the wealthier countries, can't do that, can't use this as an instrument of protectionism. We can find a way to do this. But there is a sense of solidarity all over the world, among ordinary people who get up every day, will never be able to come to a luncheon like this, do their work, raise their children, pay their taxes, form the backbone of every nation represented here. They deserve basic, fundamental decency, and the progress of global trade should reflect, also, in their own lives. I do not want the United States, or any other country, now or later, to be able to use this as a shield for protectionism. But to pretend that it is not a legitimate issue in many countries is another form of denial, which I believe will keep the global trading system from building the public support it deserves. Finally, we must work to protect and to improve the environment as we expand trade. Two weeks ago, I signed an Executive order requiring careful environmental review of our major trading agreements early enough to make a difference, including the input of the public and outside experts and considering genuinely held concerns. We stand ready to cooperate as you develop similar systems, and to integrate the environment more fully into trade policy. We are committed to finding solutions which are win win, that benefit both the economy and the environment, open trade and cutting edge clean technologies, which I believe will be the next industrial revolution. We will continue to support WTO rules that recognize a nation's right to take science based health, safety, and environmental measures, even when they're higher than international standards. Now I want to say something about this. Again I know, there are some people who believe my concern and the concern of the United States about the environment is another way that somehow we can keep the developing countries down. That is not true. There are basically two great clusters of environmental issues facing the world today. First, there are the local issues faced primarily by the developing nations healthy water systems and sewer systems, systems to restrict soil erosion and to otherwise promote the public health. It is in everyone's interest to help those things to be installed as quickly and efficiently as possible. But the real issue that affects us all, that prompts my insistence that we put this issue on the agenda, is global warming and the related issue of the loss of species in the world as a consequence of global warming. And the difference in this issue and previous environmental issues is this Once the greenhouse gases get in the atmosphere, they take a long time, 100 years or more, to dispel. Therefore, one nation's policy, including ours and we are now the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, in the United States. We won't be long, but we are now. But we have to do something about this. And I want to say to you what I said to the people at our table. There is now clear and compelling scientific, technological evidence that it is no longer necessary for a poor country growing rich to do so by emitting more greenhouse gas emissions. Or in plainer language, a nation can develop a middle class and develop wealth without burning more oil and coal in traditional manners. This is a sea change in the reality that existed just a few years ago. And let's be candid most people don't believe it. A lot of people in our country don't believe it. But in everything from transportation to manufacturing to the generation of electricity to the construction of buildings, it is now possible to grow an economy with much less injury to the atmosphere, with available technologies. And within 5 years breathtaking changes in the way automobile engines work and in the way fuel is made, especially from biomass, will make these trends even more clear. I do not believe the United States has the right to ask India or Pakistan or China or any other country to give up economic growth. But I do believe that all of us can responsibly say, if you can grow at the same rate without doing what we did that is fouling the environment and then cleaning it up Mr. Kono remembers I remember the first time I went to Tokyo over 20 years ago, people wore masks riding their bicycles around, and now the air there is cleaner than it is in my hometown in Arkansas. What is the difference now? It is not just a national issue. If you foul the atmosphere and then you later clean it up, the greenhouse gases are still up there, and they'll be there for 100 years, warming the climate. Now, we do not have a right to ask anybody to give up economic growth. But we do have a right to say, if we're prepared to help you finance a different path to growth, and we can prove to you and you accept, on the evidence that your growth will be faster, not smaller, that you'll have more good jobs, more new technology, a broader base for your economy, then I do believe we ought to have those kind of environmental standards. And we ought to do it in a voluntary way with available technologies. But we ought to put environment at the core of our trade concerns. Now I don't know if I've persuaded any of you about any of this. But I know one thing This is a better world than it would have been if our forebears hadn't done this for the last 50 years. If we're going to go into the next 50 years, we have to recognize that we're in a very different environment. We're in a total information society, where information has already been globalized, and citizens all over the world have been empowered. And they are knocking on the door here, saying, "Let us in, and listen to us. This is not an elite process anymore. This is a process we want to be heard in." So I implore you, let's continue to make progress on all the issues where clearly we can. Let's open the process and listen to people even when we don't agree with them. We might learn something, and they'll feel that they've been part of a legitimate process. And let's continue to find ways to prove that the quality of life of ordinary citizens in every country can be lifted, including basic labor standards and an advance on the environmental front. If we do this, then 50 years from now the people who will be sitting in all these chairs will be able to have the same feelings about you that Mr. Moore articulated our feelings for the World War II generation. Thank you very much, and welcome again. November 30, 1999 Thank you very much. We can pass laws, but we can't fix this podium here. Laughter Maybe I'll stand up on it. How's that? Laughter I love Whoopi Goldberg. The greatest thing about being President is that nearly anybody will come talk to you. Laughter Some will talk for you some will talk against you some will talk at you, but nearly anybody will come talk to you. And so I've had the honor of meeting all kinds of people from all walks of life. But when I met Whoopi Goldberg and I was already sort of a big fan, you know but I looked at her, and I thought, now, there is a woman who will be my friend. Laughter You know, there have been times when I'm sure my friendship has been somewhat embarrassing to her. Laughter And times when her jokes have caused me some discomfort in public. Laughter But I'm not a hypocrite about that. I'm with her through thick and thin. Laughter And she has certainly been with me though thick and thin. Of all the people that I know, I continue to be amazed by how generous truly busy and successful people are. But Whoopi, you have been so generous to me and to my family and our administration, and in so doing, you've been generous to America. And I thank you for that. I thank Beau Bridges for being here and for his leadership and for telling his story for portraying everyone from Jim Brady to P.T. Barnum. Laughter Sarah, when you get home, you tell Jim I said that I thought he was just playing the same role twice. Laughter I thank Steve Sposato for being here and being so faithful to this call. I have on the wall of my private office, which is just off the Oval Office, a picture of Steve and Megan Sposato, which he gave me shortly after I signed the assault weapons ban. I see it every day still, and every day it is an inspiration to me to continue to work on the issues we come here tonight to support. And I thank Sarah Brady for being my friend and my guiding light. I thank Representatives Sherman and Berman and Becerra, who are here and Senator Dianne Feinstein, who isn't, and Senator Barbara Boxer, who flew out to California with me today, they have both been terrific on all these issues. I talked to Governor Davis a couple of hours before I got here, and he said to tell you all hello, and he is justifiably proud of the record he established in this recent session of the legislature. And let me, lastly, by way of introduction, congratulate this year's "Pete" Shields Awardwinner, Gregory Peck, for sharing his many gifts with the world. And Veronique, thank you. You know, we meet in this wonderful old, historic Hollywood home tonight, and it gives me the opportunity to say once again that I have been, since I was a small child, an ardent movie fan. I don't know how many Gregory Peck movies I have seen and enjoyed. But I think that his remarkable performance as Atticus Finch, of all the roles that he played, probably was closer to the person Gregory Peck really is. There is a wonderful moment in Harper Lee's classic when Atticus sits down to talk with his children about courage. He says, "I want you to know that real courage isn't a man with a gun. It's when the odds are against you, but you begin anyway, and you see it through no matter what." Steve Sposato, you have done that. Sarah, you and Jim have done that. And we thank you. I am honored to be here tonight. I have come to California many times pursuing the work of this administration. Often I have come to this town that has been so wonderful to Hillary and me and asked for funds to continue our campaigns or our work. Tonight the main reason I'm here is to say a simple thank you. Thank you for what you're doing to support the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence for supporting its groundbreaking research, its public education, its coalition building, its leading light to protect families from gun violence. Thank you for all you've done year after year to support our administration's initiatives to build safer streets and stronger communities. Thank you for championing the Brady bill as Sarah said, I signed it into law 6 years ago today. Thank you for supporting the assault weapons ban. Thank you for supporting the 100,000 community police officers on our streets and programs to help keep our children out of trouble. It is working. Today applause yes, you can clap for that. Today in America the crime rate is at a 25year low the murder rate at a 31 year low violent crime down 35 percent since 1992, with the longest continuous decline in the crime rate in our Nation's history. On this 6th anniversary of the Brady bill, I want you to know that the latest figures are in and the Brady bill has now helped to block more than 470,000 gun sales by licensed gun dealers to felons, fugitives, and stalkers 470,000. And in the last year alone, the national instant criminal background check system has blocked gun sales to more than 160,000 people. Now these are more than numbers. Remember Steve's story. These are 470,000 acts of community conscience and common mercy. They have saved lives, avoided injuries, averted tragedies. Yesterday I signed the new budget bill. And I want to thank the Member of Congress here who stood with me to make sure this budget will begin putting up 50,000 more community police officers on top of the 100,000 we've already funded, targeted to the most dangerous streets left in our country provide new crimefighting technology to police and more than double after school programs to keep more kids out of trouble and in safe environments. I want to also thank you for being a source of strength and courage to all of us in our larger administration family, to Hillary, who urged me every step of the way to push for the Brady bill, to push for the assault weapons ban, to continue to push and take on this issue who reminded me that because I grew up in the South and first shot a .22 when I was 12 and understood the mind set of the people, the good people, who uncritically followed the NRA into the voting booth year in and year out, that I had a special responsibility to deal with this issue. And she asked me to tell you hello. I just talked to her about 30 minutes ago, and I thank you for that. I want to thank you on behalf of Vice President Gore, who cast the tie breaking vote in the bill to close the gun show loophole that passed the Senate. And I want to thank you on behalf of Tipper Gore, who has done so much to see that Americans with mental illness get treatment and not more handguns. But I didn't just come to say thanks, because we have a lot more to do. When the Brady bill finally passed Congress and was signed, rather than vetoed, by me laughter someone asked Sarah, "Well, what are you going to do now?" And without missing a beat she said, "I'm going to keep fighting." So I come here to tell you, you have to keep fighting. Because even though America is safer from Columbine High School to the Jewish community center in Grenada Hills to the Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, and every community in between and beyond, no one believes America is as safe as it should be or can be. Still, 12 children die every day from gun violence. And America is not acceptably safe when the rate of children under 15 killed accidentally by guns listen to this the rate of children under 15 killed accidentally by guns is 9 times higher than the rate of the 25 next biggest industrial nations combined. Now, what do we have to keep fighting for? For what works. Seven years ago a lot of people did not believe we could get the crime rate down. And when the Brady bill came up again in Congress they said I remember what they said they said, "Oh, this Brady bill will not make a difference because criminals and kooks don't buy guns at gun stores." Do you remember that? That's what they said. And we said, "Well, we think it will. And besides that, it's not that big an inconvenience to have everybody go through the background check." Well, 470,000 rejections later we know it did make a difference. The same people, I might add, said that if we put 100,000 community police out there, it wouldn't make a difference if we passed the assault weapons ban, it wouldn't make a difference. Well, they were wrong. They were just wrong. Now, I come here to suggest that the time has come to set a different goal. Let me just sort of parenthesis a minute. I want you all to think about this as citizens in the context of gun violence and every other thing America needs to do. In my lifetime a 6 year old boy asked me this weekend, who was visiting my family on Thanksgiving, he said, "How old are you?" And I said, "I'm 53." And he said, "That's a lot." Laughter Well, I guess so. Laughter But in my lifetime and that's a lot laughter there has never been a time ever, not even once, when our country had this remarkable combination of economic prosperity, social progress, self confidence, and the absence of external threat and internal crisis, so that we are freer than we have ever been in my lifetime as a people to shape the future of our dreams for our children. And the great question before the American people is not whether we'll change it, as how we will change and whether we will do that. And I'll bet you everybody here can remember an instance in your personal life, in your family life, and in your work life when you squandered a terrific opportunity because things were going so well, you thought you could relax and you got diverted you got divided you got distracted. You just blew it. And countries are no different than people, families, and enterprises. That's what countries are. So the great question before us as a people is, what are we going to make of this magic moment to deal with the challenge of educating all our children, to deal with the challenge of the aging of America, to deal with the challenge of getting poor people an opportunity to be part of our prosperity, to deal with the challenge of environmental preservation? And I could go on and on. Now, I have a modest proposal here that, if I had said it 7 years ago when I was running for President, people would have said, "Well, he seems like a nice young man, but we ought to send him home because he's touched." Laughter But 7 years ago, people didn't believe we could get the crime rate down. Okay. We've got the lowest crime rate in 25 years and the lowest murder rate in 31 years, and there's not a single soul here who believes this country is as safe as it ought to be. So I say, let's set a goal now that is really worth fighting for. Let's say we're not going to stop until the freest big country on Earth is the safest big country on Earth. Applause Now, to achieve that, we just have to keep doing what we've been doing. We have to keep moving the ball forward and resisting the same old arguments in new guises. We have to pass the commonsense gun safety legislation Congress failed to pass last year in the aftermath of Columbine. We have to, one, build on the success of the Brady bill by closing the gun show loophole. Now, let me remind you I don't know how many of you have ever been to a gun show, but I have been. That was sort of a mandatory stop when I was the Governor of my, what my distinguished opponent in 1992 said was a small southern State. Laughter I've been to these things, you know, down a country road, alley, pickups and cars on both sides, trunks up, guns in the trunk. The same crowd that said in 1993 when we were trying to pass the Brady bill they said, "All these criminals, they don't buy guns at gun stores they buy all their guns at flea markets and gun shows and all that. So this Brady bill won't do any good." So we did the Brady bill, 470,000 rejections later they now say, "Oh, it won't do any good to close the gun show loophole." I wanted to go back and read them what they said in '93. That's sort of the just say no crowd. Laughter I'm telling you, we still have too many people getting guns at these gun shows and at urban flea markets, and there ought to be background checks. And it will make a difference. That's the first thing we have to do. The second thing we have to do is build on the success of the assault weapons ban by closing the gaping loophole there which still allows the legal importation of large capacity ammunition clips. They ought to be banned from import. We don't need them. The third thing we ought to do remember the statistic I gave you on accidental child deaths? We ought to require child safety trigger locks on the sale of all new handguns in this country. Congress ought to follow the lead of California and pass my proposals to ban handgun sales to one a month, to limit them to one a month and once again to require the Brady waiting period to allow a cooling off period. Just because we've got the instant background checks doesn't mean we still don't need the waiting period. The waiting period causes people who may not have a criminal background, and who may be in some frenzy, to wait a few days, calm down, and it will save lives. We need to reinstitute it on a national basis. I also ask for your support for two non gunrelated initiatives, our national grassroots campaign against youth violence, headed by a California activist, Jeff Weiss, and our hate crimes legislation. I want to make just two general points in closing. One of the previous speakers mentioned that I had stood up to the NRA. It made me rather unpopular with one member of this community out here. Laughter But I'll tell you a story. I vetoed a bill I think I was the only southern Governor that ever vetoed a bill passed by the NRA in the State legislature, and it was in the late 1980's. They were going around this conservative group you know conservative groups believe in limited national or State authority, maximum local authority. They had a bill they were trying to pass in every legislature in the country to prohibit local governments from having gun laws more stringent than State government. There was a reason for that. State governments tend to be dominate by rural legislators, whereas local urban governments tend to be more interested in keeping cop killer bullets out of guns that can kill police officers wearing bullet proof vests, for example. So they thought this was a big threat to the Constitution and our individual liberty, so they wanted to stop all these local governments from doing this. And they passed such a bill in my legislature, and I vetoed it. And my legislature was really good. They knew that they didn't want to be in a position of overriding my veto, but they didn't want to be in the position of having the NRA go after them in the election. And so they waited until late in the session to pass it, and they were gone when I vetoed it, so they didn't have to face the fact whether they would override it or not. It was a great deal. So then 1990 comes along this is a true story, I want you all to remember this. I never will forget this. This not a joke, and I'm glad we're laughing because otherwise we would be crying about this. So 1990 comes along and the NRA comes up with this bill again. And they send a lobbyist from Washington to Little Rock to lobby for the bill. I'll never forget this guy. He was a real big, fine looking young man, a couple inches taller than me, very well dressed. One day he came up to me in the rotunda of our State capitol, which is sort of a miniversion of the National Rotunda, you know, and everything echoes. And this young man came up to me, and it was like the E.F. Hutton ad, you know, everybody got really silent. Laughter And this guy says, "Now, Governor, Governor," he says, "I want you to just let this bill become law without your signature. You don't have to do anything." I said, "I can't do that. I think your bill stinks." He said, "All right, Governor, it's this way. I think you're going to run for President, and when you do, if you veto this bill, we're going to beat your brains out in the Texas primary." And all of a sudden everybody got real quiet. There must have been 50 of my legislators standing there. And I said, "Young man, you just don't understand, do you? I think your bill stinks." And I said, "Not only that, you know this is a conservative State. You know we're not going to pass any sweeping gun control legislation here. You know that we've got this big influx of gang warfare in a couple of our areas. And it won't hurt anybody if the local government here in Little Rock decides to ban copkiller bullets. The reason you're trying to pass this bill is back in Washington, in your national headquarters, there's a big chart on the wall, and this bill is at the top of the chart, and all the States are listed down the side, and you want to be able to put a little check by Arkansas." I said, "This doesn't have anything to do with the safety of our children or the freedom of people to hunt." And I said, "If that's the way you feel, you just get your gun, and I'll get mine, and I'll meet you in Texas." Laughter So, anyway, we lost Texas in the general election by a few points laughter but got 67 percent there in the Democratic primary in 1992. So it didn't work very well. So anyway, so then we go in 1993, and we got the Brady bill. In 1994 we got the assault weapons ban. And it was very difficult for a lot of our people. That's what I want to tell you. We're all here, preaching to the saved, patting each other on the back. Let me tell you something. When these votes are cast in the State legislature and the Congress, there are people who put their seats on the line to do this because not everybody has the same views that you do and not everybody has had the chance to talk about this. And one of the reasons there is a Republican majority in the House of Representatives today is that I got them to vote on both the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban in my first 2 years as President. And there were a lot of people, I want you to know, there were a lot of people who laid their seats in Congress down so that there would be fewer people like Jim and Sarah Brady and Steve and Megan Sposato. They lost their seats in Congress to do that. I never will forget, in 1996 I went back to New Hampshire. We had one Democratic Congressman and one Republican Congressman when I became President, and they beat the Democrat, largely because he voted for these bills. And I went back to Manchester, and I went there, and as I remember, it was on a weekend morning. I went to it, and I said, "I want to get with a bunch of guys that I know go deer hunting and that I know are big sportsmen and that I know are mad about all this." And I had carried Al Gore and I carried New Hampshire in '92, which is very rare because it is basically a Republican State in the Presidential election. And so I got all these guys together, and I said, "Let me tell you something. I know you beat your Congressman in 1994 in part because he voted for the assault weapons ban and the Brady bill. And I want you to know he did it because I asked him to. So if there is a living soul here who has been inconvenienced one iota in your hunting season because of what we did, then I want you to vote against me, too. But if you haven't been, they lied to you and you need to get even." Laughter We got, in a three way race in 1996, a majority of the vote in the State of New Hampshire. I say that not to be self congratulatory but to say the answer here is not to shrivel up, turn aside, or ignore the obligation to communicate with people who are not in this tent tonight. We have to continue to broaden the base. Look, this is about it's bought on these two competing views of what liberty is. The view espoused by the NRA and others is that guns don't kill people, people do. That may be true, but people without guns don't kill as many people as people with guns. So the issue is go back to what Whoopi said about us all being connected. We've got to go out to people who may live in very rural areas and say, "Look if you carry this argument to its ultimate conclusion, we'll be in total anarchy." We've got a lot of people being killed by you know these poor people in the Middle West, the former basketball coach at Northwestern, an African American, killed by the same guy then he turns around and kills a young Korean Christian walking out of his church, and kills two or three other people, and he says he belongs to a church that doesn't believe in God but does believe in white supremacy. And I could go on and on and on. You know all these stories. Now their answer is, well, that we need a concealed weapons law and every law abiding person needs to carry a weapon. And if you take it to an extreme I saw I get my hometown paper still at the White House I saw we have a State legislator at home that says the answer to all these school shootings may be to have all the teachers go to the law enforcement academy and get trained to start carrying guns to school. Laughter Now you laugh about that, but that is the ultimate extension of the argument that, you know, we're all these sort of isolated individuals, and the last thing we can do is to have some common set of rules that we all follow. Now, we don't do that in other ways. We all give up a little of our liberty in theory when we walk through those airport metal detectors. Why? Well, we know we can't all pilot our own airplanes. And it's a matter of inconvenience to go take off your brass belt buckle or take your metal money clip out of your pocket and go through there again for the security of knowing that there is no terrorist on the plane. So you never hear anybody gripe about that anymore, do you? This is the same principle. You cannot be in a society where you are really free, unless your freedom is designed to enhance the freedom of all people in the community. And if you're not safe, you're not free. And we need to leave here tonight with a clear commitment to continue to take this debate to people and places who are good people, who still don't accept this argument, because we have a lot more to do. You clapped when I said we ought to make this the safest big country in the world. We can do it and still have a vibrant hunting and sporting culture. But we cannot do it if we labor under the illusion that we have no responsibilities to one another that require us to show mutual restraint when it comes to this gun issue. And therefore, we have to continue to work on this. This is a huge, huge issue that will go a long way to defining what kind of country we are. And it goes to this whole hate crimes issue, and I will just close with this. I think it is really ironic that on the edge of a new millennium when we are we've got now 90 percent of our schools connected to the Internet when we're unlocking the mysteries of the human genome in a few years, we'll know what is in the black holes in space when we'll be able to have little computer chips, before you know it, that we can insert into broken parts of people's bodies, including nerve centers in the spine and elsewhere and restore normal movement when we are thinking about all of these marvelous things that are going to happen, it is amazing that the biggest problem we face as a society is perhaps the oldest demon of human society, the fear and hatred of people who are different from us They are a different race they're a different religion they're gay they're whatever. And this whole issue of gun violence and how we handle it as a community and how we approach people who are different from us are related. I've been working for years on this Irish peace process. It looks like we're going to make it. One of the provisions of the Irish peace agreement is its paramilitary groups should lay down their weapons of war. In the Middle East, one of the provisions of the Wye peace agreement and the modified version that Prime Minister Barak and Mr. Arafat agreed to is that there should be some laying down of the weapons of war. In Bosnia, where I just was, looking at children who got to go home and were uprooted and driven out and seeing them back in their schools and trying to get people to lay down their hatreds and say, "Look, I know you can't lay down your hatreds tomorrow, although you ought to try, but, meanwhile, you've got to lay down your weapons of war." And so it's all about how you really define community, as just a label, or do we have some mutual responsibilities here? And I say to you, if I could have sort of one wish for America, if somebody said to me, "You don't have another year. You've got to go tomorrow, but you're like a genie, you get to give America one wish." I'd make this country one America. I would have our people understanding that our diversity is our strength because our common humanity is more important, and that imposes on us common responsibilities. I wish that we had done more in gun safety than we have. I know we can do more, as I said, and still leave all those people that I grew up with and that I represented and that I love, the right to their hunting and sporting past times. It's a big part of our culture. But we should not tolerate a society where people can still readily get these horrible weapons of destruction for no other purpose than to kill other people. It should be much, much harder for profoundly disturbed children, like those kids at Columbine, to get the kind of weapons they got. We can do better. Yes, I'm very grateful that I've been privileged to work with Sarah and Steve and Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer and the Representatives still here to do what we've done. But if you really want to make the most of this moment, you've got to keep going until we make America the world's safest big country. And if you want to do that, you have to reach out beyond those of us in this tent to the heart and soul of America and say, "Listen, we are blessed, but we have a lot to do and we have responsibilities to one another we have not fulfilled. And as we do that we will become more free, not less free." Thank you, and God bless you. November 20, 1999 Thank you very much. Professor Dorsen, Dean Sexton, President Oliva, to my fellow leaders, and especially to our hosts, Prime Minister and Mrs. D'Alema. Let me say a special word of appreciation to my good friend Romano Prodi for the very good outline he has given us of the challenges facing not only the nations of Europe but the United States and all other economies more or less positioned as we are. The hour is late, and what I think I would like to do is to briefly comment on why we're here and what exactly are the elements of progressive governance in the 21st century what do we have consensus on, and what are the outstanding challenges facing us? without going into any detail, in the hopes that that's what will be discussed tomorrow. First of all, I think it's worth noting that it's entirely fitting that we're meeting here at this beautiful villa in this great city where the Italian Renaissance saw its greatest flowering, because we know instinctively that we now have a chance at the turn of the millennium to shape another extraordinary period of human progress and creativity. There are many parallels to the Renaissance era in this time. For at the dawn of the Renaissance, Italy was a place of great economic ferment and change, rapidly expanding trade, new forms of banking and finance, new technologies and new wealth, more education, vibrant culture, broader horizons. Today, we have the Internet, the global economy, exploding diversity within and across national lines, the simultaneous emergence of global cultural movements, breathtaking scientific advances in everything from the human genome to discoveries about black holes in the universe. We have, in addition, a much greater opportunity to spread the benefits of this renaissance more broadly than it could have been spread 500 years ago. But there are also profound problems among and within nations. Making the most of our possibilities, giving all people a chance to seize them, minimizing the dangers to our dreams, requires us to go beyond the competing models of industrial age politics. That's why we're here. We think ideas matter. We think it's a great challenge to marry our conceptions of social justice and equal opportunity with our commitment to globalization. We think we will have to find what has often been called a Third Way, a way that requires governments to empower people with tools and conditions necessary for individuals, families, communities, and nations to make the most of their human potential. In the United States, we have proceeded for the last 7 years under a rubric of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans. We have also recognized something that I think is implicit in the whole concept of the European Union, which is that it is no longer possible, easily, to divide domestic from global political concerns. There is no longer a clear dividing line between foreign and domestic policy. And, therefore, it is important that every nation and that all like minded people have a vision of the kind of world we're trying to build in the 21st century and what it will take to build that world. I think there is an emerging consensus which you heard in Romano Prodi's remarks about what works and what challenges remain. There is also a clearer consensus that no one has all the answers. So let me briefly give you an outline of what I hope we will discuss tomorrow and in the months and years ahead. First, I think there is an economic consensus that market economics, fiscal discipline, expanded trade, and investment in people and emerging technologies is good economics. In the United States, it has given us an unparalleled economic expansion, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest inflation rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest unemployment among our women in the work force in 46 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, and the first back to back surpluses in our budget in over 40 years. But there are problems. I will get to them. On social questions, I think there is an emerging consensus that we should favor equal opportunity, inclusion of all citizens in our community, and an insistence upon personal responsibility. In addition to low welfare rolls through welfare reform in the United States, it has given us the lowest crime rate in 25 years and unprecedented opportunities for women, racial minorities, and gays to serve in public life and to be a part of public discourse. We have also worked particularly hard to reconcile the competing religious concerns of our increasing diverse communities of faith in the United States. The challenges to this economic and social policy are, it seems to me, as follows, and this is where we have to close the gap. Number one what Mr. Prodi talked about quite a lot the aging of all of our societies. In the next 30 years, the number of people over 65 in our county will double. I hope to be one of them. Laughter Now this is a highclass problem. In all the advanced economies, anyone who lives to be 65 today has a life expectancy of 82. Within a decade, the discoveries in the human genome project will lead every young mother including Mrs. Blair laughter within a matter of years, young mothers will go home from the hospital with their babies with a little genomic map. And it will tell these mothers and the fathers of the children what kinds of things they can do to maximize the health, the welfare, and the life expectancy of their children. Many of our best experts believe that within a decade, children born in advanced societies will have a life expectancy of 100 years. Now, this is a terrific thing but in the short run, it means that within 30 years, more or less, all of our societies will have only two people working for every one person retired challenge number one. Challenge number two, in spite of unprecedented economic prosperity in many places, there are still people and places that have been left behind. I'll give you the most stark example. In America, we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, 4.1 percent. On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the home of the Lakota Sioux, the unemployment rate is 73 percent. And in many of our inner cities, in many of our rural areas, this recovery simply has not reached because of the lack of educational level of the people or because of the digital divide or because of the absence of a conducive investment environment. But every advanced society that seeks social justice and equal opportunity cannot simply rest on economic success in the absence of giving all people the chance to succeed. Number three, there has, by and large, in all of our societies with heavy reliance on the market, been an increase in income inequality. I'm happy to say it is moderating in the United States. In countries that have chosen to make sure that did not happen, very often there have been quite high levels of unemployment, which people also find unacceptable and which is another form of social inequality. The next problem, with more and more people in the work force, both women and men, and more and more children being raised in homes that are either single parent homes or two parent homes where both the parents work, it is absolutely imperative that we strike the right balance between work and family. In this case, I think virtually every European country has done a better job than the United States in providing adequate family leave policies, adequate child care policies, adequate supports. But let me just put it in this way. If most parents are going to work, either because they have to or they want to, then every society must strive for the proper balance, because if you have to choose between succeeding at home and succeeding at work, then you are defeated before you begin. The most important job of any society is raising children it dwarfs in significance any other work. Applause Yes, you may clap for that. I appreciate that. It does. So if people at work are worried about the children at home or in child care, they're not going to be so productive at work. That means that either the economy or the social fabric will suffer. It is a profoundly important issue that will only grow more significant in the years ahead. The next big issue, I believe, is the balancing of economic growth and environmental protection. And because of the problem of global warming, we will have to prove not only that we can maintain the quality of the environment but that we can actually improve it while we grow the economy. I want to say a little more about that later, but it's a very important issue. Finally, I would like to put another issue on the table. There is a political problem with achieving this vision, and I'll give you just three examples involving all of us here. In order to pursue this economic and social vision, if you start from a position of economic difficulty and you believe that fiscal discipline is a part of your proposal that is necessary, then you're going to have upfront pain for long term gain. And the question is, will we be able to develop a progressive governance that will be able to sustain enough support from the people to get to the gaining part? Because everybody likes to talk about sacrifice, but no one likes to experience it. Everyone likes to talk about change, but we always want someone else to go first. And I have seen it. In our country, I was elected in 1992, and in 1993 I implemented my economic program, and in 1994 the public had not felt the benefits of it, and that's one of the big reasons we got a Congress of the other party. Chancellor Schroeder is facing the same sort of challenges. President Cardoso is facing the same sort of challenges. So it's all very well for us to come here when as in my case that things are rocking along well in our country and the public is supporting us. But I think it's important that we acknowledge, if we believe in these ideas they will often have to be pursued when they are controversial in the knowledge that these difficult changes have to be made in order to have results over the long term. And so one of the things I hope we'll be able to frankly discuss is how we can develop and sustain political support for like minded people in all countries who are determined to pursue this approach that we all know works and has to be pursued in order to create the kind of future we want for our children and grandchildren. Now let me just say a word about global politics. I believe there's an emerging consensus that it's good for the world to promote peace and prosperity and freedom and security through expanded trade through debt relief for the poorest nations through policies that advance human rights and democracies through policies in the developing countries that expand the rights and opportunities of women and their daughters through policies that stand against terrorism, against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and against the spread of ethnic, racial, and religious hatred. What are the specific challenges to this consensus? I'll just mention a few. How do you place a human face on the global economy? We're going to have a WTO ministerial in Washington State in a few days. There will be 10 times as many people demonstrating outside the hall as there will be inside. And I understand more than half of them may not even be from the United States. I personally think this is a good thing. Why? Because the truth is that ordinary people all over the world are not so sure about the globalization of the economy. They're not so sure they're going to benefit from trade. They want to see if there can be a human face on the global economy, if we can raise labor standards for ordinary people, if we can continue to improve the quality of life, including the quality of the environment. And if we believe we, who say we believe in social justice and the market economy, really want to push it, we have to prove that the globalization of the economy can really work for real people. And it's a huge challenge. Number two, we have to deal with the fact that about half the world still lives on less than 2 a day, so for most of them, most of this discussion tonight is entirely academic, which is why debt relief is so important. We have to deal with the fact that while we talk about having smaller, more entrepreneurial government, the truth is that in a lot of poor countries, they don't have any government at all with any real, fundamental capacity to do the things that have to be done. Even in a lot of more developed countries, they have found themselves blindsided by the financial crisis that struck in 1997. So we have to acknowledge while we, who say we are developing a Third Way and in our case, we've been able to do it with the smallest Federal Government in 37 years we have to acknowledge the fact that some countries need more government. They need capacity. They need the ability to battle disease and run financial systems and solve problems, and that it is fanciful to talk about a lot of this until you can basically deal with malaria, deal with AIDS. You look at Africa, for example, AIDS consuming many African countries. But Uganda has had the biggest drop in the AIDS rates of any country in the world because of the capacity of the Government to deal with the problem. And I think we have to forthrightly deal with that. Let me just mention a couple of other issues a little closer to home. We're going to have to deal with the conflict between science and economics and social values. Example the conflict between the United States and Europe over genetically modified seeds and the growing and selling of food the conflict between Britain and France over the sale of beef. Listen, this is hot stuff now, but you can see that there's going to be a lot more of this. And we have to find a way to manage this if we're going to be in a global society with a global economy, where there are honest differences and real fears. We have to find a way to manage this that has integrity and that generates trust among ordinary people. Another problem that I think is quite important is, all of us will have to decide how we're going to cooperate and when we separate in an interdependent world. I think, for example, our Congress did a very good thing to finally pay our U.N. dues and to enable the United States to participate in the global debt relief movement. And I think they made a mistake to defeat the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. But every one of us will have to deal with these kinds of questions, because there will always be domestic pressures operating against responsible interdependence and cooperation. And finally, I'll mention two other things. I believe that the biggest problems to our security in the 21st century and to this whole modern form of governance will probably come not from rogue states or from people with competing views of the world in governments, but from the enemies of the nation state, from terrorists and drugrunners and organized criminals who, I predict, will increasingly work together and increasingly use the same things that are fueling our prosperity open borders, the Internet, the miniaturization of all sophisticated technology, which will manifest itself in smaller and more powerful and more dangerous weapons. And we have to find ways to cooperate to deal with the enemies of the nation state if we expect progressive governments to succeed. The last and most important point of all, I believe, is this. I think the supreme irony of our time, as we talk about a new renaissance by the way, that would make New York University the successor of de'Medici laughter I think consider this The supreme irony of this time is that we are sitting around talking about finding out the secrets of the black holes in the universe, unlocking the mysteries of the human gene, having unprecedented growth, and dealing with what I consider to be very highclass problems finding the right balance between unemployment and social justice, dealing with the aging of society. Isn't it interesting to you that, in this most modern of ages, the biggest problem of human societies is the most primitive of all social difficulties the fear of people who are different from us? That, after all, is what is at the root of what Prime Minister Blair has struggled with in Northern Ireland, at the root of all the problems in the Balkans, at the root of the tribal wars in Africa, at the root of the still unresolved, though hopefully progressing problems in the Middle East. A few weeks ago, Hillary invited two men to the White House for a conversation about the new millennium. One was one of the founders of the Internet the other was one of our principal scientists unlocking the mysteries of the human genome. And they talked together. It was fabulous, because these guys said, number one, we would not know anything about the gene if it were not for the computer revolution because we couldn't have done the complex sequencing. And then the scientist said, now that they had done all this complex sequencing, the most stunning conclusion they had drawn is that all human beings were 99.9 percent the same genetically, and that the differences of individuals in any given ethnic group, genetically, were greater than the genetic differences of one ethnic group to another. So if you had 100 west Africans and 100 Italians and 100 Mexicans and 100 Norwegians, the differences of the individuals within the groups would be greater than the composite genetic profile differences of one group to another. Now, this is in an age where 800,000 people were slaughtered by machetes in 90 days in Rwanda a few years ago, when a quarter of a million Bosnians lost their lives and 2 1 2 million more were made refugees. So that's the last point I would like to make. We need a little humility here. What we really need to be struggling for is not all the answers, but a unifying vision that makes the most of all these wonders and relishes all this diversity which makes life more interesting, but proceeds on the fundamental fact that the most important thing is what it has always been our common humanity, which imposes on us certain responsibilities about how we live, how we treat others who are less fortunate, how we empower everyone to have a chance to live up to his or her God given potential. If you ask me one thing we could do, it would not be all the modern ideas. If I had to leave tonight and never have another thing to say about public life, I would say if we could find a way to enshrine a reverence for our common humanity, the rest would work out just fine. Thank you very much. November 20, 1999 President Stephanopoulos Prime Minister Simitis, thank you for that fine speech. Mrs. Simitis, Mr. Mayor, Ministers of the Government, members of the opposition, to all the leaders of the church who are here, the dean of the diplomatic corps, distinguished citizens of Greece, it is a great honor for all of us to be here my wife and daughter, the Secretary of State, members of the White House, two Members of the United States Congress, Representatives Kingston and Maloney. And I should say that, as I did last night at the state dinner, I have, in my entourage here, ample evidence of the ties between our two countries. Not only the vast array of Greek American business people who have made this trip either to hold my hand or make sure I made no critical error laughter but also a group of people who have served me so well in the White House, beginning with my Chief of Staff, John Podesta my speechwriter, Paul Glastris, who helped to prepare these remarks today Elaine Shocas and Lisa Kountoupes. Those are just four of the many Greek Americans who have worked for me in the White House, and as I have often said, the Greek American community has been overrepresented in the Clinton administration, and America is better for it. Early this morning, in the wind and the rain, I had the privilege of visiting the Acropolis. I was filled with a unique sense of awe but also familiarity, perhaps because the setting has been described to me so often and so glowingly by my Greek American friends perhaps because I studied the history of Athens and read Plato and Aristotle as a young man perhaps because America has been so inspired and influenced by the ancient Greeks in everything from politics and philosophy to architecture. For whatever reason, standing there in the rain on the Acropolis this morning, I was even more grateful for the deep ties of history, kinship, and values that bind America and other freedom loving nations to Greece, ties that prove the truth of Shelley's famous line, Eimaste olee Ellines, "We are all Greeks." We are all Greeks, not because of monuments and memories but because what began here 2 1 2 thousand years ago has at last, after all the bloody struggles of the 20th century, been embraced all around the world. Today, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's people live under governments of their own choosing. Yet, democracy still remains a truly revolutionary idea people still fight and die for it, from Africa to Asia to Europe. Its advance is still the key to building a better global society in this most modern of ages. Another great civic virtue has its roots here in Athens openness to the cultural differences among us that make life more interesting. In Thucydides' account of his famous funeral oration, Pericles declares, "We lay Athens open to all and at no time evict or keep the stranger away." Two and a half thousand years later Greece is still open to the world, and we pray that everywhere in the world someday everyone will say, "We do not keep the stranger away." Meanwhile, as all of you know, Greeks have made their way into every corner of the world, and wherever they go, they adapt to local culture yet retain immense pride in their traditions, their religion, their Hellenic identity. No nation has been more blessed by this phenomenon than the United States, with its vital and successful Greek American community. This is true in ways large and small. Last night at the state dinner I had the opportunity to acknowledge the contributions of some of the most famous Greek Americans, those who achieved wealth and fame and power and influence. But what I want to say today is that I am even more grateful that Greek Americans have enriched every single part and every single person in America. As a boy growing up in a small town in Arkansas, my very favorite place to eat with my father was the Pappas Brothers Cafe and my very best friend for 45 years was a man named David Leopoulos who, after 45 years, still every single week sends me an Email about Greece and Greek issues to make sure I don't stray too far from the fold. The Prime Minister talked about the modern world in which we are living. I think it quite ironic that in this era of global markets and modern wonders, when more than half the world's people live in democracies for the first time in history, the world is still bedeviled by the oldest of human evils the fear of the other, those who are different from us. The clearest manifestation in modern times is the ethnic and religious hatred we see rampant, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East to the tribal wars in Africa to the Balkans. How much of our history has been shaped by the struggle between those who accept with selfconfidence the interesting differences among people because they are strong enough to affirm the common humanity, which is more important, and those who live their lives in constant fear or loathing of those who are different? My wife had, a few weeks ago, to the White House two brilliant men for a conversation. One of them was one of the founders of the Internet the other is one of the most distinguished American scholars of the study of the human genome, the gene structure. The biologist said nothing could have been discovered about the structure of the gene without the computer revolution but that all this high technology had revealed an interesting fact, that all of us, all human beings, genetically are 99.9 percent the same, and furthermore, that if you take different groups of people let's take the three most prominently here discussed, the Greeks, the Turks, the Irish me. Laughter And if you put 100 Greeks, 100 Turks, and 100 Irish in 3 different groups, the genetic differences among the individuals within each group would be greater than the genetic profile between the Greeks or the Turks or the Irish. Isn't it interesting how many bodies have been piled up over human history because of that one tenth of one percent difference, when we should have been embracing all along the 99.9 percent. Whether we take maximum advantage of the unparalleled promise of the new millennium depends in no small measure on whether we can find a way to get beyond that one tenth of 1 percent difference to the common humanity that unites us all. I've been thinking a lot about what unites Greeks and Americans. In 1821, when the Greeks rose to reassert their liberty, they captured the imagination of Americans. Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Greek patriot and scholar Adamandios Korais these words "No people sympathize more freely than ours with the sufferings of your countrymen. None offer more sincere and ardent prayers to heaven for their success." Of course, we were still a young country then, preoccupied with our own experiment in democracy, reluctant to involve ourselves in distant, dangerous struggles. But thousands of ordinary Americans way back in 1821 sent money and supplies to Greece. A few actually sailed here and joined the freedom fighters, men like the brave Boston doctor Samuel Gridley Howe and a black former slave from Baltimore, Maryland, named James Williams. Over a century later, when fascism seemed ready to crush the last embers of freedom in Europe, it was Greece which said no and handed the Axis powers their very first major defeat in battle. America joined with Greece and the Allies and together, we won a mighty victory. Twice since World War II, battles between democracy and despotism have again been played out on Greek soil each time thank God democracy emerged victorious. I have been thinking about that history today again in both its painful as well as its proud aspects. When the junta took over in 1967 here, the United States allowed its interests in prosecuting the cold war to prevail over its interests I should say, its obligation to support democracy, which was, after all, the cause for which we fought the cold war. It is important that we acknowledge that. When we think about the history of Greece and the history of the United States, all the troubled ups and downs just of the last 50 years, it is easy to understand why some of those people who have demonstrated in the last few days have done so and easy to understand the source of their passion. I can be glad as an American and as a free human being that they have the fundamental right to say their piece. If the people of every country, in the Balkans for example, had the institutions and habits of democracy, if they, too, could proudly express and settle their differences peacefully and proudly and democratically, if the fundamental human rights of all those people were respected, there might not have been a war over Bosnia or Kosovo. I've been thinking about all this because, of all the people in the world, surely the Greeks know best that history matters. We cannot understand the present unless we know history. On the other hand, we cannot move into the future if we are paralyzed by history. In this era of historic sweeping change, we cannot afford paralysis. That was implicit in the Prime Minister's remarks. Surely, the Greeks demonstrate this every day as you build a bustling modern economy with a booming stock market and one of the fastest growth rates in Europe, on the verge of joining the EMU. If there were Olympic gold medals for economic revival, Greece would surely get the very first one. American companies and investors are taking notice that Greece clearly is on the right economic path. I believe we can do better, and so in the presence of all these business leaders today, I would like to make three modest proposals. First, I think we should double trade between our two countries in the next 5 years. Second, I ask Greek and American business leaders to match the money our Government is putting into the Fulbright exchange program. And third, I ask that one of these grants honor Yannos Kranidiotis, the gifted diplomat and former Fulbright scholar. He was a great citizen, a great friend of the United States, who died with his son in a tragic accident while promoting peace in the Balkans. His life and work exemplify the positive, new role Greece has begun to play in this vital region of Europe. The whole world is beginning to see Greece in a new light, no longer as one of Europe's poorest nations but as southeast Europe's wealthiest nation, its beacon of democracy, a regional leader for stability, prosperity, and freedom, helping to complete the democratic revolution that ancient Greece began, our long held dream of a Europe undivided, free, and at peace for the first time in history. And the remaining challenges to that longheld dream are all at play here in this region of Europe the challenge of bringing stability, prosperity, and full democracy to the Balkans the challenge of creating a lasting peace in the Aegean and genuine reconciliation between Greece and Turkey the challenge of integrating a democratic Russia into Europe the challenge of building bridges between and among the world's three great faiths which come together in southeastern Europe Islam and the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity. To finally create that Europe undivided, free, and at peace, we must help this region meet five main challenges. The first and, I would argue, most urgent is to stabilize Kosovo and the Balkans and build the democratic institutions necessary so that all the people of Kosovo can live in safety and freedom, including the Serbs of Kosovo. I know there is still much anger and anguish in Greece about the course of action NATO took and about the leadership role of the United States in that action. I do not expect to change what many here believe. But I must say what I believe. I believe we made the right decision, because at the end of this tumultuous century, in which so much blood has been shed, at a moment when peace and democracy have triumphed almost everywhere else in Europe and increasingly throughout the world, I do not believe we could have allowed an entire people to be exiled from their homes or extinguished from the Earth simply because of their ethnic heritage or how they worship God. I believe we had a moral and a strategic obligation to act, and that in acting, we saved thousands of lives and enabled almost a million people to go home. In Bosnia, where the world showed more reluctance and took 4 years to act, Mr. Milosevic and his allies killed a quarter of a million people, created 2.5 million refugees, and many of them still have not gone home. In spite of our differences, I want to thank the Greek Government for staying with its NATO Allies during a crisis which was far harder on you than on any other country in our Alliance. I want to thank you for getting aid to the civilians in Kosovo regardless of their ethnic backgrounds while the fighting raged. I want to thank you for committing resources to the reconstruction of Kosovo, just as you have contributed to the rebuilding of Bosnia and Albania. Our work there is far from over. Together with the U.N., we must continue to build the democratic institutions that can provide safety and freedom to all the people of Kosovo. As we do, we can take pride in our troops from both countries serving together in the same sector to keep the peace holding. Our second challenge is equally great. We have to strengthen the forces of democracy in Serbia and pave the way for Serbia's eventual integration into southeastern Europe and the European community as a whole. Greece can lead the revitalization of the economy and the political and civic life of southeastern Europe, but the work will never be complete until Serbia is a part of the process. There is no reason this can not happen. The people of Serbia have a rich and noble history, a deep love of freedom, and a rightful place in the table of European unity. It is a tragedy they are not sitting at that table now, a tragedy that they have suffered and still suffer from fear and privation, an even greater tragedy that it might have all been so very different if not for the choices made by Mr. Milosevic. We may disagree about the best way to have responded to the action of this now indicted war criminal, but surely we can agree that the people of Serbia deserve better than to be suffering under the last living relic of Europe's dictatorial past. That is why the international community must maintain pressure on Mr. Milosevic's regime, while also aiding the democratic aspirations of the Serbian people why America has invested nearly 12 million since July to promote a free press, independent labor unions, a pro democracy network of nongovernmental organizations in Serbia, on top of the 25 million we have devoted to humanitarian aid there. It is why we support the Serbian democratic opposition's call for early, fair, and free elections, and why we support lifting entirely the fuel oil embargo and flight ban on Serbia as soon as those free and fair elections are held. The third challenge we face together in creating a stable, prosperous, and free southeast Europe is to help every nation in the region build the institutions that make modern democracy thrive. As the only member both of NATO and the EU in southeastern Europe, Greece is helping to guide this truly historic transformation. The Greek military is laying the foundations for peace through its role in southeastern Europe's multinational peacekeeping force and through NATO's Partnership for Peace. Greek companies are investing in the Balkans, creating jobs and higher living standards, and the rest of us must follow your lead. The Greek Government is leading the transformation of the region's economy, committing 320 million for reconstruction of southeastern Europe, and the rest of us must follow your lead if the Stability Pact is to have true meaning. You are breaking down barriers to trade and transportation through the southeastern Europe cooperation initiative and providing crucial seed capital through the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank. Thessaloniki is a city long known for its beauty and history. Now is it becoming known as the commercial hub of the Balkans. I am pleased that next month our Government will open in Thessaloniki our office for Balkan reconstruction. I have also asked the U.S. Greece Business Council to undertake an investment mission to the Balkans. Finally, I am pleased to announce that our two Governments will fulfill a dream of Prime Minister Simitis by giving Greek and American companies a chance to jointly apply their technical knowledge to the region's challenges, from cleaning up pollution on the Danube to wiring Balkan villages for the Internet. Our fourth challenge is to build a genuine reconciliation between Greece and Turkey. I know how much history lies behind that troubled relationship, but people in both nations are beginning to see the possibilities of forging a new and better future. The world will never forget the humanity Greeks and Turks displayed toward one another when the tragic earthquake struck you both in August and then in Turkey again last week. But this is more than just seismic diplomacy. For several months, Foreign Ministers Papandreou and Cem have been holding a dialog on trade, tourism, and the environment. Prime Ministers Simitis and Ecevit had an important meeting just 2 days ago. Greek and Turkish troops in NATO have joined together in a southeast Europe peacekeeping brigade. You are serving together now in Kosovo. Greece has taken bold steps. In many ways, these steps have been harder for Greece than for Turkey, but both sides are now showing the vision necessary to move forward. I believe it is very much in your interest to see Turkey become a candidate for membership in the European Union for that will reinforce Turkey's secular, democratic, modernizing path, showing Turkey how much it has to gain by making progress on issues like Cyprus and the Aegean matters. It will prove to Turkey that there is a place in Europe for a predominantly Muslim country as long as it respects the rights of its people all its people and advances the cause of peace. For many of these same reasons, we in the United States have also strongly supported the EU's decision to start accession talks with Cyprus. Now, I know that many Greeks are anxious that if Turkey becomes a candidate for membership, the momentum in improving its relationship with Greece and actually solving these problems will slow. Having just spoken with President Demirel and Prime Minister Ecevit, I do not believe that will happen. But I can tell you this, I will do everything in my power to encourage both countries to continue building on the progress you have made. I am going to keep working hard to promote a just and lasting settlement in Cyprus. I am very pleased that last Sunday the parties in Cyprus accepted Secretary General Annan's invitation to start proximity talks, to prepare the ground for meaningful negotiations that will lead to a comprehensive settlement of the Cyprus problem. I hope these talks will bring us a step closer to lasting peace. I will keep pressing for a settlement that meets the fundamental interests of the parties, including real security for all Cypriots and an end to the island's division. The status quo is unacceptable. I will say here only what I said in Turkey at every turn before the Turkish National Assembly, before the business group, before earthquake survivors, and in every private meeting I think it is very good for the future of the world for Turkey to be integrated into Europe. But Turkey cannot be fully integrated successfully into Europe without solving its difficulties with Greece. We must put these behind us. Our fifth and final challenge is to renew the old and profoundly important partnership between our two countries and our two peoples. We should promote more tourism, more cultural exchanges. We should continue in the United States to supply our NATO Ally, Greece, with advanced weaponry. We should be working together to fight global threats that know no borders, including the scourge of terrorism. Terrorists have struck within the borders of the United States they have struck here claiming American and Greek lives. The American people and the Greek people deserve justice and the strongest possible efforts by our Governments to end this menace. I am grateful that we are working more closely to do just that. Let me say to you that as I have traveled this region, first in Turkey and now here in Greece, it is impossible for me, as it would be for anyone, not to feel the weight of history on the decisions all of you face today. We are human. We can never wholly forget the injustices done to us, nor can we ever escape reminders of the mistakes we, ourselves, have made. But it is possible to be shaped by history without being a prisoner to it. That, too, is a Greek idea. It was wise Demosthenes who said, "It is necessary to think of the future to enable us to set our ways straight." Earlier this week in Istanbul, Hillary, Chelsea, and I had the honor of visiting the Ecumenical Patriarch. My heart is still moved by that experience and by the beautiful gift that His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew presented to me, a magnificent piece of parchment on which is written, in Byzantine Greek lettering, one of my favorite Bible passages, the first verse of the 11th chapter of Hebrew "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." Elsewhere in the Bible is the marvelous verse "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Vision is to have faith and to imagine the things you hope for, and that faith is a real thing, unseen but real and tangible, more important than all the accumulated anxieties and wounds and worries and hurts, for it allows us to be human by going forward every day and looking toward a new tomorrow. With faith and sober realism, we can imagine a wonderful future for Greece, for southeastern Europe, for this whole part of the world, one in which Greek and Turkish business people work together, from the Balkans to central Asia one in which Bosnians work across ethnic lines for a common economic and political future one in which new democracies, from Slovenia to Romania to Bulgaria and, yes, to Serbia, meet the standards for entry into NATO and the European Union one in which there is a Europe where everyone understands that being open and generous to those who are different does not diminish one's own identity but enhances it a Europe where everyone practices an ancient Greek trait still alive in Greece today, filoxenia one in which children can be raised to be proud of their heritage and proud of their faith without fearing or hatred, hating those who are different. Soon, the world will have an opportunity to look at Greece and many to come to Greece to participate in filoxenia, when they see Athens throw open the gates of the city to the Olympics in 2004. By then, I want all the world to see what we know today. Greece is a force for freedom, democracy, stability, growth, the dignity of the individual assuming yet again the ancient role of the Greeks to inspire a more humane world. Two thousand four isn't that far away, and we have a lot of work to do. But I have faith that we can do it. Thank you very much. November 18, 1999 The President. I am very pleased that our administration and the Congress have reached agreement on the first budget of the 21st century. This budget is a victory, and a hard won victory, for the American people. It is a victory for our children who now will have better education a victory for our families who deserve the safer streets and cleaner environment this budget will bring a victory for farmers, for veterans, for our soldiers in uniform. It is a victory for all who agree that America should meet our responsibilities and maintain our leadership in the world. Simply put, it's a budget that meets our priorities, supports our values, and invests in our future. The budget makes progress on several important fronts. The first budget of the 21st century puts education first, as it should. That's why I stood firm for our commitment to hire 100,000 highly qualified teachers to lower class size in the early grades. I am pleased that Congress is going to fulfill that promise, and I am also pleased that this budget doubles funds for afterschool and summer school programs and supports greater accountability for results by helping communities turn around or shut down failing schools. The budget makes America a safer place. It invests in our COPS program, which already has funded 100,000 community police officers for our streets and helped to give us the lowest crime rate in 25 years. This agreement will help to hire up to 50,000 more community police officers targeted to neighborhoods where crime rates are still too high. It strengthens our efforts to preserve natural areas and protect our environment. I am very pleased we successfully opposed antienvironmental riders that put special interests above the national interest. The budget will also make it possible for millions of Americans with disabilities to join the work force without fear of losing their health care, a terrific advance in the quality of our national life. Finally, this budget strengthens America's role of leadership in the world by paying our dues and arrears to the United Nations, by meeting our commitments to the Middle East peace process, by making critical investments in debt relief for the poorest countries of the world, by funding efforts to safeguard nuclear weapons and expertise in Russia. When I insisted that Congress keep working until it finished the job, I hoped and believed we could make progress in all these areas. I believe we can maintain our fiscal discipline, continue to pay down our national debt, and still make the investments we must in our people and our future. That is what we have achieved, and we have done so by working together. I want to thank the leaders of both parties for their roles in this agreement, and I want to say a special word of thanks to the Democratic leaders and the members of my party in both Houses without whom my struggle for 100,000 teachers, 50,000 police, greater investments in the environment, and paying our U.N. dues could simply not have succeeded. I thank them very much. Q. Mr. President The President. Now, let me just say one other thing, then I'll answer the questions. We are about to start the holiday season, and then we'll begin again. And in the months ahead, I think we have to stay focused on the critical business of this Nation that is still undone, from commonsense gun safety legislation to meaningful hate crimes legislation, from a real raise in the minimum wage to a real Patients' Bill of Rights, from strengthening Social Security to modernizing Medicare and adding a prescription drug benefit. I urge Congress to work with me in meeting these goals in the same bipartisan spirit it took to reach this very important budget agreement. Thank you. Across the Board Budget Cut Q. Mr. President, just a week ago, when the Republicans were calling for an across the board budget cut of about a half a percent, just a tenth of a percent more than the one that you accepted, you said that it was unacceptable. What makes this one acceptable, sir, and would the budget as the Republicans have written it still, in your opinion, dip into the Social Security surplus? The President. Well, first of all, when I remember saying it was unacceptable, they were advocating a one percent across the board which some thought would have to be 6 percent to avoid getting in the Social Security Trust Fund. This one is, I think, about a third, a little more than a third of what their last offer was on one percent. It also is written in such a way as to preserve the management flexibility of the departments so that we can fulfill the mission. Let me give you just one example. When the Pentagon do you remember when the one percent acrossthe board proposal was made and the Pentagon said, "Gosh, we may have to lay off 38,000 uniform and non uniform personnel?" That was on the assumption that they would have to take the across the board dollar amount but fulfill every mandate Congress had imposed in the defense budget. And so now they've given the Secretaries some flexibility so that we can maintain the core responsibilities of Government. Furthermore, we now have agreements in education and in the environment and in other areas which have raised the investment level to such a point that we can take that across the board cut, still have a real increase, still be moving forward. So I think we're in a very different environment than we were just a few days ago, and I'm quite pleased by this. Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Chechnya Q. Mr. President, President Yeltsin was pretty tough in defending his military actions in Chechnya and saying that he was going to deal with bandits and terrorists. In your private meeting, was he just as frank? I mean, could you describe the talk and tell us what happened? The President. Yes. He was very vigorous, and so was I and you know, we've met together many times. We have a very good personal chemistry, but it didn't stop us from our clear disagreement here. I would never criticize anyone taking vigorous action against terrorism. I think that's very important. The real question is whether or not the nature of this uprising in Chechnya can be solved exclusively by a military strategy. And I think you could see you can sense in this audience it's not just the United States it's virtually all the Europeans don't believe that an exclusively military strategy can prevail, that it will lead to greater than necessary civilian casualties and greater than necessary refugees. So I can only tell you that he stated his position. I stated mine. But I urged them to try to listen to Russia's friends at this conference and try to find a way that we could work together and move this thing forward. And I am hopeful that you will see some progress here before we leave. I can't say for sure that you will. I hope you will. Q. Mr. President, you made some conciliatory remarks during your speech. Does that reflect the feeling that maybe you've pushed him as far as you can rhetorically and through any kind of action the Government can take? The President. I don't know. Everybody else here thought that I was pretty aggressive. Q. Well, you referred to standing up to the tanks and so forth. The President. But the point I was trying to make here let me just say there are two separate issues here. One is and I think this is worth taking a second. There are two separate issues here. One is President Yeltsin's view that what they're doing is right in Chechnya and the differences of opinion we have. The second is the general Russian view with which I take very strong exception that no one should, in effect, comment on or interfere with any internal affair of any other nation. And you heard him refer to American led NATO aggression in the Balkans. And so I responded very vigorously about Bosnia, about Kosovo. And the point I made was, when I was very personally complimentary of him is, when he stood up on that tank to save Russian democracy, suppose he hadn't prevailed. Suppose the Russian military had taken him down off the tank, thrown him in jail, and announced they were going to execute him. I would hope that the entire world represented around that table, that OSCE table today, would have gone into an absolute uproar of outrage about it and would have saved his life and helped to restore democracy. That's the point I was trying to make, that there are times in the world we live in today when we are forced to make judgments about things that happen within the borders of other countries because they have an impact beyond their borders and because they violate internationally accepted norms of human rights. That's what happened in Bosnia that's what happened in Kosovo. I think I did the right thing. And I hope it registered on the Russians, and I hope we're going to make some progress. I think we are. I'll see you all some more in the next day or two, but I've got to go to this lunch. Thank you. November 18, 1999 Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. President Demirel, Chairman Vollebaek, Mr. Secretary General, Miss Degn, distinguished leaders, it's a great honor for me to be able to say a few words on behalf of the United States. First, I thank President Demirel, his government, and the people of Turkey for a wonderful reception and for the heroic example they have set in their recovery from the earthquakes. I thank the Norwegian Chairman in Office for remarkable leadership in a very challenging year. We come together for many reasons, first, to reaffirm our commitment to the OSCE, a unique institution grounded in the principle that the root of human insecurity is the denial of human rights. Here today are leaders of more than 20 countries that were not even in existence when the Final Act was signed in Helsinki in 1975, because they were not free. In country after country, the OSCE's ideas of human rights and the rule of law are now ascendant. A quarter century after Helsinki, the question is not whether democracy will survive but when it will be embraced in every European country and how it will work in every country. Clearly, we must adapt the OSCE to meet new realities. The charter we've negotiated recognizes that the greatest threats to our security today are as likely to come from conflicts that begin within states as between them. The OSCE has responded to this challenge with courage and distinction, from the Balkans to the Baltics, organizing elections, monitoring human rights, reducing ethnic and religious tensions. We must give the OSCE the tools to respond even more effectively. I am pleased the OSCE is endorsing the REACT concept, which will enable it to deploy experts in elections, law, media, and administration rapidly to nations seeking to prevent or recover from conflict. That way, time and lives won't be lost while we organize from scratch to meet every crisis. I'm pleased we're endorsing the achievements of the Stability Pact, and pledging to support its work, for there must be a magnet of unifying force more powerful than the forces of division and fear in order for southeastern Europe to reach its full potential. I'm pleased we have recognized the needs to fill the gap that civilian police forces must fill between unarmed monitors and military forces, and I hope that all of us will be willing to strengthen the OSCE's capacity to meet that need. Now, in addition to making the OSCE more operational, we have to uphold its principles in hard cases. In that spirit, I would like to say a few words about the situation in Chechnya. First of all, I associate myself with the previous remarks of the German Chancellor, which I think made the case very well. But I think I speak for everyone here when we say we want Russia to overcome the scourge of terrorism and lawlessness. We believe Russia has not only the right but the obligation to defend its territorial integrity. We want to see Russia a stable, prosperous, strong democracy with secure borders, strong defenses, and a leading voice in world affairs. I have often asked myself, as I hope all of you have, what I would do if I were in President Yeltsin's place. I think before any of us sit in judgment, we should be able to answer that question. Russia has faced rebellion within and related violence beyond the borders of Chechnya. It has responded with a military strategy designed to break the resistance and end the terror. The strategy has led to substantial civilian casualties and very large flows of refugees. The first thing I would like to say is that most of the critics of Russian policies deplore Chechen violence and terrorism and extremism, and support the objectives of Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and to put down the violence and the terrorism. What they fear is that the means Russia has chosen will undermine its ends, that if attacks on civilians continue, the extremism Russia is trying to combat will only intensify, and the sovereignty Russia rightly is defending will be more and more rejected by ordinary Chechens who are not part of the terror or the resistance. The strength Russia rightly is striving to build, therefore, could be eroded by an endless cycle of violence. The global integration Russia has rightly sought to advance, with our strong support, will be hindered. Russia's friends are united, I believe, in what we think should happen appropriate measures to end terrorism, protection of innocent civilians, a commitment to allow refugees to return in safety, access for relief groups, and a common effort to rebuild. In other words, in order to isolate and undermine the terrorists, there must be a political dialog and a political settlement, not with terrorists but with those who are willing to seek a peaceful resolution. The OSCE and others can play a role in facilitating that dialog, as they did once before, and that is the role the OSCE was meant to play. Meanwhile, I think we should all make it clear that we are prepared to do more, through the United Nations, through this organization, and through any other available forum, to combat terror wherever it exists. Finally, let me say I have to respectfully disagree with my friend President Yeltsin in his characterization of U.S. led NATO aggression in Yugoslavia. Consider Bosnia, where the world community waited 4 years, and we saw 2 1 2 million refugees and 250,000 deaths placed on the altar of ethnic cleansing. I honor and praise the courage of the Secretary General and the United Nations for acknowledging just a few days ago the grievous error of the U.N. in waiting so long to act, and that wait being responsible in part for the travesty of Srebrenica. Consider Kosovo, where the world community did not wait, but there were still thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. But unlike Bosnia, because we acted more quickly, they are almost all home today, coming to grips with the challenge of the coming winter. So I believe we did the right thing. And I do not believe there will ever be a time in human affairs when we will ever be able to say, we simply cannot criticize this or that or the other action because it happened within the territorial borders of a single nation. President Yeltsin, one of the most thrilling experiences of my life as a citizen of the world before I became President was when you stood up on that tank in Moscow, when they tried to take the freedom of the Russian people away, and you're standing there on that tank, said to those people, "You can do this, but you'll have to kill me first." If they had put you in jail instead of electing you President, I would hope that every leader of every country around this table would have stood up for you and for freedom in Russia and not said, "Well, that is an internal Russian affair that we cannot be a part of." I don't think we have any choice but to try to work for common objectives across lines. And I certainly associate myself with any efforts that we can make together to fight terrorism within any nation's borders. Let me just say this in closing. We are here in Turkey, and it's an appropriate place to say this, thinking of Chechnya, thinking of all these issues, thinking of the trouble in the Caucasus and the trouble in the Balkans. So much of the future of the 21st century will turn on developments in the vast region that lies between traditional notions of Asia and Europe, between the Muslim world and the West, between the parts of our community that are stable and prosperous and democratic and those still struggling to build basic human security and freedom. The people who live in these crossroads face truly momentous challenges, and we're dealing with some of them today. They are trying to preserve their unique heritage and participate fully in the modern world. And there is no single, simple answer to all their problems, but there is a guidepost this OSCE and its principle that human differences should be resolved democratically, with respect for diversity and the basic rights and freedom of every individual. That was true in 1975. It is even more true today. Thank you very much. November 15, 1999 Thank you, Mr. Speaker, Mr. Deputy Speaker, distinguished members, it is a great honor for me and my family and for our delegation to appear before this body, the repository of Turkish sovereignty which, as the words behind me affirm, belongs unconditionally and without exception to the people. I have come to express America's solidarity with the Turkish people at a time of national tragedy and to reaffirm our partnership for a common future. We have been friends for a very long time. In 1863 the first American college outside the United States, Robert College, opened its doors to the youth of Turkey. It was the only foreign institution allowed along the Bosphorus, precisely because America had never encroached upon Turkish sovereignty. I'm very proud that Prime Minister Ecevit is an alumnus of Robert College. Earlier in this century, the great founder of the Turkish Republic, Kemal Ataturk, captured America's imagination with his bold reforms. He was called a second George Washington. He appeared on the cover of our Time magazine. He corresponded with Members of our Congress. And we moved our Embassy here to Ankara, the capital of his new republic. In 1927, in a 6 day speech before this body, Ataturk surveyed Turkey's relations with the countries of the world. And he paid America what I believe was a compliment when he said, and I quote, "The United States is more acceptable than the rest." In an effort to remain more acceptable to you, I promise not to speak for 6 days. But I would like to review our relationship and our future. At the dawn of the cold war, President Truman committed America's resources to protect Turkey's sovereignty. The Truman doctrine sealed our partnership and laid the basis for the Marshall plan and for America's entire postwar engagement with the rest of the world. Over 50 years now, our alliance has stood the test of time and passed every other test, from Korea to Kosovo. On behalf of all Americans, I thank you for half a century of friendship, mutual respect, and partnership. Since the cold war ended, we have learned something quite wonderful. We have learned that our friendship does not depend upon a common concern with the Soviet Union, and that in fact, in the post cold war era, our partnership has become even more important. Together we are adapting NATO to the demands of a new century. We are partners for peace in the Balkans and the Middle East. We are developing new sources of energy to help the entire region. Last year our trade was over 6 billion. It has risen 50 percent in the last 5 years alone. Thanks to the vision of your former President Turgut Ozal, the continuing leadership of President Demirel and Prime Minister Ecevit, and the dynamism of the Turkish people, Turkey has become an engine of regional growth. In the months ahead, together we will launch new projects worth billions of dollars, mostly in the energy sector, to bring jobs to Turkey and to bring our two nations even closer. This assembly has taken bold steps to lead Turkey into the new century. I want the American press to listen to this. Between June and September, this assembly passed a remarkable 69 laws. I'm going to tell our Congress about that when I get home. Laughter But I will say this, it is not just the quantity of those laws that count it is the quality landmark legislation on Social Security, an international arbitration law, banking reform, laws that took courage and vision. Now, you face a difficult budget decision that requires courage and vision. If you do pass a sound budget, it will strengthen your economy and advance the prospects of a standby IMF agreement, something the United States strongly supports. On the edge of a new millennium, we have a rare opportunity to reflect upon our journey, two nations that started in very different places, with a shared commitment to democracy, who now must forge a partnership relevant to the new era. In a sense, we are all here today because of Kemal Ataturk. Not only because he chose Ankara to be the capital, not only because he chose Ankara to be your capital, but because he pledged Turkey's future to the democracy symbolized by this proud assembly. Ironically, he accomplished much of what he did with no help from the Western powers, indeed, against the opposition of most of them. Many tried to carve up Turkey, to reduce it to a rump state. In the face of this, however, Ataturk responded not by closing Turkey up but by opening Turkey to the rest of the world, a decision for which we must all be very grateful. For better and for worse, the events of that time, when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and a new Turkey arose, have shaped the history of this entire century. From Bulgaria to Albania to Israel to Arabia, new nations were born, and a century of conflict erupted from the turmoil of shifting borders, unrealized ambitions, and old hatreds, beginning with the first Balkan war and World War I, all the way to today's struggles in the Middle East and in the former Yugoslavia. Turkey's past is key to understanding the 20th century. But, more importantly, I believe Turkey's future will be critical to shaping the 21st century. Today I want to take a few minutes to explain why I believe that is true, and what we can do together to realize the future we both want. Since people have been able to draw maps, they have pointed out the immutable fact of Turkey's geography, that Asia Minor is a bridge between continents. Less than a kilometer separates Europe from Asia at the nearest point along the Bosphorus. And, in reality, there is no separation at all, thanks to the bridges you have built, to the commerce that spans Turkey every day to the communications revolution that links all parts of the world instantaneously. Turkey's ability to bridge East and West is all the more important when another fact of Turkey's geography is considered. You are almost entirely surrounded by neighbors who are either actively hostile to democracy and peace or struggling against great obstacles to embrace democracy and peace. To the southeast, Iran is witnessing a remarkable debate between proponents of a closed and open society, while Iraq continues to repress its people, threaten its neighbors, and seek weapons of mass destruction. I thank Turkey for its support of Operation Northern Watch, which allows us to deter Saddam's aggression, protect the people of northern Iraq, and avoid another refugee crisis like the one you so courageously met in 1991. To the south, the Middle East is still roiled with violence but blessed with an historic opportunity to build a comprehensive, just, and lasting peace. Turkey is a force for that peace, as well, through its ties to Israel and the Arab States. To the northwest lie the Balkans, where in the last decade, seven new democracies have been born, and four wars have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Turkish forces in NATO helped to end those wars and, thus, to end this century with a powerful affirmation of human dignity and human rights. Today, we are working side by side for an enduring peace in the Balkans, one which not only ends ethnic cleansing but builds genuine cooperation, progress, and prosperity. To the east, 12 independent nations have emerged from the ruins of the Soviet empire. There is no more important challenge today than helping them to develop stable, independent, democratic societies. Turkey here also has been a leader, reaching out in particular to nations that share ties of language, culture, and history. There is still much to be done. We must help Russia to complete its momentous democratic revolution. We must be clear with Russia that its fight against terrorism is right but that the use of indiscriminate force against civilians is wrong, likely to exacerbate the very tensions Russia wants to resolve. We must keep working together to resolve the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh. We must secure the region's energy resources in a way that protects the Bosphorus, helps newly free states to stand on their feet, empowers Turkey and Europe's future growth. We'll have a chance to address all these challenges when nearly a third of the world's nations gather at the OSCE Summit in Istanbul this week. When we step back and look ahead, it is possible to imagine two very different futures over the next generation. Without too much trouble, a pessimist might foresee a dark future, indeed, a Middle East with the peace process shattered, Saddam's aggression unchecked, democracy collapsed in the Caucasus in central Asia, extremism and terror spreading across the region, more violence in the Balkans, military coups, unstoppable nuclear tensions in Pakistan and India. But there is another vision, one that requires a strong Turkey playing its rightful role at the crossroads of the world, at the meeting place of three great faiths. It is possible to see that brighter future, one of rising prosperity and declining conflict one in which tolerance is an article of faith, and terrorism is seen, rightly, as a travesty of faith a future in which people are free to pursue their beliefs and proclaim their heritage in which women are treated with equal respect in which nations see no contradiction between preserving traditions and participating in the life of the world a future of growing respect for human rights that protect our differences and our common humanity and, specifically, a future in which nations that are predominantly Muslim are increasingly partners with nations that are not, acting in concert in ways, large and small, to realize the shared hopes of their people. I hope that the next time an American President addresses a nation with a Muslim tradition, he will be able to say that the progress of Indonesia and Nigeria and Morocco, all very different nations, has helped all of us put the lie to the tired claim of an inherent clash of civilizations. As Ataturk said 75 years ago, "Countries vary, but civilization is one." President Kennedy said the same thing in Berlin when he said, "Freedom is indivisible." All told, there are now billions of people around the region and the world whose future depends upon decisions made in this very room over the next 25 years. Each has a stake in Turkey's success in defining itself as a strong, secular, modern nation, proud of its traditions, fully part of Europe. That will require hard work and vision. You have done much of it already through Ozal's reforms, through the actions of this assembly, through the thousands of ways in which the Turkish people daily are forging an energetic and responsive civil society. The future we want to build together begins with Turkish progress in deepening democracy at home. Nobody wants this more than the people of Turkey. You have created momentum and edicts against torture and a new law that protects the rights of political parties, in the achievements and vitality of this assembly. Avenues are opening for Kurdish citizens of Turkey to reclaim that most basic of birth rights a normal life. But there still is far more to be done to realize the promise of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, articulate at the very moment our two countries entered into close relations 50 years ago. That progress will be the most significant sign of Turkey's confidence in looking to the new century, and in many ways, the most meaningful measure of your progress. We agree with something that was never said more clearly than by the founder of the Turkish Republic Sovereignty should not be built on fear. Neither America nor Europe nor anyone else has the right to shape your destiny for you. Only you have that right that, after all, is what democracy is all about. We raise these issues because for all the reasons I have mentioned, we have a profound interest in your success, and we consider ourselves your friends. Keep in mind, I come from a nation that was founded on the creed that all are created equal and yet, when we were founded, we had slavery women could not vote even men could not vote unless they owned property. I know something about the imperfect realization of a country's ideals. We have had a long journey in America, from our founding to where we are, but the journey has been worth making. And in our own troubled century, about to close, we have clearly learned that when writers and journalists freely express themselves, they exercise not only a fundamental right but fuel the exchange of ideals essential to prosperity and growth. When peaceful outlets exist to express normal human differences, the peace is preserved, not shattered. When people can celebrate their culture and faith in ways that do not infringe upon the rights of others, moderates do not become extremists, and extremists do not become misguided heroes. A second way to shape the future lies in reducing tensions in the Aegean, something that will require hard work by both Turkey and Greece. Believe me, I appreciate how much history lies behind this troubled relationship. But people are beginning to see the possibilities that can be created by a new and better history. Prime Minister Ecevit's government has taken important strides in that direction. I agree with something he once said to me, "There is just as much as history and geography uniting you across the Aegean as there is dividing you." Greece is also taking some risks for peace and recognizing as never before that Turkey's destiny lies in Europe. You came together to promote stability in the Balkans, something that was, in fairness, far more difficult for them to do than for Turkey or the United States. The people of both nations were movingly joined again when tragedy struck you both in the form of earthquakes, first in August and then, horribly, again last week. Every person who lost a loved one or a home to those earthquakes knows that there was no such thing then as a Turkish or a Greek tragedy. They were human tragedies, and the world will never forget the humanity each nation displayed toward the other. We must also work hard to reach a just settlement in Cyprus, and I am very pleased that yesterday the parties accepted Secretary General Annan's invitation to start proximity talks in New York on December 3d. Their goal is to prepare the ground for meaningful negotiations, leading to a comprehensive settlement of the Cyprus problem. I hope these talks will bring us a step closer to lasting peace. I believe a negotiated settlement is the best way to meet the fundamental interests of all the parties, including real security for all Cypriots and an end to the island's division. Finally, the future we want to build together will require foresight on the part of our other allies in Europe. The foresight to see that our vision of a Europe that is undivided, democratic, and at peace for the first time in all of history will never be complete unless and until it embraces Turkey. The United States is not a member of the European Union, but I have consistently urged European integration to move further and faster, and that includes Turkey. There are still those who see Europe in narrower terms. Their Europe might stop at this mountain range or that body of water or, worse, where people stopped to worship God in a different way. But there is a growing and encouraging consensus that knows Europe is an idea as much as a place, the idea that people can find strength in diversity of opinions, cultures, and faiths, as long as they are commonly committed to democracy and human rights the idea that people can be united without being uniform, and that if the community we loosely refer to as the West is an idea, it has no fixed frontiers. It stretches as far as the frontiers of freedom can go. Ten years ago this month the Berlin Wall tumbled a curtain lifted across Europe. The best way to celebrate that anniversary is to rekindle the feeling of liberation for a new generation. The best way to complete the unity glimpsed in 1989 is to integrate all of southeastern Europe into the idea and institutions of Europe in 1999 and the years ahead. That means democracy in Serbia. It means peace in the Aegean. It means a successful democratic Turkey fully welcomed into the European community. At the beginning of this new century, in which we have so much hope, there is great optimism for both our countries. We have much to be proud of, but we must never forget that Turkey is built on the ruins of many ancient civilizations that once were every bit as optimistic as we are today. To avoid their fate, we must back up our words and our hopes with deeds. We must acknowledge the challenges still before us. We must not relinquish the confidence that brought us everything in this century as it becomes our history, but we must not lose the humility that this century's great troubles leave to every thinking person. Turkey has come so far over so many barriers in so short a time. It was, after all, only 61 years ago this week that Ataturk died. Prime Minister Ecevit was one of the schoolchildren who filed into the palace to pay their respects to the fallen leader. All of you are the youth he advised in his most unselfish mandate near the end to continue to think for yourselves, to always reexamine your beliefs, and to reshape democracy, generation after generation after generation. What Turkey has generated in this century is a living example of what all people can do to claim a better destiny for themselves. A new century now lies untested before us. It is an enormous opportunity. By deepening the democratic revolution embodied by, and still emanating from, this very chamber, Turkey can do more than serve its own people well. By your example and your exertion, you can truly inspire the world. Thank you very much. November 15, 1999 Thank you very much, Mr. President, Mrs. Demirel, distinguished friends. I thank you for your reception and for the invitation to come to Turkey. I'm delighted to be here in a place I have wanted to visit for a very long time, to deepen America's ties with one of our most important partners and allies. For most of this century, as Turkey and the United States come closer together, our relationship has been distinguished by an increasing sense of how much, together, we can do to improve the lives of our people. The recent earthquakes have humbled us, reminding us that for all of the advances and our own capacity to shape the future, there is much in life that lies utterly beyond our control. No one could have foreseen or avoided the terrible tragedy that struck Turkey on August 17th, or the earthquake which came again just last week. I want to express, on behalf of the American people, again, our profound sympathies and condolences to all the people of Turkey for all that you have lost. We have been honored to stand with you as you have worked so heroically to clear the damaged areas from the first earthquake and to return as best as possible to the cadence of normal life. And we pledge to work with you as you deal with this natural tragedy, as well. The United States is proud to stand with Turkey in good times or bad, against cruel natural calamities, terrorism, or other threats to freedom and democracy. With regard to the earthquake, we have dispatched a search and rescue team to the area and sent tents to house 10,000 people made homeless. Our Export Import Bank has allocated 1 billion in lending authority to help Turkish businesses finance projects related to reconstruction. We will continue to do all we can to speed your recovery, to encourage private investment, to help you prepare for future natural disasters. I would also like to express my appreciation for the swift response from many other nations, including Greece, to the needs of the people of Turkey at this moment. Mr. President, over the next 5 days, I will have the opportunity to be in your nation on the longest visit ever by an American President to Turkey. I want to express my solidarity with the Turkish people and America's commitment to Turkey's future. We will work for a future in which Turkey continues to be an ally of America, a partner in the new Europe, and reconciled with others in the region, especially our friends in Greece. I thank you for the opportunity today to meet with leaders of Turkish democracy in Ankara and the opportunity to speak to the members of the Grand National Assembly, and then for the opportunity to go to Istanbul to participate with you and 50 other leaders at the OSCE Summit. I thank you for the opportunity to go and see some of the survivors of the first earthquake, to learn about what we in America still can do to help. Mr. President, you mentioned that it was 10 years ago this month that the Berlin Wall fell. I want to thank you again for the partnership we have had for peace and freedom with Turkey in the years since, especially in Bosnia and Kosovo. I thank you for sharing the lesson we are still learning in times of agony as well as joy. We are all in this together. And to me that means, in part, we must continue to fulfill a vision of a Europe undivided, democratic, in peace for the first time in history, anchored by a stable and prosperous Turkey. Mr. President, this week I pledge to you that I will work with you to fulfill the promise of that unified, whole, free Europe. With Europe a Europe that includes Turkey and a partnership with Turkey and the United States that includes our commitment to freedom and opportunity for all people, we have a chance to start a new century on higher ground. And the success of our partnership will have a lot to do with that. Thank you again for welcoming me and for being a genuine friend to the United States. November 11, 1999 Thank you very much, Secretary West, for your eloquent remarks and your leadership and your many years of devotion to our country. Commander Smart, thank you for your leadership this year. Chaplain Cooke, Lee Thornton, thank you for always being here for our veterans. The leaders of our veterans' organizations Members of Congress here Deputy Secretary Gober and members of the Cabinet General Ralston, members of the Joint Chiefs General Davis and other Medal of Honor recipients. To the former POW's, the families of those still missing in action, to our veterans and their families. Let me begin by offering a special word of appreciation to the Army Band and Chorus for their magnificent music today and for making us feel so important. And I want to say a special welcome today to a person you may have read about in the morning papers. Captain Earl Fox is the Senior Medical Officer at the Coast Guard Personnel Command here in Washington. He also happens to be the last World War II veteran still on active military duty. Now, next week he will retire at the tender young age of 80. I think he has earned his retirement. But captain, on behalf of a grateful nation, we say thank you for your service. My fellow Americans, as we all know, we celebrate Veterans Day on the anniversary of the armistice ending World War I, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Eighty years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed this a day of solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country's service. For 2 full minutes in the middle of that day, all traffic and business across our Nation stopped, as Americans took time to remember family and friends who fought and those who never came home from the "war to end all wars." I don't believe those men and women who were our forebears could ever have imagined that so many other times in this century young Americans would be asked again and again to fight and die for freedom in foreign lands. When the 20th century began, the headstones that stand in silent formation on these beautiful hills covered fewer than 200 acres. Today, at century's end, they cover more than 600 acres. Hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the world sleep in peace because more than a million Americans rest in peace, here and in graves marked and unmarked all across the world. Today we come again to say we owe them a debt we can never repay. In a way, the young men and women who have died in defense of our country gave up not only the life they were living but also the life they would have lived, their chance to be parents, their chance to grow old with their grandchildren. Too often when we speak of sacrifice, we speak in generalities about the larger sweep of history, and the sum total of our Nation's experience. But it is very important to remember that every single veteran's life we honor today was just that, a life, just like yours and mine. A life with family and friends and love and hopes and dreams and ups and downs, a life that should have been able to play its full course. Fifty seven years ago this week, the eyes of America were focused on a small, sweltering island in the South Pacific. Pearl Harbor had been bombed the year before, and Japanese forces in the Pacific were capturing one island after another. The task of stopping them fell to a group of young marines in an operation called Project Watchtower, in a place called Guadalcanal. The battle was expected to last 6 weeks. It took 6 months. The jungle was so thick, soldiers could hardly walk fighting so fierce and rations so thin that the average marine lost 25 pounds. Every night shells fell from the sky, and enemy soldiers charged up the hills. The only weapons marines had to defend themselves were Springfield rifles left over from World War I. But with the strength forged in factories and fields back home, they turned back wave after wave of hand to hand fighting, until at last, the Navy was able to help the marines turn the tide in the naval battle that began 57 years ago tomorrow. That turned the tide of battle in the whole Pacific and with it the tide of American history. On that small island, in the Battle of Guadalcanal, Americans proved that our Nation would never again be an island, but rather allied with freedom and peace loving people everywhere, as the greatest force for peace and freedom the world has ever known. In the days and years that have followed, men and women, forged from the same mettle, in every branch of our military have built on those sacrifices and stood for the cause of freedom, from World War II to Korea, to Vietnam, to Kuwait City, to Kosovo. On the beach at Guadalcanal is a monument to those who fought on the island. In the hills that surround us, some of the 1,500 marines and sailors who lost their lives in that battle are laid to rest. They are some of the greatest of the greatest generation. One of those who served at Guadalcanal was a 19 year old marine lieutenant named John Chafee. He went on to fight in Okinawa, to lead troops in Korea, to serve as Governor of Rhode Island and Secretary of the Navy, and then, for more than 20 years, as a United States Senator. He helped write the law that keeps our air clean. His fights for health care helped millions of veterans live better lives. Yet he was so humble that when he received a distinguished award from the Marine Corps Foundation last year, he hardly spoke about his wartime service. Two weeks ago, this remarkable man passed away at the age of 77. At his funeral, Hillary and I spent time with his 5 children and his 12 grandchildren. And I was proud to announce on that day that the Navy will be naming one of its most modern and capable destroyers after John Chafee. Now, that was the measure of one man's life who fought in Guadalcanal and survived. Today, in our imaginations, we must try to imagine the measure of all the lives that might have been, had they not been laid down in service to our Nation. What about the more than one million men and women who have given their lives so that we could be free? What would have been the measure of their lives? What else would they have accomplished for their families and their country, if only they had had the chance? Of course, we don't have any of those answers. But because we have the question, we clearly have a responsibility to stand in the breach for them. We are not just the beneficiaries of their bravery we are the stewards of their sacrifice. Thanks to their valor, today, for the very first time in all of human history, more than half of the nations of the world live under governments of their own choosing. Our prosperity and power are greater than they have ever been. It is, therefore, our solemn obligation to preserve the peace and to make the most of this moment for our children and the children of the world, so that those who sacrificed so much to bring us to this moment will be redeemed in the lives they could have lived by the lives that we do live. How shall we do this? It means at least that we must continue to be the world's leading force for peace and freedom, against terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It means we must keep the commitment I have had since the moment I took the oath of office, that our men and women in uniform will remain the best trained, best equipped, best prepared in the world. In Kosovo, we had zero combat fatalities and only two planes shot down, though our pilots took heavy enemy fire every single day and put their lives repeatedly at greater risks to avoid hitting civilians on the ground. That is a tribute to the professionalism we see every day from our military forces all around the world. Last month I was proud to sign a bill that will keep us moving in that direction, with the start of the first sustained increase in military spending in a decade and the biggest pay increase for our troops in a generation. It means we must also do more to be faithful to our veterans when their service is over. President Theodore Roosevelt once said, "Anyone good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterward." Over the past 7 years we have opened more than 600 veterans' out patient clinics across America. This year we expect to treat 400,000 more veterans than last year, including more disabled veterans than ever before. We will continue to make sure that all veterans receive the care they deserve. And we must continue to make a special effort to end something that must be intolerable to all of us, the tragedy of homeless veterans. I want to commend the reigning Miss America, Heather Renee French, who is with us today along with her family her father, a disabled Vietnam veteran her mother her brother and her sister for all the work she is doing in her position finally to bring proper national attention to the plight of homeless veterans. We thank you for what you're doing. Thank you. We must not rest until we have done everything we possibly can to bring them back into the society they so willingly defended. And we must bear in mind the special sacrifice of the more than 140,000 veterans who were held in prison camps or interned during this century. I want to commend the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund for completing a project they launched a year ago today to create a special curriculum on the Vietnam war and send a copy to every single high school across America. Part of that curriculum focuses on the men and women who never came home. We must not forget them. I am very proud to announce today that we have successfully recovered the remains of three more United States servicemen lost during the Korean war. They're coming home tonight. But we must not waver in our common efforts to make the fullest possible accounting for all our MIA's, for all their families to have their questions answered. Finally, fulfilling our responsibility to lead for peace and freedom and to be faithful not only to our service personnel but our veterans, requires us to do more than prepare people to fight wars and take care of them when they come home. We must work with greater determination to prevent wars. Every American who gave his or her life for our country was, in one way or another, a victim of a peace that faltered, of diplomacy that failed, of the absence of adequate preventive strength. We know that if diplomacy is not backed by real and credible threats of force, it can be empty and even dangerous. But if we don't use diplomacy first, then our military will become our only line of defense. Of course, it also costs money to help struggling young democracies to stand on their feet as friends and partners of the United States, as we've tried to do from Poland to Russia to Nigeria to Indonesia. It costs money to make sure nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union are secure, for the terrorists and leaders who wish us harm do not acquire the means to kill on a more massive scale. It costs money to support the peacemakers in places like the Middle East and the Balkans and Africa, so that regional conflicts do not explode and spread. But all of you know, better than most, that freedom is not free. And all of you know, far better than most, that the costliest peace is far cheaper than the cheapest war. I am pleased to report to you today that the Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working together on a strong compromise that will allow us to meet some of our most urgent needs in foreign affairs, to prevent war. We're not finished yet, but there is a bipartisan center like that which has carried America for 50 years at this hopeful moment now at work in the Congress. I am grateful for it, and our children will be safer for it. In less than 2 months, we'll be able to say the conflict and bloodshed that took so many American lives came from another century. So we gather today for the last time in this century to dedicate ourselves to being good stewards of the sacrifice of the veterans of our country. As we look ahead to the large challenges and the grand opportunities of the new century and a new millennium, when our country has more prosperity than ever before, and for the first time in my lifetime has the ability to meet those challenges and to dream dreams and live them because we are unthreatened by serious crisis at home and security threats abroad, let us resolve to honor those veterans, to redeem their sacrifice, to be stewards of the lives they never got to live by doing all we can to see that the horrors of the 20th century's wars are not visited upon 21st century Americans. That is the true way to honor the people we come here today to thank God for. Thank you very much, and God bless America. November 10, 1999 Thank you very much. Thank you. Whew! This is a pretty rowdy crowd tonight. We may have to sing that song before we're done. Laughter Chairman Garrett, when you were sort of introducing Weldon, and you kept reading all those quotes about his influence, and this, that, and the other thing and I thought, this can all be distilled in one sentence Bill Clinton does what he asked him to. Laughter I want to thank Weldon and Mel for having me here. And I want to thank you, Chairman Garrett, and the board and all of you who made this dinner possible tonight. I want to thank the members of the administration who are here. Secretary Slater do you know what I thought about when Secretary Slater got up to read Reverend Jackson's letter? If Jesse had known Rodney was going to read for him, he probably would have come back for fear that Rodney would read it better than he would. Laughter I'll pay for that later. Laughter I want to tell you, I think Reverend Jackson is where he ought to be tonight, and you should know that he's been with me every step of the two new markets tours we have taken, and it's been a great joy. We've been friends for many years. I can still remember when we ate french fries in the kitchen of the Arkansas Governor's mansion, more than a decade ago, and talked about how foolish it was that we weren't trying to include all Americans in the economic mainstream of our life. And he was on this road before I was, and I'm glad that we're walking it together now. I want to thank Secretary Alexis Herman and Aida Alvarez for their leadership. There are others here in this administration. Alvin Brown does a wonderful job for the Vice President and for me, leading our empowerment zones and enterprise community initiative. And one of the things I want to compliment him on is that we just got among the victories in this lastminute budget process is we've now fully funded the second round of empowerment zones to give more poor communities opportunities. Thank you, Alvin. I told Aida Alvarez that if Weldon really had the guts to tell Erskine Bowles that she was the best Administrator of the SBA, we could all enjoy his misery tonight laughter because you have done a wonderful job. And there are others who are here. Bill Lann Lee, the head of the Civil Rights Division thank you, sir, for your leadership. And I see Dave Barram, the Government's landlord, GSA thank you for what you have done here. And Fred Hochberg, at the SBA, out there. And a person who used to be a part of this administration who had a lot to do with "mend it, don't end it," and a lot of other good things, Deval Patrick. Thank you for being here tonight. Bless you, sir. And thank you for acknowledging Minyon Moore, my political director and Ben Johnson who runs our One America office and my good friend Ernie Green. I tell you, I wish every one of you had been in the White House yesterday for that Gold Medal celebration for the Little Rock Nine. It was one of the most moving things that I have ever been involved in. I want to also acknowledge the Members of Congress here tonight, that I believe are here Congresswoman Lucille Roybal Allard Congressman Rube n Hinojosa, my good friend from south Texas Congressman John Conyers is here, obviously. And I want to pay special recognition to one other person who is here, because he's up for reelection next year he needs your help, and he is one of the most courageous Members of the United States Congress. If ever we had a friend who deserves to be reelected, it's Senator Chuck Robb from Virginia. And I want to ask him to stand up. Applause He may well be the greatest Virginia greatest Governor Virginia had since Thomas Jefferson, in his record in education and in so many other ways. We served together, and I have seen him cast vote after vote in the Senate, knowing that it might cost him his seat. And he just gets up every day and does what he thinks is right. He deserves the support of every thinking person in America who cares about the direction of the United States Senate. He's got a hard fight. I believe he's going to win, but he has to have all kinds of help, financial, vote, and otherwise, to win. And I want to urge you to support him in every way you can. I'm told that Mayor David Dinkins from New York is here tonight. If he's here, or was here, anyway and if you're not here, I still think you're great. Laughter You've heard this speech before. I thank you for this award. You know, I always feel generally that Presidents shouldn't receive awards, that having the job is award enough. But I confess I kind of like this one. Laughter And I'm going to put it on my desk in the Oval Office tomorrow, so you'll begin to see it on television, and you'll know how much I like it. You told that joke about "Lift Every Voice and Sing." I remember one time Vernon Jordan and I sang that song to a group of unbelieving people on Martha's Vineyard. Laughter You know, this is all beginning to cause me some difficulty. Last night I spoke to a Hispanic Democratic dinner, and I was introduced by my friend Miguel Lausell from Puerto Rico. And he stood up and said, "This President has a Latino soul." Laughter And not long ago, Toni Morrison said that I was Toni Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize winning African American writer, said that I was the first black President America had ever had. Laughter So I thought to myself, now I'll never be able to go home to Ireland. What am I going to do? Laughter All of this that we're laughing about really stems from something I deeply believe. I believe it about America, but I believe it about every person's journey through life. We all struggle, and we all fail. But we all struggle to live a life of integrity, which means literally that we are integrated, that our mind and our body and our spirit are in the same place at the same time, centered and connected to other human beings. And I've always believed that, in so many ways, the purpose of politics is to find a unifying vision that will allow people to release the barriers that keep them from one another so they can join hands and enhance our common destiny. It's been a privilege to serve. I don't really deserve any awards. I got to be President, and it's the greatest honor that any American could ever have. Your success is the greatest award I could get, because the mission of our country, the eternal mission of our country is to deepen the meaning of our freedom and widen the circle of opportunity and strengthen the bonds of our community. And it turns out that trying to make sure that everybody shares in our prosperity is not only the morally right thing to do, it's good for all the rest of America, too, which is why all these businesses are here tonight. So we have come a long way by following the admonition of the Scriptures to be doers of the Word and not hearers only. Twelve years ago, or in the 12 years before the Vice President and I came here, we had a very different view, I think, of ourselves as a country, which dominated Washington, and a very different economic philosophy. But in the end, by 1992, it had brought us to a place where we had economic distress and social division, with a Government that had been discredited by the people who were running it, who said the Government was the problem. And even though along the way I thought they did some quite good things standing up against communism, signing the Americans with Disabilities Act but all the time telling us that the Government was the problem. And also defying the basic laws of arithmetic when it came to doing our budget. Laughter So in 1992 Vice President Gore and I asked the American people to give us a chance to put people first, to be driven by a vision of opportunity for all, but responsibility from all Americans. I always thought, contrary to the prevailing political rhetoric, that most people wanted to be responsible and would respond to a challenge to do that and to build a community of increasingly diverse Americans. We had some new ideas about the economy, about welfare, about crime, about the environment, about national service, about America's role in the world. And with the help of a lot of you here, the American people gave us a chance to try our ideas. And after 7 years, the results are in. And I am very grateful that we have the longest peacetime expansion in our history. By February it will be the longest economic expansion in American history, including the Second World War and World War I and the times we were fully mobilized nearly 20 million new jobs a 30 year low in unemployment a 32 year low in the welfare rolls a 25year low in the crime rate 20 year low in the poverty rates the first time we've had backto back budget surpluses in 42 years, with the smallest Federal Government in 37 years. You've been a part of that. That's the America you have made because you have been given a chance to make it. And you should be very proud of yourselves for the role you played in it. Along the way, we tried to make sure that people who worked 40 hours a week and have kids in their homes should not be poor. So we doubled the earned income tax credit and cut taxes for 15 million working Americans, raised the minimum wage, and I hope we're about to raise it again. We passed the Brady bill, which has now kept 400,000 people with criminal or other problem histories from getting handguns, giving us the lowest murder rate in 30 years. We fought for and won an increase in children's health coverage that will enable us, I hope and believe, over the next year or so, to cover 5 million more children with health insurance. Ninety percent of our kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases, for the very first time in our history. We've expanded Head Start, and the family and medical leave law has now enabled over 15 million Americans to take a little time off from work without losing their jobs when a baby is born or a parent's sick. We've opened the doors of higher education with the HOPE scholarship and other tax credits and more Pell grant fundings and tax deductibility for interest on student loans. The air is cleaner. The water is cleaner. The food is safer. We set aside more land in protected areas than any administration in the history of this country, except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. One hundred and fifty thousand young Americans, and some not so young, have entered the AmeriCorps program and served in their communities all across America, solving problems and working with people, helping children, dealing with natural disasters, rebuilding dilapidated housing, doing any number of things to make our country a better place. And we have made a clear commitment to building one America in the 21st century. We've tried to reach out, I might add, in ways that are not always apparent. You know, and you've made I like that joke about how my administration doesn't look like the one on "West Wing." I don't recognize that White House, you know? Laughter It's a cute show, but it ought to be more diverse, because America is. And our administration is. You know that. You know of the record of our appointments to the Federal bench and the efforts to increase the effectiveness of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We've also, I might add, tried to make sure that people who have different political views than mine had their rights respected, that all Federal employees were citizens and could be citizens, that the religious convictions of Federal employees and children in our schools could have the widest possible protection. So I haven't tried just to bring into this tent of one America people who will vote for me at the next election, but all people who should feel that they have a place at America's table. But we have made a special effort on the economic front to help people who have traditionally been left behind. We've increased by 2 1 2 times the number of small business loans to African American entrepreneurs, and by 2 1 2 times the number of SBA loans to Hispanic entrepreneurs since 1992. And beneath those economic statistics that I just ran off the 30 years, 30 years, 20 years I wish you all could remember that and just tell everybody between now and the next election laughter we have the lowest levels ever recorded of African American poverty and child poverty, the lowest Hispanic poverty rate in a generation, the lowest female unemployment rate listen to this lowest female unemployment rate in 46 years, and the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded since we started separate statistics in the 1970's. Now, I think the important question is, what do we intend to do with this? You know, I worked as hard as I could, and I will continue to every day for the next 430 some odd days I have to be President, to keep this country going in the right direction, to build that bridge to the 21st century we talked about in 1996. A nation is almost like a vast ocean liner out in the Pacific somewhere. To turn it around, you can't do it on a dime it takes time. And we've worked hard for 7 years, and the country is moving in the right direction. The question is, what are we going to do with it? This is the only time in my lifetime that we have had this level of economic strength, free of any pressing domestic crisis or foreign threat, so that we literally can look ahead into this new millennium and say, what would we like America to be for our children and our grandchildren? Because as good as things are, we know two things. We know, number one, nothing stays the same forever, good or bad. So like all moments, this one will pass. Something will happen sometime down the road. Nothing stays the same forever. The second thing we know is, we know right now that we have some big challenges still out there. I'll mention some I won't talk about tonight in any detail, but just you ought to think about them. We know right now that the number of people over 65 is going to double in the next 30 years, and we'll only have two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. We have to decide right now whether we're going to deal with that. We know right now that Medicare is supposed to run out of money in 15 years and that 75 percent of the elderly people in this country can't afford prescription drugs. We know right now that we have, for the first time, a generation of schoolchildren bigger than the baby boom generation, and they're much, much more diverse. In Senator Robb's home State, just across the river from the White House, the Alexandria School District has children from 180 different racial and ethnic groups whose parents speak 100 different languages one school district. And we know that while we have the best system of higher education in the world, and this administration has succeeded, literally, in opening the doors of college to everybody who is willing to work for it now, no one can seriously assert that every one of our children is getting a world class education, kindergarten through 12th grade. And we know if we really want to have one America, we have to deal with that. We know right now that people who are connected to the Internet and are computer literate and understand that have big economic advantages. Even poor people get big economic advantages. I learned in northern California last week that this company, eBay I bet a lot of you have bought things from eBay, you know eBay you know there are now over 20,000 people making a living off eBay? Not working for the company trading through the site. Many of them, I learned from the company people, used to be on welfare. So we know that it makes a huge difference, and yet we know there's a digital divide out there. The Vice President and I have worked hard to close it in the schools. Four years ago, we had only 4 percent of our schools and classrooms connected to the Internet. Now, 51 percent are, and we're trying to make sure 100 percent are by the end of next year. We're getting close. But there are kids out there in schools that cannot be wired because they are so old and in such disrepair. Forty percent of the schools in New York are over 70 years old. Some of them are still heated by coal. The average age of school buildings in Philadelphia is 65 years. And I could go on and on. I was in a little town in Florida not very long ago, a little town, where there were 12 trailers out behind the grade school. So this is a challenge we know about this. I know, and I hope that you believe, that there is really an environmental challenge that the whole world faces in this climate change business and that if we continue to warm the climate at this rate, at some time in the next century the water levels will rise as the polar ice caps melt the sugarcane fields in Louisiana will be flooded much of the Florida Everglades will be flooded some island nations could disappear and the whole quality of life in America could be changed. The distribution of agricultural opportunity could be irrevocably altered. But we also know that you don't have to burn more greenhouse gases to get rich anymore, as a nation. It's not necessary. There are technological advances that are now available, and those that will soon be available, which will enable us to totally change that. Congressman Conyers and I went to the Detroit auto show together, and we looked at automobiles that use mixed gasoline and electrical engines that will soon become commercially available, that get 70 miles a gallon, and that can be economical even at presently relatively low gasoline prices. But we have to. We know that. We know that in the future we'll have to deal with the challenges from terrorists and drugrunners and organized criminals around the world, and they'll increasingly work together, and they will use the very things that we're using the Internet and technology and the openness of borders against us. We know that. What are we going to do about it? I say all these things not to alarm anyone, but to say that we know right now what most of the large challenges of the next 30 years will be, and right now, for the first time in my lifetime, we have the prosperity and the confidence and the coherence to deal with them. But they require decisions. I said yesterday, when we were celebrating Ernie and the other members of the Little Rock Nine, that the things that those kids did when they walked up the steps and into the schools and they were abused and they were run off and they went through this trial is they forced everybody else to make a decision. Before that I was like everybody else I thought segregation was a terrible thing, but I never had to really speak about it. I was 11 years old what the heck did it matter to me? I was more worried about when recess was, or something. You know, it was just the way things were. But sometimes when people act, they change everything. And everybody had to make a decision then. Because there it was. Well, that's where we are now. Except there is no crisis, so we don't have to make a decision. We can just wander on and not deal with this. Now, how many times in your personal life, in your family life, or in your business life, have you made a mistake because you thought things were going so well you could afford to be distracted, diverted, or indulgent? How many times? It happens to everybody. There's not a person in this room that hasn't happened to. It is human nature. And so I say to you, the greatest honor I could have is to know that you will work with me for the next 430 some odd days and that you will continue to work to make sure that we do not blow this precious moment. This is an incredible opportunity and an enormous responsibility. And it's never happened in my lifetime, ever. Not once have we ever had this much prosperity, this much confidence, and the absence of a pressing, convulsing domestic crisis or foreign threat. And we will never forgive ourselves if we let our children and our grandchildren down by not looking into the future and saying, here are the big challenges facing this country, and we intend to meet them. And I just want to mention two more. Number one is there are people in places which still have not participated in this prosperity. That's what the Vice President's employment zones and enterprise community initiative has been all about. That's why we worked hard to establish these community development financial institutions that some of you have participated in. That's why we worked so hard to enforce the Community Reinvestment Act and then to save it in this last banking legislation, because 95 percent of all the lending ever made under that 22 year old law has happened since this administration has been in office. And that's what this new markets initiative is all about. We will never have every single neighborhood in an employment zone we can only pick those that have their act together and have the biggest problems and try to make the fairest judgments we can. So what I have sought to do by going around the country is to say, look, there are all these other places, and shouldn't we at least give investors in America the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give them to invest in poor areas in Latin America or Africa or Asia? I support American investment around the world. I am trying to pass right now the Africa trade bill and the Caribbean Basin initiative before this Congress goes home. But I believe that the most important markets we have are the untapped markets still in this country that need to be developed. So I ask you to think about that. You'd be amazed again, this is another example where doing what the right thing to do is also good for the rest of America. You would be amazed how much time we have spent over the last year and a half figuring out how can we keep this economic expansion going. All previous economic expansions have come to an end either because the economy gets so heated up that we get inflation and then when you break the inflation, the medicine to break the inflation is so strong, it breaks the recovery or because the recovery just runs out of steam. Now, we've kept this one going, largely thanks to you and people like you. Thirty percent of it has been powered by technology 30 percent of it, until this Asian financial collapse, was powered by exports. Traditional economic theory dramatically underestimated the impact of technology to increase productivity and underestimated the impact of open markets in holding down inflation. So we can keep it going. But to keep it going, with unemployment at 4.1 percent, what have we got to do? If you go into a neighborhood in an inner city, if you go into an abandoned small town that lost its factory and has nothing left, if you go into a Native American reservation Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota there are plenty of smart people up there. I walked up and down the street with a 17 yearold girl that is as intelligent as any high school child I've talked to since I've been President. But they have 73 percent unemployment. That is wasted human potential. And if you invest there, you create new businesses, new jobs, and new consumers and new taxpayers, and you grow the economy without inflation, by definition, because you are getting both new producers and new consumers. This is the right thing to do for the people that are there. It's the right thing to do for the rest of us because we want this ride to go on just as long as it can. The other thing I want to say is, if I could leave America with one legacy, and somebody said to me tonight, "Well, you're going to have to go now, and we'll give you one wish." You know, the genie deal. Laughter "But you don't get three wishes you just get one," I'd still pick one America. Why? Because I think when we're getting along and when we're not just tolerating each other, but when we respect and like each other, when we've got a framework for dealing with our honest differences that enables them to be worked out without everybody falling out, the American people nearly always get it right. I mean, why do you think we're around here after over 220 years? Look at all the stuff we've weathered. I mean, we had these Founding Fathers who said we're all created equal, and they were slaveholders. And even white guys couldn't vote if they didn't own property, never mind the women, right? We worked it out. So now we just kept on working at it, and we worked it out. But what is the signal measure of our progress? We kept finding ways to bring more and more and more people into the circle of freedom and opportunity. And then their minds figured out how to maximize the benefits of the industrial revolution, how to provide mass education, how to integrate immigrants from all over the world into the mainstream of American life. This one America deal is much bigger than just sort of, feel good let's all be nice don't anybody be prejudiced or say anything at a dinner party you'd be embarrassed by. Laughter And, to be serious, it's much more than being tough on people who commit hate crimes, although I badly want that hate crimes legislation to pass. It is an understanding about the way we should live if we all want to do well. It is in the nature of the American idea and the core of what it means to be a human being. Isn't it interesting to you I mean, do you ever think about this? We continue to have these horrible hate crime incidents in America, and then we see these other countries convulsed by the tribal slaughter in Rwanda the awful, terrible treatment of the Kosovar Albanian Muslims in Kosovo the treatment of the Bosnian Muslims in Bosnia the continuing conflict among the Catholics and the Protestants in Ireland which we're trying to bring to an end the continuing conflict in the Middle East. What is the common element in that and the hate crimes? It is that, for all of the wonders of the modern world, we're most bedeviled as societies by the oldest problem of folks living together We still have a hard time with people who aren't like us, you know, have a hard time with people that aren't like us. And yet, the truth is, when we get over it and let it go, we find that life is a lot more interesting than it used to be. I told somebody last night, the first time I went to a Cinco de Mayo celebration in San Francisco, I thought, where has this been all my life? Laughter Man, I like this. Where has this been? I like this. So, we're laughing, but there's a grain of truth here. Why do American Christians buy books by the Dalai Lama in record numbers, about the ethics of the new millennium? Because he has a very important piece of the truth, and he's very important peace inside. So I say to you, look for the unifying vision and continue to work for it. And be clear and focused on the magic moment in which we live. Be humble enough to know it will not last forever it is not in the nature of human affairs. And if you really want to honor what you have done and the spirit of this award, which you have so kindly given me, make the most of this moment. It is the chance of a lifetime to build the future of our dreams. Thank you. November 10, 1999 Thank you very much. Thank you. It's nice to be in a restrained, laid back crowd like this. Laughter The truth is, it's wonderful to be in a place where people are happy, and they're not ashamed to be excited, and they're proud to go to work every day. Thank you very much for making me feel welcome here today. Thank you, Jeff Bleustein thank you, Bobby Ramsey. Old Bobby kind of hurt my feelings. You know, I went up to him and he said, "Well, you're not nearly as tall as I thought you were." Laughter He said, "When I saw you playing saxophone on Arsenio Hall, I thought you were a lot taller guy." Laughter And I said, "That's why I got elected President. I was 6' 8" back then." Laughter But I still think you did a good job, Bobby, and I thank you. I want to thank Bill Dannehl. Thank you, Harry Smith. I enjoyed meeting Willie Davidson today. And I thank Tom Buffenbarger, the president of the International Association of Machinists, for being here and joining us today. I want to thank Mayor Robertson for welcoming me to York, and all the county commissioners and legislators and others who are here. And I want to say a special word of appreciation again, Jeffrey, to you for making me feel so welcome here and for the nice things you said about Bill Daley, behind his back. Usually, when you talk behind somebody's back, you're not saying nice things. Laughter So Daley is up here talking, and Jeff is telling me what a good Secretary of Commerce he is. And I will say, Secretary Daley, you have been superb, and we're grateful for what you do for the United States. Now, you may remember this, some of you, but after I was nominated for President, way back in the summer of 1992, Al and Tipper Gore and Hillary and I got on a bus, and we started this bus tour. Our very first overnight stop was in York, Pennsylvania. And I'm sure none of you were there when we got in. We got in about a quarter to one, but the crowd was about the size that it is today. And I looked at that crowd. It was in the middle of the night, you know we'd been stopped everywhere along the way, and I decided I'd take a bus tour so I could go see normal people. We went out to all these little towns. And then we got to York, it was the middle of the night, and there was this huge throng there. And I popped out, and I looked at Hillary, I said, "You know, we might win this election" laughter "and we'd better not mess it up." When I was here before, I didn't get to come and visit Harley Davidson. And I wish I had, because since then I had a beautiful Harley jacket before I came here, that I got in Milwaukee, but I gave it to a guy who worked for me because he thought he was going to ride to heaven on a Harley Davidson motorcycle. So when he retired, the only thing I could think of to give him that really reflected the service he had given to our country and to me was my jacket, which I hated to part with. But the only gifts that really count are the ones that you'd like to keep yourself, I think sometimes. So today I got another one, and I thank you. I love it. You know, Bill Daley was talking about being over in the United Arab Emirates and how they were dying to have more motorcycles and other paraphernalia to sell. And I told Jeff when he mentioned it, one of the great treasures of being the President is having the opportunity to meet people around the world you would never meet and make friends with them. A person who became a particular personal friend of mine and of my wife's was the late King Hussein of Jordan. And some of you may know, he was a very satisfied Harley customer. When Hussein and his wife, Queen Noor, came to stay with us a few years ago and we became very good friends, he gave me a gift that I treasure that's still up in the White House today. It's a picture of himself and his wife in very casual clothes in the Jordanian desert, astride a Harley. My best Harley story I was just recently in Paris on my way to Sarajevo and Bosnia to try to settle the outstanding issues of all the Balkan wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. So I stopped in France to have a meeting with the President of France, and I went to the American Ambassador's residence in Paris. Now if you ever saw that house, you'd want to be Ambassador to France, too. Laughter It's a beautiful place, built in the 1700's, just takes your breath away to walk in, these grand gardens and this beautiful marble foyer when you walk in. In the beautiful marble foyer when you walk in now, replete with all the proper lighting, is a stunning, 1944 Harley Davidson. Laughter And the way it got there is that when your predecessors were making motorcycles for the war effort, some of them were sent in packages, to be assembled to our allies in Europe. And some of them went to Yugoslavia, where Mr. Tito was fighting the Nazis. Two of them were never opened, and the son of the American Ambassador actually came upon these 54 year old boxes of unassembled 1944 Harleys last year, and he gave one to his daddy. And now, if you ever go to France, it's now the main tourist attraction of the American Embassy, is a 1944 Harley. It is so beautiful, and I know you'd be proud of it. I came here today not just because I wanted to see you and not just because I wanted to come back to York to thank the people of this community and this State for being so good for the last 7 years and through two elections to me and my wife and Vice President and Mrs. Gore. I came here because I want America to know exactly what you have done and how. The recovery of this company since the 1980's has been truly remarkable. When you were down in the dumps, people were saying American industry was finished, that we couldn't compete in the global economy, that the next century would belong to other countries and other places. Today, you're not just surviving you're flourishing, with record sales and earnings and one of the best managed companies in America, according to Industry Week. According to management and labor, one of the reasons you're the best managed company in America is that you have a genuine partnership between labor and management, where all employees are valuable and expected to make good decisions on their own for the benefit of the common enterprise. And I thank you for setting that example. I wish every manufacturer in America would model it. I came here because I knew before I got here although I had never quite experienced the full force of it until you were shouting and screaming and having such a good time I knew that this was about more than making bikes for profit, more than selling attractive leather jackets. What we see here today is how people feel when they have got a job that they do well, that gives them not only a decent income but a full measure of dignity and pride. I used to tell people all the time that politics is about a lot more than economics. But if you get the economics right, people figure out how to live and shape good lives and raise their children and build strong communities. And if you don't get the economics right, then you have to deal with a lot of the other values issues, extraordinary welfare rates and higher crime rates and all those other problems. I want people to see that you have, yes, turned a company around, yes, you make an exciting product, and you sell it all around the world, but that you do it in the right way, a way that makes you proud to come to work every day. It puts a spring in your step and a shout in your voice and a light in your eyes. That is what I want for every American working family, and I hope that more people will follow your lead so that more people can stand up and shout every day just for the joy of going to work and being part of a common enterprise and doing something they can be profoundly proud of. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that example. The second point I want to make is the point that Secretary Daley has already mentioned. To really do as well as you can, you have to sell these wonderful products not only around the country but around the world. And I think that's very important. In 1973, when the first Harley rolled off the assembly line here, America exported only 6,300 motorcycles. By last year, that number had increased to 66,000. Today, you're selling about a quarter of your bikes around the world from Costa Rica to Korea, from central Europe to the Middle East. The global market for motorcycles, and for Harleys, is exploding. It's a big part of your future. And in order for it to be a part of your future and our future, America has to continue to support expanding trade on fair terms to all, including Americans. Now, this is a big issue. And I want you to just give me a couple minutes of serious time here to talk about it. When I got elected in 1992, I don't think there's any way in the world a Governor of a small southern State in the affectionate terms that President Bush used then to describe me would have been elected President if we hadn't had economic distress, social division, political drift, and a Government discredited. You all remember that. It was tough in this country. It was tough in this State. And I had spent 12 years at that time, not quite 12, a little over 10 working as Governor of my State, trying to figure out how this economy works, how the education system plays into the economy, how I could actually get up and go to work every day and create the conditions and give people the tools to make the life of their dreams. And I asked the American people, I said, "Look, give me a chance to put people back at the center of our politics, to create opportunity for every responsible citizen, to create a community that every American has a chance to be a part of. And give me a chance to put in some new ideas. I believe we can grow the economy and protect the environment. I believe we can move people from welfare to work and still allow them to take care of their children. I believe we can be tough on crime and still do more to keep kids out of trouble in the first place. I believe we can do more to help people succeed at home and at work. I believe we can have a trading system that expands trade and still protects legitimate labor rights and our responsibilities to the environment. I believe we can have a community where all of us serves more and help one another reach our common dreams." Anyway, I said, "The center of this has to be an economic strategy, and mine is very simple. I want to get rid of the deficit, but I want to find a way to invest more money in education, in technology, in training, and in research. And I want to expand trade." To me, it was simple math we have 4 percent of the world's people with 22 percent of the world's income. You don't have to be a genius to figure out, if you want to keep 22 percent of the world's income with 4 percent of the world's people, you've got to sell something to the other 96 percent. And yet, I knew people were afraid of that. They were afraid that if we opened our borders here, a lot of our lower wage workers would be put out of business by people who worked for even less money abroad, and they might not ever get another chance. They were afraid a lot of our well paid workers would not do well, because we'd have markets opened to our competitors in those areas, but they wouldn't open their markets to ours. A lot of people were afraid we would see a big transfer of wealth to poor countries, but the money would stay in a few hands, and it wouldn't flow down to the workers there, and it would lead to a degradation of the environment in ways that could hurt us. That was especially an issue along the Rio Grande River when we were working out the trade agreement with Mexico. So there was all this fight about it. Well, the results of the last 7 years are in, and it's not an argument anymore. We have the longest peacetime expansion in history, the highest homeownership in history, 19.8 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the first backto back budget surpluses in 42 years, and the Federal Government is the smallest it's been in 37 years. The record is in. Now I might add, there's a lot of women in this plant. Last month the female unemployment rate was the same as the overall unemployment rate, 4.1 percent. That was the lowest unemployment rate for women in 46 years. And from 1993 until the end of 1997, when the Asian economy collapsed and the Russian economy had such great difficulty, until that point, 30 percent of this growth came from exports. And an enormous amount of it came because of improvements and advances in technology, not just computers in Silicon Valley but the computer programs running all these machines I saw on the plant floor here today, a lot of them taking the most dangerous jobs, some of the jobs that caused people to have long term injuries, away, so that you can work and make a contribution and make these motorcycles at some less risk and wear and tear to yourselves. Thirty percent of our growth came from exports, until we had the Asian collapse. And they're coming back now. We've worked hard to help them. They're coming back now. Now, in spite of these economic statistics I mean, here's why we're here, apart from the fact that Bill Daley and I wanted to come here. And we're glad we got our jackets, and we really wish we were leaving with motorcycles. But I have to wait a year and a half, you know? I've got to wait a year and a half. I couldn't bear all the stories out here if I rode around on a motorcycle for a while. But let me tell you, the reason we're here, to be fair, is that, ironically, in spite of all those economic numbers I just recited, there's actually more division and controversy over whether trade is or isn't good for us today in Washington than there was in 1993 and in 1994 when we joined the World Trade Organization and set off this explosion of economic activity. And again I say, I think it's because people are afraid that Americans always get a raw deal. They see we have a big trade deficit that's because we've got even more money than we produce for. We buy things from other countries, but we also sell a lot abroad. We keep setting records for our exports. And a lot of what we sell abroad supports higher wages in America. The average trade related job pays almost 20 percent more than a job unrelated to trade, like yours do. You know that. So we have to find a way not just for big business leaders and people like me who live in Washington, who, you know, get a job that lasts for a term of years, regardless. We have to find ways for people like you, that get up and go to work every day and will have a lot of job security when you're doing well, and people who aren't in unionized plants and who may be working for low wages and who feel more vulnerable. We have to find a way to build a consensus in America so that all Americans understand that if we want to keep growing this economy, raising wages, creating jobs, we've got to stick with what has brought us this far. We've got to keep paying down this debt. We can make America debt free in 15 years, for the first time since 1835, if we stay on the budget plan that I've laid out. And that will be great for you. Why should you care if we're debt free? Because if the Government is out of debt, this business can borrow money at lower cost, and you will have lower home mortgage rates. You will have lower car payment rates. If you send your kids to college, the college loans will be lower. Just because of the amount we've reduced the deficit already, the average home mortgage costs the average American working family 2,000 a year less and the average car payment is 200 a year less and the average college loan is 200 a year less. We ought to keep going until we get America out of debt for the first time since 1835, so the money will be there at the lowest possible costs for the American enterprise system to create jobs and improve lives. That's important. The second thing we ought to do is to find a way to continue to expand trade. You know, we just had a meeting, and I was told, well, just what you heard here in the speech Thank you very much for helping us get into the Japanese market, and we're doing well there, but there are still some barriers there. I hear that everywhere. So next month in Seattle, we're going to have a chance to make the global trading system stronger, to tear down more tariffs, to deal with more non tariff barriers, to make it clear that if countries want access to our markets, we have to have access to theirs, but basically, to commit to expanding trade. Now that is what is in the interest of Harley Davidson, and that is what is in the interest of the 21st century American economy. So I came here to say, we can have more companies like yours. We can have more success stories like yours. This company can have more employees like you. But if we're going to do it, we have to find a way to expand trade. There's 4 percent of us. We've got 22 percent of the income. We've got to sell something to the other 96 percent. It's just as simple as that. But we will never be able to do it unless working people believe that trade benefits ordinary American families. You know, the politicians and the CEO's can talk until they're blue in the face. But we still have elections in this country, and in the end, you guys run the show. And it's a good thing. That's why we're still around here after 200 years. But if we can't convince people like you that we're right about this trade issue, then we are going to shrink America's future prospects. It's as simple as that. You know, I want you all to watch Seattle when it rolls around. Every group in the world with an axe to grind is going to Seattle to demonstrate. I'll have more demonstrators against me than I've had in the whole 7 years I've been President. I'm kind of looking forward to it. Laughter I'll tell you why. I told them all I wanted them to come. I want all the consumer groups to come. I want all the environmental groups to come. I want everybody who thinks this is a bad deal to come. I want everybody to get all this out of their system and say their piece of mind. And I want us to have a huge debate about this. But I'm telling you, I've worked really hard for you the last 7 years to turn this economy around and to get it going in the right direction. I've worked hard to make sure other people play by the rules, not just in York, Pennsylvania, but in York, England, and in York, western Australia. And now, as I look ahead to the last year and a couple of months of my term, I try to think of what things I can still do that will allow this prosperity to go on and on and that will embrace people who haven't yet been affected by it. We still have people in places who haven't been picked up by this recovery. And I want this to go on. It's already the longest peacetime expansion in history. In February it'll be the longest economic expansion, including those that embraced our World Wars. But we can keep it going. But only if we find more customers and more investment in a non inflationary way, and there's only two places to find it. You've got to go to the places in America which have had no recovery and to the people who are still on welfare or otherwise left out, or you've got to sell more stuff overseas. Therefore, I say to you I don't think the trading system is perfect, by the way. I have argued until I'm blue in the face, and I will continue to argue that when we make these trade rules, we need to take the concerns of ordinary citizens into account. We should be growing the economy not just in America but everywhere and still improving the environment. Let me tell you, compared to 7 years ago, with all these jobs, in America, the air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer. We've set aside more land to protect it for sportspeople and for tourists and people that just want to be out in nature, than any administration in the history of this country, except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. You can improve the economy and improve the environment at the same time. People ought to have that everywhere. They ought to have that security everywhere. Working people everywhere, even if they can't enjoy the same income you do, ought to have access to basic labor rights. We shouldn't be having child labor in some of these countries producing products to compete in our markets and exploit children when they ought to be in school. We ought to have basic, decent labor standards for people everywhere. And I believe that's why I'm glad the demonstrators are coming. I want us to try to find a way to build a consensus where we can expand trade and respect the rights of labor and the environment. But let me tell you something. You know this. You think about your own life. If we have more trade and it's good for you and it's good for those countries, don't you think it's more likely that working people will be better off and their environment will be cleaner? I mean, the more money you've got, the more you can afford to give workers wages that are increased, and the more you can afford to clean up the environment. So I think all these things work together. In Seattle, I'm going to ask the trade organization for the very first time to establish a working group on trade and labor, so we get working people and their concerns involved in the trade process before all the decisions are made. I have worked hard to make environment a part of this. I think it's important. But I came here for this simple reason. This is a great company. You've got a great union. You've found a successful way to compete in the world. You represent the future of the American economy. But if I cannot convince the decisionmakers in Washington and ordinary people like you all across America that a key part of the economic success we've enjoyed in the last 7 years and the economic success America can enjoy in the years ahead requires us to continue to break down barriers to trade, then in the future, when I'm not around anymore, you won't have the economic prosperity that I think you deserve. So I ask you to think about this. I thank you for being so quiet and listening to this. I wouldn't be for this if I didn't think it was right for you, if I didn't think it was good for ordinary Americans. But I'll leave you with this thought We live in a world that is smaller and smaller, and that is either going to make us more prosperous and more secure or more vulnerable and more insecure. If we don't trade with other people and help them to get involved in a cycle of growth with us, and you have more and more people that are poor, with open borders, you're going to have more drug trafficking, more organized crime, more political terrorism, and more headaches. And everybody everywhere will be more vulnerable to it. On the other hand, if we make a living by selling more of our things overseas and the price of that is to let people sell more of their things to us and they do better and their children do better, you will have more cooperation and a far more interesting world for your children to live in. I believe the best days of this country are still ahead. I believe the life our kids and grandkids are going to have will be truly amazing. Within 10 years, children might actually be born with a life expectancy of a hundred years. Their mothers will take home with them from the hospital a map of the children's genetic system, which will say, your child has the following strengths and the following problems, but if you do these 10 things in the child's upbringing, you will dramatically reduce the fact that your little girl will get breast cancer or your little boy will develop colon cancer. It will be an amazing future. But we have to do the big things right. That's what you do here. You do the big things right. And you know a lot of little mistakes will be made. You know even you aren't perfect. You know mistakes will be made, but if you get the big things right, you know it's going to come out all right. What I'm trying to do, with this new trade round in Seattle, Washington, and with these speeches across the country, is to make sure as Americans, we get the big things right. Should we fight for fair trade? You bet. Did we get a lot of steel dumped on us when the Asian and the Russian economies went down, and was it unfair, and did I have to push hard to get it out? You bet. Did you deserve trade protection several years ago when you got it? Absolutely you did. Do we have to make the system work right? Yes. That's true. You've got to make the system work right. But let's not lose the big point if we want to continue to grow, have high incomes, low unemployment the lowest minority unemployment in the history of the country, lowest women's unemployment in 46 years, the lowest overall unemployment in 30 years if we want that, if we want a country growing together, a part of our strategy has got to be to sell more, not just Harleys but everything we can possibly sell, around the world. So I ask you, don't let this trade debate be the province of politicians and CEO's. You embrace it. It's your future and your children's future. And every company can be like Harley. But we have to embrace the world and say, "We are not afraid. We can get the big things right." Thank you, and God bless you. November 09, 1999 Thank you very much. After that introduction, I am thinking many things. Laughter I'm thinking, I wonder how long it will be before Miguel will run for office. Laughter I'm thinking, it is much better to have such a friend than an opponent. Laughter Thank you. Thank you for being my friend in ways that are personal as well as political. You may, however, have caused me quite a problem tonight, not over Vieques but over saying I have a Hispanic soul. Not very long ago the great African American Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison said I was the first black President. Laughter And if I am the first black President and the first President to have a Hispanic soul, I'm afraid they'll never let me go home to Ireland. Laughter It might be worth it. Laughter Loretta Sanchez, thank you very much for your leadership and standing up here tonight and performing in your usual, laid back, repressed fashion. Laughter What a joy it is to have somebody like you in Congress who's not ashamed to have a good time being in public life. We ought to all enjoy it and be honored. You know, when I see people trudging around here all the time, complaining about how hard public life is and all the burdens, I say, "You know, they're not giving these jobs away. Nobody made you come up here." Laughter People come to me all the time and say, "Hasn't this been just awful for you?" I say, no. Laughter It's actually been quite wonderful. You know, a few turns in the road one way or the other and I could be home doing deeds, wills, and divorces. Laughter I am grateful to be here, and I like it, every day of it. And Loretta likes it, and she's grateful to be here, and I appreciate that. I want to thank the administration members who are here Secretary Slater, who represented me at home today in Arkansas at the funeral of Daisy Bates, a great hero of the civil rights movement Administrator Alvarez Maria Echaveste my former Secretary of Transportation and Energy, Federico Pen a, who did a superb job in both places, it's nice to see you. I would also like to thank another former member of my administration who is here tonight, who is now working for Vice President Gore, Janet Murguia. Her brother was just confirmed as the first Hispanic Federal judge from Kansas, so we've got one of them on the payroll, anyway. I want to thank all the people at my table and other places who had so much to do with the success of this evening, Joe and Alfie and Roger and Leo and all the others. Nelson, thank you very much for your leadership. Thank you, Joe Andrew and the others who are here from the DNC. Lottie Shackelford, Lydia Camarillo, thank you for your willingness to go run our convention. Make sure we all have a good time out there, will you? Laughter And let me say one serious word before I go forward. There's one person I really wish were here tonight, who died a couple of days ago, the great mayor of Sacramento, California, Mayor Joe Serna. Mickey Ibarra would be here, but he's out there representing me at that service today. So I ask you all to remember Isabel Serna and the family in your prayers. They've been through a lot. He was a magnificent mayor and a great Democrat and a great friend of mine. He was one of those people who enjoyed public service, had a good time doing it, and was proud down to the last day his health would no longer permit him to serve and I ask you to remember. I also would like to thank two people who aren't here tonight one, Secretary Richardson, who is still in the administration and the other whom I wish were here, Henry Cisneros, who has served us so ably and is such a great man. I thank him. Now, as all of you know, we're trying to finish this year's budget, and we're trying to do a few other things before the Congress goes home. And I'd like to mention just a few of them because I think they relate particularly to the concerns of the Hispanic community. I want you to know what's still out there. We're fighting to get a reaffirmation of the commitment that Congress made last year, right before the election, that the majority, the Republican majority has voted to go back on. But I am determined that we will reinstate it, and that is to put 100,000 teachers out there in the early grades so we can lower class size and give our children a better education. We are fighting to give our hardest pressed communities that still have a high crime rate 50,000 police officers on the street. We are fighting to raise the minimum wage, which I think is very, very important, especially for lower income workers, many of whom are Hispanic. You know, we lifted over 1 1 2 million Hispanics out of poverty by doubling the earned income tax credit in 1993 and then by raising the minimum wage. And it's time to raise it again. And I hope we can prevail, and I hope you will help us. We're trying to pass hate crimes legislation. We're trying to pass legislation that will enable disabled people to go into the work force and not lose their Medicaid health insurance. We're trying to pass the Caribbean Basin initiative and the African trade bill, which would open our markets to the Caribbean nations and African nations and open their markets more to us and put our Caribbean neighbors on a more equal footing with our Mexican neighbors in our trading relations. All of those things can still be done before the Congress goes home. And insofar as any of you have influence with anyone, I hope you will get out there and help us with our agenda, because all these things reflect the deepest values of the Democratic Party and our commitment to the future. I just want to make a couple of other points. I don't want to keep you late, and most of you have heard me give a lot of speeches. I had a very emotional day today. I was thinking about many things. I'm about to leave to go to Europe. Hillary and Chelsea just left to go to the Middle East to continue the work that I was doing last week in our hope that we can, over the next 100 days, actually get a framework for a final peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Then I'm going to Turkey and to Greece, two great friends of America, in the hope I can help them resolve some of their difficulties over Cyprus and other issues before I leave office. And then I'm going on to Bulgaria, a great ally of ours, to try to keep pushing to make peace in the Balkans, where we have had to take up arms in Bosnia and Kosovo to stop ethnic cleansing and slaughter. And today I had this incredible experience, which would have been wonderful for any President but was especially wonderful for me. I hosted in the White House about 30 members of the United States Congress, Republicans and Democrats, and a couple of hundred other people to give the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award Congress can award, to the nine students who integrated Little Rock Central High School 42 years ago. For those of you who are old enough to remember that or young enough to have studied it, you may know also that, in addition to the courage of the young children and the power of the Supreme Court's decisions and the court orders, the power of the Presidency was necessary for the integration of Little Rock Central High School when President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division and later federalized the Arkansas National Guard to stop the obstruction. Today I signed a bill naming the Old Executive Office Building after President Eisenhower because he worked there many years in the military. That building, until the Great Depression, housed all the offices of the executive branch, including all the offices of what was then called the War Department, except for the Treasury Building and the Office of the President. So Dwight Eisenhower actually worked in that building as long as he worked in the White House as President. And his son, General John Eisenhower, who is also a noted historian, and John's wife and their daughter were there, so I asked them to come. So Dwight Eisenhower's son and granddaughter were actually present as we recognized these nine students. And because Arkansas is my home, I have lived with the reality of these people all my life, since I was 11 years old. And I said today that these nine students, in their simple desire to get a better education became, as children, our teachers. When I lived at home, literally 99 percent of all children in my State went to segregated schools. And we may have had an opinion one way or the other, but everybody more or less accepted it was the way it was. But when they did what they did, then all of a sudden, they came crashing in our lives and everyone had to decide Where do you stand what do you believe how will we live? Thirty years later, I hosted them in the Governor's Mansion for the 30th anniversary of Little Rock Central High. I brought them all in, and I showed them all the rooms where the then Governor planned the obstruction to keep them out the school. They got a big kick out of that. And 40 years later, 2 years ago, I went home to Little Rock, to the steps of Little Rock Central High School which in the 1920's was voted the most beautiful school building in America, and it's still a magnificent structure and I held the doors open for them, with our Governor, as they walked freely through the front door, something they had not been able to do 40 years ago. And then 2 years later, they came to the White House, with all their myriad family, kinfolks, and friends, for a celebration that truly represented America at its best. This has been a great day, a great day to be President and a great day to be an American. And to end it with you you and all those you represent have been so good to me and to Hillary and to the Vice President and Mrs. Gore is a great privilege. I just want to leave you with a couple of thoughts. Number one, many of you helped me in 1992 because you knew we didn't want to keep on going the way we were going, because we had economic problems and social discord and political drift, and Government was discredited. So you knew what you were against, and you were willing to try something else. But I was just an argument for most of you. Most of you never met me before I started running for President, and you decided to give me a chance. So the first thing I want to say to you is it is not an argument anymore. Together, we made a good decision, and we've changed America for the better. Seven years later, when you go home tomorrow and you go back across the country and people ask you why you were there, you can say, "Well, we gave him a chance, and we tried it their way." And as has already been said, we not only have had the most diverse administration with the most diverse appointments, including the judicial appointments more of whom I'm trying to get up for a vote by the way in history, but we have the longest peacetime expansion in history, 19.8 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest female unemployment rate in 46 years, the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years, with the smallest Federal Government in 37 years. It is not an argument anymore. It's working. It's the right direction for America. So the second thing I want to say to you is, we've got to decide now, what are we going to do with this. Because even if I pass everything I'm trying to pass, if we get a good minimum wage bill and the 100,000 teachers and the 50,000 police and we get the antienvironmental riders off the bills and we pass the Caribbean Basin Africa trade initiative, we do all the things I mentioned to you, there still will be a lot for America to do. And of all Americans, Hispanics ought to be able to think about this, our country, as we would our family. I remember one of the nicest nights we ever shared at the White House, Federico and I, was when we previewed that wonderful movie "Mi Familia" at the White House. In my lifetime, which is stretching on and on as the days go by, in my lifetime, this is the first chance America has had to have, on the one hand, the prosperity and confidence that we have and, on the other, to be unburdened by serious, wrenching foreign threats to our security or domestic crises. In the 1960's we had, for a brief period more or less, the best economy we'd ever had, with low unemployment, low inflation. But we had, first, the civil rights crisis to deal with and then the war in Vietnam. Now what do you do, as a person, as a family, as a business, if things are better than they have ever been, but you can look ahead to the future and clearly see challenges and opportunities that will not be met or seized if you don't do certain things you're not doing now? What do you do? That is the great question before our people. I can tell you you know, I don't know about you, but I'll just use my own life from the time I was a little boy, one of the well, when I first ran for office, let me start with that. I asked an old sage in Arkansas politics, I said I was running really well in this race for Governor. I said, "What do you think I ought to really remember?" He said, "Bill, just remember this In politics, you're always most vulnerable when you think you're invulnerable." How many times can you remember in your own life, when you broke your concentration, when you got divided, when you made a stupid mistake because you thought things were rocking along so well, nothing bad could happen? How many times has that happened to a family or to a business, where you just think things are going to roll on forever? It's never that way. Human nature is not that way. Human circumstances don't work that way. I'm telling you, this is a precious jewel we have been given, a gift we have been given as a country, to look ahead and say, "Okay, what are the big challenges? What are the big opportunities?" You ought to make your own lists. And ask yourself, in your lifetime, has there ever been an opportunity like this for America? What are the challenges? I'll just give you a few. The number of people over 65 is going to double in 30 years. There will be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. Medicare is supposed to run out of money in 15 years. Seventy five percent of our seniors can't afford prescription drugs but need them to stay alive and maintain their quality of life. How are we going to deal with the aging of America? We have the largest number of children in our schools in history, the first time more people than the baby boom, and by far more diverse. Loretta was talking about that Republican newsletter from northwest Arkansas. That's really true. Northwest Arkansas is one of the fastest growing areas of America, has been for 20 years, and one of the most racially and religiously homogeneous areas in the country. And all of a sudden, boom, they have this big infusion of Hispanics. The Catholic Church there now has a Spanish mass every Sunday and has had for the last several years. And that's nothing if you're from Orange County, but if you're from northwest Arkansas, that's a huge deal. Laughter We also have a big influx of people in western Arkansas from Southeast Asia. But last year, our State ranked first or second I'm not sure which, but I'm sure it's one of the two in the percentage growth of Hispanic population. Joe Andrew didn't mention this, I don't think, but in addition to all the mayors we've celebrated, we've had a truly historic, breathtaking election in the State of Mississippi, where we won the governorship in a State where they didn't think a Democrat could be elected for love or money. And part of it was the overwhelming African American turnout. But there are also more Hispanics moving to Mississippi. All over the South, their voices are being heard. And we only won the election by about 6,000 votes, so everybody can take credit for the victory. Laughter So we have to think about this. What are we going to do for all these children? They need a world class education. If we do it right, the diversity of America will be a blessing in a global society. What are we going to do about the fact that this fabulous recovery has left people and places behind? Unemployment on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is 73 percent. Upstate New York, outside of the suburbs in New York City, if it were a separate State, would rank 49th in job growth since I've been President. Hawaii, burdened by the collapse of the Asian economy, is the only State with no economic growth the inner cities, the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia. How are we going to bring prosperity to people and places left behind? Do we have the will to guarantee economic growth for a generation of Americans by taking America out of debt? I gave a budget to the Congress that will get us out of debt over the next 15 years, for the first time since 1835. And the progressive party, the Democrats, ought to be for that. It sounds like a conservative thing it is but it's the progressive thing to do in a global economy. Because if the government is not borrowing money, you can borrow it for less, and our trading partners can get more for less, and then they can be better partners with us, and they can lift their people out of poverty. How are we going to grow the economy and meet our environmental responsibility? We've proved you could do it. Are we going to keep doing it? We've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years. Does anybody seriously think America is as safe as it ought to be? If you do, let me just give you one statistic. The accidental death rate of children from gun shots in the United States is 9 times the rate of the next 25 biggest industrial economies combined. I think we now know we can bring the crime rate down. Why don't we set a realistic goal? I mean realistic in terms of our dreams. Why don't we say we won't quit until America is the safest big country in the world? And if we want that, how are we going to do it? Last night, I appeared in the first ever townhall meeting on the Internet, which was interesting for me, since one of the reasons I asked the Vice President to join the ticket is because I was so technologically challenged. Laughter It was quite a thrill for me to do that. But there is a digital divide, and it can have huge consequences. I was in northern California the other night, meeting with people who work for eBay. Do you all ever use eBay? Buy anything on eBay? You want to hear something interesting? Over 20,000 Americans now make a living on eBay, not working for eBay, trading on eBay, many of them former welfare recipients. Think of what we could do in America to close the economic divide if we could close the digital divide, if usage and access to computers and connections to the Internet were as dense as telephone ownership and usage. Think of it. Now, these are the kind of things we ought to be thinking about. What are the security threats of the 21st century? Well, I think one of them is we can start running away from each other because we've all of a sudden gotten afraid of trade. We need to keep expanding trade but work harder to put a human face on it, to take into account legitimate environmental issues and labor issues, but not to run away from the fact that with 4 percent of the world's people and 22 percent of the world's income if we want to continue to grow, we've got to sell something to the other 96 percent. And if we want to sell something to them, particularly since we're richer, we have to be willing to buy things. But this is a good thing. What else? The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical, and biological, and the possibility that they can be made in smaller quantities, like everything else is smaller. We've got cell phones so small now my big old fingers won't even hit the numbers right. The miniaturization of all things technical will apply to weapons, as well, make no mistake about it. This is a serious challenge, the growth of terrorism around the world, the prospect that the terrorists, the drug runners, the organized criminals will all start working together, and the rampant threat of racial, ethnic, and religious wars big challenges. Which brings me to the last one. And it's what I've spent so much time on around the world and what I celebrated today with honoring the Little Rock Nine Can we truly make our motto, E Pluribus Unum, real as we grow ever more diverse? It requires, I would argue, three things. One is we have to respect, not just tolerate not just tolerate but respect and celebrate our differences. You know, I don't have the same attitude as the people that put out that memo Loretta talked about. I think it's a lot more interesting in America as we grow more diverse. I'll never forget the first Cinco de Mayo celebration I went to in San Francisco. I thought, "Where has this been all my life?" Laughter You know? I mean, what have we been doing here? You know, I used to when I was Governor of my home State, I used to go to a place called Little Italy to eat spaghetti in a town called Slovak, to meet with the farmers that came there in the 1848 revolution. And now we're just repeating our history in technicolor, times four. And I think it's fascinating. But let's stop all this tolerance stuff. Tolerance is not good enough. We need respect and celebration of our differences, number one. Number two, we need to recognize that, as we have from the beginning, we have genuine differences of opinion, which ought to be forthrightly and publicly argued. In that sense, and if that's all we're doing, partisanship is not necessarily a bad thing. When people say partisanship with a little negative edge, what they really mean is these people in Washington are fighting their partisan battles trying to increase their power without concern for the public interest. They think there's some game going on that's not real. But we will always have honest differences. I know why I'm a Democrat in the year 1999. And I have friends in the Republican Party who know why they're Republicans. And we honestly see the world in different ways. We ought to create a safe and constructive way for people to feel free to think and argue. But the third thing we have to do is to recognize that the differences we celebrate and the differences we fight over, neither one of them are nearly as important as our common humanity. And that is what the world keeps forgetting, at its peril. Don't you think it's interesting that, at a time when we talk about the Internet this and finding a cure for cancer, and last year we actually were able to transplant nerves into the spine of laboratory animals that had had their spines severed, and for the first time ever they have movement in their lower limbs. Two years ago we identified the two genes that are the biggest predictors of breast cancer for women. Within a couple of years, when mothers take their babies home from the hospital, we'll be able to give them a genetic map which will say, here are the things your child has a greater than normal propensity for, but if you do the following things, you can minimize them. A lot of people I know, experts in the field, actually believe within a very few years babies will be born with a life expectancy of nearly a century within a very few years. Already today, if you live to be 65, your life expectancy is over 82 years. Isn't it interesting, at this time, with all this marvelous stuff happening, not to mention all the techno joys we can have, that the biggest problems we have in the world are rooted in the oldest failing of human society? We are afraid of people who are different from us. And when you're afraid of somebody who's different from you, it's easy to formalize that fear in dislike or hatred, and it's a short step to dehumanizing them, after which it's a short step to taking violent action against them and to thinking it really doesn't matter. I'll never forget being in the airport at Kigali, Rwanda, talking to a woman who thought she had been killed, because she was cut up in one of the machete rampages in the Rwandan genocide, and she woke up to find her husband and her six children all slashed to death around her. She's the only surviving one, knowing that they had been betrayed by her neighbor, a person they lived with, lived next to her, in total peace for years, and boom, like that, they started the fight between the Hutus and Tutsis, and people turned on a dime, betrayed their neighbors for life, and let people be slaughtered. Now, there are lots of other stories that are heroic on the other side. But what happens to people? Why does that happen? Why are the Catholics and the Protestants still fighting in Northern Ireland when the Irish Republic has got the fastest growing economy in Europe, and their common heritage is rich and fascinating and interesting, and they could be having arguments in bars or in Parliament and making money, instead, and educating their children? What is it that's keeping the Israelis and the Palestinians from taking these last few steps, the Syrians from joining in? Why are there other terrorist and rejectionist groups that are prepared to go out and kill innocent civilians to keep the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Syrians from making their final peace agreement? If you look at America, you look at the success of people from the Indian subcontinent in America from India, from Pakistan, from Bangladesh the phenomenal success, if you look at the fact that India will be bigger than China in 20 years, that they both have big scientific bases of expertise, why are they fighting over the line of control in Kashmir? Why can't they work that out? Why is that such a big problem that they keep spending money preparing to go to war with one another instead of educating their children and alleviating the abject poverty that is holding them down and keeping them from their full potential? I mean, I could go on and on and on. But you get the point. Why did I have to go into Europe and bring the power of the American military to bear in Bosnia and Kosovo to keep people from slaughtering mostly Muslims, although others were involved too. What is the deal here? Same reason, in a more thank God mundane but still very cruel way people were spitting on and kicking and cursing those nine kids when they tried to go to Little Rock Central High School 42 years ago. One of the great human weaknesses is that when people get organized, they think that, in order for their tribe to matter, the other tribe has to matter less. In order for their lifestyle to be validated, somebody else's has to be invalidated, that every difference of opinion turns out to be a difference justifying the dehumanization of your opponent. This is a very dangerous thing, made more dangerous, not less, by the collision of societies and the close contact and the openness of borders. So we need you for another reason. We need you in the Democratic Party. We need you as Americans. We need you to remind us of what the concept of family means to you. What are the obligations of people who are in your family? What do we owe to one another? If you're like me, once you get about 50, your family members, there are some you don't even like very much. But you are bound together. You are bound together. I want you to think about that, so when you go out across the country, you go back home and people say, "Why are you here? What are you doing? Why are you a Democrat? Why are you helping who you're helping in 2000?" Say, "Well, number one, I tried him in '92 and it worked. We're in a lot better shape than we were then, and we're in a lot better shape than we've been in a long time. Number two, I'm doing it because I want to take on the big challenges of the future. And I'm really determined that we're not going to blow this responsibility to our children and grandchildren. And number three, because the Democrats represent the best hope for creating a family in America and a family in the world that doesn't minimize our differences it celebrates them. It doesn't minimize our arguments it respects them. But it recognizes that underneath it all is our common humanity. And without that, nothing else matters much. With it, there's nothing we can't do." Thank you, and God bless you. November 08, 1999 The President. More than 60 years ago, at the dawn of another era of great change, President Franklin Roosevelt told our Nation "new conditions impose new requirements on Government and those who conduct Government." From that simple proposition, Roosevelt shaped the New Deal, which helped to restore our Nation to prosperity and to define the relationship between the American people and their Government for 50 years. Now, as we move into the information age, we have reclaimed that true legacy of Franklin Roosevelt by making a real commitment to bold experimentation, to the idea that new times demand new approaches and a different kind of Government. This evening is a perfect example. As Al said, like FDR's fireside chats and President Kennedy's live press conferences on television, the first Presidential townhall meeting on the Internet taps the most modern technology for oldfashioned communication between the American people and their President. Tonight's event is exciting not only because of the technology involved in its execution but, on a larger scale, for the unbridled potential it represents. You know, when I became President, in January of 1993, the Internet was the province of scientists funded by Government research projects. Back then, there were only 130 sites on the Web, only 1.3 million computers connected to the Internet. Today, over 56 million computers are connected to the Internet, and there are 3.6 million websites. And we're adding new pages at the rate of over 100,000 an hour. Since 1993, our administration has worked hard to unleash the power of information technology and to bridge the digital divide. Vice President Gore and I set a goal of connecting every classroom and library to the Internet, and we've come a long way. The number of classrooms connected to the Internet has increased from 4 percent in 1994 to 51 percent in 1998 with the E rate providing over 2 billion to help connect all our schools and libraries to the Internet. That's just the kind of thing Vice President Gore and I came to office to do, to replace outmoded and failed ideas of the past with a new vision for the role of Government in the 21st century. In the early 1990's, long neglected economic and social problems had piled up. Unemployment and welfare were high. Crime was spiraling virtually no one believed it could be stopped. Poverty was growing. The real wages of working families were steadily falling. There were deficits as far as the eye could see. Our debt had quadrupled in just 12 years, and some experts were telling us that we couldn't really solve our problems, that Government at best was useless and at worst was the source of all of our problems. Now, for too long, I felt that both our parties had put ideology above ideas that actually worked. And the American people too often were presented by Washington with false choices, choosing between work and family, between growing the economy and cleaning up the environment, between helping business and helping working people, between being safer or maintaining freedom, between what makes us different as a people and what makes us equal before the law and in the eyes of God. For too long Government seemed to either try to solve all of our problems or to use the failures of Government as an excuse to do nothing at all. Now, it was in this environment that the New Democratic movement, which had been developing for nearly a decade by 1992, or what has now become known as the Third Way, began in earnest. We believe, like Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and Abraham Lincoln before him, that new conditions demand a new approach to Government. We said, in 1992, we want opportunity for all, but we also want responsibility from all our citizens, in a community of all Americans. It was clear to Vice President Gore and to me that we couldn't meet the challenges of our new century by returning to the past but that we also had to overcome the great neglect of the 1980's. We also knew that we needed a new kind of Government which focused not on neglect or solving all the problems, but instead on giving our citizens the tools and conditions they needed to make the most of their own lives. And at the same time, we had to challenge our own citizens to take a far more active role by serving in our communities and shaping our Nation's future. Because of our commitment to Third Way principles and the hard work of the American people, our country has made a dramatic transformation. Over the last 6 1 2 years, the American people have created almost 20 million new jobs with rising wages, the longest peacetime expansion in history, the highest homeownership ever, a 30 year low in unemployment, a 32 year low in welfare, a 30 year low in the crime rate, the first back to back balanced budgets in 42 years, with growing projected surpluses for years to come. And all of this while we were shrinking and reinventing the Government so that it is now the smallest it's been since John Kennedy was here in the White House in 1962. And I'm trying to continue that process by passing a budget that honors our values and our commitment in the future, with 100,000 new teachers for smaller classes, 50,000 new community police officers to keep the crime rate coming down, stronger efforts to protect and preserve our environment and to meet our responsibilities abroad. The world is starting to take notice of what's happening here and where we're headed. Now Third Way ideas are influencing governance in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Brazil, to name just a few. In closing, let me say that now we have to use the progress we've made and the new tools of Government and technology at our fingertips to meet the big challenges of the 21st century the aging of America the largest and most diverse group of schoolchildren we've ever known extending our prosperity to people in places who haven't felt it yet genuinely meeting the challenges of the new environment making the most of biotechnology getting this country out of debt for the first time since 1835 and continuing to be the world's major force for peace and freedom and against technology that proliferates nuclear weapons and biological and chemical weapons and against terrorism. But more important than any of that, we have to find a way in this most modern of worlds to use our new knowledge and our new technology as forces for unity, not division. We have to usher in a new age of genuine enlightenment where we are coming together as a people across all the lines that divide us. That's why I've worked for things like the employment nondiscrimination act and the hate crimes legislation why I've done as much as I could to end wars and killing and conflict based on religious or racial or ethnic hatred around the world, from the Balkans to the Middle East to Northern Ireland to Africa. We believe that this can be a unifying age. We can celebrate our diversity, all the differences. We can respect those genuine differences of opinion as long as we understand that what unites us, our common humanity, is the most important thing of all. Now I'd like to turn it back to Al and get on with the questions. Democratic Leadership Council President Al From, who hosted the townhall discussion, read questions submitted on the Internet Prescription Medication Q. My wife and I are both disabled, with two teenaged children. Our medication expenses take a very large amount of our monthly Social Security income. Will Medicare ever pay for medications? The President. Well, the answer to that is, I certainly hope so, and I have proposed it. As a part of our reform of the Medicare system, to deal with the fact that we're going to double the number of people over 65 within 30 years and increasing numbers of people with disabilities will have access to Medicare, I recommended a lot of changes that will actually save some money in the system but also providing a prescription drug option which would be completely voluntary. Three quarters of the disabled and seniors on Medicare don't have access to an affordable, adequate prescription drug program. If we were designing the program again today, given the role that prescription medication has in our lives now, as compared with 34 years ago when Medicare was established, we would certainly not even set it up without prescription medication. We should do it. We should do it as quickly as possible. And we can afford to do it in the budget that I presented and still get the country out of debt in 15 years. So I hope that next year Congress is the Republican majority has refused to deal with it this year. I certainly hope they'll deal with it next year. And maybe the fact it's an election year will make them more interested in doing so. Health Care Reform Q. What else can you do in your Presidential term to help the common people to have health care reform before you leave office? The President. Well, let me just mention two things very quickly. First, we ought to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights to protect people who are in HMO's with the quality of their health care, the right to see a specialist, the right to the nearest emergency room. And we ought to have privacy in medical records. We ought to have a requirement that and I think we'll get this, by the way that people who are disabled who get Medicaid can go to work and not lose their Government health insurance. And we now have the funds available to sign up 5 million or more children of lower income working people, working families, on health care. We ought to try to do that. Now one other thing we can do is to get more States to try to let more and more working families buy into the Medicaid system. Tennessee was the first State to do this, and they immediately got up over 90 percent of their people with health insurance. And we're working to try to persuade more States to do this. Then we can provide the Medicaid money, and you can work out, State by State, how much people pay for the premiums. Those are just some of the things that I think we can do in my term. Now in the coming election season, I hope all the candidates will be required to talk about this because, as you know, I think it's terrible that America has so many people without health insurance who are working for a living. And I said back in '94 that if we didn't do something about it, the number would only increase, and that's exactly what's happened. So there are some things we can do now. Some things you'll probably have to debate in the 2000 election. Funding Higher Education Q. How do you feel about the need for less expensive higher education? The President. Well, you've got to be for that. I mean, everybody's for less expensive higher education. But what I'd like to emphasize is what we have done, because I think that a lot of Americans do not know that in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, we created something called the HOPE scholarship, which is a 1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college. We also have more generous Pell grants we have better student loan programs. You can now borrow money through a Government loan program and pay it back at lower interest rates and as a percentage of your income, no matter how much you borrow. So college is, as a practical matter, less expensive than it has been in many, many years because of the assistance programs that are out there. And I would urge you to look and make sure you know about every single one for which you might be eligible. The discussion continued. Gun Control Legislation Q. What kind of laws would you like to see Congress pass concerning gun control? The President. Well, first, Greg, let me say that one of the first laws I signed in 1993 was the Brady law, which requires background checks for people who buy guns in gun stores. The NRA and the others who opposed this said it wouldn't do any good, but now, in 1999, we've had 400,000 people who haven't been able to get guns because of their criminal records or other problems. And the murder rate's at a 31year low. So what else would I like to see? I would like to see us close the loophole in the background check law by saying there will also be background checks for guns sold at gun shows and at flea markets. I would like to see more done to limit the importation of big ammunition clips, because we banned assault weapons, but there are still loopholes in that law. I think the Brady law ought to be extended to juveniles who commit serious offenses. I don't think they ought to be able to get handguns. And I think these are very important. Now, you may know that in the Presidential election, I think both the Democratic Presidential candidates, Vice President Gore and Senator Bradley, have recommended that people who buy handguns at least have to get a license like you get a driver's license, to show that you know how to use the gun safely and that your background's been checked. And I think there's some real merit to that, and that's something the American people are going to have a chance to be heard on. But we've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years. But we ought not to quit until we're the safest big country in the world. And we won't be until we have reasonable restrictions to keep guns out of the wrong hands. They don't interfere with hunting or sport shooting. And there's more we can do. I'm strongly committed to it, and I hope you will be, too. Funding for Research and Development Q. Where do you see the Federal Government's role heading in funding non defense research in science and technology? The President. Well, most of that is done at the National Institutes of Health, at the Energy Department. It's done in universities through Federal grants. And I believe we ought to see a dramatic increase of that. Essentially, if you look at the last few years, Congress has been good about increasing funding for NIH, not so good about increasing funding for environmental research and other nondefense areas. So good on the health care, not so good on the rest. We need more on the rest. The discussion continued. The Digital Divide Q. As Government makes it services available via the Internet, how will this affect people who are not computer literate or connected? Will the non techies be accommodated? The President. First of all, this is a good question because this illustrates the problem of the so called digital divide. And the answer to your question is Number one, we will continue to provide services in non computer options and number two, we'll continue to do things to bridge the digital divide. We're trying to hook up all the classrooms and libraries to the Internet by the year 2000. We have community computer centers that we are establishing around the country, where we're trying to make access to computers more universal. But I will say this I think we should also be trying to get people who aren't computer literate to be computer literate and then to have access to the technology, because I believe if we have the same density of computer and Internet access that we have of telephone access, that would dramatically improve the economic prospects for a lot of Americans and, I might add, a lot of people around the world. So we have to keep providing the services in non Internet, non computer ways. But I think we also ought to try to get more people hooked up. And we're doing both. The discussion continued. The President. Let me just make one other point before we go on to another question, to go back to my point that we ought to try not only to provide the services for people who aren't computer literate or connected in ways they can access of course, we have to do that but why we should try to get more people connected and more people computer literate. I was out in Silicon Valley in the last few weeks where the number of people from eBay, which all of you know is a remarkable trading company I learned that in addition to the employees of eBay, some 20,000 people now make a living on eBay just trading. That's the way they make a living. And a lot of them used to be on welfare. So this technology is getting more and more user friendly. And I think that if we continue to work toward making it more and more universal, you will create lots of more economic opportunities which will be good for the overall economy and good for people who, today, are kind of non techies, to use your word. Class Size Q. Mr. President, how are you going to decrease the class sizes with the vast shortage of teachers? The President. I think the most important thing that the Federal Government can do is to give the States the money to continue our class size initiative. Last year the Congress approved a proposal of mine to make a downpayment on putting 100,000 more teachers in our schools, concentrated on reducing class size in the early grades, because we know from lots of research that that increases educational achievement long term. This year Congress is seeking to reverse that commitment, for reasons I do not entirely understand. And I am fighting to keep it, along with the Democrats in our caucus in the House and Senate. I'm hoping that we'll have a successful resolution of this. But you should know that maybe you do know, since you asked the question We have the largest number of schoolchildren in our history, the first group bigger than the baby boomers, over the last 2 years. It's the most diverse group in our history. And about 2 million teachers are going to retire over the next few years. So it's important right now to get these teachers in there that are well trained and to get them in the early grades. Now, there's a lot of flexibility in this program. So if class size is already small, this money can be used to retrain teachers, to upgrade their skills, and other things. But the most important thing that we can do to reduce class size is to put 100,000 more teachers in the classroom. That's the main thing I'm fighting for in the remaining budget struggles here in Washington. That's a good question. Tax Relief Q. I would like to know what programs are going to be cut to provide for some of the much needed tax relief, starting with the marriage penalty. The President. Well, what you have to do basically to provide tax relief under our system, the rules that we operate up here, is to figure out what it costs over 10 years and then to slow the rate of growth of other programs. Now, what I did was to present a budget to the Congress which would allocate, as I recall, about 250 billion to tax relief over a decade. And we slowed the rate of growth of everything else to accommodate that, including defense, where we still were going to have real increases. Congress passed a 792 billion tax program, and I vetoed that because I said we couldn't pay for it. And then they proceeded to spend more money than I recommended in this year's budget, in different ways but more money. So the truth is, you don't have to have any big cuts to pay for, let's say, marriage penalty relief or something like that, that is clearly affordable. All you have to do is to make a decision now that you will manage the rate of growth of all the other expenditures to accommodate the tax relief. And I still think we ought to have modest tax relief package. I will try again next to pass one, and I will be flexible in working with the Congress on what the contents of the package are. But we just have to make sure that it's something we can afford and still pay down the debt, save Social Security and Medicare, and continue to invest in education and the environment and in research and technology. Young People and Politics Q. Mr. President, what would you recommend to high school students who want to get involved in the political process? The President. Well, I think I would recommend two or three things. First of all, I would recommend that you get involved in the 2000 election. You know, with all the technology and all the television ads and all the money that's raised and spent in elections, candidates still need volunteers. And I think you ought to pick someone who is running, either for President or Governor or Senator or maybe a local office, maybe mayor in your hometown, that you believe in and show up and volunteer and learn everything you can about how the electoral process works, what the issues are, and you'll also learn about different kinds of people and human nature. Secondly, I think you ought to pick an issue you care about in your school and get involved in that. And then the third thing that I would strongly recommend is that you try to make sure you're as well informed as possible, by accessing information on the Internet or your local newspaper or however else you want to do it. But I think that those three things, together, will give you a chance to really get started. And it's not too soon for you to get started, to start working in politics. And I thank you for your interest. The discussion continued. Livability Agenda The President. If I could just say, Al, the mayor said a lot of good things, but one of the things he said that I'd like to highlight is that they're using computer technology to help manage traffic patterns and alleviate congestion. That is one of the elements in Vice President Gore's livability agenda we're trying to pass through Congress, not just preserving more green space in urban areas but actually using the most up to date technology to give people some freedom, give them back some of their time by minimizing traffic congestion and waiting. I mean, it's becoming a bigger and bigger issue for Americans both in their cars on the street and, unfortunately, in their airports and in their airplanes. So I think anything we can do to give people back time is enhancing their freedom dramatically. And I think that more and more public officials will have to focus on this. Y2K Readiness Q. Mr. President, if you were an ordinary citizen, would you save a little food for Y2K? Laughter The President. You know, we've had so many jokes about that, about taking our pickups to Arizona and all. The answer is, no. America is laughter I wouldn't, because I think America is in good shape. We have worked very, very hard on this. I want to thank the Vice President and John Koskinen, who's helped us. I want to thank all the big the financial institutions, the utilities, the other big sectors in our economy that have gotten Y2K ready. The only problems left in the United States that we're aware of are with some of our small businesses who basically haven't yet made sure that they're Y2K compliant. But the United States is doing fine, and I wouldn't hoard food, and I wouldn't hide. I would be trusting, because I think we're going to make it fine. Internet and E Commerce Q. How can citizens be assured that the Internet will not become another political ploy that is harmed rather than helped by politicians? The President. It's a good question. What we're trying to do, I can tell you, is to protect E commerce, because it's growing so fast. And I signed legislation that would prohibit taxation on Internet transactions for several years. And I think we need to continue to work. So the first thing you can do as a citizen is to try to protect E commerce, to let it grow, to let it flourish, to let all the jobs be created, the businesses be created, because of this incredible thing. Then I think, in terms of objectionable material on the Internet, how do you keep the freedom and the creativity of the Internet without having children too exposed? I think the answer to that is to support the efforts that are being made by many in the industry now to give parents appropriate screening and other technologies, so that you continue to have creativity and growth on the Internet and parents can still do their jobs. I think those are the two most important things. The discussion continued. Presidential Term Limits Q. Mr. President, would you like to serve another term in office, like you can in the U.K.? Maybe you ought to talk to Tony Blair about that. Laughter The President. Well, I love the job, and I would continue to do it if I could. But we've had a two term system here ever since President Truman's time, and I respect it, and I honor it. And so I'll try to find some way to be useful to my country and to the causes I believe in around the world when I leave the White House. But I love it, and I would not willingly give up any day of the opportunity to serve as President. AmeriCorps Q. Will future administrations be able to continue the support for the AmeriCorps program? The President. You know, for people who are on this hookup who don't know what AmeriCorps is, we ought to say first what it is. It is a national service program of local community efforts so that young people and sometimes not so young people of all ages can give a year and with the option of giving the second year of community service in an AmeriCorpsaffiliated program. And we have community groups we have church groups and other religious groups we have all kinds of groups who are doing good things in their community. And in the process, they earn credit for college tuition. So many young people actually do it and use the funds they get from working in AmeriCorps over and above their living stipend to go on to school. And we've had 150,000 young Americans serve in 6 years. To give you some basis for comparison, it took the Peace Corps 20 years to get 100,000 volunteers. So AmeriCorps is changing America for the better. I believe it has broad bipartisan support and, therefore, I think future administrations will be able to continue to support it. I would like to see us get up to where we have at least 250,000 people a year in it, because I think you could get that many people who want to serve. But at least insofar as funding become available, I'd like to see it continue to expand. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. The discussion continued. The President. Before we go on, I'd just like to reiterate for the people who are interested in this subject, that thanks to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland is the only State in America which presently requires young people to engage in community service as a part of their course study. In order to get a high school diploma, you've got to do some community service. Now, some of us know of specific schools that require that, but Maryland is the only State that requires it. Twelve years ago the former Republican Governor of New Jersey Tom Kean and I were on a middle school study task force for the Carnegie Corporation, and we recommended that community service ought to be a requirement, an academic requirement. It's part of learning to be a good citizen. It's part of an education. And I'd like to see most States follow Maryland's lead. The discussion continued. School Safety and Youth Violence Q. I attend a public high school. Considering the events of the past few years, how can you ensure my safety at school? The President. Well, first of all, I understand why you're concerned about it. We've had all these terrible incidents of school shootings. But I think you should know that, on balance, we have the lowest murder rate in our country in 31 years and that schools are the safest places kids can be. Now what we have to do to ensure that all our schools are safe, are, number one, have a strict, zero tolerance for weapons in schools. I've announced a zero tolerance for guns policy several years ago out in California. We're trying to get every school to adopt it. We had several thousand young people who were sent home last year and expelled because they brought guns to school. Number two, we need a system in every school that identifies kids who are troubled, who might cause trouble and get some help before they commit violent acts, whether they're being reported to the authorities, part of a peer mediation group, getting mental health or other counseling. I think you have to have a system in which all the kids are involved in trying to identify people who might be disturbed and might cause these kinds of problems. And I think, number three, we have to try to make sure that the schools that are in highcrime areas, that there is adequate security there. So there are lots of things that can be done, but on balance, you should not believe that you're in more trouble at school than you are someplace else, because for almost all of our children, they're safer at school than they would be on their streets or in their neighborhood. The discussion continued. The President. If I could just say one other thing to Joshua, who asked this question, and to others who particularly young people who might be listening, there. I had a White House Conference on Youth Violence, and then we set up a national effort on youth violence. If you or anybody else that's part of this press conference tonight have any ideas, I want you to send them in. And I can assure you that we will carefully review them. We will do our best to see whether, if they're working in someplace, they can be made to work everywhere. If you have some new ideas, send them to us, because there is hardly anything more important in the whole country than giving our children the safety and security that they and their families need. So please, we're still working on this. We have a highly concentrated effort, and we'd like to have your ideas. The discussion continued. Post Presidential Plans Q. Mr. President, what are your plans after you leave the White House, beside supporting the First Lady for a possible Senate run? The President. Well, I will certainly support her in any way that I can, and I'm looking forward to that. But I want to build my library and my public policy center at home in Arkansas. And then I want to be a useful citizen. I'll do what I can to support other people, if they ask me to, who are running for office or when they're in office. But I want to use that public policy center and the educational programs there to bring in people who are interested in public service and to advance a lot of these issues I'm interested in, that I think will have great significance in the future. For example, how can you maximize the use of technology to bring educational opportunities to poor people in poor areas in America and around the world? How can you grow the economy and improve the environment? How can you use new technologies to prove that we can clean up the environment, reduce greenhouse gases, and create more jobs? How can we minimize racial and religious and ethnic and other tensions, both in our society and around the world? These things, these big issues I've worked on as President, I want to find a way to continue to work on at my library and center in a way that doesn't get in the way of the next President. I don't want to do that, but I do think I can be a good citizen and help solve a lot of these problems and continue to move us forward. Mr. From. Mr. President, do you think the people who are sending these questions think we're humorless? Because they have a line on here that says, "Laughing is permitted." The President. I don't know what that means, but I've already been laughing, so thank you for permission. I never knew we had to give people permission to laugh, but I'm glad to have it. Laughter Child Care Q. What are you going to do about the rising cost of child care? The President. Let me say, this is a huge issue. If you want to balance work and family in America, you have to have adequate family leave laws, and then affordable quality child care. And given the fact that most parents work and the percentage will go up, one of the most significant issues we have to resolve as a people is how to make people successful at the same time at home and at work because if you have to choose between one or the other, the country's going to be badly hurt. We had a question earlier about an affordable tax cut. One of the things that I asked the Congress to do was to increase the tax credit for child care so that we could embrace more people. I've also asked the Congress to appropriate more money, because right now, we only serve with Federal subsidies about 10 percent of the working parents who are eligible for child care help. So the answer to your question is, we have at the national level and at the State level, we ought to be doing more with both tax credits and with direct subsidies to child care centers to help lower income and middle income people who otherwise can't find affordable quality child care. It's a huge issue out there that I don't believe has gotten the attention it deserves yet. I hope this, too, we'll make progress on, both next year in Congress and in the Presidential election. I'd like to see it heavily debated. The discussion continued. On Line Townhall Meeting Q. I commend you, Mr. President, for using the available new technology to stay in touch with the people. It gives anyone the chance to speak to the President, truly a shining example of freedom. The discussion continued. Class Size Q. What do you think about the fact that in other countries, classrooms have many more children per teacher, yet they are ranked higher than the U.S. in education? The President. Well, I think you have to, first of all, look at what the differences in those countries and the United States are. Let me also say, the United States is doing better in these international exams. And among the schools that have set high standards and measure in tests for them, they're doing quite well, indeed. But if you look at the countries which can have larger classes and have higher achievement levels in the early grades, what you will find is two things. You will find that they are not as diverse as we are, racially and ethnically and linguistically. And secondly, you will find that they don't have the same income and other social variations that you have in American classrooms. So there is no country in the world with anything like the kind of diversity we have in the classroom, that has much bigger class sizes and higher performance. If the kids are more similar, obviously they would tend to have more similar learning patterns, and you can do things that sort of routinize the educational system more in the early grades. If the kids are vastly dissimilar, in terms of family circumstances and, literally, even language, you need more individual attention in the early grades. And all I can say to you is that the American context we have lots and lots and lots of research that well trained teachers and smaller classes give not only immediate but permanent learning gains. And that's why I favor doing that. The discussion continued. Staying in Touch With the People The President. Mayor, I want to thank you for that. You know, when I came here in 1993, one of the things that I promised myself I would do is to try to keep in touch with the American people, to try to avoid getting out of touch. And I now, having been President for nearly 7 years, I understand why Presidents get out of touch, how easy it is to happen. And I do think that this technology will help more and more Presidents to kind of be accountable to the American people, stay in touch with them, even in those weeks and sometimes months when they can't be out of Washington in the States and communities very much because of the workload here. So this is very, very hopeful, and I appreciate what you said. Free and Fair Trade Q. Do you believe in more open trade between our two countries, or are you and your party committed to protectionism more than open trade? The President. Well, the short answer is, I believe in more open trade between our two countries. Our two countries have a huge bilateral trading relationship, the biggest in the world and it's benefited Canada it's benefited the United States. Both of us have among the highest growth rates in the developed world now. We're both doing real well. I would say two things about the trade issue. First of all, it is true that there are still some people in the Democratic Party who do not believe that we grow the economy and benefit people through expanding trade. And that is a difference of opinion we're still having. I will say this There is a New Democratic majority, a big one, for almost every other issue on how to manage the economy, the importance of paying off the debt, what our education policy ought to be, what our crime policy ought to be, what our welfare policy ought to be. We don't have, in my judgment, the right consensus on trade yet, but we're moving in the right direction. And let me just give you two examples, if I might, of what we are concerned about with trade. First of all, the United States, even though we've got a budget surplus and we're paying down our debt, has, by far, the biggest trade deficit in the world, because we've tried to keep our markets open. We think they help us to maintain low inflation and to be sharp and to be competitive. But if the competition is unfair, if countries can do things in our markets we can't do in theirs, then we're going to have a distortion of the trading system, and Americans who shouldn't lose their jobs will do so. I don't think that's right. And so, I believe in open trade, but it ought to be fair. I'll give you just one example. We've won two cases in the World Trade Organization against the Europeans, one on beef and one on bananas, and we still can't get any satisfaction. We won the banana case three times. So it's going to be impossible to sustain support for an open trading system if the rules and the rulings are ignored. Now, the second point I want to make is that we have got to put a human face on the global economy. As we expand trade, ordinary people have to benefit and they have to believe we're not destroying the environment. So I have concluded that we should do more to open up the trading system to labor and environmental groups, let them be a part of the development of trading rules and regulations, and have certain standards for the environment and for labor in these trade agreements. I think in the end, that's the best way to do it. We've got to succeed in putting a human face on the global economy if you want to have broadbased support for it. The discussion continued. The President. When the Asian financial crisis hit in 1997, we had been increasing our manufacturing employment, including in steel. But in the 1980's and early nineties, we lost 60 percent of our employment in steel. Then we modernized, and we were competitive globally. And other countries started dumping steel on our markets and throwing people out of work who were competitive on the global economy. In other words, they weren't playing by the rules. So we had antidumping actions, and we worked hard to reverse that and to restore the imports back to their pre crisis levels. That doesn't mean I'm against free trade, but I had to fight for those jobs. And I can tell you, there are a lot of people out there who don't think we did enough to do that. So there will always be difficult questions. But on balance, America has 4 percent of the world's people, with 22 percent of the world's income we've got to sell something to the other 96 percent of the world. And you don't have to be a mathematical genius to figure out, therefore, we should be in favor of expanding trade. The discussion continued. Seattle Round and the Environment Q. During the WTO summit in Seattle this month, will President Clinton propose to strengthen environmental safeguards? The President. Yes. Yes, and in addition to that, the involvement of environmental groups in the whole World Trade Organization process. We've got to open this process up. One of the reasons you're going to have thousands of demonstrators in Seattle telling everybody that this world trading system is some sort of dark conspiracy to destroy the environment and keep down ordinary working families is that they use funny language, and they have big, secret rules, and they meet too much in secret in Switzerland. And I think we've got to open this process up. This is not complicated. If some people produce some things better than others and the more we can work together and lift the fortunes of people everywhere, the better wealthier countries will do. This is not complicated. But I think it's very I'm actually kind of glad all these demonstrators are coming to Seattle, even though it may be kind of messy, because we ought to have a big global debate on this. And the people who feel like they've been shut out ought to be brought in and listened to, not just the environmentalists but the others as well. Middle East Peace Process Q. What do you feel are the chances that there will be any real progress in the talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis before you leave office? The President. Oh, I think they're quite good. For one thing, there already has been real progress. Keep in mind, it was back in 1993 that we signed the Israel PLO accord. We now have the Palestinians with their land in the West Bank and in Gaza. There's a high level of security cooperation between the two. And Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat reaffirmed their commitment to the peace process in Oslo when we went last week to honor the late Prime Minister Rabin. And they are now on, literally, about a 100 day timetable to finish a final framework agreement. Now I don't want to kid you. The issues are very, very tough. But I think the chances of success are better than 50 50. And with a lot of prayers and a lot of pushing, maybe we'll make it. I feel hopeful. Education On Line Q. How does the President feel about supporting on line education to serve the increasing number of students? The President. I'd be for that. And we'll have more of that anyway. That's going to happen. You want to take these two and then come back? Q. Yes, we'll do that. What I like is a micromanager. Laughter The President. At my age, I'm just glad I can read that. Laughter National Defense in the New Millennium Q. Taking into consideration the fact that the Chinese have developed an ICBM capable of reaching American shores, what is your position on the missile defense system for the United States? The President. Well, if we can develop a missile defense that will actually work to block incoming missiles that could have nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads, it would be irresponsible not to develop it, assuming we can do so consistent with our obligations under treaties. However, I don't think the Chinese will be the biggest problem. China does have 20 such missiles we have 6,000 such missiles. I think the real problem is the danger that in the future, rogue states and terrorist groups might, themselves, get missile technology that could pierce America's traditional defenses. So we're working on missile defense, and we're also working with the Russians to see if we can agree to make some amendments to the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty so that we can put the missile defense up if we can develop it, and they can share the benefits of it. Now, let me also say to all of you, not to be unnecessarily alarmist, but I think we need to be realistic here. I think in the future, future Presidents will have to tell you that we'll also have to worry about defenses from miniaturized nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in the hands of terrorists who won't need missiles to try to deliver them. So it will be a whole new world out there, and there's a lot of blessings from the end of the cold war, but we'll have to deal with more and different threats. And I would favor doing whatever is responsible to enhance the national security of the United States, including deploying the right kind of missile defense system. Federal Involvement in Education Q. Can you explain to me why you feel the Federal Government needs to get involved in education and why this can't be left to State and local government? The President. Well, yes I can. First of all, the Federal Government has been involved in education for over 30 years now and in very discrete ways in higher education, to help more people afford the costs of college, because that's something most States don't have massive resources to do in preschool education like Head Start, to help more poor children get started. In public schools, the Federal Government's role traditionally has first of all, it's always been less than 10 percent of the total budget of the public schools. It's basically designed to give poor children or children whose first language is not English or children with special education needs the access to the best possible education they can have, and then designed to meet discrete needs, like after Sputnik we spent more money to train teachers in math and science. So what I have proposed is consistent with our historic mission 100,000 teachers, because we have more kids and more teachers retiring, and we now have evidence that smaller classes work a policy to end social promotion but to dramatically increase the number of after school and summer school programs and funds to help failing schools turn around or shut down and then a big DLC favorite, more charter schools. When I became President, we had one there are now 1,700. We want 3,000 of these schools that are set up and chartered by teachers or parents that are free of a lot of the redtape of local school districts and are judged and stay in business only on their results. These, I think, are appropriate roles for the Federal Government. They are limited. We don't tell the States how to achieve excellence in education. We tell them there ought to be standards here are things that work. If you want to do these things, we'll help you fund them. President's Legacy Q. Mr. President, what kind of legacy do you think the American people will remember about your administration? The President. I think they will see it as a time of dramatic transformation and change where we restored economic prosperity where we widened the circle of opportunity to include people who'd been left out where we deepened the bonds of freedom and community in this country, by helping to solve social problems and bridge a lot of the divisions in our society and when we essentially assumed the leadership of the post cold war world, whether it's in expanding NATO or fighting against ethnic cleansing in the Balkans or working to deal with the challenges of terrorism in the 21st century. So I think it will be seen as a time of transformation, of hope, of genuine opportunity, and genuine community in America. So I'm very grateful for the chance I've had to serve. And I'm very grateful for the results that the approach that Al From and I have been working on for 15 years now has had in the lives of the American people. I think it's, by and large, a tribute to the public and the citizens of this country. But for whatever role I've been able to play, I am profoundly grateful. And I believe that the legacy will be transformation, movement, the restoration of prosperity and hope. The discussion continued. The President. Let me say, first of all, I want to thank you, Al, again for giving us all this opportunity and for always being a visionary and thinking about the future. I want to thank the other elected officials who have shared this press conference with me tonight, and commend you and those like you who have taken our New Democratic ideas and actually used them to change the lives of our people for the better. And finally, let me say to all the people who have been a part of this, I'm not running for anything anymore. I'm doing this because I believe in the enterprise of Government and in the work and impact of citizenship. And if we can use technology to chip away at cynicism and increase participation and give empower citizens to feel that they're holding their elected officials accountable and they're helping them to do their jobs, that will be a very great thing, indeed. So I would urge you to keep the E mails coming into the White House, keep the E mails coming into the DLC. If you have questions that weren't answered or ideas you want to share, keep pouring them in there. But let me tell you something. There's a reason this country's been around here for more than 200 years, and there's a reason we're enjoying this enormous level of economic prosperity with our social conditions improving and our leadership in the world unquestioned. America is a great country founded on a great set of ideas, capable of permanent renewal. And the technology of the moment has made it more exciting than ever before. But it still requires, more than anything else, even more than good leaders, good citizens. Those of you who have been part of this tonight have been good citizens. I thank you, and I want to urge you on because our country's best days lie ahead in the new century. November 08, 1999 Thank you very much, Secretary Albright, for your introduction and your leadership. From the reception you just received, I would say you can come home at any time. But I hope you'll wait a while longer. Thank you, Father O'Donovan, for welcoming me back to Georgetown. Dean Gallucci, thank you. Mrs. Quandt, thank you so much for this lecture. And to the representatives of BMW, members of the diplomatic community, the many distinguished citizens who are here, and to Mr. Billington, Mrs. Graham, and others, and to all the young students who are here. In many ways, this day is especially for you. I too want to say a special word of thanks to Prime Minister Zeman of the Czech Republic and Prime Minister Dzurinda of Slovakia. They have come a long way to be with us today. They have come a long way with their people in the last decade, from dictatorship to democracy, from command and control to market economies, from isolation to integration with Europe and the rest of the world. It has been a remarkable journey. You and your people have made the most of the triumph of freedom after the cold war. We thank you for your example and for your leadership and your friendship, and we welcome you. Thank you. Today we celebrate one of history's most remarkable triumphs of human freedom, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, surely one of the happiest and most important days of the 20th century. For the young people, the undergraduates who are here who were, at that time, 9 or 10 years old, it must be hard to sense the depth of oppression of the communist system, the sense of danger that gripped America and the world. I still remember all of our air raid drills when I was in grade school, preparing for the nuclear war as if we got in some basement, it would be all right. Laughter It, therefore, may be hard to imagine the true sense of exuberance and pride that the free world felt a decade ago. So today I say to you, it is important to recall the major events of that period, to remember the role America was privileged to play in the victory of freedom in Europe, to review what we have done since, to realize the promise of that victory, and most important of all, to reaffirm our determination to finish the job, to complete a Europe whole, free, democratic, and at peace, for the first time in all of history. Let's start by looking back a decade ago at Berlin. If the Soviet empire was a prison, then Berlin was the place where everyone could see the bars and look behind them. On one side of the wall lived a free people, shaping their destiny in the image of their dreams. On the other lived a people who desperately wanted to be free, that had found themselves trapped beyond a wall of deadly uniformity and daily indignities, in an empire that, indeed, could only exist behind a wall, for, ever if an opening appeared, letting ideas in and people out, the whole structure surely would collapse. In the end, that is exactly what happened in the fall of 1989. Poland and Hungary already were on the road to democracy. President Gorbachev of the Soviet Union had made clear that Soviet forces would not stand in their way. Then Hungary opened its borders to the West, allowing East Germans to escape. Then the dam broke. Berliners took to the street, shouting, "We are one people." And on November 9th, a decade ago, the wall was breached. Two weeks later, the Velvet Revolution swept Czechoslovakia, started by university students, just like the undergraduates here, marching through Prague, singing the Czech version of "We Shall Overcome." Then, in Romania, the dictator Ceausescu fell in the bloody uprising. A little more than a year later, the Soviet Union itself was no more. A democratic Russia was born. Those events transformed our world and changed our lives and shaped the future of the young people in this grand room today. Yes, the students of our era will still grow to live in a world full of danger, but probably, and hopefully, they will not have to live in fear of a total war in which millions could be killed in a single deadly exchange. Yes, America will still bear global responsibilities, but we will be able to invest more of our wealth in the welfare of our children and more of our energy in peaceful pursuits. You will compete in a global marketplace, travel to more places than any generation before you, share ideas and experiences with people from every culture, more and more of whom have embraced and will continue to embrace both democracy and free markets. How did all this happen? Well, mostly it happened because, from the very beginning, oppressed people refused to accept their fate not in Poland in 1981, when Lech Walesa jumped over the wall at the Gdansk Shipyard and Solidarity first went on strike, or in Czechoslovakia, during the Prague Spring of 1968. I was there a year and a half later as a young student, and I never will forget the look in the eyes of the university students then and their determination eventually to be free. They did not accept their fate in Hungary in 1956, or even in St. Petersburg way back in 1920, when the sailors who had led the Soviet revolution first rose against their new oppressors. They did not accept their fate in any Soviet home where the practice of religion was preserved, though it was suppressed by the state, or in countless acts of resistance we have never heard of, committed by heroes whose names we will never know. The amazing fact is that all those years of repression simply failed to crush people's spirits or their hunger for freedom. Years of lies just made them want the truth that much more. Years of violence just made them want peaceful struggle and peaceful politics that much more. Though denied every opportunity to express themselves, when they were finally able to do it, they did a remarkable job of saying quite clearly what they believed and what they wanted democratic citizenship and the blessings of ordinary life. Of course, their victory also would not have been possible without the perseverance of the United States and our allies, standing firm against the Iron Curtain and standing firm with the friends of freedom behind it. Fifty years ago, when all this began, it was far from certain that we would do that. It took determination the determination of President Truman to break the blockade of the Soviet Union of Berlin, to send aid to Greece and Turkey, to meet aggression in Korea. It took the determination of all his successors to ensure that Soviet expansion went not further than it did. It took vision the vision of American leaders who launched the Marshall plan and brought Germany into NATO, not just to feed Europe or to defend it but to unify it as never before, around freedom and democracy. It took persistence the persistence of every President, from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Bush, to pursue policies for four decades until they bore fruit. It took resources to bolster our friends and build a military that adversaries ultimately knew they could not match. It took faith to believe that we could prevail while avoiding both appeasement and war that our open society would in time prove stronger than any closed and fearful society. It took conviction the conviction of President Reagan, who said so plainly what many people on the other side of the Wall had trouble understanding, that the Soviet empire was evil and the wall should be torn down the conviction of President Carter, who put us on the side of dissidents and kept them alive to fight another day. And it took leadership in building alliances and keeping them united in crisis after crisis and, finally, under President Bush, in managing skillfully the fall of the Soviet empire and the unification of Germany and setting the stage for a Europe whole and free. This was the situation, the remarkable situation that I inherited when I took office in 1993. The cold war had been won. But in many ways, Europe was still divided, between the haves and have nots, between the secure and insecure, between members of NATO and the EU and those who were not members of either body and felt left out in the cold, between those who had reconciled themselves with people of different racial and religious and ethnic groups within their borders and those who were still torn apart by those differences. And so we set out to do for the Eastern half of Europe what we helped to do for the Western half after World War II to provide investment and aid, to tear down trade barriers so new democracies could stand on their feet economically to help them overcome tensions that had festered under communism and to stand up to the forces of aggression and hate, as we did in the Balkans to expand our institutions, beginning with NATO, so that a Europe of shared values could become a Europe of shared responsibilities and benefits. Since then, there have unquestionably been some setbacks, some small and some great. Under communism, most everyone was equally poor. Now, some people race ahead while others lag far behind. Former dissidents who once struggled for freedom are now politicians trying to create jobs, to fight corruption and crime, to provide basic security for people who are simply tired of having to struggle. Most terrible of all have been the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which claimed a quartermillion lives and pushed millions from their homes. But still, 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, most of Europe is unquestionably better off, as these two leaders so clearly demonstrate. Democracy has taken root, from Estonia in the north to Bulgaria in the south. Some of the most vibrant economies in the world now lie east of the old Iron Curtain. Russia has withdrawn its troops from Central Europe and the Baltics, accepted the independence of its neighbors and, for all its own problems, has not wavered from the path of democracy. The armed forces of most every country, from Ukraine to Romania all the way to Central Asia, now actually train with NATO. NATO has three new allies, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, three strong democracies that have stood with us in every crisis, from Iraq to Bosnia to Kosovo. Other new democracies are eager to join us as well, including Slovakia, and they know our alliance is open to all who are ready to meet its obligations. Eleven countries are beginning a process that will lead them to membership in the European Union. And just as important, because we and our allies stood up to ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, the century is not ending on a note of despair with the knowledge that innocent men, women, and children on the doorstep of NATO can be expelled and killed simply because of their ethnic heritage and the way they worship their God. Instead, it ends with a ringing affirmation of the inherent human dignity of every individual, with our alliance of 19 democracies strong and united, working with partners across the continent, including Russia, to keep the peace in the Balkans, with new hope for a Europe that can be, for the first time in history, undivided, democratic, and at peace. I hope all of you will be proud of what your country and its allies have achieved, but I hope you will be even more determined to finish the job, for there is still much to be done. On Friday, I will leave on a trip to Greece and Turkey, Italy and Bulgaria. This trip is about reinforcing ties with some of our oldest allies and completing the unfinished business of building that stable, unified, and democratic Europe. I believe there are three principal remaining challenges to that vision that we must meet across the Atlantic and, I might say, one great challenge we must meet at home. The first is the challenge of building the right kind of partnership with Russia, a Russia that is stable, democratic, and cooperatively engaged with the West. That is difficult to do because Russia is struggling economically. It has tens of thousands of weapons scientists listen to this it has tens of thousands of weapons scientists making an average of 100 a month, struggling to maintain the security of a giant nuclear arsenal. It has mired itself again in a cruel cycle of violence in Chechnya that is claiming many innocent lives. We should protect our interests with Russia and speak plainly about actions we believe are wrong. But we should also remember what Russia is struggling to overcome and the legacy with which it must deal. Less than a generation ago, the Russians were living in a society that had no rule of law, no private initiative, no truthtelling, no chance for individuals to shape their own destiny. Now they live in a country with a free press, with almost a million small businesses, a country that should experience next year its first democratic transfer of power in a thousand years. Russia's transformation has just begun. It is incomplete. It is awkward. Sometimes it is not pretty, but we have a profound stake in its success. Years from now, I don't think we will be criticized, any of us, for doing too much to help. But we can certainly be criticized if we do too little. A second challenge will be to implement, with our allies, a plan for stability in the Balkans, so that region's bitter ethnic problems can no longer be exploited by dictators and Americans do not have to cross the Atlantic again to fight in another war. We will do that by strengthening democracies in the region, promoting investment and trade, bringing nations steadily into Western institutions, so they feel a unifying magnet that is more powerful than the internal forces that divide them. I want to say that again I am convinced that the only way to avoid future Balkan wars is to integrate the countries of Southeastern Europe more with each other and then more with the rest of Europe. We have to create positive forces that pull the people toward unity, which are stronger than the forces of history pulling them toward division, hatred, and death. We must also push for a democratic transition in Serbia. Mr. Milosevic is the last living relic of the age of European dictators of the Communist era. That era came crashing down with the Wall. He sought to preserve his dictatorship by substituting Communist totalitarianism with ethnic hatred and the kind of mindless unity that follows if you are bound together by your hatred of people who are different from you. The consequences have been disastrous not only for the Bosnians and the Kosovars but for the Serbs as well. If we are going to make democracy and tolerance the order of the day in the Balkans, so that they, too, can tap into their innate intelligence and ingenuity and enjoy prosperity and freedom, there can be no future for him and his policy of manipulating human differences for inhuman ends. A third challenge is perhaps the oldest of them all, and in some ways, perhaps the hardest to build a lasting peace in the Aegean Sea region, to achieve a true reconciliation between Greece and Turkey, and bridge the gulf between Europe and the Islamic world. When I am in Greece, I'm going to speak about the vital role Greece is playing and can play in Europe. The world's oldest democracy is a model to the younger democracies of the Balkans, a gateway to their markets, a force for stability in the region. The one thing standing between Greece and its true potential is the tension in its relationship with Turkey. Greece and Turkey, ironically, are both our NATO Allies, and each other's NATO Allies. They have served together with distinction in the Balkans. Their people helped each other with great humanity when the terrible earthquakes struck both lands earlier this year. This is a problem that can be solved. Eventually, it will be solved. And I intend to see that the United States does everything we possibly can to be of help. When I go to Turkey, I will point out that much of the history of the 20th century, for better or worse, was shaped by the way the old Ottoman Empire collapsed before and after World War I, and the decisions that the European powers made in the aftermath. I believe the coming century will be shaped in good measure by the way in which Turkey, itself, defines its future and its role today and tomorrow, for Turkey is a country at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia. The future can be shaped for the better if Turkey can become fully a part of Europe, as a stable, democratic, secular, Islamic nation. This, too, can happen if there is progress in overcoming differences with Greece, especially over Cyprus, if Turkey continues to strengthen respect for human rights, and if there is a real vision on the part of our European allies, who must be willing to reach out and to believe that it is at Turkey where Europe and the Muslim world can meet in peace and harmony, to give us a chance to have the future of our dreams in that part of the world in the new millennium. Now the last challenge is one we can only meet here at home. We have to decide, quite simply, to maintain the tradition of American leadership and engagement in the world that played such a critical role in winning the cold war and in helping us to win the peace over this last decade. Think about it We spent trillions of dollars in the cold war to defeat a single threat to our way of life. Now we are at the height of our power and prosperity. Let me just ask you to focus on this and measure where we are as against what has been happening in the debate about maintaining our leadership. We have the lowest unemployment rate in this country in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years, and the smallest Federal Government in 37 years. In my lifetime, we have never had ever as a people, the opportunity we now have to build the future of our dreams for our children. In the early 1960's, we had an economy that closely approximated this, but we had to deal with the challenge of civil rights at home and also the Vietnam war abroad. Today, we are not burdened by crisis at home or crisis abroad, and the world is out there, looking to see what we are going to do with the blessings God has bestowed upon us at this moment in time. Everything else I said will either happen or not happen without American involvement unless we make up our minds that we are going to stay with the approach to the world that has brought us to this happy point in human history. That is the most important decision of all. Now, what are we doing? Well, first, our military budget is growing again to meet new demands. That has to happen. But I want to point out to all of you, it is still, in real terms, 110 billion less than it was when the Berlin Wall fell. Everyone agrees that most of that money should be reinvested here at home. But don't you think just a small part of the peace dividend should be invested in maintaining the peace we secured and meeting the unmet challenges of the 21st century? Look at all the money we spent at such great cost over the last 50 years. The amazing fact is we are not spending a penny more today to advance our interest in the spread of peace, democracy, and free markets than we did during the 1980's. Indeed, we are spending 4 billion less each year. I think it's worth devoting some small fraction of this Nation's great wealth and power to help build a Europe where wars don't happen, where our allies can do their share and we help them to do so to seize this historic opportunity for peace between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East to make sure that nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union don't fall into the wrong hands to make sure that the nuclear scientists have enough money to live on and to feed their families by doing constructive, positive things so they're not vulnerable to the entreaties of the remaining forces of destruction in the world to relieve the debts of the most impoverished countries on Earth, so they can grow their economies, build their democracies, and be good, positive partners with us in the new century and to meet our obligations to and through the United Nations, so that we can share the burden of leadership with others, when it obviously has such good results. I think most Americans agree with this. But some disagree, and it appears they are disproportionately represented laughter in the deciding body. Some believe America can and should go it alone, either withdrawing from the world and relying primarily on our military strength or by seeking to impose our will when things are happening that don't suit us. Well, I have taken the stand for a different sort of approach for a foreign affairs budget that will permit us to advance our most critical priorities around the world. That's why I vetoed the first bill that reached my desk, why I'm pleased that Democrats and Republicans in Congress worked together last week on a strong compromise that meets many of our goals. But we're not finished yet. We still must work to get funding for our United Nations obligations and authorization to allow the use of IMF resources for debt relief. This is a big issue. It has captured public attention as never before. I mean, just think about it This initiative for debt relief for the millennium is being headlined by the Pope and Bono, the lead singer for U2. Laughter That is a very broad base of support for this initiative. Laughter Most of the rest of us can be found somewhere in between that our pole star leaders there. But it's not just a political issue. It is the smart thing to do. If you go to Africa, you see what competent countries can do to get the AIDS rate down, to build democratic structures, to build successful economies and grow. But we have to give them a chance. And the same is true in Latin America, in the Caribbean, in other places. This is a big issue. I hope the bipartisan agreement we reached over the weekend on the foreign affairs budget is a good sign that we are now moving to reestablish and preserve the bipartisan center that believes in America's role in the new post coldwar world. In the coming year, we have an ambitious agenda that also deserves bipartisan support. We have about 100 days to meet the ambitious timetable the leaders of the Middle East have set for themselves to achieve a framework agreement. We have to secure the peace in the Balkans. We have to ease tensions between India and Pakistan. We have to help Russia to stabilize its economy, resolve the conflict in Chechnya, and cheer them on as they have their first democratic transfer of power, ever. We have to bring China into the World Trade Organization, while continuing to speak plainly about human rights and religious freedom. We have to launch a new global trade round, enact the African and Caribbean trade bills, press ahead with debt relief, support the hopeful transitions to democracy in Nigeria and Indonesia, help Colombia defeat the narcotraffickers, contain Iraq, and restrain North Korea's missile program. We have to continue to do more to fight terrorism around the world. And we must do what is necessary and for the young people here, I predict for 20 years this will become a national security issue we have to do more to reverse the very real phenomenon of global warming and climate change. To meet those challenges and more, we simply must hold on to the qualities that sustained us throughout the long cold war, the wisdom to see that America benefits when the rest of the world is moving toward freedom and prosperity, to recognize that if we wait until problems come home to America before we act, they will come home to America. We need the determination to stand up to the enemies of peace, whether tyrants like Milosevic or terrorists like those who attacked our Embassies in Africa. We need faith in our own capacity to do what is right, even when it's hard, whether that means building peace in the Middle East or democracy in Russia or a constructive partnership with China. We need the patience to stick with those efforts for as long as it takes and the resources to see them through. And most of all, we need to maintain the will to lead, to provide the kind of American leadership that for 50 years has brought friends and allies to our side, while moving mountains around the world. Years from now, I want people to say those were the qualities of this generation of Americans. I want them to say that when the cold war ended, we refused to settle for the easy satisfaction of victory, to walk home and let our European friends go it alone. We did not allow the larger prize of a safer, better world to slip through our fingers. We stood and supported the Germans as they bravely reunified, and supported the Europeans as they built a true union and expanded it. We stood against ethnic slaughter and ethnic cleansing. We stood for the right kind of partnership with Russia. We acted to try to help Christian and Jewish and Muslim people reconcile themselves in the Middle East, and in the bridge represented by Turkey's outreach to Europe. I want them to say that America followed through, so that we would not have to fight again. A few months ago, my family and I went to a refugee camp full of children from Kosovo. They were chanting their appreciation to the United States, thanking America for giving them a chance to reclaim their lives. It was an incredibly moving event, with children who have been traumatized far beyond their ability even to understand what has happened to them but who know they have been given a chance to go home now. Years from now, I believe the young people in this audience will have a chance to go to Europe time and time again, and you will, doubtless, meet some of those children or maybe some of the young people who actually tore down the Berlin Wall or marched in the Velvet Revolution. They will be older then. I hope they will say, "When I was young I sang America's praises with my voice, but I still carry them in my heart." I think that will be true if America stays true. That is what we ought to resolve to do on the anniversary of this marvelous triumph of freedom. Thank you very much. November 02, 1999 Thank you very much. Well, Mr. Ambassador, Doreen, Mr. DCM, Congressman Sabo, thank you for coming with us. And thank you so much, Secretary Albright, for all you've done to make this a safer, better world. Now, Hermelin did not tell you the truth. Laughter He says, "Come to Norway. I guarantee you a standing ovation." That's why you don't have any chairs today. Laughter He did not even tell you the truth about how he got this job. This deal about, "Oh, I got to go to Norway, and I thought I hit the lottery," that's not what happened. Laughter He called me, and he said you said, "Name one person in America who has done more for you than I have" laughter "just one." I said, "Hillary." Laughter He said, "You can't make her an Ambassador." So I said, "Well, what do you want?" He said, "I want to go to Norway." I said, "David, you can't even find Norway on a map." Laughter He said, "No, you have to appoint me to Norway." He said, "You know the Oslo accords and the role they have in the Middle East peace process?" I said, "Yeah, sure, of course, I do." He said, "I, David Hermelin, am the last remaining Norwegian Jew on the face of the Earth." Laughter So even though it isn't true laughter hasn't he been good for the American Embassy? You know, one of the great joys of my life, because I've spent so much of it in public life, I'll be when I leave on January 21st, 2001, I'll be moving out of public housing for the first time in 20 years. Laughter One of the great joys of my life is, I've gotten to meet so many thousands of people from all over the world, all over our country, from all different walks of life with all different slants on things and all kinds of different talents. And this man and his wife, his children, and his family are truly among the most wonderful human beings I've ever met anywhere in the world. And I am so blessed that they have been with me. I also want to say again to those of you who are Norwegian nationals, how profoundly grateful I am to His Majesty, the King, and to the Prime Minister and the Government and people of Norway for inviting me to come and for opening once again their hearts to the peace process in the Middle East and having this truly remarkable event today in honor of our friend Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And for those of you who were there or who saw it on television, I'm sure you'll agree it was a very moving event. And I can tell you, I met just before I came here with Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat, and I think that the event and the feeling of the people and the luncheon that followed really did help to put them in a good frame of mind as we kind of head for the last sprint toward getting a framework agreement on all these final status issues by next February. It will be very difficult to do. The chances that we can do it now are dramatically increased in no small measure because we have had one more great gift from this small but remarkable and wonderful country. So I thank them very much for that. I would like to thank all the people who are here, our career Foreign Service officers, beginning with you, Mr. Gundersen, and all the others who are here, people who have worked for the other departments of the Federal Government, the military people who are here. I'd like to thank the young musicians for providing our music today. Thank you very much. It was very good. But I want to especially thank those of you who have given your life in service to our country. And I want to reiterate and reaffirm what Secretary Albright said. You know, in my lifetime, literally in my lifetime, which, unfortunately, is getting older by the minute, our country has never before been in quite this position where we had the strongest economy in our history, where our social fabric was coming together, not being driven apart, where we have a very high level of confidence that we can do things. For those of you who are Americans, I can tell you, back home in America, if our economic expansion continues it's already the longest peacetime expansion in history if it continues until next February, it will be the longest one we ever had, including those that embraced the wars. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years. Our country is moving in the right direction. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war, this is literally the first time in my lifetime that we have had both a very strong economy and a society coming together and the absence of an overarching threat from outside or from inside our country. I would argue to all of you that that imposes upon us enormous responsibilities, greater than we have had in the past, even in the cold war, to try to build the Nation of our dreams for our children in the new millennium but also to try to bring the world to the point where the forces of peace and freedom are triumphing everywhere and the sense that humanity will continue to increase its sway against all the forces of darkness will be far more deeply embedded. And if we walk away from that, we will never be able to explain it to our children. So, yes, I want to pass a good diplomatic budget yes, I think the United States should lead the world toward forgiving the debt, much of the debt of the poorest countries in this world for the millennium, just as the Pope and others have asked us to do. I think the United States should help to bring empowerment opportunities of education and health care and the economy to poor village people, particularly poor village women, and guarantee that their little girls, as well as their little boys, can go to school, on every continent. And I think that we ought to continue to lead the world's fight against the proliferation of dangerous weapons and against terrorists. I know we didn't ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but I think we will do that before it's all done. And I do not believe the United States will withdraw from the world. But to all of you who have stayed on the forefront of this important public service all these years, I just want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. And I want to urge you to do whatever you can to urge your friends, your relatives, and others back home to think about this moment in terms of what it means for our country. Every advanced country has to deal with the aging of its population most of them, like us, have to deal with the increasing diversity of its children. But no other country can do what we should be doing now to advance peace and freedom and to stand against terrorism and the proliferation of dangerous weapons. We cannot walk away from this. And you're a good example you and what happened here these last 2 days of why we don't need to and why we can be successful. Let me say, in closing, it has been a very great honor for me to serve. I gave you all those numbers not because I think that I brought them about singlehandedly but because this is what I want America to be like at the close of the 20th century. But it only matters if now we do the right thing with our good fortune and our prosperity. And anything you can do to make sure that we do and to tell people back home about a country like Norway, the burdens they bear, the responsibilities they shoulder, the dreams that we share, will help. So again, let me thank you all and urge you all on. And thanks for David Hermelin's guaranteed standing ovation. Thank you very much. November 01, 1999 Prime Minister Bondevik. Mr. President, dear journalists, it's a very special occasion for us in Norway. This is the very first visit from a sitting President of the United States to our country. So we are so glad to receive President Clinton here. We have had fruitful discussions, where we could continue our talks from the White House in Washington, only 2 weeks ago. And of course, we have discussed the Middle East peace process. We think that the ceremonial commemoration tomorrow for the late Prime Minister Rabin and the talks in that framework can stimulate the peace process. And we are both committed to assist the two parties. The main responsibility for a final solution is, of course, upon the two parties. Norway and the U.S. will seek ways to expand our common efforts in a number of areas for security, development, and for well being. The President and I have today agreed on an initiative to follow up the Reykjavik Conference on Women and Democracy, where the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, participated. We are also agreed on a joint initiative on funding for support of disabled victims of the war in Sierra Leone. Mr. President, I believe that you want to say a few words before we answer one or two questions. Mr. President. President Clinton. Thank you. First, Prime Minister, let me say I am delighted to be here, honored by your invitation to come a few weeks ago, and then by the King's invitation to come to Norway. As you perhaps know, I traveled here alone as a young man some 30 years ago it was actually 30 years ago this December and I fell in love with this country. I'd long wanted to come back. I was amazed to discover that I am the first sitting President ever to visit Norway. I can't imagine what the others were thinking about laughter but I am delighted to be here. I also would like to thank you for the wonderful reception that my wife and my daughter received when they represented our Nation in Lillehammer at the Olympics, and for the support, Prime Minister, you have given to the women's conference and the women's issues that Hillary has tried to raise, most recently in Reykjavik with representatives of your country and the other countries in the region. We have been friends for a long time. We have been allies for 50 years with NATO. Today the Prime Minister and I discussed building a Europe that is united, democratic, and free and I am looking forward to seeing the Prime Minister again shortly in Turkey at the meeting of the OSCE. And I'm very grateful that Norway is now the leader of the OSCE, serving its term as chair. We did discuss the Sierra Leone, and I would just like to say again, I am profoundly grateful that Norway has agreed to work with the United States to provide prosthetics, to provide artificial limbs to as many people as we possibly can, many of them children, whose limbs were deliberately amputated in the cruel civil war in Sierra Leone. I also want to thank you, Prime Minister, for Norway's support for our common efforts to end the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. And I want to say a special word of thanks to the Norwegian people, because I believe that when the 800,000 plus Kosovar Albanians were driven from their home, on a per capita basis, Norway took in more of the refugees from Kosovo than any other country in the world. And that is something that you can be very proud of and something for which your friends must be very grateful. So I want to thank you for that. And finally, let me thank you for your continuing interest in the Middle East peace process and for having this wonderful occasion to honor the memory of my friend and partner, former Prime Minister Rabin. I think it will be very successful, indeed. Your country has a lot to be proud of. You have enormous influence for your size, and it is very much earned and deserved. Thank you. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, do you believe that the Middle East talks here in Oslo can move the peace process substantially forward? President Clinton. Yes, I do. I don't think you should expect some sort of major announced breakthrough here, because, keep in mind, the parties have had since, in the last couple of years, they had the Wye peace agreement under Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat. Then when Prime Minister Barak came in, they modified the Wye peace agreement and agreed to an even faster schedule of implementation. Since then, Israel has released controversial political prisoners, agreed to establish safe passage between and started it, actually, started the safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza, and agreed to open a port, which was a source of great tension between them before. Now they have to move into the final status talks, as conceived almost 7 years ago now here in Oslo, with the Oslo accords. So the important thing now is that the two leaders know that they have set themselves an ambitious timetable and that they agreed about how they're going to meet the timetable. This is the hard part, I mean the really hard part. And we all need to support them. But do I believe that we can come out of this meeting and this solemn occasion with a renewed commitment to the peace process? Yes, I do. EgyptAir Flight 990 Aircraft Tragedy Q. Mr. President, they're still combing the wreckage of EgyptAir flight 990. Do you know any more about the cause of the tragedy, whether it was a mechanical malfunction or has terrorism been ruled out? And have there been any threats recently against any carriers flying out of the United States? President Clinton. We know nothing more than I said to you earlier today it seems like half a lifetime ago when I came out of church with Hillary. We are still searching. We have to find as you know, to make a final determination about the cause of the crash will require the recovery of as much of the airplane as possible, as well as the equipment, which will give us some if the usual case is present here, give us a pretty definitive idea of what happened. But that has not been done yet, and therefore, I will say again, nothing has been ruled in, nothing has been ruled out. And I hope no one will draw any conclusions one way or the other until we finish the work. President's Legacy Q. Mr. President, how do you hope that people will remember you as the President of the United States? And is the peace process in the Middle East important in that regard? Would you like to be remembered as the President that created peace in the Middle East? President Clinton. Well, first of all, that's a question I'd feel more comfortable answering if I weren't President anymore, because I hope I'm still piling up memories for them. But I can tell you what I tried to do. What I tried to do is, first of all, take a country which I've found in economic distress and social division and turn it around toward greater prosperity and greater harmony, and convince people that, working together, we could solve our social problems. And then, I hope I will be remembered as someone who got our country to assume its responsibilities in the post cold war world, to make America a major force for peace and freedom, and against terrorism and racial and ethnic and religious hatreds. That is what I have worked to do and what I intend to continue working to do every day I have left to serve. Threats to U.S. Air Carriers Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, two things. Could you address Mr. Katz' question about whether there had been any threats to U.S. to carriers, airline carriers flying out of the United States? And also, do you see any merit to the idea that's been floated about having a Camp David style negotiation in January to help Israel and the Palestinians meet the rigorous deadlines that they've set for themselves on the toughest issues in the talks? President Clinton. First, Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press , on the first question you ask and I didn't mean to evade it if there have been any such threats, I do not know about them. That is, I am not aware of any specific threats against American airlines or airplanes flying out of American airports with large numbers of American passengers. If there have been any such, I don't know about them. Now, it is possible that there could have been some that I don't know about, so I don't want to I can't tell you the things I don't know about didn't happen. But I can tell you that I'm not aware of any, and as you know, I work on my intelligence information every day. As to the possibility of a Camp David style meeting, I think it is premature to discuss that at this time. What we need now is an understanding of the parameters of where we're going and how we're going to get there. I wouldn't rule out anything, but there is, as you know, going all the way back to '93, there is nothing I would not do if I thought it would genuinely help to build a lasting peace in the Middle East. There is nothing I would not do, and I'm prepared to reaffirm that to Prime Minister Barak and to Chairman Arafat. But one of the things we have also learned here is that, in the end, the hard decisions have to be made by the parties. The United States can help with financial support, with military support, with moral backup. The rest of the world can help in many ways. But we have to get a framework of going forward that is consistent with the timetable they, themselves, have adopted, because I don't think we want to slip the timetable. Even though these decisions are very hard, they've been looming out there for several years now, and they're not going to get any easier, in my judgment, by letting them linger. So I will do what I can to get this thing going. Prime Minister Bondevik. Last question. Q. Yes, Mr. President, what do you regard as a real progress in the discussions with you and the Palestinians and the Israelis concerning the discussions about peace in Palestine and Israel? President Clinton. The real problems? Q. The real progress. What will you regard as the real progress? President Clinton. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, I would feel that real progress has been made if they made agreements about the modalities under which they will proceed the procedures, the process, how it's going to operate so that we can move into and then through these decisions in a timely fashion. There's no way in the world they can come here and agree in talks with me on the big issues. You know what all the big issues are. That's why they're final status issues. But if we can get everybody sort of focused on what it would take to get there within the time allotted, the time they have allotted themselves, then I think that that would be a very good thing, indeed. Keep in mind, you have here leaders who have demonstrated their commitment to peace and demonstrated their willingness to take risks. And you also have leaders who have been supported by their people for taking those risks. So I don't think this is a time for handwringing. But when you have a lot of implementation, like you did recently with the Wye modified agreement, and then you have the prisoners release, you have the port decision going forward, you have the safe passage open, you have some settlements closed and not all settlements closed, what it does is it whets everyone's appetite, on the one hand, for more to be done and it also builds in a little bit of a resistance to more being done. It's like, "I'm tired I did this last week," you know? And what we've got to do is to create a renewed energy to make the process continuous, until you work all the way through to the end. Prime Minister Bondevik. I'm sorry, I just have to end up by saying that I know that you have been informed that I could be to your disposal after the President has left this building. Unfortunately, because we are on overtime for the luncheon at the Royal Castle, I also have to leave now. But I can be to your disposal at the Grand Hotel at 2 15, approximately, and tell you even more about our discussions. We have, of course, also discussed the situation in Chechnya, our relations to Russia. We have found that we have very much in common regarding the priorities in foreign policy, combating poverty, promoting human rights, preventing conflicts. And I feel that our meeting has served to strengthen the already close ties between our two nations. Thank you so much. October 29, 1999 The President. Thank you so much. Audience member. I came to kiss you, Mr. President! The President. Well, if you came to kiss me, if you'll wait until I finish, I'll be right down there. Laughter Don't you go anywhere. I'll be right there. Laughter That sort of cuts the atmosphere, doesn't it? That's great. Laughter What was I going to say? Laughter Howard, thank you for your introduction and for your many years of friendship and support and for your leadership. Abe Foxman, thank you for your long leadership of the ADL. Glenn Tobias, thank you for your service. I know the president of the city council, President Pitts, is here and De Kalb County Chief Executive Levetan is here. I thank them for their presence. And I'm especially grateful to be here with my friend and I believe one of the greatest living Americans, Congressman John Lewis. And Lillian, hello. Lillian, it's nice to see you. Thank you. More than anything else tonight, except to get my kiss laughter more than anything else tonight, I came here to say thank you. Thank you for nearly 7 years of working with me and Hillary and the Vice President and Mrs. Gore, year in and year out. Thank you for your commitment to genuine peace in the Middle East. Thank you for fighting anti Semitism and terrorism and for promoting religious freedom throughout the world. Thank you for developing a model hate crimes statute, which is now the law in 40 of our 50 States. Thank you for helping us to organize the first ever White House Conference on Hate Crimes. Thank you for standing with us to promote excellence and diversity and equal opportunity with the appointments of people like Bill Lann Lee and Jim Hormel. Thank you for your pioneering work to filter out hate on the Internet, which lamentably was a part of the poison that led to the tragedy of Columbine High School. Thank you for making a world of difference, through your World of Difference Institute, to teach tolerance on campuses and to law enforcement officials across our land. I thank you for all that. The Talmud says, "Should anyone turn aside the right of a stranger, it is as though he were to turn aside the right of the most high God." Well, that passage carries special meaning in the world in which we live, because the great irony of this time is that we stand on the threshold of unbelievable discoveries in science and technology, amidst the greatest revolution in telecommunications the world has ever known. I was in Silicon Valley the other night with a bunch of people that started this great company, eBay. You ever buy anything on eBay? Nearly everybody has now. What you might find interesting is that over 20,000 Americans, including many former welfare recipients, are now making a living on eBay, not working for the company but trading on eBay. I was talking the other night, just a few months ago, at one of the millennial lectures that Hillary put together, with the brilliant Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, who wrote a book called, "A Brief History of Time" which I pretended to read. Laughter And we were talking about how the new century will bring with it the discovery of millions, perhaps even tens of millions of new galaxies, and perhaps the capacity to pierce the black holes in the universe, to see what is there. We had an evening the other night, about which I'll say more later, a fascinating evening at the White House that Hillary sponsored, with a man named Vint Cerf, who essentially developed the architecture of the Internet and gave the first E mail, 18 years ago, to his profoundly deaf wife he thought about the E mail as a way to communicate with his wife while he was at work, because she was so deaf even hearing aids could not help her she now hears, by the way, because of deep implanted computer chips in her ear canals and Professor Lander from Harvard, one of America's most prominent scholars of the human genome. And they were saying that in a matter of a few years, children will come home from the hospital with a genetic map and with the genuine prospect of a life expectancy of 100 years or more. Isn't it interesting that in this most modern of all imaginable worlds, with even more breathtaking discoveries just around the corner that I believe will also include cures for many of the most severe forms of cancer and the ability to give people with severed spinal cords the capacity to walk again, all these miracles that the biggest problem the world faces is the oldest problem of human society, the fear of the other? We all still continue to turn aside the rights of a stranger, people we do not know, therefore we do not understand, therefore we easily fear, therefore we easily dismiss and pretty soon dehumanize them after that. How easy it is to justify violence. And so, the most urgent task, as we stand on the threshold of the new millennium, is not to plumb the depths of outer space or the inner depths of the human gene, but to follow the oldest admonitions of our Scriptures, and to build what Congressman Lewis, in his marvelous autobiography, and before him, Dr. King, called "the beloved community," one in which we genuinely love those even with whom we disagree because we do not fear those who are different. The ADL has always stood for that. And most of all, I say thank you. You know, I've spent a lot of time now going around to political events to try to stir the party faithful, and I feel like a beast of burden since I can't run for anything anymore doing that. I kind of hate that. But I do it laughter but I do it happily because I want to say to people, I think we're leading the country in the right direction. And it's nice for me, after these years of work and labor and often bitter disputes, to say to the American people that we have the longest peacetime expansion in history, 19 1 2 million new jobs, and highest homeownership ever, and a 29 year low in unemployment, a 30 year low in welfare rolls, and a 30year low in the crime rate and a 30 year low in inflation and a 20 year low in the poverty rate and the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years achieved by the smallest Federal Government in 37 years. That's pretty good, and I like saying that. This week I was able to say we had gone from a 290 billion deficit to a 123 billion surplus. In the last 2 years, we paid 140 billion down on our national debt. That's the most we've ever done on that. I like saying that. But what I want to say to you tonight is that the real issue is not the marvelous way America has come in the 7 years that I've had the privilege to be President. The real issue before the American people is, what are we going to do with this moment of great good fortune? And again, you can plumb the depths of our Scriptures to find ample evidence that sometimes a good time can be a great hazard to people. A nation is no different from a family or an individual or a business. Sometimes you're most prone to mess up when things are going well. And I often think that some of the bitter partisanship and sort of shortsightedness we've seen in the last 2 years have occurred because people think they have the luxury to do that, because things are going so well, they can't imagine there could be any adverse consequences to not paying the U.N. dues, or contributing our fair share to the alleviation of the debt of the poorest countries in the world, or adopting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, or moving to clean up the environment, or any of the number of other issues. And what I have tried to say to the American people is I think this is an enormous responsibility that we have, not just me as President or the Democrats and Republicans in Congress, but as a people. I'm 53 years old. And in my lifetime, not once, not even once, have we had the combination of prosperity, social progress, and the absence of emergency necessary to allow a people to literally imagine the future of their dreams and build it for their children. We had an economy maybe almost this good in the sixties, but we had to deal with the awful realities of the civil rights revolution and then with the burden of the Vietnam war. Before that, it was the cold war and before that, World War II and before that, the Depression. We have never had a time like this in my lifetime. And I have asked the American people to meet the challenge of the aging of America, save Social Security, save Medicare, add a prescription drug benefit to it meet the challenge of the largest and most diverse group of schoolchildren in our history, give them all a worldclass education, turn the failing schools around or shut them down, but give the kids the afterschool programs, the summer school programs, the modern schools, the Internet, the small classes they deserve to meet the challenge of now that we have a 30 year low in the crime rate, no one thinks it's as safe as it ought to be in America make our country the safest big country in the world. And do the things we know will help us to do that do more to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children do more to put police on our streets in the most violent neighborhoods do more to make our communities more livable and meet our international environmental responsibilities and still grow the economy do more to bring economic opportunity to people in places left behind. The other day, I was in South Dakota, where the unemployment rate is 2.8 percent, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where the unemployment rate is 73 percent. I think we ought to give all of you the same incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give you to invest in poor areas in Latin America, or Africa, or Asia, because if we don't, if we can't bring enterprise and opportunity to our poorest Americans now, we'll never get around to dealing with it. That's why I've asked America to guarantee our long term prosperity by adopting a longterm plan for the budget that by the year 2015 will have us completely out of debt for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President in 1835, because I believe it'll bring long prosperity to us. But I would say to you all, as important as those things are, there are two things that relate to the irony I mentioned at the beginning the fact that we enter a new millennium with all these modern possibilities bedeviled by the oldest failing of human society. But there are two other issues without which we cannot proceed successfully. One is to meet our responsibilities around the world as the world's leading force for peace and freedom and reconciliation, against terror and the other forces of destruction, including proliferation of nuclear and chemical and biological weapons. That's why we ought to pay our debt to the U.N. That's why we ought to make our contribution to alleviate the debt of the poorest countries in the world. That's why we ought to continue to fund the program begun by former Senator Sam Nunn from Georgia, to take down these nuclear weapons in Russia, that they want us to help them destroy. And that's why we ought to pay our commitment, made at the Wye peace talks pursuant to 25 years of bipartisan bipartisan efforts for peace in the Middle East, to contribute to the success of the Wye talks, and the modified efforts under Barak and Arafat. On Sunday night I will leave for Oslo to honor the memory of my friend Yitzhak Rabin and to continue his mission. We're now at a critical moment in the peace process. Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat have made some real movement forward. They've made some hard decisions. They're working hard on preserving security and fighting terrorism, and they're making progress in implementing the provisions of the Oslo agreement. We actually have a chance within the reasonably near future for peace for Israel and its neighbors, for security so necessary for progress and prosperity and freedom and justice all across that region. But like all chances in life, it is fleeting. It will require hard choices and hard work within a short timeframe. And it cannot be done without the support of the most determined friends of peace, like those of you in this room. I still believe that we're either going to go forward or drift backward. We can't just freeze this moment. The region could reverse course. There's still plenty of extremists and terrorists out there. There's still people all over the world who represent the forces of destruction and the enemies of the nation state not simply Israel, but everywhere working to develop weapons of mass destruction that can be miniaturized and carried around and used at a moment's notice. And the same technology that gives you a tiny, tiny cell phone that guys with big fingers like me can hardly dial these days will lead to the miniaturization of weapons in the 21st century. Make no mistake about it. Our problems with the enemies of peace, with the terrorists, are far from over. And I'll make you a prediction. Within 10 years, it will be normal to see a very sophisticated alliance all around the world between terrorists, drugrunners, and organized crime, maximizing the same modern technologies that we all seek to access to do good. This is the moment that we must seize. It is so important for America to support the peace process and to provide the resources to make peace work. I don't know how many times I have heard one of my leaders at the Pentagon say, "Mr. President, the most expensive peace is far, far cheaper than the cheapest war." It is inexcusable that we would not fund a national security budget for peace, necessary to meet our responsibilities in the Middle East. Congress sent me a foreign aid bill without the 800 million I requested this year, or the 500 million for next year to fund our part of the Wye River agreement. The bill sent a terrible signal to our friends in the Middle East, the strongest possible encouragement to the enemies of peace that there will be no immediate rewards for peace. That's why I vetoed it, and I'll veto it again if it doesn't provide for the funding of our obligations around the world. I ask you to support the other provisions of the bill, the funds necessary to reduce the nuclear threat from Russia, to provide debt relief to the poorest countries as the Pope and so many others have asked us to do in the millennial year, to meet our obligations to the United Nations, to do the other things that promote democracy and opportunities for trade and investment. We must sustain America's leadership. I want you to know, on a subject I know you care a lot about, I have urged the Russian leadership not to allow the current challenges they face to undermine respect for human rights and individual liberty and opposition to anti Semitism in Russia. If we want I will say again, if we want to have influence with other countries, none of them are asking us to buy our way into their favor. But as the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world at the moment of our greatest success, for us not to even pay our fair share when already we spend a smaller percentage of our income on nonmilitary national security measures than any major country in the world is inexcusable. So for all of those other challenges I mentioned, we must be a force for good around the world. And we cannot do that for free. We get a lot out of our interdependence with others. We contribute to the United Nations so that when something happens like Kosovo yes, our planes flew the bulk of the mission, and yes, we bore the bulk of the financial burdens to save those 800,000 people from ethnic cleansing, and I'm glad we did it. But today, as they work to rebuild, the bulk of the burdens in manpower and in money is being borne by our allies in Europe. Yes, it was necessary for the United States to take a strong position on the problem in East Timor to stop the terrible slaughter there as a result of their vote for independence. But now the bulk of the load is being carried by our friends, like Australia and Malaysia and others there, because we live in an interdependent world where we share responsibility. Yes, we spend some money in Africa to train troops, but that means the next time a horrible slaughter like Rwanda comes along, it can be handled by the Africans and we can give them support, and they won't have to look at us and say, "Why didn't you send 100,000 Americans to stop this before it started?" We get a lot out of being good neighbors and responsible parties, and we need to continue to do it. The last point I want to make is one the ADL well knows. We can't be a force for good abroad unless we are a force for good at home. And while, thank God, we have been spared the ravages in the modern age of mass conflict based on religion as in Northern Ireland, or religion and ethnic differences as in the Middle East or the Balkans, or tribal bloodshed as in Rwanda, Burundi, and other places in Africa, we see in these hate crimes the murder of young Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, the horrible dragging death of James Byrd in Texas, the killing of the postman, the Filipino postman and the shooting of the children at the Jewish community center in Los Angeles, the murder spree in the Midwest that took the lives of the African American basketball coach outside Chicago and a young Korean Christian as he walked outside his church, those perpetrated by a man who claimed he belonged to a church that did not believe in God, but did believe in white supremacy we see that we are not immune from this. And why is that? Because it is a part of human nature. Why was it in the Torah in that provision I read earlier? Because of the knowledge from God that in us, there is all the tendency, in all of us, to turn away from the right of a stranger. Every one of us, I believe maybe you don't maybe you guys are perfect I wake up every day, and I know I sort of think of my life and my attitude toward the world and of its people as being governed by an internal scale, and on one side of the scale there is light and on the other side there is darkness, and you always want it tilting toward the light, but not so much as to be naive, but enough to have a genuine charitable view toward others, a genuine respect, a genuine humility, and understand that you may not always be right but you have an obligation to recognize the integrity and the common humanity of others. But it's easy to get that scale out of balance. Even all of us have our good days and our bad days. When it gets badly out of balance, then the fear and the dehumanization of the other drives people to these terrible, tormented acts of slaughter. Sometimes there's a political patina on it, so people can actually act as if it's justified. Sometimes it's just some poor, demented, twisted soul, acting out of pain and fear and anger and blindness. Nothing is more important to our future than flushing that not only from the killers but flushing that feeling in its less violent manifestations from all of our hearts. If I could leave America after my Presidency with one wish, it would be to be one America, to revel in our diversity, to respect it, to celebrate it, to enjoy it, to make it interesting. It can only happen you can only have fun in a diverse country. You can only find it interesting to examine whether someone else's religious perspective or cultural heritage has some validity for you, something you can learn. You can only really revel in it if you believe that our common humanity is more important than the things which make us different. Now, that means, it seems to me, we need to stand against manifestations of our inhumanity, and we need to do more to reaffirm our common humanity. That's why I was so disturbed when the Republican majority on the relevant committees of Congress took out the hate crimes legislation in the form of the bill that had already passed the Senate. I vetoed the bill that came to me, in part because it didn't contain those hate crimes provisions. And I think it's very important that we say, "Look, it's not that the victims of these hate crimes" you know, the people that say we don't need these things are saying, "You're saying those victims are more important than other victims." That's not true. What we are saying is that hate crimes victimize not only the victim but they victimize society as a whole in a special way, because they contradict the very idea of America we are trying to build. We're not letting somebody else off the hook. We're saying we want a clear and unambiguous stand against things that contradict the very idea of the America we want to build. The other point I'd like to make is, it's not enough just to be against things. We need to be for things that will enable us to live up to our full potential. That's why I'm also for strengthening the equal pay law, for the employment nondiscrimination act or the so called Kennedy Jeffords bill to let people with disabilities go into the workplace and keep their Government health care through Medicaid, so that they can work and be a part of our society. We need to be for things that bring us together. I want to close with these two stories. I told you earlier we had this millennial evening at the White House, with the genome scholar from Harvard and Vint Cerf, who was one of the architects of the Internet. And we were talking about they were talking about how the mysteries of the human gene could not have been solved without the advances in computer science. And then they put them all up on the screens, the formula for what our genes look like. And I pretended to understand that. Laughter But I did understand the point they were making. So I said to them, I said, "Look, with these 100,000 sequences and all the possibilities and permutations, how much are we alike or different?" And Professor Lander said, "The truth is that all people, genetically, are 99.9 percent the same." That confirms your philosophy, right? Here's the next point he made, which is more interesting to me. He said if you were to get groups of people together by ethnicity or race let's suppose you've got 100 European Jews together, and you've got 100 Arabs, and you've got 100 Iranians, and then you've got 100 people from the Yoruba Tribe in Nigeria, and you've got 100 Irish people together and you put them all in a room with their groups, here's what they said. They said the genetic differences among the individual groups that is, among the Yorubas, among the Irish, among the Jews, among the Arabs the genetic differences within the groups would be greater than the genetic differences between any one group and any other group. Now, think about that. When you look at a profile of any sizeable ethnic group Hispanic, African, you name it the genetic differences of the individuals within the group are greater than the group genetic profile of one group as compared with another. In other words, the most advanced scientific knowledge confirms the wisdom of the Torah and tells us not to turn aside a stranger. Because it turns out a stranger is not so strange after all. In the summer of 1994, as I remember, it was just before we went to the Wadi Araba to sign the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan. The late Prime Minister Rabin and the late King Hussein addressed the United States Congress. Near the end of his speech, Rabin turned to Hussein and said, and I quote, "We have both seen a lot in our lifetime. We have seen too much suffering. What will you leave to your children? What will I leave to my grandchildren? I have only dreams," he said, "to build a better world, a world of understanding and harmony, a world in which it is a joy to live. That is not asking for too much." That dream has united those of you in this organization for 85 years now. That dream in our time requires us to build one America and requires America to be a force for peace and harmony in the world. Think of it Rabin gave his life so that we might build a world in which it is a joy to live. It is not asking for too much, but it will require all we can give. Thank you, and God bless you. October 27, 1999 Thank you very much. Thank you, David, and thank you, Vic. I'm glad to know you still have to pay some political dues for the price of going into private life. Laughter Let me say, I'm honored to be here for David Bonior. And the most important thing I can say to all of you is, thank you, because you know it's important that he be reelected or you wouldn't be here. I do think it is worth pointing out that he represents the kind of district that is pretty reflective of America it could go either way. And he always has a competitive race because they spend a lot of money against him, and they try to say things that will turn the voters against him and convince them that he's something he isn't. Dave and Judy go home every summer they knock on thousands of doors they actually talk to people. I know that if you give money to a lot of candidates, one of the things you want to know is, now, if I really back this person, is he or she going to work hard? This guy kills himself to fulfill his responsibilities to his country and to his party in Washington and to his district back home. And he does as good a job in as difficult a situation as anybody in the United States. The other thing I want to say is that I am in a unique position having worked with him for nearly 7 years now, under some of the most difficult conceivable circumstances with very hard issues, to tell you that he is a great leader who is both loved and admired. Some of the people in the other party, they seem fond of electing people that they can then be terrified of, so they have to be browbeaten into doing whatever it is they want to do. This guy is followed because he is respected, admired, and loved by people who sometimes don't agree with him on every issue. The last point I want to make is this. We are very close now to returning a majority of the House of Representatives to the Democrats. We can't lose any seats, and we've got to win some. And we certainly don't want to fool with a leadership team that is working and is producing for our party and, more importantly, for our country. The most important thing in politics is to have, first of all, the right ideas and then, secondly, the right people. And I define the right people as people who understand how ideas affect real peoples' lives and identify with them and then have the courage to fight for them. One of the things that David didn't say, that I think he ought to take a lot of credit for back home in a district of prudent, conservative Americans is that, when I came into office, the deficit was 290 billion. We just got the final numbers on last year's budget. We had a 123 billion surplus. We paid 140 billion down on the debt in the last 2 years. If I had run for President in 1992 and I had told you, "Vote for me. I'll turn this 290 billion deficit into a surplus. We'll do it 2 years in a row, and I'll pay 140 billion on the debt," you would have said, "You know, he's a very nice young man, but he's totally delusional, and we should send him home." Laughter Now, that reduction, on average, for the average American family, has been worth 2,000 savings in home mortgage payments, a 200 savings in car payments, and a 200 savings in college loan payments. So the average American family has gotten a 2,400 tax cut, in effect, from responsible economic policies brought to you by our party. And it's not just the President. None of this would have happened if we hadn't had the votes in for the '93 economic plan and if David and Vic and others hadn't been up there whipping it. We did not have a single vote to spare, and the Vice President had to break a tie in the Senate, and it turned the country around. And for that reason alone, in a district that thinks of itself as a moderately conservative district, I wouldn't give away a man without whom it would not have happened. This country's economic recovery was sparked by our commitment to that and by enacting it, and David Bonior deserves an enormous amount of credit for it, and I'm very grateful to him, and I thank him. The second point I want to make, only because a lot of you run in the circles of our friends, is he was too modest in the litany he gave. And I say this because, again I say, I could have done none of this without his help and others. But here are the real numbers. This country now has the longest peacetime expansion in history. If it goes on until February, it will be the longest economic expansion in the history of America, and we didn't have a war during this. It's unthinkable. The highest homeownership in history. And here are the numbers. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest crime rate in 30 years, the lowest teen pregnancy rate in 30 years, the first back toback budget surpluses in 42 years with the smallest Federal Government in 37 years. Now, that is a record that you ought to be able to run on in any congressional district in America and be very proud of. And I'll close with this this is by far the most important point. The real issue before the American people and Senator Bradley and Vice President Gore are having a town meeting right now in New Hampshire while we're here the issue is not whether we're going to change of course we are. The world is changing. It's practically moving under our feet. The question is, how are we going to change? Are we going to, on the one hand, take a U turn and go back to the policies that got us in so much trouble in the first place, which is essentially what all the people running for the other party's nomination advocate on economic and social policy? Are we going to forget what got us here in the first place and forget about things that will maintain our economic prosperity? Or are we going to build on what has happened, to take advantage of this moment to meet the big challenges of the new century? This is the first time in my lifetime that our people, as a people, have had a chance to essentially build the future of their dreams for their children. You know, the last time we had an economy that was about this good was in the 1960's We had the civil rights crisis we had the Vietnam war. Now we have no excuse. But a nation is no different from a business or a family or an individual. You are most vulnerable to making a mistake in life when you think everything is peachy keen, because it's easy to just relax, it's easy to get distracted, it's easy to do something that's in the short term selfish interest that doesn't deal with the long run. The challenges this country faces is no different than the challenges that you have seen in your businesses, in your families, and in your lives. When things are really good, it's hard to muster the vision, the will, and the focus to do the right, big things. That's what the candidates should all be questioned about this year. The most important reason for his candidacy and his leadership is so we can save Social Security for the baby boom generation, so we can modernize Medicare and put a prescription drug benefit, so we can radically improve the education of the largest and most diverse group of kids in the country's history, so we can bring prosperity to the people and places that still haven't felt it, so we can keep on until we pay down the debt completely for the first time since 1835, so we can stop all these assaults on the environment and prove that we can clean the environment and grow the economy at the same time, so that we can meet our responsibilities in the world. David is an internationalist, and Gerald Ford spoke so passionately today about the importance of a bipartisan commitment to our global responsibilities, which means, do what it takes to continue to fight for peace and against ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, continue to support the Irish peace process, continue to support the Africans, who want to stop further tribal wars, continue to work for peace in Northern Ireland, continue to work for peace in the Middle East, continue to work against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, continue to work for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, continue to work against terrorism. This is an important part of our future. If you don't think that all this stuff we're enjoying could be interrupted tomorrow by a collapse of the international economic system, by a rise in global terrorism, by America walking away from its responsibilities to peace in these important areas, think again. So I say to you, this is an important part of it. And the last thing I'll say is, we Democrats, we may have lost a lot of votes over the last 30 years because we believe in one America, without regard to race or gender or religion or sexual orientation. But if you look at the way the world is in turmoil today and if you look at the horrible, though isolated, instances of hate related violence in America today, I think you will agree that it's pretty important that we hang in there together. Dave Bonior has a big heart, a good mind, and a steel spine. He will fight a buzz saw for what he believes in. And that's why the people who follow his lead both respect him and love him. You did a good thing in coming here tonight, but we've got a lot of work to do between now and next year at this time. If we do it, we're going to have a lot to celebrate. Thank you. October 25, 1999 Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Callus, Ms. Kayden, for your remarkable statements. Thank you, Secretary Shalala, for your steadfast leadership on this issue. I would like to welcome a very large number of Members of the United States Congress who are here Senator Baucus and Senator Wyden Representatives Abercrombie, Brown, Waters, Obey, Vento, and Hoyer and Congressman Berry. And I would like to acknowledge the important work of two that are not here, Representatives Waxman and Allen, who have been particularly interested in this issue. Death of Senator John H. Chafee Before I go into my remarks, I would like to make a statement about the passing last night of Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island. Rhode Island and America have lost a great leader and a fine human being who, in 23 years in the Senate and in his service as Secretary of the Navy, always put his concern for the American people above partisanship. When you think of the term "bipartisan," you immediately think of John Chafee. Known throughout his beloved Rhode Island simply as "the man you can trust," Senator Chafee was a consummate statesman and patriot. He served with valor in war and peace. I am particularly grateful for his commitment to health care, his concern for the environment, and his devotion to our children, especially his work for foster care and child care. John Chafee proved that politics can be an honorable profession. For him, civility was not simply a matter of personal manners. He believed it was essential to the preservation of our democratic system and the progress of our Nation. He embodied the decent center which has carried America from triumph to triumph for over 200 years. How we will miss him. Today our thoughts and prayers are with his wonderful wife, Ginny, their five children, and their twelve grandchildren. And again, I want to say a special personal word of appreciation on behalf of Hillary and myself for the many kindnesses John Chafee extended to us and the many opportunities we had to work together. Prescription Drug Benefits Now, last January, in the State of the Union Address, I was able to give the American people a great report on our economy and the improving condition of our society, which now has the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest crime rates in 30 years, and the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years. In the State of the Union Address, I said as we approached the new century, we could look back on 100 years of Americans meeting the great challenges of the century we're about to leave the Depression, civil rights, two World Wars, the cold war. And now, because of the good fortune we presently enjoy, we have the opportunity and the obligations to meet the great challenges that we know lie before us in the 21st century to build one America out of our amazing diversity to make America debtfree for the first time since 1835 to use this moment of prosperity to bring genuine economic opportunity to the people and places that have been left behind to deal with the challenge of global warming to meet the new security challenges of the 21st century, including the challenges of high tech terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to give the largest and most diverse group of children in American history a world class education and to meet the challenge of the aging of America. We will double the number of people over 65 in just 30 years. There will be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. This challenge would be truly daunting were it not for the fact that all of us, as a country, have worked so hard over the last 7 years to bring us to this moment of prosperity and to bring us to a point where we can predict long term, consistent budget surpluses into the future which give us the means, if we have the will and vision, to deal with this challenge. No one should have to make the kind of choices Mr. Callus and Ms. Kayden spoke of in their remarks in a country that has the strongest economy on Earth. No senior should have to forgo or cut back on lifesaving medication because of the cost. Neither should any senior be forced to get on a bus to Canada where the same medicines cost so much less. Just a couple of days ago, the Vice President held up an example of one of the most popular drugs for lowering cholesterol. In Canada, 60 tablets cost 44 in New Hampshire, they cost 102, if you're lucky. I think we can do better than that. It's wrong, and we have to deal with it. We also have to deal with the fact that about three quarters of our seniors simply don't have effective, affordable access to prescription drugs. We can afford to do something about it we know what to do about it, and therefore, we have no excuse for inaction. This debate over Medicare is more than about politics and budgets it's about people, real people like Mr. Callus. You heard what he said. He said he was in pretty good shape, and I think that his speech verified that. Laughter But giving him and Americans like him all over the country the chance to live to the fullest of their God given abilities, not only to live as long but to live as well as they can, is an important value that we all stand for. For 34 years, Medicare has helped to achieve that value. And it has eased the financial burden on families who care for their loved ones. Before Medicare, nearly half of our seniors had no health care coverage at all. Today, Medicare is truly at a crossroads. As Secretary Shalala said, when we took office the Trust Fund was supposed to expire this year. And thanks to the good work of the Congress and the people who operate the program and the people who administer the health care of the country, we've worked together and we got the life expectancy of the Trust Fund back to 2015. We've done it by combating fraud and making Medicare more efficient and investing some more funds. But we know we have to go further because it is simply not going to be enough to stay with the status quo. This past June I gave the Congress a comprehensive and fiscally responsible plan to extend the life of Medicare to 2027, while at the same time modernizing it to keep pace with changes in our medical system and our medical needs. I proposed new innovations used now in private sector health care to keep quality high and costs lower. I said we should remove barriers to preventive tests for cancer, for diabetes, for osteoporosis, and other diseases. I said we should invest more money, not only to deal with some of the hardships caused by the savings in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 but simply because there are going to be so many more people on Medicare over the next few years. And I want to say this again, no expert who has studied this has said we can deal with the challenge of Medicare without injecting more money into the system. And finally, I called for adding a prescription drug benefit. Adding prescription drug coverage, as Secretary Shalala said, isn't just the right thing to do it is the smart thing to do, medically, over the long run. Today, prescription drugs can accomplish what once could be done only through surgery, at far less pain and far less cost. We already pay for doctor and hospital benefits under Medicare, but we let many of our seniors go without prescription drugs and preventive screenings that could keep them healthy and keep them from having to undergo expensive treatment. It doesn't make sense. Unfortunately, the Republican leadership in Congress has refused altogether to consider adding a prescription drug benefit, effectively rendering meaningful Medicare reform impossible this year. The Congress is joining with me to work to alleviate undue strain on hospitals, nursing homes, home health agencies, and other providers and that's a good thing to alleviate some of the most severe burdens of the Balanced Budget Act. But by ignoring the need for a prescription drug benefit, the Republican leaders are squandering a golden moment, leaving more than 13 million seniors without any prescription drug coverage and millions more with inadequate coverage, unreliable at best. Now, in human terms, that means a lot. Think of the seniors on fixed incomes, like Mr. Callus, who are paying a couple of thousand dollars a year out of pocket. Think of men and women falling prey to illnesses because they can't afford proper doses of new miracle drugs that could easily keep them well. Asking them to wait for Medicare reform is like putting their lives on hold, and maybe into a lottery. It is unacceptable. It is unacceptable especially because it is so unnecessary. And I want you to know I don't intend to give up the battle until it is won. And the good news is, because I vetoed the tax bill that would have taken away all the money to fix Medicare, we can still win it. First, let's set the record straight. One of the key reasons no action was taken on prescription drugs this session was because the pharmaceutical industry spent millions of dollars on an all out media campaign filled with flatout falsehoods. In ads featuring a fictional senior named Flo laughter the special interests say that our Medicare proposal and I quote "would put big Government in your medicine cabinet." I might point out that even though we do, thanks to the leadership of these people, have the smallest Federal Government since 1962, it's still not small enough to get in your medicine cabinet. Laughter It says and I quote "all seniors will be forced into a Government run plan." The truth is, under our plan, there are no Government restrictions of any kind. Doctors would be able to prescribe any needed drug for any patient at any time, and the benefit would be purely voluntary, completely optional. If seniors want to keep their current coverage, they're perfectly free to do so. We cannot stand by and watch the pharmaceutical industry go on and distort this debate. We have to expose these deceptions and give the American people the facts. I wish they'd spend this ad money explaining why seniors have to get on the bus and go to Canada to buy drugs at less than half the price they can buy them in America, when the drugs are made in America with the benefit of the American system and American research and American tax systems. I wish they would spend their advertising money explaining that to the American people. I guess if you've got a weak case, the best thing to do is change the subject. Laughter But I would like for Flo to get on TV and tell me about that. I'm sure she could explain it. Laughter And it would be so enlightening to us. Laughter Meanwhile, the rest of us are going to keep on talking about expanding access to affordable prescription drugs. Another thing I don't understand is, I know they're worried that if we buy drugs in bulk the way the private sector does, that their profit per package of drugs will be smaller. But if we cover all the seniors, the volume will be so much greater, they will make more money. Do you remember when Medicare came in? All the people were saying, "Oh, my goodness, the people providing health care are going to go broke." But they didn't. The pharmaceutical companies are going to do fine under this. We're not going to have the Government try to take them over. We're not going to have a big price control system. But we ought to be able to bargain to get American seniors a decent deal. And the volume, the increase in volume will more than offset the better prices that large purchases get. Besides that, old Flo's up there arguing for keeping 13 million seniors, just like her, from having any access to any drugs. Bet she wouldn't be making that ad if she had found herself in the same position. So this is really important. Look, all these issues are complicated. We're a big, grownup country we don't have to have bogus ads out there confusing people about what the truth is. This is a matter of life or death. Everybody this man's age, who has the ability to be standing and talking and being what he was up here today, ought to have the same chance. That's what we believe. Now, beyond dealing with the ad campaign to illustrate that the failure to add a prescription drug benefit has actual consequences, I am going to gather clear and indisputable evidence of what this failure costs in physical and financial terms. Today I'm directing Secretary Shalala to produce a sweeping study the first of its kind to examine prescription drug costs in America. In 90 days she will present me with an analysis of what the most commonly prescribed drugs cost for those with and without coverage to help assess whether people without coverage are paying too much. The analysis will also report on trends in drug spending by age and by income to help us document the increasing toll high drug costs are taking on our seniors, on people with disabilities, and on their families. Combined with a State by State analysis on our seniors' prescription drug needs, which I've already ordered, the new cost study should help to lay the foundation for a more informed debate in the coming year. Finally, as part of the plan to safeguard the Social Security surplus, tomorrow I will send to Congress legislation that would reserve a third of the non Social Security surplus the non Social Security surplus all of which would be gone if I hadn't vetoed the tax cut bill laughter that would reserve a third of this for extending the solvency of Medicare and for funding a prescription drug benefit. Now, I stand ready to work with Congress across party lines on crafting a Medicare reform plan that has the best chance of gaining bipartisan support. But even if Congress won't pass the Medicare modernization plan this fall, it can and should adopt at least a proposal for protecting the Social Security surplus. I challenge Congress to pass this legislation as part of the final budget negotiations now underway, to ensure that Social Security and Medicare will have the resources they need to meet the challenges in the new century. Let me just say what the difference in my proposal is and the proposal of the Republican majority. Anybody under any circumstances who saves the Social Security surplus gives America one big benefit, which is, if we don't spend the Social Security surplus, we pay down more of the debt every year interest rates stay lower the economy grows more. Our two plans have that in common. The difference is that under my plan, starting at about 10 years, we will take the interest savings we get from reducing the debt from the Social Security surplus and put it into the Social Security Trust Fund, which will take the Trust Fund out to 2050 and go beyond the life expectancy of the baby boom generation. That's the big difference. If you just save the Social Security surplus, if you don't do anything else, it doesn't add to the life of the Social Security Trust Fund. Because all those years, from 1983 forward, when the deficit was made to look smaller because we were spending the Social Security surplus, the Social Security surplus got a Government bond, and it gets the money back, and it pays the seniors. So if you want to do something meaningful for the baby boom generation, it's not enough to save the Social Security surplus. You've got to take the interest savings you get on the budget from saving the surplus and put it into Social Security, so you add to the life of the Social Security Trust Fund. So we have a lot more work to do, even though we're already in the last week of October. Congress still has not done a lot of things. Because they have not taken action to protect the privacy of medical records, I will use the power of my office to do that in the coming days. I think that's a very important issue. But there are other agreements we have to make before we can end this year. Congress made a commitment last year, which I applauded, a bipartisan commitment, to 100,000 more teachers in our schools to reduce class size and paid for 30,000 of them. Now they want to totally undo it. I think it's wrong. They have not yet given our families the vital protections of a Patients' Bill of Rights. They took the hate crimes legislation out of the legislation that they've sent me to fund the Justice Department. They have not yet raised the minimum wage. And they have not yet fixed the flawed system that prevents people with disabilities from going to work. All those things can be done in the next few weeks, and we intend to work hard to see that they are done. But let me close again with the subject that brought us here today. Colleen Kayden came here and spoke about her experience as a pharmacist. She also spoke for every pharmacist and every community pharmacy in America. Stephen Callus came here and talked about his life. He could have been speaking for millions upon millions of seniors. Time is passing here, and I want to get back to the point I made at the beginning. I hope to be one of those baby boom seniors one day, and it's getting there in a terrible hurry laughter but I have lived already quite a good number of years. Never in my lifetime has this country had the opportunity we now have free of war, free of internal discord to chart a course for the future that will embrace all Americans and that will consciously deal with the great challenges before us. Only once in my lifetime have we had an economy that approximated this economy. That was in the early sixties, but we had to deal with the civil rights challenge and with the Vietnam war. We have never had an economy like this and, basically, the freedom within our own hands to just chart a course for the future. And there are some things that we know are going to be out there, including how many kids we're going to have and what their different backgrounds are and how many seniors we're going to have and what their absolutely certain health challenges will be. And we absolutely have no conceivable excuse for walking away from the chance of a lifetime to build the century of our dreams. Thank you very much. October 18, 1999 Thank you. Well, first of all, ladies and gentlemen, let me say I'm delighted to be here in Ray Lesniak's humble home. Laughter It's a beautiful place we have a beautiful tent. It's a gorgeous New Jersey evening. When I got out of the airplane at the Newark airport and I looked up in the sky, it was just so beautiful, and I was so glad to be here. I thank Representative Menendez for being here and for his friendship and support and his representation of you in the Congress. I thank Mayor Bollwage for hosting us and my good friend Mayor Sharpe James, who is the only big city mayor in America who's also in the State Assembly in the State Senate it's liable to start a trend laughter which if you're a Democrat would be a very good thing to do. Laughter So, Sharpe, I think at the next mayors' conference you ought to suggest to all of our other mayors they should run for the State Senate or the State Assembly. It would be a good thing. Chairman Giblin, thank you for your work. Senator Codey, Assemblywoman Weinberg, and to all the other members of the Assembly here, all the other mayors that are here. Mr. Corzine, thank you for being here and for offering yourself for public office. I got tickled, you know, I'm always learning about New Jersey, and I love it. What Ray didn't say was that we had the biggest improvement in our vote in the margin of victory from '92 to '96 in New Jersey of any State in the entire United States of America. And I am so very grateful for that. So here's what I learned about New Jersey politics tonight. Lesniak, the Pole laughter introduces Bob Janiszewski. Doria, the Italian, pronounces it properly and calls him Janiszewski. Laughter Now, that's because if you're not in the family you've got to be politically correct laughter but if you are, you want to say the guy's name in the way that can get the most votes. Laughter It was fascinating, I loved it. Let me say, I met you know, Bob had me, in October of 1991, 8 years ago this month, to the Hudson County Democratic dinner. And I was hoarse I could barely talk. I thought, you know, I saw this guy, and I didn't know whether he was going to bounce me out of the room or put his arm around me, and as strong as he is, I might not survive either one. Laughter And I wanted so badly to make a good impression, I couldn't even talk. Maybe that's why most of the people there supported me. I don't know. Laughter But since then, the friendships that I have enjoyed here, the support that I have received from here, and the opportunity we've had to work together has meant more to me than I can say. And you've been so good to me, to the Vice President, to our family in the administration. I just can't thank you enough. You might ask Joe said, well, I'm the only President that ever came here for the Assembly candidates. Now, if I were running for reelection you might understand that. What am I doing here tonight? Well, if Ray Lesniak asked me to empty my bank account meager though it is fly to Alaska to meet him tomorrow morning, I'd probably do it. I feel deeply indebted to him, and I'm glad his wonderful family is here tonight. But I came here tonight not only out of a sense of gratitude and indebtedness to people like Joe and so many others here who have helped me over the years but also because I think this is quite important. And I'd like to ask you just to take a few minutes with me and think about where our country has come from, where we are now, and where we're going, and how these Assembly races fit into it. You know, when I ran for President in 1992, it's almost impossible to remember what the country was like. We had high unemployment, stagnant growth, stagnant wages. We had increasing social division crime was up welfare was up all the social problems were up. We had had serious incidents of civil disobedience out in Los Angeles. We had political gridlock in Washington. Our country was divided, and there was no unifying vision that would bring the people together, and it seemed to me that someone ought to run. And at the time, the incumbent President, Mr. Bush, was at over 70 percent approval in the polls, in the aftermath of the Gulf war. But it seemed to me that somebody ought to run and say, "Look, this country is going through a lot of changes, and we have a lot of challenges and a lot of opportunities. And we're not going to either meet the challenges or seize the opportunities unless we have a vision that will bring us together and move us forward." And so I went around the country. I declared to show you how much frontloaded this process has become, I didn't even declare for President until this month in 1991. This race has been going on ever since my daughter was in diapers, for this year I think. Laughter And I said, "Look, I believe we need to bring this country together around a set of simple values and new ideas opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans. I believe we need to look to the future and understand that we can get rid of this deficit and still invest in education, that we can protect the environment and still grow the economy, that we can help labor and business, and that all these either or choices that have been put on us from Washington for years and years and years will not get us where we want to go." I also said I thought we needed a new set of partnerships in America between Government and business and labor and between the Federal Government and the State and local government. We needed to focus on empowering our citizens to make the most of their own lives and challenging them to serve in whatever way they could. All these things were just arguments in '92. And luckily for me and the Vice President, the country gave us a chance. They said, "Okay, we heard your argument. We'll give you a chance." But it's not an argument now. There's evidence. The results are in, and after nearly 7 years in office, we have the longest peacetime expansion in history, 19 1 2 million new jobs, the highest homeownership ever, the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest crime rates in 26 years, the lowest murder rate in 32 years, the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years, and we've reduced the size of the Federal Government it's the smallest it has been in 37 years. It's not an argument anymore. We're going in the right direction. And along the way, we proved you didn't have to give up other things. The air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer. We've set aside more land and protected it than any administration in the history of this country, except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. We've immunized 90 percent of our children against serious diseases for the very first time. A hundred and fifty thousand young Americans have now served in AmeriCorps. The HOPE scholarship and other financial aid have virtually opened the doors of college to all Americans who are willing to work for it. And 15 million Americans have taken advantage of the family and medical leave law. Now, the question before America in the elections of 1999 and 2000 is what are we going to do now? Where are we going now? Are we going to say, "Well, we're doing so well, we can indulge ourselves in petty politics and meanness and just power positioning of the moment?" Or are we going to say, "Hey, this is the chance of a lifetime. Once in a lifetime a country is in this kind of shape a great country, leading the world and we have to use this once in a lifetime chance to basically build the 21st century of our dreams for our children and our grandchildren and for a safer and more prosperous world?" In order to do that, we have to challenge the American people, and you have to challenge the people of New Jersey to think big and to be big. I know what I think the big challenges are. And when I tell you, you'll see why I'm here tonight. One, we have to take care of the aging of America. The number of people over 65 in this country will double in the next 30 years. I hope to live to be one of them. Laughter When that happens, there'll only be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. So meeting the challenges of the aging of America requires us to do a number of things. Number one, to save Social Security and stretch out the life of the Trust Fund until it encompasses a life expectancy of all the baby boomers. That's worth fighting for. Number two, to save and reform Medicare and add a prescription drug benefit. To let people between the ages of 55 and 65 buy into Medicare, because people who lose their health insurance at that age almost never find another job with the same sort of health care guarantees. We ought to have a long term care tax credit. That's a tax cut I wish my Republican friends would embrace, because so many families are having to take care of their parents or disabled relatives in long term care. The second thing we've got to do is meet the challenge of our children. We have more children from more diverse backgrounds by far than at any time in our history, in State after State after State, not just in places like New Jersey and New York and California. My State, Arkansas, is one of the top two States in America in the percentage growth of Hispanic children in our schools. Our whole country is becoming more diverse. And yet we know that, while we have the best system of colleges and universities in the world, we do not give all of our children a world class education. We need higher standards, and we need more support. If we're going to have no social promotion, which I favor, we also should have summer school and after school programs for the kids who need it 100,000 teachers for smaller classes, which gives great results, and every classroom in this country should be hooked up to the Internet. And we ought to build or modernize thousands and thousands of schools. And if my initiative passed, we could help you get that done here in New Jersey. So, the aging of America and the children of America the third big challenge we have is to help the families of America in an age where almost everybody with children is also working. I think we need to broaden the reach of the family leave law. I think we need to toughen the enforcement of equal pay for equal work. It is still not a reality. Women still don't get equal pay, and that is very, very important. I'm the only guy that I know made less money than his wife every year we were married until I became President. Laughter This is something I'm doing for the rest of you. Laughter I feel very strongly about it. We ought to pass the patients' protection bill. We ought to do more for child care for working families. We ought to raise the minimum wage. These things are important. We ought to expand health care coverage, especially to children of lower income working people. The fourth thing we've got to do, I believe, is to set as a national goal that we're going to make America the safest big country in the world. Yes, the crime rate is the lowest in 26 years. That's good. The murder rate is the lowest in 32 years. In spite of these horrible school shootings, children are less likely to be killed today than they were 7 years ago. I'm proud of that. But does anybody seriously believe this country is as safe as it ought to be? And if it's not, why should we stop until America is the safest big country in the world? Now, I have a proposal to put 50,000 more police on the street the first 100,000 did a good job and to put them in the highest crime areas of the country. The Democrats in Washington, we're trying to pass proposals for reasonable gun restriction, for child safety locks, for closing the gun show loophole, which has no background checks at gun shows and urban flea markets, and doing a number of other things. But we shouldn't stop. We shouldn't say we're satisfied with where it is, because we shouldn't be. The next thing we ought to do is to make this economy work for all Americans. You know as well as I do that right here in New Jersey there are people and places that have not been touched by this economic recovery. We've worked very hard on this. The Vice President has run our remarkably successful empowerment zone program. But we want to double the number of those empowerment zones, and we want to make sure that with our new markets initiative that people who have money to invest get the same financial incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods in America we give them to invest in poor neighborhoods in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, and throughout the world. Because people here who want to go to work ought to have a chance. If we don't do something now, when our economy is so prosperous and when our unemployment rate is so low to give people who don't have work the chance to have it, we will never get around to it. Now is the time to do that. Let me just say one other thing, maybe in some ways the biggest idea of all. People are asking me all the time if we've repealed the business cycle, because we now have the longest peacetime expansion in history. We haven't. But one of the things we know is that if we keep an open economy and we keep competing and this technological revolution continues and we educate more and more of our people, we'll do better. But you all know that one of the reasons we're doing better is because we took a 290 billion deficit and turned it in to 115 billion surplus, and that drove down interest rates, and it increased investment it increased jobs it increased incomes it lowered home mortgage rates it lowered college loan rates it lowered car interest payment rates and credit card rates. It made us more prosperous. If my plan in Washington is adopted, to save Social Security and Medicare, it will enable us to pay down the debt over the next 15 years, so that 15 years from now this country could be out of debt for the very first time since listen to this Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. Now, why should the nominally more liberal party be for getting us out of debt? Because it's good for poor people who want jobs it's good for middle class people who want affordable credit it will give us a stronger, longerrunning prosperity. And when we do get into trouble, it won't be nearly as bad as it otherwise would have been. And I hope every Democrat will stand up for that and stick up for that. That's why I vetoed that Republican tax bill, because we never would have gotten out of debt and we wouldn't have had any money left to invest in education and health care and the environment. I'll just mention two other things real briefly, because they don't bear on you quite so much. One is, I think the most important thing we can do is keep working to build one America, to keep working to reach across the lines that divide us. The more complicated, the more diverse we get, the more we ought to be lifting up and celebrating our differences and making a little fun of them, like I did tonight laughter and enjoying it but also reaffirming our common humanity. When you see all these hate crimes we have Matthew Shepard killed in Wyoming because he was gay James Byrd dragged apart in Texas because he was black a Filipino postalworker shot in California by a man who just got through shooting at Jewish children at a Jewish community school an African American basketball coach and a young Korean Christian killed walking out of his church in the Middle West by a man who belonged to a church that said he didn't believe in God, he believed the church believed in white supremacy. When you see all this stuff it is just sort of the most egregious example in America of the problems that all of us have in looking at people who are different from us and feeling fear or misunderstanding. And when those things are not dealt with, they can lead quite easily to hatred, which can lead to dehumanization, which in the most egregious examples, can lead to killing. And it's not just America. It's all over the world. What am I working on in the Middle East or Ireland or to try to stop tribal wars in Africa or in Bosnia and Kosovo? All over the world, we are still, on the verge of this most modern of ages, we're bedeviled by fear of the other. We had a fascinating Hillary has organized eight different Millennium Evenings at the White House, where we bring in brilliant people to come talk about various things and then put it out over the Internet, all over the country and all over the world. Last week we had two guys come in and talk. It was the most fascinating thing you ever saw. One of them helped to develop the architecture of the Internet. The other one was an expert in the human genome project. And they talked about how computers made it possible to unlock the mystery of the human genes and together would make it possible to do things like put little computer chips in any part of our body that's broken someday and have the chip emit electronic impulses which would, for example, take the place of damaged nerves. It was fascinating. But what the geneticist said is interesting. He said that all human beings, from a genetic point of view, are 99.9 percent the same, and that the genetic differences among groups of people that is, within them are greater than the genetic differences of the group as a whole with any other group. So that among Poles, Italians, Latinos, and African Americans, within each of those groups, the genetic differences are different than on average the genetic differences of one group are from another. We have got to get over this notion that we define our lives in terms of being better than somebody who is in some other group. And it's a huge issue. The last thing I want to say you mentioned the test ban treaty. I have done everything I could from the first day I got here to try to lead the world to a point where we could take advantage of the good things going on and beat back the threats of tomorrow. What are the threats? The spread of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons the growth of terrorism, organized crime, and drug running and the groups working more and more together. What are the opportunities? Expanding trade, expanding communications. One of my big struggles with the Congress is that they don't agree with a lot of this. But I just want you to know one thing about the test ban treaty. Everybody is for it when you hear about it. Then they can get a lot of people to say, "Well, I don't know if I'm for it because," they say, "why should America sign a nuclear test ban treaty when other people can cheat?" The answer is, the treaty makes it harder to cheat. Because if we get the treaty, we get over 300 supersophisticated sensors that we put out all over the world, in all the critical places, which catch people cheating. If we don't sign it, it's harder and harder to know whether people are testing or not and even if they do, they're not violating any rules, because we walked away. Now, that's what I think. Deal with the aging of America. Deal with the children of America. Deal with the families of America. Make us the safest big country in the world. Get us out of debt and give poor people a chance to be a part of this economy. Make us one America, and keep leading the world. That's what I think. Now, look at the Republicans' position. On Social Security, they have an act to save Social Security or reform Medicare, and they say there won't be any prescription drug benefit this year. On education, they're against voluntary tests they're against our no social promotion policy they won't give us 100,000 teachers and they sure won't give us any funds to help you to build or modernize your schools. On the family issues, they're against expanding family leave they haven't supported equal pay they're sure against the Patients' Bill of Rights, the leadership and they haven't helped us expand child care. On the crime issue, they were against putting 100,000 police on the street, and they're against putting 50,000 more. And you know where they are on the gun issues. On the economy, the tax cut would have taken away the possibility of getting us out of debt. On one America, they're against the hate crimes bill, the employment nondiscrimination bill. And on world leadership, it's not just the comprehensive test ban they won't pay our U.N. dues they're against our doing our part to combat climate change and they're against adequately funding our national security. I vetoed a bill today for foreign operations which doesn't have any money to meet our obligations to the Middle East peace process, any money to increase our efforts to diminish the nuclear threats that still exist in Russia, any money to help pay off the debts of the poor countries that the Pope and everybody else has begged the rich countries of the world to do in the year 2000. Now, what has all this got to do with the New Jersey Assembly? Plenty. Because if you look at these things the children, the seniors, the families, whether the economy works, how the education system works, whether we've got safe streets, and whether we're coming together instead of drifting apart a lot of that work is done at the State level. Joe has already talked about it but, you know, I'm proud to come here because you're trying to pass a meaningful patients' protection bill that not only has the right to sue but also has an ombudsman to look over how the managed care system works. Now, I have a right to say this because I have never condemned managed care, per se. But do you know when I proposed the Patients' Bill of Rights, 43 managed care companies came to me and said, "Mr. President, we're interested in these principles. We think they ought to be the law. But you don't understand you have got to pass a law, because if we try to do this on our own, we'll lose our shirt if our competitors undercut us. They'll take all the healthy people and not charge them anything and leave us with all the problems. There needs to be a law here." I'm here because New Jersey's Democrats are trying to pass child proof gun legislation, which is very important. I'm here because you believe in progressive, not regressive, taxation and I know about your fight there and because of what you've done in education. Keep in mind, this only works if there is a partnership. Now, my Republican predecessors talked a lot about partnerships, but we have eliminated more regulations on the State two thirds of all the Department of Education regulations. We have turned over more programs to the State than my two predecessors combined. But if it's going to work, you have to have the right people in the State government. So I ask you, again, think about what you want the new century to look like for your kids and your grandkids. Think about the obligation we have with this chance of a lifetime. Do what you can to stick with us nationally but also at the State level. And if you do what you ought to do in these elections, you will send a loud message to America that we are moving in the right direction for tomorrow. Thank you, and God bless you. October 14, 1999 Thank you very much, Secretary Summers, Director Stafford, Commissioner Peck, Monsignor Vaghi, Ms. Worley, Congressman Kolbe and Congressman Hoyer, Sergeant at Arms Livingood, Mr. Berger, Secretary Johnson. And I especially appreciate the presence of three former Directors of the Secret Service here today, Eljay Bowron and John Magaw and Stu Knight. I thank them for coming. I thank the Marines for giving us such wonderful music today. Didn't they do a great job? Applause. I think that's the only thing I'm going to miss more than Air Force One when I'm gone, having music everywhere I go, provided by the Marines. Laughter I wanted to be here for a number of reasons today. At first, I just wanted to look out and see some friendly faces. I just finished a press conference. Laughter It's nice to do that. I wanted to see this beautiful building, and I knew I would be given the experience of seeing this beautiful building. I want to thank Larry Cockell for letting me come in the front door today. Laughter You know, usually when I go into a building the Secret Service makes me go into an underground parking garage, past all the garbage laughter up the service elevator. You think the last time I went to the Hilton here, I have been in the service entrance so much that they had an employee in every section of the Hilton Hotel, in every part of inaudible they met me when I came in, and they gave me a laminated employee ID card. Laughter Just something else I owe to the Secret Service. I also was hoping that I might get another invitation to try out some more of the Secret Service training that I got at Beltsville, with Hillary, a couple of years ago. We're still looking for that escape pod on Air Force One. We haven't found that yet. Laughter I want to also say how much I appreciate the leadership that Brian is giving to the Secret Service. The only apprehension I had about his becoming the Director was that he wanted to extend the protection of the PPD to country music singers and motorcycle gangs laughter and I had to draw the line somewhere. Actually, I came here most of all to say thanks. I compliment the architects, the contractors, and all those involved in the construction of this magnificent building. And I do believe it will reinforce all the values and sense of community that Brian talked about. Harry Truman once said, the Secret Service was the only boss he had as President, with the exception of Mrs. Truman. And even when I don't like it, I have to admit that's true. And I came here to say thank you on behalf of Hillary and Chelsea and myself. I know Hillary wanted to be here today. I can't tell you how I feel about the Secret Service the way I sometimes feel about some of my friends in the Congress I like them a lot more than they like me. They've had to put up with me on so many different occasions, under such stress. You know, you wake up in the morning, and you're worried about something else, and you take it out by being a little short. You're impatient because you're tired and you've got a headache. They have to put up with all of it and act like you're still President, even when you're not acting like it you're really being a person. I think of all the sacrifices that the Secret Service and the PPD has made. I think about all these long, exhausting trips we take. I've seen the worried look in the agents' eyes whenever I get out and make some spontaneous stop into an unmagged crowd. A lot of times at night, I'm working late, and I come down, and I walk in between sometimes after midnight between the office and the house, and the agents are always there. And I often wonder how many children they have and how hard it must be for them to be awake while their children are sleeping and sleeping while their children are awake. Sometimes, I just worry that they're going to have a heart attack on the job. I never will forget the first time all the Secret Service who have been in PPD know this there's this sort of, this elaborate little electronic guard system out around the White House. And if anything triggers the alarm, if you'll forgive me, all hell breaks loose for the Secret Service. You know, they're convinced that, you know, 45 terrorists are storming the gates they have to do it. That's why we're all so taken care of. Anything, any little old thing, can trigger that deal. And I remember the first time that happened. I didn't know it. I was up on the third floor of the White House, and the Residence is on the second floor, and I didn't know what happens. So what happens is, the elevator stops, and the SWAT team occupies the staircase with their semiautomatic weapons. So they're all looking for somebody that's invading the White House. I come tromping down the staircase to the third floor this guy comes rushing up on the second floor. I look up, and there he is with his weapon pointed at me, and I thought This would be a heck of a note for the Secret Service. Laughter "Clinton killed by agent protecting the President." Laughter That poor I think he still has nightmares about that. Laughter We're all laughing about it, but this is a hard job. And it's an important job. And it's important, the protections that are provided to other people and all the other things the Secret Service does, and I want to say more about that in a moment. But especially, I want everyone to know I want Larry and Donny and all the people on PPD and all their predecessors to know how profoundly grateful I am for the way my wife and my daughter and I have been treated and genuinely cared for and protected, whether we like it or not. It has made an enormous degree of difference in the confidence with which I think the American people can express toward their Government, and we are all in your debt. I also want to thank you for naming this building after the 32 brave men and women who gave their lives in guarding our democracy and in whose memory the building now stands. Ten of those 32, I'm sad to say, lost their lives during my Presidency, including the 6 in the Oklahoma City bombing, one of the most difficult events in my life. You have honored their memory in two ways First, by naming this building in their honor and second, by using this building to continue your mission and their mission. Most people know the Secret Service as these sort of mysterious, stone faced figures that are either steely eyed or masked behind sexy sunglasses, protecting Presidents and visiting world leaders. They don't know much about the ongoing efforts of the Secret Service to protect the integrity of our financial system, but that's a proud history that stretches back 130 years now. When our country was awash in counterfeit currency after the Civil War, America turned to the Secret Service. When three Presidents were assassinated in four decades, America turned to the Secret Service, broadening the mandate at the beginning of this century to include protective duties. Now, with the new challenges we face in a new and rapidly changing world, America still turns to the Secret Service. You are out there every day, fighting telecommunications fraud, credit card fraud, computer crimes, counterfeiting, abuses of Government programs, taking on your investigative and protective assignments across the country and all around the world. Regardless of the times or the tasks, there has always been a thread of honor and integrity, trust, and true confident performance, also, a remarkable ability to adapt to change and challenge. Those values are symbolized in this building. It is a solid, solid building, standing on a firm foundation but looking toward the future. So, today, I'm honored to join you in dedicating this building and honoring the memory of those who gave their lives for what you do every day and in saying a special, special word of profound appreciation for the many sacrifices so many have made for me and my family and our country. Thank you very much. October 13, 1999 Thank you. Let me say, first, it's good to be back. I want to thank Al From and Senator Joe Lieberman. And I have seen Senator Robb and Senator Breaux. I understand Senator Landrieu is here. I saw Cal Dooley, and I know there are some other Members of the House here. My former Chief of Staff and Envoy to Latin America, Mack McLarty, is here. I saw Harris Wofford, who has done a magnificent job with our national service program. And I know there are a lot of others here. But I want to say something about Sam Fried, the gentleman who introduced me. First of all, he gave a good speech, didn't he? I mean, he's got a great gift in capturing our vision. And he also did the nicest thing imaginable he said how much he liked my phrase about putting a human face on the global economy, which I use three times a day. He didn't tell you the truth. He gave me that phrase, Sam Fried. So he could either be a speechwriter or a Senate candidate from Ohio or anyplace else he wants to run. But I think we need to recruit people from the private sector to run for office with the DLC message. And thank you, my long time friend. This conference is designed to talk about trade in the global economy in the information society. And I want to talk about that tonight. But I want to try to put it into some sort of context. I began a conversation with many of you, and led by and prodded by Al From, 15 years ago now. Tonight we know some things about the Third Way and about our credo of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community of all Americans. We know some things tonight about that that we only believed 15 years ago. We know that if this credo is translated into meaningful ideas and real policies, that it's not only good politics, it's very good for America. In 1992, when Al Gore and I went before the American people, we made an argument. And that's all it was it was an argument. We said, "We want to put people first. We want a country that's run by opportunity, responsibility, and community. We want a new economic policy. We want a new crime policy. We want a new welfare policy. We want a new environmental policy. We want a new foreign policy. We want to make America strong, America united, America a responsible partner and leader for peace and prosperity and security in the world." And it was just an argument. Thank goodness it was a good enough argument, under the circumstances, to win the election, thanks to an awful lot of you. Tonight, it is not an argument anymore. We took those ideas we took the specific commitments of policy we implemented them. We did what we said we would do in our very specific campaign. And I've got to say something parenthetically, because I owe this to a lot of you in the DLC. I've always believed ideas matter. But when I ran for President, I violated all the conventional wisdom. We made more specific commitments on more issues than any candidate ever had who was a nominee of a major party. And a scholar of the Presidency, Thomas Patterson, said that we had kept a higher percentage of those commitments, even though we made a larger number of them, than any of the previous five Presidents. And what really mattered to me is, when I went back to New Hampshire in February of this year, on the seventh anniversary of the New Hampshire primary, people there who pay attention to what you say, because you have to ask every individual 14 times for his or her vote, or you can't play there. And I love the place. You know, it was like running back home, but person after person after person came up to me on the street that day not at the Democratic Party event at night, on the street and said, "Mr. President, it's a good thing we've got an" they had an unemployment rate of below 2 1 2 percent they said, "Things are good here, but the thing we really appreciate is you did what you said you would do." It would not have been possible if I had not been part of the DLC. It would not have been possible if we hadn't thought through in advance what it was we wanted to do, if we hadn't gone from an identification of our guiding values to an analysis of the situation, to a description of what we wanted to achieve, to a strategy, to specific tactics. This organization made that possible. So let me say, first of all, it's not an argument anymore. The results are in. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the lowest crime rates in 26 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the first back to back budget surpluses in 42 years, the highest homeownership in history, the longest peacetime expansion in history. It is not an argument any more it works, and you should be proud of that. The other thing I want to say is, a lot of our specific ideas have worked. The Vice President's leadership in reinventing government has given us the smallest Federal establishment since 1962, even though the most active executive initiatives in memory. We have proved you could grow the economy and protect the environment. I went down to Virginia today to a national forest and announced that we were going to close 40 million acres of the nearly 200 million acres of national forest to roadbuilding, to preserve water quality and biodiversity and recreational quality. We have proved that you can empower poor people to make the most of their own lives with the earned income tax credit, the empowerment zone program, the community development financial institutions, and now the new markets initiative. AmeriCorps, which was a DLC idea, national service has now enlisted over 100,000 young people in the service of our country at the community level in 5 years, a goal that took the Peace Corps 20 years to reach. We also supported the Brady bill. We supported the family and medical leave law, two bills vetoed in the previous administration. And all of the objections to them turned out to be wrong. So I say to you, you can be proud of that. We pursued an aggressive policy to become engaged in the rest of the world, to recognize that we live in an interdependent world in which we ought to lead. And whether it has been pursuing peace from the Balkans to the Middle East to Northern Ireland to building self capacity to prevent hardship through the Africa crisis response initiative to give the African nations the capacity to prevent future Rwandas to developing economic capacities in poor countries to our efforts to combat terrorism and the spread of the weapons of mass destruction, we have made progress. And I thank you all for that. Now, by contrast, it is interesting to me to watch the debate in the present election, which I'm not a part of, and to see how people try to say, "Well, maybe there can be a new Republican Party like there is a new Democratic Party." Remember this They're like we were in '92 it's just an argument. The Democratic Party a heavy majority of the Democratic Party has come together to move forward. But their party still is overwhelmingly, including all those people they've got running for President they supported that tax cut, which would have completely undermined our ability to save Social Security and Medicare and get this country out of debt over the next 15 years, and which they said they could pay for, even though now they admit they can't even pay for the money they've already spent this year. They all stuck with the NRA and the Republican congressional leadership, when we tried to close the gun show loophole, after we proved that background checks do not undermine people's legitimate hunting and sporting interests. They're over there opposing the hate crimes legislation in the face of painful evidence that we are still in the grip of bigotry. They're not for the employment nondiscrimination act. We see that on so many other issues. On education, we're for high standards, no social promotion, making failing schools turn around or close down, and thousands of charter schools. They're still hawking vouchers, even though we know the Federal Government only provides 7 percent of the total educational expenditures in the first place. On health care, they're out there all against the Patients' Bill of Rights, even though their own Members, who were doctors, in the House of Representatives couldn't bear the position that the party had taken. So I would say to you, I'm proud of where we are. I'm proud of where the Democrats are. I'm proud of where our party has gone. And I still believe that when it comes to defining the future, the American public will be with the new Democratic Party instead of the right wing of the Republican Party which is driving their agenda. And we saw it again tonight when they rejected on a party line vote the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, after it had been ratified by 11 of our NATO Allies, including Britain and France, nuclear powers, endorsed by the President and four former Chiefs of Staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 32 Nobel laureate physicists, the heads of our own nuclear weapons labs. They basically said, "Don't bother me with that. I just don't think it's good." And it now has come out, of course, that there was a partisan commitment to vote against the treaty by more than enough to defeat it before it was ever brought up and anybody ever heard the first argument. We are trying to work with Republicans, independents, and Democrats to move this country forward. That is the difference in the new Democratic Party. And we are still confronting a level of extremism and partisanship which is truly chilling for the long term interests of America. But tonight I ask you not to think about our differences with the Republicans but to think about the one remaining issue on which we have not forged a consensus within our party. And that is how we're going to respond to globalization, to the global economy, the information age, and the whole nature of how we relate to other countries in terms of economics, the environment, and trade. For all of our changes, we had overwhelming majorities of both parties in both Houses voted for the Balanced Budget Act, overwhelming majorities of our party in both Houses voted for welfare reform. We are still not of one mind, and we do not have a consensus on the way forward with trade. So tonight I would like to talk to you about what I think we should do and where I think we should be, not only because I think we have serious responsibilities to the rest of the world but because we know that, until the Asian financial crisis, 30 percent of our growth in this marvelous expansion came from the expansion of trade and the opportunities that we found there. I believe a strong, properly constructed global trading system is good for all the nations of the world. I know it's good for America because of the evidence of what has happened here. Today, the worst of the global financial crisis is behind us, and I think the time has come to take an important step forward. I believe we can make our economy even stronger and make open trade an even greater force for peace and prosperity in the new century. I know some believe that isolating ourselves from the world will shield us from the forces of change that are causing so much disruption, so much instability, and so much inequality. I understand why they fear it, but I disagree that they can hide from it. America can only seize the problems of the new century if we shoulder our responsibility to lead to a responsible system of worldwide trade. If we fulfill that responsibility, if we lead boldly and resolutely, pairing solid principles with concrete proposals, we can fulfill our promise in the global economy and help other people as well. We can create for billions of people the conditions that allow them to work and live and raise their families in dignity, and I might add, we can give those nations the kind of greater prosperity necessary to have more responsible environmental and public health policies. We can expand the circle of opportunity, share the promise of prosperity more widely than ever, and in so doing also help to bring down walls of oppression in other countries. We can, in short, put a human face on the global economy. How are we going to do it, and how are we going to begin? In a little more than a month's time, in Seattle, Washington, our Nation will host a gathering of leaders from government, business, labor, and civil society. That meeting of the World Trade Organization will launch a new round of global trade talks that I called for in my State of the Union Address last January. We've had eight such rounds in the last 50 years, helping trade to grow fifteen fold worldwide. It's no coincidence that this period has seen the most rapid sustained economic growth ever recorded. Every trade round in this halfcentury has served to expand frontiers of opportunity, to expand the circle of prosperity and the rule of law and the spread of peace. I want the round we launch in Seattle to do the same. But I also want it to be a new kind of trade round for a new century, a round that is about jobs and development, a round about broadly shared prosperity, about improving the quality of life and work around the world. I want to ensure that the global trading system of the 21st century honors our values and meets our goals. Of course, different nations will bring different perspectives and different interests. To reach a truly global agreement, of course, we've got to work together in good faith. America will do its part. Tonight I want to set out our agenda for Seattle and the ways we intend to expand opportunity from the world's oldest business, farming, to its newest, electronic commerce. First, we want to ensure that in this round agriculture is treated as fairly as other sectors in the global economy. That's long overdue. In America, farmers are the lifeblood of our land, as they are in so many other places. They help to fuel our unprecedented prosperity. Unfortunately, too few of our farmers are reaping the bounty they themselves have sown. Flood and drought and crop disease, as well as the financial crisis in Asia, have threatened the livelihoods not only of many farmers but of some entire farm communities. Every American has a stake in the strength of agriculture. So let's be clear One way we can revive the rural economy in America is to open markets abroad. The family farmer in America finds trade not an abstraction. It is vital to the bottom line and to their survival. America is the largest exporter of agricultural products in the world. One in every three acres planted here is growing food for abroad. Five years ago, during the last trade round, we joined with our trading partners to put agriculture on the WTO's agenda. In Seattle, we should move forward fairly but aggressively to expand our opportunities for farmers and ranchers. We must eliminate export subsidies. All farmers deserve a chance to compete on the quality of their goods, not against the size of other countries' Government grants. In the European Union, fully half of the overall budget is spent on agricultural subsidies. The EU accounts for 85 percent of the world's farm export subsidies 85 percent. This stacks the deck against farmers from Arkansas to Argentina to Africa. In Seattle, we'll work to end this unfair advantage and level the playing field. At the same time, we have to lower tariff barriers. Tariffs remain much too high, and on average, they're 5 times higher abroad than they are in America. And we must work to reduce the domestic supports that distort trade by paying farmers to overproduce and drive prices down. These steps will help farmers to produce the vast and varied variety of food for the best possible prices. The benefits will accrue not just to them but to the global fight against hunger and malnutrition. We should also see that the promise of biotechnology is realized by consumers, as well as producers, and the environment, ensuring that the safety of our food will be guaranteed with science based and transparent domestic regulation and maintaining market access based on that sound science. Second, we can lift living standards worldwide if we level the playing field for goods and services. Manufacturing remains a powerful engine of our own economic growth it generates nearly a fifth of our GDP and two thirds of our exports. It employs more than 18 million Americans in good jobs. This sector has grown since 1992, accelerated greatly by expanded trade, boosted by agreements made at previous trade rounds. If the Asian crisis has hurt our manufacturers and it certainly has it's because expanded trade is vital to their economic health, and it will remain so. Since 1948, we have cut major industrial nations' tariffs on manufactured goods by 90 percent. Where they remain too high, we can do better, beginning in Seattle where we'll join other nations in pressing to lower barriers even further, some entirely and immediately. Eight key industries, from an environmental technology to medical instruments to chemicals to toys, stand ready to take this step now. They account for nearly a third of our exports. So let's take that step at Seattle and set ambitious goals for other manufacturing sectors. And there's one special aim we should achieve at Seattle We should follow the lead of Korea and Hungary and work together on an agreement to promote transparent procedures and discourage corruption in the 3.1 trillion government procurement market worldwide. We should set equally ambitious goals for services. Trade is no longer just agricultural and manufactured goods. It's construction and distribution and entertainment. America is the world's largest exporter of services, in quantity and quality. And though we've made really important advances in agreements on financial and communication services, too many markets remain closed to us. In Seattle, I want to open those markets more fully and unlock the full creative and entrepreneurial potential of our people. Third, we have to have a trading system that taps the full potential of the information age. The revolution in information technology can be the greatest global force for prosperity in this century. Last year, in the U.S. alone, electronic commerce totaled about 50 billion. That number may reach 1.4 trillion in 3 years. Three years later almost half our work force will either be employed by the new information industries or rely on their services and products. Around the world, the number of Internet users may reach 1 billion in 5 years. Now, currently, no country charges customs duties on telephone calls, fax transmissions, E mail, or computer links when they cross borders. That's the way it should be. The lines of communication should not crackle with interference. Last year the world's nations joined the U.S. in placing a moratorium on tariffs on E commerce. In Seattle, we should pledge to extend that ban and reach a second agreement to eliminate remaining tariffs on the tools of the hightech revolution. Fourth, as I have often said, in the immortal words of Sam Fried, we must put a human face on the global economy. We're Democrats we've got to make sure this deal works for ordinary people. We need to ensure working people everywhere feel they have a stake in global trade, that it gives them a chance for a better life, that they know that spirited economic competition will not become a race to the bottom in labor standards and environmental pollution. I know to some people in some nations open trade seems at odds with these basic human goals, but I think the opposite is true. A strong system of trade and a dialog like the one we'll begin in Seattle are our best means to achieve those goals. For those of us who believe the global economy can be a force for good, our defining mission must be to spread its benefits more broadly and to make rules for trade that support our values. It is nothing more than an international commitment to doing what we're trying to do here with the new markets agenda and with the empowerment zones. I really believe, if we work it right, we can bring the benefits of enterprise to the people and the places in America that have not yet felt it, from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to the Indian reservations to the inner cities. And I feel that way about the rest of the world. So I ask you to support our efforts to have international organizations work to protect and enhance the environment while expanding trade and to have a decent regard for the need to have basic labor standards so that people who work receive the dignity and reward of work. The American agenda in Seattle includes a thorough review of the round's environmental impact, as well as win win opportunities that benefit both the economy and the environment. We will continue to ensure that WTO rules recognize our right to take science based health, safety, and environmental measures even when they are higher than international standards. In Seattle, the WTO should also create a working group on trade and labor. And I know you're going to have some labor people here tomorrow, and I congratulate you on that. We have got to keep working on this and banging our heads together until we reach a consensus that is consistent with the reality of the modern world and its opportunities and consistent with the values that we both share. How can we deny the legitimacy or the linking of these issues, trade and labor, in a global economy? I think the WTO should commit to collaborate more closely with the International Labor Organization, which has worked so hard to protect human rights and to ban child labor, and with the International Environmental Organization. To facilitate this process, in the last year or so, I have gone to Geneva twice, once to talk about new trade rules for the global economy and once to meet with the ILO to talk about the necessity of banning child labor everywhere in the world. This organization needs to be on the forefront of integrating our objectives and trying to build a global economy that will promote open trade and open prosperity and lift the standards of living and the quality of life for people throughout the world. They should be reinforcing efforts, not efforts in conflict. I also believe that the WTO itself has got to become more open and accessible. You know, every NGO, just about, with an environmental or a labor ax to grind is going to be outside the meeting room in Seattle, demonstrating against us, telling us what a terrible thing world trade is. Now, I think they're dead wrong about that. But all over the world, when issues come up, a lot of people representing these groups have some legitimate question or legitimate interest in being heard in the debate. And the WTO has been treated for too long like some private priesthood for experts, where we know what's right, and we pat you on the head and tell you to just go right along and play by the rules that we preach. The world doesn't work that way anymore. This open world we're trying to build, where anybody can get on the Internet and say anything, is a rowdy, raucous place. And if we want the world trading system to have legitimacy, we have got to allow every legitimate group with any kind of beef, whether they're right or wrong, to have some access to the deliberative process of the WTO. And I hope you will support that. Finally, let me say, we have got to expand the family of nations that benefit from trade and play by the rules. In Seattle and beyond, we have to be guided by Franklin Roosevelt's vision, a basic essential to a permanent peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in the world. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want. It was this understanding that led the generation of postwar leaders to embrace what was still a revolutionary idea that freedom, not just of commerce but of governments and ideas and human transit, was the surest route to prosperity for the greatest number of people. This new round should promote development in places where poverty and hunger still stoke despair. We just went over, I think in the last 24 hours, 6 billion people on the face of the Earth. Half of them live on 2 a day or less 1.3 billion live on 1 a day or less. One of the reasons that I want to expand the reach of global trade is because I want more people to be able to lift themselves up. One of the reasons I want to expand the reach of global technology is that I believe if we work to bridge the digital divide here at home and around the world, we can help poor people in poor countries skip 20 or 30 or 40 years in the ordinary pace of development because of the explosion of technology. And I believe we can prove to them that they grow a middle class and grow a wealthy country without have to pollute the atmosphere, as their forebears did in the industrial era. I believe that. But for those who share our views and our party, we must make clear there is no easy way to this. We can't get this done if we're not willing to build a global economic system and tear down these trade barriers and trade with people more and give them access to our markets and try to get our technology and our investments into their markets and build the right kind of partnership. We can't just say we want all these things and then always find some reason to be against whatever trade agreement is worked out. We have got to have a global trading system, and we're either going to keep pushing it forward, or we're going to fall behind. Let me just say, to kind of amplify this, there are some specific things that I hope we will do to show that we're acting in good faith. I hope we will get congressional approval in this session of Congress to expand our trade with Africa and the Caribbean Basin. I have proposed two initiatives there. There is broad bipartisan support for it. I hope and pray we will get that out of this session of Congress. I hope we will bring more countries into the WTO in Seattle. Thirty three nations are applying for WTO membership today. Two thirds once had communist command and control economies. It is remarkable and hopeful to all the listen to this Albania, Estonia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia wanting to enter the world trading system. This is not charity. This is an economic and political imperative. It is good for us because we want more trading partners. Never forget, your country has 4 percent of the world's people and 22 percent of its wealth. We've go to sell something to the other 96 percent if we want to hold on to our standard of living. And the more people we bring into our network of possibility, the better they do, the better we'll do. It is very, very important to remember this. It's also important to remember that as these countries that are new to the experience of freedom and the rule of law and cooperation with other nations that has no element of coercion in it they are new to all this the more they have a chance to be a part of it, the more they will like it and the more they will become a part of an international system of democracy and law that is so important to the future of our children. In that same spirit, I am still determined to pursue an agreement for China to join the WTO on viable, commercial terms again, not as a favor but to reinforce China's efforts to open, to reform its markets, to subscribe to the rules of the global trading system, and, inevitably, as more and more people have access to more and more information, more and more contacts, to feel that stability comes from openness and not repression of thought or religion or political views. What is at stake here is more than the spread of free markets or the strength of the global economy, even more than the chance to lift billions of people into a worldwide middle class. It is a chance to move the world closer toward genuine interdependence rooted in shared commitments to peace and reconciliation. This is a moment of great promise, a moment where we have to lead. A lot of things happen in this country that send mixed signals to people around the world that I regret. And most of them come out of the initiative of the other party in Congress the failure to pay our U.N. dues the failure to embrace the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty the abysmal budget for foreign affairs, when we can spend a little money in helping our neighbors and get untold benefit and the zeroing out of our market oriented initiative to meet our responsibilities to reduce global warming. But one thing is still on our plate We have not granted renewed fast track authority we are not pursuing the Free Trade Area of the Americas we haven't yet passed the Africa trade initiative and the Caribbean Basin one, although I think we might get that done, because in our party, we have not been able to resolve these conflicts. They've got a lot more work to do in their party than we do in ours, as I explained at the outset. We have worked through where we are on budget discipline, on economic management, on foreign policy, on environmental policy, on crime policy, on education policy, on health care policy. There has been an enormous modernization of the thinking and direction of the Democratic Party, and we can be proud of it. But we can't go to the American people and say we have a whole vision for the future that will be a unifying vision, until we get over this one last big hump. This is an exciting issue, and it is a difficult issue. And the labor people who will come here tomorrow have real interests at stake which ought to be heard. The environmental community people have real interests at stake which ought to be heard. But we're going to globalize one way or the other, and we'll be at the front of the line or the back or somewhere in the middle. And I believe it is profoundly in our interest and in the interests of the world for America to be leading the pack. And I promise you, if we take initiative, it will lead to a cleaner environment and higher labor standards and more values that are consistent with ours, including letting more people be part of the process. So what you are doing here is real, real important. It's our last big challenge to be the party that reflects the values, the heart, and the dreams of 21st century America. Good luck, and God bless you. Thank you. October 09, 1999 Good morning. On Tuesday the Senate plans to vote on whether to ratify the nuclear test ban treaty. Today I want to emphasize why this agreement is critical to the security and future of all Americans. Just imagine a world in which more and more countries obtained nuclear weapons and more and more destructive varieties. That may be the single greatest threat to our children's future. And the single best way to reduce it is to stop other countries from testing nuclear explosives in the first place. That's exactly what the test ban treaty will do. The treaty is even more essential today than it was when President Eisenhower proposed it more than 40 years ago, or when President Kennedy pursued it. It's more essential even than when we signed it 3 years ago, because every year the threat grows that nuclear weapons will spread in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Asia, to areas where American troops are deployed, to regions with intense rivalries, to rogue leaders, and perhaps even to terrorists. The test ban treaty gives us our best chance to control this threat. A hundred and fifty four countries have already signed it, including Russia, China, Japan, Israel, Iran, and all our European allies. Many nations have already ratified it, including 11 of our NATO Allies, including nuclear powers France and Britain. But for 2 years after I submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification, there had been absolutely no action. Now, only a week has been allotted to consider it. That is especially disturbing since the issue has been politicized, apparently with large numbers of Republican Senators committing to their leader to vote against it without even giving the issue serious consideration or hearing the arguments. Now, a week is not enough time for an issue of this profound importance. That's why I've said I want to see the vote postponed so we can have a thorough debate that addresses all the legitimate concerns. The stakes are high. If our Senate rejected this treaty outright, it would be the first time the Senate has rejected a treaty since the Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations after World War I. We all know what America's walking away from the world after World War I brought us in the Depression and the Second World War. If our Senate rejected this treaty, it would be a dangerous U turn away from our role as the world's leader against the spread of nuclear weapons. It would say to every country in the world, "Well, the United States isn't going to test, but we're giving all of you a green light to test, develop, and deploy nuclear weapons." Last year rival nuclear explosions by India and Pakistan shook the world. Now both countries have indicated their willingness to sign the test ban treaty. But if our Senate defeats it, can we convince India and Pakistan to forgo more tests? America has been the world's leader against the proliferation of nuclear weapons for more than four decades. If our Senate defeats it, we won't be anymore. If our Senate defeats it, what will prevent China, Russia, or others from testing and deploying new and ever more destructive weapons? Some oppose the treaty because they say we still need to test nuclear weapons ourselves to make sure they're reliable. But this week 32 American Nobel Prize winning physicists and other leading scientists told the Senate that America doesn't need to test more nuclear weapons to keep a safe and reliable nuclear force. After all, we stopped testing back in 1992. And now we're spending about 4 1 2 billion a year on proven programs, using our advanced technology to maintain a superior nuclear force without testing. Since we don't need nuclear tests to protect our security, this treaty does not require us to do anything we haven't already done. It's about preventing other countries from nuclear testing about constraining nuclear weapons development around the world, at a time when we have an overwhelming advantage. I've told the Senate I would be prepared to withdraw from this treaty if our national security ever required us to resume nuclear tests in the future. And I've urged them to work with me to include safeguards in their ratification act, as they normally do. Some also say these treaties are too risky because some people might cheat on them. But with no treaty, other countries can test without cheating and without limit. The treaty will strengthen our ability to determine whether other countries are engaged in suspicious activity. With onsite inspections and a global network of over 300 sensors, including 33 in Russia, 11 in China, 17 in the Middle East, we could catch cheaters and mobilize the world against them. None of that will happen if we don't ratify the treaty. That's why four former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the current Chairman have all endorsed the nuclear test ban treaty. So have a broad spectrum of religious leaders and many other leading Americans, both Republicans and Democrats. So I say to the Senators who haven't endorsed it, heed the best national security advice of our military leaders. Hear our allies who are looking to us to lead. Listen to the scientists. Listen to the American people who have long supported the treaty. And since you're not prepared for whatever reason to seize the priceless chance to fulfill the dream of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy for a safer world, delay the vote on the treaty, debate it thoroughly, and work with us on a bipartisan basis to address legitimate concerns. And then you'll be able to vote yes for our country and our children's future. Thanks for listening. October 08, 1999 Prime Minister Chretien. Mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure for me to receive the President of the United States in Canada for this occasion of opening the new Embassy and for the President to come and make a speech in Mont Tremblant on federalism. As you know, the relations between Canada and the U.S. are excellent, and the President is here for his fifth visit to Canada since he started in office. And when I asked him to come to the conference at Mont Tremblant, I had to call upon our longstanding friendship. And everyone is very pleased that you, the leader of the greatest democracy and the greatest federation, should come to give your point of view. Inaudible the President of the United States to come and make this statement, the speech in Mont Tremblant, because he has been he is in a very privileged position. He has been the Governor of a State, of Arkansas, and he has been the president of the conference of the Governors, and he has been, on the other side, the President of the United States. So he knows the functioning of a Federal system inside out. And I'm sure that the people coming from around the world will benefit very strongly from his experience. And I want to say thank you very much. And I take it as a great sign of friendship for Canada and for myself that you have accepted to be with us today. If you want to say a few words. President Clinton. Thank you. First of all, Prime Minister, thank you for welcoming me back for my fifth trip to Canada since I've been President. I would like to be very brief, and then we'll open it to questions. I'm here today to dedicate our Embassy, to speak at the Prime Minister's federalism conference, and to have the chance to meet with Prime Minister Chretien. I want to just mention two or three issues. First of all, I'm profoundly grateful for the leadership shown by Canada in our common efforts to promote world peace, the work we've done together in Haiti, the work we did together in Bosnia, the work we did together in Kosovo with NATO, and the efforts that we're all making in East Timor, which is still a difficult situation, where we've got to get all the refugees home and safe and where we strongly support Secretary General Annan's efforts to establish a United Nations program there. One of the things that we have worked on together is our efforts in nonproliferation. And Canada and the United States agree with all of our NATO Allies that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is the right thing to do, it's in the interest of the United States. There has been far more controversy about it in our country than in other countries, including other nuclear powers who are our allies. And I was we've been trying to have a debate on this for 2 years, but it is clear now that the level of opposition to the treaty and the time it would take to craft the necessary safeguards to get the necessary votes are simply not there. So I hope that the Senate will reach an agreement to delay the vote and to establish an orderly process, a nonpolitical orderly process, to systematically deal with all the issues that are out there and to take whatever time is necessary to do it. With this treaty other nations will find it harder to acquire or to modernize nuclear weapons, and we will gain the means to detect and deter. If we don't have the treaty, the United States will continue to refrain from testing, and we'll give a green light to every other country in the world to test, to develop, to modernize nuclear weapons. I think it's clear what we ought to do, but it's also clear that we ought not to rush this vote until there has been an appropriate process in the Senate. So those are the major foreign policy issues I wanted to mention. The other thing I wanted to say is, I think Canada and the United States will be working very closely to try to reinvigorate the movement to expanded trade around the world. If we're going to really see the rest of the world's economy pick up and enjoy the kind of prosperity we have enjoyed in the last few years, we've got to make the most of this WTO ministerial. We've got to make the most of Canada's hosting the Free Trade Area of the Americas ministerial. And I think that's important. Now, as to our bilateral relations, I wanted to mention one thing that we talked about in our meeting. We have agreed to have a more intensive dialog on border issues, through a new forum we creatively called the Canada United States Partnership or CUSP. This will enable us to have local businesses, local communities, talk about managing border issues, and figure out how we can resolve some of the hassles people have with the vast volume of goods that go back and forth across the border and the vast number of people. So, I thank you. And you've already said why you invited me to the federalism conference. And I can tell you, I was a Governor for 12 years, and no matter how hard you try, you will never solve all the problems of federalism. So the best thing you can do is to paraphrase Winston Churchill and say it is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Thank you very much. Prime Minister Chretien. Thank you, sir. Now, we'll take questions. Sir? Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Q. Mr. President, the Senate majority leader has stated that he would consider taking the test ban treaty off the table, withdrawing it from consideration under the caveat that it would not be reintroduced in the 106th Congress. Would you, sir, in order to preserve this treaty, be willing to give up ownership of it to the next Congress and the next administration? President Clinton. First of all, I don't own it. And insofar as I do, we always will, since we negotiated it and the United States was the first to sign it. But it isn't mine. It belongs to the world. And I think the whole nature of your question shows what's wrong with the way the Senate has treated this. They've treated this like a political document. They've treated this whole issue like a political issue. They went out and got people committed to vote against the treaty before they knew the first thing about it. And what I have said is I don't understand what he's worried about. This thing could never have come up in the first place if he hadn't agreed to it. And I wouldn't bring it up unless I thought we could ratify it, because I won't treat it politically. So this whole thing is about politics. It's about Burn us in 1999 because we're against the treaty that 80 percent of the American people support, but please don't burn us again in 2000. It's political. This treaty is not going to come up until we think we can pass it, and it won't come up until they treat it seriously. Every serious American treaty, for example, has the legislative language attached as safeguards, just like we did in the chemical weapons treaty, so that everyone understands exactly what it means. In this treaty they actually went out of their way to try to keep safeguards from being attached to it so that they could have the maximum number of votes against it. So I will give you a nonpolitical answer. I will say again, they should put if off, and then they should agree to a legitimate process where Republican and Democratic Senators think about the national interest. They have total control over when it comes up, not me. If it had been up to me we'd have started on this 2 years ago. We'd have had 6 months of hearings, 2 weeks of debate, lots of negotiations, and this whole thing would have been out of the way a year and a half ago. It was not out of the way because that's the decision they made not to bring it up. They control when it comes up. So you're asking the wrong person whether it would come up next year. You should turn around and ask Senator Lott whether it would come up next year. What I want to do I don't care when it comes up, except when it comes up, I want it to come up as soon as we can, pass it, with a legitimate process. As messy as this has been, this has illustrated to the American people, beyond any question, that this whole deal has been about politics so far. Now, there are some people who are honestly against this treaty. But we haven't been able to hear from them for 2 years, and we haven't been able to answer them, and we haven't been able to work on it. So I think it's been a very healthy thing to bring it up. But now we ought to do what's right for America take it out of politics. This is not going to be a huge issue next year in the election, one way or the other. We should deal with this on the merits. They should agree to a process, and they control when it comes up. Prime Minister Chretien. And I would like to add that we all have an interest in that. And all your allies to Americans will want this process to be terminated as quickly as possible, because there's a lot of other nations that have to live with the consequences of what the American Congress will do. And peace in the world is extremely important for our neighbors, too. Canadian Defense Industries Licenses Q. Prime Minister, did you discuss the concerns that Canada's defense industries have had with having to get licenses? And did you get any answer from the President? Prime Minister Chretien. Yes, we discussed and we have found an agreement. And the agreement will be in details made public by Madam Albright and Mr. Axworthy. Q. Was it important to get an agreement? Why? Prime Minister Chretien. But, yes. It's always important when you have a problem to find a solution. And we found a solution. That's all. Laughter Next. Next. U.S. Documents on Augusto Pinochet Q. Mr. President, today a London magistrate ruled that former Chilean dictator Pinochet be extradited for trial in Spain. The CIA has been accused of withholding documents that are said to show that the United States encouraged the coup which installed Pinochet in power and that the CIA maintained close ties to Pinochet's repressive security forces. Will you order that the release of those documents be sped up? President Clinton. Well, I believe we've released some documents and my understanding before I came out here, I was told that we're about to release some more. So I think we ought to just keep releasing documents until we I think you're entitled to know what happened back then and how it happened. And obviously, the Governments of Spain and the United Kingdom are following their own legal systems. I would point out, in defense of the people of Chile, is that they actually succeeded in moving away from the Pinochet dictatorship and solving the problem they had in a way that allowed them to make a transition to parliamentary democracy. And I think even the people that spent their whole lives opposed to Pinochet, they have some they're trying to figure out, now, what the impact on their democracy will be of all these actions. But the United States has supported the legal process, and we continue to do so. And we support releasing the documents in an appropriate fashion. And we support the democracy which now exists in Chile. Paul? Prime Minister Chretien. Okay, en Fran ais. President Clinton. I've got to take a couple of the Americans go ahead. France, yes, go ahead. Q. Monsieur Clinton Prime Minister Chretien. Oh, the question is for Clinton. Laughter Premier Lucien Bouchard of Quebec Q. Mr. Clinton, I want to know if your meeting with Mr. Bouchard today is an indication of any change in U.S. policy towards Quebec sovereignty? And secondly, if Mr. Chretien asked you anything about that meeting today? President Clinton. No, and, no. That's the short answer. Prime Minister Chretien. Thank you. Next. Laughter President Clinton. The short answer, no and no. I did meet with him when he was in opposition about 4 years ago. He is the Premier of the Province. We're going there. He's the host. It's a courtesy, and I think I should do it. But there has been no change in our policy, whatsoever. Prime Minister Chretien. American. Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Q. First of all, Mr. President, are you going to meet Senator Helms' demand that you actually submit what you announced here today in writing? How badly has this hurt the United States? President Clinton. I'm sorry, what? Q. Senator Helms' demand that you submit it in writing to him. President Clinton. Submit what? Q. The CTBT I'm sorry the CTBT, the withdrawal of it in writing. He's asked for that. How badly has that hurt U.S. leadership role in arms control? And what's the message from India where the world's largest democracy just overwhelmingly reelected the Government that you criticized heavily for conducting nuclear tests? President Clinton. Well, I think, first of all, if you look at India, you have to see the people voted for that Government for all kinds of reasons. And what I believe is look, France conducted a nuclear test before they signed the treaty. What I believe is that the United States does not sign the treaty and show a little leadership here, why should the Pakistanis and the Indians do it? Ever since the end of World War II and beginning with the election of Dwight Eisenhower, we have had a bipartisan commitment to leading the world away from proliferation. It has never been called into question until the present day. Never. Now, we had to work for a very long time to get the Chemical Weapons Convention passed, which is very important. But Senator Helms and the others followed a legitimate process. I never had a doubt that the objections that they raised and the safeguards they wanted were absolutely heartfelt and serious. This treaty was never treated seriously. They took 2 years, had no time for hearings, said, "I'll give you 8 days," and later we discovered, after they said that, that that was offered only after they had 43 commitments on a party line vote to vote against the treaty from people who hadn't heard a hearing and hadn't even thought about it, most of them. So they want me to give them a letter to cover the political decision they have made that does severe damage to the interest of the United States and the interest of nonproliferation in the world? I don't think so. That's not what this is about. They have to take responsibility for whether they want to reverse 50 years of American leadership in nonproliferation that the Republicans have been just as involved in as the Democrats, to their everlasting credit. Now, they have to make that decision. I cannot bring this treaty up again unless they want to. I have asked them to put it off because we don't have the votes. I have talked to enough Republicans to know that some of them have honest, genuine reservations about this treaty, and they ought to have the opportunity to have them resolved, instead of being told that they owe it to their party to vote against the treaty and that the leadership of their party will do everything they can to keep us from writing safeguards into the treaty which answer their reservations, which is what we do on every other thing. So I don't want to get into making this political. But they shouldn't tie the Senate up or themselves up in knots thinking that some letter from me will somehow obscure from the American people next year the reality that they have run the risk of putting America on the wrong side of the proliferation issue for the first time in 50 years. And they want to do it, and then they don't want to get up and defend it before the American people in an election year. That's what this whole thing is about. That is the wrong thing to do. We don't have the votes. I'm not going to try to bring it up without the votes. Let them take it down but also agree on a legitimate process to take this out of politics. I will not criticize them as long as they are genuinely working through the issues, the way we did in the chemical weapons treaty. They're entitled to advise and consent. They're entitled to take all the time they want. But nobody hit a lick at this for 2 years. And then they tried to get it up and down on grounds that were other than substantive, and that's wrong. And it's bad for America. It has nothing to do with me and my administration. I wouldn't care who got the thing ratified, as long as we did it in the right way. Canada in the New Millennium Q. On your throne speech next week, do you see it as charting some kind of grand new course for the millennium? Or is it just more of the same? Laughter Prime Minister Chretien. Yes, it will be if Canada is considered as the best country in the world. Laughter President Clinton. Are you sure he's not one of ours? Laughter Prime Minister Chretien. You know, they're complaining because I keep telling them that Canada's been considered, Mr. President, as the best country in the world to live in. I'm sorry to tell you to that. Laughter And I want to carry on in the 21st century with the same thing, and they say I have no vision. Imagine if I had a vision. Laughter So you will see. Q. Mr. Chretien? Mr. Chretien? President Clinton. Go ahead. Laughter I'm sorry. That was great. Oil Prices Q. You've been asked to sell oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to fight rising heating oil prices as the winter comes. Do you think this is a good idea, and do you agree with Senator Schumer that OPEC has been engaged in price gouging, to raise the prices? President Clinton. I think we should look at the reserve and the question of whether, if we released some oil from it for sales, we could moderate the price some. I think that the States in the Northeast, as you know, are unusually dependent upon home heating oil and, therefore, are the most sensitive to oil prices. But it's also true that the price of oil was historically low for a good long time. And it's made a modest rebound, now. I'm grateful that it hasn't put any inflation in our economy and so far we can manage it. But we have to be sensitive to the people who are disproportionately affected by it. And I have not reached a decision yet, because I haven't been given a recommendation yet, about whether we could have any appreciable impact on the Americans that are most disproportionately affected. One of the reasons we always fight hard for the LIHEAP program, apart from what the summertime can do to people all over America, is that we know these people in the Northeast have a problem that no other Americans have, with the impact of the oil prices. It hits them much, much harder. So we're looking at it. Prime Minister Chretien. Thank you. Madam? Quebec Q. This morning you talked about rule of law, respect for rule of law being one of the fundamental principles Canada and the U.S. share. I am wondering, in that context, if the President could tell us what he thinks of Mr. Bouchard saying that Quebec could secede without regard to the Canadian Constitution, or the Supreme Court ruling last year, which said they must have a clear majority vote, yes, and a clear question. Would the U.S. ever recognize a sovereign Quebec under those circumstances? Prime Minister Chretien. I think that it's for me to reply. I think that the rule of law will apply to Canada. We have a judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada, which said very clearly that the question has to be clear and the majority has to be clear. And if there is a clear will expressed, that only after that, that negotiations could start. So the rule of law will be applied. The question will have to be clear, and the majority will have to be clear. And I know that if they have a clear question, the President of the United States will never have to make a decision on that. Natural Disasters Q. Excuse me. I would like to say something. You've had a lot of disasters lately, and so has the world. And I'm with Christian News, and I would like to ask you, have you thought that possibly this is a message from above that there is moral decay, that there is abortion, that there is violence? I was wondering if you had given it some thought. President Clinton. Actually, I have. You know, we particularly because of all the millennial predictions. But I think the fact is that some of these natural disasters are part of predictable weather patterns, and the others have been predicted for more than a decade now by people who tell us that the climate is warming up. And I think that the real moral message here is that as we all get richer and use more of the resources God has given us, we're being called upon to take greater care of them. And I think that we have to deal seriously with the impact of the changing climate. I was just in New Zealand at the jumpingoff place for 70 percent of our operations in Antarctica, the South Pole, talking about the thinning of the polar ice cap there and the consequences it could bring to the whole world. So I believe that insofar as these natural disasters are greater in intensity or number than previous ones, the primary warning we're getting from on high is that we have to keep to use the phrase of a person I know reasonably well we have to keep Earth in the balance. We have to respond to this in an appropriate way. Yes. Prime Minister Chretien Okay. And that will be the last one. President Clinton. Go ahead. Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Q. Sir, you talked about the Republicans playing politics with this arms ban treaty or weapons testing ban treaty. Are you talking about normal partisan politics, just Republicans versus Democrats? Are you talking about the kind of politics where some Republicans maybe not a lot of them, but some will say, "I'm sorry, Bill Clinton is for it. I feel so viscerally that I despise Bill Clinton, I'm not going to go along with something that he wants that much, and I'm not going to give him a victory during his administration on something this important?" President Clinton. I don't think that's what's going on. I mean, it might be, but I don't think so. That sounds like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, you know? Laughter But I don't think that's what's going on. I think you have the following things. I think you have I will say again you have some Republicans who have thought about this and listened to people who aren't for it and really believe it's not the right thing to do. I hate it when we have fights. We're always questioning other people's motives. There are people who genuinely aren't for this. I think they're dead wrong, and I think it would be a disaster if their view prevailed, but I believe that's what they think. Now, in addition to that, however, this process the Democrats were frustrated because for 2 years that's why I don't think the second part of your thing is right. For 2 years they've been trying to bring this treaty up for a hearing, during which time we did ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention, and they could never even get hearings. So there was something about this thing that they didn't want to give hearings on. So then the Democrats agreed to what they knew was a truncated hearing schedule almost no hearings and debate schedule, only to find that basically a sufficient number of votes in the Republican caucus had been locked down for reasons of party loyalty, whatever their motives were, from people who couldn't possibly know enough about the treaty right now to know they were against it on the merits. Now, maybe it's they don't want some alleged victory to come to the administration during the pendency of the political season. Maybe that's it, maybe not. My point is, I don't care about that. I don't care who gets credit for it. If they adopted it, I'd be glad to say it was Trent Lott's triumph. It's six and one half dozen of the other to me. What I want to do is to leave this country with a framework my country with a framework for dealing with the major security problems of the 21st century. I believe that there will still be rogue states that want nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. I, furthermore, believe that there will be enemies of all nation states terrorist groups, organized criminals, drug runners who will be increasingly likely to have access to miniaturized, but powerful weapons of mass destruction. And what I would like to leave office doing is not getting credit for anything I don't give a rip who gets the credit for it. What I want is the Chemical Weapons Convention to be enforced, the Biological Weapons Convention to have teeth added to it so it actually means something, and this Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to be in place so at least we have a shot to reduce the number of nuclear states and the sophistication of their weapons and their ability to use them. That's the whole deal with me. Because I think that our successors are going to have a whole lot of headaches from all these groups, and we need to minimize risk because as societies grow more open they'll be more vulnerable to being terrorized by people who have access to this. That's the whole deal with me. I don't care who gets credit for it I just want there to be a framework for dealing with it. So if they take more than a year to deal with this, if there is a legitimate process of working through, that's okay with me. If there is an emergency in the world where the rest of the world it looks like we're going to have 10 other people try to become nuclear powers, and they've had 2 months of hearings or 3 months of hearings, and I think there's some reason we ought to vote that goes back to your question I don't want to say on the front end, "Yes, I'll play the same political game, and no matter what, we won't vote next year, no matter what other developments we see on the Indian subcontinent or in other places." But this thing can't come up for a vote if they don't bring it up. And I'm not going to willfully try to get it up if I think it's going to get beat. That's the only thing I want to I'm sorry to bore our Canadian friends with a discourse to American politics. And the other thing, the United States cannot afford to relinquish the leadership of the world in the cause of nonproliferation. So if they want to strengthen the treaty, there are all kinds of vehicles through which we can do it. We do it on every other treaty. And if they want to take months, if they want to take a year whatever they need to take just play this straight. I'm not going to be out there there's no downside for them to playing it straight. But I will not say in advance, no matter what no matter what happens in the world, no matter what unforeseeable development there is, no matter what other countries are about to do, no matter what, I would not ask you to deal with this next year, because on the merits there might be a reason. If it's just politics, we won't, because I'm not going to bring it up if we can't win. Prime Minister Chretien. Perhaps, Mr. President, I would like to add that when we were at the summit in Birmingham, and it was at the moment that India was about to do the experiment and Pakistan was to follow, we were all extremely preoccupied about it. And it is a problem that concerns the world. And it's not only the United States everybody around the globe has a stake into that. And for me, I cannot agree more than the President that the leadership of the United States for the allies is extremely important. And keep up the good fight. And unfortunately, we have to go. Merci beaucoup. Thank you. President Clinton. Thank you. October 06, 1999 Thank you very much. Let me begin by saying a profound word of thanks to Senator Glenn, to General Shalikashvili, to Dr. Townes, and to Secretary Cohen for what they have said. I thank General Jones and Admiral Crowe for being here. I thank all the other Nobel laureates who are here Secretary Richardson and General Shelton and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mr. Berger and Mr. Podesta, the other people from the White House. And I thank Senators Biden and Dorgan for their presence here and their enormous leadership on this issue, and other committed American citizens who are in this audience. Let me say that I was sitting here thinking two things when the previous speakers were speaking. One is, it made me very proud to be an American, to know that our country had been served by people like these four, without regard to party. The second is that each in their own way represent a different piece of the American experience over the last 50 years and bring a remarkable combination of intellect, knowledge, experience, and humanity to the remarks that they made. There's a reason that President Eisenhower said we ought to do this and a reason that President Kennedy agreed. They saw World War II from slightly different angles and different ranks, but they experienced the horror of the atomic era's onset in much the same way. I think you could make a compelling argument that this treaty is more needed now than it was when they advocated it, when there were only two nuclear powers. I think you could make a compelling argument that, given the events of the last couple of years, this treaty is more needed than it was when I signed it at the United Nations 3 years ago. Nuclear technology and know how continue to spread. The risk that more and more countries will obtain weapons that are nuclear is more serious than ever. I said yesterday I'd like to just stop here and go off the script. I am very worried that the 21st century will see the proliferation of nuclear and chemical and biological weapons that those systems will undergo a process of miniaturization, just as almost all other technological events have led us to, in good ways and bad and that we will continue to see the mixing and blending of misconduct in the new century by rogue states, angry countries, and terrorist groups. It is, therefore, essential that the United States stay in the nonproliferation lead in a comprehensive way. Now, if you look at what we're trying to do with the Biological Weapons Convention, for example, in putting teeth in that while increasing our own ability to protect our own people and protect our friends who want to work with us from biological weaponry, you see a good direction. If you look at what we did with the Chemical Weapons Convention, working in good faith for months with the Congress to ask the same question we're asking here are we better off with this or without it? and how we added safeguard after safeguard after safeguard, both generated out of the administration and generated from leaders of both parties in the Congress, that's how we ought to look at this. But we have to ask ourselves just the same question they all presented, because the nuclear threat is still the largest one, and are we better off or not if we adopt this treaty? I think we start with the fact that the best way to constrain the danger of nuclear proliferation and, God forbid, the use of a nuclear weapon, is to stop other countries from testing nuclear weapons. That's what this test ban treaty will do. A vote, therefore, to ratify is a vote to increase the protections of our people and the world from nuclear war. By contrast, a vote against it risks a much more dangerous future. One of the interesting things I'll bet you that people in other parts of the world, particularly those that have nuclear technology, are watching the current debate with some measure of bewilderment. I mean, today we enjoy unmatched influence, with peace and freedom ascendant in the world, with enormous prosperity, enormous technical advances. And by and large, on a bipartisan basis, we've done a pretty good job of dealing with this unique moment in history. We've seen the end of the cold war making possible agreements to cut U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals by more than 60 percent. We have offered the Russians the opportunity of further cuts if they will ratify START II. But we know the nuclear peril persists and that there's growing danger that these weapons could spread in the Middle East, in the Persian Gulf, in Asia, to areas where our troops are deployed. We know that they can be present in areas where there are intense rivalries and, unlike at least the latter years of the cold war, still very much the possibility of misunderstanding between countries with this capacity. Now, let me say the reason I say that I think other countries will be looking at this, one of the concerns that I have had all along is that the countries we need to get involved in this, India, Pakistan, all the other countries, will say, "Well, gosh, when we all get in this Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Americans have a big advantage, because they're spending 4.5 billion maintaining the integrity of their nuclear stockpile." And I always thought that, too. And I think that's a good thing, because people around the world know we're not going to abuse this responsibility we have. But it is strange to me and I'm sure strange for people in foreign capitals analyzing the debate going on in Washington that there are people against this treaty who somehow think we will be disadvantaged by it. So instead, they propose to say, well, we they don't, any of them, say we should start testing again. So the message of not ratifying this treaty is, "Okay, we're not going to test, but you guys have a green light." Now, forgive my less than elevated language, but I think we've got to put this down where everybody can get it. And I don't think we ought to give a green light to our friends in India and Pakistan, to the Chinese or the Russians, or to people who would be nuclear powers. I think that would be a mistake. I think we ought to give them an outstretched hand and say, let us show common restraint. And see this in the framework of our continuing work with the Russians to secure their own nuclear materials, to destroy nuclear weapons that are scheduled for destruction, and to continue our effort to reduce the nuclear threat. The argument, it seems to me, doesn't hold water, this argument that somehow we would be better off, even though we're not going to start testing again, to walk away from this treaty and give a green light to all these other countries in the world. Now, I sent this test ban treaty up to the Senate over 2 years ago. For 2 years, the opponents of the treaty refused to hold any hearings. Suddenly, they say, "Okay, you've got to vote up or down in a week." Now, this is a tough fight without much time, and there are lots of technical arguments can be made to confuse the issue. But I would like to just reiterate what has already been said by previous speakers and make one other point. There are basically three categories of arguments against the treaty. Two have been dealt with. One is, "Well, this won't detect every test that anybody could do at every level," and General Shalikashvili addressed that. We will have censors all over the world that will detect far more tests than will be detected if this treaty is not ratified and does not enter into force. And our military have repeatedly said that any test of a size that would present any kind of credible threat to what we have to do to protect the American people, we would know about, and we could respond in an appropriate and timely fashion. The second argument is, no matter what all these guys say, they can find three scientists somewhere who will say or maybe 300, I don't know that they just don't agree and maybe there is some scenario under which the security and reliability of the nuclear deterrent in America can be eroded. Well, I think that at some point, with all these Nobel laureates and our laboratory heads and the others that have endorsed this say what they say, you have to say, what is the likelihood that America can maintain the security and reliability of its nuclear deterrent, as compared with every other country, if they come under the umbrella of this and the treaty enters into force? The same people say that we ought to build a national missile defense, notwithstanding the technological uncertainties, because our skill is so much greater, we can always find a technological answer to everything. And I would argue that our relative advantage in security, even if you have some smidgen of a doubt about the security and reliability issue, will be far greater if we get everybody under this tent and we're all living under the same rules, than it will be if we're all outside the tent. Now, there's a third sort of grab bag set of arguments against it, and I don't mean to deprecate them. Some of them are actually quite serious and substantial questions that have been raised about various countries' activities in particular places and other things. The point I want to make about them is, go back and look at the process we adopted in the Chemical Weapons Convention. Every single other objection that has been raised or question that has been raised can be dealt with by adding an appropriately worded safeguard to this treaty. It either falls within the six we've already offered and asked for or could be crafted in a careful negotiation as a result of a serious process. So I do not believe that any of these things are serious stumbling blocks to the profound argument that this is in our interest. Look, 154 countries have signed this treaty Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Iran, all our NATO Allies 51 have already ratified, 11 of our NATO Allies, including nuclear powers Britain and France. But it can't go into effect unless the U.S. and the other designated nations ratify it. And once again, we need American leadership to protect American interests and to advance the peace of the world. I say again, we're spending 4 1 2 billion a year a protect the security and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. There is a reason that Secretary Cohen and Secretary Richardson and our laboratory heads believe that we can do this. Once again, I say the U.S. stopped testing in 1992. What in the world would prevent us from trying to have a regime where we want other people to join us in stopping testing? Let me just give one example. Last year the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan shook the world. After those tests occurred, they had a serious confrontation along the line of control in Kashmir. I spent our Independence Day, the Fourth of July, meeting with the Pakistani Prime Minister and his senior government officials in an intense effort to try to help defuse this situation. Now, both of these countries have indicated they will sign this treaty. If our Senate defeats it, do you think they'll sign it? Do you think they'll ratify it? Do you think for a minute that they will forgo further tests if they believe that the leading force in the world for nuclear nonproliferation has taken a U turn? If our Senate defeats the treaty, will it encourage the Russians, the Chinese, and others to refrain from trying to find and test new, more sophisticated, more destructive nuclear weapons? Or will it give them a green light? Now, I said earlier we've been working with Congress on missile defense to protect us from a nuclear attack should one ever come. I support that work. And if we can develop a system we think will work, we owe it to the American people to work with the Russians and others to figure out a way to give our people the maximum protection. But our first line of defense should be preventing countries from having those weapons in the first place. It would be the height of irresponsibility to rely on the last line of defense to say, "We're not going to test. You guys test. And we're in a race to get up a missile defense, and we sure hope it will work if the wheels run off 30 or 40 years from now." This argument doesn't hold water. People say, "Well, but somebody might cheat." Well, that's true, somebody might cheat. Happens all the time, in all regimes. Question is, are we more likely to catch them with the treaty or without? You all know and I am confident that people on the Hill have to know that this test ban treaty will strengthen our ability to determine whether or not nations are involved in weapons activities. You've heard the 300 sensors mentioned. Let me tell you what that means in practical terms. If this treaty goes into effect, there will be 31 sensors in Russia, 11 in China, 17 in the Middle East alone, and the remainder of the 300 plus in other critical places around the world. If we can find cheating, because it's there, then we'll do what's necessary to stop or counter it. Let me again say I want to thank the former chairs of the Joint Chiefs who have endorsed this. I want to thank the current Chair, and all the Joint Chiefs, and the previous service chiefs who have been with us in this Lawrence Eagleburger, the Secretary of State under President Bush Paul Nitze, a top Presidential adviser from Presidents Truman to Reagan former Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker many Republicans and Democrats who have dealt with this issue for years have stayed with us. John Glenn, from Mercury to Discovery are you going up again, John? has always been at the cutting edge of technology's promise. But he's also flown fighter planes and seen war. The Nobel laureates who are here, Dr. Ramsey, Dr. Fitch, both part of the Manhattan Project Dr. Ramsey, a young scientist, Dr. Fitch, a teenage soldier, witnessed the very first nuclear test 54 years ago in the New Mexico desert. Their letter says, "It is imperative" underline imperative "that the test ban treaty be ratified." Let me just say one other thing. There may be a suggestion here that our heart is overcoming our head and all that. I'd like to give you one example that I think refutes that on another topic. One of the biggest disappointments I've had as President, a bitter disappointment for me, is that I could not sign in good conscience the treaty banning landmines, because we have done more since I've been President to get rid of landmines than any country in the world by far. We spend half the money the world spends on demining. We have destroyed over a million of our own mines. I couldn't do it because the way the treaty was worded was unfair to the United States and to our Korean allies in meeting our responsibilities along the DMZ in South Korea and because it outlawed our antitank mines while leaving every other country's intact. And I thought it was unfair. But it just killed me. But all of us who are in charge of the Nation's security engage our heads, as well as our hearts. Thinking and feeling lead you to the conclusion that this treaty should be ratified. Every single serious question that can be raised about this kind of bomb, that kind of bomb, what this country has, what's going on here, there, and yonder, every single one of them can be dealt with in the safeguard structure that is normally a product of every serious treaty deliberation in the United States Senate. And I say again, from the time of President Eisenhower, the United States has led the world in the cause of nonproliferation. We have new, serious proliferation threats that our predecessors have not faced. And it is all the more imperative that we do everything we possibly can to minimize the risks our children will face. That is what you were trying to do. I thank the Senators who are here with us today and pray that they can swell their ranks by next week. Thank you very much. October 05, 1999 Thank you very much, Secretary Cohen, for your remarks, your leadership, and for the depth of your concern for our men and women in the military. Secretary Richardson, Secretary West, Deputy Secretary Hamre, General Shelton, General Ralston, Senior Master Sergeant Hall he told me today this is the fourth time we've met and the first time in Washington, DC. I've tried to get around to see people like the senior master sergeant in uniform in the Middle East and Asia and elsewhere. I want to thank all those who serve them the senior service chiefs, the service secretaries, the senior enlisted advisers. I'd also like to say a special world of thanks to all the Members of Congress here, too numerous to recognize them all. But I do want to acknowledge the presence of Senator Warner, Senator Levin, Senator Thurmond, Senator Robb, Senator Allard, Representative Spence and Representative Skelton, and the many other Members of the House of Representatives here today. This, for me, more than anything else, is a day to say thank you thank you for recognizing the urgent needs and the great opportunities of our military on the edge of a new century. Today should be a proud day for men and women in uniform, not only here in this audience but all around the world. Time and again, they have all delivered for our country. Today America delivers for them. In a few moments, I will have the privilege of signing the National Defense Authorization Act. As you have already heard, it provides for a strong national defense and a better quality of life for our military personnel and their families. It builds on the bipartisan consensus that we must keep our military ready, take care of our men and women in uniform, and modernize our forces. Today, we have about 1.4 million men and women serving our country on active duty, doing what needs to be done from Korea to Kosovo, to Bosnia, to Iraq, to helping our neighbors in the hemisphere and in Turkey dig out from natural disasters, to simply giving us confidence that America is forever strong and secure. We ask our men and women in uniform to endure danger and hardship, and you do to suffer separation from your families, and you endure that. We ask you to be the best in the world, and you are. In return, you ask very little. But we owe you the tools you need to do the job and the quality of life you and your families deserve. This bill makes good on our pledge to keep our Armed Forces the best equipped and maintained fighting force on Earth. It carries forward modernization programs, funding the F 22 stealth fighter, the V 22 Osprey, the Comanche helicopter, advanced destroyers, submarines, amphibious ships, command and control systems, and a new generation of precision munitions. The bill also recognizes that no matter how dazzling our technological dominance, wars still will be won today and tomorrow as they have been throughout history, by people with the requisite training, skill, and spirit to prevail. The excellence of our military is the direct product of the excellence of our men and women in uniform. This bill invests in that excellence. It authorizes, as you have already heard, a comprehensive program of pay and retirement improvements that add up to the biggest increase in military compensation in a generation. It increases bonuses for enlistment and reenlistment, and provides incentives needed to recruit and retrain our military personnel. I would like to say a special word of appreciation to all the members of our military, including a lot of enlisted personnel, who have discussed these issues with me over the last 2 or 3 years, in particular. And I would like to thank the Members of Congress not only for the work they did on the pay issue but also on the retirement issue. And I'd like to say a special word of appreciation on that to Congressman Murtha, who first talked to me about it, and I know labored very hard on it. Now, an awful lot of people worked to make this bill a reality. And I'm glad that there are so many members of both parties of the House and the Senate Armed Services Committee here today. I also want to thank Secretary Cohen, General Shelton, and all the people at the Pentagon for their leadership and determination. This bill is an expression of America at its best. It's about patriotism, not partisanship. It's about putting the people of our Armed Forces first. No matter how well we equip these forces to deal with any threat, I would also argue that we owe them every effort we possibly can to diminish that threat the threat to the members of our Armed Forces and to the American people whom they must defend. One of the greatest threats our people face today, and our Armed Forces face, is the threat of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. We have worked in a bipartisan way to diminish those threats, passing the Chemical Weapons Convention, getting an indefinite extension of the nonproliferation treaty. We are now working to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. At this time, the Senate has a unique opportunity to diminish that threat by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It will end nuclear weapons testing forever, while allowing us to maintain our military strength in nuclear weapons and helping to keep other countries out of the nuclear weapons business. We stopped testing nuclear weapons in 1992 in the United States. Instead, we spend some 4.5 billion a year on programs that allow us to maintain an unassailable nuclear threat. This treaty will strengthen our security by helping to prevent other countries from developing nuclear arsenals and preventing testing in countries that have nuclear weapons already but have nowhere near the sophisticated program we do for maintaining the readiness of our arsenal in the absence of testing. It will strengthen our ability to verify by supplementing our intelligence capabilities with a global network of sensors and onsite inspections, something we will not have if the treaty does not enter into force. It will make it easier for us to determine whether other nations are engaged in nuclear activity and to take appropriate action if they are. Obviously, no treaty not this one or any other can provide an absolute guarantee of security or singlehandedly stop the spread of deadly weapons. Like all treaties, this one would have to be vigorously enforced and backed by a strong national defense. But I would argue if the Senate rejects the treaty we run a far greater risk that nuclear arsenals will grow and weapons will spread to volatile regions, to dangerous rulers, even to terrorists. I want to emphasize again, the United States has been out of the testing business for 7 years now. We are not engaged in nuclear testing. If we reject this treaty, the message will be, "We're not testing, but you can test if you want to," with all the attendant consequences that might have in India, Pakistan, China, Russia, Iran, and many other places around the world. I want to avoid a world where more and more countries race toward nuclear capability. That's the choice we face, not a perfect world, but one where we can restrain nuclear testing, but train the growth of nuclear arsenals. Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy first advocated a comprehensive test ban treaty. Four former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, together with Chairman Shelton and our Nation's leading nuclear scientists, including those who head our national weapons labs, advocate this treaty. I believe the treaty is good for America's security. I believe walking away and defeating it would send a message that America is no longer the leading advocate of nonproliferation in the world. So, all I ask today is not a vote the discussion just began. What I ask is that we meet this challenge in the same bipartisan fashion in which we approached the defense authorization bill. The stakes are exactly the same. When a young man or woman joins the United States military, they don't ask you if you're a Republican or a Democrat. And you all make it clear you're prepared to give your life for your country. We should do everything we can to ensure your safety, to give you a bright future, even as we give you the tools and the support to do the work you have sworn to do. Let me say in closing, after nearly 7 years in this office, there has been no greater honor, privilege, or joy than the opportunity I have had to see our men and women in uniform do their jobs, all kinds of jobs all over the world. I have also been very moved by how honestly and frankly and straightforwardly they have answered every question I have ever put to any of them. In a very real sense today, the work the Congress did and the support that I and our administration gave to this legislation is purely and simply the product of what our men and women in uniform, from the highest rank to the lowest, told us needed to be done for them and for America. So again I say, this is a day for celebration and thanksgiving, and more than anyone else, I feel that deep gratitude to you. Thank you very much. October 01, 1999 Thank you very much. Senator Bryan, Senator Reid, Senator Baucus Mr. Mayor, Mayor Jones, and Senator Bernstein that sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Laughter Sounds pretty good. Laughter And my good friend Arthur Goldberg I had a wonderful day with him in his home in New Jersey, and now he's brought me to Paris. I went to Paris for the first time 30 years ago this year as a young man. And not very long ago, on my way to Bosnia to talk about our humanitarian efforts there to save the people of Kosovo from ethnic cleansing, I stopped in Paris for a day to see the President of France and the Prime Minister, and I had a chance to walk again as I did a young man, along the Tuileries and look again at the Eiffel Tower. I've already had more dreams fulfilled than I could have asked for in 10 lifetimes, but I never dreamed I'd actually get to give a speech in the Eiffel Tower. Laughter So I thank you, Arthur, for one more milestone in my life, and I congratulate you on this magnificent creation and the success it's enjoying. I was thinking about all of you here today, and I was thinking, one of the things that I like about Arthur Goldberg and a lot of the others of you who have been my longtime friends here, is that you have a sense of enlightened self interest. You're intelligent enough to support Democrats so you can continue to live like Republicans. Laughter And I told someone the other day, I saw how much money Governor Bush had raised you know, I'm thinking of putting that down as one of the economic achievements of my tenure in office laughter that we didn't discriminate we allowed the Republicans to make money, too, in this economy. And it's not our fault if they decide to spend it in a way different than we would like. Let me say, just seriously I'll be rather brief, but I want to first thank you for coming here and second, to try to give you some sense of what is at issue in this coming election year in all of the elections, and certainly in these elections for United States Senate, every one of which is of genuine national significance. First, when Al Gore and I moved to Washington in 1993, into the White House, and we started our administration, we had a few very definite ideas about how we ought to change our policy, how we ought to change our economic policy, our crime policy, our welfare policy, our education policy, what our priorities in foreign policy ought to be, and we generally were trying to prepare America for the global economy and the global society in which we're living for the post cold war world, with a view to give every person in this country a chance to live up to his or her God given abilities trying to bring an increasingly diverse country closer together, instead of allowing it to become more and more torn apart and fractionalized, as so many countries in the world are today, over differences of race, religion, and other things. And we wanted to try to maintain America's role for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world. And after 6 1 2 years, the results, I think, speak for themselves. We do have the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years and the lowest crime rates in 26 years. We just had back to back surpluses in our budget for the first time in 42 years. And yesterday we learned that we have the lowest poverty rate in 20 years, the longest peacetime expansion, and the highest homeownership in history. These are things we can be proud of. And I am grateful that I had the chance to serve and to be a part of these historic developments. And for all of you that had anything to do with that, I thank you. But every country must always have its eyes pointed toward tomorrow. And it may seem strange to you, since I can't run again, but I almost wish that the theme song of this year's election the millennial election next year, I mean were the one that we used in 1992, that great old Fleetwood Mac song, "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." The question is not whether America will change it is how America will change and whether we will build on what we have done that is working to meet the large, long term challenges the country faces in this new millennium or whether we will basically veer off and go back to an approach that got us in an awful lot of trouble before. The economy has been good so long, most people have forgotten what it was like in 1992. Most people forgot what it was like to have year in after year out of crime rates rising, welfare rolls rising, and intensifying social divisions. So I say to you, the question and I hope you'll keep this in mind between now and November of 2000 the issue for every citizen, without regard to party, is not whether we will vote for change. The issue is what kind of change we will embrace. That is, America is always changing. That's why we're still around here after over 220 years, because we've always been in the business of recreating ourselves based on our bedrock principles. And what difference does it make who's in the Senate? It will determine whether we use this moment of prosperity to save Social Security so that the baby boomers don't, in effect, bankrupt our children with our retirement. It will determine whether we lengthen the life of Medicare and add a prescription drug coverage, which is of pivotal importance to millions of Americans. Three quarters of the retired people in this country today do not have access to affordable prescription drugs, and a lot of the hospital bills that they run up are because they did not have the preventive medications that they need. It will determine whether we make a commitment to what is now the largest, most ethnically and religiously diverse group of people we've ever had in our schools, and whether we really believe that they can all learn and we're determined to give them a world class education. Yesterday I went to New York, to the IBM Center, to meet with Governors and business leaders of both parties to talk about the absolute imperative of having world class standards and genuine accountability for all of our school children the need to end social promotion but to give our children the schools they need to turn around failing schools or shut them down to give kids the after school and summer school and mentoring support they need but to keep pushing for higher standards in education. These are just three big questions. I have asked the Congress to adopt a plan that would take Social Security out to 2050, beyond the life expectancy of all but the most fortunate baby boomers. I'd like to be around then, but it seems sort of unlikely. I have asked them to add more than a decade to the life of Medicare and to deal with the prescription drug issue. I have asked to adopt some truly groundbreaking educational reforms, and I have asked them to do it in a budget that would allow America over the next 15 years to pay down the debt, so that by 2015 we'd be debtfree for the first time since Andrew Jackson was President in 1835. Now, those are changes worth fighting for. Now, in every case, there are differences among the parties on this. I also have to tell you that there are differences in other areas. I'm fighting now to get the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty ratified in the Senate. Virtually all the opposition we have is coming from the other side of the aisle. A dream that was first embraced by Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican President, and proposed by John Kennedy, a Democrat, who gave us the first temporary test ban treaty. It is profoundly important because we are trying to stop countries that do not have nuclear power now, and terrorist groups who do not have nuclear power now, from getting it. And it will help us not only to restrain people who have nuclear weapons from using them ever in the future but from seeing the proliferation of these things. Every Senator's vote makes a difference. The treaty has to be ratified by twothirds of the Senate. I'm trying to get the funds from the Congress to implement the agreement I made with former Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mr. Arafat, with the help of the late King Hussein, at the Wye peace accords. It's absolutely imperative that America do its part if we want the Israelis and their partners in the Middle East to keep making peace. It could have a huge impact on the life our children lead in the 21st century. And the congressional majority so far has been unwilling to fund it. Every Senator's vote makes a difference. And I can go on and on and on. You know this you've seen it. But it's easy to forget. This State has been profoundly well served by Dick Bryan and Harry Reid. And Arthur said he wished I could run again I wish Dick would have run again. Laughter I told him, I said, "He's too young to quit. He doesn't even have gray hair, unlike some people." So when you pick someone to succeed him, you have to think about this. The person you pick to succeed him is going to lengthen the life of Social Security or try to let it wither on the vine, hoping that it will be privatized, not really thinking about what's going to happen not to the baby boomers most of us will be fine. What happens to our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren if we leave a significant percentage of our people who are my age and younger, in the baby boom generation, unable to sustain themselves in retirement? What if we don't continue to push to raise standards in education? You know, our children have picked up nearly a full grade in reading levels in the last 2 years. It didn't happen by accident. Four years ago only 16 States had enforceable standards today, 50 do. Four years ago only 11 States had real accountability that is, for schools, teachers, and students today, only 16 do. Now, I can tell you, the Democrats are more likely than the Republicans, by a factor of five or six, to continue to push to raise standards in education. It could change the whole future of America. We are more likely to push for things like the hate crimes legislation and other things that are designed to bring us together across all the lines that divide us, and certainly more likely to think about our responsibilities in the world. You know, people come here to Las Vegas, from all over the world. And I know that for many Americans, maybe people living in small towns in this State, they'd just as soon, just thinking about it for 30 seconds, that we not invest any money anywhere else in the world. But with the end of the cold war, a modest investment in our diplomacy can keep American men and women in uniform out of wars for decades to come. It will save lives it will give us a more peaceful world. It will also protect the international economy, on which our own prosperity depends. All this will be determined not only by the Presidential race but by the races for the Senate and the races for the House. And it seems to me, when you think about the things everybody used not everybody, at least our friends in the opposition the Republicans used to say about the Democrats that they were weak on crime, weak on welfare, weak on the budget, weak on foreign policy, all those things they used to say about us "you can't trust them to run the country." Our crime policy has helped communities have the lowest crime rate in a generation. Our welfare policies have given us the lowest welfare rolls in 32 years, without doing what they wanted to do, which was to cut the kids out of federally guaranteed food and medical care and to give more child care so people can succeed at home and at work. Our economic policies have benefited not just those of us in this room who can afford to be here, but we've also got the lowest poverty rates in 20 years. And our continued commitment to fulfilling our responsibilities in the world have given us a safer world and will give us a safer world in the 21st century, which means a more prosperous world, which is critical to a more prosperous America. I'd just leave you with this thought We are 4 percent of the world's population we have 22 percent of the world's income. We cannot sustain 22 percent of the income with 4 percent of the people unless we have a constructive relationship with the other 96 percent of the people in the world. It is of pivotal importance. So it is not only for humanitarian reasons that I have sought to end the slaughter in Kosovo and Bosnia, to try to bring peace from the Middle East to Northern Ireland, to try to deal with the test ban treaty. It's also very much in the immediate daily interest of the people of this city, this State, and this Nation. This is a different and a better country than it was in 1992, and I'm grateful that I had a role to play in it. But don't be deceived here. It wasn't because of me it was because what we did was the right thing to do. It is the ideas, the policies, the direction, the conviction of where we're going that's what counts. And you can keep America changing in the right way with the right decisions in all these elections in 2000. After those elections, I'll just be a citizen again, but I look forward to bearing this message for the rest of my life. And I thank you for being here to help make America work. Thank you. October 01, 1999 The President. Good morning. This morning before I leave for California, I would like to talk about two issues briefly first, the tragic nuclear accident in Japan. I have just spoken with Prime Minister Obuchi to express our sympathy to those who have been affected, and our readiness to help in any way we can. He told me the Japanese authorities have been able to bring the situation under control, and he thanked me for the outpouring of support from the United States. Over the last day we've been providing information to Japan on our experiences in dealing with similar incidents in the United States, and making available our experts in atmospheric monitoring and any other areas that might be useful. Secretary Richardson has been meeting with his counterparts in Russia and discussing ways we can all coordinate our assistance with them. Japan has been our friend and our ally, and we're ready to work together to address the situation and to prevent future accidents. I would also like to talk about a new important step we're taking to help more Americans make their retirement years more secure. Through war and peace, from recession to expansion, our Nation has always fulfilled its obligation to older Americans. Thankfully, it's hard to remember the time when growing old usually meant growing poor. It seems impossible to believe, but in many cases, retirement before Social Security meant being sent off to long, lonely years of dependence. The normal aches of aging were accompanied by the unbearable pain of becoming a burden on one's children. That's why Social Security means so much to the life of our Nation. For almost 65 years now it's been an unshakable covenant among generations, between workers and retirees, between the disabled and the able bodied. But too many Americans, when planning their retirement, take too little account of Social Security. Of course it's hard to fully plan for tomorrow if you don't know where you stand today. Most Americans receive annual statements of their earnings, their savings, and their private pensions. Until today, however, they've never received annual statements on Social Security, the largest source of income for many, many elderly Americans. I am pleased to announce that today the Social Security Administration is launching a new effort to help workers know what they can plan on, what they can count on, and if need be, what they can rely on during retirement. One hundred twenty five million American can now look forward to annual estimates of their Social Security benefits. The first half million mailings go out today. This new Social Security statement will help more Americans understand what Social Security means to them. It will form a vital part of any family's financial planning and help more Americans chart a course to retirement that is clear and secure. For many Americans Social Security, along with savings and pensions, is the foundation of retirement security. It's a rock solid guarantee. In this time of prosperity we have our best chance yet to see that it remains so. I hope we will do so and extend the life of the Social Security Trust Fund. I will continue to do all I can, not only to strengthen Social Security but also to strengthen and reform Medicare for the next century, to fulfill our obligation not only to our older Americans but to their children and their grandchildren. Thank you very much. Federal Bureau of Investigation Q. Mr. President, do you believe the FBI is being operated professionally, and what makes you think that? The President. Well, do you already know the answer? Laughter Q. You made a comment about it the other day. The President. No, I think I made a comment, I believe, in the context of the Waco situation. And there is now a provision for Senator Danforth to look into it. I think that was the appropriate thing to do. That was, of course, agreed on by both the Attorney General and Director of the FBI. And I think that is the way that it should proceed. Several years ago, as you know, the FBI director was set up in a different way by Congress, given a term of years, and essentially, I think, it was designed to insulate it more from the executive branch generally, although the Attorney General clearly still has supervisory responsibilities there. And I think that under these circumstances what I have said is all I should say. And I think that both Mr. Freeh and the Attorney General did the right thing in asking for this independent review. I don't think there is much more to say about it. Republican Budget Proposal Q. Mr. President, what do you make of Governor Bush's comments that House Republican leaders should not balance the budget on the backs of the proof? The President. Well, I was delighted to see that he, or that any prominent Republican, finally had joined our position on this. We've been saying this since the proposal was first floated. What they propose to do is unconscionable, and basically, instead of those people getting their tax returns on time like other Americans do, they would get it once a month, and it would cost them a lot of money not only in they would actually lose some money and then the rest of the money they would get much later in the year. I think it's wrong, and I intend to do everything I can to stop it. And I believe I can stop it. But I will also say, as I said yesterday, that this is a difficult thing for the Republicans because unlike us, they don't want to provide reasonable offsets so that we can begin this year to segregate the Social Security surplus from the general revenue surplus and not dip into the Social Security surplus any more. That requires good, firm decisions with reasonable offsets, and we've given them to the Congress. And I hope that the reaction across the country to their idea to raise taxes on the poor will provoke them to reconsider the offsets we have offered. Let me emphasize again, however, that this only underscores my judgment that I did the right thing in vetoing their tax cut. They can't even pay for this year's spending without getting into the Social Security surplus. They certainly couldn't pay for this year's spending, the spending it will necessitate in the years to come, and the tax cut on top of that. Japanese Nuclear Accident Q. Mr. President, are you confident that the kind of accident that happened in Japan can't happen here in America, or do you think that some additional steps need to be taken? The President. Well, I've asked our people to look at that, the appropriate authorities, to take a look at that. We had a similar incident in this country, I was informed yesterday, I think about 30 years ago. I think that's right. I wish I had the specifics. But we had a general conversation about it, and I said that I thought that we ought to have all of our people learn everything we could about what happened there, analyze our systems here, and make sure we've done everything we can to protect ourselves. There was a pretty good level of confidence that we had done that, yesterday. But I think that when something like this happens we realize we live in a world where perfection eludes us, and we've got to keep working on this. So that's what I've asked to be done. I also think, by the way though if I could just reemphasize, that this should again sensitize us to the importance of issues of nuclear safety. And if I could just mention one once again I'm in a dispute with a majority of Members of Congress over this Yucca Mountain Facility in Nevada. And my feeling that at the time it was selected, there was some science in there but perhaps some politics, too, since Nevada is a small State and I have wanted not to see this issue politicized but to bend over backwards to make sure we do everything we can to deal with the nuclear safety issue before we adopt this course. I still feel that way. I hope that generally all Americans will want to see us proceed in every area where we're dealing with nuclear safety. Social Security and Federal Spending Q. Mr. President, given the political crossfire over dipping into the Social Security surplus fund why don't you take the lead and invite GOP leaders down to the White House to discuss reasonable offsets and, as a last resort if need be, agree to spend money together? The President. Well, I am certainly willing to talk to them, and we are, as I'm sure you know, we're trying to keep the lines of communication open. And I hope that there will come a time when we can get the leaders of both parties in Congress together and agree on a future course. I think that is important. But they have to be also willing to have that sort of discussion first, and we're working on it. I'm very hopeful that they will decide that, as is usually the case in the United States, that doing the right thing for the American people is the best politics. They have decided that the right thing to do is to spend money that goes beyond the budget caps of '97, which is certainly understandable, particularly in the Medicare area, that they are too tight and that it would go beyond what the non Social Security surplus is. As I said yesterday, that has been the case at least since 1983 when the last Social Security reform was done and the revenues of Social Security came in, but no one really noticed it because we were always running a deficit. Then the Congress decided, and I agreed, that it would be a good thing, since we now project surpluses, to segregate out these two. That's a good thing. But they found out that they had committed to do it a year before they could do that and meet their spending goals. So, there are three choices here. Either really do harm to the country by not making some of these investments, which they don't want to do and I don't either or cut some things that I think would be a big mistake, like education or our responsibilities around the world or find reasonable offsets or otherwise make a principled agreement and tell the American people what we're doing or look for the gimmicks. And I think they've got to move away from the they chose the third alternative, gimmicks plus television ads, to try to blame us for doing what they are, in fact, doing. And I just think that's a mistake. I am perfectly willing to work with them and talk with them and tell the American people, whatever decision we wind up making, what we did and why if we can reach a principled agreement. Yesterday, at least, it looked to me like they wanted to stick with the course they're on. I think it's a big mistake, and I think eventually we'll get where we need to go and do the right thing. And they will find when we do, that politically it's almost always the best politics to do the right by the country. Florida A M Bombings Q. You've been sounding out against terrorism, and there is a quiet story coming out of Florida, Florida A M. Have you heard about the bombings at Florida A M? And there is supposedly a conclusion today to that situation. What are your thoughts? There have been several bombings at Florida A M. The President. Well, I would like to know more about the source of them, whether they're racially motivated, whether they're politically motivated. When I do, then I think I should make a statement. Obviously we deplore violence of any kind and bombings, by their very nature, are terroristic. But I would like to know more about what the roots of it are or what we believe they are, and then I will be glad to say more. Q. Were you made aware of the incidents before this week? The President. Just in the general way that you've described them, but no more. Thank you. September 21, 1999 Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, members of the United Nations General Assembly, good morning. I hope you will forgive me for being a little hoarse today. I will do the best I can to be heard. Today we look ahead to the new millennium, and at this last General Assembly of the 20th century, we look back on a century that taught us much of what we need to know about the promise of tomorrow. We have learned a great deal over the last 100 years how to produce enough food for a growing world population how human activity affects the environment the mysteries of the human gene an information revolution that now holds the promise of universal access to knowledge. We have learned that open markets create more wealth, that open societies are more just. We have learned how to come together, through the U.N. and other institutions, to advance common interests and values. Yet, for all our intellectual and material advances, the 20th century has been deeply scarred by enduring human failures, by greed and lust for power, by hot blooded hatreds and stone cold hearts. At century's end, modern developments magnify greatly the dangers of these timeless flaws. Powerful forces still resist reasonable efforts to put a human face on the global economy, to lift the poor, to heal the Earth's environment. Primitive claims of racial, ethnic, or religious superiority, when married to advanced weaponry and terrorism, threaten to destroy the greatest potential for human development in history, even as they make a wasteland of the soul. Therefore, we look to the future with hope but with unanswered questions. In the new millennium, will nations be divided by ethnic and religious conflicts? Will the nation state itself be imperiled by them or by terrorism? Will we keep coming closer together instead, while enjoying the normal differences that make life more interesting? In the new century, how will patriotism be defined, as faith in a dream worth living or fear and loathing of other people's dreams? Will we be free of the fear of weapons of mass destruction or forced to teach our grandchildren how to survive a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack? Will globalism bring shared prosperity or make the desperate of the world even more desperate? Will we use science and technology to grow the economy and protect the environment or put it to risk, put it all at risk in a world dominated by a struggle over natural resources? The truth is that the 20th century's amazing progress has not resolved these questions, but it has given us the tools to make the answers come out right, the knowledge, the resources, the institutions. Now we must use them. If we do, we can make the millennium not just a changing of the digits but a true changing of the times, a gateway to greater peace and prosperity and freedom. With that in mind, I offer three resolutions for the new millennium. First, let us resolve to wage an unrelenting battle against poverty and for shared prosperity so that no part of humanity is left behind in the global economy. Globalism is not inherently divisive. While infant mortality in developing countries has been cut nearly in half since 1970, life expectancy has increased by 10 years. According to the U.N.'s human development index, measuring a decent standard of living, a good education, a long and healthy life, the gap between rich and poor countries on this measure has actually declined. Open trade and new technologies have been engines of this progress. They've helped hundreds of millions to see their prospects rise by marketing the fruits of their labor and creativity abroad. With proper investment in education, developing countries should be able to keep their best and brightest talent at home and to gain access to global markets for goods and services and capital. But this promising future is far from inevitable. We are still squandering the potential of far too many 1.3 billion people still live on less than a dollar a day more than half the population of many countries have no access to safe water a person in South Asia is 700 times less likely to use the Internet than someone in the United States and 40 million people a year still die of hunger, almost as many as the total number killed in World War II. We must refuse to accept a future in which one part of humanity lives on the cutting edge of a new economy, while the other lives at the knife edge of survival. What must we do? Well, we can start by remembering that open markets advance the blessings and breakthroughs we want to spread. That's why we in the United States have worked to keep our markets open during the recent global financial crisis, though it has brought us record trade deficits. It is why we want to launch a new global trade round when the WTO meets in Seattle this fall why we are working to build a trading system that strengthens the well being of workers and consumers, protects the environment, and makes competition a race to the top, not the bottom why I'm proud we have come together at the ILO to ban abusive child labor everywhere in the world. We do not face a choice between trade and aid but instead the challenge to make both work for people who need them. Aid should focus on what is known to work credit for poor people starting business keeping girls in school meeting the needs of mothers and children. Development aid should be used for development, not to buy influence or finance donors' exports. It should go where governments invest in their people and answer their concerns. We should also come to the aid of countries struggling to rise, but held down by the burden of debt. The G 7 nations adopted a plan to reduce by up to 70 percent the outstanding debt of the world's poorest countries, freeing resources for education, health, and growth. All of us, developed and developing countries alike, should take action now to halt global climate change. Now, what has that to do with fighting poverty? A great deal. The most vulnerable members of the human family will be first hurt and hurt most, if rising temperatures devastate agriculture, accelerate the spread of disease in tropical countries, and flood island nations. Does this mean developing countries then must sacrifice growth to protect the environment? Absolutely not. Throughout history, a key to human progress has been willingness to abandon big ideas that are no longer true. One big idea that is no longer true is that the only way to build a modern economy is to use energy as we did in the industrial age. The challenge and opportunity for developing countries is to skip the cost of the industrial age by using technologies that improve the economy and the environment at the same time. Finally, to win the fight against poverty, we must improve health care for all people. Over the next 10 years in Africa, AIDS is expected to kill more people and orphan more children than all the wars of the 20th century combined. Each year diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia leave millions of children without parents, millions of parents without children. Yet, for all these diseases, vaccine research is advancing too slowly, in part because the potential customers in need are too poor. Only 2 percent of all global biomedical research is devoted to the major killers in the developing world. No country can break poverty's bonds if its people are disabled by disease and its government overwhelmed by the needs of the ill. With U.N. leadership, we've come close to eradicating polio, once the scourge of children everywhere. We're down to 5,000 reported cases worldwide. I've asked our Congress to fund a major increase to finish the job I ask other nations to follow suit. We've begun a comprehensive battle against the global AIDS epidemic. This year I'm seeking another 100 million for prevention, counseling, and care in Africa. I want to do more to get new drugs that prevent transmission from mothers to newborns, to those who need them most. And today I commit the United States to a concerted effort to accelerate the development and delivery of vaccines for malaria, TB, AIDS, and other diseases disproportionately affecting the developing world. Many approaches have been proposed, from tax credits to special funds for the purchase of these vaccines. To tackle these issues, I will ask public health experts, the chief executive officers of our pharmaceutical companies, foundation representatives, and Members of Congress to join me at a special White House meeting to strengthen incentives for research and development, to work with, not against, the private sector to meet our common goals. The second resolution I hope we will make today is to strengthen the capacity of the international community to prevent and, whenever possible, to stop outbreaks of mass killing and displacement. This requires, as we all know, shared responsibility, like the one West African nations accepted when they acted to restore peace in Sierra Leone the one 19 democracies in NATO embraced to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo the one Asian and Pacific nations have now assumed in East Timor, with the strong support from the entire United Nations, including the United States. Secretary General Annan spoke for all of us during the Kosovo conflict, and more recently in regard to East Timor, when he said that ethnic cleansers and mass murderers can find no refuge in the United Nations, no source of comfort or justification in its charter. We must do more to make these words real. Of course, we must approach this challenge with some considerable degree of humility. It is easy to say, "Never again," but much harder to make it so. Promising too much can be as cruel as caring too little. But difficulties, dangers, and costs are not an argument for doing nothing. When we are faced with deliberate, organized campaigns to murder whole peoples or expel them from their land, the care of victims is important but not enough. We should work to end the violence. Our response in every case cannot or should not be the same. Sometimes collective military forces is both appropriate and feasible. Sometimes concerted economic and political pressure, combined with diplomacy, is a better answer, as it was in making possible the introduction of forces in East Timor. Of course, the way the international community responds will depend upon the capacity of countries to act and on their perception of their national interests. NATO acted in Kosovo, for example, to stop a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing in a place where we had important interests at stake and the ability to act collectively. The same considerations brought Nigerian troops and their partners to Sierra Leone and Australians and others to East Timor. That is proper so long as we work together, support each other, and do not abdicate our collective responsibility. I know that some are troubled that the United States and others cannot respond to every humanitarian catastrophe in the world. We cannot do everything everywhere. But simply because we have different interests in different parts of the world does not mean we can be indifferent to the destruction of innocents in any part of the world. That is why we have supported the efforts of Africans to resolve the deadly conflicts that have raged through parts of their continent why we are working with friends in Africa to build the Africa crisis response initiative, which has now trained more than 4,000 peacekeepers from 6 countries why we are helping to establish an international coalition against genocide, to bring nations together to stop the flow of money and arms to those who commit crimes against humanity. There is also critical need for countries emerging from conflict to build police institutions, accountable to people and the law, often with the help of civilian police from other nations. We need international forces with the training to fill the gap between local police and military peacekeepers, as French, Argentine, Italian, and other military police have done in Haiti and Bosnia. We will work with our partners in the U.N. to continue to ensure such forces can deploy when they're needed. What is the role of the U.N. in preventing mass slaughter and dislocation? Very large. Even in Kosovo, NATO's actions followed a clear consensus expressed in several Security Council resolutions that the atrocities committed by Serb forces were unacceptable, that the international community had a compelling interest in seeing them end. Had we chosen to do nothing in the face of this brutality, I do not believe we would have strengthened the United Nations. Instead, we would have risked discrediting everything it stands for. By acting as we did, we helped to vindicate the principles and purposes of the U.N. Charter, to give the U.N. the opportunity it now has to play the central role in shaping Kosovo's future. In the real world, principles often collide, and tough choices must be made. The outcome in Kosovo is hopeful. Finally, as we enter this new era, let our third resolution be to protect our children against the possibility that nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons will ever be used again. The last millennium has seen constant advances in the destructive power of weaponry. In the coming millennium, this trend can continue, or if we choose, we can reverse it with global standards universally respected. We've made more progress than many realize. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine courageously chose to give up their nuclear weapons. America and Russia have moved forward with substantial arms reduction. President Yeltsin and I agreed in June, even as we await Russian ratification of START II, to begin talks on a START III treaty that will cut our cold war arsenals by 80 percent from their height. Brazil has joined the Non Proliferation Treaty, capping a process that has almost totally eliminated the threat of nuclear proliferation in Latin America. We banned chemical weapons from the Earth, though we must implement the commitment fully and gain universal coverage. One hundred and fifty two nations have signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and while India and Pakistan did test nuclear weapons last year, the international reaction proved that the global consensus against proliferation is very strong. We need to bolster the standards to reinforce that consensus. We must reaffirm our commitment to the NPT, strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention, make fast progress on a treaty to ban production of fissile materials. To keep existing stocks from the wrong hands, we should strengthen the Convention on Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials. And today, again, I ask our Congress to approve the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. We must stop the spread of nuclear weapons materials and expertise at the source. Since 1992, we have worked with Russia and the other nations of the former Soviet Union to do that. We are expanding that effort because challenges remain. But thus far, we can say that the nightmare scenario of deadly weapons flowing unchecked across borders, of scientists selling their services, en masse, to the highest bidder has been avoided. Now we must work to deny weapons of mass destruction to those who would use them. For almost a decade nations have stood together to keep the Iraqi regime from threatening its people and the world with such weapons. Despite all the obstacles Saddam Hussein has placed in our path, we must continue to ease the suffering of the people of Iraq. At the same time, we cannot allow the Government of Iraq to flout 40 and I say 40 successive U.N. Security Council resolutions and to rebuild his arsenal. Just as important is the challenge of keeping deadly weapons away from terrorist groups. They may have weaker capabilities than states, but they have fewer compunctions about using such weapons. The possibility that terrorists will threaten us with weapons of mass destruction can be met with neither panic nor complacency. It requires serious, deliberate, disciplined concern and effective cooperation from all of us. There are many other challenges. Today I have just spoken about three the need to do something about the world's poor and to put a human face on the global economy the need to do more to prevent killing and dislocation of innocents the need to do more to assure that weapons of mass destruction will never be used on our children. I believe they are the most important. In meeting them, the United Nations is indispensable. It is precisely because we are committed to the U.N. that we have worked hard to support the management effective management of this body. But the United States also has the responsibility to equip the U.N. with the resources it needs to be effective. As I think most of you know, I have strongly supported the United States meeting all its financial obligations to the United Nations, and I will continue to do so. We will do our very best to succeed this year. When the cold war ended, the United States could have chosen to turn away from the opportunities and dangers of the world. Instead, we have tried to be engaged, involved, and active. We know this moment of unique prosperity and power for the United States is a source of concern to many. I can only answer by saying this In the 7 years that I have been privileged to come here to speak to this body, America has tried to be a force for peace. We believe we are better off when nations resolve their differences by force of argument, rather than force of arms. We have sought to help former adversaries, like Russia and China, become prosperous, stable members of the world community, because we feel far more threatened by the potential weakness of the world's leading nations than by their strength. Instead of imposing our values on others, we have sought to promote a system of government, democracy, that empowers people to choose their own destinies according to their own values and aspirations. We have sought to keep our markets open, because we believe a strong world economy benefits our own workers and businesses as well as the people of the world who are selling to us. I hope that we have been and will continue to be good partners with the rest of you in the new millennium. Not long ago, I went to a refugee camp in Macedonia. The people I met there, children and adults alike, had suffered horrible, horrible abuses. But they had never given up hope because they believed that there is an international community that stood for their dignity and their freedom. I want to make sure that 20 or 50 or 100 years from now, people everywhere will still believe that about our United Nations. So let us resolve in the bright dawn of this new millennium to bring an era in which our desire to create will overwhelm our capacity to destroy. If we do that, then through the United Nations and farsighted leaders, humanity finally can live up to its name. Thank you very much. September 18, 1999 On behalf of the American people, I want to extend our deepest condolences to the families and friends of those who lost their lives in the recent terrorist bombings in Russia. We share your outrage over these cowardly acts. We know what kind of pain such tragedies can cause. Our own citizens have suffered from repeated acts of terrorism. Not very long ago, a terrorist bombing took the lives of more than 160 Americans in our State of Oklahoma. The World Trade Center in New York City was bombed. Last year bombings at our Embassies in east Africa took the lives of American diplomats, along with hundreds of Kenyans and Tanzanians. The crimes they suffered remind us that terrorism knows no borders, and that acts of terror anywhere are a threat to humanity everywhere. While we stand united with you in our grief, we also stand united with you in our resolve that terrorism will not go unpunished and will not undermine the work of democracy. The United States is ready to work with Russia and the Russian people to stand against the scourge of terrorism. We are working with the allies elsewhere to make sure there is no safe haven for terrorists, and we want to work with Russia to isolate nations that support terror. Together, we can ensure that the future belongs to peacemakers not bomb throwers. In the days ahead, our thoughts and our prayers will be with you as you work to rebuild from these terrible tragedies. August 20, 1999 Thank you very much. Let me begin by joining others in thanking Bob and Mia for having us in their beautiful, beautiful home and making us all feel at home. I thank Jack and Lyle for their work on the fundraisers and for all the many things they've done for me over many, many years. I thank all the board members of the American Ireland Fund who are here. And I congratulate you on honoring Tim Russert. You know, most of us who have tried to be professionally Irish laughter you know, we get our Irish shtick down, you know. This is about the best I've ever seen. Laughter And I say it because it is because it's genuine. You could feel it. You could feel it. His heart was in his remarks. You could see it was yesterday that he was a young man writing that statement for Senator Moynihan. For the American Irish, which is probably the largest diaspora in the world, the last 30 years of the Troubles have been a source of enormous heartbreak and frustration and sometimes downright disgust, but always, always, love. And I want to thank Tim for his continuing passionate commitment to the principles of peace and equality in Ireland. And I thank you for honoring him. I also want to thank you more than I can say for honoring Hillary with the proceeds of this fundraiser to Vital Voices. In so many ways in Ireland, we have moved almost in two different worlds in the last 6 1 2 years. And sometimes, I think her world will have more to do with whether peace really takes hold than the one that I have moved in. The first big decision I had to make was whether to give a visa to Gerry Adams. Remember? And I was told here I was, this ardent Anglophile who had spent 2 years in college in England and knew most of the Kings of England in order and all of that sort of stuff, and the Queen and they said, "Well, if you do this, you will just destroy the special relationship between the United States and Britain." And I said, "Well, if I don't do it, we're never going to get anybody off the dime over there." And so we made it absolutely clear that we would not tolerate terrorism, that this trip could not be used to raise money to buy guns or ammunition, that this was to be a gesture of peace. Well, the rest is history, good, bad, and indifferent, but at least it got us off the dime. And the Irish people have pretty well done the rest. They voted for the Good Friday accords in overwhelming numbers. We had the parliamentary elections following on them. We've had a lot of institutions start. But let me say that I think one of the things that made all this possible is the American Ireland Fund for the last 20 years. Why? Because all that money you raised and put in there created opportunity after opportunity after opportunity for people, and so they saw there could be a different future. You know, one of the problems you have if you go into a place like Kosovo now, to get people to quit killing each other and staying in the same old rut hating people because they're not in their tribe and the way they worship God or their ethnic group is that they cannot imagine a tomorrow that is different from yesterday and today. The American Ireland Fund, by just being there, in Ireland and in Northern Ireland for 20 years, you know, the place is booming now, but for most of the last 20 years it was about the poorest country in Europe. And you were there, day in and day out, month in and monthout, year in and year out, and I am telling you it made a difference. I know. I've been there. I've been on the streets. I've been in those neighborhoods. I've seen your projects. I've seen the people you've helped. And so as we move forward, you ought to remember that one of the reasons that the Good Friday accords were overwhelmingly embraced by the people in the Republic and in Northern Ireland is that they could visualize a different tomorrow. And the American Ireland Fund helped them to do that, and you should be very proud of yourself. But one of the things that I have learned from the Middle East, from Northern Ireland, from Kosovo and Bosnia, from the tribal wars in Africa I've tried to help deal with, is that in addition to people being able to visualize a different tomorrow, you have to have leaders who can let go. There was reconciliation in South Africa because Nelson Mandela could let go and he had a whole lot more to let go of than most of the Irish do. I mean, let's fess up here. Laughter He had a lot more to let go of than most of the Irish do. But because he could let go, we were able to make peace. And that's why I said what I did about Hillary and the Vital Voices. We've had some of these women in the White House in the Oval Office. They're very practical. I mean, people that have buried their children. They still get up in the morning, and they have to go to the store and buy food, and they have to do this, that, and the other thing, do practical things. And they are enormously practical people, and they have no vested interest in the continuation of the conflict. And so I say to you that helping these people in Vital Voices will make more than the park that Hillary talked about there will be lots of parks like that and lots of things that people will do together. And you've got to get these kids out here. You see if you see kids in Ireland, if you see kids in the Middle East, if you see kids anywhere who get to each other soon enough before they're taught how to hate, they change the whole future. And the last thing I want to say is this You all those of you who are really interested in this, you know what the deal is now. We had a big election, and the Good Friday accord was approved. Then we had elections for Parliament, and they worked. They were honest, and they were full, and everybody got into the Parliament at Stormont. And I went there and shook hands with them all. But the agreement that said anybody that got over a certain percentage of vote in the election would also be in the executive branch and Sinn Fein got enough to get in the agreement also said that there would be decommissioning that would be finished within 18 months according to a schedule to be set up by the Commission, which now is headed by General de Chastelain, the former Canadian Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So we're back to that old trust issue because the Unionists don't want Sinn Fein in the executive until they have a symbolic act of decommissioning, and the IRA say, "Well, we don't want to do that until we know we're not going to get snookered." Well, obviously, this is at some level, it almost looks like two kids daring each other to go first. But if you look beneath that, the IRA say, "Well, it's our people that voted for the peace. We wanted to render our arms to them, not to the other side and have them claim that they got some victory over us this is a victory that the people together voted for." So this argument goes on endlessly. Now, let me tell you, the good news is that everybody on all sides agrees to all parts of the Good Friday accords everybody on all sides agrees that it all has to be done by next May. Nobody wants to get rid of anything else about the agreement, and the only problem we've got left is the sequencing of standing up the executive branch and decommissioning. That is all that will be discussed when Senator Mitchell reconvenes the group on September 6th. And when the Good Friday agreements were reached, it was anticipated that roadblocks might develop, and so they set this up. So all I would say to all of you is that part of this problem is trust, and at some point, they're going to have to figure out a way that they're both trusting each other at the same time. So you get out of this "you go first." You know, it's like two kids standing on a big old diving board holding hands and looking down into a deep pool. Part of it is that, unlike the women that Hillary deals with in Vital Voices, some of these folks have been doing this for so long that their whole identity is caught up in the continuation of the conflict. I say this in all respect. I'm not attacking them, but it's true. So what we have to do is to find ways to help them let go. And that's why the work of the American Ireland Fund is still important. Even though the economy is going like crazy I've talked to Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern about this repeatedly we have got to target those critical decisionmakers and give them an image of a life they can have that will be meaningful and rich. I don't mean materially rich I mean it'll have a lot of texture and meaning and standing in the community if they let go. So thank you for what you've done. Thank you for supporting Vital Voices. The women are doing better than the men now in promoting peace, for the reasons I've said. Laughter But this deal in September may be our last chance for a generation, and we cannot blow it. It's too late to turn back now, as Mr. Morrison sang. Laughter It is too late. And so we need the voices. I can look at people in this room that I know I've been working on this now with many of you for a long time. We have got to help them let go. And you can do it. Thank you, and God bless you. August 16, 1999 Thank you very much, Commander Pouliot distinguished officers of the VFW Congressman Skelton Congressman Moore Congresswoman Kaptur Secretary West and Deputy Secretary Gober ladies and gentlemen. It is a great honor for me to be here in Kansas City today to help to celebrate a hundred proud years for the Veterans of Foreign Wars. You should clap for yourselves. Applause That's good. I'd like to begin with just a few reflections of what these 100 years mean for you and for the United States. We are less than 150 days now from the beginning of one century and the end of another, which many have called the American Century. Lately, there have been a number of looks back at the people and personalities and events that made this 20th century the leaders who led freedom's triumph over tyranny, like Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Marshall inventors like the Wright brothers, whose ideas changed the way we lived moral forces like Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose ideas and examples changed the world scientists like Dr. Jonas Salk, whose discoveries liberated a generation of parents from the mortal fear that their children would have polio and be crippled. But if you ask who has been most responsible for making this the American Century, one answer would be at the top of anyone's list after two World Wars and a long cold war. That answer would be America's service men and women. Today, as we celebrate your centennial anniversary, we must never forget that tens, even hundreds of millions of people, in the United States and all around the world sleep in peace because hundreds of thousands of Americans rest in peace in graves, marked and unmarked, all across the world, fallen veterans of foreign wars. It is no accident, therefore, that the American Century also marks the VFW century. For over the last 100 years, America's men and women have sacrificed whatever was necessary, not for territorial gain, nor for the domination of others, but to secure the rights and freedoms of others so that Americans might have their freedom secure. You have made our Nation proud. Thanks to you, we will begin a new century with a truly historic achievement, for in the last few years, for the first time in all of human history, more than half the world's people live under free governments freely elected. Still, you and I know this is not a world free from danger. There is the potential for major wars, rooted in ethnic and religious hatred. There is the chance that former adversaries will not succeed in their transition to democracy and could become adversaries again. There is the risk that nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons will fall into the wrong hands. There is the risk of terrorist groups with increasing access to money, to technology, to sophisticated weaponry. There is the possibility that global financial vulnerabilities could overwhelm free societies. Therefore, we cannot assume that, because we are today secure and at peace, we don't need military strength or alliances or that, because we are today prosperous, we are immune from turmoil half a world away. America must still be engaged in the world, working with others to advance peace and prosperity, freedom and security, and America must remain strong. That is what our most recent conflict in Kosovo was all about. I want to thank you profoundly for the support the VFW gave us during the conflict there. I know it wasn't easy for you to do. We were still in the early stages of the longest and most difficult military campaign in the 50 year history of NATO. Critics were convinced from the beginning that we could not succeed. But you stood with us, and more importantly, you stood with our men and women in uniform. NATO and the United States prevailed. We are all grateful for your support. Many of you in this room today fought in World War II against the tyrants who preached racial and religious superiority. In Kosovo, innocent men, women, and children were systematically targeted for killing and mass expulsion by their governments simply because of their ethnic heritage or the way they chose to worship God. After World War II, after ending the 4 year war of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, NATO could not accept that kind of behavior on its own borders. It could not stand by, once again, and see people driven from their homes, loaded on railcars, having their history erased. So, instead, the century ends with a powerful statement by NATO's 19 democracies, reaffirming human life and human dignity, giving us the chance after two World Wars, the cold war, and the Balkan conflicts, for the first time ever to have an undivided, democratic, and peaceful Europe. It shares our values, strengthens our economy, helps us meet our common aspirations, and will not call young Americans to go there to fight and die in the 21st century. We prevailed in Kosovo because our cause was just, our goals were clear, our Alliance were strong, and our strategy worked, thanks to the performance of our men and women in uniform. In 78 days, they flew more than 37,000 support and strike sorties in the face of constant danger, including surface to air missiles. Many times our pilots risked their lives because they would not fire back at the Serb gunners who were positioned in heavily populated areas and they didn't want to kill innocent civilians. In the end, thank God we had zero combat fatalities and only two planes shot down. That is an astonishing record and a tribute to the professionalism we see every day from our military forces the world over. They are good people. They are good people who are well trained, well led, and well equipped. Rigorous training is critical and, as all of you know, dangerous in and of itself. Indeed, we must always remember our two Army airmen who died in training exercises in Albania during the Kosovo conflict. And we thank God there weren't more casualties in Kosovo, in part because the men and women trained so hard with the world's best equipment. As long as I am President, I intend to keep the commitment I made from the first day of our administration that our men and women in uniform will remain the best trained, the best equipped, the best prepared military in the entire world. All of you know we have challenges in keeping that commitment. Thanks to the strength of our economy, in part, we're having a harder time recruiting and keeping some of our best people. And we have a lot of tough decisions to make to maintain the readiness of our equipment and to keep ahead of the latest generation in military developments. I have asked Congress for the support necessary to deal with these challenges. I believe it will be forthcoming, and I ask for your support in making sure that it is. We also recognize another simple truth here, on your centennial The troops of tomorrow will only be as good as our commitment to veterans today. Way back in 1903, Theodore Roosevelt said, "A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards." One of the great privileges I have had in being President is to work for and with our country's veterans and their organizations. The White House doors have been open to veterans, to help to shape policy affecting veterans, especially when it comes to critical matters like health care. Early in our administration, Hershel Gober recommended that we look for ways to bring health care closer to veterans who needed it. Since then we have opened more than 600 outpatient clinics all across America and have more planned over the next 2 years. We expect to treat 400,000 more veterans this year than last year. We've also confronted some long neglected problems head on. We've reached out to more than 40,000 veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange, to tell them about the expanded benefits available to them. I pressed hard for answers to the Gulf war syndrome and proper care for those who suffer from it. We are in the process of building five new national cemeteries, the most since the Civil War. And we are making a special effort to end something I know is unacceptable to all of us here today, homeless veterans. They should be brought back into the society they did so much to defend. In all these efforts, I want to thank Secretary West, his predecessor, Secretary Brown, and Deputy Secretary Gober and all those at the Department of Veterans Affairs that have worked so hard to reach out to you and to work with you. We know there is more to do. As Vice President Gore announced last month, we will continue to work with the VFW and others to make sure that all veterans receive the high quality care they deserve next year and every year, and we expect this year's budget to reflect that commitment. I would like to make another point today. Standing by our military and standing by our veterans means more than simply preparing people to fight wars and taking care of them after they wear our Nation's uniform. We must also work with equal determination to prevent wars. That means paying attention not only to military readiness but to diplomatic readiness as well. We know that if diplomacy is not backed by real, credible threats of force, it can be empty, indeed, dangerous. But if we don't use diplomacy first to promote our interests, if we rely on our military as the only line of defense, it almost certainly will become our only line of defense. Of course, international engagement costs money, but the costliest peace is far cheaper than the cheapest war. Ever since I became President, I've been trying hard to convince Congress of that basic truth. It has been a considerable challenge. Our international affairs programs, which fund everything from resolving conflicts to strengthening young democracies, to combating terrorism, to fighting dangerous drugs, to promoting our exports, to maintaining our Embassies all around the world, amount to less than one percent of the Federal budget and less than one fifteenth of our defense budget. But I regret to say that since 1985 these programs have been cut significantly. This year the House and Senate have passed spending bills that would cut our request for international affairs by more than 2 billion. In other words, we're cutting the very programs designed to keep our soldiers out of war in the first place. Underfunding our arsenal of peace is as risky as underfunding our arsenal for war. For if we continue to underfund diplomacy, we will end up overusing our military. Problems we might have been able to resolve peacefully will turn into crises that we can only resolve at a cost of life and treasure. If this trend continues, there will be real consequences for important American interests. Let me mention just a few, beginning with our interest in peace and stability across the Atlantic. Today, after the victory in Kosovo and in Bosnia, we have an opportunity to invest in peace so that future wars do not occur there. The people of the Balkans have been crippled by conflict, really, since the end of the cold war. Today, we have a chance to integrate them with each other and into the mainstream of Europe, where they will have strong incentives to maintain democracy and good behavior and avoid conflicts. To do this, we don't need anything as ambitious as the Marshall plan. And whatever is done, we must insist that our European partners carry most of the load and that Balkan leaders themselves take responsibility for changing their policies. Still, the United States should be a part of this process. If we don't and the effort fails, make no mistake, there will be another bloody war that starts in the Balkans and spreads throughout southeastern Europe. And some day, more young Americans may be asked to risk their lives at far greater cost than our part of the rebuilding of the region. If we are to succeed in winning the peace, we may see a 21st century I'll say again in which we do not have to send the young people of America to fight in another European war. That is a worthy objective. We have seen enough wars in Europe, claiming the lives of their children and America's young people. Now we have a chance to avoid it, and we ought to take the chance. We also have a responsibility to protect American people from the dangers most likely to surface in the 21st century. The gravest of those may not be another country launching a nuclear weapon but that weapons of mass destruction will fall into the hands of terrorists and their rogue state sponsors. We have worked to reduce that doomsday scenario. Since 1992, our support has helped to deactivate almost 5,000 nuclear warheads in the former Soviet Union to eliminate nuclear weapons from three former Soviet republics to strengthen the security of weapons and materials at over 100 sites to tighten export controls in Russia and to purchase hundreds of tons, literally hundreds of tons, of highly enriched uranium that otherwise could be used for nuclear weapons that end up in the wrong hands. This effort has received strong bipartisan support in the Congress for which I am very grateful. Today, the Russian economy is struggling, as we all know. The average salary of a highly trained weapons scientist in Russia listen to this the average salary of a highly trained weapons scientist in Russia is less than 100 a month. Now, for a small investment, we can help them turn that expertise to peaceful projects that help the world and draw a living wage doing it. Or we can do nothing and pray that each and every one of those thousands of scientists will somehow resist the temptation to market their expertise to those who wish to do us and the cause of freedom harm. Common sense says to me that we ought to give them something useful and good to do and let them make a decent living. That's why, in my State of the Union Address, I proposed increasing funding for threat reduction by two thirds over the next 5 years. I want to work with Congress to make these investments to make the world a safer place. Another challenge is to create a durable and comprehensive peace in the region that every President since Richard Nixon has considered among the most dangerous in the world, the Middle East. Today, we have a real opportunity to do that. The new Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, formerly the commander of all Israel's military forces, has set forth an ambitious agenda to reach agreement within the next 15 months and to move the process beyond the setbacks of recent years. Both Israelis and Palestinians now are determined to move forward. But the enemies of peace stand ready to strike to undercut this path. That is why last fall, when the two sides made a commitment to peace at the Wye River talks, we made a commitment to them, as well. As the United States has done ever since the Camp David accords in the late 1970's, we told the Israelis that we would help them minimize the risks of peace and lift the lives of the Palestinian people. We told the Jordanians that we would help promote their safety and their wellbeing. Now, I know that's a long way away. But you know if there's a full scale war in the Middle East, it will affect our interests and our values. The Middle East is home to all three of the world's great religions that hold we are created by one God. We have a chance to see it become a place of peace. If it becomes again a place of war, it will cost us far more than investing in a common, shared, peaceful future. The conflict has gone on for too long. We have a historic opportunity to end it. If the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Jordanians ultimately, the Syrians and the Lebanese if they all are willing to do their part, we must do ours, and we ought to begin by keeping our word to fund the Wye River peace process. We also have an opportunity, believe it or not, to move beyond a series of cruel conflicts in Africa. In the last 3 weeks, in efforts led not by the United States, although we supported them, but by the African countries themselves, we have seen signs for hope in the resolution of devastating conflicts, especially in the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which has claimed more than 70,000 lives already. We have seen the most populous country in Africa, Nigeria, hold a democratic election and bring to an end 15 years of misrule. All this is very good news. It means that the largest untapped market for our products in the world, a continent of over 700 million people, that provides nearly as much oil to us as we get from the Middle East, will now have a chance to develop in freedom and peace and shared prosperity with us and other freedom loving people. Now, the African countries don't want the United States to solve their problems or to deploy our military. All they've asked us to do, at a small cost, is to support their efforts to resolve conflicts on their own, to keep the peace, to build better lives for their people, and to develop competent militaries. These efforts don't make a lot of headlines. I'll bet most of you don't know much about them. That's good, because the point is to avoid headlines, headlines about famine and refugee crisis and genocide, and to replace them, instead, with stories of partnership and shared prosperity. These are the stories we can write now, again, if Congress will invest only a tiny portion of what we spend on defense on avoiding war in the first place. Finally, there is the question of the United Nations. One of the great legacies of our victory in World War II is an institution where nations seek to resolve differences with words instead of weapons. Paying our dues to that organization is a legal and a moral responsibility. It ought to be reason enough to do so. If we fail to do so soon, the United States will actually lose its vote in the General Assembly. But obligation is not the only reason for doing this so is opportunity. The U.N. helps us to mobilize the support of other nations for goals Americans cherish, from keeping the peace to immunizing children, to caring for refugees, to combating the spread of deadly weapons. We've been working with growing success to make sure that the U.N. operates better, at lower cost. But we have to do our part. Unless we want America to pay all the costs and take all the risks to solve the world's big problems, we have to work with others, and that means paying our fair share of dues, like every other country does, to the United Nations. The bottom line is this Today, we have a unique opportunity and a real responsibility to advance the values in the world won in the 20th century over the last 100 years by America's veterans. But if we have only one arrow in our quiver, our military, we sacrifice the work of peace and increase the risk of war. We have to do our part to keep the world on a stable path toward democracy, the democracy that every single one of you put your lives on the line to defend. That's how President Truman felt. Fifty years ago this week he spoke to you at the VFW's Golden Jubilee Convention. Listen to what he said, and you can feel it here, because we're not very far from his hometown. Harry Truman said, "Peace with freedom and justice cannot be bought cheaply. It can only be assured by the combined efforts of the multitudes of people throughout the world who want a secure peace. We must keep them our friends if the world is to be a decent place for our children and their grandchildren to live." Harry Truman was a pretty smart fellow. Just 2 months ago I visited a refugee camp full of Kosovar Albanians in Macedonia. I wish every one of you could have been there. As I walked through the camp, these young children started chanting spontaneously, "U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.," thanking Americans for giving them a chance to reclaim their lives in their native land. They've all gone home now, by the way over 90 percent of the refugees from Kosovo are home. But it reminded me of my trip to Normandy for the 50th anniversary of D day in 1994. In Normandy, we all heard stories, from our veterans, of French citizens who came up to them, took their hands, and told them that they were very young, 50 years ago, but they would always remember what Americans did for them and what it meant to them. I hope that in 50 years, some of our veterans from the conflict in Kosovo will go back there, and the children from that refugee camp, who will then be in their middle years, will take their hands and say, "Fifty years ago I was chanting, U.S.A., U.S.A.,' with my voice, but I still chant with my heart." We are very grateful to you, all of you. So on this centennial anniversary, on behalf of a grateful nation and grateful people throughout the world, I say to every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, and coastguardsman, to every man and woman who fought bravely for our Nation and brought dignity to the world, thank you for a job well done. May we look forward to a century in which all your sacrifice and all your service is honored and redeemed with the greatest peace and prosperity the world has ever known. Thank you, and God bless you. August 09, 1999 Thank you very much. Thank you, Secretary Cohen and Janet. Let me begin by thanking the Secretary for his remarks, his devotion, his remarkable leadership, and his willingness to serve in our administration, to prove that when it comes to the national security of the United States, we are beyond party, and all Americans. General Shelton, thank you for your leadership and for your remarks. And we are delighted to be joined today not only by your wonderful wife, Carolyn, but also by your mother. We're glad she came up to be with us. Thanks, Secretary Slater, Secretary West, Senator Thurmond, for being here. Senator Thurmond may be the only person here who served in the military before there was a Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was at D day, and he's here 55 years later, and we're delighted to have him. In both places, he has served our country well. Thank you, Senator. I thank the service secretaries, the members of the Joint Chiefs who are here, General Ralston and others, and the former members of the Joint Chiefs, and all the other officers who are here. One in particular I would like to mention, General Wes Clark, because of his extraordinary leadership in our most recent military victory in Kosovo. I thank him and all the men and women of our Armed Forces who have served there. I especially want to welcome here the former Chairmen and their wives Admiral and Mrs. Moorer, General and Mrs. Jones, General and Mrs. Vessey, Admiral and Mrs. Crowe, General and Mrs. Shalikashvili, and, of course, Alma Powell. We're glad to have them here. Fifty years ago you've heard a lot about already today, but I think it is worth remembering what it was like to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 50 years ago. It was a new job. It was clearly overwhelmingly preoccupied with the onset of the cold war and the need to defend Europe. But soon after General Omar Bradley was summoned to assume the job, war broke out in Korea. So he had not only to defend Europe, but also to defend freedom in South Korea, and fulfill the job description to coordinate the services, and also to coordinate with the State Department and the White House. We have our White House Chief of Staff, Mr. Podesta, and the National Security Adviser, Mr. Berger, and others who are here. I think we can say with some conviction that sometimes the hardest military job of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is his coordination with the White House. And it has been so for 50 years. But General Bradley and then 13 other remarkable leaders have found a way to do that, and at the same time, to provide wise and honest counsel at crucial moments to every President and Secretary of the Defense. And I would like to stop a moment and emphasize that. There will come a time in the service of every President in my time it has come, unfortunately, on several occasions when you have to have the honest advice of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And very often, it is the last thing in the world you want to hear, because he will either tell you that you really can't achieve the objective you want to achieve for the price you're willing to pay, or that you have to do something that you'd rather to go to the dentist without novocaine than do. And I can tell you that, without exception, every time a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has had to do that to me, he has done it. He has served our country well he has served the President well he has served the military and the men and women in uniform well. This institution has worked because the people who are part of it did what they were required to do in times of crisis. And our country should be very grateful to all of them. Just think what has happened over the last 50 years. We look back on 50 years of constant vigilance, of two hot wars and a long cold war, of military victories in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans, of difficulties like the Cuban missile crisis and many others too numerous to mention. But through it all, and though new threats emerged continuously, we see the march to freedom, and we see the depth of America's security. We can look forward to the 21st century with genuine confidence, in no small measure because of the 14 leaders we honor today. So again, I say, along with the Secretary of Defense, to those who are here, to the surviving families of those who are not, and to those who could not be with us today, our Nation is grateful. You have served it well. I was very privileged to work with three Chairs Colin Powell, John Shalikashvili, and Hugh Shelton to work very closely with the previous Chairman, Bill Crowe, who has been my Ambassador to Great Britain and has done a lot of important work to alert us to the continuing dangers to our Embassies and their personnel from terrorists. I had the privilege of getting good counsel on the very difficult POW MIA issue from General Vessey, and on our efforts to save innocent civilians from the dangers of landmines by General Jones. Of course, I still hear from General Powell on a regular basis about his work with America's Promise and our shared interest in it. The more I know the people who are involved in these endeavors, the more my esteem for them grows. I always have separation anxiety when someone important leaves. When Shali walked out the door and went all the way across the country, I thought Joan would never let him come back. But I've even found something for him to do from time to time that doesn't get him in too much trouble at home. These people are unique. They have these unique experiences that they blend with their abilities and their patriotism. And I think we should think just a moment about the position beyond the question of advice to the President. If you think about it, with the world changing as much as it is today, and with the United States occupying the rather unique position we occupy at this moment in history, there are few positions which require the occupant to think harder about the threats the Nation faces and will face. There are few which force a leader to weigh more soberly the costs of action which in a world where people are comfortable, are very high against the costs down the road of inaction. There are few which require a person to spend as much time thinking about how to avoid war as how to win one if it should become necessary. General Bradley said a long time ago that the way to win a nuclear war is to make sure it never starts. I would like to thank the former Chairs of the Joint Chiefs who have endorsed the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to end nuclear testing forever, proposed by President Eisenhower, championed by President Kennedy, signed now by the United States and over 150 other countries 41 of them have ratified it. Four of our former Chairs General Jones, Admiral Crowe, General Powell, General Shalikashvili have issued a statement endorsing the treaty, agreeing with the current Chair, General Shelton, that it is in America's interest. Why? Because we have already stopped testing our leading experts say we can maintain a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent without further tests and the only remaining question is, will we join or lose a verifiable treaty that can prevent other countries from testing nuclear weapons. If we don't ratify it, by its terms the treaty can't enter into force. And countries all around the world will feel more pressure to develop and test weapons in ever more destructive varieties and sizes, threatening the security of everyone on Earth. So today, once again, as we honor the Joint Chiefs, the individuals and the institution, I ask the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to hold hearings on the treaty this fall and the full Senate to vote for ratification as soon as possible. This will strengthen national security not only of the United States but of people around the world. This will help the new Chairs of the Joint Chiefs in the future not only to prepare for war but to avoid it. Let me finally say that as we approach a new century, we can still be proud, indeed, never prouder, of our men and women in uniform. Thanks to their courage and skill in the most recent campaign in Kosovo, a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing has been reversed our alliance has been preserved and strengthened there is new hope for a world where people are not murdered or uprooted because of their ethnic heritage or the way they choose to worship God. Operation Allied Force was a truly remarkable military campaign over 30,000 sorties flown no combat casualties. Still we must not indulge the illusion of a risk free war. In Kosovo, our pilots risked their lives every day. They took enemy fire, faced enemy aircraft, time and again put themselves in even greater danger just to avoid hitting civilians on the ground. And we know not every conflict will be like Kosovo not every battle can be won from the air. We must remember, too, that the rigorous training we require of our men and women in uniform is in itself dangerous. We lost two helicopter pilots training in Kosovo. In every single year, we lose a good number of men and women in uniform just doing their duty. Our job from the top down is to reduce the risks of their service as much as we can and to send our service men and women into harm's way only when we're certain that the purpose is clear, the mission is achievable, and all peaceful options have been exhausted. When we do send them, we have to make sure they have the tools to do the job. We must always match their skill and courage with a high level of readiness. And we must always prepare today for tomorrow's threats. All those jobs, in the end, fall on the shoulders of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In his remarkable memoir of World War II, Omar Bradley wrote the following words. He said, "No matter how high an officer's rank, it's important to scoff at the myth of the indispensable man. For we have always maintained that Arlington Cemetery is filled with indispensable men." Now, that statement is a tribute to his decency and his humility. Nevertheless, for 50 years now, the role of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been indispensable to the preservation of life on this planet from nuclear holocaust, to the security of the United States, and to the march of freedom across the world. Fourteen Americans of great ability and even more intense patriotism have occupied that office and made it indispensable. So, to all of those who are here and their families and those who are not here today, a grateful nation says, thank you, thank you, thank you. August 07, 1999 Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for being here, and thanks for being in such a good humor. My remarks tonight could be summed up in two phrases Thank you for everything here's Al. Laughter I want to begin by saying to Mark Pryor how much I appreciate his taking on this responsibility for the Vice President. I once did the same thing in the same job for President Carter, and I hope you have the same result. I want to thank Blanche Lincoln for being here, for her support of our administration and of the Vice President, but most of all, for the people of this wonderful State of ours. It really is true that you know, when Blanche decides that she wants something for Arkansas, you can let her wear you out, exhaust you, break you down until you're prostrate on the floor, and you'll do it, or you just go on and do it anyway. Those are really the only two alternatives. I want to thank Congressman Berry and Congressman Snyder for representing you so well and being such steadfast allies. I thank them. I thank the members of the Congressional Black Caucus who have joined us here today from other States in the South. And I thank Senator Bumpers and Senator Pryor for coming. I miss them. You know, Dale called me last week and told me a joke laughter and it isn't repeatable from this podium. Laughter But it was just like old times. And I was kind of feeling low when he did it I worked for another 3 or 4 hours in a fabulous frame of mind after he did that. Now I've got to try to give the rest of this introduction without thinking about the punch line and laughing in the middle. Laughter I want to say just about three things tonight. The first thing I want to say is this. Yesterday, before I left Washington, we announced that the country has now produced more than 19 million jobs since I became President, as part of the longest peacetime expansion in history, which has given us the highest homeownership, the lowest minority unemployment in history, a 30 year low in unemployment, a 32 year low in welfare rolls, a 26 year low in the crime rate. The air and the water is cleaner the food is safer 90 percent of our children are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time. Because of the HOPE scholarship, virtually every kid in this country can get a 1,500 tax credit to pay for tuition to go to college. A hundred thousand young people have served their country in AmeriCorps in 4 years. It took the Peace Corps 20 years to reach that milestone. We have been a force for peace from Bosnia and Kosovo to Northern Ireland to the Middle East. And what I want you to know is I could not have achieved any of those things without the leadership and the support and the aggressive efforts of Vice President Al Gore. In 1993, when all the Republicans said that the country would go down the drain if Bill Clinton's idea of economics which was to return to basic arithmetic instead of smoke and mirrors took off, he cast the deciding vote on the economic plan. And the rest is history. We went from the biggest deficit to the biggest surplus in the history of the country. We made a decision that we wanted to do something to try to bring economic opportunity to people in places who had been left behind with the empowerment zone program, the enterprise community program. He personally ran it, and it's been a terrific success. And a lot of you know that I was in the Mississippi Delta region of our State this week, and in the Delta and on Indian reservations and Appalachia a couple of weeks ago, trying to take nationally the approach pioneered by Al Gore, proving that we can bring opportunity to poor people who want jobs in this country. Everybody in Arkansas ought to be concerned about whether we can get computers into all of our schools and hook them all up by the year 2000. And one of the things that we don't want to do is to go into the 21st century with a big digital divide between the rich and the poor. Al Gore led the fight to make sure that the Federal Government required all the schools in this country to have affordable rates so that every classroom in the poorest schools in America can be hooked up to the Internet. He did that, and he deserves credit for it. And there are so many more things that I can hardly list them all. But just let me say one thing. The management of our national security and for our foreign relations is very important. He has handled very important, complicated, difficult aspects of our relationships with Russia. He has dealt with any number of other countries. He played a major role in the decisions we made when they were not popular to liberate Bosnia and Kosovo from ethnic cleansing, to free the people of Haiti from a military dictatorship, to push ahead with our support for the peace process in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, to stand up to terrorists around the world and organize the world against it. In short, to prepare for the world we are living in. People can say many things about these last 6 1 2 years. Historians may have their different evaluations. There is one thing, I will make you a prediction, that there will not be a single voice of dissent on Al Gore has been the single most influential, effective, powerful, important Vice President in the history of the United States of America. Now, the second thing I want to tell you is this He understands what the purpose of this election is. He understands it's a job interview. He wants you to hire him, and he's gone to the trouble of telling you what he'll do if you give him the job. Now, that may sound laughable to you. I think one of the reasons we've enjoyed the success we have is that I was forced to think through in advance what I'd do if I got the job, and I told the American people in greater detail than anyone ever had. Then when I asked Al to join me, we revised we sat down together, and we went over every plan, and we revised it, and we put it out again. And now that he's running, he's told you what his economic policy will be, what his anticrime policy will be, how he wants to use faith based groups in communities to help solve social problems, how he wants to go out and do dramatic new things with medical research, to cure cancer and other things, and exactly how he proposes to do it. And here's why that's important. Our generation our generation, the baby boomers have got an opportunity, because of the work we've done the last 6 1 2 years, to save Social Security, to save Medicare and provide a prescription drug benefit, and to do it in a way so that when we retire, our kids don't have to support us and undermine their ability to raise our grandchildren. We have the opportunity to invest in the education of all of our children, so that we'll have world class opportunities for the poor, the rich, the in between of all races and backgrounds, so that our country will be strong. And we have the opportunity to get this country out of debt for the first time since 1835. Now, what I want you to understand is, we're living in a dynamic time. We're still embracing change. Our administration is the force for positive change. This is not going to be change versus the status quo election. This election is about what kind of change do you want and do you want to build on what's worked and go beyond it, or do you want to go back to the ways that got us in the ditch in the first place? That's what the issue is. And you don't have to guess with Al Gore, not only because of his record, but because he's given you a roadmap. And the third thing I want to tell you is this I have been with this man in every conceivable kind of circumstance, good and bad, personal and political. We have talked about our children. We have talked about our parents and their deaths. We have talked about every conceivable subject, personal and political. I know him as few people do. He is a good person. He is a decent person. He is a strong person. If everything was on the line and I had to pick an American to make a decision that I knew would be good for my country when my daughter is my age, I would pick Al Gore, and so should you. Ladies and gentlemen, Vice President Al Gore. July 20, 1999 Thank you very much. I want to thank you all for your welcome, and I want to thank my good friend Janice for her instruction. I did know, as a matter of fact, that she was from a place called Hope. I didn't know that I had the endorsement of her father in quite that way. Laughter But I appreciate it more than I can say. I want to thank John Merrigan and Penny and Susie, and I want to thank Joe Andrew and Beth Dozoretz and all of you who have worked so hard to put our party on the soundest financial footing. I think Mr. Merrigan said we were out of debt for the first time since '91. I should point out that we were outspent by 100 million in 1998 and still picked up House seats, the first time it had happened in the sixth year of an administration since 1822. I say that to say that it is not necessary that we have as much money as the other side does. You know, the economy the Democrats have built has been an equal opportunity beneficiary. And so we have showered benefits on Republicans, as well as Democrats. And if they choose to misspend their money, there's nothing we can do about it, is there? Laughter It's a free economy. But it is necessary that we have enough. And if we have a good message and we stand for the right things and our people are excited, then that is enough, and I thank you for that. We were talking at our table I have a friend who is a New York Democrat who heads quite a large American company, and he said he'd gotten so exasperated with these Republicans throwing their money around he started going up to his friends in New York saying, "You should give money to the Republicans if your taxes went up in 1993 by more than you've made in the stock market, support them. But if the balanced budget and the low interest rates and the tripling of the stock market have benefited you more, you ought to be for us. And if you're not, you're not even acting in your own best interest, much less the country's." Laughter I want to talk to you just very briefly tonight, not so much about your own best interests, but about our own best interests. And I want to begin by thanking all of you. Thank you for your support, many of you for your repeated support over these years some of you for your involvement in this administration, like Dr. Susan Blumenthal thank you very much for being here. Thank you for being so good to me and Hillary and to Al and Tipper Gore. And thank you for doing something that has been very good for America. I want to make just a few brief points, in case somebody tomorrow gives you a quiz and asks you why you came tonight. This country was in trouble in 1991 and 1992. It was in trouble because we had been in a prolonged recession, but even more because we kept coming out of these recessions and dripping back in, coming out and drip back in. We hadn't had any sustained growth for some time. It was in trouble because the crime rates and the welfare rolls were rising. It was in trouble because our country was becoming more divided. It was in trouble because the political debate in Washington left most Americans cold, because there seemed to be a debate between people who essentially were against the Government doing anything and people who wanted to preserve the status quo of what the Government had been doing. The country was in trouble. I ran for President because I had some ideas about how we could change things. I believed that we could create a country again in which there was opportunity for every responsible citizen, in which we had a community of all Americans who were responsible for themselves and for each other, in which we led the world for peace and freedom and prosperity. But I didn't think we could do it by having the same old fights in the same old way. And I knew if the people gave me a chance to serve, some difficult decisions would be required. Well, it worked out. And we said, look, we're going to cut this deficit, get interest rates down, and grow the economy but we still have to invest in education, in medical research, in technology, and the environment. We have to do that. We said we want more money in education, but we want higher standards and more competition, too. We said we believe you can grow the economy and improve the environment. We said we thought that you could create a society where people who had to work and had children could succeed at work and at home. And a lot of that just kind of sounded like political rhetoric at the time. But what I want to say to you tonight is when people ask you why you were here, say, "Look, the country was in trouble we elected the Clinton Gore administration they had friends and allies in the Government and the Congress and in the private sector they implemented their ideas most of the time not all of the time, but most of the time they were opposed by members in the other party, and it worked out." Our approach turned out to be right. That's what Janice was saying. This is no longer subject to serious debate. I was told for 2 years I saw the Republicans go into the '94 election telling everybody how we'd raise taxes on people we hadn't raised taxes on and how terrible it was and how it was going to bankrupt the country and run the debt up. And we went from the biggest deficit in history to the biggest surplus in history, the longest peacetime expansion in history, almost 19 million new jobs, the highest homeownership in history, the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded since we started keeping that data almost 30 years ago. In addition to that, we have the lowest crime rate in 26 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years and teen pregnancy, teen drug abuse, teen smoking are declining. Things are moving in the right direction in this country. So I say to you, first, thank you because we have moved this country in the right direction. We did it and proved you could have a better environment. The air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer. Ninety percent of our kids are immunized against childhood diseases for the first time in the history of America. Over 100,000 young people have served their communities in AmeriCorps in 4 years it took the Peace Corps 20 years to get to 100,000 people. We have virtually opened the doors of college to every American with the HOPE scholarship and the other tax credits and student loans. This is a stronger country than it was in 1992. And we have done it by relentlessly pushing to bring people together, standing against discrimination and against hatred and against the politics of division. When I say "we," I don't mean "me", "we" I mean, "we" we, our party, our allies, the people that believed as we did. And along the way we've been a force for peace in the Middle East, in Northern Ireland, in Bosnia, in Kosovo. We stood up against terrorism and stood up for trade and human rights around the world. Today I asked the United States Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, first advocated by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, first signed by the United States. I signed it at the U.N. a couple years ago. We are moving the country in the right direction, toward a world that works better for all the people. That's the first thing I want to say. We're entitled to the benefit of the doubt on the great debates going on in Washington today because we just had 6 years of argument and it turned out we were right. And I say that in all humility. I am grateful for that. The point I'm trying to make is, Joe Andrew always says, "Well, why is Bill Clinton doing this? He's not running for anything." I came here to say not that I was right, but that our ideas were right. And I am grateful that I had the chance to be President, to be the instrument of bringing the country together and moving it forward. But it wasn't me it was that the ideas we had were right. And you've got to get out there between now and the next election cycle and hammer that home. Before I took office they were killing family leave because it was going to bankrupt small business. I signed the family leave bill, first thing I did so we'd have 15 million people take advantage of it. The largest number of small businesses formed in any given year every single year I've been President has broken a new record. So the family leave law did not wreck the small business economy it made America a place where you could have work and family. And they vetoed and killed the Brady bill before I became President. So I signed it first chance I got. And 400,000 people couldn't get guns because they had criminal backgrounds. And we have a 26 year low in the crime rate. And we've got 100,000 more police on the street, even though on the other side of the aisle they said, "This won't make a lick of difference these police will never get out there." Well, we funded them ahead of time and under budget, and we have a 26 year low in the crime rate. So as Democrats we should be proud not proud as if we did it, proud that the ideas we stood for were the right ones and that it actually works when you try to create a society where everybody has a chance, all the rest of us who are going to do fine regardless, do even better that we all do better when we try to create opportunity for each other, when we try to make sure we're responsible for each other in an appropriate way and we try to pull together. Now, the second thing I want to say is we have to take that fast forward to today. What's the great debate in Washington today? What are we going to do with the surplus? Now, if I had been running in '92 and I had come to you and you had never seen me before, and I said, I want you to vote for me so that 6 years from now we'll be having a debate about what to do with the surplus, you would have sent me home to Arkansas. Laughter You would have said, "This guy has lost it he doesn't understand. We've got a 290 billion deficit we will always have deficits." So what are we going to do with it? First, the good news. There's a bipartisan agreement that we shouldn't spend the Social Security surplus. That means until we need it to pay for Social Security, we can use it to pay down the debt, and that's good. I think we have that agreement. I want to see the details, but I think we do. That's good. Now the question is what to do with the rest of the surplus. Here's what we feel. We feel what we should do is to do the following things. Number one, we should fix Medicare and provide a prescription drug benefit. Number two, we should have appropriate money set aside to continue to invest in education, national defense, biomedical research, and the environment. Number three, we believe that as the interest on the debt comes down, because our interest payments will come down as the debt comes, we should put the savings into Social Security so we can run the Trust Fund out to 2053. So when I leave office everybody will know Social Security is all right for at least 50 years, and we can quit worrying about it. Now, that's what we think. And you can do what we suggest and still have a tax cut, a substantial one. They believe that virtually all the non Social Security surplus should go to a tax cut. And they think it sounds really popular "my tax cut is bigger than your tax cut." Well, if that were the whole story that would sound like a pretty good argument. But I say we ought to save Social Security and Medicare and not just pay down the debt but make this country debt free for the first time since 1835 and continue to invest in education. We'll still have money for a tax cut to help families save for long term care, for child care, for investments in our country. But we will continue we will not risk running a deficit, destroying the education budget, not meeting our defense responsibilities, or not doing one single thing to add a day to the solvency of Medicare, and not providing the prescription drug benefit. That's the difference. That's the choice. So it's just all back to 1993 again, or even back earlier than that. Most of you in this room, what are you doing here? You're all in upper income groups you ought to be at their deal, not ours. Why are you here? You get more money out of their tax cut. This is very important, why you're Democrats, why I am. But 5 years from now you're going to be a lot better off, and so is America, if we pay down the debt, save Social Security and Medicare, continue to invest in education, and have a modest tax cut we can afford. You know, if you just think about just three great challenges this country faces, we're going to double the number of people over 65 in 30 years. We hadn't been in this kind of financial shape in forever and a day. What in the world are we going to say to our children if we walk away from this opportunity to run the Social Security Trust Fund out at least 50 plus years? What are we going to say if we walk away from our obligation to run the Medicare Trust Fund out until 2025 or beyond, and to provide all these elderly people not all of them poor, a lot of them middle class a little help in dealing with the prescription drug program? What are we going to say if we adopt a tax cut which causes us to cut education when we ought to be investing more in it? What are we going to say when 5, 10 years from now some Kosovo comes along and America is asked to stand up for human rights around the world? We'd say, "Well, we'd like to do it, but we had that tax cut" laughter "and I needed that tax cut." Closer to home, what are we going to say I've been waiting for this, and I never wanted to be the first to raise it because I wouldn't have had credibility on it, but now it's in the press what are we going to say if they cut taxes and the markets say, "Well, we don't need a tax cut in the economy like this we better raise interest rates?" So you get it with one hand and get it taken away with the other, and everything gets squeezed. So I say to you we ought to save Social Security and Medicare we ought to continue to move forward in education. And I want to talk just a minute about this paying the debt down. A lot of people it just seems so alien it's like an alien subject we haven't been out of debt since 1835. And for most of this century we shouldn't have been out of debt. We needed to have a little debt to invest in infrastructure or to expand the economy in times of recession or outright depression. But it's different now. Why is it different now? I want you all to think about this. You may not agree with me on this. I've really thought about this a lot. Why should the Nation's progressive party be for taking the country out of debt in 1999 when we have still an unconscionably large number of poor children and any number of things that we ought to be spending this money on? Here's why. We're living in a global economy. Interest rates are set globally money moves globally. The best thing we've done for poor people in America is create 19 million new jobs and give tax relief to lower income working people and raise the minimum wage to create an economy, in other words, that they could be a part of to support the Vice President's empowerment initiative and the community development banks and all the things we've done to try to bring jobs. Now, if we get out of debt and if everybody knows we're on the target, we're going to be out of debt in 15 years, what happens? Interest rates stay down, investments stay high, more jobs are created with inflation low, more money for wage increases. Average people pay lower interest costs for home mortgages, car payments, credit card payments, and college loan payments. And the next time a global financial crisis comes along, like the one in Asia, nobody has to worry about America gobbling up scarce dollars and driving the price of money up. So when our trading partners, who are poorer than we are, need to get money because times are tough, they can get it and get it at a lower cost, which means they will recover more quickly and we'll start doing business more quickly. And if you don't think that's a big issue, look what is happening to America's farmers because of the collapse of the markets in Asia. Here we are at the most prosperous time perhaps in this country's history with an absolute disaster in the family farms of America. So that's why it makes sense in a global economy for the world's richest country to be debtfree, and why it is a progressive thing to do and why, by the way, when you do it, we won't be paying interest on the debt anymore. If you were a Member of Congress, you would find that before you did anything else you'd have to take about it used to be 15 and now 14 cents on every tax dollar to pay interest on the debt we have accumulated, largely in the 12 years before I took office. So don't forget, you get out of debt, you've also got 14 cents you used to not have. And 14 cents of every dollar, all of you pay in taxes, is a pretty tidy sum of money. So that's why this is a good thing. So I say to you we need to go to the country and say, tax cut, sure, but first things first Save Social Security and Medicare and deal with the challenge of America's aging continue to invest in our children's future and in the other basic things we have to have pay that debt off for the first time since 1835, and guarantee America a generation of prosperity. Then have a tax cut that we need and can afford. That is the debate we ought to have. And I can tell you there are lots of other examples. I think we were right on closing the gun show loophole, and I think they were wrong. I think we were right on the Patients' Bill of Rights, and I don't think they were. I say that not because I take any joy in that. I liked it when we got together. I liked it when we had big majorities of both parties in both Houses voting for welfare reform. I liked it when we had big majorities of both parties in both Houses voting for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. I wish it can be that way again. But I am telling you, we've got to stand up for what's right for all the people. What brings us together as a community? What gives other people opportunity they wouldn't otherwise have? What purges our spirit from the kind of awful, arrogant hatred that led that terribly disturbed young man to kill those people because they were of different races in Illinois and Indiana and claim it was a religious imperative? I had today a bunch of civil rights lawyers in my office and a bunch of high toned business lawyers who don't practice civil rights law, to commemorate the 36th anniversary of John Kennedy bringing 200 lawyers to Washington to ask them to lead America's charge in civil rights. And I asked them to lead America's charge in trying to integrate our law firms, integrate our corporations, and use pro bono legal work to help solve the economic and social problems of low income people around the country. I'll just close with this. One of the greatest weeks of my Presidency was a couple of weeks ago when I had the privilege of going to Appalachia, to the Mississippi Delta, to East St. Louis, to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, to south Phoenix, and East L.A., because I believe that we can keep this economy going better if we get people to invest in the areas that have felt none of our recovery. And I have a simple proposal Give Americans like you the same tax incentives to invest in poor areas in America we give you to invest today in the Caribbean, in Africa, in Asia, and Latin America. I want you to have those incentives. I just want poor areas in America to be as attractive. Our best new markets for America are here in America. But what it reminded me of is all these people, they're just like us. Just because they don't have a nice necktie and a nice suit to wear, life dealt them a little bit different hand. You know, Janice and I, we'd like to have you believe we were born in log cabins we built ourselves. Laughter But the truth is, you take one or two different turns in life and she and I both are back in Hope, Arkansas, doing business with each other in our little hometown. Some days I think it wouldn't be too bad. Laughter But I'm just telling you, you think about it, every one of you you think about this when you go home tonight. Why did you come here? Why did you come here? If they ask you why you came, tell them because you believe we're better off when we all go forward together. Tell them because you believe this ought to be one community. Tell them, guess what, we tried our ideas in the crucible of excruciating combat for 6 1 2 years, and the country is better off. So it's not like there's no evidence. And before we squander this surplus, let's take care of the aging of America let's take care of the children of America and let's get this country out of debt so we can go forward together. Thank you, and God bless you. July 19, 1999 President Clinton. Good afternoon. Please be seated. Prime Minister Barak and I have had a very good series of meetings over the past few days. Of course, we have focused primarily on the Middle East peace process. We strongly agree that a negotiated peace is the best way to make Israel more secure, the best path to lasting stability and prosperity for all the peoples of the Middle East. The Prime Minister is determined to accelerate that process, to reach with Chairman Arafat a permanent status agreement between Israel and the Palestinian people, and to achieve a broader regional peace that includes Syria and Lebanon. As he has said, the objective now is to put the peace process back on all its tracks. But we should have no illusions. The way ahead will be difficult. There are hard decisions to be made. Knowing his long record of accomplishment, both as soldier and civilian, and having spent a good deal of time with him these past few days, I believe the Prime Minister is ready to move forward decisively. And America is clearly ready to help in any way we can. As Israel takes calculated risks for peace, we will continue to support Israel's defense. Today we have agreed to strengthen our security assistance to Israel so Israel can best meet the threats to its citizens, including terrorism and the growing threat of long range missiles and weapons of mass destruction. We've also agreed to establish a high level joint planning group to consult on security issues and to report back regularly to the Prime Minister and to me personally. I intend to work closely with our Congress for expedited approval of a package that includes not only aid to Israel but also assistance to the Palestinian people and Jordan in the context of implementing the Wye River agreement. Making Israel stronger and making Palestinians and Jordanians more secure and more prosperous all these are crucial to building a just and lasting peace in the region. Finally, I want to announce that America and Israel will be taking our partnership to new heights, literally. As part of an effort to enhance our scientific cooperation, we will create a working group between NASA and the Israel Space Agency to advance scientific research, educational activities, and the peaceful uses of space. And an Israeli astronaut and a payload of Israeli instruments will fly on a space shuttle mission next year. All these efforts will strengthen the bonds between our two democracies. They will help us to build a better future together. I am proud that Prime Minister Barak is my partner in this work. I look forward to seeing him again soon. Mr. Prime Minister, the floor is yours. Prime Minister Barak. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen. President Clinton and I have just concluded the last in our series of meetings. Those meetings were held in an atmosphere of deep friendship and understanding that characterizes the bilateral relationship between Israel and the United States. Our policy is based on the following We are committed to the renewal of the peace process. It is our intention to move the process forward simultaneously on all tracks bilateral, the Palestinian, the Syrians, and the Lebanese, as well as the multilateral. We will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to reinvigorate the process, which must be based upon direct talks between the parties themselves and conducted in an atmosphere of mutual trust. Any unilateral steps, acts or threats of terrorism, violence, or other forms of aggression have no place in a process of peace. The peace we seek to establish is only the one that will enhance the security of Israel. Only a strong and secure Israel is capable of making the difficult choices that the process requires. I will not shy away from those difficult choices, but I have responsibility to the people of Israel to do all that I possibly can to minimize the risks and dangers involved. From here, I call upon our Arab partners and their leaders to embark with us together on this historic journey, which requires tough choices from all parties. Mr. President, Israel and America share a unique friendship and a very special partnership. Our relationship is built upon common values, shared interests, and a mutual vision as to the future of the region. A strong Israeli American relationship must be the cornerstone on which to build a peaceful Middle East. Mr. President, the road ahead may be long and arduous, but together with our peace partners, we can and will make it happen. We know, Mr. President, that in the pursuit of this sacred mission, a mission of peace, we can count on your wisdom, experience, good advice, and continued support all along the road. For Nava and for myself, thank you again for your warm hospitality accorded us throughout our visit and for your consistent friendship and support. Thank you. President Clinton. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Middle East Peace Process Q. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, the Prime Minister has committed himself to implementing the West Bank pull back agreed upon at Wye River. You just talked about accelerating the peace process. Realistically speaking, looking ahead, how long before the final status talks get underway on the tough issues like Jerusalem, the Palestinian hopes for a homeland, refugees? And what specific steps can the United States do to facilitate this process? Maybe if each of you could address those. President Clinton. Well, first of all, the United States will continue to do what it has done all along. I believe that we should be prepared to support a final status agreement in the way we have supported all these other agreements, going all the way back to Camp David and through those that have been reached during my tenure. We should support the security of Israel, the stability of the region, the economic development of the region. And we should help to work out any of the particular problems as they arise. In terms of the timing, I don't think it's for the United States to set the timetables here. I think we should just be supportive of moving ahead as vigorously as possible. But it's not our role and shouldn't be to impose an outside timetable on the process. Prime Minister Barak. We are committed to agreements signed by Israeli governments. We are committed to Wye. We will implement it. We are committed to the permanent status negotiations, and we intend to go forward and do it. We have to consider, together with Chairman Arafat, the way to combine the Wye agreement implementation with the pushing forward of the permanent status negotiations and implementation. And we will do exactly that in the coming months. I would suggest a kind of framework of about 15 months, within which we will know whether we have a breakthrough and are really going to put an end to the conflict, or alternatively I hope this will not be the case we are stuck once again. I use the kind of framework of 15 months to signal to all publics and ask the players that we are not talking about a miraculous solution, magic solution, that will drop upon us from heaven in 3 weeks, and we do not intend to drag our foot for another 3 years. President Clinton. Want to take a question from an Israeli journalist? Prime Minister Barak. Please. President Hafiz al Asad of Syria Q. Mr. President, do you intend to have talks or to meet with President Asad at the present time and maybe shoot for a summit meeting here with President Asad? And, Prime Minister Barak, another question also on Damascus. Today terrorist organizations there were urged to leave the country by the Syrian Government. Is there any proof of this news that you heard, and if it's true, do you see any significance? President Clinton. Well, let me answer the first question. I have had regular contact, as you know, and a lot of contact with President Asad over the last 6 1 2 years. He knows very well that I am committed to the peace process between Israel and Syria, and that I believe that he has a golden opportunity now to resume that process and that I hope he will do so. And I intend to reaffirm that in the appropriate way at the conclusion of our meeting. We, too, would like more normal relations with Syria, and we would like Syria to be reconciled to all its neighbors in the region. And I think anything that Syria does to disassociate itself from terrorists is a positive step in the right direction. Yes, ma'am. Helen Helen Thomas, United Press International , you're next I'll take you next. Future Israeli Security Q. Mr. Prime Minister, a question to you. As Israel moves now to resume peace talks with its Arab adversaries, what and who do you regard as the real existential threats to Israel in the coming century? Do you look more toward Iran and Iraq? Do you have different views on these issues than your predecessor? Thank you. Prime Minister Barak. Unlike this part of the world, our neighbor unlike North America Western Europe is a very tough neighborhood, you know, kind of merciless environment, no second opportunity for those who cannot defend themselves. And many threats might loom over the horizon without very long early warning. We, of course, see the risk. This is one of the reasons why I'm so determined to do whatever we can to achieve peace. I spent all my life in uniform fighting for the security of our country, and we know from our experience that by strengthening Israel and going toward peace, we will reduce this kind of threat. There are a lot of conventional armed forces around us. If you combine them together it's more weapon systems in the Middle East than in NATO. And of course, the prospect of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and missile technology to places like Iran or Iraq create a major threat to the stability of the whole Middle East, to the free flow of oil from this region that helps to sustain the economies of both Europe and Japan, and, of course, to Israel. And we are watching very carefully these kinds of threats. We do not aspire to eliminate any future risk from the globe by making peace with our neighbors, but we're clearly determined to make our future and the future of our neighbors better by reaching a full agreement about peace with all our neighbors around. Q. Iraq and Iran, sir? Prime Minister Barak. Iran and Iraq is a sources of potential threat to the stability of the Middle East and to Israel if they reach missile technology, nuclear weapons, and, by this, the combination to really launch them. Middle East Peace Process Q. President Clinton, you have met with Prime Minister Barak for many hours, and we all know that you have concluded some sort of a program to advance the peace process. Can you please tell us some of these details that you can tell us? What is expected in the coming days or weeks, and when is the talks between Syria and Israel are going to be resumed? Is there any date? And a question to Prime Minister Barak, what is your reaction to the meeting of Abd al Halim Khaddam in Damascus with a few Palestinian organizations that are imposing the Olso the peace process? Do you think that it's a significant step for peace? President Clinton. First of all, we have issued a very detailed joint statement. I don't know if you have it yet or not. Q. I've read it, but it doesn't say specifically what are the coming moves. President Clinton. That's right that's on purpose. Laughter So you know, sometimes in this process, the less you say, the better. Let me say that you know that Prime Minister Barak has talked to Chairman Arafat, and they intend to talk again. And I have said that I will make it known to President Asad what I consider to be the very satisfactory results of this meeting and that this is an important time to restart the peace process. I think to go beyond that right now would be an error on my part, not because I don't intend to push ahead in every way I can, but I just think it would be a mistake. Prime Minister Barak. I can just add to this that I'm fully confident that when we will have something to tell, we will be interviewed by you, and we'll tell you, and the public will know. There will be no secrets when something really happens in the open. On the other part of your question, I did not get a real report about this meeting, but if there was such a meeting and the Syrians really asked the terror organizations to reduce their level of activity, if that is true, it is, of course, good news for all of us. President Clinton. Helen. Israeli Palestinian Relations Q. Mr. Prime Minister, there's an expression Prime Minister Barak. I awaited you. Laughter Q. that if you walk in someone's moccasins, then you'll know how they really feel. If you were walking in a Palestinian's shoes, how would you feel about occupation, annexation, incarceration for months, for years without a charge, without a trial? Prime Minister Barak. I was elected Prime Minister of the State of Israel. I'm fully focused on the security and future of the Israelis. I am aware that the same way that a person cannot choose his parents, a nation cannot choose its neighbors. They are there, the Palestinians we respect them. We want to build a peace with them that will put an end to the conflict with all the sufferings that happen on both sides of this conflict. We are determined to do it. I believe that focusing on how to solve the problems of the future is a more, may I say, productive way to consume our time than dealing with analyzing past events or their interpretation. Q. Well, they aren't past. They're very current. Prime Minister Barak. We are working on bringing a peace that will create a different environment in the Middle East, and I am fully focused on this future, rather than on analysis of the past. President Clinton. Do you want to take another question? Prime Minister Barak. Please. U.S. Role in Middle East Peace Process Q. How do you reconcile between the Prime Minister's expectation to get your support to the further negotiations with the Palestinians, the potential difficulties that Israel will face, with your role as an honest broker? President Clinton. Why are they inconsistent? I'm not sure I understand the question. Q. It's a cultural gap. Q. No, it's not cultural gap. President Clinton. No, no, explain the question. I'm sorry I don't mean to be dense, but I don't understand the question. Q. We understand that the Prime Minister strove to get your understanding to Israel's point of view with regard to the negotiations that he will have with the Palestinians. President Clinton. Yes, that's correct. Q. On the other hand, America is going to play the role of an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians. So probably there is a kind of conflict between these two roles. President Clinton. Oh, I see what you mean. Actually, in this case, I disagree with that for the following reason. The Prime Minister has made it clear this goes a little bit to the question Helen asked in a general way the Prime Minister has made it clear that however he proceeds into the future in negotiating with the Palestinians that it must all be done by agreement, including the ideas of synchronizing Wye and going to the final status talks. I'm convinced that at the end of the road, anything they could both agree to would be in both their interests. And I must say, I think some of you may think this is naive, especially as long as I've been doing this but I honestly believe that the most important element for success for an Israeli Prime Minister in negotiating an agreement with the Palestians is being able to set aside the accumulated burdens of the past to at least see them with respect and understand how they perceive the legitimacy of their aspirations. And I have seen that with this Prime Minister. And I think when you do that, then there will be a way to work this out. I think that in a peculiar way, the United States can only be of value to the Palestinians because we are so close to Israel. Otherwise, of what value are we to them? And because we are, if we believe they have a good point that I privately and personally communicate to the Prime Minister or his designated representatives, it should carry more weight because they know how close we are. So I don't see the two things as in conflict. I think that, in the end, they both have to believe they have won or there will be no agreement. If either side believes that it has lost, why should they agree? Convicted Spy Jonathan Pollard Q. Mr. President, did the subject of Jonathan Pollard and his possible release come up in any form during your discussions? It's now 8 months since White House Counsel Chuck Ruff requested the major U.S. Governmental agencies to offer their opinions on this. Did any of those agencies recommend or indicate that they would recommend his release? And, Mr. Prime Minister, did President Clinton give you any reason to expect that Pollard's release may be a possibility? Prime Minister Barak. Maybe I'll answer first, and it will make it more smoother in a way. I clearly want to see Jonathan Pollard released, but I am of the position that any public discussion of this issue doesn't push forward the purpose of having him released. For many reasons, this is a subject that should be dealt with not in public, but at most, between the leaders of the two nations. President Clinton. One more over here, and then we'll take Sam Sam Donaldson, ABC News , you want a question? First Lady's Position on Middle East Process Q. Sir, I'd like to take another crack at a question you've been asked before. You've said that when Mrs. Clinton expresses her opinions publicly she's just doing something in public which you've done in private before that is, have disagreements. That's the American way. But when she talks about an opinion in which she takes the Israeli position on Jerusalem, doesn't this make it more difficult for you to be that honest broker that one of your colleagues talked about, sir? President Clinton. No, no. For one thing let me say, that issue is not one that that's not the public private distinction. The Government of the United States, the executive branch, the President, is a sponsor of the peace process and a facilitator of it. In that context, those of us with positions of official responsibility who are all the time asking Israel and the Palestinians, we're all the time asking both sides not to do anything which prejudices final status issues I have taken the position that my government should not prejudice final status issues. There are many American citizens who consider, for example, Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel Israel considers Jerusalem to be the capital of Israel. You heard the Prime Minister say that he hoped that when we had all this worked out, everybody's Embassy would be there. The genius, I thought, of the legislation which was passed by the Congress and sponsored I think primarily by Senator Moynihan was that it permitted each individual Member of Congress and, therefore, imposed on everybody who might want to be in Congress, the responsibility of expressing their opinion on it, while allowing the United States to continue to be an honest broker through the waiver authority so we don't have to prejudice the final status issue. The status of Jerusalem is, under the Oslo accords, something that the parties themselves have to work out at the end. So that's my position. I don't think there is any inconsistency there at all. I think that anybody who is ever going to consider being a candidate for Congress in any place in this country, or the Senate, where people care about this, might be asked about it. But we have a framework in our law, which I think is quite good, where people can express their opinion about it, vote for a law, support the law, but the President, whoever the President is, is permitted to honor the obligation of the United States not to prejudice the final status issue. Q. But sir, the thrust Prime Minister Barak. of Israeli TV Q. Sir, may I just follow up? Prime Minister Barak. Please, let the young lady beauty before age. Laughter I'm not quarreling with your wisdom, but look, a young Israeli. Laughter Palestinian State Q. To both of you, Prime Minister Barak was mentioning that 15 month framework for the negotiation do you see, Mr. President, and you, Prime Minister Barak, a Palestinian state at the end of this period of time? Prime Minister Barak. I think it's too early to think of the results of the negotiations about permanent status that were hardly begun. And I don't think that you should interpret this 15month framework as a kind of a deadline where everything should be either fully concluded and implemented, or the whole thing is blown up, blown apart. I don't think that is the case. We have this framework in order that different players on different tracks with only partially transparent membranes between them could make up their judgment about what should be concluded in their own track, visa vis Israel, while taking into account the fact that the others are continuing. So without providing them with a certain timeframe they might be lost or suspicions would be heightened, which as you know, happens very often in the Middle East. So in order to produce a certain kind of common basis, common framework, and common understanding about how we intend to move, we shaped this timeframe. It could not be interpreted as more than this. Q. What about the possibility of a Palestinian state? Prime Minister Barak. Oh, this was the question, I thought laughter . It's part of the permanent status negotiations, and I'm confident that the nature of the Palestinian entity will emerge quite naturally out of these permanent status negotiations. We are concentrating on solving at the same time all the problems that are on the table the refugees, the border, the future of settlements, the problem of Jerusalem. And I don't think it's a very easy task to solve part of the problem without solving, at the same time, the other parts. President Clinton. Joe says we were about to draw this to a close. But if you want to chew on me, I'll be back Wednesday we're going to have a press conference. Thank you very much. Thank you. Oh, wait, wait, I'll answer the Coast Guard question. Go ahead. This is important further what's going on for America today, so I'll answer this. Go ahead. John F. Kennedy, Jr. Q. Mr. President, I'm told that you were briefed earlier today by the U.S. Coast Guard about their search for the wreckage of the Kennedy plane. Can you tell us what the results of that are to date? And also, sir, since the search became a quote, unquote "recovery operation" last night, have you had a chance to speak with any members of the Kennedy family, and if so, can you relate some or all of those conversations? President Clinton. Well, let me say, first of all, I did speak with Admiral Larrabee this morning, and again I want to say I think the Coast Guard, the National Transportation Safety Board, the FAA, all the State and local entities who have worked for them have done quite a fine job here and I'm grateful to them. He was actually, Admiral Larrabee, somewhat optimistic that they would eventually be successful in this area they have identified, in finding further at least further parts of the plane. And I believe it's appropriate that this search continue. So I think they've done a good job. I have had, over the last 3 days, several conversations with Senator Kennedy, and I have talked with Caroline, and I have but I think it would not be appropriate for me to talk about the merits of it. Let me say that John Kennedy and his sister and later his wife, were uncommonly kind to my daughter and to my wife, and this has been a very difficult thing for us, personally, as well as because of my position. They are very strong people, and I think they are carrying on as well as any human beings could. But they need the support and prayers of our country. Thank you. Prime Minister Barak. Allow me please to add to it to extend on behalf of myself and the Israeli people our prayers and thoughts to the Kennedy family that faced so many tragedies and now is facing another one, a tragedy that I believe touched hearts of billions all around the world. Thank you. President Clinton. Thank you very much. July 14, 1999 The President. Thank you very much. You guys look good out there. Laughter I want to thank Al for inviting me, and thank you, Cruz, for your wonderful remarks and your generous introduction. One thing I like about the California Lieutenant Governor is he doesn't beat around the bush you know what's on his mind. Laughter I shouldn't do this because it's not really Presidential, but I'm going to do it anyway. I have really you've got to give it this "compassionate conservatism" has a great ring to it, you know. It sounds so good. And I've really worked hard to try to figure out what it means. I mean, I made an honest effort. And near as I can tell here's what it means it means "I like you, I do." Laughter "And I would like to be for the Patients' Bill of Rights, and I'd like to be for closing the gun show loophole. And I'd like not to squander the surplus and save Social Security and Medicare for the next generation. I'd like to raise the minimum wage. I'd like to do these things. But I just can't, and I feel terrible about it." Laughter Oh, that will come back. Laughter I would like to thank you don't have to give me credit if you repeat that back home. Laughter I want to thank you all for being here today. We have five Governors Governor Glendening, Governor Barnes, Governor Carnahan, Governor Carper, Governor Vilsack Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is here, along with Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante Mayor Schmoke, the leaders of the Maryland legislature, Senator Mike Miller and Speaker Casper Taylor any number of other officials. I brought a large delegation from the White House, including Secretary Glickman and a number of people who have been particularly close to the DLC, including Sidney Blumenthal and your old hands, Bruce Reed and Linda Moore. And I brought a person who joined the DLC with me back in 1985, although he says he joined before I did my first Chief of Staff and the former Special Envoy to Latin America, Mack McLarty. So we're old hands, and I thank them all for coming with me today. This is the third national conversation about a talk that Al From and I have been having for nearly 15 years now. Today, we can have a very different conversation than we had 15 years ago or even half that long ago because of the proven success of New Democratic ideas. When I first ran for President back in 1991, I asked for a change in our party, a change in our national leadership, a change in our country. The American people have been uncommonly good to me and to Hillary, to the Vice President, to Tipper, to our administration, and thanks to their support, we have changed all three things. The ideas of the men and women who are here today are rooted in our core values of opportunity, responsibility, and community. They have revitalized our party and revitalized our country. We won the Presidency in 1992 with new ideas based on those values, because the American people could see and feel that the old ways weren't working. We won again in 1996 because, with the help of a lot of people in this room, we turned those values and ideas into action. And they did work to get our country moving again or in the words of Cruz Bustamante, they did help real people. Now, as we move into a new era and a new millennium, these ideas, as all of you well know, have spread around the world. They've helped center left parties to take power in Great Britain and France and Germany and Italy and Brazil. They have sparked the kinds of debates and discussions that you have been having in virtually every country in the world where people take politics seriously. The Third Way has become the way of the future. And when you hear our friends in the other party sort of use the same words in the same way, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, that, too, is something we should welcome. I told the little story at the first because, as the Lieutenant Governor said, rhetoric and reality are sometimes two different things, and it's better when they're not, when they are the same thing. But it shows you the grip that the idea of a dynamic center has on thoughtful people throughout the world. It shows you how desperately people want new ideas, experimentation, an end to bitter partisanship, a genuine spirit of working together. And wherever that exists, it is a good thing. As we move into the information age, we really, as Democrats, have reclaimed the true legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, which is not a particular set of programs but a real commitment to bold experimentation, to the idea that new times demand new approaches and often a different kind of Government. America was ready to listen to that back in 1992. You know it's almost hard to believe now, and we may have to remind our fellow citizens in times to come just what it was like back then, how high the unemployment was how stagnant the wages were how steeply growing the inequality was how fast the social conditions were worsening. Then, the Democrats were seen too wedded to the programs of the past to make the necessary changes for today and tomorrow. The Republicans were too committed to the idea that Government was the cause of all of our problems, and neglect, therefore, was the right response. They won election after election at the national level by sort of dividing our people and putting up cartoon caricatures of our Democrats as somehow not really American, not really in touch with the values of ordinary citizens. And they were so good at it, they came to see the White House as their private fiefdom. I'd always get a little kick out of the fact that our friends on the other side of the aisle rail and rail about entitlements they really don't like them. But actually they thought the White House was their entitlement until the DLC came along. Now, Al Gore and I had a different idea. We thought power should not be vested in any party but in the people. We thought that we should use the power of our office and the power of Government to take a different direction for the country. We believed we could do it with a smaller Government and it is now, as all of you know, the smallest Federal establishment since John Kennedy was President in 1962. That's the last time the Federal Government was this small. But we have been much, much more active, trying to be a catalyst, trying to be a partner, trying to give people the tools and to create the conditions so that our people could meet their own challenges and live out their own dreams. We have been called New Democrats our approach has been called the Third Way. But I think it is important to remember that we too do not want to get trapped in our rhetoric. We were the first to point out that labels should not define a politician or a person or a political movement ideas do. And every time, every age in time requires a continuous infusion of new ideas. We took on the hard work of creating real solutions. We worked hard to make politics and policies and to put both in the service of progress. Now, I think it's worked pretty well. We did everything we could to reject forced, false choices between work and family, between the economy and the environment, between being safe and being free, between recognizing what makes us interesting and individual and different as people and what we have in common. We tried to solve problems rather than score partisan points. We have done our best to restore the people's faith in our Government but, more important, to restore their faith in the limitless potential of America. Now, I think it's worked pretty well. Along the way, we had the '94 election setback, and we had to fight a rearguard action to beat back the Contract With America. Then we worked with the Republicans to pass welfare reform and the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and I was encouraged. Lately, I have been discouraged, obviously, because the Republican majority in Congress has taken, I think, very, very wrong actions in killing the Patients' Bill of Rights and in killing the sensible gun control measures embodied in our legislation, among other things, to close the gun show loophole. So, there are still profound differences among the parties. Cruz listed a few of these, but I would just like to say that, as you go back home and the people you represent ask you for your thoughts about what's going on in Washington, I would like to respectfully request that you at least ask them to give us the benefit of the doubt, because our friends in the other party said if we implemented our policies, it would be a disaster for America. They said it over and over and over again. They said, when the deficit was 290 billion and we passed our economic program, it would get bigger and we'd have a deep recession. Now we have the biggest surplus in our history almost 19 million new jobs the longest peacetime expansion in history the highest homeownership and the lowest minority unemployment ever recorded wages are rising crime is at a 26 year low the welfare rolls at a 30year low teen pregnancy, teen smoking, teen drug abuse are all declining air and water are cleaner the streets are safer 90 percent of our kids are immunized against serious diseases for the first time we've opened the doors to college to virtually all Americans through the HOPE scholarship that we modeled on what Georgia did and we have had over 100,000 young people serve our country and their community through AmeriCorps, another big DLC idea. From the California redwoods and the Mojave Desert to the Florida Everglades, this administration has protected or set aside more land than any administration in history except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. We have worked for peace from Bosnia and Kosovo to the Middle East to Northern Ireland. We've worked to expand trade on fair and freer terms. We have worked to build partnerships with Latin America and Africa and people who often feel that they're not even in our radar screen or in our orbit. We have worked to give our children a safer world by combating terrorism and the other threats which they will face in their lifetime. We've done this and I appreciate the reception you gave me when I came in but we have done this because we had the right ideas. I am grateful that I was given the opportunity, in my time, to be the instrument of implementing those ideas. If anybody is responsible for the intellectual renaissance which possesses the politics in this country, in this world, it really is Al From and all the true believers with the DLC who stayed there all those years. But you're here because we believe that you can do these jobs. You can do the jobs you have. You can be Governors you can be Senators you can be President. The most important thing is that we keep the ideas coming, consistent with our core values, always looking at the real facts, always looking at the long term future. And what I am trying to get the American people to focus on now, and the Congress, is that, in the remaining days of this century and this millennium, we will either explicitly or implicitly make some very large decisions that will affect our country for a long time to come. I think that we have shown by results that our Third Way is the right way for America, for our economy, and for our society. In the weeks to come, around the budget, we will have a huge debate over great national priorities. We will have to make a choice that 5 or 6 years ago you never would have believed we'd be making, which is how are we going to use the fruits of our prosperity. If somebody had told you, 6 years ago, the biggest debate in Washington will be what to do with the surplus laughter you would never have believed it. Now, I think the answer is to stick with the economic strategy that brought us to this great dance and to deal with the great challenges still before us. So I gave the Congress a budget that will do big things that will meet the challenge of the aging of America by saving and reforming Social Security and Medicare that will do it in a way that will make this country debt free for the first time since 1835 that will raise educational standards and end social promotion but provide for summer school, modern schools, and 100,000 more teachers and hooking up every classroom to the Internet by the year 2000 that will make America safer with even more community policing and more efforts to keep guns out of the hands of criminals that will make America more livable with the Vice President's livability agenda that will provide genuine tax relief to the people and the purposes who really need it at a price we can afford, without undermining our prosperity, including our new American markets initiative designed to give Americans the same incentives to invest in the poor areas of America we give today to invest in the Caribbean and Latin America and Africa and Asia. I think that's a very important thing to do. I might say, all of you would have gotten a big kick seeing Al From and Jesse Jackson walking arm in arm across America last week. Laughter It was good for America. It was good for the Democratic Party. It was good for the people that lived in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, in East St. Louis. Mayor Powell, I'm glad to see you here today. We had a wonderful time there. Thank you for coming. She gave such a great speech when we visited East St. Louis, I told her she ought to show up for this conference, and lo and behold, she did. So I thank you for coming. We went to Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. We went to south Phoenix. And I know we've got some legislators from Arizona here today, and I thank you for being here the block over there. And we ended in L.A. These are big things. These are big, big things. And we will decide, directly or indirectly, whether to embrace them. The decisions cannot be escaped. You all know the basic elements of my plan. I want to use the bulk of the surplus to save Social Security. I want to set aside 15 percent of it to reform Medicare and to begin with a prescription drug benefit, which would have been in any program if it were to be designed today from the start. I want to provide substantial tax relief, 250 billion of it, targeted to help families save for retirement, to deal with child care and long term care needs, to help to deal with some of our larger challenges including modernizing our schools, adjusting to the challenge of climate change, and as I said, investing in America's new markets. If we do it the way I have proposed, this country will be out of debt in 2015. Now, I would like to tell you very briefly why I think that is a good idea. First of all, you all know we live in a global economy. Interest rates and capital availability are set in global markets. If a wealthy country like the United States is out of debt, what does it mean? It means interest rates will be lower it means there will be more business investment it'll be more jobs it'll be higher incomes. It means that, for ordinary citizens, their car payments, their house payments, their credit card payments, their student loan payments will be lower. It means the next time there's a financial crisis in the world, we won't need to take money, and the needy, vulnerable countries will be able to get the money they need at lower interest rates, which means not only their people will be better off, but they will be better trading partners for us, and their democracies will be more likely to weather the storms. This is a progressive idea today, and we ought to stick with it. Now, I realize 16 months before an election the allure of "I've got a bigger tax cut than you do come look at my tax cut" laughter I mean, that's got a lot of appeal, you know. And it doesn't take very long to explain. You can put it in a 5 second ad "Our tax cut is bigger than theirs." But I'd just like to remind the American people, number one, look at the results we have achieved in the last 6 1 2 years by looking to the long run and doing the responsible thing. Number two, every ordinary American citizen, and virtually every wealthy American, will be better off over the long run with lower interest rates, a more stable economy, a more growing economy, than with a short term tax cut. I'm not against a tax cut. We've got a good one in here. But if we don't fix Medicare and Social Security and we let the baby boom generation retire and worry about whether these systems are going to go haywire and we impose on our children the burden of taking care of us when it is absolutely unnecessary, undermining their ability to raise our grandchildren, we will never forgive ourselves, just because there is an election in 16 months. It's wrong. The Vice President and I had a meeting with the Republican and the Democratic leaders of Congress Monday, and we told them that we wanted to work with them. And we have worked with them in the past, as I said, with welfare reform and the Balanced Budget Act. But we've got to stay on this new way. I think that, on this issue, they're still committed to their old ways. Yesterday the Republican leadership unveiled a tax plan that I believe could wreck our economy. It would certainly wreck our fiscal discipline. Let me explain what is wrong with their plan. Their tax plan would devote just about all of the surplus that doesn't come from Social Security taxes, all the non Social Security surplus to a tax cut. First of all, if they did that, it would leave no money for Medicare. Every responsible analyst of Medicare says there are just so many people drawing and so few people paying in as the baby boomers retire, that will be twice as many people over 65 in 2030 as there are today. Everybody says you've got to put some more money in. So there would be no money for that. Secondly, it would require, as our economy grows, real cuts in education, defense, the environment, research, technology, the kinds of things that we have invested more in. We have almost doubled investment in education and technology as we have shrunk the size of the Government and gotten rid of the deficit and eliminated hundreds of programs. So it won't work. The second big problem with it is that if you look at the next 10 years, not just the first 10 years that is, the 10 years when the baby boomers will retire and when we ought to be paying off the debt their tax cut will really be big, and it will put us back into debt. So remember now, I'm not going to I hope I will be one of the people just out there drawing my check, you know. I'll be out of here. But think about this, especially the younger people in this audience. In the second decade of the 21st century, just when the baby boomers start to retire, just when Social Security and Medicare begin to feel the crunch, just when we could be debt free for the first time since 1835, at that very moment, their tax cut would swallow the surplus and make it impossible to meet our basic commitments. I have asked the Treasury to report as soon as possible to me on what their tax cut costs in the second 10 years of this decade. We should not undo our fiscal discipline. We should not imperil our prosperity. We should not undermine Medicare. We should not make big cuts in education, defense, research and technology, and the environment. I won't allow that sort of plan to become law. It wouldn't be right. Now again I say, we can have a tax cut. We ought to have a tax cut, but we ought to do it in the right way for the right reasons, and we ought to put first things first. We should save Social Security and Medicare, meet our responsibilities for the next century, before we go off talking about the tax cut. You know, some of this is basic arithmetic. We had years and years in the 1980's when people said there is no such thing as basic arithmetic. There is supply side economics, or whatever, and they said supply side economics would dictate a huge recession after our '93 economic plan passed. But the American people don't have to guess any more. We tried it their way we tried it our way. There is evidence. And I'm telling you, I don't care if the election is next week, never mind next year we have worked for too long to get this country out of the hole. We are moving in the right direction, and we must not compromise the future of America and the next generation just for the next election. It would be wrong, and I want you to help us get that message out there. The same thing is true on crime. The DLC had a lot to do with our ideas about fighting crime, and you remember what they were. We wanted 100,000 police. We used to go our DLC trips, we'd go to these places, and we'd go look at these community policing operations that were already bringing crime down in cities in the early nineties. We wanted the Brady bill we wanted an assault weapons ban we wanted targeted, tougher punishment and broad prevention programs for our young people. And the program is working. The real choice, as the Vice President pointed out in his speech Monday, is not between stronger punishment and better prevention. The real choice is to do both. But I hope the DLC will not give up its ideas on fighting crime just because we're at a 26 year low. Because, if you're one of the victims, the crime is still too high. We could make this country the safest big country in the world if we would do the right, sensible things to do it. I thought the Vice President put some great ideas forward on Monday. And that's what this election ought to be about. Even the commentators on the other side point out that, so far, he's the only person who has actually said what he would do if the people gave him the job, which I think is a reasonably good idea to do. You probably ought to tell people what you're going to do when you get the job, and then you would be more likely to do it. And I believe one of the central reasons for the success that we have enjoyed is that we worked Al and I and others and my folks at home in Arkansas we worked for years to think about exactly what ought to be done. And so, if you look at what he said, that we ought to apply reforms that are working in the private sector at many levels of government to revolutionize the justice system, we ought to take the next step on licensing people who own handguns to make sure that they're trained to use the guns and that they should have them and that would solve all these loopholes because, if you had a bad background, you couldn't get a license, you couldn't own one. This is not going to keep anybody from being a hunter or sportsman. This is not going to undermine the fabric of life in America it's going to make it safer. And this is a very serious issue, so I would urge you to keep up your interest not only in the economic issues, not only in the entitlement reforms, but also in the question of how we can make America the safest big country in the world. When I was running in '92, we were just trying to get the crime rate down. Everybody thought it was going to go up forever. Now, we know we can bring it down. I think we ought to commit ourselves to making America the safest big country in the world. When I was running in '92, everybody said we've just got to get the deficit down, got to try to balance the budget. Now, we can imagine making America debt free. We can do things that are not imaginable at the moment if we will have good ideas and work on them in a disciplined way. So I think that the other candidates ought to follow the Vice President's lead and tell us where they stand on these crime issues and on the other issues as well. There will be clear choices here. Will we have commonsense gun laws, or Government by the gun lobby? I'll never forget when I went to New Hampshire in 1996. Just for all you elected politicians who think you can't survive this stuff, they voted for me by one point in '92, and I was grateful, because they normally vote Republican. So my first meeting, we had a couple of hundred, largely, men in this audience in their plaid shirts, waiting more for deer season than the President's speech. Laughter And so I told them, I said, "You know, in '94 you beat a Democrat Congressman up here, and you did it because he voted for the Brady bill and the crime bill and the assault weapons ban. And I want you to know he did that because I asked him to. So if you have, since 1994, experienced any inconvenience whatever in your hunting season, I want you to vote against me, too, because he did it for me. But if you haven't, they lied to you, and you ought to get even." Laughter In New Hampshire, our margin of victory went from one percent to 13 percent. You can do this. Tell the American people the truth about these things. Just go out and tell people the truth about these things. I feel the same way about welfare. I had to veto two bills that the Congress passed, because I thought they were too tough on kids. They took the guarantee of nutrition and health care benefits away from children. After we put that back in, I believe the welfare reform bill was right, because I thought we ought to require able bodied people to work, and because letting the States have the money for the benefits was not a big deal since the States had radically different levels of benefits anyway. And remember, in our welfare reform bill, we left the States with the same amount of money they had in February of 1994 when the welfare rolls were at an all time high, even after the rolls dropped, so that they could be free to put the money back into training, to child care, to transportation, to the things people need. We've still got work to do to make sure that work pays. With the strong support of the DLC back in '93, we doubled the earned income tax credit then we raised the minimum wage we put more into child care. But I want to do some other things. First of all, we are changing the rules, so thousands of poor working families won't be denied food stamps, as they are today, just because they own a reliable car. We're going to change those rules, and we should be for them. We're also going to get rid of some of the old reporting rules and launch a national campaign to make sure that working people know there is no indignity in taking public assistance to help feed their children if they're out there working 40 hours a week. And finally let me say, I hope you will really give a lot of thought to the project that Al and I and others were on last week. How can we go across that bridge to the 21st century together? How can we bring the spark of enterprise and opportunity to every community? There are still a lot of people that haven't participated in this recovery and a lot of places that we didn't visit last week. There are still a lot of small and medium sized towns that lose just a factory, but have real trouble restructuring their economy. We presented this new markets initiative, which I said I think is very good, because it will give the same incentives to people nationwide that they only have in the empowerment zones today to invest in those markets. But we need to do more. A fertile, fertile ground for DLC endeavors is involving everyone, every single American who is willing to work in American enterprise. We can do that. And let me just make one last point as we segue into the next part of the program. The DLC now takes a lot of justifiable pride in the fact that the ideas we have long championed are now being debated in Berlin or London or some other world capital. But that's not why we got into this. We got into this to prove that politics had a positive purpose in the lives of ordinary citizens, and therefore, it is far more important for us what is happening in Sacramento or in countless other legislatures and city halls across America. You are still on the frontline of the battlefield of ideas. You must lead us forward. I have taken enormous pride in the work of Lieutenant Governors like Cruz Bustamante and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. I have taken enormous pride in watching mayors like Kirk Wilson in Austin and Don Cunningham in Bethlehem. I see my former colleagues in the Governors' Association continuing to do remarkable things and people in other State offices. Don't forget that. I close with these words. Robert Kennedy, who I believe was trying to do something like what we've been doing when his life and career were cut short in 1968, said, "Idealism, high aspiration, and deep conviction are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient of programs. There is no basic inconsistency between ideals and realistic possibility, no separation between the deepest desires of heart and mind and the rational application of human efforts to human problems." That is a good statement of what we believe and what you were doing. I thank you for your hard work, and I ask you to remember, you can celebrate our achievements all you want, but the American people hire us for tomorrow. Thank you, and God bless you. At this point, the conversation proceeded. The President. Well, first of all, I would like to thank Kirk and Don and Ember and Mike for their presentations. They pretty well made the point I was trying to make, that and I think they're four people who could do just about any job, and I think that the jobs they are doing are changing people's lives. I would just like to make a couple of points about what was said by each of them. First of all, if I could go back to the point I made about paying the debt down and the general condition of the economy. If we can keep this going, pretty soon this peacetime expansion, which is the longest peacetime expansion in history we'll have the longest expansion of any kind in our history, including wartime, pretty soon. Now, I do not for a moment believe we have repealed all the laws of economics. But I do believe that the technological revolution underway in America, and the fact that we have relatively open borders, and therefore, have consistent competition, has kept inflation down as we've had growth. But if you look at what they said from the perspective that I have to take every day you know, we sit around here all the time, and we argue how much more can the American economy grow without getting inflation going up. And you remember, every time the Federal Reserve meets now, that's the big argument. People say, are they or are they not going to raise interest rates? Well, there's no evidence of inflation now, but surely we can't keep doing this on and on and on. We've now got unemployment under 5 percent for 2 years in a row. Well, if you think about it, how could we continue to grow without inflation? And if you posit for the moment the potential of technology, there are the following ways You can look at what Austin is doing you have to continue to expand the base of people that make a living in the most powerful part of the economy now. Eight percent of our economy is in high tech, 30 percent of our growth. And since it, by definition, is the whole thing that makes it work is continuing explosive increases in productivity. So that's one thing you can do. The second thing that you can do is to sell more of what we make around the world, which is why I've tried really hard to build a consensus among our party and to reach out to the others by continuing to expand trade, but to do it in a way that lifts labor and environmental standards around the world, so it's a race to the top, not a race to the bottom. The third thing you can do is to reach out to discrete population groups, and that's what Michael does. The two biggest discrete population groups in the country that are still not in the work force are the people who still haven't moved from welfare to work, although we moved another million and a half last year. And they are the hardest to reach. That's why what you said about the work force act is so important. Every Governor now has been given the opportunity to work with labor commissions and others to design a training program that we hope will eventually lead to a lifetime educational training program, so that whenever anybody's changing jobs at any age, they'll always be able to get the training they need. But the two big population groups anywhere are people on welfare and disabled people who want to go to work. One of the things that I think will come out of this Congress, there appears to be almost unanimous bipartisan agreement that we ought to let people on disability who get Medicaid health insurance keep their Medicaid when they go in the work force. Now, that's a good deal for the States, because we're going to pay their Medicaid anyway State and Federal Government but if they're working, they'll be paying taxes back. They'll be happier they'll be part of it. Seventy some percent of the people who are disabled in this country want to go in the work force. I met in New Hampshire, I met a guy who was an Olympic skier once who had a terrible skiing accident, was confined to a wheelchair. He had 40,000 in medical bills a year, and that was slightly more than he was going to make on his job. We're better off if he takes a job. But on the welfare I don't want to minimize the difficulty of this he's got a big challenge now, because most of the easy movement from welfare to work has occurred. So if you want to move people now, you've got to really work at it. And then, to go to what the mayor of Bethlehem said, the other thing we've got to do is to find a way to enable people who lose their economic base to create one more quickly. People like me who come from the Mississippi Delta area I see Mr. Eastland over there that's what happened to us. We never we lost the economic base that once gave everybody a job, even though a lot of those people were working for substandard livings, and we that's a part of our country that's not yet reconstructed its economic base. That's why I think the DLC ought to be working on it. The reason we were celebrating East St. Louis the other day is it was the first this Walgreens store is going to anchor this big development down there it's the first development they've had in decades not years, decades. We cannot afford, in an economy that's moving literally at the speed of light, to wait decades to figure out how to bring enterprise to places that have been left behind. We have to figure out how to do that better. And what you're doing will work, but it needs to be done everywhere. The last point I'd like to make is that, going to what Ember said, when I became President, there was one charter school in the whole country one in Minnesota. Minnesota was also the first State in the country to have statewide school choice before the charter schools. Arkansas was the second I stole the idea from Minnesota. So I said, well, let's have 1,000 charter schools. Then I asked the Congress to give me enough money to help people set up 3,000 charter schools for this next year. We're going to be at 1,500 this fall. I think next year will be actually quite close to 3,000 nationwide, which is enough to have a profound impact. But we won't really have a successful system until the things that make the charter schools work can be found in the other schools. And the voucher movement will never go away if people feel that they're trapped in failure. I've worked for school choice. I've worked for the charter schools. I believe in accountability. Actually, there is no evidence and there is quite a bit of evidence out there now on how well kids do who opt out and go to private schools there is no evidence that they're doing better. But if people feel their schools are unsafe or they're inadequate, the voucher movement will be out there, and it will be a difficult political issue for Democrats, for Republicans, for people who love public education. We have got to prove that the one thing that we have never done, and I've worked for 20 years on this deal now, more than 20 years now we have not succeeded as a country in taking what works in public education in one place or two places or 10 places, modifying it for local conditions, yes, but implementing it somewhere else. And so you have to assume that parents and others who would go to the trouble to set up the charter schools wouldn't go to all the trouble unless they were committed to learning, unless they were really committed to what works. But if I could have waved a magic wand as Governor, when I was Governor and solved any problem in my State, it would have been that. I had poor little rural schools, I had some schools in poor urban areas that were doing stunningly well. But I never could either set up the systems or set up the incentives or convince people that everybody else ought to run through what they were doing and do it. Because this is not rocket science. This is not the same as walking on Mars within 5 years. In some ways, it's more difficult because it deals with the human psyche and all these human difficulties, but people can understand what works. And I just think that the work you've done in Minnesota and what you're pushing now, this whole concept of charter districts I never even thought about it before you said it today, but that's the sort of thing we need to be doing. We will never bring everybody into the big tent of our prosperity until we have not only the best higher education system in the world but the best elementary and secondary education system in the world. And you've got to give this lady and her colleagues in Minnesota an enormous amount of credit for what they have done now for more than a decade to make us think about this. But if I could say to all of you at the grassroots level, if you can figure out a way to make economic change faster, to bring opportunity to where it doesn't exist, and to bring more uniformity of excellence in public education, if we could do those things, if that could be a huge part of the DLC's crusade for the next decade, I wouldn't be a bit worried about America's future. Thank you very much. July 13, 1999 Well, thank you very much. I must say, I have had a wonderful time in south Florida today, as I always do. I got to speak to the communications workers convention earlier today, and then I got to play golf with some of you in this room. I didn't play all that well, but I had a good time anyway. Laughter And now Coach Riley is giving me this Miami Heat gear, and I might say Hillary will be very jealous of me. She thinks that Pat Riley is the best looking person in the NBA. Laughter And we're thrilled by the success that you've had down here, Coach. I have so many friends in this room, and I hesitate to even start to say any, but let me begin by saying, Alfie, you were there for me from the beginning, and you've been there we've gone through some difficult times and I want to thank you personally for the extraordinary effort that you made, with Mitch Berger and others, to resolve this issue of where we would go and how we would save the Florida Everglades. And now I think we're going to do it, and I thank all of you for being involved in this. I thank you. I want to thank Attorney General Butterworth and Marta for being here, and Bill and Grace Nelson. And I almost never ran without opposition I guess Bill's going to get through the primary without any. That's pretty impressive. That's the best way to run, I think. I want to say to all of you, that's a profoundly important race in 2000. We have a lot of highly competitive United States Senate races. And who wins will have a lot to do with what our country will be able to accomplish in the first 3 or 4 or 5 years of the next millennium. I want to thank Representative Carrie Meek and Representative Alcee Hastings for being here, and I want to thank them for their wonderful support over the years. I want to thank my good friend Adele Graham for being here, and with her daughter and her about to be grandchild laughter and her son in law. Thank you. Bob was reminding me, their 10th grandchild it doesn't seem I knew Bob and Adele when their kids were maybe not even all in high school. It seems impossible to me that they have or are about to have 10 grandchildren. I'm here tonight also because this State's been very good to me, from 1991, in December, when I won the Florida straw poll, thanks to a number of you in this room, including Representative Elaine Bloom. I hope you're going to send her to Congress to join Carrie and Alcee. Pat was telling me he wanted to make sure the Democrats targeted Florida in the year 2000 because I argued with all the Democratic Party people in '92. I said, "We can win Florida." They said, "You're crazy." And we nearly did, in spite of everything. I think we spent 3.50 here in 1992 laughter and took a lot out and nearly won anyway. And in '96 we had our first campaign meeting in 1995. I said there was one issue over which we will have no argument. The first meeting, 5 minutes into the first meeting, I said, "This year we're going after Florida, and we will win." And thanks to you, we did and I thank all of you. So I'm very, very grateful to all of you for that. And I'm also here because Charlie Whitehead has been my friend a long time. I'll tell you an interesting story. It's a little bit about human nature that you never forget. I first came to Florida to give a speech in 1981. Now, when I was invited to Florida to give a speech by Charlie Whitehead in 1981, he thought he was inviting the youngest Governor in America. Then we had the Reagan landslide, and it turned out he was inviting the youngest ex Governor laughter in the entire history of the Republic, you know? Laughter You can't imagine what it was like back then unless you went through it, man. Laughter Our friends on the other side, some of them are fairly coldblooded, and the guy that defeated me terrorized I had contributors, people I had actually appointed to office who were afraid to speak to me on the street. True story. So I was rather amazed that anybody still wanted me to come to Florida and get a suntan. And so I came and I made the best little talk I could. Then I got reelected, and he invited me back in '83. And then I got to come back in '87. So I became a regular fixture at the Florida Democratic Convention, and I came to love it very much. But I'll never forget the fact that when I was down and out and I didn't think I'd ever get invited to the smallest Rotary Club in my State again and my career prospects were something less than bright, Charlie Whitehead still wanted me to come to Florida to give a speech. And I will never, ever forget it, and I thank you. Alfie told you why he's a Democrat. I thought he made a remarkable statement. Somebody asked me the other day what I thought about Governor Bush raising 36 million. I said it just proves I didn't discriminate in my economic policies they benefited the Republicans, too. Laughter And as far as I'm concerned, they can spend their money any way they wanted to. That was not part of my deal, but we helped to make it. I've got a friend in New York who's a very wealthy and successful businessman, an ardent Democrat, who's now going to every person he knows on Wall Street and saying, "Look, if you paid more taxes in 1993 than you made in the stock market, support the Republicans." Laughter "But if you made more money than you paid in taxes, you better stay with us, and it will keep going." So you might remember that, you all, when you're out there moseying around. Laughter You don't even have to give me credit for it. Just sort of mosey around and say it. Laughter Anyway, I've had a wonderful relationship with this State. The last time I was here, I was at the Garys' home, and what a wonderful night we had there with so many of their friends. And we had great music. I think he had the Drifters there, and Willie got up and sang with them. He could actually leave his day job, unlike me. Laughter I want to say just a few things to you tonight. I spent most of the 1980's, except for my brief period out of office, as a Governor. My seatmate for most of that time was Bob Graham. I think I served with 150 Governors. If you asked me to make a list of the five best I served with, he would certainly be on that list. But we had an interesting time of it in the 1980's, in that Republican ascendancy, when we were out here in our States trying to make our schools better, trying to generate income, trying to build a future. And I spent a lot of time thinking about what makes America work, what were the challenges of our country, what should the Federal Government do, and what shouldn't it do. And in 1991, when I decided to seek the Presidency, I had thought for years and years and years not so much about what I would do but what I thought our country should do. And one of the reasons that I've been very pleased with the Vice President's campaign is that, alone among all the people running in both parties, he is the only person who said, "Now, before I tell you that I want you to vote for me, I want you to know what I intend to do if I get elected." And I think that's pretty important. And so I said to the American people, I didn't think our country was headed in the right direction for the 21st century. Unemployment was high social problems were worsening there was a sense of drift in the country. And I asked the American people basically to embrace a vision of politics that was premised on some simple ideas. One is that we ought to be committed to opportunity for every citizen who was responsible enough to deserve it. The second was that we ought to be committed to building a community that embraced every law abiding American without regard to whatever differences they had in their God given characteristics or their choices in life. The third was that the Government of our country ought to be smaller but more active, and ought to be focused not on trying to solve all the problems but being a good partner, giving people the tools they need to solve their own problems and live their own dreams. And I said, if we did the right things and embraced some new ideas, I really believe that we could go into the 21st century with the American dream alive and well for everyone, with America coming closer together instead of drifting further apart, and with our country still the world's leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity around the world. Well, 6 1 2 years later, I have been profoundly gratified by what has happened. Our country has nearly 19 million new jobs the longest peacetime expansion in history a 26 year low in crime a 30 year low in the welfare rolls declining rates of teen pregnancy, teen smoking, teen drug abuse 90 percent of our kids immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time in our history the highest homeownership in history the lowest minority unemployment rates ever recorded 100,000 young people have served our country and their communities through AmeriCorps and earned some money to go to college. We changed the tax laws now so that through tax credits we've really, literally, opened the doors of college to anyone who's willing to work for it. We set aside more land for preservation than any administration in the history of this country, except those of Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt. The air is cleaner the water is cleaner the food is safer. And we've been a force for peace in the Middle East to Northern Ireland to Bosnia and Kosovo. It has been a wonderful ride, and for the role that all of you had in it, I am grateful. Why am I here tonight? I'm not running for anything. I'm here tonight for two reasons. Number one, I don't want the country to go on idle for the next year and a half while everybody plays games about the next election. There's plenty of work to do, and everybody in Washington is still drawing a salary from you therefore, we are expected to show up for work every day. I do, and I want everybody else to do the same. And there are some big challenges out there. The second reason is and I will talk more about that in a minute the second reason is, it is very important that we build the strength of the Democratic Party at the grassroots level so that every person can answer the question Alfie answered, each in your own way. Why are you here tonight? You're going to go about your life tomorrow morning. You'll come in contact with all different kinds of people. People ask you, "Why did you come?" You might say, "Well, it is a beautiful house." Laughter That would be a good reason to come, but it won't persuade anybody else. You need to know and you can tell them what I just told you that this is working. And when people make their judgments in 2000, no one should believe that you're just riding on a clean slate, that there's no connection between the candidates and their ideas and what they're committed to and the consequences that will flow to the country. You can see it today in Washington. We're debating the Patients' Bill of Rights. Two hundred organizations have embraced the bill, unanimously supported by the Democratic Senators, unanimously supported by our side The American Medical Association and all of the other major doctors groups, the American Nurses Association and all of the other major health care groups, all the major consumer groups. The health insurers are on the other side. Why? They think it will erode their profits, and they're claiming they're telling the American people that all these people that are in managed care plans, if we guarantee basic fundamental rights that we ought to be able to take for granted, your premiums will explode. This is just one of the issues that's before us. What are those rights? Most of us probably have good health care we don't have to worry about it. But I'm telling you, millions and millions and millions of people who are in managed care today do not know whether they can get to see a specialist if their doctor tells them they need it, or whether some accountant can tell them no, they can't. There are people in managed care plans today that if God forbid they should go outside and get hit by a car, they would have to go by one or two hospitals before they would finally get to a hospital emergency room covered by the plan. That's not right. When people are hurt, they ought to go to the nearest health care, not the farthest because it's covered. There are people today who work for small businesses who, if the small business changes their health provider while a woman is 6 months pregnant, no matter how difficult the pregnancy, or a woman or a man is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, might be told in the middle of the treatment they have to change physicians. And I don't think that's right. Now, the Congressional Budget Office, which until this moment until this very moment from the day they got into the majority, the Republicans have said is the end all and beall, the authority on everything having anything to do with money you ask Alcee and Carrie they tell us every time, you know, whatever they say is what we do so they said, if we guarantee these rights to all Americans, it might it might raise health insurance premiums by as much as 2 a month. I think it's worth it to see a cardiologist or to keep your pediatrician or to keep your obstetrician or to stop at the nearest emergency room. There is no reason in the world that we shouldn't. And it's another going back to what Alfie said my premise is, if you do what's right for the people, the country tends to do pretty well. Those of us who have been blessed with the means to make money or with good educations or with good positions in life, we tend to do pretty well, regardless. But we do a whole lot better when everybody else does well. We have a big decision to make. Are we going to deal with the challenge of the aging of America now that we have this surplus? Did you ever think we'd be debating what to do with a surplus? Laughter When I took office, the deficit was 290 billion the debt total had quadrupled in the previous 12 years we were spending 15 cents plus every dollar of your tax money on interest payments on the debt. Elaine will go to Congress, and first thing she'll have to do she has all these things she'd like to do for you, whether it's investing money or giving you tax relief or you name it. Well, the first thing she has to do is to figure out how much of every dollar you pay in taxes you've got to take right off the top just to pay interest on the debt. So, now we have this surplus, and I'm gratified that there seems to be agreement between both parties that we ought to take that portion of the surplus that's produced by your Social Security taxes and set it aside for Social Security. Now, how we do that will make all the difference. But they want to spend the rest of it on a tax cut. And you know, it's getting close to election, and I'm sure it's popular, but I'd like to tell you what the consequences of that will be. If we do it, there will be no new money put into Medicare. There's a representative here tonight who told me he worked for a hospital, and the hospital already is out 6 million this year because we cut Medicare too much in the balanced budget amendment for a lot of urban hospitals that deal with a lot of poor people. That's true with a lot of teaching hospitals, a lot of university hospitals. I propose to put 15 percent of the surplus into Medicare, provide a prescription drug benefit, to provide free preventative services so older people will go in and get all these tests and screenings and prevent themselves from getting sick. It doesn't make any sense for us we don't pay for the preventive screenings, so people don't get them. Then they get sick, they go to the hospital, they cost 10 times as much, and we pay for that. Better to keep people well. So that's what I think we ought to do. I also don't think we ought to cut education or our investments in medical research or technology or the environment or defense by the 25 to 35 percent it would cost to fund this program over the next decade. I think that's a mistake. I think that's a mistake. But we have offered the American people a sizable tax cut, targeted at child care, to longterm care if your family needs it, to help all families save more for their retirement, to help build world class schools, to give people the same incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods in our inner cities and rural areas. You saw me visiting some of them last week at our Native American reservations. I think they ought to have every one of you in this room with money ought to have the same incentives to invest in those areas that you get today to invest in poor areas overseas. I'm not against that I'm glad we invest in the Caribbean and Latin America and Asia and Africa. But I believe you ought to have those same incentives to invest in the Indian reservations, in the Mississippi Delta, in Appalachia, in inner cities in Florida, in New York, in California, and wherever else in this great country of ours. I think it's important. Let met just say one other thing. If my plan gets adopted, we'll save most of this surplus for Social Security and Medicare. As we save it, our debt will go down, because we don't have to spend it right away. We'll run Social Security's Trust Fund out until 2053 we'll run Medicare out to 2027. It will be the first time in everybody's memory that it's been stable for that long. We'll be able to handle the retirement of the baby boom generation. The interest payments on the debt will go down, and we'll take the savings on the interest and put it into Social Security. And, guess what? For the first time since 1835, in 15 years, this country will be debt free. Now, why and I'd like to tell you all, particularly those of you who are younger and have young children, why that's important. I predict to you that 10 years from now, when your 10 grandchildren are all getting up there, it will be the conventional wisdom all around the world that wealthy countries ought to be debt free. Why? Because we live in a global economy this money moves around the interest rates are set by global movement. All of you know this. If we are out of public debt, what it means is interest rates in America will be lower. That means more business investment, higher business profits, more money for more jobs, and higher wage increases. It means ordinary people have lower home mortgages, lower car payments, lower credit card payments, lower college loan payments. It means that our children and our grandchildren will have a more stable economy. It means, when the world gets in trouble like it did 2 years ago in Asia and there's a terrible financial crisis, we won't have to worry about it because we won't be borrowing money, and our friends we want to help will be able to get the money they need at a lower cost. This is a huge deal. Now, all of this takes more time to explain than somebody saying, "Look, I'm going to take this surplus and put the part paid by Social Security into that and give the rest back to you in a tax cut." That just took me 5 seconds to say. It sounds great. But keep in mind, I'm not running for anything. But I do want to able to bring my grandchildren to Florida someday and show them the things that I did when I was a young man here and tell them the stories about what you did for me and know they're living in America that is having its best days. And I'm telling you did you ever think we'd be sitting here having a national debate about what to do with the surplus? We can have a tax cut. The question is, how big can it be and still allow us to fulfill our fundamental responsibilities to make sure America is the strongest country in the world in the 21st century and every American, without regard to race or religion, has a chance to live out their dreams? This is the question before the Congress today. That is the question before the American people today. I'm going to do my dead level best to work with the Republicans. I have told the Democrats, and I think almost all of them agree with me, that we should do this. There will be still plenty we disagree with by the 2000 election. Take it from me. Laughter Florida is not known for example, we have a 26 year low in the crime rate, right? Part of the reason is we put 100,000 police on the street, and we passed the Brady bill, which has kept 400,000 people with criminal records from getting handguns. Now, when we passed the Brady bill, I remember what the Republican leaders and the NRA said. They said, "This is a worthless bill because those criminals do not buy guns in gun stores they get all their guns at gun shows and flea markets and stuff like that." So we passed the Brady bill turned out they were wrong 400,000 people who shouldn't have handguns were trying to buy them at gun stores. And that's one of the reasons the crime rate has gone down. But now we said, "Hey, you guys might have been right. Let's close the gun show loophole. Let's do the background checks at the gun shows and the flea markets." They said, "Oh, goodness, we couldn't do that," even though they told us 4 years ago that's where the criminals are buying the guns. Florida no flaming liberal State, right? Laughter Left wing, pinko Florida voted 72 percent in the last election to close the gun show loophole. We can't close it in the Congress for the country. Why? Because the leadership of the other party and the NRA won't let the rank and file Republicans vote for it. That's the truth. In the Senate, 98 percent of our side voted to do it, and 90 percent of theirs voted against it. In the House, 75 percent almost 78 percent of our side voted to do it, and 85 percent of the their side voted against it. There are real, significant partisan differences here, on the Patients' Bill of Rights, on how to keep America safe, and other things. But you know, we're all going to get older. The baby boom is going to age. There will be twice as many people over 65 in the year 2030 as there are today. And whether we like it or not, we Democrats are going to get old just like the Republicans. Laughter And we are never going to have another time like this in our lifetime. We should not wait to save Social Security, to save Medicare, and to get this country out of debt. We shouldn't wait we don't need to do that. We shouldn't wait to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. We shouldn't wait to continue the improvements in education that we've worked so hard on the last several years. There will be plenty to argue about in 2000. So I hope we can do it. But you ask me why I'm a Democrat. I'm a Democrat partly for the reason Alfie is. When ordinary citizens in this country do well, when poor people have a chance to work their way into in the middle class, the rest of us who have been gifted and blessed and are lucky as sin, we do just fine, even better than we would if those folks were in trouble, first of all. Secondly, life is about more than money and when we live in harmony with our friends and neighbors when we have a feeling that our society is just and moving in the right direction when we know that people, who are less fortunate than we are, are going to have a chance to live out their dreams and when we come into more contact with more different kinds of people, life is more fun, more interesting, and more rewarding. So all those things are terribly important to me. And when they ask you why you came, tomorrow, say you came because of those things. Say you came because our ideas worked, and say you came because what we're fighting for now is right. Let me just say a few words Alfie asked me to talk about the Cuban issue and the unfortunate incident with the people who were trying to come here. I'd like to put it into a larger context. One of the most frustrating things to me as President people say all the time I'm a reasonably good communicator, but I don't think I've succeeded in convincing the American people entirely that America is living in a world that's increasingly interdependent and that our prosperity and our security and the quality of our life is more and more caught up with how we relate to other people throughout the world. I'm proud of the fact that we stopped the ethnic cleansing and slaughter in Bosnia in 1995, and I'm proud of the fact that we didn't let it go on for 2 1 2 years before we stopped it in Kosovo. And that's a long way away. And you may say, "Well, that's a long way away." I mean, it's amazing we lost no pilots in combat. They had far fewer civilian casualties than we would have had if there had been some massive invasion. But over 650,000 of those people have already gone home. Va clav Havel, the great Czech President, great hero of liberty and human rights, said it was the most moral, selfless war ever fought, because the people who carried it forward, we didn't want anything we didn't want territory we didn't want power we didn't want money. All we wanted was to create a world in which Europe could live without people being killed because of the way they worship God or because of their race or ethnic background. We're trying to set up the same systems that will prevent that from happening in Africa. We're working today to diffuse the conflict between India and Pakistan. We're looking forward I'm eager as a kid with a new toy for the meeting I'm going to have with the new Israeli Prime Minister this weekend, in the hope that we can begin to energize the peace process in the Middle East on terms that are just and fair and will guarantee genuine security for Israel and a way of living for the Palestinians that will bring reconciliation and a resolution of all these issues with Syria so that there can be peace in the Middle East. These are things I believe in, just like I believe we were right to expand trade. I haven't convinced everybody in my party we were right about that. But if you think about it, we're 4 percent of the world's people we've got 22 percent of the world's income. There's no way for us to keep 22 percent of the world's income unless we sell something to the other 96 percent of the world's people. To me, it's not rocket science, and I know there are difficulties, but we have to do it. Now, one of the things that I've tried to do as President is to be more active with the Caribbean and with Latin America. I'm trying to pass a Caribbean Basin initiative through the Congress that will enable us to be better neighbors to our friends in the Caribbean. I have had now the opportunity to participate in two Summits of the Americas. Every country in the Caribbean and Latin America is a democracy but Cuba, and it is a continuing frustration to us. We have an embargo, a tough embargo that's even tougher than it was before those people were shot out of the sky. And you remember that, just a few years ago, which led to the passage of the new legislation. There is no question that they were flat out killed illegally. It was wrong. So what we have tried to do recently is to be firm with the Government of Cuba and make it clear that we can't be forthcoming until they change, but that we want to help the people of Cuba and their suffering and keep families here in communication, one with another. One of the most difficult things has been how to handle the people that want to get away, particularly when you know, well, from time to time they've been used as a political weapon. So a few years ago, we reached an understanding with Cuba, and we've tried to use the Coast Guard, as Alfie said, as a lifesaver. We have, completely independent of that and you should know this completely independent of what is happening with Cuba, the United States has had more and more and more people come to this country, principally in California and New York, under the control of alien smugglers, cruel people who enslave people and bring them here. So the Coast Guard, in part, I think, has tried to react more to try to cut down on alien smuggling. But what happened with the way those people were sprayed and all that, it was outrageous. I want you to know it was not an authorized policy. None of us knew anything about it in Washington until we saw it on the news or read it in the newspapers, just like you did. We have taken vigorous steps to make sure it does not happen again, and the incident is being thoroughly investigated. So now we have to look and see whether or not the policy we have is manageable, given the problems that we're facing. But we still have to try to have a legal, orderly process by which people come from Cuba to the United States. A few years ago, I expanded the number of people who could legally get visas to come here to 20,000 a year, and we are reviewing this whole situation now in light of what has happened. But I do believe that the general statements Alfie made at the beginning are the correct ones. We have to try to keep the movement here orderly, safe, and legal, and we have to look at the new challenges that have been presented to us. But I want you to know that there will never be a time when any of us will willfully sanction the use of excessive or inhumane tactics in dealing with anybody coming to this country. We have to try to enforce our laws we have to try to protect our borders we have to try to deal with a situation which could, as you well remember from times past, spiral out of hand. And I am reviewing what the facts are and what our options are. But I want you to know that the values that will guide us, I think, are the right ones. So last thing I want to say is, thanks for giving money to the Florida Democratic Party. Laughter Pat, I will do my best to make sure nobody gives up on Florida. I haven't given up on Florida. We're going to get a Senator. We're going to get Members of Congress. You're going to have gains in the legislature, and I believe we can carry it in the Presidential race in the year 2000 if it is clear what the issues are and what the choices are. And you can't do that if you don't have folks like you out here who know good and well what they are and are willing to say it and if you don't have people like you who are willing to give money so we can get our message out to the larger populace. You have done that tonight. You have validated Whitehead's decision to come out of retirement. You've made sure that the old lion will not return to his den prematurely. Laughter So for all that, I am very grateful. Mostly, I am grateful that you have been so good to me and to Hillary and to Al and to Tipper in what has been the experience of a lifetime. But we're not done yet, and we owe it to the American people to give them our best down to the last day. That's what I mean to do, and I'm going to do what I can, wearing my Miami Heat outfit laughter to keep enough heat in Washington to make sure they do the same. Thank you very much. Mayor Penelas just came in. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Good to see you. How are you? Welcome. July 01, 1999 President Clinton. Good afternoon. I'm delighted to welcome President Mubarak back to the White House. He is our longtime partner in building a safer and more peaceful world. Once again, we now have a real chance to move the peace process forward in the Middle East. Egypt has been central to that process and to all the progress which has been made since the Camp David accords over 20 years ago. Egypt will continue to play a leading role to address the important tasks ahead, building on Oslo, Wye River implementation, reaching a permanent status agreement between Palestinians and Israelis, widening the circle of peace to include agreements with Syria and Lebanon, revitalizing talks between Israel and the Arab world on a host of other important issues from the environment to water resources to refugees to economic development. There are, to be sure, major challenges ahead, but the will of the people for peace is strong. President Mubarak and I also discussed our common determination to fight terrorism in all its forms. With regard to the peace process, let me just say one other thing. The best way for the Israelis to have lasting security is a negotiated peace based on mutual respect. That is also the best way for Palestinians to shape their own future on their own land. A negotiated peace is the best way for all the people of the region to realize their aspirations. Let me just say also that over the last two decades, under President Mubarak's leadership, Egypt has done much to fulfill the aspirations of its people. Economic growth has been strong and sustained inflation has been held in check the GDP per person has increased by a factor of five. Egypt is building a modern infrastructure in roads, powerplants, communication systems. Civil society has grown, with work ahead to strengthen it, so that all Egyptians participate in building a better future. Among the reasons for all this progress, two stand out, both advanced by President Mubarak's wise leadership. First, Israel's excuse me Egypt's deepening peace with Israel that has freed resources and energies of the people. A broader regional peace will be good for prosperity, for progress, and for freedom. Second, Egypt's economic reform, with expansion of the private sector and free markets. The work of President Mubarak and Vice President Gore on our U.S. Egypt partnership for growth and development, which they will advance later today, has been crucial. The President is committed to continuing the reforms, and America will continue to help. Today we discussed a number of other issues. I'd like to mention just one Kosovo. I am profoundly grateful to Egypt for supporting the stand taken by NATO. Already, more than half the refugees have returned to Kosovo. There is still much work to do, and I thank Egypt for its commitment to provide Egyptian police officers for the civilian police implementation force there. But we have made a powerful statement together. The future belongs to those who reconcile human differences, not those who exploit them. The future belongs to those who respect human rights, not those who destroy people because of their religion, their race, or their ethnic background. I hope we can carry some of the momentum from what we have achieved in Kosovo to the Middle East, as we seek there to promote tolerance and a durable peace. As we do, the leadership of President Mubarak, as always, will be critical. Mr. President, welcome. The floor is yours. President Mubarak. Thank you. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I was very pleased to see my friend President Clinton and exchange views with him on matters of common concern. As usual, our talks this morning reflected the similarity and the convergence of our views. We value our solid friendship with this great Nation and consider it one of the pillars of our policy. For decades, we have been working together in order to bring about peace and reconciliation in the Middle East. President Clinton has been playing an active and very effective rule. Under his leadership, the American contribution to the cause of peace has reached a new high. His continued involvement is appreciated by those of us who are committed to peace in the region. In the months ahead, we'll be looking forward to reviving the peace process, which has been stalled for sometime. Unfortunately, valuable time has been wasted. Today there's an opportunity which should not be missed. We shall work closely with the U.S. and coordinate our joint efforts in order to have the parties break the stalemate and restore movement towards peace. Recent events indicate that most of the region's inhabitants are yearning for peace. We shall be working with President Asad, Prime Minister Barak, and Chairman Arafat, respectively, with a view to creating the necessary atmosphere for resuming the peace process without delay. I'll be meeting with each of them in the near future for this purpose. Agreements which have been signed on the Palestinian track must be implemented fully and in good faith. Provocative actions, especially settlement activities, should be stopped altogether. This will pave the way for starting final status negotiations. In parallel, negotiations should be resumed on the Syrian track. There are signs that the ground is favorable for that. It would be a mistake to assume that movement should be confined to one track at a time. Progress on each track facilitates movement on the other. The goal is to achieve just, comprehensive, and stable peace in the whole area. In that context, we were alarmed by the recent Israeli bombing of civilian targets in Lebanon. Such actions only poison the atmosphere in the region. They create an erosion of the people's confidence in the process at the time when we are working hard to encourage the parties to take confidence building measures. We call upon Israel to apply maximum selfrestraint in the crucial months ahead. As tangible progress is achieved towards peace, we can work for enhancing cooperation and interaction in the region. Egypt was a country that initiated the peace process, and we remain most willing and determined to do all we can to help bridge the gaps and restore confidence between the parties. We also discussed some other regional and international problems, notably African issues, as well as matters related to cooperation between countries of north and south. I commended President Clinton on the success of the American role in bringing about peace and security in Kosovo. We hope that the events that took place in that part of the world will convince all those concerned of the necessity to abide by the rule of law and respect the human rights of all peoples. We are aware of the fact that much has to be done to help the refugees and to prevent any recurrence of ethnic, religious, or cultural violent conflicts. On our part, we will contribute to international forces as being assigned the task of maintaining security and order in Kosovo. As we are about to enter a new era, with the dawning of the new millennium, we must spare no effort in our quest for peace and security. For all nations, global problems that threaten the future of mankind ought to be addressed with vigor and determination. In all these endeavors, we shall cooperate with our partners and friends, among whom the U.S. figures very prominently. Our bilateral cooperation is expanding every year, and it will continue to grow. This is a goal both of us are committed to. The Clinton administration has done much in this respect, and the President's personal involvement in this process was and continues to be most appreciated by the Egyptian people. Before I conclude, I would like to send a message of friendship and affection to all Americans. Thank you very much. President Clinton. Thank you, Mr. President. Now, as is our practice, we will alternate between American and Egyptian journalists. Helen Helen Thomas, United Press International , you go first. Q. I'd like to ask both Presidents questions. President Clinton, do you have any new ideas for breaking the stalemate in the Middle East? And with the advent of our own Independence Day, when do you think Lebanon will be free and independent and rid of a longtime occupation? President Mubarak, do you think the new Israeli Government will make a gesture toward halting the settlements? President Clinton. Well, let me answer the questions you asked me first. I do think that the time is right, but I think that before I advance publicly any ideas, I should have a chance to meet with the Prime Minister elect, Mr. Barak, when he according to the reports in the press this morning, he has constituted a government on quite a broad base. We should give him more freedom of movement to move aggressively ahead. Our role, traditionally, has been to try to create the conditions and provide the support necessary for the parties to make peace, and I expect that he will have ideas of his own about that. And so I think that the appropriate thing for me at the moment is to look forward to our meeting, which I hope will occur in the near future, and then after that, after I talk with him, to make whatever statements are called for at that time. On the question of Lebanon, I think our position on that has always been clear. We believe that a comprehensive peace in the Middle East should include not only an agreement with the Palestinians and an agreement with the Syrians but also an agreement which includes Lebanon and promotes its independence and integrity. President Mubarak. The question about the settlements you mean? I think the time now is, at least, to improve the atmosphere in the area, to stop building the settlements now until the negotiations start. Then the Palestinians and the Israelis could sit and find out what could be done. This is, I mean, a step for improving the atmosphere between the two groups. President Clinton. Would you like to call on one of your journalists? President Mubarak. Yes. Q. Thank you. The question is for President Clinton. I would like to follow up on Helen's question on the settlements. President Clinton, in 1991, when you first were running for the Presidency, you made a pledge never to criticize Israel publicly. However, your administration expressed its dissatisfaction with Israel's settlements activities by describing them as an obstacle to peace. However, 23 new settlements have been built since the signing of the Wye River accord. Would you be willing, your administration, would be willing to tell Israel to stop building the settlements, the new Israeli government, to stop building the settlements and undo the wrong that has been done? Thank you. President Clinton. Well, I think our position on the settlements has been clear. We don't believe that unilateral actions by any parties, including other interested parties like the United States, which compromise the capacity of the parties to the Oslo accord to reach agreement on final status issues, should be taken. And that includes provocative settlement actions. We have made that clear and unambiguous. But I do not believe the Israeli people just had a huge election, a big election, and they voted in very large percentages in ways that almost every commentator has concluded sent the signal that they were ready to pursue the peace process to its conclusion. They now have a Prime Minister elect who has just completed his government. He is coming to see me in the next few days. I think the less I say, until I see him and until we see if we can embrace a common posture toward making a peace, the better. But my views on the settlement question are well known and have not changed. Yes, Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . 2000 Election and Campaign Finance Reform Q. Mr. President, Governor Bush has raised a record breaking 36 million, more than 10 times his closest rival for the Republican nomination. Do you think he's wrapped up the nomination, or is wrapping it up? And if he decides not to accept Federal campaign money and the spending limits that go with it, as appears increasingly likely, do you think that would be a blow to campaign finance reform? President Clinton. Well, first of all, I don't want to get into being a political handicapper, so I can't say how do I know what the Republicans are going to do in their nominating process? I don't have a clue. But I would make two observations. First of all, the leadership of the Republican Party, in general, are unanimously hostile to campaign finance reform. They don't believe in it. And so, if he did that, he would have that in common with the other leaders, who won't permit us to bring the McCain Feingold bill to a vote or to try to pursue what I believe are needed changes in the campaign finance laws. So that is one thing that that's just where they are, and they're very forthright about it. And the American people are going to have to make up their minds whether this is an important issue to them or not. But I would make one point, generally. I think the most valuable commodity in an election, in a democracy, in which you will cover the candidates extensively even more valuable than money is ideas. And I think the most important thing, therefore, that I have seen in this election so far is that Vice President Gore is, nearly as I can determine, the only candidate of either party who has yet actually told the American people what he would do if he got elected. And I think that if you look at the 1998 elections, for example, it's a good example that, in a democracy which has a vigorous media publicizing what people are doing and saying, money may be important, but ideas are even more important. World Summit on Terrorism Middle East Peace Process Q. My first question is for President Mubarak. You've been suggesting for some time the preparation of a world summit on terrorism. Did you discuss your ideas on this issue with President Clinton? And, Mr. President, do you have a specific plan for dealing with this international threat? And for you, President Clinton, to carry on with the peace process, how do you plan to work really on the peace process as you approach the next, best and maybe the happiest, 18 months in the Clinton administration? Laughter President Clinton. Well, being at peace would be a good start. Laughter President Mubarak. I've already discussed this issue about international terrorism with the President, as well as I have discussed it with other heads of states, but mainly here with President Clinton I did this issue. I'm saying that in the coming century, the most dangerous element is not the war program of this or that it's terrorism spreading all over the world. Sometimes when the terrorism starts, when I start speaking about terrorism sometime, I was told, "Oh, because of some kind of incident, you're speaking about terrorism." Now terrorism is spreading everywhere in the world. It's a very dangerous phenomenon. And a summit, and if it's well prepared before it I think the whole world will suffer from terrorism. War is much more easier than terrorism. Terrorism, you never know when the attack is going to take place. But war is planned, and you know its limits. That's why I discussed with the President, and I hope we could reach a summit, and before the summit there should be very thought out preparation with a technical group to see what kind of agreement could be reached in the whole world under the U.N. President Clinton. We discussed this issue quite extensively, and this has been a subject of great concern to me. It's one thing we've shared over the last 6 years. A few years ago, I gave a speech at the United Nations, at the opening session, about terrorism and asked that we focus on it. We have asked the Congress to provide substantial resources to look into what else we can do to fight terrorism, to deal with the threats of biological and chemical weapons and the prospect that they might get into the hands of terrorists. We have to consider the prospect in the future that, as the President said, the most serious security threats to nations will not be from other nations but from terrorist groups that cross national borders and that may well form presently unprecedented allegiances with other illegal groups, organized crime groups, drug traffickers, weapons profiteers. And so I think that all the nations of the world that are interested in stability and peace for their people are going to have to have a much higher level of cooperation on these issues. So I'm for doing anything that can be done to increase that. Now, you asked me about the Middle East peace process. Let me just say again, our role has never been to dictate to either party the terms of the peace. Even though we have many Arab Americans and many Jewish Americans in this country, we do not live in the Middle East. The people of the Middle East live there, and they have to work out the terms of their own reconciliation. What we have always tried to do is to keep the parties working together and then to do whatever was necessary to provide the support that the friends of peace need, and if the process seemed in danger of failing, as it did before the Wye River 9 1 2 days and sleepless nights, to do what could be done to keep it alive. But I think that the people of Israel have sent us a loud message that they want the process to be kept alive and they want it to be seen through. So we're in a period of transition now. Let's let the Prime Minister, the new Prime Ministerelect get his government in place, take office, come to see me, talk to President Mubarak, and talk to all the other parties and see where we go from there. But those of us who are friends of the peace process in the Middle East should focus on successful resolution of it. And sometimes, the less we say in public, the more likely we are to have a positive impact on the outcome of the negotiations. Q. On Northern Ireland President Clinton. Larry Larry McQuillan, Reuters ? Yes, I'll take an Irish question. Go ahead. President's Relationship With the Vice President Medicare Q. President Clinton, as you're aware, there have been reports of tension between you and Vice President Gore, and I wondered if you could comment on your relationship. And are you resigned, as the campaign goes on, that inevitably, you're going to be at odds on certain issues and disagree with the Vice President, and for that matter, assuming your wife decides to run for the Senate, perhaps on Medicare and New York issues? President Clinton. Well, that's a substantive question. I'll be glad to answer that if you want. But let me say, I have been, frankly, bewildered by those reports. Only one person ever asked me about it directly, one of your number, and that was Wolf Blitzer, in an interview I did before I left my European trip at the G 8, and I gave him a very good answer, which was that I thought that the Vice President had done a good job in his announcement. I thought the most important thing he had done is I'll say again is to tell the American people what he would do if he got the job and to pose the choice that I think is before them, which is do you want to go beyond build on and go beyond the successful direction of the last 6 1 2 years, or would you like to turn around and go back and take a different course? And so I think he's doing fine. I honestly do not know what the source of the stories are, but they are not in my heart or my mind. I want him to get out there, and if he disagrees with the decisions that I make as President during the next year and a half, then of course, he will have to say so. And I will take no offense at that. And if my wife decides to run for Senator from New York, then some of the disagreements that we've had in the past over decisions I've made as President she may be constrained to state publicly because they will be relevant to the future. And that's the way a democracy works. You know, members of a political party, whether Democrats or Republicans, belong to the political party because they share a general set of values and a general approach and because they agree on almost all things, not because they agree on all things. It would be a dreary world, indeed, if we all agreed on everything, and I didn't ask Al Gore to become Vice President so that he would agree with me about everything. Nobody with a fine mind and a lot of experience and looking at the world we live in would agree with anyone else with the same qualities on every issue. It just wouldn't happen. Now, on the merits let me say, on this Medicare issue, there have been many people not just in New York with the teaching hospitals, but there are rural hospitals there are home therapy providers there are others who have felt that the budget savings, the cuts in the '97 Balanced Budget Act, were too severe and made it difficult for them to maintain quality of care. One such group are the teaching hospitals. There are a lot of them in New York who take care of a lot of poor people, but there are a lot of them in Massachusetts, a lot of them in California, and there is at least one in every State in the country. When we put out our Medicare plan, we, therefore, did not continue all of the cost savings in the '97 Balanced Budget Act beyond the period when they run out. We actually left some of them off to try to alleviate that pressure. The second thing we did was to create a fund, a quality fund, of about 7.5 billion, which the Congress can use to debate and allocate to alleviate present problems. So I would encourage the Senators from New York, or anyone else who's concerned about this, to bring those concerns, bring the facts to the table, get it out in the open, then embrace the idea of Medicare reform, pass that fund, and then allocate it as it should be allocated. Because I do think that's a legitimate issue. Iraq Kosovo Middle East Peace Process Q. For President Mubarak, have you discussed the issue of Iraq and how close or distant American and Egyptian positions are? For President Clinton, Mr. President, I'd like to congratulate you on your success and resolve on Kosovo. And from your statement, you referred as one of the criteria for success, the return of refugees will you work the return of refugees, Kosovars, to their homes. Will you use the same criteria in the Middle East, that the Palestinian refugees and displaced will come back to their homes? Thank you. President Clinton. That's really good. Laughter That's really good. Laughter President Mubarak. Well President Clinton. You called on him. Laughter President Mubarak. I didn't know what was the question. Laughter Really, for the first part of the question, about Iraq, really, our position didn't change at all. We are looking forward, how to help the people of Iraq under any circumstances. I have discussed this with the President, and I think that the resolution in the U.N., and I think maybe some improvement in it in the near future, may lead to helping the people of Iraq for medicine, food, and other things. And I hope that something can conclude in that direction discussed this with the President. President Clinton. Let me say, our position on Iraq is that we favor the proposal before the United Nations, advanced by the British and the Dutch. It would provide for more money to Iraq to help the people there, with their human needs. But it would maintain a vigorous arms control regime, because we do not believe that Saddam Hussein should be permitted to develop again weapons of mass destruction. And I would remind everyone that he has actually used weapons of mass destruction. He has used chemical weapons on the Iranians. He has used them on his own people, on the Kurds that live in Iraq. So I think that we have a balanced position. But I have never wanted the Iraqi people to suffer because of their leader. And I think we supported a relaxation of the way the funds flow there so that more can go to benefit the people. But I do not believe we should give up on an attempt, an insistence, indeed, that the United Nations, in return for this, maintain an arms control regime. Now, on the refugee question, let me say one brief question about Kosovo because I do appreciate the interest in Kosovo in Egypt and in other countries of the region. About half the refugees have gone home. They're dying to go home. And one of the reasons that NATO was determined to act is we knew, if we acted quickly enough, that the refugees could go home and most of them would wish to go home. Even in Bosnia, where the war went on from the conflict from 1991 until 1995, there were many people who had established other lives in other places and did not want to go home. There are still a lot of refugees who have not gone home in Bosnia. So I'm delighted that the Kosovars are pouring in. The truth is that we've actually tried to slow it down a little bit, because we're worried about the landmines and other explosives which might be there, and we want it to be safe for them, and because we're tying to get organized to help everybody rebuild their homes and the basic infrastructure of life so that once they do go home, they can actually live and do well. Now, that brings you back to the refugee question you asked in the Middle East. I think that the important thing is if we have the right kind of a peace agreement. That's why I say no one can accuse me of dodging Middle East questions. I've been up to my ears and eyeballs in this peace process since the day I took office. But if you just look at it as a practical matter the agreement that is made in the end whether refugees go home depends in part on how long they've been away and whether they wish to go home. It will also depend on what the nature of the settlement is, how much land will the Palestinians have, where will it be, how does it correspond to where people lived before. And I would like it if the Palestinian people felt free and more free to live wherever they like, wherever they want to live. I would also like it very much if we could help those countries which have borne a heavy burden, particularly Jordan where a majority of the population is now Palestinian, to build a better life for the people who are there, because they have a lot of very serious economic challenges. They have a fine new King who is an able person, and we're trying to help, and we want others to help. But I think it will depend upon the refugees themselves, and it will depend upon the shape of the final agreement. Ask the Irish question if you want. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. Thank you, sir. Several questions on Northern Ireland. What is the latest laughter sorry. President Clinton. They're learning from you now. Laughter Q. What is the latest update you can give us about your activities? Do you plan to make an emergency trip over there? Do you blame either side for the impasse? And what constructive suggestions can you convey to us at this juncture? President Clinton. Well, I have been for the last couple of days, particularly, we've been in virtually constant contact with the parties there. And I spent a lot of time on it yesterday and late, late last night and this morning early. They are in negotiations as we speak. The mood seems to be reasonably positive, and they are exploring some new ideas. I offered my suggestions for a possible resolution of the sticking points, with the benefit of all the folks on our national security team who have been working on that. And I'll say this, it is a very difficult problem for the parties, but it will be very hard for the world to understand if this breaks off, since everyone has agreed to the fundamental elements of the Good Friday agreement. Both sides agree that they have to comply with every bit of it. There was an election where the Irish people voted for it. Then there was an election where the Irish people voted for leaders under it. So if you have a situation where you've had two elections ratifying a peace agreement and you have all the leaders saying that we all have to comply with every element of it and it falls apart over sequencing, I think that it would be to call it a tragedy would be a gross understatement. But it is a very difficult thing it would take 30 minutes to go through the whole litany of why. But they are working now. They are exploring some new ideas, and they do seem determined to work it through to a positive conclusion. Would you like to take one more? Middle East Peace Process Iraq Q. Thank you. President Clinton, you talked about the 9 1 2 days at the Wye Plantation. We know you tried God knows you tried, but you failed, sir. Laughter What makes you think that President Clinton. I got an agreement. It wasn't my job to implement it. It has not been fully implemented. The agreement, itself, was a success. Q. That's correct, sir, but your officials laughter President Clinton. That's all right. They tell me I've failed every day. It's quite all right. Laughter You just save them the trouble today. Go ahead. Q. Your officials used to speak about CBM, confidence building measures. The Palestinians did their part, even Netanyahu thanked Arafat at one stage. But let's say you failed in convincing the Israelis to reciprocate and do the same. What makes you feel that this time around you would be more successful, sir? My question to President Mubarak Sir, how does Egypt view any external interference in Iraqi internal affairs from whatever source it comes? Thank you. President Mubarak. I've failed also this time. Laughter President Clinton. Yes, they zinged you this time. Let me say, I think, with regard to Wye, obviously, I think its conditions should be honored, because it's like any agreement between two parties unless both parties agree that the agreement should be modified, then it should be honored. I believe that historians, when they look back on this period, will conclude that the principal difficulty that Mr. Netanyahu had was the nature of his coalition, and because it was small enough his majority was so small and it included people who were so hostile to the peace process, that no matter what he tried to do, they could always threaten to bring him down. Now, the reason I think it will be different now is, number one, Prime Minister elect Barak was a much more open and heartfelt supporter of the Oslo process. He has you remember, I think his first public event after his election was to visit the gravesite of our friend Prime Minister Rabin. But number two, he got a big vote from the people of Israel with peace being the major issue. And number three, he has constituted a government apparently, from the morning press with quite a large voting majority in the Knesset, obviously geared toward the peace process, because the parties have deep differences, in his coalition, over domestic policies unrelated to the peace process. So for those reasons, I think the chances of success are now greater. And therefore, I think that all of us should try to restrain our comments about specifics until we talk to the Prime Minister elect and we can form a common strategy. President Mubarak. Concerning the interference in the internal affairs of Iraq, you know our principle from the beginning we never interfere in the internal affairs of Iraq. If there is any change in the Government of Iraq, it should come from internally, not from outside. This is our principle which has been adopted all our life with any country in the world. Press Secretary Joe Lockhart. Thank you. President Clinton. One more, go ahead. Q. On Russia? President Clinton. One more. Q. What if I say I'm going to leave? Laughter President Clinton. I'll give you a question. Laughter Bill Bradley Q. Mr. President, when you were asked about George W. Bush and the Republicans a few moments ago, you deferred, pleading ignorance. Perhaps I could ask you about the Democrats. When you said that Al Gore is the only one in the race on either side of the party who has been talking about ideas, clearly that represents a dig not merely at the Republican candidates but also former Senator Bill Bradley as well. So let me ask you about his candidacy, sir, if I may. Number one, do you believe that he's as qualified as is the Vice President to be President of the United States? And number two, how do you explain, in your own mind, when you heard the figures yesterday showing that the Vice President raised less money than he'd hope for and Bill Bradley appears to have raised more? President Clinton. Well, first of all, I'm not going to talk about their fundraising because I don't think I should be a political handicapper. But anyone who understands Senator Bradley's career and life story would not be particularly surprised by this. I certainly wasn't. And I don't think it's accurate to say the Vice President has raised less money than he hoped for. On the other question, it wasn't a dig at Senator Bradley. He has said, himself, that he has not laid out his case for being President and said that he wants to wait until the fall to do it. That's what he said. I'm not digging him. I have nothing bad to say about him. That's a fact. But I, personally, have always believed that you should begin by saying why you want the job, because you're asking people to hire you to do things. And I think the Vice President deserves a lot of credit for doing that. That's my view. But you can't read that as a dig at Senator Bradley because he, himself, said, "In the fall, I will tell you what it is I intend to do." That's his position. Q. And do you think he's as qualified as the Vice President, sir? President Clinton. I think the question the American people will have to decide who's qualified and who's not. There is nobody in the race who is running or who could run who has had as much experience in as many different ways. He's had both legislative experience and executive experience. Besides that, he's been a journalist, the Vice President. You've got to think that counts for something. Laughter So he's been a journalist he's been in the executive branch he's been in the legislative branch. He has vast experience in foreign policy, in arms control issues, and vast experience in domestic policy. And maybe even more important than experience, the ideas that he's advanced have made America a better place. So if results counts and experience counts, then he has quite a good resume. And I don't have to make comparative judgments about the other candidates to say that. No one has anything like that level of experience, with that level of positive impact on the people of our country. Those are just, I think, indisputable facts. Q. How about one more? President Clinton. You want to ask one more Egyptian? Equal time. Middle East Peace Process Q. I have a question for President Mubarak and one for President Clinton. Sir, at this moment, Prime Minister elect Ehud Barak is forming his government in Israel. What should be, with so little time before the next American elections, which are just around the corner, what would be President Clinton. Seventeen months? Laughter Q. What would be perhaps the one thing or one message you would direct towards Mr. Barak as a step that should be taken as soon as possible to revive the peace process? And President Clinton, your comment on President Mubarak's statement? President Mubarak. Is the question directed to me? Q. Yes, first, Your Excellency. President Mubarak. I think I have already mentioned that, in the comments I started with, there should be some steps to make that feel much far better and to start the peace process. Eighteen months is quite a lot we could achieve in one year so many things. The peace process was already started years and years ago. The Palestinians have signed some agreements. If Mr. Barak and I'm sure that he's going to do it starts implementing the Wye agreement, for example makes some steps for the settlements, I think the process will move. And we hope that we could finish or reach a final status in one year. One year and a half is quite a lot of time for negotiations. President Clinton. I agree with that. It doesn't have anything to do with the time left I have on my term. My advice would be let me go back to 1993 when I became President. Our biggest problem was the domestic economy was not doing well, and we had a 290 billion deficit, and there was no easy way to close it. And we presented an economic plan to the Congress that passed by only one vote in both Houses. It was very controversial it was very difficult, I think in that sense politically, internally was perhaps more controversial than making than in Israel going forward with the peace process maybe now, given the vote in the last election. I think it's better, if you know you've got to do something without which you cannot succeed in serving your people in the long run, it's better to do it sooner rather than later, generally. That is generally true. And if it is going to be difficult and there are tough consequences, it's better to take them early rather than later. That is just a general rule. Because otherwise, if you don't do it, you may never get around to doing it, but it won't get any better. It will just get worse and worse and worse. So it's better to just take a deep breath and go on and do what you think has to be done. That's what I believe. Press Secretary Lockhart. Thank you. President Clinton. First next question, I'll give you next time we come, I'll give you the first one, after we do the roll. I've got to go. Thank you. President Mubarak. Thank you very much. President Clinton. Thank you. June 25, 1999 The President. Earlier today, in a speech at Georgetown University, I discussed the opportunities now before our Nation. Before I take your questions, let me just take a moment to recap what I believe is America's agenda in the coming months. Our trip to Europe advanced America's ideals and interests. Working with our partners, we won an agreement to ban abusive child labor everywhere in the world, took new steps to strengthen the global economy, agreed to triple the debt relief provided for many of the poorest nations, and to strengthen democracy and reform in Russia. We also worked to put together, to put in place the building blocks of peace in Kosovo and to put the Balkans on a shared path to a prosperous, united future. I will meet with the region's leaders later this summer to give the process further momentum. I met with Kosovar refugees in Macedonia who are planning to return home. They thanked America and our Allies for giving them a chance to reclaim their lives on their native lands. I also met with and thanked some of the American air men and women who achieved the success and with some of our and other NATO troops who are going into Kosovo now to make sure we win the peace. They know that they're doing the right thing, and I am very proud of all of them. While America is enjoying success abroad, it is important that we keep pushing forward on our challenges here at home. This is a time of great hope for our Nation. Just today we learned that the American economy grew at a 4.3 percent in the first 3 months of this year. America plainly is on the right track. But we will be judged by what we do with this opportunity, whether we seize it or squander it in petty bickering and partisan animosity. There will be plenty of time for politics in the months to come. This summer should be a season of progress. We should start by acting quickly on issues where most lawmakers, Democratic and Republican, agree legislation to let disabled Americans keep their Medicaid health insurance when they go to work an increase in the minimum wage campaign finance reform a strong and enforceable Patients' Bill of Rights. I was heartened that earlier today the House overwhelmingly passed legislation making sure that foster children are not cast out in the cold when their time in foster care ends. This is a vital issue, one that Hillary has championed for many years. And I am very pleased by the House action. Then we must turn to broader ways and, in some ways, more difficult challenges facing our Nation. First, we have a duty to maintain the fiscal discipline that has produced our prosperity and use it to strengthen Social Security and Medicare for the 21st century and to pay down our national debt. On Tuesday I will propose the detailed plan to modernize Medicare, cutting costs, improving service, and helping senior citizens with their greatest growing need, affordable prescription drugs. Second, we must widen the circle of opportunity by investing in education while demanding accountability and insisting that the Congress keep our commitment of last year to finish hiring 100,000 more teachers to lower class size in the early grades. Third, in 2 weeks I will be joined by corporate, civic, and political leaders of both parties on a 4 day tour of America's new markets, the places in our country which have not yet felt the surge of our prosperity, to mobilize the private sector to bring jobs and growth to our poorest neighborhoods and to build support for our new markets initiative to give tax credits and loan guarantees to those who invest in America on the same terms we give to those who invest in developing economies overseas. And fourth, in the wake of the tragedy at Littleton, we must continue to meet the challenge of youth violence. Hillary and I are developing a national campaign on youth violence, working with parents, educators, the entertainment industry, and others. But we also must take sensible steps to take guns out of the hands of criminals and away from children. We can't expect young people to stand up to violence if Congress won't stand up to the gun lobby. I proposed and, with a tie breaking vote by Vice President Gore, the Senate passed the measure to close the gun show loophole. The Senate also passed legislation to require child safety locks, to ban large ammunition clips for assault weapons, to ban violent juveniles from owning handguns as adults. Two weeks ago the Republicans in the House blocked that measure. They would even weaken the current law by letting criminals store their guns at pawnshops. Now, there is still time for Congress to act. Republican leaders could appoint legislators as negotiators to craft a bill that includes the tough Senate provisions. I hope they will do that and send me a strong bill. Plainly, the country wants that. Again I say, this is sort of like the Patients' Bill of Rights it's really not a partisan issue anywhere but Washington, DC. I hope they will send me a strong bill. If they send me one that weakens current law, I will send it back to them and keep working until we get the job done right. Now, this is, admittedly, an ambitious agenda, but it can all be done in the coming months. I will use all the powers available to me as President, working with Congress and with my executive authority. I will summon the citizens of our country to help us to solve these problems. This is a good time for America, but we will be judged by whether we make the most of it. I look forward to making the effort. Thank you very much. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Kosovo Q. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, despite the end of the war, there is still a new wave of violence and terror in Kosovo, only this time it's Serb homes that are being burned, Serb stores that are being looted, and Serb civilians who are being killed. Are you alarmed by what's going on there? And why is NATO letting this happen? Can't NATO do more to stop it? The President. Well, first of all, NATO is not letting it happen. We're doing what we can to stop it. And I am concerned about it. I'm not particularly surprised after what they've been through. But we signed an agreement with the KLA in which they agreed to demilitarize. The leader even asked the Serbs to come home. And we are deploying our people as quickly as we can. Obviously, if we can get all of our people in completely and then get them properly dispersed around the country, we'll be able to provide a far higher level of protection. And I think it's very important. And for those people who lose their homes, they're entitled to have them rebuilt, along with everybody else, and I intend to do that. President's Initiative on Race Q. Mr. President, you covered the waterfront on domestic issues you think are very important. But there is a question of racism. And I understand there's a report in the White House, already in second draft, and it's supposed to be a political hot potato, and therefore you're hesitant to make it public. The President. Oh, no, that's not what's going on. There is a draft of a book that I wanted to produce and asked for help on from Chris Edley and from others on our staff and not on our staff several months ago. And Chris gave me his draft then the staff looked at it and talked about where it was and wasn't consistent with present policies we were pursuing. They gave it all to me. I was involved for the last 3 months with the conflict in Kosovo. And what has really happened is that I want to do this right. I think all of you know how important this whole race issue is to me, and it's been amplified in its potential future importance because of the problems that we see involving race and ethnic and religious problems around the world. So I want to make sure that when we put this document out, it is in the form of a book which can be useful and have something to say and move the conversation and the efforts beyond where we were in the Presidential initiative on race. So you shouldn't draw any conclusions other than that I want to be personally involved in it and I simply haven't had the time to give it the effort that it deserves. Q. Is it based on the panel's hearings and so forth? The President. Oh, yes, to some extent. It's based on the panel's hearings it's based on very long conversations I had with the people that worked on the draft for me, with Mr. Edley and Terry Edmonds and others. We had some long, long sessions. I went through everything I wanted in the book. I went through some things I wanted to emphasize more than were emphasized in the year that the panel was publicly meeting we were having the race dialogs. But I think it's very important, but it's got to be, first of all, mine. It's got to reflect what I believe and where I think we need to go. And secondly, it needs to move the ball forward a little bit. There's still a great deal of interest in this. Those of you who covered the speech this morning at Georgetown will remember that the young woman from Alabama who introduced me talked about how the initiative on race got her involved in something in her local community. Another one of the Presidential scholars, when she walked by me this morning, said, "I want to know how I can get involved. I'm still interested in this." So I think there's still a great deal of interest in this in the country and maybe especially among our younger people. And I just want this book to be very good. So you shouldn't yes, there are some differences of opinion among the people who had input in it, but that's not what's caused us not to put it out. What's caused us not to put it out is that I have not had the time to give to it, to be very careful and relaxed and thoughtful about how I say what it is I want to say to the country about this. Larry Larry McQuillan, Reuters . Legislative Agenda Q. Mr. President, this morning and again just now, you made references to a summer of progress, and you were calling for bipartisanship to try to accomplish things in the next few months. I'm just wondering, with the 2000 campaign obviously heating up and growing in intensity, do you feel there's more of an urgency to act right away, within the coming months? The President. Well, for one thing, I think it would be to everyone's advantage to continue to make progress. As I always tell the Republicans and Democrats, no matter how much we do, there will still be plenty of things on which there is honest disagreement, over which the next election can be fought. That is just in the nature of things. That's healthy that's good that's a two party system in America. But we are all hired by the American people to work here day in and day out, week in and week out, and we make a grave mistake and it's almost never good politics to do the wrong thing, that is, to take a pass on making progress when you can do it. This is a very unusual moment where we have sustained prosperity, the longest peacetime expansion in our history. We've gone from having the biggest deficits in history to having the biggest surpluses in history. And yet, we have these looming demographic challenges of Social Security and Medicare. And we have these big issues that are right before us now, the ones I mentioned on which there is basically broad agreement. So I think that it would be good for America and, therefore, good for everyone involved if we go ahead and do this. I think, obviously, the closer you get to the election, perhaps the more difficult it will be. But I expect I'll make you a prediction here I expect that we'll get some good things done in the year 2000, before the Congress recesses finally for the election then. I expect to keep working right up to the very end, and I think that we will continue to make progress. But the most important thing is the attitude of the main players in Congress, insofar as Congress has to play a role in this. Yes, go ahead. Cox Committee Report on Chinese Nuclear Espionage Q. Mr. President, in the wake of California Congressman Christopher Cox's study of spying in the U.S. and, specifically, Chinese attempts to spy, you asked your Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to look into this, and it came back with a central recommendation that you separate the Nation's nuclear labs from the Energy Department. Your Energy Secretary seems to be resisting that. Ask me, sir tell me, sir, how you feel about it laughter and let me ask you once again Do you still maintain that you were not told anything about these Chinese efforts to spy at the Nation's nuclear labs during your administration, sir? The President. Let's go back to the first question there are two separate questions. I read Senator Rudman's report. I thought it was quite interesting and had a lot of very helpful analyses of how this problem developed. And there were actually two separate organizational recommendations that he made in the alternative either that the labs could be put under an independent board, or that the labs should be taken out of the present hierarchy of organization because of the culture the committee the Rud man group talked a lot about the culture of the labs and its resistance to oversight. He said another alternative might be to take it out from under the present organizational structure and make it directly answerable the labs directly answerable to the Secretary's Office. And he posed those things in the alternative. I have asked our people to look at it. I have talked to Secretary Richardson about it. I think everyone recognizes that he has worked very hard to deal with the underlying security issues, which are the most important things. And I think we all just ought to try to get together and work out what the best organizational structure is, and I expect that we will be I expect to have a chance to talk to him about that and to work on it. But I think the Rudman report was a service to the country, and I think that Bill Richardson is doing a good job on trying to implement the security measures that are necessary. He's being very, very aggressive. Now, on the second question, I went back I've been interested in this question, and I went back and looked at exactly what I said. Let me go back to what the facts are. First of all, there's been a 20 year problem with lax security at the labs. And what I said was that I didn't suspect that any actual breaches of security had occurred during my tenure. Since then, we have learned of the offloading of the computer by Mr. Lee, from the secured computers into his personal computers. That's something we know now that I didn't know then. But I think my choice of wording was poor. What I should have said was I did not know of any specific instance of espionage, because I think that we've been suspicious all along. And I have to acknowledge, I think, I used a poor word there. I think suspicion is we have been suspicious all along, generally. We did not have any specific instance, as we now do, of the offloading of the computer. But I also want to emphasize that I took no particular comfort in that, because what we have here is what I learned in 1997 was that there was a general problem of very long standing with the security at the labs, and I issued the Executive order in early '98 to clean it up. And Secretary Richardson has been working on it since then. And I think we've made a lot of progress since then. Yes. Medicare Q. Sir, I'd like to ask you about Medicare and your plans that you're going to be announcing next week. This is a program that tens of millions of Americans depend on, and yet in 15 years it will be effectively bankrupt. And you're about to propose what could be a very costly additional benefit in the prescription benefit. Why are you going to do that, sir? Isn't that going to make the problem worse, not better? The President. No. For one thing let me remind you that we have taken a lot of very tough positions to reform Medicare since 1993. When I took office, Medicare was supposed to go broke this year. And now it's out to what is it 2015 or something. So we have taken a lot of important positions already. And as a matter of fact, as I'm sure you're all aware, a lot of the health care providers, particularly rural hospitals, nursing homes, home health providers, a disproportionate share of hospitals for the folks listening to us, that's basically inner city hospitals and teaching hospitals that have a whole lot of poor folks they take care of who aren't reimbursed a lot of those people believe that our savings are too great. But we've taken some very tough actions to try to lengthen the life of the Medicare Trust Fund. When I make my proposals on Tuesday, there will be more to lengthen the life further, to make sure that we get through the first quarter century and maybe more of the new century with Medicare alive and well. But if you look at the long run, I think it's important that we propose a prescription drug benefit because life expectancy is going up. Drugs are being constantly developed which help to improve the quality as well as the length of life, and if they are properly taken, they can actually reduce long term hospitalization and other medical costs. Now, it is absolutely true that if we design this wrong, it could wind up being a lot more expensive than rosy scenario suggests. But if you look at my record here over the last 6 1 2 years, I've tried to be quite conservative in my budget projections and quite responsible in handling the budget of the country. And you will see that, I think, reflected in the way I make this proposal, including the prescription drugs. But I don't really think there's any alternative here. You've got 15 million Americans, seniors, out there without any kind of coverage for their medicine. You've got millions and millions of others with inadequate or highly expensive coverage. And I just I really believe that this is the most significant health care need that senior citizens have today. And I believe that over the long run, the proper availability, properly priced, of prescription medicine will actually not only lengthen lives and improve the quality of life of our seniors and improve their security, their state of mind, but it will also, long, long term, save medical costs because it will keep people out of hospitals and out of more expensive treatments. Ellen Ellen Ratner, Talk Radio News Service . Campaign Finance Reform Q. What is your strategy now, Mr. President, for a comprehensive campaign finance reform, to really make it pass? The President. Well, I think the best strategy is to get a clear majority of the House of Representatives to demand that it come up and then try to put enough pressure on to get the Senate leaders to let it come up. Basically, the Republican leadership in the Senate has said that they're just not going to permit it to come up, because they don't want their people who would vote against it to have a recorded vote on it and they don't want to run the risk that they've got enough for their folks that would vote with all of ours. See, all of our people are for it. We've got 100 percent of the Democrats in the Senate for it. And so, what I think we have to do is to keep it on the front burner enough so that the discomfort level rises high enough that an actual vote is allowed. All I've really asked for here is a vote. If we'd just get a vote on the bill, I will be very well satisfied, and I think it will come out just fine. Yes, Ann Ann Compton, ABC News . Candidacy Announcements for 2000 Elections Q. Can I ask a political question? When Vice President Gore announced officially for President, he chose a date when you were going to be out of the country. And according to Mrs. Clinton's supporters, if she announces her exploratory committee in the next couple of weeks, it would be at a time when you've got a commitment to go out to South Dakota. Do you think your personal behavior has made you something of a liability to those who are running? And did you take it personally when Vice President Gore made his announcement and seemed to set himself so clearly separate from you when it came to issues of family? The President. Well, first of all, I thought, as I have said repeatedly, I thought the Vice President had a great announcement. And what he really said in his announcement I actually heard it, so I don't have to have it characterized for me. What he said in his announcement was that he had had more experience than anybody running, which is true that he would put forward more specific ideas about what he would do if he were elected President than anyone has to date, by far, which is true and that the choice before the American people was whether we would build on the progress that we've made for the last 6 years or turn around and go backwards, which is what I think the real choice will be before the American people. So I approved of that. And as far as his doing it when I was out of the country, I thought that was a good thing. Very often, you'd be amazed how many times over the last 6 1 2 years we have planned for certain announcements to be made by the Vice President when I was out of the country, because that way it gets I mean, far be it for us to try to maneuver the press laughter but he gets better coverage, and I get better coverage I'm out of the country, so he gets better coverage. So I thought that was a good thing. And I think on the general point, what I have noticed over now more than 30 years, since I first began to volunteer as a young man in politics, all politics, all elections are about the future, and all candidates are judged on their own merits. And I believe that is the case here. But I think that the American people know that the country's in good shape and that not only our economic policies, our crime policies, and our welfare policies, but our family policies are good for their efforts to raise their children. And the best thing that I can do, it seems to me, is to do the right thing by my country, to just keep working at being a good President, and they'll do fine. Q. Not be with Mrs. Clinton when she campaigns? The President. Well, first of all, she hasn't made a decision to announce to run for the Senate. This is not what's going on here. And as a practical matter, logistically and legally as a practical matter, she has to have an exploratory committee to continue to talk to people in New York about this. That's all this is. She has not made a final decision to run yet. So I think that's a whole different issue. And I think that you should look at it in that context. Mark Mark Knoller, CBS Radio . Kosovo Q. Mr. President, considering what's going on in Kosovo now, and now that you've had a chance to meet with the refugees in Macedonia on Tuesday and you've heard the depth of the hatred that they feel for the Serbs and you've heard of the brutality to which they were subjected, is it not asking the impossible for the Serbs and the ethnic Albanians to live in peace in Kosovo? The President. Well, I don't think they could do it without a lot of help in the short run. And I think I was asked this question earlier in a slightly different question I think that the first and most important thing is for us to get the whole KFOR force in there, all 50,000, as quickly as possible, properly deployed to maximize security. Then I think we've got to get people busy doing positive things, rebuilding their homes, reestablishing their property records, reestablishing their schools. We've got to give them something to think about on a daily basis that is positive. Then I strongly believe we need to give them the help they need to try to work through this emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, morally. I think a lot of these children are going to need mental health services, and I hope we can get them. I think that we need to bring people in who have been through similar things. I had a long talk with Elie Wiesel about this after he came back. He went over and toured the camps for me and talked to the people. I think that there are people who've been through the Holocaust who can help a lot. I think there are people who have been through South Africa and the peace and reconciliation commission and 300 years of what those people went through there who can help a lot. I think we need to be quite imaginative about once we get the building blocks of security and the building blocks of reconstruction in place and the building blocks of civil society in place, then I think we need to be quite imaginative about the human, spiritual dimension of this. And I will do my best to be supportive. I've talked to Reverend Jackson about this, about the importance of bringing in religious leaders from all the not only from the Muslim and the Orthodox faiths to come and work together and work people through this but perhaps others as well. So there are lots of things that we need to do. Can it be done? I believe it can be done. It's going to take a lot of courage, and it's going to take some time. Go ahead, Sarah Sarah McClendon, McClendon News Service . American Families Q. Mr. President inaudible the future of this country, it seems to me that one of our big issues is parenting that causes divorces inaudible having children and breaking up the families. Isn't there any way that we can design a national program to educate people inaudible ? The President. Well, you know, it's interesting. On the to go to your point when Hillary and I decided that we ought to have this grassroots campaign to try to protect children against violence and we began to talk to Pam Eakes, who started the Mothers Against Violence movement in Washington State, and others, one of the things that we learned, obviously, is that a lot of young people wind up being especially really troubled young people can often be almost strangers in their own homes. And we assume that people ought to just know how to do the most important jobs in life, and they're very often reluctant to ask for help. But I think one of the things that we have to try to do is to develop the kind of supports parents need to do a better job. And it's a much harder job now than it used to be, especially since the average parent is away from his or her children for 22 hours a week more than was the case 30 years ago. So I do think that we need to do some more. Most parents, however, want to do a good job, really, really want to do a good job. And I think when you start with that, one of the things that I hope very much will come out of this whole movement against teen violence is more efforts in that regard. Of course, that's one of the reasons that Hillary wrote her book a few years ago she knows more about that than I do and, of course, one of the reasons the Vice President and Mrs. Gore had those family conferences every year, starting before he joined the ticket with me back in '92. The short answer to your question is, yes, we should do more to help parents do a good job. Go ahead, Susan Susan Page, USA Today , and then John John King, Cable News Network . Medicare Q. Mr. President, a lot of Medicare beneficiaries are enthusiastic about the idea of a new prescription drug benefit but perhaps less enthusiastic about paying higher premiums to pay for it. Should Medicare beneficiaries, themselves, be prepared to endure some pain to get some gain? Should they be prepared to pay higher premiums? And especially, should higher income Medicare beneficiaries pay means tested premiums that are higher? The President. Well, let me just if I give you all the details of my program Tuesday, you won't cover me Tuesday, and then I'll be bereft. Laughter What we should do is, first of all, make sure that the integrity of the basic system is strengthened, because there are a lot of seniors who depend upon it. And from my point of view, that means making sure that it's good for at least another quarter century. So that's the first thing we need to do. And to do that, we're going to have to bring in more pressures from competition and other things to modernize it. Then we should offer a drug benefit, but we should do it to go back to the former question I was asked, your question we should do it in a way that we're quite clear that it won't and can't break the bank, that we'll be able to monitor its cost and see how it's going. And as to the other, as you know, I've been publicly open to that option since 1992. But I think that I want to ask you to wait until Tuesday for the details of the program. Go ahead, John. Tax Cuts Q. Sir, we're told that next week, the administration will announce that the Federal budget surplus is even larger than you had previously projected. Given that, and given your words today about bipartisanship, do you think now it might be possible to tackle Medicare and Social Security reform and perhaps reach out to Republicans and open the door to a larger tax cut than you have discussed previously? The President. First, I'm not against tax cuts. I'm not against giving the American people some of this money back from our present prosperity right now. The question is, what kind of tax cut? Who benefits from it? How should it be designed? And how should it be handled to guarantee that we're going to take care of first things first strengthen Social Security and Medicare, paying down the debt, continuing to secure the health of the American economy? Keep in mind, what produced the surplus was the strength of the American economy, the fact that we had the will to do the very tough things in 1993 and that we followed it up with a Balanced Budget Act in 1997. So my plan has tax cuts. The USA accounts are worth literally hundreds and hundreds of dollars to most families every year. They could be worth a quarter of a million dollars to a family over their lifetime. It's most progressive inducement to save in the history of the country. We have tax cuts fully paid for already, for long term care, for child care, for school construction, for investing in the inner city. So I'm not against tax cuts. We have had tax cuts in the past, big tax cuts, for tuition tax credits for college, the HOPE scholarship tax cuts, tax cuts for workers and families with modest incomes, the child care tax credit, 500 per child. We've had lots of tax cuts. I am not opposed to that. What I want to do is to make sure that before we go off and start cutting taxes by some arbitrary large amount, we take care of first things first. We need to know that we're going to modernize and strengthen Social Security for the 21st century, that we're going to modernize and strengthen Medicare for the 21st century, and that we're going to do it in a way that will enable us to continue to pay the debt down. There will still be money for a tax cut, and a sizable one. Will I work with the Congress on that? Of course, I will. If I want to pass it, I have to work with them they're in the majority. Of course, I will. But first things first. We've got to get our priorities in order here. The American people plainly expect us, first of all, to keep the economy going. And the best way to do that is to send a signal to the markets that we've resolved Social Security we've resolved Medicare and we're paying the debt down. That is the most important thing we could do to guarantee long term, economic growth. Secondly the only other point I want to make is, I do not believe that it is responsible to have a tax cut if the impact of the tax cut plus the defense increases that we have had to adopt, plus the highway expenditures that the Congress wants to adopt is to cut education or cut health care or cut our investments in the environment. There is enough money to do all these things and to do it really well, with great discipline. But we have to have our priorities in order. Go ahead. Efforts at Bipartisanship Q. Mr. President, 2 1 2 years ago, in your Inaugural, you said you wanted to help the Nation repair the breach. And this morning, again, you called for greater cooperation in Washington. But it seems apparent that, for many people, you, personally, remain a polarizing and divisive figure in national politics. I was wondering if you've ever reflected on why, as Mrs. Clinton, I think, has sometimes noted, throughout your career, you've always seemed to generate such antagonism from your opponents. And do you assign any responsibility to yourself for what this morning you described as the rancorous mood in Washington today? The President. Since I have been here, I have tried to work as well as I could in an open fashion with Members of both parties. I actually have developed quite good personal relationships with some Republican Members of Congress. But as you know, from the beginning, from 1991, and especially after I was elected, particularly the right wing I've been accused of murder and all kinds of things. And it seems almost that the better the country did, the madder some of them got. Now what I think is, we have a new Speaker, and I think he wants to work with me to get things done. And I've had a very cordial relationship with him. I had a nice talk with Senator Lott just last week. And all I can tell you is, I don't think much about yesterday. I keep telling everybody that works for me that we have no right to harbor anger, to keep that people in positions of public responsibilities are not permitted to have personal feelings that interfere with their obligations to the public. And I would start tomorrow with any Member of Congress who wanted to work with me on anything, to do something that I thought was good. And that's all I can tell you. There's not a single Member of Congress that I wouldn't be willing to work with to do something that I felt was good for America. And I think that's what the American people want us to do. And all I can tell you is but it is true, I think, generally in our country's history, that people who are progressive, people who try to change things, people who keep pushing the envelope, have generally elicited very strong, sometimes personally hostile, negative reaction. You read some of the things people said about President Roosevelt. In retrospect, because of the magnificent job he did and because of the historic consequences of the time in which he served and what he did for America, we tend to think that everybody was for him. That's not true. So people say these things. I think you just have to dismiss them and go on. And all I can tell you is that we in the White House, we try and I hammer this home all the time we don't have to like everything people say about us, but it can't affect, in any way, shape, or form, what we're prepared to do in working with people. That's the way I feel. People in positions of responsibility owe the public owe the public their best efforts every day. And they have no right to let their personal feelings get in the way. I try not to do it, and I would hope others would do the same. Yes, go ahead. President's Approval Ratings After Kosovo Q. Mr. President, normally when the United States wins a war, that victory is accompanied by a surge of approval for the Commander in Chief. The war in Kosovo has not produced that sort of bounce for you. As a student of the polls, what do you think they're trying to tell you here? The President. First of all, I don't know that we know that yet. I just don't know that we know that. And the important thing for you to know is that I did what I thought was right for the United States and for the children of the United States and for the future of the world. And I'm not responsible for anything but that, including the reaction of some after it was over, and we turned out to be right about what would and wouldn't work. It's totally irrelevant. Abraham Lincoln once said, in a much graver time, that if the end brought him out all right, it wouldn't matter what everybody said against him. And if it didn't, 10,000 angels swearing he was right wouldn't make any difference. So I have tried to do what I think is right for my country here. I believe that the young people of America are likely to live in a world where the biggest threats are not from other countries but from horrible racial, ethnic, and religious fighting, making people very vulnerable to exploitation from organized criminals, drug runners, terrorists, who themselves are more and more likely to have weapons of mass destruction no matter how hard we work against it. So I think anything I can do to reduce terrorism, to reduce the ability of terrorists to have weapons of mass destruction, or to stand against racial and ethnic genocide and cleansing is a good thing for our future. You know, that's all I can tell you. I did what I thought was right. I still believe it was right. And I'll keep working to make it work out. And the public and the members of the other party and others, people can react however they like. I just have to do what I think is right, and that's what I'll do. Yes, go ahead. Congressional Democrats Q. Sir, in advancing your agenda you talked about the need for bipartisanship, but don't you have a problem with congressional Democrats? They say, "Bill Clinton doesn't have to face another election we do." And they want to run against a do nothing Congress. As an experienced political pro, don't you have some sympathy for them? The President. I do, except I have a lot of sympathy for them. But first of all, not all Democrats believe that. You see a number in the House, and I think probably a majority in the Senate, do not agree with that. But I think you you have to, first of all, say, what is our obligation here to the American people? Our obligation is to work for the welfare of the country. Secondly, I think that nowhere near half the responsibility so far rests on them for the current atmosphere. I mean, they tried we tried on the guns. We tried on a lot of other things on campaign finance reform. We're trying on many other issues. I think that I wouldn't overestimate the extent of that. But secondly, just as a you know, if you look at 1996, where we got a lot done for America that year we didn't just beat the contract on America we actually did a lot of good things for America. The Democrats made gains in the Congress in 1998, against all the odds, against all the weight of history. We got we passed a big education budget at the end of 1998 100,000 new teachers and had a program to run on, and the Democrats were rewarded, against all the odds. So my view is that if you believe that Government has a role to play in our national life and you accept the fact that there will be honest and legitimate differences between the two parties on outstanding issues, no matter how much we get done, you're better off doing what you can, that you believe in, so you can go tell the people you did that. And then say, but look what still needs to be done look what still needs to be done. Elections are always about tomorrow. So I think that I can only tell you that I think both in terms of what is right for the American people and what is the best politics, we should keep trying to move forward. Yes. Justice Department Tobacco Litigation Q. I want to talk to you a little bit about tobacco litigation. You had said in your State of the Union Address that the Justice Department was going to bring a Federal case against the tobacco companies. But what we're hearing is that the Justice Department had serious reservations about that case. Are they close to being resolved, those reservations, and when do you expect the case to be brought? The President. Well, I hope so. Let me say just this, I would not have announced it in the State of the Union Address if I hadn't had a clear signal from the Justice Department that they thought there was a legal basis to proceed. We knew if we needed statutory authority to sue under Medicare a further act of Congress to sue under Medicare, on exactly the same grounds all the States have already sued to recover under Medicaid, that in this Congress, given the power of the big tobacco in this Congress, it would be hard to get. So we worked for a year or more with the Justice Department on this, arguing back and forth about whether it could be done. We I and my administration we were prepared to do this way over a year before I announced what I did in 1998. Maybe as many as 2 years. I just don't remember exactly what the time frame was, but it was quite a long while that we wanted to do this. So I did not make the announcement in the State of the Union Address until I believed, at least, that the Justice Department felt that while it would be complicated, big, and difficult, that we did, in fact, have a cause of action and we could bring it. So that's all I can tell you. I don't know any more. Yes. Support for President's Agenda Q. Mr. President, a question about polling statistics on your domestic issues. Recently, or quite frankly, your numbers have been tracked on certain issues showing that core groups, people who have supported you in the past, have now fallen off. Do you fear, sir, that perhaps you are beginning a disconnect with the American people? And how can you possibly lead in Congress on the legislative agenda that you've outlined if you don't have the backing of your core groups? The President. Well, for one thing, the only polls I've seen show overwhelming public support for the Patients' Bill of Rights, for closing the gun show loophole, for the other commonsense gun initiatives overwhelming support. There is public strong public support for campaign finance reform. There's overwhelming public support for the gun legislation and some of these issues, like the Patients' Bill of Rights, for example, the support is almost uniform among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. So I don't know what issues we're pushing, as it happens, that the public agrees with the Republicans and disagrees with us on. I recognize that the public was ambivalent about Kosovo, but they were ambivalent about Bosnia and Haiti and a lot of the other things that I've done in foreign policy helping Mexico when they were in trouble. But I think the President hires on to make the tough decisions and controversial decisions, too. You know, the Democrats stayed when we were in much worse shape in '93 and '94, the Democrats stayed because they believed we were right. We knew that when we cut the deficit 500 billion and we were all by ourselves we didn't have any Republican votes it wasn't going to be popular. And you could characterize it, but it was the right thing for America. And look at where our economy is today. So I think, no matter what the polls say, you just have to get up every day and do what you think is right. And that's what we're doing, and I think we'll be borne out. Yes, go ahead. Moral Decline Q. I've got a follow to that. The polls are also showing that although people do acknowledge that they're doing better in the economy and that they're doing well personally, they show a deep concern for the Nation's moral fabric, and actually that concern seems to be growing. What responsibility do you, personally, take for that, and what can you in the White House do to address these moral problems that seem to be cropping up more and more in the polls? The President. Well, I think people are worried about I think the most important thing on that is what happened, the shattering effect that Littleton had. In terms of what happened to me in the impeachment issue, I did what I could by telling the American people what I was going to do, that I was going to go back to work being the best President I could be, and I was going to go back to work to try to repair my family life. I have worked very hard for a year to do that, and the public, at the time, had a strong response to that. That's all I can do, and that's what I have done. I've done that very faithfully. So I don't think that's what's going on. I think people are worried when they see the fabric of life still under great strain in spite of the fact that we have quite a large amount of prosperity. And I think what we all have to do is to ask ourselves What can we do to reinforce the ability of families to raise their children, to teach them right from wrong, to increase the chances that they'll be able to live strong, whole lives? And I believe, therefore, that there is, in that sense, a moral component to the debate we're having over guns. I mean, basically, we know let me just give you one example. We know from the experience of the Brady bill that if we do background checks, thousands of people at gun shows thousands of people who shouldn't buy guns won't get them. Now we know that. I think that's a positive moral value. The people on the other side essentially say, "Yeah, but we don't want to be inconvenienced." And when people see inconvenienced elevated over the life of a child in this context, I think that causes them problems. We know that in the case of the Patients' Bill of Rights, that people think it's a moral issue if they need to see a specialist or they need if they get hurt in an accident and they can't go to the nearest emergency room. They know that. And when they see, in effect, someone else's convenience elevated over that, I think that's a problem for them. So I think that there are lots this is a complicated thing. But my own view of that is, what we have to do is not pretend that the Government can solve all the moral questions, not evade what people have to do personally in their own lives with their own families, but neither can we take the dodge that the Government has no responsibility. That's why I tried so hard after that Littleton incident. That's why I'm so disappointed in what Congress did in the House on this gun issue, because I tried so hard after that Littleton incident not to play politics, not to point the finger at anybody, not to say, "Oh well, it's this, that, or the other thing." You know, I went to Hollywood, I challenged the entertainment community, even though they had done far more to try to move the ball forward than anybody in the gun community until the gun manufacturers started helping, and they've done a good job, too, a lot of them. I still believe that people think that there is too much "everybody for himself," and if people can get away with what they do because of their position, they'll do it. And I think what I tried to do was to acknowledge it to whatever extent I had done, that it was dead wrong, and I was going to spend the rest of my life trying to rectify that, which is all anybody can do. And I think most people accept that. They'd rather have somebody do that than go around trying to give a lot of speeches about how good they are and then open the door for the gun lobby to run the Congress. So you'll just have to make up your own mind about that. But I think that what I think is important is that we stop trying to figure out how to make points against one another by saying, "I'm better than you are." You know, I was raised in a family that would have given me a whipping if I had done that as a boy. I was raised to believe that we were suppose to try to be humble in our personal search but aggressive in trying to help our neighbors. That's the religious tradition I was raised in. Now, I get the feeling that people say, "Well, what we should do is be arrogant about how good we are, and the heck with our neighbors." I don't agree with that. I think we'd be better off with the former tradition, and I think it has deeper roots in American life and is more consistent with what we should be doing. George George Condon, Copley News Service . Lessons From Kosovo and Bosnia Q. Mr. President, wartime Presidents, even the great ones, Lincoln, Wilson, or Roosevelt, all discovered that wars never went exactly the way they planned it. In Kosovo, what surprised you or went a way that you didn't expect, and what lessons did you learn in Kosovo? The President. The bombing went on I had two models in my mind on what would happen with the bombing campaign. I thought it would either be over within a couple of days, because Mr. Milosevic would see we were united, or if he decided to sustain the damage to his country, that it would take quite a long while for the damage to actually reach the point where it was unsustainable. It took only a little longer than I thought it would once we got into the second model. But I was surprised about some of the things. I was surprised that it took I was surprised, on the one hand, that we lost no pilots. I was surprised by that. I was surprised that we'd lost only two planes and no pilots. I know that from your point of view, there were a lot of civilian casualties, but that's because you got to cover them as opposed to covering the civilian casualties of the Gulf war. If you talked to any military person that was involved in both conflicts, they will tell you that there were far, far more civilian casualties in Iraq. I mean, many more by several times as many. I was a little surprised that we had no more problems than we did in maintaining our allied unity, given the enormous pressures that were on some of our allies. And I think that gives you some indication about the depth of conviction people had that this was right. Let me just say this, I think one way to understand this I almost never see this, but let me just one way to understand this about why we all did what we did even when a lot of folks thought we were crazy or at least thought we couldn't prevail, is I don't think I can even begin I am very surprised I was surprised and heartbroken that the Chinese Embassy was hit because of the mapping accidents. That did surprise me. I had no earthly idea that our system would permit that kind of mistake. That was the biggest surprise of all. But let me just say one other thing. I think that when you look at this conflict and you seek to understand, well, why did President Clinton do this, why did Tony Blair do this, why did Jacques Chirac go along, why did the Germans get in there with both feet so early, given their history and all this I think you have to see this through the lens of Bosnia. And keep in mind, in Bosnia, we had the U.N. in there first in a peacekeeping mission. Then we tried for 4 years, 50 different diplomatic solutions, all those different maps, all that different argument. And the end of it all, from 1991 to 1995, we still had Srebrenica. We still had and when it was all said and done, we had a quarter of a million people dead and 2 1 2 million refugees. And I think what you have to understand is that we saw this through the lens of Bosnia. And we said we are not going to wait a day not a day if we can stop it. Once we knew there was a military plan, they had all those soldiers deployed, they had all those tanks deployed, we knew what was coming, and we decided to move. So yes, there were surprises along the way. I'm terribly sorry about the Embassy. We made our report I've gotten a report and the Chinese got I made sure the Chinese got essentially the same report I did. We didn't put any varnish on it. And I'm sorry about it. But our pilots on the whole did a superb job, and we did the right thing. And I hope that the American people, as time goes on, will feel more and more strongly that we did. Yes. Aid to Farmers Q. There's one issue that you didn't raise in your list of domestic priorities, and that's agriculture. As you know, the agricultural economy is not doing well. Some say it's in a death spiral. Senate Democrats have tried to add a 6 billion aid package to agricultural appropriations. Now the Senate Republicans have written you a letter asking you to acknowledge the crisis and set a dollar amount for what you think might be needed to keep those farmers on the land this year. The President. Well, we're working on that. Last year, at the end, we got about that much money about 6 billion in emergency appropriations last year for the farmers. And it is quite bad this year, and we are going to have to give them more support. And I intend to do it. I just want to point out, when this Congress passed the freedom to farm act, I warned them that there was no safety net in there and that it would only work as long as farm prices stay at an acceptable level. And I think what we have to face now is whether or not this is another emergency. From the point of view of the farmers, it's a terrible emergency it's a crisis. We have to deal with it. But from the point of view of the Congress, what they have to face is, is this a second year of an emergency, or do they have a fundamentally flawed bill? And if the answer is the latter, can we handle this with emergency legislation, or do we need to change the law? But if you're asking me, am I going to recommend more help for America's farmers? The answer is, yes. There is no other alternative. This was there were a lot of good things in the freedom to farm bill. It gave more freedom to farmers it gave more opportunity for conservation reserve it had more for rural development. But it had no safety net, and it was obvious to anybody that ever fooled with agriculture for several years that sooner or later this was going to happen. And it happened. And it was as predictable as the Sun coming up in the morning. And I think it would be terrible to let thousands of more farmers go under, under these circumstances. Yes, go ahead. Q. Which one? The President. You. First Lady's Travel Q. Thank you. As the First Lady considers a possible Senate bid in New York, she's made an unusual number of campaign style appearances in the Empire State using Government jets at taxpayer expense. I wanted to ask you if you thought that was an appropriate expenditure of taxpayer money and if you think the privilege should continue once or if she finally does announce her candidacy. The President. Well, part of how she travels is determined by the Secret Service. She is willing to do first of all, in the exploratory phase and if she should become a candidate, she will fully comply with all the Federal rules and regulations that govern her. But part of how she travels is determined by what the Secret Service says. And you'd be amazed how many times in the last few years we've wanted to take the train to New York, for example, and haven't been able to do it. So these are legitimate questions that we take quite seriously, she takes seriously, and we're trying to work through them as best as possible. Yes sir, in the back. Action Against Serbia Q. Thank you, sir. How do you want to be remembered abroad, as a leader who wanted to shape America's face among other nations? How do you want to be remembered in the Balkans, in Eastern Europe, where people have strong feelings about America, different kinds of feelings? And pardon me for asking that, do you expect if someone, somewhere, wants to put a price tag on your head, just as the State Department offered 5 million to get Mr. Milosevic, given the controversy that NATO leaders might also have committed war crimes by bombing vital infrastructure in the region? Thank you. The President. Well, first of all, we have not put a price on Mr. Milosevic's head for someone to kill him. We have offered a reward for people who can arrest and help bring to justice war criminals, because of the absence of honoring the international extradition rules in Serbia. So let's get that clear. No one is interested in that. The United States policy is opposed to assassination, has been since Gerald Ford was President, officially, and I have rigorously maintained it. So we don't try to do that to heads of state. So that's the first thing. Secondly, NATO did not commit war crimes. NATO stopped war crimes. NATO stopped deliberate, systematic efforts at ethnic cleansing and genocide. And we did it in a way to minimize civilian casualties. Our pilots were up there I'm telling you, there were days when they were consistently risking their lives because the Serbs were firing at them with shoulder fired missiles in the midst of highly populated villages, and the pilots did not fire back and take them out because they knew if they missed, they would kill civilians. Yes, there were civilians killed. But I will say again, if you compare the civilian losses here with the losses in Desert Storm, it's not even close. They did a magnificent job. They were brave. We tried to minimize casualties. Every target we hit was relevant to the, essentially, the state machine of terrorism that Mr. Milosevic was running. And finally, I'm not concerned right now about how I'm being remembered I'll be remembered when I'm gone. Right now, I'm not gone, and I've got lots to do. Yes, go ahead. Okinawa Q. Thank you, Mr. President. You're just back from the G 8 summit meeting in Cologne, Germany, and next year you're going to Okinawa, Japan, for another summit meeting. Okinawa is the home of a huge U.S. military presence in Japan and the Far East. And I'm wondering if you will try hard and resolve all the major issues pending between the U.S. and Japanese Governments about the U.S. bases in Okinawa, most importantly, the relocation of the Futenma Air Base, before you go there next year. Thank you. The President. Absolutely. I don't want to go over there and have all these things hanging out. I hope they'll all be resolved. Let me say, I think it's a very exciting thing, and I congratulate Prime Minister Obuchi on wanting to host this conference in Okinawa. It's very unusual, in a way, for a leader to do that, to take the conference so far away from the capital city. And I think it's very farsighted. I hope it will be good for the people and the economy of Okinawa, and I hope to goodness we'll have all the outstanding issues resolved by the time we get there. Jane Jane Fullerton, Arkansas Democrat Gazette , go ahead. Post Presidency Plans Q. Both you and the First Lady have indicated that you plan to live in New York once you leave the White House. I'm just curious what you would say to the people of Arkansas, the people who have supported you and who helped you run for President. Should they feel used or abandoned in any way? Laughter The President. No. Now, let me say this I have made it clear what I intend to do and what I intend to do from the beginning. What I intend to do is to divide my time between, as I said in my interview with CNN from Europe, I intend to divide my time between Arkansas and New York. I intend to spend at least half my time at home, when I'm not traveling and doing other things, because I've got a library and a public policy center to build, and I want it to be great, and I want it to be a great gift to my State. I've worked quite hard on it and thought a lot about it. And I think that I think the people at home will be quite excited about it when they see what we're going to do and will be thrilled by it. And I won't be home so much, I'll be underfoot, you know, I'll just be but I'll be there quite a lot. Yes. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. Mr. President, on Northern Ireland. Sir, on Wednesday the deadline looms, and I was wondering whether or not if the IRA does not sign up for disarmament in time for Wednesday's deadline, whether or not or a timeline is established for disarmament will Gerry Adams still be allowed to come to the United States and raise funds? And secondly, do you have any personal words that you'd like to express to the people who are about to undergo another marching season, where it's been a very volatile and very bloody situation at times? The President. I'd like to answer the second question first. The people of Northern Ireland, a majority of both communities, voted for the Good Friday accords. They voted for peace, for decommissioning, for universal acceptance of the principle of consent. And in American terms, that's majority rule. They voted for new partnerships with the Irish Republic, and they voted for self government. They were right when they voted for that agreement. It's still the right thing for the future of Northern Ireland. So I would ask those who march and those who are angry at the march to remember that. I don't want to answer your first question for a simple reason I have been in intense contact with Prime Minister Blair and with Prime Minister, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. As you know, I have invested a great deal in the process of peace. And I don't think we have a great deal of time to resolve this complicated issue. It's politically and emotionally complicated. But I just would ask all the parties the only thing I want to say about it publicly now if it doesn't work out, there will be plenty of time for you to ask me all the other questions, but I'm still banking that we'll get it to work out. But I think everybody needs to think about how far we've come, all the things that are in the Good Friday accords, the fact that the public, Catholic and the Protestant public, voted for them, and ask, no matter how difficult these issues are, how in goodness' name we could ever let this peace process fall apart? This is a very serious, serious period. And I do not want to say anything that would make it worse. And in the days ahead, I intend to do whatever anybody thinks I can do to save it. But I hope and pray it will be saved, because the Good Friday accords were good when the people voted for them, they're good today, and the differences, though they are profound, are as nothing compared to the cost of losing it. Go ahead. Books on the Clinton Presidency Q. Mr. President, in the wake of the books by George Stephanopoulos and Bob Woodward, I was wondering if you think that you can have anything close to a candid or a frank conversation with aides or, for that matter, lawyers these days, and whether you believe that this makes you a more isolated President as a result of this trend? The President. Well, I don't feel isolated. I mean, you all are having at me pretty good here today. Laughter And that's one of the reasons I'm still here, because I haven't been isolated, either from the American people at large or from a wide and large network of friends. I haven't read either book, and I haven't read the excerpts of the book, Mr. Woodward's book in the Washington Post, so I can't comment because I don't know exactly what was said. And I think it's better for me not to comment on something that I haven't read. Yes, sir. The gentleman in the back. Reconstruction of the Balkans Q. Mr. President, you've been very much involved in the last few weeks in an attempt to create a Balkan reconstruction program. Many people, including yourself, have referred to the Marshall plan after World War II as kind of a comparison to what you want to accomplish. And yet, you and your administration officials have insisted that Serbia cannot be involved in this until Milosevic is out. Given the nature of the Balkan economy, which is a very integrated area with the electricity networks, the transportation networks, the Danube River, which is a unifying force which unites the entire region, isn't it a folly to try and conduct a program of this nature by excluding Serbia? And really economically impossible without Serbia as a part of the picture you cannot really get the whole economy moving. And secondly, is there not a danger I realize that you have said that the reason for excluding Serbia was to try and get the Serb people to reject Milosevic. But isn't there a danger that they may indeed coalesce around Milosevic, feeling themselves as victims, and support him in spite of his own personal character, simply because of the bitterness towards the West after the bombing and the sanctions and now what they feel is disappointment over the reconstruction? The President. To answer your question, first of all, I don't think it's folly or impossible to think we can have a Balkan reconstruction plan a southeastern Europe reconstruction plan without Serbia, but it would be terribly unfortunate and more difficult. What will happen is that new networks will be formed, and the relative importance of Serbia will be diminished if they're not a part of it. But it will be much more difficult, and it will be very unfortunate. Now, having said that, what the Serbian people decide to do, of course, is their own affair. But they're going to have to come to grips with what Mr. Milosevic ordered in Kosovo. They're just going to have to come to grips with it, and they're going to have to get out of denial. They're going to have to come to grips with it. And then they're going to have to decide whether they support his leadership or not, whether they think it's okay that all those tens of thousands of people were killed and all those hundreds of thousands of people were run out of their homes and all those little girls were raped and all those little boys were murdered. They're going to have to decide if they think that is okay. And if they think it's okay, they can make that decision. But I wouldn't give them one red cent for reconstruction if they think it's okay, because I don't think it's okay, and I don't think that's the world we're trying to build for our children. So I think it's simple. And I'm look, I met with Mr. Milosevic in Paris I shook hands with him I had lunch across the table from him. It was a delightful and interesting lunch. And I thought, well, maybe he had some distance between the extreme activities of the Serbs in Bosnia. And then he went right out and did it all over again, and I mean with people directly under his control. And I do not believe we should give them any money for reconstruction if they believe that is the person who should lead them into the new century. I do not, and I will not support it. Yes, go ahead. Taxes Q. You said earlier that you would not be averse to cutting taxes. And yet, your budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office, actually raises taxes overall by some 50 billion over 5 years. Why is this, in an era of surpluses? The President. Well, now, what are they counting? They're counting all the money from the tobacco tax that we used to pay for the Q. All of it. The President. I believe that you have to have a very generous interpretation to reach that conclusion. You look, we're giving 11 percent of the surplus on the USA accounts as a whole 11 percent. We have, in addition to that, you've got the long term care tax credit you've got the child care tax credit you've got the continuing funding of all the education and child tax credits that we had in the previous budgets. And my guess is to get to that, they have to not count the continuing funding of the tax cuts but count the continued extension of tax increases that have to have extenders as new revenues. I can't imagine how they got it otherwise. We did have a large cigarette tax increase in there because we were trying to depress teen smoking, and we were trying to get funds to use to deal with the health consequences of what is a virtual epidemic among young people. But I am for the tax cuts, and I will go back to the answer before. I've got new tax cuts in this budget, and I will work with the Republicans on it. But we should not we should not pass up this chance to save Social Security, to save Medicare, to give the prescription drug benefits, to pay the debt down, which will keep the economy stronger and keep people with more jobs and higher incomes. Then we can talk about the tax cuts. And if Mr. King is right and we have some more money, then we can talk about that. But let's deal with first things first. Laughter Thank you very much. June 25, 1999 Thank you very much. Danielle, you did a fine job. Didn't she do a good job? I thought she was great. Thank you. I'd also like to thank my good friend Father O'Donovan, for allowing me to come back to my alma mater to make this speech and to be with you and Bruce Reed, for the superb use he has made of the Presidential scholarship he got. He does a wonderful job in our office. I hope you got the joke he made about how he looks younger than you. We all rag him about how young he looks. Actually, when I was his age, I looked young, too. And then it just overcame me. Laughter I want to congratulate the Presidential scholars, the teachers, parents who are here. I am delighted to have this chance to be with you. Because I have been on an extended trip to Europe, I actually want to take a few moments to give a serious talk about where we are in Washington today and where we are in America and to talk to you a little bit about the whole nature of our public life and politics. Nearly 8 years ago, as Bruce said, I came to this hall, where I sat many times as a student, to ask America to join me on a journey, to go beyond what were then the competing ideas of the old political establishment in Washington that dominated the entire decade of the 1980's. People, on the one hand, said Government was bad, and we should get it out of everybody's life and leave people alone to fend for themselves, or on the other hand, said Government was good and could solve most of our problems if it were just free to do so. I asked the American people instead to embrace a new way, something I called a New Covenant between America and its Government, an agreement with the citizens and their Government that we would jointly pursue opportunity for all Americans, responsibility from all Americans, and a community of all Americans. I believed it would bring America back to prosperity. Over the years since I became President, I have come back to this hall several times to discuss in more specific terms the progress we have made in building that New Covenant and the opportunities still to be seized, the responsibilities still to be shouldered, the pillars of community still to be built. Washington is pretty far away from most American's lives most of the time. It is tempting for people in public life here, who are so far away from you, to fall into easy rhetoric in positioning themselves against their opponents. But politics at its best is about values, ideas, and action. When it is that, it becomes public service, and it is a noble endeavor. Let me give you some examples of the ideas we've had here. When I came here, our administration believed we could balance the budget and increase our investment in education, in technology, in research, in training people for the future. Those ideas, turned into action, have given us 18.6 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the highest homeowner ship ever, the longest peacetime expansion in history. And along the way we have virtually opened the doors of college to all Americans with the HOPE scholarship, the other tuition tax credit, improvements in the student loan program, a million work study positions. We're well on our way to connecting every classroom in the country to the Internet by the year 2000. We believed that we could reform welfare and make it good for work and for families. That idea, turned into action, has cut the welfare rolls in half, while maintaining health and nutrition benefits for poor children and increasing our investment in child care for lower income workers. We believed we could make our streets safer by putting more police on the streets and taking guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them. Those ideas, put into action, have given us a 25 year low in the crime rate. We believed we could grow the economy and improve the environment. That idea, put into action, has given us cleaner air, cleaner water, millions of acres of land set aside from the California redwoods to the Florida Everglades. It has allowed us in the field of public health to have safer food and, for the first time in history, 90 percent of our children immunized against serious childhood diseases. And the economy has gotten better, not worse, as we have taken steps to advance the environment and public health. We believed that young people in our country, if given the chance, would serve in their communities and that they ought to be given a chance to earn some education credit. That idea, put into practice, produced AmeriCorps, our national service program, which in just 5 years has already had over 100,000 young people working in communities all across America, a milestone it took the Peace Corps 20 years to reach. And we believed America could be the world's leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity and security. Those ideas, turned into action, have given us over 250 trade agreements, new partnerships for America with Latin America and Africa, new initiatives against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, progress on peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, a stand against ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and now in Kosovo, where with our allies we have said that when innocent civilians are uprooted or slaughtered because of their race or their religion, if we can stop it, we will do so. We still have a lot of work to finish the job in Kosovo. We still have many challenges abroad, from peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, to our continuing efforts to help relieve the debt burdens of poor nations, to our efforts to stabilize the global economy. But I came back to Washington after my trip to Europe with a renewed energy for the domestic agenda. And I'd like to talk to you about it today, about the things we can do here today that will affect your communities today and very much affect your futures tomorrow. With our present prosperity, we actually have a rare opportunity to meet the remaining large challenges facing our country on the brink of a new century. But to do it, both parties must work together. There will be plenty of time for politics in the year and a half ahead, but this summer must be a season of progress. Just think how far we've come in the last decade. When I came here to speak in 1991, America was drifting toward a new century without direction. Now, our people, working with common purpose, have brought the Nation back to a position of unprecedented strength, with greater prosperity, greater safety, more social healing, more national leadership for the United States around the world. Our economy is perhaps the strongest in our history, and something you may know more about than I do, it is increasingly clear that it is being powered in large measure by a once in a lifetime technological revolution. For example, the high tech sector accounts for only 8 percent of our economy but for fully one third of the growth we've had over the last 6 1 2 years. We are now seeing an explosion of technology, and productivity along with it, from the Internet that links offices around the world to computers used to track warehouse inventories. You will have a chance, thanks to technology, to work in jobs that have not been created yet, in industries that have not yet been imagined. But right now we are benefiting immensely for it. Just this morning we learned that in the last quarter, our economy grew at the brisk rate of 4.3 percent, with virtually no inflation. If we can keep that going, that's very good for your future. I think that those of us who work here now will be judged, however, primarily by whether we choose to seize this opportunity to ensure your future, not just the short term but the long term, or will it be squandered with petty arguments and animosities and special interest politics. I regret to say that the atmosphere in Washington has become increasingly poisoned by bitter partisanship. I don't understand exactly why, since we keep doing better and better and better in America. It may be that some people believe they have the luxury of engaging in shortsighted partisanship because the country is doing so well. I think that is a bad misreading of reality. Moreover, it is clear to me that in the last few weeks our Nation has come together in an unprecedented consensus of conscience and common sense on issues like gun violence, where the Congress unfortunately buckled under to special interest pressure. Partisanship has even paralyzed the basic work of writing our spending bills, something we have to do here every year. Let me give you an example. Not very long ago, I issued an order saying that the United States Government would cut our greenhouse gas emissions coming out of our buildings by 30 percent over the next few years to meet our responsibility to deal with the challenge of global warming. Now, you have to understand, this doesn't cost you anything. This saves you money. We're going to reduce our energy use so that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions coming out of our facilities by 30 percent. It's a no brainer. It's no money, nothing. The only people that lose are the people that won't be pumping electricity to us. Unbelievably enough, just yesterday a Senate committee voted to largely block my executive action to cut the Government's emissions by 30 percent, an action that would save you 750 million a year. Now, I think I can stop that. But it's an example of what happens when adults with responsibility fall into small time wrangling and even want to stop things that are 100 percent good and not controversial. I say again, the interesting thing to me is if you look at all the surveys or just go out and talk to people, or if we would sit down and talk, you would see that across party lines, across regional lines, across income lines there is actually quite a remarkable consensus emerging in America on a number of issues outside Washington. But the American people have to depend on those of us who work in Washington to take the consensus ideas they have embraced and turn those ideas into action. Remember what I said at the beginning Politics at its best involves values, ideas, and action, and the balancing of all those things in ways that change lives. Now, some other people here really believe that because the Presidential election season has already started, the battle for Congress has already started, even though it's a year and however many months away, that the best politics is just to run out the clock and wait until the next election and hope that the country is doing so well and we enjoy the lazy days of summer so much, nobody will notice. I don't agree with that, either. And I would like to say to you, as young people, there are an awful lot of very good people in public life who don't think that way, who want to get things done. And I hope someday many of you will be among them. But you will find that all of your life one of the greatest struggles you have to embrace is against being small, against being defensive or angry or combative for the sake of it, or thinking about some slight that someone imposed on you yesterday, instead of some good thing you can do today and tomorrow. And we have to break out of that now. This country has not had an opportunity like this, with this level of prosperity and this level of progress on social problems, in decades. And there actually is quite a lot we can do. For example, there are things, believe it or not, that both parties agree on here. We should certainly act on them. Laughter And then there are things on which we have honest disagreements. On those, we should seek to find honorable compromise. The American people give us these jobs to get things done. In the weeks and months ahead, I will do all I can, working with Congress, taking executive action, summoning citizens to deal with these challenges. But first let's start with what we agree on. You might be surprised by the list. To make sure that Americans should never have to choose between going to work and paying their medical bills, we must pass the proposal to let disabled Americans keep their Medicaid health insurance when they take a job. Believe it or not, people who normally who get Medicaid lose their insurance if they take a job. The problem is a lot of disabled people can't get any other insurance. Their bills may be 40,000, 50,000 a year. But all of us are better off if those folks can go to work. They are more fulfilled. They are living their lives better. They also become tax paying citizens. And whatever their medical bills are, they would be paid, regardless, by Medicaid. So we now have a bill that solves a huge problem. And believe it or not, almost everybody agrees on it, Republicans and Democrats alike. So let's start with that, the easy one and a very good one, that will help untold numbers of Americans and their families. Congress should pass it, and I will sign it. To honor work and strengthen our families, we should raise the minimum wage. There are still too many people who work 40 hours a week whose children are in poverty. Democrats and many, many Republicans agree that we should do this. So Congress should pass it, and I will sign it. To renew our elections and stem the rising tide of campaign spending, we must pass strong campaign finance reform. Finally, after years, it appears that a majority of lawmakers in both parties, in both the Senate and House, agree. But the leaders of the Republican majority are blocking the bill. Instead, they ought to let the Congress vote everybody votes his or her conscience. But if it passes and I believe it would I would certainly sign it. To protect the interest of 160 million Americans who use managed care, we should pass a strong, enforceable, and bipartisan Patients' Bill of Rights. Now, you all probably know what the problems are here More and more Americans are going into managed care, and managed care has done a lot of good in our country to slow the rise in health care costs. But we should not ask people to sacrifice quality of care. Our Patients' Bill of Rights would simply say that if you're in an HMO or any other kind of health care plan, you wouldn't lose a right to see your specialist, if you needed. You wouldn't give up the right to go to the nearest emergency room if you were hurt in an accident believe it or not, some people do in their plan. You couldn't be forced to give up your doctor in the middle of a treatment for example, if you were 6 months pregnant and your employer changed health care providers, you couldn't be required to change doctors, or if you were in the middle of a chemotherapy treatment and your employer changed health care providers, you wouldn't give it up. And you would have a right to protect yourself to make sure these rights were enforceable. Now, these problems have been evident now for the last few years. Yesterday we learned that it had gotten so bad, that doctors are so angry that the doctor patient relationship is being breached by insurance company accountants' meddling, that they're even organizing a union to bargain with the HMO's. Now, again, I've seen survey after survey after survey. There is no partisan issue here. Republicans and Democrats and independents all get sick. Laughter Right? I mean, they do. There's not a partisan issue here. Most doctors are Republicans most nurses are Democrats. Laughter So what? This is not a big deal. This is not a partisan issue anywhere in the whole country but Washington, DC. Over 200 medical and consumer organizations have endorsed this Patients' Bill of Rights, and one has opposed it, the health insurance companies. Now, if we get a vote on this because out in America, doctors, nurses, and patients agree, and Democrats and Republicans will agree it will fly like a hot knife through butter. But again, the leadership of the Congress is trying to find a way to block the bill. It's not right. So I say again, just let everybody vote his or her conscience. And if they send it to me and they will I will sign it. Now, these are measures awaiting action that could be enacted quickly. And if America will send a signal to Congress that they want action, we can pass them. There are some, however, broader, more fundamental and, frankly, more difficult issues that I hope we can resolve this year. First, I believe, as I said in my State of the Union Address, that we have a duty to you to use the bulk of this surplus over the next 15 years to solve the long term challenges of Social Security and Medicare and to do it in a way that pays down our national debt. Now, why? Because that means that future generations will have guaranteed income and health care in their retirement years. And it means as we pay down the debt, we will keep interest rates low, investment high, and guarantee when you get out of college there will be lots of good jobs available because we'll have a stronger and stronger and stronger economy. We can actually get rid of America's debt over the next 18 years if we will do this. So I hope, even though we have honest, here, honest philosophical differences about what the best way to reform Medicare is, what the best way to reform Social Security is, the point is we ought to be able to proceed in a spirit of honorable compromise because the goals are so important and the stakes are so high and because, frankly, the choices are a lot easier when you have a surplus than when you have a big deficit. Next week I will propose a detailed plan to strengthen Medicare, to cut its costs, to modernize its operations, to use competition and innovation, to strengthen the core guarantee of quality care for all Americans who are elderly and eligible. I will also, for the first time, propose a way to help senior citizens with their greatest growing need, affordable prescription drugs. It is a huge issue out there for seniors. Now, finding agreement on Social Security and Medicare will be hard. Finding agreement on tax cuts will be hard, although I hope the Congress will at least adopt targeted tax credits for long term care and child care that I proposed. But we can do it. Now, regardless, Congress has to pass a budget this year. We must decide on how to use the surplus. So I hope we can work together to make progress on these goals. Second, we ought to continue to advance our economy by doing more for the education of our people. As we have balanced the budget and cut the size of the Federal Government listen to this we have cut the size of the Federal Government to the same size it was when I was your age. The Federal Government now is the same size it was in 1962. That was a long time ago. Laughter Anyway, as we have done that, we have nearly doubled our investment in education and training. Why? Because, as was said in my introduction, the information age will be the education age. Last year, at my urging, with school populations in our country at record highs, Congress passed a budget that began to hire 100,000 new teachers to reduce class size in the early years. Unbelievably to me, in the budget the majority is now writing, they repeal their pledge to finish the job of hiring those teachers. I just want Congress to keep its word. I think when you tell people something in an election year, you ought to still be for it the next year when there is no election. I have also sent Congress an ambitious education reform plan because this is a year, as we do every 5 years, we have to reauthorize the general program under which we give money to schools all over America. And I believe we should dramatically change it to hold schools and school districts and States more accountable for results and to give them more funds for after school, summer school programs and to target and turn around failing schools. It is controversial. But it is based on what is working in the States that are having success in lifting all their schools in student achievement. Again I say, there may be those who disagree with me philosophically we ought to have an open debate about this and come to an honorable compromise. We do not have to continue to spend money in the same old way when we know we can spend it more effectively based on what we have seen in our schools. Third, let me say something that I hope will be important to all of you and has doubtless been experienced by some of you. We've got the strongest economy on record, all right, but there are still too many poor neighborhoods and rural communities where prosperity is something you read about, not experience. And I believe we should be committed to going into this new century leaving no one behind. This is not only a good thing to do ethically it is also good economics. I keep thinking every day, now, how can we continue to grow this economy? How can we drive unemployment even lower, create even more jobs, without having inflation? One way is to find new investment in America. So I say to you, we've spent a lot of time seeking new markets abroad, but our most important new markets are right here at home. Two weeks from now, for 4 days, I will lead an unprecedented trip across America so our country can see the places I'm talking about. I'll go to the hills and hollows of Kentucky, to the Mississippi Delta, to a poor community in the Midwest, to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, to Phoenix, to inner city Los Angeles. I'll be joined by distinguished corporate leaders and political leaders of both parties. Again, this is something that should not be a political issue at all. We want to shine a spotlight on the pockets of poverty that remain in America and on the potential they have for new investment, new jobs, new hope, new opportunity. I will ask Congress to do its part by passing my new markets initiative. It provides for tax incentives and loan guarantees for people to invest in these areas, the same kind of incentives we give people today to invest in emerging economies abroad. I think that whatever we encourage people to do abroad, we ought to give the same encouragement to do at home, to give our people those kinds of chances. Finally, I think we ought to do more to protect our young people from violence, to redeem the awful sacrifice of the children of Littleton, of the other school shootings, of the 13 American children we lose every single day to gun violence. After Littleton, our whole Nation came together in grief and determination. We know there are many causes of youth violence, and therefore, there must be many solutions. Hillary and I are launching a national campaign against youth violence to bring all kinds of people from all sectors of our communities together. We have done this before, like Mothers and Students Against Drunk Driving dramatically reduced drunk driving in America, just for one example. And we can do that. Of course, more must be done at home. Young people can have a greater influence on each other. Schools, houses of worship, other places where children gather can do better. The entertainment community must do more to stop marketing violence to children. I'm proud that theater owners have agreed applause I wonder if that's coming more from the adults or the young people. Laughter I feel very strongly about this. I'm proud that theater owners agreed that from now on, young people will be carded for R and PG 13 movies. I'm glad, thanks to the Vice President and Mrs. Gore, that next year TV's will have the V chip in half of all new TV's sold and that Internet and video game companies are helping with ratings and blocking technologies. We have our differences with various sectors of the entertainment community from time to time, but they have actually done quite a lot with the TV rating systems, the video game rating systems, the blocking technologies in the last few years, and they deserve credit for what they have done, as well as urging to do more. But we have to face the fact that if you have more children spending more time alone and let me say that one big difference between the time when I was your age, or even Bruce was your age, and today, in America as a whole, the average average young person spends 22 hours per week less with his or her parents than 30 years ago. From birth through age 18, that's over 2 years less time that the average young person spends with his or her parents over 2 years. You don't notice it so much it's just a few hours a day. Why is that? More single parents, more working parents, more people living in suburbs spending more time going to and from work. Everybody is busy, busy, busy. And most of you are turning out just fine, and most of your parents are doing the best they can and doing a fine job. But we shouldn't minimize the fact that when this happens, the most vulnerable children among us will be even more vulnerable. And that is why this whole entertainment culture counts, not because of you but because there are among us always vulnerable people. And there will be more of them, and they will be more vulnerable. And that's why the access to guns matters. I've heard this I got a letter the other day from a really nice person that I admire, saying, "Mr. President, we've got all these laws on the books, and if somebody wants a gun they can get it." Now, if you say that, it seems self evident, since there's way over 220 million guns in the country. It seems self evident. But let's look at the facts here. Since we passed the Brady law, over the strenuous objections of the gun lobby, who then said that no criminal ever gets a gun from a gun store just since we passed the Brady law in 1993, we have put a stop to some 400,000 illegal gun sales, without stopping one legitimate sports man or woman from buying a gun. And you cannot convince any reasonable person in law enforcement that those 400,000 stops didn't have something to do with the fact that we have a 25 year low in the crime rate and an even bigger plummet in many areas of gun related violent crime. Now, in the wake of the shootings after Littleton, I asked the Senate to pass a commonsense measure to help prevent youth violence by doing more in this vein to keep guns out the hands of criminals and children. For one thing, we should close the loophole that lets a criminal turned away from a gun dealer go to a gun show or a flea market in a city and buy a gun without a background check. The technology is there now for these background checks to be done without great burden to people who run gun shows and flea markets. But today they can buy a gun there, no questions asked. Now, the same people who said in 1993 that no criminals buy their guns at gun stores, they buy them other places, say that we should not have background checks at the other places. I think we should. I think we should require that safety locks be sold with every handgun. We should ban the importation of large capacity ammunition clips. We should say violent juveniles should not own guns when they become adults. It took a pivotal vote by Vice President Gore to break a tie in the Senate so that the Senate did the right thing in closing the gun show loophole. Unfortunately, as most of you probably know, 2 weeks ago, the Republicans in the House of Representatives, with some Democrats but not many, shot down America's best hope for commonsense gun control in the face of strong public demand, clear public need, and again I say, out in the country, no partisanship. The House filled the proposal full of high caliber loopholes. And now they say they want to watch it die. The majority even pushed measures to weaken current law, for example, letting criminals store their guns at pawnshops, even if the reason they need to store it is because they're taking a sabbatical in prison. Laughter They say if they come back to get the gun, there shouldn't be a background check. Laughter We've had a pawnshop background check for a good while now. They want to get rid of that, as if that is somehow terribly burdensome to people. Well, I think we can do better than that. But I don't know how we can expect you to stand up to youth violence if the Congress won't stand up to the gun lobby. We have got to applause . So again, I say, it's not too late. The House and the Senate will now appoint conferees on this bill, because they have passed two different bills. Those people can put the provisions the Senate passed into the bill, send it to the House and the Senate, pass it, and I'll sign it. It's important that we strengthen, not weaken, our laws that make it easier for criminals to get and keep guns. Okay, so let's go back and review the bidding here. We have a raft of bipartisan bills health care for the disabled the minimum wage campaign finance reform the Patients' Bill of Rights. We have big issues on which there are disagreements but where honorable compromise is possible long term reform of Social Security and Medicare paying down the debt. We have a clear case where Republicans and Democrats should join together to mobilize private capital to give new life to our poorest communities legislation to hire more teachers and to raise educational standards sensible but vital steps to protect our children from violence. These are big things. These are things worthy of a great nation and its elected representatives. I will work day and night to achieve this agenda. I hope you will support it, again, without regard to party. And I hope you will believe that good citizenship and public service are worth your time and effort. Many times when I have come here, and many times around the country, I have referred to a professor I had here, who I talked about in 1991, who taught Western Civilization. He said our civilization was unique in the belief of what he called "future preference," that is, the idea that the future can be better than the past and that every individual has a duty to make it so. Now, you obviously believe that, or you wouldn't be here. I'm about to give you all your medal, and we're going to take pictures. And it's a whole monument to years and years and years of your effort believing in tomorrow, right? It is. You wouldn't be here if you didn't. And that belief has had a lot to do with your Nation's success over the last 220 plus years. It has driven my public life. And it was validated again a few days ago by the pain and the hope I saw in the faces of the children of Kosovo. The more we think about tomorrow, the more energy, determination, and wisdom we have for the challenges of today. I believe in your future. I believe America's best days lie in the new millennium. I ask Congress to help me make it so. Thank you very much. June 22, 1999 Thank you very much, General Clark, General Jackson, General Craddock, Colonel Ingram, ladies and gentlemen of the United States military. And as nearly as I can tell, we've got a few of our British counterparts back there and at least two Spanish officers over here somewhere. And I just want to say, first of all, I am proud to have the soldiers, the marines, the air men and women, the naval forces of the United States of America serving in NATO. I am proud that we're part of KFOR. I'm proud that we're serving under an able commander like General Jackson. I am proud of Wes Clark. You know, General Clark and I went through the agony of Bosnia together. He lost three good friends, who fell off a mountain because Mr. Milosevic wouldn't let them take the safe road to try to negotiate a peace. And we watched for 4 years while reasoned diplomacy tried to save lives and a quarter of a million people died and 2 1 2 million refugees were created before NATO and our friends on the ground in Croatia and Bosnia forced a settlement there and ended the horror there. This time we didn't wait. And it took 79 days, but that's a lot better than 4 years. And I hope the people of the world, when they see these horrible, horrible stories coming out, the mass graves and all of that, just imagine what it would have been like if we had stepped to the side and not done what we did for the last 3 months. I hope, to the day you die, you will be proud of being a part of a nation and a democratic alliance that believes that people should not be killed, uprooted, or destroyed because of their race, their ethnic background, or the way they worship God. I am proud of that, and I hope you are. Let me also say to you that I just came from one of our refugee camps, and there are a lot of grateful people there. But you and I know that there's a lot to be done yet, and General Jackson's got a big job. And the United States is proud to be doing our part to help our allied efforts succeed there. We must not have one conflict and roll back ethnic cleansing and then lose the peace because we don't do every last thing just as we're supposed to do it. So the whole credibility of the principle on which we have stood our ground and fought in this region for years and years now that here, just like in America, just like in Great Britain, people who come from different racial and ethnic and religious backgrounds can live together and work together and do better together if they simply respect each other's God given dignity and we don't want our children to grow up in a 21st century world where innocent civilians can be hauled off to the slaughter, where children can die en masse, where young boys of military age can be burned alive, where young girls can be raped en masse, just to intimidate their families. We don't want our kids to grow up in a world like that. Now, what it rides on is not the precision of our bombs, not in our power to destroy, but your power to build and to be safe while you're doing it and to protect the ethnic Kosovar Albanians and the ethnic Serbs alike as long as they are innocent civilians doing nothing wrong, they're entitled to protection and to try to show by the power of your example, day in and day out, those of you that are going into Kosovo, that people can lay down their hatreds. You need to think about telling your family stories. You need to think about how we can help these people get over this awful, grievous thing. I saw a lot of little kids just a few minutes ago with a lot of hurt and terror and loss in their eyes. So you've got a big, big job left. It is not free of danger it will not be free of difficulty. There will be some days you wish you were somewhere else. But never forget, if we can do this here and if we can then say to the people of the world, whether you live in Africa or central Europe or any other place, if somebody comes after innocent civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background, or their religion, and it's within our power to stop it, we will stop it. And by the way, look at central Europe. These people can live together and prosper together. That's what we're trying to do. It can make a huge difference to our children in the new century. It may mean that Americans will never have to fight again in a big land war because we just let things get out of hand and out of hand and out of hand until everything blew up and there was nothing else that could be done about it. This is very important. And again I say, I hope you will always be proud of it. I hope you know how proud that I and the American people are of you. Thank you, and God bless you. June 21, 1999 Thank you, Thank you. Dober dan! You have certainly provided for me a welcome to Slovenia I will never forget. Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, Mayor Potocnik to the young lady who introduced me, Irena Majcen and to your famous Olympian Leon Stukelj and to all the people of Slovenia, thank you very much. I would also like to thank the Big Band of RTV for playing my national anthem and yours. Let's give the band a hand, there. Applause I have wanted to visit your country for a long time. The whole world admires Slovenia's success in building freedom and prosperity, and now we look to you to play a crucial role as we build a better future for all of Europe. Your great Olympic champion Leon Stukelj has now lived 100 years. He has lived throughout this century, the bloodiest and most turbulent in history, from the collapse of Austria Hungary to the first Yugoslav State, from fascist invaders to Soviet forces to Tito's Yugoslavia. Think how many armies have marched through this square, how many flags have been raised over your city. Now, at last, the flag flying in this capital stands for independence and democracy and the better life you are building. Congratulations, and God bless you. All over the world, people seek the same kind of freedom and justice and peace that you have brought here from Northern Ireland to the Middle East, to southern Africa, and in central and southeastern Europe. But we know these gains are fragile, for freedom's enemies hope for our failure. Therefore, we must keep moving forward to deepen democracy and widen opportunity, to build genuine communities and lasting peace. To succeed, we must begin with a simple truth Racial and religious hatred has no place in a civilized society. That is why free nations stood against Mr. Milosevic's ethnic cleansing and killing in Kosovo. Now the Serb forces have left, the international security forces are moving in, and the Kosovars are going home. This is a great day for freedom. I thank Slovenia for standing with NATO and for providing vital aid to the refugees. For all you have done, I am very, very grateful. Thank you. Eight years ago Mr. Milosevic triggered a military assault on your nation. But you resisted. You secured your freedom, and you proclaimed It will never be the same again. Now, all the people all the people of every part of Europe must be able to say the same thing. Democracy, tolerance, and human rights must prevail everywhere. For no nation is safe, no prosperity is stable if conflict and refugees and crime and terrorism can be pushed across borders. We must build a Europe with no frontline states, a Europe undivided, democratic, and at peace for the first time in history. And Slovenia can lead the way. And America will help. Today America and Slovenia have reached agreements to encourage more American companies to do business here, to expand trade, and to do other things which will help your economy. And let me say to people all over the world who will see this on television, do not be deterred by the rain. Laughter This a wonderful country. Come here and help them build a future. We also want to build Slovenia's security. You have stood with us in Kosovo. You have made progress in creating a modern military. You have established a demining trust to remove land mines and aid their victims. You have been a good partner, and you are an excellent candidate for NATO. Let me also say that we want Serbia to be a part of the new Europe. But Serbia must reject the murderous rule of Mr. Milosevic and choose the path that Slovenia has chosen, where people reach across the old divides and find strength in their differences and their common humanity. A decade ago, just as Mr. Milosevic was launching his campaign of ethnic terror, Slovenia chose a new national anthem, with a verse from your great poet and patriot France Preseren. Your anthem your anthem tells what Europe's future should be. The anthem praises those who work for the day when all will be free when nations live as neighbors, not enemies when war is banished from the world. Your vision is our vision. Let us pursue it together, for all of Europe, so that for all your peoples, it will never be the same again. Thank you, and God bless you. On behalf of our delegation, my wife, my daughter, all of us, thank you for making us feel welcome. We never will forget this. I hope you won't either. God bless you, and thank you. June 20, 1999 Mr. Kiselev. Mr. President, hello, and let me express my gratitude for your interview. The President. Thank you very much. I'm glad to do it. Russian Participation in KFOR Mr. Kiselev. And let me start with this question. For the past week and a half, relations between Russia and the West have been complicated by the unexpected deployment of the Russian peacekeepers to Pristina. What was at the heart of the disagreement between Moscow and the West regarding Russia's participation in KFOR? How did you overcome this disagreement? The President. Well, first of all, let me say that this entire difficulty in Kosovo has been a great test for the relationship between the United States and Russia, but it is a test, I believe, that both countries have passed on your part, thanks to the leadership of President Yeltsin and the work that our foreign ministers and defense ministers have done, the work that Prime Minister Stepashin has done. I don't know that there ever was much disagreement about Russian participation. I said from the beginning that I strongly felt in order for the peacekeeping force to have credibility and full impact, Russia would have to be a very important part of it. And the agreement we have reached regarding Russian involvement in terms of leadership over the airport and being involved here in three different sectors I think will enable all of us to achieve our objectives to bring the Kosovars home in peace and security, and to make sure that the Serb minority as well as the Kosovo Albanian majority are both treated freely and fairly. Meeting With President Boris Yeltsin of Russia Mr. Kiselev. Today, Mr. President, you met with Russian President Yeltsin. What questions did you discuss, and what did you manage to agree on? The President. First of all, we discussed Kosovo. We talked about what a difficult challenge it had been to our relationship, and we both committed to implement our agreement in good faith in a way that will, I think, reflect credit on the leadership and greatness of Russia and the Russian people, and on those of us who are working with Russia in Kosovo. Secondly, we discussed the importance of continuing our efforts to reduce the nuclear threat and the threat of proliferation of missile technology. And we agreed to work together on that. Among other things, President Yeltsin said that he hoped that START II would be ratified by the Duma, and that we would begin soon parallel discussions on START III to take our nuclear arsenals down even more and on the ABM Treaty. Then, the third thing we discussed was the need to do more to try to support economic development in Russia, to get Russia qualified in the IMF program and, of course, that requires some action in the Duma. And I expressed my strong support for IMF assistance to Russia, as well as for help on the Soviet era debt problem and some other things that can be done, I believe, to boost Russian economic prospects and help the lives of ordinary citizens in Russia, which all of us think is very, very important. Mr. Kiselev. Mr. President, let me ask you this. Both in Russia and in the West, the question of Yeltsin's health, President Yeltsin's health constantly comes up. How did you find Mr. Yeltsin today? The President. Today he was strong, clear, alert, vigorous. He stated Russia's case very forcefully on every issue, and we did what we have done in all of our meetings we've now had 17 meetings in the last 6 1 2 years. We had an agenda we reached agreements and we committed to go forward. So I would say, today he did very, very well. He has acknowledged from time to time that he's had some health problems, but in all of my conversations with him about Kosovo, and especially today, I found him to be alert and very much on top of his responsibilities. Russia U.S. Relations Mr. Kiselev. Mr. President, let me ask you about this. NATO's operation in the Balkans has led to manifestations of anti Western and anti American sentiments in Russia. What are you planning to do to improve America's image in Russia's eyes, and what kind of specific concrete steps will you take to improve relations between Russia and the U.S.? The President. Well, first, I hope that this interview will help to some extent by giving me the opportunity to clarify my country's position and our commitment to a strong, successful, democratic Russia, fully participating in world affairs and a leadership role, and fully integrated into Europe in the major economic and political institutions that will be so important to the welfare of ordinary Russian citizens in the new century. Second, I think that as we work together in Kosovo and as you are able to bring to the Russian people the facts of the horrible atrocities committed against the Kosovars by Mr. Milosevic's forces, the nightmares that are so much like what we saw in Bosnia before the United States and Russia and others went in there, at least perhaps the Russian people will understand what was behind what we were doing. We sought no political or economic advantage, we sought no change in the balance of power worldwide. We were only trying to reverse ethnic cleansing and genocide. And now it is something we are doing together with the Russian forces. So I hope that will help. And finally, I think it's very important that we get back to our larger agenda to reducing the nuclear threat and the burden and it imposes on Russian as well as American people to reducing the threat of the proliferation of dangerous weapons technology and to building up the Russian economy in ways that benefit ordinary Russian citizens. These are things that are in the interest of the American people, things we are deeply committed to. And I believe as we continue to work on these things together, I would hope that the feeling the Russian people have for the American people in the United States will warm up again, because we strongly want our partnership with Russia to endure and to be felt in the hearts of ordinary citizens in both countries. Aftermath of Situation in the Balkans Mr. Kiselev. Mr. President, with regard to NATO's operation in the Balkans, let me ask you this this question is asked by many people nowadays. Does it not seem to you that the actions of the United States and NATO show some sort of double standard I mean, that America doesn't act, say, in the Balkans the same way as it does in Kurdistan or Rwanda and other regions of the world where authorities are conducting a policy of genocide or national oppression of minorities? The President. First, let me say Mr. Kiselev. Will NATO be just as I'm sorry to interrupt you The President. Yes? Mr. Kiselev. will NATO be just as firm with the KLA, for example, as it has been against Serb forces if they try to take over Kosovo or endanger the Serb population? The President. The answer to the last question has to be yes, and a strong yes. Our commitment, as I said from the beginning, is a Kosovo in which no innocent civilians were subject to death, uprooting, or oppression. Our commitment, therefore, now must be to give equal protection to all the innocent civilian citizens of Kosovo. And I would just note that KLA has agreed now to demilitarize, to give up its large weapons, to suspend any kind of military operations or training, including even the wearing of the uniforms. So we will have to be vigilant, but I am pleased with the progress of that. And I want to say again, I am committed to protecting all the people of Kosovo, and one of the reasons that I wanted the Russians to come in and first have a partnership is so that the Serbs, as well as the Kosovar Albanians, would feel that the KFOR force was committed to their protection and that they would all try to live together again. It's going to be hard a lot of horrible, horrible things have occurred. But we will work with them and we will do our best to help reconcile the civilians who had no role in the wrongdoing, to help them reconcile to one another. Response to Genocide and Minority Oppression Mr. Kiselev. And as far as the first part of my question? The President. The first part of your question, I have spoken to quite extensively in America. First, America did actually play a very major role in preserving an area of protection for the Kurds in northern Iraq for several years after the Gulf war. And we have, several times, intervened to try to help protect the Kurds and will continue to be sensitive to that. Secondly, I have said repeatedly that the slaughter of the Rwandans, the genocide in Rwanda occurred in the short space of about 100 days, and we were caught flat footed. I feel terrible that we did nothing. And I would hope that if anything like that develops in Africa again that the United States and Russia, indeed, all the major powers of the United Nations would move aggressively to try to stop it. We should not countenance genocide or ethnic cleansing anywhere in the world if we have the power to stop it. That's not to say that we can expect all people of all different ethnic groups to always like each other and never even to fight. But when innocent civilians are subject to mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing, if we can stop it, we should. Russian Role in Balkan Peace Negotiations Mr. Kiselev. Let me ask you about the role of Russia in the Balkans peace deal more in detail. There are basically two views. Some believe that NATO was forced to turn to Russia for help because only Russia could sit down with both sides and convince Milosevic to accept the peace deal. Others believe that the West could have avoided turning out Russia and only did so out of good will and a desire to preserve Russia's role in the Balkans. What is your point of view? The President. I would say there's a little bit of both there. The United States and the other NATO authorities do view Russia with good will, not ill will, and we do want and believe Russia should appropriately have a role in the Balkans. But also, I always believed if we were going to get a diplomatic solution here, we had to have Russia's involvement. Keep in mind, before the bombing began, for 14 months we worked closely with the Russians to try to find a diplomatic solution in the Balkans, because we knew that Russia's positive influence would be essential. Then, when it appeared that the diplomatic solution might be possible and could bring an end to the bombing and bring the Kosovars home, President Yeltsin was willing to appoint Mr. Chernomyrdin. He then came to us and made it clear that he would like someone who could represent the rest of Europe in these negotiations, and President Ahtisaari of Finland became his partner. And I believe that the Russian people should be very, very proud of the role, the indispensable role that Russia played in these diplomatic negotiations, and the role of Mr. Chernomyrdin in particular. He and President Ahtisaari did a very, very good job, and it's something that I think is a great credit to Russia and to the people of Russia. G 8 Summit Financial Aid to Russia Mr. Kiselev. And there's probably now one last topic that I wanted to dwell upon. Today is the last day of the G 8 summit. The Western press usually refers to it as G 7 plus Russia, even though more than a year ago in Birmingham, Russia was officially admitted, accepted to the club of the world leading nations. Is Russia, in fact, a full fledged member of the G 8, or is it still early to talk seriously about this because of Russia's economic weakness? And is the U.S. going to pressure the IMF to provide credits to Russia, and is the U.S. going to help Russia's economy apart from IMF? The President. Let me try to answer all of your questions. There is a G 8 now, not a G 7 plus one. It is a G 8 Russia is a full member. Mr. Kiselev. Please do it. The President. The communique that we issued today, which covers a wide range of economic and social issues, was fully participated in by Russia. The Russians had a full hand, along with all the rest of us, in developing this communique. And President Yeltsin was at the meeting today when the leaders went over the sections and, in effect, ratified and said we wanted it out there. So I think you can feel quite good about that and about the fact that there is a G 8 and Russia is a full member of it. Secondly, you ask about the future and whether we would pressure the IMF to help Russia. The answer is that we have always strongly, strongly supported IMF assistance to Russia. We also strongly, however, support the changes that the Duma has been asked to make in order to give Russia a competitive world economy. Because no matter how much the IMF tries to help Russia, unless your country has made the basic changes that every country must make to compete in the global economy, the private money will not flow into Russia that will really bring it back to the position that the Russian people deserve and that, frankly, the rest of the world needs. It's very much in the interest of the United States to have an economically successful, strong, prosperous Russia. And I will do everything I can to that end. And your third question was whether there were things apart from the IMF that we could do to help the Russian economy, and the answer to that is yes. And I discussed some of those with President Yeltsin today. I want you to understand that the United States believes that a strong and prosperous democratic Russia, actively involved with the rest of Europe, actively involved with the United States, actively working together in partnership to solve the world's problems, from terrorism to the threat of weapons of mass destruction to the need to stop ethnic cleansing that this is in our interest. We do this because we genuinely want the Russian people to have a leading role in the world and to have personal prosperity, because we think it gives us a safer world and it's better for the American people. Mr. Kiselev. Mr. President, thank you for your time, thank you for your answers, and I wish you good luck. The President. Thank you. June 17, 1999 President Chirac. We wanted to have the Sun shine for President Clinton's visit, and I would like to welcome him most warmly for the meeting this year, in the framework of frequent contact and very pleasant contacts always very pleasant contacts whether it's over the phone or whether it's a friendly meeting such as today's. And I'm very pleased that President and Mrs. Clinton were able to take some time to come through Paris on the occasion of the President's trip to Cologne for the G 7 G 8. Yesterday evening we had a very pleasant dinner. I can't say that we worked a great deal yesterday evening, to tell you the truth. But however, we did spend time which personally I very much enjoyed. So a bit yesterday evening and much more this morning, we first of all drew the lessons from the crisis in Kosovo, and we noted that our victory in Kosovo will be a complete victory only once all refugees have been able to come back to their homes and when all the communities living in Kosovo are able to live in safety, namely, thanks to the vigilance of the military security force which is at present deploying in the region. We also discussed a number of other problems the European defense system, in particular, concerning recent events which have occurred in the Balkans, but also following positions taken at the Washington summit the relaunching of the peace process in the Middle East, such as we very much hope for following the forthcoming appointment of the government of Israel, and the role which Europe and France might play and the help we might contribute to those efforts made to ensure an effective launching of the peace process. We also considered various problems on the agenda of our Cologne meeting, summit the very important initiatives that we're taking on the eve of the next century concerning the debt owed by poor countries the reinforcement and adjustment of the international financial system the social dimension, which you know I'm very deeply attached to, of globalization and the consequence to be drawn from this. And I also suggested to President Clinton that the G 8 Summit consider the possibility of taking initiative in an area which is of great concern, namely to Europeans at present, and which is that of food security, safety of foodstuffs. Our people are increasingly concerned, worried, and I would like to suggest that the setting up of a global higher scientific council for food safety. I shan't go into the details, but I have proposed this to the heads of state government of the G 8, and I shall have an opportunity to develop this point in Cologne. But my wish is to have this considered by heads of state and government of the G 8, and that we see whether it might be possible to find a solution able to better guarantee the health of Europeans of all of the inhabitants of the world, of course. And before giving the floor to President Clinton, I should like to say in concluding how very much I welcome the very good quality of Franco American relations. Everybody knows, and it's obvious, occasionally we have differences of views. But we know how to deal with them, and have done so for some time, and to resolve these differences in a spirit of friendship between partners who respect each other. And it is probably a fact which is based on a very long, very long, century old friendship between our two peoples and our two countries. Bill, you have the floor. President Clinton. Thank you very much, Mr. President. I will be brief. President Chirac has given you a good summary of the things that we discussed today. I would like to thank him again, publicly, for the wonderful dinner that he and Mrs. Chirac gave to Hillary and to me last night. We had a terrific time. We did not discuss a lot of business. We mostly discussed archaeology and endangered species around the world. But we had a wonderful dinner. Let me say a few words about Kosovo. As of today, 26,000 Serb soldiers have left Kosovo 15,000 of our KFOR forces have arrived. The refugees are coming home, indeed, in many cases, faster than we think safe because of the landmines, which we are working hard to remove. But they want to go home. It has been very moving to me to see the troops of all of our nations cheered by the people there also moving to see our soldiers uncovering evidence of what we stood against, evidence of mass graves, evidence in the form of the piles of documents stripped from the refugees to erase their identities. I'd like to pay particular tribute to President Chirac for his leadership and his firmness in this crisis. This was the longest operation in which NATO had engaged in 50 years. We had 19 countries representing hundreds of millions of people with all manner of different domestic situations. But we stayed together, and we will stay together, and we will continue our mission there until we succeed. But the French President was especially adamant that, having begun, we had to stay until we won, and we had to do it in the right way and to do whatever it took to do that. And I am very grateful to him for the relationship that we have enjoyed personally and for the relationship that our countries have enjoyed and the solidarity we've had within NATO. Now we have to finish the job. We have to help the Kosovars to restore their homes and the basic conditions of living, the institutions of civil society necessary for them to exercise autonomy. We also have to help the region. We have made a commitment at the NATO Summit, which I know will be reaffirmed at the G 7 G 8 meeting and which the EU has already articulated, to try to build a different future, a more prosperous, more democratic future for the entire region. And we are all committed to doing that. If we don't want the Balkans and southeastern Europe to be torn apart in the future by ancient religious and ethnic hatreds, we have to give them a better tomorrow to work for. And we are strongly committed to that. Now, we also discussed any number of other subjects, but I think it would be better for me to open the floor to questions. I would close by saying I was particularly moved by the discussion we had about the Middle East peace process. Hopes are high now, but we all know that we have to give the Prime Minister elect the opportunity to put his government together and get off to a good start. But the reports we have about a broad based coalition are quite encouraging, and I think it's fair to say that France and all of Europe, the United States hope that we can play a constructive role in what we hope will be a productive next step in that. NATO Russia Negotiations on Kosovo Q. President Clinton, what is the latest from the Russians? There is a report President Clinton. Go ahead, Sam Sam Donaldson, ABC News . Q. President Clinton, what's the latest on the Russians, sir? There's a report that they may have agreed on the command structure acceptable to NATO but are still insisting on something like a zone. What can you tell us? President Clinton. Well, I can tell you that just before I came over here for my meeting with President Chirac, I got an update. You know that Secretary Cohen has been meeting with the Russian Defense Minister, Sergeyev. You know that Secretary Albright left here and flew to Helsinki to meet with Foreign Minister Ivanov. And the atmosphere is pretty positive and pretty hopeful. President Chirac and I talked about it for a long time. We want the Russians to be involved in this mission in a comprehensive way. We think it is important. But we also think it is important that we maintain clear unity of command, under KFOR, according to the U.N. resolution. And they're working through that, and I hope and believe they will reach a successful conclusion. I don't have any specific details for you because they're in the middle of trying to work this out. But I know that I'm aware that there are two or three options they're working on, all of which would be acceptable to us and to our partners, including the French. So we're working on it. Reconstruction of the Balkans Q. In the reconstruction of Yugoslavia, do you take into consideration the only full member state of the NATO having a direct border with Yugoslavia, Hungary, that applied many times for being the center and headquarters of the reconstruction? At this point, another question was asked in French, and a translation was not provided. President Chirac. The certainty of France is that it is necessary to organize as soon as possible in the region a system which is democratic. It is by enabling democracy to put down roots that it shall be possible to create the conditions for tolerance. And it is tolerance that will allow communities that have clashed for a long time to live together at peace. It will take time. Naturally, there is an objective. The objective is the possibility, calling for these countries to become members of the European Union and their interest to do so. And therefore, the prospect for France is to do our utmost to help the region to overcome the difficulties that presents but also to do our utmost to convince them that their future is the European Union, and this entails peace at home. And this peace can only be found thanks to development and to the enrooting of democracy. President Clinton. You asked me a question about whether Hungary might be the center of the reconstruction efforts. Actually, I have as you know, the Hungarian President was just in Washington for a state visit, and it was a wonderful success. And then I called your Prime Minister to thank him for his solidarity with NATO during this very difficult period for Hungary. Both of them expressed a willingness for Hungary to play a role in the reconstruction of Kosovo and the entire Balkans region. Both expressed some interest in being the center of the reconstruction effort. That decision is a decision which would have to be made by all of our allies, and not just by the United States, especially given the leading role the European Union has played in making commitments to the long term redevelopment of the area. But I think that because of Hungary's ties to Serbia, because of the large number of Hungarians in northwest Serbia and Vojvodina, I think it is very important that the Hungarians be very much involved in this. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . War Crimes Trials Aid to Yugoslavia Q. Mr. President, now that the conflict is over, do you and President Chirac think that a full court press should be made to bring Slobodan Milosevic to trial to answer for the war crimes indictment? And President Chirac, do you agree with President Clinton that there should be no reconstruction aid for Belgrade as long as Mr. Milosevic is in power? President Chirac. Great democracies, in particular, and the international community, in general, have, as a rule, to give development aid to a country only if the country meets the democratic criteria which are usually retained. And there are still some countries, unfortunately, which are subject to embargoes, do not receive aid, precisely because they are not democratic regimes. And this is the reason why. Personally, I absolutely share the feelings of President Clinton that is, that there can be no economic development aid to a regime which is not democratic and whose present leader, furthermore, has been indicted with crimes against humanity by the international war crimes court. Development aid is one thing humanitarian aid is a different thing. What we wish to sanction is a regime that does not apply democratic rules, obviously it is not unfortunate Serbs who are also victims. Hence, humanitarian aid, yes development aid, economic aid, no so long as democratic criteria are not met. President Clinton. Let me say, first of all, I as you know, I agree exactly with what President Chirac has said, also on the humanitarian issue. I think there's some humanitarian support we should make available to all the people of the region, including the Serbs in Serbia. But on redevelopment, I believe what he just said we're all together on that. Even though I strongly support the decision of the War Crimes Tribunal or the prosecutor, Mrs. Arbour, too, to make the charges she did, I think it's important that we not in any way mislead people about what happens next. Our heaviest responsibility, the NATO Allies, is to get the Kosovars back home in safety and then to give them self government, autonomy, and rebuilding assistance, and then work on the region. Under the rules that we have followed, any of us, if we had jurisdiction over Mr. Milosevic, would turn him over, or anyone else who had been charged, just as we do in Bosnia. If he remains in Serbian inside the confines of Serbia, presumably he's beyond the reach of the extradition powers of the other governments. But sometimes these things take a good while to bear fruit. I think we'll just have to wait and see how that develops. But I think, given the evidence that was presented by Mrs. Arbour and what we know to be the evidence, I think she made the right decision. I think it's a very important thing. But I do not believe that the NATO Allies can invade Belgrade to try to deliver the indictment, if you will. And I don't think we should be that does not mean that this is not an important thing or that there won't someday be a trial, but we need to focus on our obligations, our fundamental humanitarian obligations to get the Kosovars home and to continue to uncover whatever evidence of war crimes there is in Kosovo, as well. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, what are the steps that your administration intends to undertake to revive the Middle East peace process, and to what extent are you determined to achieve a major breakthrough before the end of your second term? President Clinton. Well, as you know, I have spent an enormous amount of time on this, for 6 1 2 years now. The major step I took to revive the peace process was 9 1 2 days at Wye Plantation last year in the Wye peace talks. I don't believe that I will have to take any steps to revive the peace process. I believe when the new government takes office, if what we see in the press reports is right about the composition of this broad based coalition government, I believe that there will be a vigorous pursuit of all channels of the peace process. And the United States will do what it can, as I have for 6 1 2 years, and as we have done as a nation before, to support the parties that are seeking peace and to provide whatever security and other economic and other incentives we can to bring it to a successful conclusion. But I expect there to be a revival of the peace process generated by the parties themselves. And then I expect to support it very strongly, and I would expect that President Chirac and the European Union will do the same. President Chirac. Allow me to add that Europe today unanimously and Europe has shown this once again in Berlin and France naturally, given the traditional ties France has with all countries of the region, are absolutely determined in this new context to give maximum support to the efforts made by the parties concerned and, obviously, by the United States. Serbian Withdrawal From Kosovo Q. Mr. President, do you expect the Serbs to get the other 14,000 troops out by the Sunday deadline? And are you surprised that President Milosevic has kept his word so far? President Clinton. The short answer, I guess, is yes and no. Yes, I do expect them to meet the deadline, unless there is some practical reason they can't. And it's interesting, when the Serb military made the agreement, we even got word from some of the Kosovars that they expected the agreement to be kept. They thought that if the Serbian military forces actually gave their word, they would keep it. And I thought that was a hopeful reaction in terms of our ability to see some work together in the future. Now, as you know, General Jackson has already our Commander in Kosovo has already given permission at one phase of this withdrawal for a day's delay. So if General Jackson were to be asked and were to accede to some reasonable change because there were some fact that I'm unaware of, I wouldn't necessarily oppose that. I've got great confidence in him. But they are keeping to schedule. And am I surprised that Mr. Milosevic is doing that? No, I'm not, not really, because not only because of the impact of our military campaign but because we have forces going in on the ground. Of the previous understandings that I have had over the last several years with Mr. Milosevic, the ones we had at Dayton, coming out of Bosnia, have pretty much been honored. But the facts were the same we had forces on the ground. And I believe that that has a way of reinforcing people's commitments, when we have our forces there. Iraq Q. Mr. President, is there still a strong disagreement with the United States as to how to get out of the crisis with Iraq accept the principle of the French proposals on Iraq concerning the 100 day suspension of embargo on Iraq? President Clinton. Well, as you know, there is some difference here. I think largely it's a difference over what is likely to be more effective. The United States supports the efforts of the British and the Dutch and the Security Council because we believe that without the strongest possible inspection mechanism, Saddam Hussein will attempt to rebuild weapons of mass destruction stocks, particularly in the chemical and biological areas and perhaps missile technology, as well. President Chirac can speak for himself, but he believes that if the French Dutch resolution were I mean, the British Dutch resolution were to pass, that it would simply be not accepted by Saddam Hussein, and so we would still be at an impasse. So there is a difference of opinion there. We agreed that we would discuss it further at the G 8 and we would try to come to a conclusion on it. This is not an easy issue, and I respect the efforts that the French are making, that the President is making. I can tell you generally what my concern is. It is not so much Saddam Hussein himself as my belief that 10 years from now, the person who is standing here as President and the person who is standing there as the President of France will be and all of you, those of you who will be here asking questions, one of the things that you will be really worried about is the spread of biological and chemical weapons, probably high tech, small scale weapons, into the hands of international terrorist groups and organized crime groups that have loose relationships with irresponsible countries that give them these things. And I think it will be a substantial problem for the first couple of decades of the next century. And I just think we ought to do everything we possibly can to minimize that problem. But I think I have fairly stated the practical difference between our two positions, and I think the President should speak for himself. President Chirac. Well, obviously, I have the same concerns as President Clinton. But I think that the most important is, today, to once again reestablish inspections on Iraq's weapons, international verification. And to do so, what we need, at the very least, is to reexamine the conditions of the embargo what is necessary, in any case, it seems to me, for reasons that have to do with the very serious degradation of living conditions of the Iraqi people, who are the victims of the situation. So we shall discuss a way of synthesizing, bring together these concerns. But let us not challenge the solidarity and the unity of the Security Council if we are not convinced that we're going to reach a result. And the present state of affairs, as President Clinton was saying a moment ago, that in any case Iraq will refuse the resolution which is at present being drafted, and therefore, it would be a somewhat pointless gesture which would not lead to any concrete results but might strain the solidarity of the Security Council. And you know how very deeply France is attached to the U.N., in general, and the Security Council, in particular. Thank you very much. President Clinton. Thank you. Q. Mr. President, do you believe the Russians lied to you, sir? Q. Inaudible President Clinton. We're going to be out there some more tomorrow. Gun Control Legislation Q. Inaudible NRA may win with the inaudible President Clinton. I know. I got up at 5 a.m. and started making calls this morning. I'm doing my best. Q. What's your view? President Clinton. I don't know yet. I'm not close enough to have a good count. Presidential Candidacy Announcement Q. How do you think Al Gore did yesterday? President Clinton. Wonderful. I thought he was terrific. June 10, 1999 My fellow Americans, tonight for the first time in 79 days, the skies over Yugoslavia are silent. The Serb army and police are withdrawing from Kosovo. The one million men, women, and children driven from their land are preparing to return home. The demands of an outraged and united international community have been met. I can report to the American people that we have achieved a victory for a safer world, for our democratic values, and for a stronger America. Our pilots have returned to base. The air strikes have been suspended. Aggression against an innocent people has been contained and is being turned back. When I ordered our Armed Forces into combat, we had three clear goals to enable the Kosovar people, the victims of some of the most vicious atrocities in Europe since the Second World War, to return to their homes with safety and self government to require Serbian forces responsible for those atrocities to leave Kosovo and to deploy an international security force, with NATO at its core, to protect all the people of that troubled land, Serbs and Albanians, alike. Those goals will be achieved. A necessary conflict has been brought to a just and honorable conclusion. The result will be security and dignity for the people of Kosovo, achieved by an alliance that stood together in purpose and resolve, assisted by the diplomatic efforts of Russia. This victory brings a new hope that when a people are singled out for destruction because of their heritage and religious faith and we can do something about it, the world will not look the other way. I want to express my profound gratitude to the men and women of our Armed Forces and those of our Allies. Day after day, night after night, they flew, risking their lives to attack their targets and to avoid civilian casualties when they were fired upon from populated areas. I ask every American to join me in saying to them, thank you, you've made us very proud. I'm also grateful to the American people for standing against the awful ethnic cleansing, for sending generous assistance to the refugees, and for opening your hearts and your homes to the innocent victims who came here. I want to speak with you for a few moments tonight about why we fought, what we achieved, and what we have to do now to advance the peace and, together with the people of the Balkans, forge a future of freedom, progress, and harmony. We should remember that the violence we responded to in Kosovo was the culmination of a 10 year campaign by Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia, to exploit ethnic and religious differences in order to impose his will on the lands of the former Yugoslavia. That's what he tried to do in Croatia and in Bosnia, and now in Kosovo. The world saw the terrifying consequences 500 villages burned men of all ages separated from their loved ones to be shot and buried in mass graves women raped children made to watch their parents die a whole people forced to abandon, in hours, communities their families had spent generations building. For these atrocities, Mr. Milosevic and his top aides have been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity. I will never forget the Kosovar refugees I recently met. Some of them could barely talk about what they had been through. All they had left was hope that the world would not turn its back. When our diplomatic efforts to avert this horror were rebuffed and the violence mounted, we and our Allies chose to act. Mr. Milosevic continued to do terrible things to the people of Kosovo, but we were determined to turn him back. Our firmness finally has brought an end to a vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing, and we acted early enough to reverse it, to enable the Kosovars to go home. When they do, they will be safe. They will be able to reopen their schools, speak their language, practice their religion, choose their leaders, and shape their destiny. There'll be no more days of foraging for food in the cold of mountains and forests, no more nights of hiding in cellars, wondering if the next day will bring death or deliverance. They will know that Mr. Milosevic's army and paramilitary forces will be gone, his 10 year campaign of repression finished. NATO has achieved this success as a united alliance, ably led by Secretary General Solana and General Clark. Nineteen democracies came together and stayed together through the stiffest military challenge in NATO's 50 year history. We also preserved our critically important partnership with Russia, thanks to President Yeltsin, who opposed our military effort but supported diplomacy to end the conflict on terms that met our conditions. I'm grateful to Russian Envoy Chernomyrdin and Finnish President Ahtisaari for their work, and to Vice President Gore for the key role he played in putting their partnership together. Now, I hope Russian troops will join us in the force that will keep the peace in Kosovo, just as they have in Bosnia. Finally, we have averted the wider war this conflict might well have sparked. The countries of southeastern Europe backed the NATO campaign, helped the refugees, and showed the world there is more compassion than cruelty in this troubled region. This victory makes it all the more likely that they will choose a future of democracy, fair treatment of minorities, and peace. Now we're entering a new phase, building that peace, and there are formidable challenges. First, we must be sure the Serbian authorities meet their commitments. We are prepared to resume our military campaign should they fail to do so. Next, we must get the Kosovar refugees home safely. Minefields will have to be cleared homes destroyed by Serb forces will have to be rebuilt homeless people in need of food and medicine will have to get them. The fate of the missing will have to be determined. The Kosovar Liberation Army will have to demilitarize, as it has agreed to do. And we in the peacekeeping force will have to ensure that Kosovo is a safe place to live for all its citizens, ethnic Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians. For these things to happen, security must be established. To that end, some 50,000 troops from almost 30 countries will deploy to Kosovo. Our European Allies will provide the vast majority of them America will contribute about 7,000. We are grateful that during NATO's air campaign we did not lose a single serviceman in combat. But this next phase also will be dangerous. Bitter memories will still be fresh, and there may well be casualties. So we have made sure that the force going into Kosovo will have NATO command and control and rules of engagement set by NATO. It will have the means and the mandate to protect itself while doing its job. In the meantime, the United Nations will organize a civilian administration while preparing the Kosovars to govern and police themselves. As local institutions take hold, NATO will be able to turn over increasing responsibility to them and draw down its forces. A third challenge will be to put in place a plan for lasting peace and stability in Kosovo and through all the Balkans. For that to happen, the European Union and the United States must plan for tomorrow, not just today. We must help to give the democracies of southeastern Europe a path to a prosperous, shared future, a unifying magnet more powerful than the pull of hatred and destruction that has threatened to tear them apart. Our European partners must provide most of the resources for this effort, but it is in America's interest to do our part, as well. A final challenge will be to encourage Serbia to join its neighbors in this historic journey to a peaceful, democratic, united Europe. I want to say a few words to the Serbian people tonight. I know that you, too, have suffered in Mr. Milosevic's wars. You should know that your leaders could have kept Kosovo as a part of your country without driving a single Kosovar family from its home, without killing a single adult or child, without inviting a single NATO bomb to fall on your country. You endured 79 days of bombing not to keep Kosovo a province of Serbia but simply because Mr. Milosevic was determined to eliminate Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo, dead or alive. As long as he remains in power, as long as your nation is ruled by an indicted war criminal, we will provide no support for the reconstruction of Serbia. But we are ready to provide humanitarian aid now and to help to build a better future for Serbia, too, when its Government represents tolerance and freedom, not repression and terror. My fellow Americans, all these challenges are substantial, but they are far preferable to the challenges of war and continued instability in Europe. We have sent a message of determination and hope to all the world. Think of all the millions of innocent people who died in this bloody century because democracies reacted too late to evil and aggression. Because of our resolve, the 20th century is ending not with helpless indignation but with a hopeful affirmation of human dignity and human rights for the 21st century. In a world too divided by fear among people of different racial, ethnic, and religious groups, we have given confidence to the friends of freedom and pause to those who would exploit human difference for inhuman purposes. America still faces great challenges in this world, but we look forward to meeting them. So, tonight I ask you to be proud of your country and very proud of the men and women who serve it in uniform. For in Kosovo, we did the right thing we did it the right way and we will finish the job. Good night, and may God bless our wonderful United States of America. June 10, 1999 The President. Thank you very much. Charlie, wait a minute. Before Chairman Rangel sits down you know, Dick Gephardt got up there and said, "You know, the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is as powerful as the President." Laughter Bob Johnson said, "That's a scary thought." Laughter And I said, "No, no, he's more powerful than the President." Laughter You should know that among all the things we have to be grateful for tonight and to celebrate, tomorrow is Charlie Rangel's birthday. So I think we should sing "Happy Birthday" to him. At this point, the participants sang "Happy Birthday." Representative Charles Rangel. My only response is, save Social Security now! Laughter The President. That's just like we rehearsed it. Laughter Let me say to Congressman Rangel and, in his absence, Chairman Clyburn, Eleanor Holmes Norton, all the members of the caucus who are still here, and those who have come and gone, to the members of the Cabinet that are here I saw Secretary Slater and Secretary Riley, there may be others here and my former Cabinet member Jesse Brown, former Secretary of Veterans Affairs back there, I'm glad to see you. My wonderful friend from Chicago and fellow Arkansan John Stroger and all the others who did so much to make this night a possibility. I thank the chairman of the DNC, Joe Andrew, for being here and Lottie Shackelford, others from the DNC who are here. I want to say I have so many friends here, but there's one young couple here that I'm particularly pleased about being here because they're new Washingtonians, the newly acquired new quarterback for the Washington Redskins, Rodney Peete, and his wonderful wife, Holly Robinson Peete. You all stand up there and say hello. Applause They are a big addition to this community and wonderful people, and I'm glad to have them. I want to say a few things rather briefly tonight. First of all, Congressman Rangel, my wife said to tell you hello, and once again, thank you for your friendship. Laughter Secondly, I want you to know when we had the New York Yankees at the White House today to celebrate their championship last year, I called them the Bronx Bombers, and I emphasized "Bronx," and I said I was doing it at your behest. Laughter Finally, let me say I was looking at Dick Gephardt standing up here, and I have known him for many years, and I thought he was a good man and an able man when I first met him. But I have watched him grow in his responsibility, in the depth of his understanding and his spirit. He should be the Speaker of the House. He should be the Speaker of the House. The last thing I want to say by way of introduction is, I'm delighted to see Lionel Hampton again. We had John Conyers and I had a 90th birthday party for him at the White House last year, almost a year ago, and they actually let me play with the band. And I hadn't played in months, and it was really one of the nicest nights I've had in the White House, and I'm very grateful for that. And I'm grateful for him. If I look half as good at 60 as he does at 90 laughter if I can hear to play my horn as well as he can hear to play his vibe, I will be a happy fellow. I apologize for being late here tonight. I think all of you know why. I addressed the people of the United States tonight about the end of the conflict in Kosovo. I want to say a couple of things about that and what it has to do with all of the things that have already been mentioned and all the issues we don't have time to mention tonight. The unimaginable horrors that were inflicted on those people, which led to an unprecedented indictment of a head of state, Mr. Milosevic, for war crimes and crimes against humanity, came to them solely because of their ethnicity and their religious faith. And it is indeed ironic that here we are on the edge of a new century and a new millennium, with the world growing closer together, with technology literally exploding opportunities for all of us, with America becoming more and more diverse by the day, that the world is most bedeviled by the oldest problem of human society people are scared of people who don't look like them and who worship God in a different way than they do and who basically come from a different tribe. We have learned, in ways good and bad, that our differences make us stronger they make life more interesting they make life more fun. But if that curious balance that exists inside all of us gets out of whack and our fears overcome our hopes, we can go quickly from fearing people to hating them, to dehumanizing them, to justifying all manner of repression and abuse of them. What the conflict in Kosovo was about at bottom is whether or not, after all we have learned from what happened in World War II to the Jewish people and others in Nazi repression and all we have seen since, would or would not provoke the world, especially after the agonizing experience we had in Bosnia and the awful experience we had in Rwanda, when everyone was caught flat footed, with no mechanism to deal with it whether we would say, "Okay, from now on we don't expect everybody to get along. We don't think we can abolish all war. But if innocent civilians are going to be slaughtered and uprooted and have their lives destroyed and their families wrecked only because of their racial or ethnic background or their religious faith if we can stop it, we intend to stop it." The United States did not go there for any territorial gain or economic gain. We went there because we want there to be peace and harmony, first in Europe and, wherever possible, in the rest of the world. We went there with an Army that looks like America, an Air Force that looks like America. We landed a Marine expeditionary unit in Greece today, going into Kosovo to help those folks come home, that looks like America. There are people from every conceivable racial and ethnic group and all different religious backgrounds, bound together by what they have in common being more important than the interesting things that divide them. I say that because I am grateful for what they have achieved with our Allies. But I know, as I look toward the future, when I am long gone from this job, and the world grows closer and closer but we will still have struggles between those who are left out and those who are included in the bounty of the world. We will still have to deal with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and international criminal gangs and all, and people will always be trying to feed on the differences, to switch the balance from hope to fear. And it will be very important that the United States of our children and grandchildren be a force for bringing people together, not tearing them apart. And we will not be able to do that, over the long run, to do good around the world, unless we first are good at home. That is why that's why I've worked as hard as I can on all the issues involving race why I know we've got to get rid of this racial profiling why I know we've got to do more to deal with the threat of violence to our children why I have asked everybody from the entertainment community to the gun community, to the schools, the people that provide counseling and mental health services, to the parents, to do something all of us to do something to give our children their childhood back. That is why I have asked the Congress to invest more in education, to adopt this new market initiative. I like the fact that we will give you tax breaks, tax credits, and loan guarantees to invest in poor countries around the world. I don't want to take them away. I just want you to have exactly the same incentives to invest in poor neighborhoods in inner city America and Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta and Native American reservations and all those other places. So I ask you to think about this. This is a night you can be proud of your country. This is a night you can be grateful for the economic prosperity that we have enjoyed, that we have the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates we have ever recorded, that wages are rising for people in all income groups. We can be grateful for that. And you have expressed your gratitude by coming here and giving these funds, for which I am grateful. But I want you to support our party not just so that Dick Gephardt can be Speaker and Charlie Rangel can be chairman, we can have 3 or 4 chairmen and 19 subcommittee chairs, but for what Mr. Gephardt said because if we are in these positions of responsibility, we will show up for work every day. And we will not be interested simply in accumulating power but in using the fleeting power we have been given by the American people to advance the cause, the future, and the hopes of ordinary citizens from all walks of life. I believe it's not fashionable to say, I guess, but politics and public service are noble endeavors if they are informed by a high purpose. I have never thought that I was going to be President for life, and I have never thought one bit of power I exercised really belonged to me. It was something that was loaned to me for a little while by the American people, thanks to the remarkable Constitution under which we live. And so if you give us this kind of responsibility, we will ask the American people to search their consciousness and to serve their search their consciences, to think and to feel what we still must do to deepen the meaning of freedom and widen the circle of opportunity and strengthen the bonds of community. That's what a lot of our fights are about. That's what the Patients' Bill of Rights is about. If I get sick tonight, I'm going to be fine. Unless God gets ready to take me home, I'll have the best health care in the world. I don't need it, and neither do most of you. That's why we're trying to have America join the mainstream and stop being the only country in the world that doesn't even have sensible, commonsense regulation of these handguns, to keep them out of the hands of criminals and kids, and to keep the assault weapons away from the children. The Secret Service is taking care of me I don't need that. And if anything happened to me, besides, I've already had more life than 99 percent of the people who ever lived. Laughter I don't have any gripe. But all those kids Dick Gephardt reminded us, 13 kids get killed every day, get shot and die and don't have the life that I have had or the life that you have had that has brought you to this point. And I have been so moved by the people at Littleton and how they have responded, and the courage and dignity with which they have borne their awful fate, and the way they have asked us not to let their children die in vain. But every day, for years, 13 kids die in ones and twos, on the mean streets and the tough alleys in which they live. We want to do something about that, and we can. It's why we've tried to make college affordable for everybody and put a computer in every child's schoolroom. Our kids we don't need that our kids can have their computers. I say that not to make you feel better than our political adversaries, either. I say that to make this simple point. The same thing that makes us believe that people are better off getting along than they are fighting over their racial or religious differences makes us believe that we ought to have universal excellence in education, universal quality in health care, a strong economy that includes everyone. But because we know down deep inside that that's being smart selfish, we know that we'll be better off and our children will be better off and our country will be stronger if we're not just sailing along alone. If you ask me what the single most significant difference between the two parties is today and why it is so important that you're here and why we had the historic victory we had in 1998, even though we were outspent by 100 million, it is because we believe, truly, that we are all God's children, that none of us inherently is better than any other, and that we don't believe, even if we are in the elite, in just the elite and their welfare. And this is not about class warfare, either. This is about whether you believe that individuals and families and businesses are better off when they're part of a fabric of a strong community, where everybody's trying to give everybody else a hand up. And if we ever do it right, there will be no more handouts. If we had enough hand ups, there would be no more handouts. So I want you to leave here being proud of what you did tonight, but I don't want you to quit. It's a long road between now and 2000. And we're not getting much encouragement from most of our friends on the other side of the aisle in campaign finance reform, because they figured if they outdid us by 100 million in '98, maybe they can have a 200 million advantage in 2000. But one thing we showed them in 1998, partly thanks to a record African American turnout, one thing we showed them It doesn't matter if they have more money than you do if you have enough to be heard. If you have enough to be heard, if you have enough to make those telephone calls and to get those doors knocked on and to send those letters out and to put those ads on and to be heard if you stand for something, if the power is not an end in itself but to be used as a gift, given for a limited period of time by the people to strengthen the common life of our country, we've proved that great things can happen. You have done a good thing tonight for your country. I want you to think about it and continue to speak for it. And when people ask you why you were here tonight, I hope some of the words that we have said will give you an answer because you want us to go forward together. Thank you, and God bless you. May 19, 1999 Thank you very much. First of all, I want to say a real thank you to Jack and to Phyllis for having us here. I've been in their home in New Jersey I've never been here before, and I wanted to come. And as you can see from the pictures on the wall, the Vice President has been here. Laughter And I've been rather jealous of this. Laughter To say this is an interesting house would be an understatement. Laughter And I'm just delighted to be here. And I thank them for opening their home to us. I also want to thank Gerry Ferraro for being here. And Congressman Kostmayer, thank you for being here. And I want to thank Joe Andrew and Beth Dozoretz and Fran Katz and everybody at the DNC for the work they've done. You know, Joe and I, we just finished a western swing Joe and Beth and I, we've been out on the west coast. And about every time he got up to introduce me, he said, "You know, we're going to win every election from the White House to dogcatcher." And I keep pointing out to him that that is not such a great distance. Laughter He acts like that's such an encompassing term, you know. He hasn't been paying attention to Washington lately. Laughter But let me say, I just came a lot of you know this, but I just came from a remarkable event with Senator Moynihan and the Governor and a lot of the transportation authorities here. We announced new plans for the new Penn Station and the old Farley Post Office Building. And a lot of you you probably saw, the last day or 2, the New York Times had a nice piece on the architectural plans and what was going to be done. But this is something that Pat Moynihan talked to me about way back in '93. And I also announced that we were going to put 60 million in our budget over the next 3 years to help pay more of the Federal share to build this. But I wanted to sort of use it as a metaphor for the point I want to make here. For whatever reason, I think nearly everybody who has been involved in this project has been captured by the idea of it. And most everybody with any sense of the past at all deeply regrets the fact that the old Penn Station was destroyed, and with it a lot of memories of New York and a magnificent architectural creation. And so anyway, this little project, it was like a lot of Pat Moynihan's ideas. It was a little bit ahead of its time, and it took a while to catch hold. But I signed on early and told him to just call me back when there was something to do. And so slowly it sort of picked up steam, and people kind of got together. So we announced it today, and everybody felt so good about it. And I was trying to think to myself why they felt so good about it. I think it's because it captures the past, and it also throws people into the future in a way they feel good about, because beautiful public spaces really help us to build a community across all the lines that divide us maybe because nearly everybody alive can remember sometime in his or her life, maybe when we were all much younger and had more free time, when we were sitting in a train station just watching people go by, felt free and kind of elevated by it. But I say that because, to me, what I've tried to do for the United States is to give us a sense that we could meet all our challenges but that we had to meet them together. That meant that everybody had a role to play and some citizen responsibility. It also means that with all of our diversity, which ought to be celebrated, not just tolerated but celebrated, we have to realize that what binds us together is even more important. And the story of the last 6 years has been an effort to try to take the ideas that I developed over a long period of time and that I developed a belief in, and that I talked to the American people about in '92 and again in '96, and turn those ideas into policies that then could be made real in the lives of the American people. And I'm very grateful for the good things that have happened in this country. But I came here today to say to you that for whatever role I played in it, I think the far more important contributing factor was that we had the right ideas, rooted in the right vision of America, and we had a good team, and we showed up for work every day laughter and we intend to continue doing it down to the last day. That elicited a few laughs, but anybody that's ever watched any national capital in politics knows that it's no small achievement to get your team to show up for work every day, because an enormous amount of time and energy is always devoted to trying to divide your team and distract them and wonder who's dropping the dime on whom in the morning paper, so they won't work. Instead, they'll spend all their time calling each other names or being torn up and upset or worrying about something other than the people's business. So I am here today because for whatever role I have played in this, I know the most important thing was that we had the right vision and the right ideas, and we brought teamwork, and we showed up for work every day. And we need to keep doing that. And America needs to make that decision again. And every time you give the people a chance to have a referendum on whether they want politics to be about politicians and the politics of personal destruction or whether they want it to be about people and progress and unity, they always make the right choice. But you have to put the choice before them, which means we need good candidates and they have to be adequately financed, and we have to keep the message out there. The other point I'd like to make rather briefly is that I think it's quite important for us, even though we have now reached a point where Presidential elections almost take 2 years, which I think is wrong I actually I announced in October of '91, 13 months before the election. And that was a short campaign. I waged a short campaign. But I think it's very important, particularly for the Democrats, because we have been the party of vision and progress and of trying to pull the country together and not drive wedges among the people it's particularly important for us to keep working, to keep working, to keep producing. There are things which won't wait until 2001. For example, Jack mentioned that we'd balanced the budget, and we now have the biggest surplus ever. I have offered the Congress a plan that would save Social Security and Medicare and actually pay the publicly held debt of the United States down to its lowest point since before World War I in 15 years. Now, why do I think that's a good idea? Because I think it will keep interest rates lower and investment higher and create more jobs and raise incomes. It will also make us relatively less dependent on international capital markets at a time when I am doing my very best to stabilize them, so we don't have another Asian financial crisis, and we don't have to worry about spending an enormous amount of money to keep it from spreading to Brazil or all the things that those of you in finance know we have been working on the last 2 years. But I can't say for sure what will happen 10 years from now. I can say for sure, 10 years from now, that if we have a terrible recession and we have to deficit spend, it will be a lot better to do it if we've got a much lower debt base than we have. I can say for sure that if there's another round of global turmoil 10 years from now, we'll be much more immune to it if we've got a smaller debt and our interest rate structures are smaller. So these are important things. We need to do them now. We don't need to be waiting around. We need to continue our efforts at educational excellence. Today I introduced a bill into Congress I announced it just before I came up here every 5 years we have to reauthorize the general bill by which we give Federal money to public schools in New York and everywhere else. It's called the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. By and large, this money is given to help schools that have a lot of poor kids or a lot of kids whose first language is not English or a lot of kids who have special needs disabilities their targeted aid. And a lot of it is given to provide for other kind of special purposes, technology in the schools and things like that. None of it, however, is related to results. I have been working for 6 years to get everybody to embrace the idea that we had to have standards and accountability, and we ought to do a better job making sure teachers know the subjects they're teaching and all this. But we've never really been able to move these standards into the schools. So it's basically whether they're being observed or not is a function of the character of the local leadership or the commitment of the local political leadership or the State leadership. We now have a chance to actually change the way schools work. If we say, okay, for the next 5 years we're going to take all the research that has been done and take the uncontestable findings and make the pursuit of those findings a condition of the money no social promotion but don't say the kids are failures give them all summer school or after school programs this works. Identify the schools that are failing and turn them around or close them down, let the kids go some place else. Have charter schools, have districtwide school choice. Do something to give the kids other choices. Those are just a couple of examples of the kinds of things that I think we have to do. We also I have to tell you, though, it's not the Federal Government and others are going to have to find a way to put more money into teaching because we're going to have a 2 million teacher shortage the next decade, with more kids coming into the schools. Now, we already have too many teachers out there teaching science and math courses, especially, for which they have not been academically prepared and in which they, themselves, have not passed performance exams. So it's all very well we've got to invest more money in this, and we've got to be more flexible about getting people into teaching, in all kinds of ways, that actually know the subjects we expect them to teach. So these are some of the things that are in this bill. I think this is quite important. This could have a lot to do with what America looks like 10 years from now. If we can't give everybody knows we've got the best higher education system in the world and, relatively speaking, a higher percentage of people going into colleges than other countries. No one seriously believes that we're giving all of our kids the best elementary and secondary education in the world. And until we can do that, we won't be able to take full advantage of this astonishing diversity in our student body. And I think this is, by the way, a huge asset for us in the global economy, to have all these kids from all these different countries. Just go to the New York school system and look. This is a big deal. This is a plus, not a minus. This is a good thing in a global society to have this but only if we can give these kids a chance to learn what they need to know to do well in the world they will become adults in. Let me just mention one or two other things. The aftermath Hillary and I are going out to Littleton, Colorado, tomorrow. And the aftermath of that shooting, I think, has had an even more profound impact on the country than all the school shootings last year did. And you can see it by what is happening in the Congress now. I think there is finally a feeling that it's time for everybody to stop making excuses it's time for everybody to stop trying to place blame and instead just basically say, "I would like to assume whatever my share of responsibility is for giving a safe childhood back to our children." And there's something for the gun people, the entertainment people, and the Government people to do. There's also something for the school people and the parents to do, and the kids, themselves. But I would just like to make a couple of points. Number one, the American people can take a lot of pride in the fact that in the United States Senate that would never have passed any reasonable gun control on a bet 6 months ago over 70 Senators last night voted to impose child trigger locks on the gun manufacturers. They voted to raise the age of handgun ownership to 21. And they voted on I don't like the bill they voted for because it's got too many loopholes, but at least they're moving toward closing the gun show loophole. The Speaker of the House yesterday came out for closing the gun show loophole and for raising the gun ownership age to 21. This is good. The Democrats who have been for this for years should reach out the hand across the aisle and say, "Look, this is good." We've come a long way since 1994 when one of the principal reasons we lost the House of Representatives in the '94 election was the lobbying of the NRA against our Members who voted for the crime bill, with the Brady bill and the assault weapons ban. Ask the gentleman from Pennsylvania he knows. We lost at least a dozen and perhaps as many as 20 seats solely because of this. This is a different country than it was then. And the grieving of the American people for these children and the recognition that these two young men, who had gone to such a dark place in their own minds, had a Tec 9 and were making bombs, large numbers of them, I think it really registered on people. And we have a chance, therefore, to do something good. While I was in California last weekend, I told the entertainment community I thought that they should stop advertising what is violent that might be shown to kids who couldn't see the movies or rent the movies or the video games that the advertising people who are exposed to the advertising ought to be rated in the same way that the people who are exposed to the underlying product, and that the whole rating system ought to be reevaluated in terms of gratuitous violence. Now, this doesn't mean that the people that manufacture guns or the people that manufacture movies or video games are personally responsible for anything. But it does mean we know this we know that kids are spending more time on their own, less unsupervised time, that their parents, when they're with them, are more tired because they're often working two jobs, than at any previous time. We know this. And therefore, we know that there will be more of them who will be vulnerable. And if that is true and you have easier access to guns and explosives, on the one hand, and on the other hand, you have now over 300 studies that say that sustained exposure to violence and the average 18 year old has now seen 40,000 televised murders on movies or TV or a video screen 40,000 and we know that the vulnerable among us are made more vulnerable, then the whole mixture is a caldron out of which some dramatically terrible things will happen. And you don't have to blame anybody personally for this, but we all have to say, "Look, we've got to do something about this." Then I think there has to be a national grassroots campaign in every community involving religious institutions and schools and other groups patterned on what the Mothers and Students Against Drunk Driving did, patterned on the national anti teen pregnancy campaign grassroots, value based, personal contact with all these kids to try to really dramatically reduce this. And believe me, it can be done. The last thing I'd like to say is, I've been in a lot of schools and there are some schools do better than others with counseling programs, with peer mediation programs, with intervention programs that ultimately lead to mental health for the kids who need it, and also with just trying to set an environment in which people are encouraged to be in groups, but the groups are not encouraged to look down on one another and provoke social discord. I mean, there's a lot that can be done in the schools by the students. And finally a person came up to me the other day everybody says, we need to do more to try to make it easier for parents not to lose touch with their kids. And anybody who has ever raised a child through adolescence knows that it's an interesting challenge. I mean, you want your child to become independent, to have space, to begin even to have things that aren't necessarily shared with you. But you don't want to lose the connecting cord. And we have it's interesting, isn't it, that we think we should get help in education and instruction and support for everything from losing weight to improving our athletic skills, to figuring out how to use a computer to how to make money in the stock market. And yet, we don't think anybody ought to have instruction in the most important things in life. And this grassroots campaign ought to be out there helping parents to deal with the challenge of having their children come of age and get that independence they're entitled to without severing the cord that they don't want severed. This is a big deal. And you know, our family and Al and Tipper Gore, we've worked on a lot of these issues for years and years and years. And we're going to spend a lot of time on this in the next 18 months. The last thing I'd like to say I'd like to say just a word about the world, because people are so interested, especially in the crisis in Kosovo now. We have tried in the last 6 years to be a force for peace, from Northern Ireland to the Middle East to Bosnia. We've tried to be a force for reducing the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and we've made a lot of progress in that and for standing up against terrorism and the emerging threats of biological and chemical weapons in the hands of organized criminals or terrorists. We've worked on all that. And we've tried to expand global prosperity through trade initiatives. But I think it's ironic and Jack said it at lunch, he said, "It's interesting to me, in this great, modern world we live in, we still can't figure out what to do about genocide" since that's what World War II was really about. And I think if you think about what characterizes the modern age in a positive sense an explosion of technology, especially in the telecommunications area computer science increasingly being merged with the biological sciences, so that when the human genome project is completed we'll be able to get a map of the genetic map of ourselves and our children and our grandchildren, and it should move us very rapidly over the next 15 years to another dramatic increase in life expectancy. So that's the first thing, this explosion of technology and its immersion with telecommunications and with the biological sciences. And then the second thing is the world getting closer together, national borders becoming more porous, the interconnections of people becoming closer. Isn't it ironic when we're dreaming of our children all learning how to speak different languages, having E mail pen pals in Asia and Africa and Latin America, and all this sort of interesting stuff that we want to dream about, that the number one problem we're facing in the world today is the incredible, durable persistence of the oldest demon of human society, the fear of people who are different from us. And the fear leads to loathing. The loathing leads to dehumanization. The dehumanization leads to the justification of killing. And the justification of killing then often leads to the justification of systematic killing, based on racial or ethnic or religious difference. But it is the oldest problem of human society. And it is a true irony that when we I look at these young people here, and I think Gosh, the world they'll live in 30 years from now will be full of things that I can't even imagine. Will they really be burdened by this primordial madness that manifested itself in Bosnia or in the little villages of Rwanda, where 700,000 people at least were hacked to death in a hundred days, in a country not a colonial creation, those people had been living together for 500 years, or Bosnia, where a quarter of a million people died, and 2 1 2 million people were made prisoners, and mosques were burned, and libraries and museums were burned up, and books were destroyed that were priceless or what's going on in Kosovo? Will the people of Northern Ireland take the last step that's still hanging them up to make peace? Will the evident desire of the voters in Israel for peace and security find a concrete expression in the next few months? The biggest problem to all of it is when it gets right down to the lick log, it's hard to hold hands with somebody who's really different from you and jump off into a common future. It's hard. And I know a lot of people that question what I have done and how I have done it in Kosovo. All I can tell you is I'm convinced that I've done the right thing in the best available way. And one of the things you hire a President to do is to think about all the implications of all the options that are available. But I would far rather be here today answering the questions that I have to answer to the American people and to the press about what we have done and why we have done it and how we have done it, than I would like to be here today asking you to contribute money to our party and to our cause if I were sitting on my hands and letting those people be butchered and thrown out of their homes and plundered and their records erased. And I think the fact it's amazing to me how many American Jews have told me they support what we are doing for Kosovar Muslims. It is a great thing. It is something special. We have no territorial ambitions there. We have no economic ambitions there. We, in fact, are going to have to spend more money to help them rebuild the area and build it higher than it was. What we want is for our children to be able to live in the world where they can maximize the explosion of technology and maximize the openness of borders, and you cannot do that in a world where you're worried about being blown up by a terrorist who is driven by ethnic, religious, or racial hatred. That is what this is about. It's very much in our security interests to do this. But it's because of the world toward which we're going. If this were 1950, it wouldn't be. The world we're going to live in does not need a Europe consumed, even at its edge in southeastern Europe, by this kind of hatred. Let me just close with this story. I've been telling this for 5 days now, but I was overwhelmed last week. I had an experience which to me embodies the best in this country. Last week, at the request of our leader in the Senate, Senator Daschle, and the other four Democratic Senators from North and South Dakota and Montana, we hosted in the White House a meeting of 19 Native American tribal leaders from the upper plains States. They are the poorest of all of our Indian tribes. And most of them don't have any gambling. They don't have any population density. And it's long way from here to there, so they don't get a lot of new investment. And they haven't been part of this great booming economy. They haven't noticed that the stock market went from 3,200 to 11,000 in the last 6 1 2 years. It just totally escaped them. I mean, they haven't felt this. So they came to the White House. And the first thing they did was, they said, well, now and we met in the Roosevelt Room, which is a room that some of you have been in it's commemorated, basically dedicated to Franklin and Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt. And Theodore Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize is on the mantelpiece there, which he got for helping to end the Russo Japanese War in 1905. So they say, "Well, can we get all this stuff out of here and sit in a circle? That's our custom." So we get the table out, and everybody is sitting in a circle. And a lot of Cabinet members were there. And their spokesperson was a 6 6 tribal chief named Tex Hall not exactly your Native American name, but anyway, that's his name. Laughter So he gets up and speaks, and then everybody speaks, and they talked about the education concerns and the health care and the economic concerns. And I came in about midway through the meeting they all were talking. So at the end, Chief Hall, he stands up again, and he said, "I want to tell you something." He said, "There's something else we want to do before we go." He said, "We have a proclamation here we have signed, supporting what you are doing in Kosovo" representing the poorest Americans, right, and the first Americans. He said, "You see, Mr. President, we know something about ethnic cleansing. And our country has made a lot of progress, and here we are today, and we think we should stand up against it." And then this other young man said that he wanted to speak. And he represented one of the tribes in South Dakota. He wasn't very tall, and he had this beautiful piece of Indian jewelry on around his neck, silver jewelry. And he said this you think about this when you leave here today, about what kind of country you want in the 21st century he said, "Mr. President, I had two uncles. One of them was on the beach at Normandy. The other was the first Native American fighter pilot in the history of the American military. My great great grandfather was slaughtered by the 7th Calvary at Wounded Knee," he said, "and here I am in the White House." He said, "We have come a long way from my great great grandfather to my uncles to this day. I have only one son, and he means more to me than anything. I would be proud for him to go and fight against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo." He said, "We know what is right now." And you could not hear anyone breathe in that room. I ask you to think about that. This is a different country than it was 6 1 2 years ago. It needs to be a different country 6 1 2 years from now. We have still so much to do. But If you made me choose one thing I could do in the next nearly 2 years I've got left, it would be to bring the American people closer together, not to give up our fights and our disagreements and our arguments but to just remember this is quite an extraordinary place. We have had quite a journey. We have a lot to do at home and abroad, and we'll be able to do it if we don't forget that what binds us together is more important than all the things that divide us. Thank you, and God bless you. May 16, 1999 The President. Thank you very much. First, I would like to say to Elias and Jody, we're grateful to be here, and thank you for turning the Muzak off. Laughter And all the televisions I couldn't compete with them. Laughter And I thank you for being my friend for so many years, when I was up and when I was down, and for being my mother's friend, something I will never forget, and for having me into your home for the second time. I thank Senators Reid and Landrieu and Senator Bryan and Bonnie for being here and Representative Berkley, newly married glad that Larry came. And your attorney general, Frankie Sue Del Papa Mayor Jones and former Governor Miller and his wife who, as of this morning, is Dr. Miller, so we have to be appropriately respectful there. Former Congressman Bilbray, my good friend and Chairman Andrew and Beth Dozoretz, our national finance chair, and her husband, Ron. And to all of you, my old friends in Las Vegas, and some of you I have not met before. I'm delighted to be here. I was sitting here thinking you know, I've had a rather rigorous schedule. Last week I went to Europe, to Germany, to see our forces who are involved in the operation in Kosovo and then to meet with the refugees. And then I had to go right down to Texas and then to Oklahoma to see the aftermath of the worst the most powerful tornado ever measured in the history of the United States down there. And then I came back to Washington, and then I came right back out here a couple of days later and I was in Seattle, northern California, Los Angeles, San Diego, and now I'm here. So I'm slightly disoriented. And I was wondering if maybe Rich Little would come and give the speech for me. We would never know the difference. Laughter And if you got tired of me, then you could hear President Carter, President Reagan, President Nixon, you know laughter sort of a little walk through of American history. Thank you for coming. Rich Little. Oh, it's a pleasure. The President. I won't take a lot of time today. I enjoyed having a chance to visit with all of you in the line. I would like to begin with what is to me the most obvious thing about this day. I want to thank all of you who brought your children here. I'm delighted to see all these young people here. When I ran for President in 1991, when I made the decision, it was, believe it or not, a rather difficult one for me to make, because our daughter was in the eighth grade, or then finishing the seventh grade. She was as happy as a clam and doing well, and Hillary and I were doing well. We had our friends, and I had been Governor for, at that time I was in my 11th year. And believe it or not, I was still having a great time. I loved my State I loved my job. And I decided to run because I was convinced that our country was sort of stumbling toward the 21st century with no governing vision that would create an America where every person who would be responsible enough to work for it would have opportunity where all the diversity that you see so glittering in this room, all the differences among us would be respected, even celebrated, but where our common sense of humanity would give us a stronger American community as we grow more diverse and where our country would still be the world's most important force for peace and freedom and prosperity. I knew I believed, and now I believe more strongly that to have that kind of vision come alive in the 21st century, we had to be able to deal with what was going on here that is different. And what is going on here that is different? We're in the middle of the biggest explosion of technology in the history of the country, in the history of the world. We also are seeing the shattering of all kinds of barriers, making people ever more interdependent and drawing us closer and closer together across all national lines. Most of that is quite good, but we know there are some serious problems. The global economy and the information revolution has made untold numbers of new millionaires, but it threatens to leave people without an education behind. Drawing closer together has given greater mobility, greater knowledge, greater access to things through the Internet and through travel than ever before but the open borders and the Internet technology mean that people who want to use it for bad ends can learn how to make bombs on the Internet, and that the possibilities for collision of terrorism and organized crime and weapons of mass destruction are greater, and we have to deal with that. And so what I have tried to do for the last 6 1 2 years is to lead first the Democratic Party and then the Nation to a whole different approach to politics nationally, to say that we have enough tough decisions to make, but we're going to put behind the false ones. We believe, for example, we can grow the economy and reward entrepreneurs and still expand the middle class and give poor people a chance to work their way up. We believe that working people should be able to succeed at work, but also at home, because the most important job of any society is to raise its children well. We believe we can improve the economy and actually improve not just protect but improve the environment, because we no longer have to use the same energy patterns of the industrial age to grow the economy. We believe we can reduce crime by not only prosecuting it more vigorously but by doing a better job of preventing it in the first place. We believe we can reduce the welfare rolls without hurting the children on welfare. These are things we believe we can do. We believe we can be a force for peace from the Middle East to Northern Ireland and still stand up against ethnic cleansing and terrorists. And in large measure, the work that Hillary and I and the Vice President and our Cabinet, our administration and our allies in Congress have done the last 6 years has been a vigorous effort to take these ideas and turn them into policies so they could be made real in the lives of the American people. We also have tried to change our notion of the primary role of Government. I have downsized the Government dramatically. Most people have a hard time believing this, but the Federal establishment is now almost exactly the size it was when John Kennedy was President in 1962 smallest Federal Government in 37 years now. But it is more active, and we focus on two things. One, creating the conditions for prosperity and for security, and two, giving people the tools to solve their own problems and to make the most of their own lives. And I am very grateful for all the good things that have happened in America and for whatever force for good we've been in the world in the last 6 years. And I'm grateful for the people who have expressed their support for me through thick and thin. But I am here today for the Democratic Party because what I want you to understand is, that while I am grateful I had a chance to serve and I hope that my leadership had something to do with the good things that have happened the most important thing is, we had the right vision and the right ideas we had a sense of teamwork, and we got up and went to work every day doing the right things. And that's why it's important that your Congresswoman be reelected, that we elect a new Democratic Senator from this State, that we win the Presidential election, and that we keep the country on the direction it is going. I am very grateful to the citizens of this State for voting for me and Al Gore twice, when most people didn't think any Democrat would ever win here again. And I'm very grateful to Governor Miller and your two Senators for making sure that I never made a mistake on a local issue, so that at least I wouldn't fall off the knife edge we were on and we could hold on to our victory. But what I want to know when you leave here today is, it's important that people who have supported me all these years understand that no person, not even the President, can have a good impact unless you have a good vision, good ideas, a good team, and you're doing the right things. And all of that will be here when I am gone. I won't be on the ballot in 2000. But all these issues really matter. It matters where we stand on these issues. If I could just mention two or three things today. In the next 2 years, I'm going to do a lot to try to keep this going. We were talking the Senators and I were, on the way in we want to have our version of saving Social Security and Medicare, helping people deal with long term care, helping people to save more for their own retirement. We want to see this debt paid down. Who would have ever thought we'd be paying the debt down? First, you thought you'd be grateful to see the budget balanced. We now have the biggest surplus ever. I want to pay the debt down. I want to pay it down. I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I want to pay it down because I know the more we pay it down, the more we'll have low interest rates, high investment, more jobs, and better incomes. And the less we need to borrow money around the world, the more our friends who are in trouble, who are our trading partners and our neighbors, will be able to borrow money. The Japanese are in trouble today. We want to help them. When they do well, we do well. If they need to borrow money, they can borrow it at less cost if we're paying our debt down. This is a good thing. I want to do some more things in education. I'm going to spend an enormous amount of time both trying to raise educational standards, to bring technology and good facilities and good teachers to all of our kids, and continue to open the doors of college to all Americans. I want to do that. And there are lots of other things. But what I want to say today, I want to think about one thing. We look at these kids. And look at this audience. Look how different we all are. Look at Elias' background the story of the American dream coming out of the Middle East, coming here without a nickel to his name, struggling through college, doing all the things that he has done, and then marrying way above himself. Laughter Elias Ghanem. I agree. I agree with you. The President. Having all these wonderful children. Look at all these kids here. I want you to listen. This is the most important thing. You know, if tonight I woke up in the middle of the night, and the good Lord appeared to me, and he said, "I'm sorry, but you've already had a heck of a good life, and I'm not going to let you do all these things. But I will let you do one thing for the next 18 months. You only get to do one thing." And then here's what my answer would be I would think about Littleton, Colorado, and I would think about Kosovo, and I would say, "It seems to me supremely ironic and very humbling that here we are on the edge of the 21st century, where we have all these wonderful, high tech dreams for our kids, right? I mean, these kids can have pen pals in Mongolia and Botswana and Singapore. They can look forward to going everywhere, doing everything maybe we'll all be living to be 125 years old within 20 years. We'll unlock the mysteries of the human gene and all that. "Isn't it ironic that on the verge of such an incredible era of discovery and potential, that what we are bedeviled by at home and abroad are the oldest demons of human society these children talking in Littleton about how they were disrespected by the athletes, so they hated them. And then they had to look for someone they could disrespect, so they looked down on the minority kids." I was in Texas the other day with the very pregnant young daughter of James Byrd, the African American man who was dragged to death not very long ago there, trying to help them pass the hate crimes legislation, the Texas legislation. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights had its annual dinner last week in Washington, and I went by and acknowledged the presence of Matthew Shepard's mother, the young man who was murdered in Wyoming because he was gay. Don't you think it's interesting that here we are, celebrating all this wonderful, high tech, modern future, and what bedevils us most is the darkness of the heart, the fear of the other? It is as old as when people first had to join into tribes to stay alive in the cold and to kill game and to live in caves, before there was language, before there was writing, before there was anything. And maybe at some point there was some rational reason for it. And then as people developed their religious faiths, very often they fought more over their religious faiths than the fact that the color of their skin or the nature of their history was different. But when you strip it all away, it starts with You're different from me I'm afraid of you therefore, I don't like you no, I take it back, I hate you therefore, I will dehumanize you therefore, it's okay for me to kill you. It is a very short step. And it is easy for us to demonize others, but the truth is, every one of us gets up every day with a little light and a little darkness inside. And it's almost like they're on scales, and we fight this lifelong battle to make sure that the light always outweighs the darkness on the scales. So if I were given one wish, I would say I would like to build a stronger sense of community in America, and I would like to do something to advance a sense of common humanity around the world. Because if we could do that, you and people like you all over our country would take care of the other problems. That's why I'm for the hate crimes legislation. That's why I'm for the nondiscrimination in employment bill. That's why I'm for all these sensible gun control measures. That's why I've asked the whole country to join with Hillary and me and Al and Tipper Gore in a national campaign to reduce violence against children. That's why I've spent all my life trying to advance the cause of civil rights. That's why I've worked for peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland and why I'm proud that we stopped the war in Bosnia and why I'm trying to stop it in Kosovo. We can't stop every war. People have a right even to fight, sometimes. That's how we, after all, created our country. But on the eve of the 21st century, we should say, "You know, you don't have to like each other around the world, but we won't tolerate mass killing based on religious and racial and ethnic differences." I know that in a world where we're used to seeing the news be different every day, it is frustrating to some people that this difficulty in Kosovo is not yet done. And I know there are many questions about it. I wish I had time to spend 3 or 4 hours here and answer your questions. But I can tell you this I would far rather be here today, where we are, standing up against ethnic cleansing, standing for the rights of a different people not to be exterminated because they happen to be Muslims and they happen to have Albanian heritage and they happen to have no guns than if I were here asking you to give money to me and to our party, and we were sitting on our hands enjoying the sunshine, and I had not lifted a finger to stop it. And so I leave you with that thought. I have tried to make our party a party where all people of good will could feel at home and, more importantly, our country. Life is infinitely more interesting because it's more different, more various. Look around this room. This is an incredible group of people from all over, everywhere. And if we can respect and celebrate our differences, our lives are literally more fun and almost always more profitable. But if there are no limits on the importance to which we give our differences, life can quickly become unbearable. So I ask you to think about that and help us. I thank you for your contributions. I thank you for your support. I thank you for your friendship to Elias and Jody. I thank you for helping me be President. But remember, what has made these last 6 1 2 years, and what will keep America going for the next 220 years, is not any one leader, but it's having the right vision and the right ideas and working together. And we need more of that. Thank you, and God bless you. May 16, 1999 Thank you very much. I was hoping that no one in California had heard that joke I told. Laughter They liked it in Albany, however. Laughter Let me say to Irwin and Joan, first of all, I want to thank you for opening this wonderful home and for giving me a tour of the art and a tour of your family. Laughter What a wonderful, big, beautiful group they are. And I thank you for your philanthropy and for your commitment to so many good causes, and for bringing all of us together today. A lot of my old friends are here and some people that I've never had the honor to meet before. I appreciate that. I'd also like to say how glad I am to be here with Bob and Jane Filner. You know, I deal with a lot of Members of Congress on occasion, even Members of the other party deal with me. I can honestly say that I have never met and dealt with any Member of the House of Representatives who was more consistent and persistent in trying to get me and the White House to respond to the needs of his district than Bob Filner. There isn't anybody else who works any harder at that, and you can be very proud of that. He's done a very fine job. I want to thank Assemblywoman Susan Davis for being willing to run for Congress it's an arduous endeavor. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of heart. When I was 27 years old in 1974, I ran for Congress, and I lost. I wonder if I'd be here today if I'd won. Laughter But I remember, I ran against a man who had 99 percent name recognition and 85 percent approval. And I ran for 11 months, and 6 weeks before the election, I was still behind 59 to 23, and I lost I got 48 1 2 percent of the vote. I say that just to encourage you. Every election has a certain rhythm, and my instinct is, if you go out there and talk about the things you have done so well in the assembly, the passion you have for educating our children, the role that Federal Government needs to play to support our local schools, and the other issues, I think you'll do very well. And I hope we can be of help. I want to thank Joe Andrew and Beth Dozoretz and all the people on our team for working with the Democratic Party. And I'd like to say a word of appreciation to everyone in San Diego who is responsible for the selection of my friend of 30 years Alan Bersin, the new superintendent of schools. I thank you. When I saw Alan today he's got a great gift for one liners, which I have appropriated over the last 30 years. And so he came through the line today he looked at me and said, "And I thought you had a hard job." Laughter But let me also say I have a very special feeling about this community. I've had some wonderful days here. I've had some wonderful family vacation days here. As you noted, Hillary just got back from Macedonia and a trip to Northern Ireland a brief trip to Northern Ireland, where we're working to try to close the last gaps in the peace process there and couldn't be here. And I talked to her this morning on the way down, and she was quite jealous that I was coming back to San Diego. We have nothing but wonderful memories of this great place. Also, in 1992, when the Vice President and I carried this county, it was the first time since Harry Truman had carried it in 1948 that a Democrat had carried it and looking at the signs, pro and con, on the way in today, I would say there's still some disagreement about what ought to happen. Laughter Let me say, you're here at a fundraiser for the Democratic Party. And I'm grateful for that. I'd like you to know why I'm here. I mean, I'm not running for anything. Maybe I'll try to get on a school board someday, but I won't be on the ballot in the year 2000. I am here because I believe in what I have done and because I believe that whatever good has come of the country because of my Presidency, I should be grateful for. But I am under no illusion that the most important thing was me. The most important thing was the vision that we shared for America and the ideas we pursued. And I believe it needs to continue. That's why I'm here. And when you leave, I hope you'll be convinced that that's why you were here. When I ran for President in late 1991 and '92, it was not something I had intended to do until just a few months before in that year. I was very concerned about the problems that our country was having and that there didn't seem to be any driving vision. And I don't think you can run any great enterprise without one. I also believed as a Governor as President Bush said, a Governor of a small southern State that most of the rhetoric I heard in Washington, unfortunately often from both parties, bore so little relationship to the world I was living in and the problems I was facing and the way I was having to deal with them. And it seemed to me that we needed to change the nature of the debate and to come up with some basic ideas that were not then driving policy in Washington, that were new but rooted in the very old fashioned vision of our country. I have always believed that when Americans widen the circle of opportunity for all responsible citizens, when they deepen the meaning of freedom, when they strengthen the bonds of community, we do well. And so I went out and said I want a 21st century America where every responsible citizen has the chance to live out his or her dreams, where across all of the differences we have we are bound together more closely as one community and where we are still the world's leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity. And I think to get there we have to think about things in a different way. For example, I think that we have to think about rewarding entrepreneurs in a way that expands the middle class and gives more poor people a chance to work their way into the middle class. I think we have to believe that we can grow the economy and preserve and even improve the environment. I think we have to believe that we can create a country in which people can succeed, not only at work but at home, in the most important job of any society, raising children. I think we have to believe that we can reduce the welfare rolls and put people in the work force in a way that does not require them to stop being good parents to their children. I think we have to reduce the crime rate, not only by doing a better job of enforcement, but a better job of prevention something Mr. Bersin did in his previous incarnation as your U.S. Attorney. Anyway, those are just some of the ideas. I believe that we had to be a much more active force for peace in the world, but I thought we had to be willing to use our power to stand up against terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and ethnic and religious cleansing and killing. And most of the last 6 years have been an effort by the Vice President and our administration, our Cabinet, and all the rest of us, working with me to try to find ways to put those ideas into concrete policies and make them come alive in the country. Along the way, we've given the American people the smallest Government they've had since John Kennedy was President. Federal establishment is now the smallest it's been since 1962. But it is more active in trying to create the conditions and give people the tools to solve their own problems. And I believe that these ideas resonate pretty well with Americans, whether they're Democrats or independents or Republicans, because they make sense and because they are related to the world toward which we are moving. Now, there is a lot of the future present in this room in what you all do. It seems to me that the two most dominant elements in the world of the 21st century toward which we're moving, are the explosion of technology and the increasing interdependence of people across national lines. Even our biggest threats grow out of that. We are increasingly vulnerable because of the openness of our society and the openness of our technology to people who would use this for destructive forces. And what we have to do now is to look ahead to the unmet challenges of the country and bring sort of the same sort of commonsense commitment to that vision. It means politically we have to have good candidates properly financed to have a good message to run in the year 2000 for all of our positions. They have to know why they're running. You know, whenever anyone comes up to me and asks me if they should run for office, I always say, "Why do you want the job?" And you better be able to tell a total stranger in 30 seconds and then have a 5 minute version on why you want the job. And if you can't answer that question, you shouldn't run. And if you can, ignore the polls and run. And so I think it's important that we do that. But in the last election, where we had a historic victory in the House of Representatives, you should know that we were out spent by 100 million. But we still won seats in the House and didn't lose any in the Senate a truly historic election because we had a message. We knew what we were for we knew what we were against and we had enough to get it across. So it's very important that you're here. Now, as we look ahead, let me say that in the next 2 years, with all the energy I have, I'm going to do what I can to get our country to reach across party lines to deal with the aging of America, to reform Social Security and Medicare and do something about making long term care more available, and helping people save for their own retirement more. I'm going to do what I can to make sure that we finish our work of modernizing our schools, help to modernize facilities make sure we hook all the classrooms up to the Internet provide more opportunities for more charter schools, like you have in this school district and other things that will raise standards and dramatically increase the resources we provide to local schools for after school programs, summer school programs, mentoring programs, the kind of things that will help our kids, so that we can have more uniform standards of excellence in education. And there are many other things that I intend to do. The Vice President has a livability agenda we worked very hard on that we're going to try to pass to try to help all of our communities deal more with traffic problems, with having the need for more green space, as well as setting aside more land in reserve. I'm very by the way, just parenthesis I'm very proud of the fact that our administration has protected more land in perpetuity than any administration in the history of the Republic except those of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. And I think 50 years from now people will be very grateful even the people in the red rocks area of Utah, who are still kind of mad at me about it, I think they will be grateful. So there are a lot of things that still have to be done. But I have to tell you, if you ask me to describe in a sentence what I think is the most important outstanding work of the country, I would say it is an attempt to get people to define community in terms of our common humanity instead of our evident differences, both at home and abroad. And if you look at what happened in Littleton, there are many tragedies. And doubtless, a lot of the elements, as it's all unpacked, will turn out to be highly peculiar to the two young men in question and the whole psychology of murder suicide. But there is also clearly an element of part of what drove them over the brink was the fact that they were in a group that was disrespected, and they developed a grievance against those they thought were disrespecting them. And then since they thought they were disrespected, they looked around and they found another group the minority students in the schools, in this case that they could then look down on. I was just in Texas with the daughter of James Byrd, Jr., the African American who was dragged to death and virtually dismembered by people who killed him because he was black you remember, about a year ago. I was, the other night in Washington, at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dinner with the mother of Matthew Shepard, the young man who was killed in Wyoming not so very long ago because he was gay. And I say this to point out, if America wants to do good around the world I appreciate what Congressman Filner said about Kosovo, and I want to come back to that but if you want to do good around the world, we've first got to try to be good at home. And we have to recognize that there is something deep within all of us that represents the oldest curse of human society, which is the propensity to hate the other people who are different from us. And if you look, isn't it ironic here we are, you and I were talking about how we had to break everybody's mindset of believing that in order to grow the economy, you had to have industrial age energy use patterns. We had to modernize energy use. But if you look at what they're fighting about in Kosovo or what they fought about in Bosnia or what they slaughtered over in Rwanda or what the continuing turmoil of the Middle East is about or Northern Ireland, they're not arguing about who is going to get the franchise to sell solar panels or who gets to represent Microsoft. Interesting, isn't it? We're thinking look at all the high tech activity in this room. We're thinking about a 21st century in which we want our kids to have pen pals in every conceivable country of the world, travel around, you know, do unimaginable things because of all these technological wonders. We all expect to live to be 125 because by within the next couple of years the human genome will be totally unpacked and the intersection of computer technology and biomedical discoveries will doubtless lead to breathtaking and, at present, unimaginable discoveries that will enable us to prolong life, prevent disease, cure disease. But the biggest problem we've got is the oldest problem of human society. First, people are scared of people that are different from them, and their fear leads them to hate them, and their hatred of them leads them to dehumanize them, and then that legitimizes killing them. And this has been a factor in human relationships since people first joined together in tribes before there was any writing or any language or anything else. And here we are, on the edge of this great modern age, beleaguered with this. And so I say to you, to me that is very important. One of the people at our table was telling me that she was a native of Sarajevo and that these are old and deep differences here. That is true. I do not believe if I could move to Kosovo for a minute I don't believe the United States can intervene in every ethnic conflict. I don't think we can ask people to like each other. I don't think that can be a requirement of international law or a justification for military intervention. We can't even ask people not to fight each other if one group wants to secede and the other doesn't. But we can say that in the international arena there ought to be certain limits on this. And what is now euphemistically called "ethnic cleansing" when you unpack it, what does that word mean? That means you look at people who are of a different in the case of the Balkans, religious group, and therefore and with a different ethnic history and you say, "I'm afraid of you I don't like you I hate you I dehumanize you, therefore, I can kill you I can rape your daughters I can blow up your mosques I can blow up your museums I can destroy your historical records I can take your own property records, and I can burn them up. I can take the young people of military age and wrap them up and set fire to them while they're still alive. I can do these things because this is my land, and our greatness depends upon our ability to get rid of you." And in the most benign form, "We'll burn all your villages and run you by the hundreds of thousands off your land, because we can't share this land with you, because you're Muslims and we're Orthodox Christians you're Albanians, and we're not. And, oh, by the way, 600 years ago the Muslims came through here and had a big battle in Kosovo, and we've hated you all ever since." Now, what our position ought to be in this is not that we're telling other countries how to live not that we're telling them how what their governmental arrangements have to be, but that in Europe and by the way, I think, anywhere else that the United Nations or others have the power to stop it we say we know there will be ethnic conflicts we know there will be civil wars. There's a terrible, regrettable conflict going on right now between Eritrea and Ethiopia, who once were one and then split, and now they're, in effect, having their tribal conflict over the border. No one has suggested 10,000 people have been killed there no one has suggested that some third party should intervene and fight both of them. That is not what is going on in Kosovo. That is not what Bosnia was about. That was about ethnic cleansing it's a mass killing of people because of their ethnic and religious background. And if we can't stop that in the underbelly of Europe on the edge of the 21st century, then we're going to have a very difficult world ahead of us, because there will be a lot more of it. They will get aligned with organized criminals, with terrorists, with people who have access to weapons of mass destruction. They will use all this technology and all these open airports and all this other stuff, and these conflicts will not stay confined to the land on which they occur. So this is in America's interest, but it is also morally the right thing to do. Think about these children who were here today. What do you want their children's America to be like? What do you want their children's world to be like? The 21st century can and should be the most interesting period in all of human history, in a largely profoundly positive way. But it will not happen unless we find ways to deal with our differences which, after all, as we see in America, make life much more interesting if they can be respected and celebrated but limited in their impact. When there is no limit to what you can do to somebody else who's different from you, life quickly becomes unbearable. That is really what is at stake here. Yes, there are many difficulties in this endeavor we have undertaken, we and our NATO Allies, in Kosovo. And you may have many questions in your mind. But let me ask you this How would you feel, in this gorgeous setting today, with the birds singing outside and the ocean before us, in all of our comfort, if I came here asking you to give money to the Democratic Party, and I was having to explain to you why we were sitting on our hands and not lifting a finger while those people were killed and uprooted and dislocated? I prefer to answer the hard questions about what we're doing than the hard questions I would never be able to answer to you if we had done nothing in the face of this travesty. But, remember what I said We should have a higher standard for ourselves at home. Abroad we are simply saying, "You can have your fights you can have your arguments but we're against ethnic cleansing and the slaughter that goes along with it and if we can stop it, as an international community, we ought to." At home, we have to do better than that. We have to say, "The differences that we have make us stronger, make us better, when we respect and celebrate them, but when we're not consumed by them." And therefore, I want to say again what I said yesterday and the day before. We need a national campaign to protect our kids from violence. We will never get there unless we first of all teach people respect for one another and, secondly, find a way to connect with every one of our children in a very personal way. A lot of people are strangers in their own homes, and they are lost to their parents, to their classmates, and to others. This is a very hard job. And we will never get there unless all of us ask not, "Who is to blame?" but "What can I do?" That's what the entertainment industry ought to do, not because any movie or television or video game caused those young men or others in these other school killings to do what they did, but because the average 18 year old sees 40,000 murders by the time he or she is 18, because there are 300 studies now 300 which show that sustained exposure to violence diminishes and it diminishes one's sensitivity to the consequences of violence and because we know that we have a higher percentage of kids who spend more time in front of various media and less time with their families, or with their friends doing other things, than virtually every other country, and we have a higher percentage of kids who are at risk. And we don't give families the support we should give to balance family and childrearing work and childrearing. So if you have more kids at risk, more vulnerable, and you bombard them with things that will desensitize them, you will increase the number who will fall over the line. It's just like the guns. The NRA slogan is actually, of course, literally true, that guns don't kill people, people do. That is literally true. But people with guns kill more people than people without them. Laughter And again, I say if you have more if you have more vulnerable people and it's easier for them to get assault weapons, or other weapons they have no business getting their hands on, then more of them will fall over the line and you'll have more violence. A lot of you have been involved in that, and I would just close with this the Government has its responsibility in this crisis, too. And one of our responsibilities is to give both law enforcement and citizens the help they need by having sensible gun restraint measures. There was a police officer out at the airport today when I stopped at the marine base on the way over here. And when he said, "Mr. President," he said, "I'm a police officer I'm off duty today I came out here with my family, and I just want to thank you for taking on that gun fight." He said, "We need all the protection we can get out there and so do the kids." And all we've done look what I've asked them to do. I've asked them to close this gun show loophole so you can't buy a gun at a gun show if you can't buy it in a gun shop. We've asked them to and the Senate has voted to close the loophole allowing big, multiple ammunition clips to come in from foreign countries, and to raise the handgun age to 21. We've asked them to strengthen the Brady bill and reinstate the 3 day waiting period. We've asked them to do a background check on people who buy explosives which, after Littleton, you will see, is very important very, very important and do some other commonsense things that help us to trace and keep records on these weapons. This is crazy, that we would permit our society to put more children at risk than any other society in the world would when we already know we've got more of them that are fragile. Now, we don't have to point fingers at each other. We should all sort of say, "Forget about who's to blame. We're showing up for duty tomorrow. What can I do?" That's what everybody ought to be asking. But the Congress of the United States needs to pass this legislation, and I was very encouraged that some of the Senators, after the American people expressed their feelings, have begun to change their votes. But I want to see this as a part of our struggle to be one community. Most of the people there was a great article in the Los Angeles Times today about a woman from Colorado, rural Colorado, who had her rifle and used it to run off wild wolves that were going to kill her livestock, and who felt so threatened in her way of life by all these city folks, like us, trying to regulate her guns. Well, of course, nobody's trying to regulate her guns. She'd just been told that. And if she needs something other that she has to do a background check on, she's got nothing to fear. But I understand, there is that whole other culture out there of people who are law abiding they pay their taxes they show up for duty when we need them to fight for our country, to defend us, to do whatever else and a lot of them just think that this is some big urban conspiracy to take their guns away. Well, it isn't. And we all need to be talking to each other. We need to quit this sort of you know, trying to make this chapter 57 in the culture war for someone's political benefit. So I say that to you hey, if you ask me, yes, I hope we get before I leave office, I will be very disappointed if we haven't reformed Social Security, committed ourselves to pay down the debt over the next 17 years, reform Medicare, pass my education and my environmental agenda. But the American people will get the rest right if we decide to do what it takes to be one America, if we decide to do what it takes to reach out across all the lines that divide us and say, "You know, our common humanity is more important than our interesting differences." And if we do that, then we will be able to lead the world to a better place and give our children the future they deserve. That's what I think my party represents. That's what I've worked for 6 years to bring to the American people. And when you leave here today, I hope that's why you believe that you came. Thank you very much. May 15, 1999 I have never before had the honor of being the warmup act for Andrea Bocelli, but I will. I will do my best. Laughter I want to and if I sing a little, you will just have to laughter . I want to say first of all how grateful I am to all of you for being here, especially to the chairs and the cochairs of the dinner and, of course, to David and Steven and Jeffrey. I want to thank my leaders, Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt. I was looking at them up here. We knew each other, of course, before I was elected, but not so well as we do today. And I can tell you that it is a joy and an honor every day to work with them. They are people that we can really be proud of. And I have seen them in far less comfortable circumstances than we find ourselves tonight, and they are what they seem to be, and they're always there for the American people. I'd like to thank Governor Davis and Sharon for coming. I'm thrilled by his success and was honored to be asked to campaign here a time or two last year. And I want to echo what has already been said about Senator Feinstein and Senator Boxer. They are on the forefront of this still ongoing and yet unfolding struggle to protect our children on the gun issues, and I want you to give them a big boost tonight and a lot of support, because it's been pretty tough there, although the American people did a great job in turning some of those votes around last week. I'd like to thank Senator Torricelli for being here. It's his unhappy, or sometimes happy, duty to go around and try to make sure that we've got someone to actually run for all these Senate seats and take on some very tough fights. I thank Congressman Kennedy and your Congressmen, Henry Waxman and Brad Sherman, for being here. And Mayor Levin gave me a gift from the city tonight, so I'm delighted to be here. Laughter And I'm glad to be here in, as far as I know, the only beneficial product to the Teapot Dome Scandal here this beautiful place. Most of what needs to be said has already been said, but I would like to try to put a few things in perspective, talk a little bit about some of the events of the present that are of great concern to people. When I came to California in 1991 and early '92, this was a very different place in a different country. People were divided and confused and drifting and frustrated. And I believed very strongly it was because we had no overriding vision for our future, no strategy to achieve it, no way, therefore, of pulling the American people together and getting us pointed in the right direction. And that's really why I got in the race for the President. It was not the easiest of races. I was laughing with Goldie Hawn tonight because I remember her being in the Biltmore in Los Angeles on June 2, 1992, when I was nominated for President, really officially. I won in California and New Jersey and Ohio that night, so it was clear that I had enough votes to be nominated. And all the stories were the exit polls showing that Ross Perot was really in first place, and I was in third place. I say that to caution you about reading too much into any polls. Laughter But I knew something, I thought, about the American people, about where we were at this moment in our history and where I thought we ought to go. Just 6 weeks later there had been a complete reversal in the polls, and thank the good Lord, they stayed that way through November, and the people of California were very good to me and to Al Gore and to our families and our administration, twice. And I am very, very thankful. What I want you to do you know what all the individual issues are, but what I want you to think about tonight, just for a minute, before we hear a magnificent performer and before you go home and you go back to your lives tomorrow and the days ahead, is what you would say to people if they asked you why you came tonight. You could say, "Well, Geffen made me." Laughter Or there's a lot of things you could say. But I hope you will have some really good answers. I guess the first thing I'd like to say to you is, obviously, this is a fundraiser for the Congress. It's not for me. I can't run anymore. And I'm here because I believe very strongly that the people you just saw should lead the majorities in the House and Senate because while I am very grateful for the opportunity I have been given to serve the American people as President and for whatever role I was able to play in this remarkable economic turnaround and the big drop in crime and welfare and the improvements in almost all the indicators of social health the lowest minority unemployment in history, the highest homeownership all the things that are moving in the right direction, I'm grateful that we've had a chance to be a force for peace and freedom around the world. What I want you to understand is, first, most of what we have done could not have been done, had it not been for the support I received from the Democrats in the Congress. Second, most of what we stopped could not have been stopped, had it not been for their support. And third and most important, what we did grew out of a vision of 21st century America as a place where there is opportunity for every responsible citizen, where we celebrate our differences but we come together in one community, and a place that can still lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity, and out of a willingness to think in different ways about the future, to break out of the old vices that were paralyzing Washington. We believe, for example, that we can reward successful entrepreneurs, like many of you in this audience, and still expand the middle class and give poor people a chance to make it. We believe we can grow the economy and improve the environment. We believe we have an obligation to help people succeed not just at work but also at home, because raising children is the most important job of any society. We believe these things. We believe that we can have a quality and excellence and high standards and accountability in education. We believe we can be a force for peace in the world and still stand up if we have to, against ethnic cleansing and weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. And the work of the last 6 years has largely been our combined efforts to take these ideas and that vision and hammer them into specific proposals. It's what animates our efforts today to deal with the aging of America, with the reforms of Social Security and Medicare, doing something about long term care, helping people to do more to save for their own retirement. It's what's driving me now that we have a big surplus instead of a huge deficit to say that we ought to deal with Social Security in a way that pays down the debt for the first time in anybody's memory, so that 17 years from now, we could actually have the smallest debt this country's had since before World War I, which will mean for our children lower interest rates, a stronger economy, less dependent on the vagaries of the world economy. We believe that we have to continue to improve the environment in ways that are tangible. I'm proud of the fact that the air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, and we set aside more land than any administration except those of the two Roosevelts, in our term, but we have a lot more to do. And this environmental issue will continue to dominate public concern for at least another 30 to 40 years. So we still have more to do. But what I want to say to you is, those of you who are here because you've helped me through thick and thin for all these long years, this did not happen by accident, nor did it happen just because I was President. It happened because we had the right vision and the right ideas, and we worked to make them real. And it couldn't be done without the help of the people who have spoken before me and what they represent, and they deserve the chance to be in the majority so that we can see these ideas fully implemented in the beginning of the 21st century. That is what I want you to think about when you leave here tonight. Let me say, in spite of all the good news, most Americans have been sobered in the last several days because of the terrible tragedy at Littleton and the ongoing conflict in Kosovo. And I would like to say to you that I think how we respond to both of these will say a lot about what kind of country we have for years to come. And I believe that the ideas that I've tried to infuse into all of our work ought to be looked at against the backdrop of these two issues. I do think you heard Dick Gephardt talking about what the person who lost a child at Littleton said, "Don't let my child die in vain." I do believe that, even more than all the terrible tragedies that happened last year, because of the sheer scope and power of this event, it touched a deep nerve in America that has profoundly opened up our country to a serious examination of what it would take to give our children a safer childhood. And last Monday I had a lot of people from every sector of our society into the White House, with Hillary and Al and Tipper, to talk about how we could have a national campaign against children's violence in the same way that we have seen other national campaigns prevail in the past. And what I'd like to say is what I've pleaded with people to do is not to make this chapter 57 in the ongoing American culture war saga. You know, if the house next door here were burning down, we'd probably all be willing to go over there and help put the fire out. And think how absurd it would be if Norm looked at David and said, "I'm not going to help put the fire out because it's your fault you left your car running outside the house, and its sparks from the fumes caused the fire." And David said, "Norm, if you'd quit smoking years ago, you wouldn't have put a cigarette over in the yard, and that's what caused the fire." And so everybody gets in a fight about who's at fault here, and we let the house burn down that is a dumb thing to do. This is far more important. We can't let those children have perished in vain. And I don't know you know, probably a lot of you are like me. I have watched the parents of these children being interviewed. I have seen the school people. I have seen some of the wounded children. I have been, on the whole, profoundly moved and impressed by these people, by the depth of their faith and their conviction and their genuine striving to understand and go beyond this. So for me, I think we ought to since I think what happens to our kids is more important than whether the house next door burns down, I think we ought to have the same attitude. We ought to say, "Okay, I'm showing up for work. Tell me what I can do." And I believe that we have to do more to help parents do their job, whether it's better child care or family leave programs or, literally, people helping people understand that your kids can become strangers in your own home. And I agree with what has already been said. It is a fact that most parents in America spend far less time with their children today than they used to spend. That is not free. That's why I say, we will never be the society we want in the new century until we better balance work and family. I think we have to help the schools do more. I was in a fabulous school in Alexandria, Virginia, the other day that's the most culturally diverse school district in America now, just across the river from the White House where they have peer mediation programs and counseling services and mental health services and a 1 800 anonymous hotline that if one kid calls and says, "I'm worried" about another one, they know it will be followed up on, and they know they will be kept anonymous. We have to do those kinds of things. We have to give every school the ability to protect our children better. I think the people in the gun business ought to come to the table and help us. And I want to say one thing that wasn't mentioned, that I'm very proud of, is that the gun manufacturers, who for years sided always with the NRA and always opposed all these measures, have changed. And every one of you who believes that it's a good thing that we raise the handgun ownership age to 21 and that we close the loophole and Senator Feinstein's assault weapons bill, so now we can stop these big ammunition clips from coming in it's never had any purpose, anyway. We can also thank the gun manufacturers who supported the legislation this time in Congress and had the kind of civic responsibility that we need more from every American. I appreciate that. Now, we've still got a lot of work to do. We've got to do background checks on explosives. We've got to get this gun show loophole closed in the right way. And I'm going to watch it pretty close, because unlike most Americans, I've actually been to a lot of these gun shows. It was part of my job description at one time when I was Governor of Arkansas. And I enjoyed them greatly, but they ought to have background checks, and they ought not to have loopholes. So that's a big part of it. I also believe let's talk about the entertainment issue. You know, I think the here's the way I look at this. It's like the NRA can say, "Guns don't kill people, people do." That's true, but people with guns kill more people than people without them. And we're the only country in the world that has no reasonable restrictions. There are now over 300 studies that show that sustained lifetime, week in and week out, night in and night out, exposure to indiscriminate violence through various media outlets over a period of time makes people less sensitive both to violence and to the consequences of violence. Now, for most kids, it won't make any difference. But if you have a society where we have already positive there are more kids who are spending less time with their folks and less time being connected to somebody that they know they're the most important person in the world to, and if that same society has those same kids having easier access to weapons, then desensitizing them will be more likely to push those that are vulnerable into destructive behavior. Now, that doesn't make anybody who makes any movie or any video game or any television program a bad person or personally responsible with one show for a disastrous outcome. There's no call for finger pointing here, but we just look around and we know that all these things go together, starting with the raw material that you've got more kids who are more isolated, some of them in their own homes, strangers. So I would like to say, first, like I said about the gun manufacturers, it ought to be put in the record that the entertainment industry for 6 years has worked with Al Gore and me and with our administration on the V chip, the television rating system, the video game rating system, the screening technologies that the video people the Internet people have worked with us to try to help parents screen inappropriate material away from their kids on the Internet. Today in my radio address, I said there were two or three other things I had been studying this and listening that I think ought to be done. I think that if young people can't see certain kinds of movies, then they shouldn't see the advertisement for the movies if the advertisement has the same stuff that caused the movie to be rated as inappropriate. And that's something I think the entertainment industry can look at and ought to look at very seriously, that the advertising ought to be consistent with the rating in terms of the audience that receives it. I also think there's a lot of evidence that these ratings are regularly ignored, not by you but by the people who actually sell or rent the video tapes or the video games or run the movie theaters. And the rating system ought to be used by checking ID's. And finally, I believe in light of the most recent research, it would be a very good thing if the industry would reexamine the nature of the rating system, especially the PG 13 as it relates to violence, not because anybody is willfully doing something that they know is going to hurt somebody, not because any one television program or video game or movie will do it, but because we know that by the time a person becomes 18 in America, he or she has seen about 40,000 killings, and because we have a higher percentage of vulnerable people. But we are determined to do this as a family. When we were at the White House, we sat around a big old table, and everybody was there, and everybody was asking, "What can I do?" And I say again to the Congress, this is not the time to let any interest group control doing things that are common sense. How in the world we can let somebody buy a gun at a gun show that they can't get in a gun shop because they've got a criminal background is beyond me. And this is a classic example to go back to what my leaders said earlier the people of Florida, not the most liberal State in America, voted last November, 72 percent to close the gun show loophole with no ifs, ands, or buts, no wrinkles or curlicues or subterfuge. So I say this is a time for all of us to do this. And how we deal with this, and whether we really come up with a kind of grassroots national campaign, like the campaign that Mothers and Students Against Drunk Driving launched that precipitously lowered deaths from drunk driving in America, like the effort that has been made that has precipitously lowered the teen pregnancy rate, like the grassroots effort business made that led to 10,000 business people hiring over 400,000 people off welfare how we do this will have a lot to say about whether we're really going to build one community. But there are other things we ought to do, too. And let me come back to Kosovo and talk about you say, "Well, what's that got to do with this?" Well, first of all, all the studies, the reports indicate that these young men who were involved in this terrible tragedy at Littleton felt like they were a disrespected group and felt like they had to find some other groups to look down on or hate, the athletes, the minorities in the school. And in Kosovo what you see and what you saw in Bosnia is people who have been ethnically cleansed. That's a sort of sterilized word for being systematically killed, uprooted, raped, having your property records destroyed, having your mosques and your museums and your libraries destroyed, having an effort to basically eradicate your existence. But it's very interesting. Don't you find it ironic especially those of you I was talking to Steven the other day about my library, and we were talking about whether we could have some virtual reality effects in my library in the museum, you know. Sometimes I feel like I'm living in virtual reality, so I'm highly interested in this. Laughter This is the kind of thing you guys think about when you think about the 21st century, you know? Our kids are all on the Internet, and the human genome secrets have all been unlocked, and we all live to be 135, and we whiz around the world in safe airplanes that never have wrecks. And we'll be driving on the Los Angeles freeways, and there won't be any more traffic jams because all our cars will be computer programmed and directed and everything will be managed just fine. This is the exciting and our kids will all have pen pals in Mongolia and Zimbabwe and Bolivia and every place around the world. Technology will bring us together, and there will be a new golden age. That's our sort of image for our children in the 21st century. Don't you think it is ironic that here we are in the last year of this millennium and that image is threatened by the oldest demon of human society, the hatred of the other? It starts as fear of the other, goes to hatred of the other, goes to dehumanization of the other, goes to killing of the other. Don't you think that's interesting? I mean, these people in Kosovo, they're not fighting over who gets the right to show the latest Hollywood movie in the theaters in Pristina. In Rwanda, they weren't killing each other over who got the latest software package. They're talking about how they worship God and what their ethnic group is, what real or imagined slights they have against one another as groups. And we are not free of it here. I was in Texas the other day meeting with the daughter of James Byrd, the African American who was dragged to death in Texas. The other night, I went to the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights dinner in Washington and recognized the mother of Matthew Shepard, the young man who was killed in Wyoming because he was gay. So America's got some work to do here, too. We ought to pass the "Hate Crimes Act" and the "Employment Non Discrimination Act," and we ought to to show that we understand this. But let me say, how we respond to Kosovo will determine what kind of world we're going to live in. I think all of you who know me know that I have worked for peace, that I deplore violence, that I have been heartbroken by the people who have been innocents in this battle who have perished. You know, I'd a lot rather be in Northern Ireland giving speeches to my people about how they ought to put all their guns down. I want to go back and work on peace in the Middle East. I don't even think that we can intervene in all the ethnic conflicts in the world. We're not asking everybody to get along. We can't even ask them not to fight. But if we cannot stand, after the lessons of the 20th century, against the systematic killing of people and their uprooting because of their religion or their race or their ethnicity, then what kind of world are we leaving to our children? You know, I had a wonderful day today. I spent the day with my daughter today, and Hillary just got back from Macedonia. That's where she was in the refugee camps. And so we called her, and then we got lonesome, and we'd call her again. The three of us were talking about all this. And she was talking to me about these people and how they have lost everything and how they have loved ones they don't even know what happened to. There are tens of thousands of people who are unaccounted for. Nobody knows what happened to them. And she talked about this little girl that was holding her hand while she was speaking. The little girl had no idea what she was saying, just holding her hand. I saw them in Germany when I was there, the young women and the Muslim families where rape is an even worse thing than it is in our culture saying, "I want to talk to you, but these are things I cannot discuss in my family." A 15 year old boy stood up and said, "I cannot talk about Kosovo," and sat down and started crying. I ask you to think about this. What Europe and the United States is doing, what we are now engaging the Russians in trying to do we're not trying to redraw the map of Europe. We're not playing some power game. I don't want to control anybody's life. All I want to do is to create a world in which we do not idly turn away from systematic bigotry based on hatred of the other that leads to mass killing. And I believe, as difficult as all the questions are I have to answer here God, I grieve for those Chinese people that were killed in that horrible mistake that was made. As difficult as all the questions I have to answer, I would rather answer these questions than answer the question of, why am I having a good time in Los Angeles tonight and we have not lifted a finger to help those people? That is the question I would have no answer to. I would have no answer to that. They are a part of our community. If you want a world that will really be fit for your children to live in, if you want the benefits of the modern world, we need at home the philosophy the Democratic Party has brought that we're going to have all these benefits we're not going to leave anybody behind if we can help it. We're certainly not going to leave anybody behind that's willing to work to be a part of it. But even more, we have to build a sense of community, where we not only tolerate each other, we actually relish our differences. And we can have the security to relish them and make our lives more interesting because underneath we know that what binds us together is a whole lot more important than what's different about us. And I want to close with this story. Tom Daschle told you that we had these tribal leaders come to the White House. And he didn't tell you the whole story. We had the heads of 19 Indian tribes from the high northern plains, from the two Dakotas and Montana. They asked for a meeting at the White House through Senator Daschle and his colleagues. And then they came into the Roosevelt Room at the White House, which is in honor of Teddy, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Teddy Roosevelt's Nobel Peace Prize is hanging on the mantelpiece. And so the tribal leaders said, "Well, could we sit in a circle? That is our custom." So we sat in a circle. And each in their turn, they stood up and said, "Well, here's what we'd like to have help on. Here's our education concerns, our health care concerns, our economic concerns." And I came into the middle of the meeting, listened to it all. It was just fascinating. Then at the end, the guy who was sort of their main spokesman, the tribal leader, whose name was Tex Hall, interestingly enough, stood up and said, "Well, there's one other thing we want to do." He said, "Mr. President, we want to talk to you about Kosovo." He said, "You see, we know something about ethnic cleansing. And our country has come a long way. And we believe what you are doing is right. And so the chiefs have signed this proclamation supporting it." And then at the end of the room, another young man who was a tribal leader stood up, and he said, "I would like to speak." He had this beautiful silver necklace on. And he was very dignified, and he said, "Mr. President," he said, "I had two uncles. One landed on the beach at Normandy. One was the first Native American fighter pilot in the United States military." He said, "My great great grandfather was slaughtered by the 7th Calvary at Wounded Knee." He said, "We have come a long way from my great great grandfather's time, to my uncles' time, to this time." He said, "I have only one son, and I love him more than life. But I would be honored if he went to Kosovo to stand up for the human rights of people who are different from the majority." That is the journey America has made. That is the journey I hope we can help the world to make. And if we do, you will take care of the rest of our challenges. Thank you, and God bless you. May 14, 1999 Walter, I'd like to say something that I think a lot of us who've known you for many years could have been thinking. We laughed about how you've always been for losers and now you've had a few winners. But one of the reasons that we love you and admire you is that you stuck by the people with whom you agreed, whether they won or lost. A lot of people don't do that anymore we appreciate that. Let me say I'm delighted to be here with Governor Davis and with Sharon, Attorney General Lockyer, Mayor Brown he's funny, isn't he? Laughter I would have come all the way out here tonight just to hear Willie do that little shtick he did, you know? Laughter When I start to get bored with politics and kind of tired I and you know, it's 12 30 on my body clock, so I needed a little jolt. Laughter I want to thank Walter and Martin and Tom, Victoria, all the rest of you who put this dinner together tonight. I want to thank our Democratic Party officers for coming with me, Joe Andrew, Andy Tobias, and Beth Dozoretz. You know, today we were in Seattle before we came here. And we had all these exciting young people at this fundraiser we did, and a lot of them were kind of high tech folks. And Joe Andrew got up and said, "In 2000 we're going to win every election, from President to dogcatcher" as if that were a great distance. Laughter I was sort of hoping we would have a wider range than that myself. Laughter I want to thank Willie Mays for being here again. I want to thank Walter one of the greatest things Walter ever did for me was arrange for me to meet Willie Mays. And a lot of you know I am a big sports fan, and I collect memorabilia. I've got 100 year old golf clubs and all kinds of things, but the things that I treasure the most are the baseballs that Willie has autographed for me and my wife and my daughter. And I hope he won't be embarrassed by this, but I went to Atlanta the other day oh, a couple months ago to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the night Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record. And Hank and Billye are friends of Hillary's and mine, and we like them very much. So I went down there, and Hank Aaron had 12 Hall of Fame baseball players there Reggie Jackson and Frank Robinson, just a slew of great players. And we were sitting there, and I meet all of Hank's family and his in laws and all these there were thousands of people there. And I just, sort of off the top of my head, I said, "Hank, who's the greatest baseball player you ever played with?" He said, "Oh, that's an easy answer it's not even close Willie Mays." He said, "Not even close!" And I personally would like to thank Willie and his wonderful wife for the work they have done since leaving baseball and for their concern for our children. And I'm delighted to see them. I just talked to Hillary not long before I came here. She's on an airplane coming back you may have seen on the news today, she was in Macedonia visiting the refugees there. And I wanted to mention her, in particular, since we're all making jokes at Gray's expense including himself making jokes at his expense. The very first person who ever told me he would be elected Governor when he had been written off by all of the experts was my wife, who came to California. And she said, "Man, I've been out there and," she said, "I think he's going to win. He knows why he wants the job he's done a good job, and he inspires confidence." She said, "He inspires confidence in me, and I believe he would inspire confidence in other people." And sure enough, you have, and we're grateful to you, and we thank you. I would also like to thank Laura Tyson, who was the Chairman of my Council of Economic Advisers and head of my Economic Council, for being here. And she's now an academic, which means that sooner or later, she will have to criticize something I'm doing on the economy. Laughter So I'll give her advance dispensation. Ladies and gentlemen, the hour's late and most of you have heard me give this speech before. Laughter I'll tell you a story, one more story. One night in the mid 1980's I can't remember exactly when it was Tina Turner came to Little Rock, Arkansas, to do a concert. And you all remember, you know, she sort of faded from the scene, and then she made this huge recovery with an album called "Private Dancer." I remember because she had a saxophone player in her band who was a weight lifter. Remember that guy, the guy with the great big arms? He had arms as big as my neck, and he wore chains and stuff it was a weird deal. Laughter But the guy could play. So she comes to make this concert and she was playing at the Arkansas Fairgrounds and, I forget, Hillary had to go some place that night. So I had six tickets, and I took all these friends of ours and we went. And usually the guy who ran the concert put me sort of 15 rows back in the middle, so I had a real good seat but I wasn't conspicuous because I was the Governor, after all. But he knew I loved Tina Turner. So this night he completely embarrassed me by putting all six of us on the front row in the middle. And behind us there was a lady I later found out was a hairdresser in a small town about 50 miles away, dressed in a tiger outfit laughter complete with ears and tail and everything. It was an interesting night, all right. Laughter But anyway, here's the point I made about the speech you all laughed when I said you'd all heard the speech. Tina Turner sang all of her new songs, and everybody loved them. Then at the end of the concert the band started playing the introduction to her first hit, "Proud Mary." And as she walked up to the microphone, with all that energy packed into her, the crowd just went crazy before she ever said anything. So she backed off, and then she walked up again. The crowd went crazy again. And she looked at the crowd, and she said, "You know, I have been singing this song for 25 years, and it gets better every time I do it." So I thought, that's something I'll try to remember as I rock along through life. Laughter I want to make a case tonight that I hope you can remember. We were talking at our table, and I was looking at all of you, and I remembered little conversations we shared when you came by and we took the pictures. I always am interested as to what motivates people to get involved in politics, to make their contributions, to come to events like this. And when you go home tonight, I want you to think about why you came and what you're going to do tomorrow and in the days ahead. I am gratified by what has already been said, what the Governor said, what Walter said. I've loved being President. I love working with people like Mayor Brown, because we think we're supposed to actually enjoy what we're doing. And Gray is actually beginning to enjoy what he's doing. Laughter I hope it doesn't destroy his whole sort of persona, you know. Laughter But it is a great privilege to be in public service. You know, everybody talks about what a great burden it is. Well, nobody made us do this. It is a great privilege. It's an honor. And I am so gratified that the economy is in the shape it's in. I saw the pain in the faces of the people in California when I was running for President in 1992. And I wanted people here to believe that California was the cutting edge of tomorrow again. I wanted them to be full of optimism and hope and taking all these initiatives to meet the challenges of our country. And I'm grateful for the progress we've made in crime and welfare and education and so many other things. I'm glad that 90 percent of our kids are immunized against serious childhood diseases for the first time ever. I'm glad that we've got 100,000 young people in AmeriCorps. Many of them have served in northern California. It took the Peace Corps 20 years to get 100,000 volunteers. We got that many in the domestic national service program in 4 1 2 years. I'm proud of that. And I'm grateful for the chance to serve. But I want to make this point Whatever role I had in this was not as important as the fact that in 1992, our party united behind a vision and a set of ideas that we have then all worked like crazy for 6 years to make real in the life of America. And the reason you should be here tonight because I'm not running for anything the reason you should be here is not because you're glad I was President and you feel good about what's happened in California but because you understand that that there is no indispensable person, but there are indispensable ideas and indispensable attitudes. I ran for President, and I was happy as a clam at home with Hillary and Chelsea and the life we had. But I was very concerned that our country had no driving vision of what we were going to be like in the 21st century and no strategy to get us there. And I didn't like what I saw in Washington. Everybody was having the same old political debate over and over, sounded like a broken record every day. And if I was bored with it, I can only imagine how people who aren't addicted to politics, like I am, felt. And we tried to change all that. I really do want our children to live in a world in the next century where everybody has a chance to live out their dreams, where everybody is expected to be a responsible citizen, where we join together across all the lines that divide us celebrating the differences but appreciating even more our common humanity, and where America is trusted enough and strong enough to continue to lead the world to greater peace and freedom and prosperity. That's what I want. It's pretty simple. And I believed in 1992, and I believe more strongly today, that to have that kind of world, we had to have a different approach to politics. First, we had to believe we could grow the economy and preserve the environment at the same time. Second, we had to believe we could grow the economy in a way that had more entrepreneurs like you have in this part of our world, and at the same time make life better for ordinary middle class people and give more poor people a chance to work their way into the middle class. I believed there was a way you could lower the crime rate not just by prosecuting crime but by preventing it. I believed that we ought to put more money in education, but we had to raise standards, and I was tired of seeing poor people patronized, because I believe all of our children can learn. And lots of other things like that. I think a lot of times, the debates we have in Washington, they don't resonate very well with the real world experience people have in California or Arkansas or anywhere else in the country. And the story of this administration has been the story of a relentless effort for over 6 years now to take these basic ideas and that vision and turn them into real, concrete actions and results for the American people. Now, we still have a lot to do. I'm doing my best to get the Congress to address the challenges of the aging of America, to reform Social Security and Medicare and help people with long term care, and help people save for their own retirement. I'm asking the Congress to do it in a way that pays down the Government's debt. Did you ever think a politician could even talk about that? Because I believe that we can get the Government debt down in 15 years to its lowest point since before World War I. And if we do, interest rates will be lower investment will be higher there will be more businesses, more jobs, and higher incomes. And we will be relatively less dependent on the vagaries of the world financial markets. I believe that we have to do more to help people balance their work life and their family life. So when I talk about child care or family leave or the Patients' Bill of Rights, what I'm really saying is, most parents are working, and I think it's important for people to succeed at home and at work because the most important work in America is raising good children. And if it doesn't work out, as we often see, there is a grievous price to be paid. I am concerned in the aftermath of what happened at Littleton, but I am also hopeful because we had all these school shootings last year and people wanted to do things, and a lot of things were done. But I think for the first time, the whole country now believes that what happened with those children could happen in any community. And I believe the whole country wants to do better and also recognizes that many of our children fall victim every year, not in stunning, tragic, big ways but in quiet alleys or in drive by shootings or in other ways where they can almost die anonymously. And I want us to have a national campaign to make our children's lives less violent. And I'd like to close with just a reflection on that and what we're doing in Kosovo and point out what I think is in addition to economic opportunity for all and educational opportunity for all and the sense of general community I think the most important thing about the Democratic Party on the eve of the 21st century is our vision of what community means at home and our relationship to the rest of the world. And if you take these two difficult events and break them down, maybe I can make some sense of that. What I honestly believe about the Littleton situation and I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. I have been overwhelmingly impressed by almost all of the people I've seen from that community talking on television and going to the townhall meetings, some of the brave parents actually already who lost their children already able to try to make some contribution to a safer future for the rest of us. One father who lost his child was with Hillary last week, the day before Mother's Day, to be part of this whole antiviolence movement. But what I think is that we now understand I hope we do, as a people that if we're going to make America a safer place for our children, we have to stop pointing the fingers at one another and start assuming responsibility. We have to instead of saying, "I wish someone else would do something," we have to say, "Okay, I've shown up for duty. What am I supposed to do?" Because this is an exceedingly complex thing Willie and I could have an argument. I could take you know, we have the is it the entertainment culture or is it the gun culture? And he could take one side and I could take the other, and then 5 minutes later we could switch roles. We all know how to point fingers we're good at that and shift the blame. Let's start with the facts of life today. For whatever reason, there are more children in the United States, of all races and in all socioeconomic groups, that are at risk of being victims of violence. You would all accept that, I presume that is a fact, for whatever reason. And there are also children, therefore, at risk of being victims of violence from other young people. Therefore, there are a higher percentage of children in the United States than in most other advanced countries who are themselves vulnerable to violent conduct. Now, if we start with that, and we say, "Shouldn't we all be doing something," I think we can move to "yes" very quickly. One of the things that you see in all these tragic stories it's heartbreaking is how easy it is for children as they come of age and naturally seek their own independence to be strangers in their own homes and not to have people in their schools or their communities that are so connected to them that they can't drift off into the darkness. So the fundamental thing is, we have to still do a better job trying to help parents understand what it means for children to move into adolescence and to drift away, and to be given both independence and still be held accountable and be involved with their parents and their lives. And we have to help the schools do a better job of connecting and telling kids how they can find nonviolent ways to deal with their conflicts and how they can count no matter what group they're in and how they can be treated with respect no matter what group they're in. I don't see how anybody can dispute the fact that it's crazy to have a country where, you know, criminals can buy guns at gun shows they can't buy at gun stores. I mean, I think that's a pretty hard case to defend. I think it's a hard case to defend to say we've abolished assault weapons thanks in no small measure, by the way, to a citizen from San Francisco named Steve Sposato, who lost his wife in a shooting, a man who happened to be a Republican. I met him and his daughter. So we abolished assault weapons, but we let people keep bringing in these big ammunition clips and selling them legally as long as they were imported, as opposed to homegrown. How come these things are in the law? These things don't happen by accident, folks. I did the best I could back in 1994. I pushed that thing as hard as I could push. So now we have a sense all over the country we should close the loopholes. Florida, not normally known as a raving liberal State, voted 72 percent in a public referendum to close the gun show loophole, and we're having trouble getting it done in Washington. That's not good. It's not going to kill the NRA to change its position. The gun manufacturers did, and I applaud them. They deserve a lot of credit. There have been one of the most outstanding groups in this whole debate are the gun manufacturers, coming and saying, "Okay, let's clean up this business. Let's have responsible, commonsense controls. We want people to be able to hunt we want to support the rights of sportsmen but we don't need that. We need to deal with this." So they have their responsibility. But so, too, does the entertainment industry. You can say if you start from their perspective, just like you can say if you start from the gun perspective, "Guns don't kill people, people do." Right? If you start from the entertainment perspective, you can say, "Well, we show these movies and we sell these video games in Europe and you don't have this level of violence." You can say that in other words, from anybody else's perspective, you can always say this. But here is the thing. Start with the kids. We have more kids getting hurt and more kids hurting other kids. Start with the facts. And we now have over 300 studies that show that the volume of sustained exposure to violence through the media and now increasingly through interactive video games is so great that it desensitizes children dramatically to the impact of violence and the real consequences of it, and therefore makes the most vulnerable children more likely to go over the edge. Now, having said that, we have to find some commonsense things we can do. For example, you could change the whole advertising strategy of a lot of these games and other media outlets and not have a lot of the problems you have. But lots of other things can be done. I'm trying to make a larger point here. How we respond to this and whether we take on something really big and important like this and do what the Mothers and Students Against Drunk Driving did to drive down drunk driving or do what the 10,000 business people did to hire 400,000 people off welfare so people wouldn't be just thrown in the streets how we respond to this and whether we respond to this as one community coming together instead of pointing the finger at each other will define in large measure what kind of country we're going to be in the 21st century. And the same is true of Kosovo. What in the world have these two things got in common? Well, in both cases, there at least is some evidence that part of the problem was one group of people looking down on another group of people and getting to where they hated them and then getting to where they thought it was legitimate to take them out. And if you look all over the world today, from the Middle East to the Balkans, to Rwanda and Africa, to the still unresolved conflict in Northern Ireland, what is at the root of most of the world's problems on the edge of the 21st century? Is it that the Kosovar Albanians don't have as good computers as the Serbs? Are we fighting over some software secret in central Africa? Not on your life. The economics are bringing people together. That's one of the reasons we're going to get this thing done in Ireland this year. What is dividing people on the edge of this brave new brilliant high tech interdependent world are the oldest demons of human society, our hatred and fear of people who are different from us. First, you're scared of them then you hate them then you dehumanize them then it's okay to kill them. And isn't it ironic that we're sitting here a stone's throw from Silicon Valley, dreaming about the marvels of modern technology and at risk of being held hostage to the oldest, most primitive human designs? So you want to know why we're in Kosovo? Because it's in Europe, where we were pulled into two wars in the 20th century and the cold war and because we had the capacity to stand against that kind of ethnic cleansing and slaughter and because when we couldn't get it done for 4 long years in Bosnia, there was a trail of 2 1 2 million refugees and a quarter of a million people dead, and we still had to get in and put Humpty Dumpty back together again and tell people they had to stop killing each other because of their different religious and ethnic background. But I'm telling you, there are common threads to what is there the hatred of those boys built up in Littleton, hatred looking up at the athletes, hatred in their minds looking down at the minorities the hatred in what happened when that poor man, James Byrd, was murdered in Texas and his body was torn apart hatred in what happened to Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. It's all the same thing. We're all scared. Not anybody in the world is not scared from time to time. How many days do you wake up in a good mood? And how many days do you wake up in not such a good mood? Every human being has got a little scale inside. It's like the scales of justice and hope and fear. And some days the scales are just perfectly in balance, some days they're just you're crazy with hope, and some days you're gripped with fear. And the more fearful you are, the more people who are different from you seem to present a threat. And here we are. Look at California. Look at San Francisco. Look at Seattle, where I was today. Look at the diversity of our population, racial and otherwise religious, all the differences you can imagine sexual orientation, the whole 9 yards. Look at all the differences in our population. In our dreams, all people get a chance to become what God meant for them to be and we pull together. In other words, we finally got a chance to be the country our Founders said we ought to be when they knew darn well we weren't. I mean, when only white men with property could vote, they said all are created equal, and they knew what they were doing. These guys were not dummies. Every now and then, I go over to the Jefferson Memorial and read what Thomas Jefferson said, "When I think of slavery, I tremble to think that God is just." He knew exactly what he was doing. They knew that this whole struggle would be sort of an endless effort to try to make real these ideals. And here we are about to do it. And are we going to let the whole thing go haywire because of the most primitive impulses in human society, both inside our country and beyond our borders? That man that blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City, he was poisoned with hatred and a sort of blind irrational notion that if you worked for the Federal Government there was something inherently bad about you. And I believe the distinguishing characteristics of our country in the 21st century has to be that we constantly, consistently reaffirm that for all the differences among us we don't have to like each other, but we have to respect each other, we have to tolerate each other, and we have to actively affirm each other's common humanity. And if you want all this modern technology to be put at the service of your children's dreams instead of terrorists and madmen, then you have got to say this is one thing America will stand for, overall, above all, beyond everything else. And that is what all these incidents have in common. We must not let the great promise of the modern world be undermined by the most ancient of hatreds. We cannot fundamentally alter human nature, but we can alter the rules by which all of us let our nature play out. And we can call forth our better selves. That is what we have worked for 6 1 2 years to do. And you know as well as I do, if the economy works better it's easier to do. But when you go home tonight and you get up tomorrow and somebody says, "Why in the world did you write a check and go to that thing?" Tell them, "Because I believe in the vision and the ideas that the country has followed in the last 6 years. We have a lot more to do, and most important of all, I really want America to be a community and a model to the world, because I want my children to have a future more like my dreams than the worst nightmares we see in the paper." We can do it, but not unless we work at it. Thank you, and God bless you. May 13, 1999 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Commander Pouliot. I am grateful to you and to Veterans of Foreign Wars for your support of America's efforts in Kosovo. General Chilcoat, Secretary Albright, Secretary Cohen, Secretary West, National Security Adviser Berger, Deputy Secretary Gober, General Shelton and the Joint Chiefs, and to the members of the military and members of the VFW who are here. I'd also like to thank Congressman Engel and Congressman Quinn for coming to be with us today. I am especially honored to be here with our veterans who have struggled for freedom in World War II and in the half century since. Your service inspires us today, as we work with our Allies to reverse the systematic campaign of terror and to bring peace and freedom to Kosovo. To honor your sacrifices and fulfill the vision of a peaceful Europe for which so many of the VFW members risked your lives, NATO's mission, as the Commander said, must succeed. My meetings last week in Europe with Kosovar refugees, with Allied leaders, with Americans in uniform, strengthened my conviction that we will succeed. With just 7 months left in the 20th century, Kosovo is a crucial test Can we strengthen a global community grounded in cooperation and tolerance, rooted in common humanity? Or will repression and brutality, rooted in ethnic, racial, and religious hatreds, dominate the agenda for the new century and the new millennium? The World War II veterans here fought in Europe and in the Pacific to prevent the world from being dominated by tyrants who used racial and religious hatred to strengthen their grip and to justify mass killing. President Roosevelt said in his final Inaugural Address "We have learned that we cannot live alone. We cannot live alone at peace. We have learned that our own well being is dependent on the well being of other nations far away. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community." The sacrifices of American and Allied troops helped to end a nightmare, rescue freedom, and lay the groundwork for the modern world that has benefited all of us. In the long cold war years, our troops stood for freedom and against communism until the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain collapsed. Now, the nations of central Europe are free democracies. We've welcomed new members to NATO and formed security partnerships with many other countries all across Europe's east, including Russia and Ukraine. Both the European Union and NATO have pledged to continue to embrace new members. Some have questioned the need for continuing our security partnership with Europe at the end of the cold war. But in this age of growing international interdependence, America needs a strong and peaceful Europe more than ever as our partner for freedom and for economic progress and our partner against terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and instability. The promise of a Europe undivided, democratic, and at peace, is at long last within reach. But we all know it is threatened by the ethnic and religious turmoil in southeastern Europe, where most leaders are freely elected and committed to cooperation, both within and among their neighbors. Unfortunately, for more than 10 years now, President Milosevic has pursued a different course for Serbia, and for much of the rest of the former Yugoslavia. Since the late 1980's, he has acquired, retained, and sought to expand his power by inciting religious and ethnic hatred in the cause of Greater Serbia, by demonizing and dehumanizing people, especially the Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims, whose history, culture, and very presence in the former Republic of Yugoslavia impedes that vision of a Greater Serbia. He unleashed wars in Bosnia and Croatia, creating 2 million refugees and leaving a quarter of a million people dead. A decade ago, he stripped Kosovo of its constitutional self government and began harassing and oppressing its people. He has also rejected brave calls among his own Serb people for greater liberty. Today, he uses repression and censorship at home to stifle dissent and to conceal what he is doing in Kosovo. Though his ethnic cleansing is not the same as the ethnic extermination of the Holocaust, the two are related, both vicious, premeditated, systematic oppression fueled by religious and ethnic hatred. This campaign to drive the Kosovars from their land and to, indeed, erase their very identity is an affront to humanity and an attack not only on a people but on the dignity of all people. Even now, Mr. Milosevic is being investigated by the International War Crimes Tribunal for alleged war crimes, including mass killing and ethnic cleansing. Until recently, 1.7 million ethnic Albanians, about the population of our State of Nebraska, lived in Kosovo among a total population of 2 million, the other being Serbs. The Kosovar Albanians are farmers and factory workers, lawyers and doctors, mothers, fathers, school children. They have worked to build better lives under increasingly difficult circumstances. Today, most of them are in camps in Albania, Macedonia, and elsewhere, nearly 900,000 refugees, some searching desperately for lost family members. Or they are trapped within Kosovo itself, perhaps 600,000 more of them, lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home. Or they are buried in mass graves dug by their executioners. I know we see these pictures of the refugees on television every night, and most people would like another story. But we must not get refugee fatigue. We must not forget the real victims of this tragedy. We must give them aid and hope. And we in the United States must make sure must make sure their stories are told. A Kosovar farmer told how Serb tanks drove into his village. Police lined up all the men, about 100 of them, by a stream and opened fire. The farmer was hit by a bullet in the shoulder. The weight of falling bodies all round him pulled him into the stream. The only way he could stay alive was to pretend to be dead. From a camp in Albania, he said, "My daughter tells me, Father, sleep. Why don't you sleep?' But I can't. All those dead bodies on top of mine." Another refugee told of trying to return to his village in Kosovo's capital, Pristina. "On my way," he said, "I met one of my relatives. He told me not to go back because there were snipers on the balconies. Minutes after I left, the man was killed. I found him. Back in Pristina no one could go out because of the Serb policemen in the streets. It was terrible to see our children they were so hungry. Finally, I tried to go shopping. Four armed men jumped out and said, We're going to kill you if you don't get out of here.' My daughters were crying day and night. We were hearing stories about rape. They begged me, Please get us out of there.' So we joined thousands of people going through the streets at night toward the train station. In the train wagons, police were tearing up passports, taking money, taking jewelry." Another refugee reported, "The Serbs surrounded us. They killed four children because their families did not have money to give to the police. They killed them with knives, not guns." Another recalled, "The police came early in the morning. They executed almost 100 people. They killed them all, women and children. They set a fire and threw the bodies in." A pregnant woman watched Serb forces shoot her brother in the stomach. She said, "My father asked for someone to help this boy, but the answer he got was a beating. The Serbs told my brother to put his hands up, and then they shot him 10 times. I saw this. I saw my brother die." Serb forces, their faces often concealed by masks, as they were before in Bosnia, have rounded up Kosovar women and repeatedly raped them. They have said to children, "Go into the woods and die of hunger." Last week in Germany I met with a couple of dozen of these refugees, and I asked them all, in turn, to speak about their experience. A young man I'd say 15 or 16 years old stood up and struggled to talk. Finally, he just sat down and said, "Kosovo, I cannot talk about Kosovo." Nine of every ten Kosovar Albanians now has been driven from their homes, thousands murdered, at least 100,000 missing, many young men led away in front of their families over 500 cities, towns, and villages torched. All this has been carried out, you must understand, according to a plan carefully designed months earlier in Belgrade. Serb officials pre positioned forces, tanks, and fuel and mapped out the sequence of attack What were the soldiers going to do what were the paramilitary people going to do what were the police going to do. Town after town has seen the same brutal procedures Serb forces taking valuables and identity papers, seizing or executing civilians, destroying property records, bulldozing and burning homes, mocking the fleeing. We and our Allies, with Russia, have worked hard for a just peace. Just last fall, Mr. Milosevic agreed under pressure to halt the previous assault on Kosovo, and hundreds of thousands of Kosovars were able to return home. But soon, he broke his commitment and renewed violence. In February and March, again we pressed for peace, and the Kosovar Albanian leaders accepted a comprehensive plan, including the disarming of their insurgent forces, though it did not give them all they wanted. But instead of joining the peace, Mr. Milosevic, having already massed some 40,000 troops in and around Kosovo, unleashed his forces to intensify their atrocities and complete his brutal scheme. Now, from the outset of this conflict, we and our Allies have been very clear about what Belgrade must do to end it. The central imperative is this The Kosovars must be able to return home and live in safety. For this to happen, the Serb forces must leave partial withdrawals can only mean continued civil war with the Kosovar insurgents. There must also be an international security force with NATO at its core. Without that force, after all they've been through, the Kosovars simply won't go home. Their requirements are neither arbitrary nor overreaching. These things we have said are simply what is necessary to make peace work. There are those who say Europe and its North American allies have no business intervening in the ethnic conflicts of the Balkans. They are the inevitable result, these conflicts, according to some, of centuries old animosities which were unleashed by the end of the cold war restraints in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. I, myself, have been guilty of saying that on an occasion or two, and I regret it now more than I can say. For I have spent a great deal of time in these last 6 years reading the real history of the Balkans. And the truth is that a lot of what passes for common wisdom in this area is a gross oversimplification and misreading of history. The truth is that for centuries these people have lived together in the Balkans and southeastern Europe with greater or lesser degree of tension but often without anything approaching the intolerable conditions and conflicts that exist today. And we do no favors to ourselves or to the rest of the world when we justify looking away from this kind of slaughter by oversimplifying and conveniently, in our own way, demonizing the whole Balkans by saying that these people are simply incapable of civilized behavior with one another. Second, there is people say, "Okay, maybe it's not inevitable, but look, there are a lot of ethnic problems in the world. Russia has dealt with Chechnya, and you've got Abkhazia and Ossetia on the borders of Russia. And you've got all these ethnic problems everywhere, and religious problems. That's what the Middle East is about. You've got Northern Ireland. You've got the horrible, horrible genocide in Rwanda. You've got the war now between Eritrea and Ethiopia." They say, "Oh, we've got all these problems, and, therefore, why do you care about this?" I say to them, there is a huge difference between people who can't resolve their problems peacefully and fight about it and people who resort to systematic ethnic cleansing and slaughter of people because of their religious or ethnic background. There is a difference. There is a difference. And that is the difference that NATO that our Allies have tried to recognize and act on. I believe that is what we saw in Bosnia and Kosovo. I think the only thing we have seen that really rivals that, rooted in ethnic or religious destruction, in this decade is what happened in Rwanda. And I regret very much that the world community was not organized and able to act quickly there as well. Bringing the Kosovars home is a moral issue, but it is a very practical, strategic issue. In a world where the future will be threatened by the growth of terrorist groups, the easy spread of weapons of mass destruction, the use of technology including the Internet, for people to learn how to make bombs and wreck countries, this is also a significant security issue. Particularly because of Kosovo's location, it is just as much a security issue for us as ending the war in Bosnia was. Though we are working hard with the international community to sustain them, a million or more permanent Kosovar refugees could destabilize Albania, Macedonia, the wider region, become a fertile ground for radicalism and vengeance that would consume southeastern Europe. And if Europe were overwhelmed with that, you know we would have to then come in and help them. Far better for us all to work together, to be firm, to be resolute, to be determined to resolve this now. If the European community and its American and Canadian allies were to turn away from and, therefore, reward ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, all we would do is to create for ourselves an environment where this sort of practice was sanctioned by other people who found it convenient to build their own political power, and therefore, we would be creating a world of trouble for Europe and for the United States in the years ahead. I'd just like to make one more point about this, in terms of the history of the Balkans. As long as people have existed, there have been problems among people who were different from one another, and there probably always will be. But you do not have systematic slaughter and an effort to eradicate the religion, the culture, the heritage, the very record of presence of the people in any area unless some politician thinks it is in his interest to foment that sort of hatred. That's how these things happen. People with organized political and military power decide it is in their interest, that they get something out of convincing the people they control or they influence to go kill other people and uproot them and dehumanize them. I don't believe that the Serb people in their souls are any better I mean, any worse than we are. Do you? Do you believe when a little baby is born into a certain ethnic or racial group, that somehow they have some poison in there that has to, at some point when they grow up, turn into some vast flame of destruction? Congressman Engel has got more Albanians than any Congressman in the country in his district. Congressman Quinn's been involved in the peace process in Ireland. You think there's something about the Catholic and Protestant Irish kids that sort of genetically predisposes them to you know better than that, because we're about to make peace there, I hope getting closer. Political leaders do this kind of thing. Think the Germans would have perpetrated the Holocaust on their own without Hitler? Was there something in the history of the German race that made them do this? No. We've got to get straight about this. This is something political leaders do. And if people make decisions to do these kinds of things, other people can make decisions to stop them. And if the resources are properly arrayed, it can be done. And that is exactly what we intend to do. Now, last week, despite our differences over the NATO action in Kosovo, Russia joined us, through the G 8 foreign ministers, in affirming our basic condition for ending the conflict, in affirming that the mass expulsion of the Kosovars cannot stand. We and Russia agreed that the international force ideally should be endorsed by the United Nations, as it was in Bosnia. And we do want Russian forces, along with those of other nations, to participate, because a Russian presence will help to reassure the Serbs who live in Kosovo, and they will need some protection, too, after all that has occurred. NATO and Russian forces have served well side by side in Bosnia, with forces from many other countries. And with all the difficulties, the tensions, the dark memories that still exist in Bosnia, the Serbs, the Muslims, and the Croats are still at peace and still working together. Nobody claims that we can make everyone love each other overnight. That is not required. But what is required are basic norms of civilized conduct. Until Serbia accepts these conditions, we will continue to grind down its war machine. Today our Allied air campaign is striking at strategic targets in Serbia and directly at Serb forces in Kosovo, making it harder for them to obtain supplies, protect themselves, and attack the ethnic Albanians who are still there. NATO actions will not stop until the conditions I have described for peace are met. Last week I had a chance to meet with our troops in Europe, those who are flying the missions, and those who are organizing and leading our humanitarian assistance effort. I can tell you that you and all Americans can be very, very proud of them. They are standing up for what is right. They are performing with great skill and courage and sense of purpose. And in their attempts to avoid civilian casualties, they are sometimes risking their own lives. The wing commander at Spangdahlem Air Force Base in Germany told me, and I quote, "Sir, our team wants to stay with this mission until it's finished." I am very grateful to these men and women. They are worthy successors to those of you in this audience who are veterans today. Of course, we regret any casualties that are accidental, including those at the Chinese Embassy. But let me be clear again These are accidents. They are inadvertent tragedies of conflict. We have worked very hard to avoid them. I'm telling you, I talked to pilots who told me that they had been fired at with mobile weapons from people in the middle of highly populated villages, and they turned away rather than answer fire because they did not want to risk killing innocent civilians. That is not our policy. But those of you who wear the uniform of our country and the many other countries represented here in this room today and those of you who are veterans know that it is simply not possible to avoid casualties of noncombatants in this sort of encounter. We are working hard. And I think it is truly remarkable I would ask the world to note that we have now flown over 19,000 sorties, thousands and thousands of bombs have been dropped, and there have been very few incidents of this kind. I know that you know how many there have been because Mr. Milosevic makes sure that the media has access to them. I grieve for the loss of the innocent Chinese and for their families. I grieve for the loss of the innocent Serbian civilians and their families. I grieve for the loss of the innocent Kosovars who were put into a military vehicle that our people thought was a military vehicle, and they've often been used as shields. But I ask you to remember the stories I told you earlier. There are thousands of people that have been killed systematically by the Serb forces. There are 100,000 people who are still missing. We must remember who the real victims are here and why this started. It is no accident that Mr. Milosevic has not allowed the international media to see the slaughter and destruction in Kosovo. There is no picture reflecting the story that one refugee told of 15 men being tied together and set on fire while they were alive. No, there are no pictures of that. But we have enough of those stories to know that there is a systematic effort that has animated our actions, and we must not forget it. Now, Serbia faces a choice. Mr. Milosevic and his allies have dragged their people down a path of racial and religious hatred. This has resulted, again and again, in bloodshed, in loss of life, in loss of territory, and denial of the Serbs' own freedom and, now, in an unwinnable conflict against the united international community. But there is another path available, one where people of different backgrounds and religions work together, within and across national borders, where people stop redrawing borders and start drawing blueprints for a prosperous, multiethnic future. This is the path the other nations of southeastern Europe have adopted. Day after day, they work to improve lives, to build a future in which the forces that pull people together are stronger than those that tear them apart. Albania and Bulgaria, as well as our NATO Ally Greece, have overcome historical differences to recognize the independence of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and others have deepened freedoms, promoted tolerance, pursued difficult economic reforms. Slovenia has advanced democracy at home and prosperity, stood for regional integration, increased security cooperation with a center to defuse landmines left from the conflict in Bosnia. These nations are reaffirming that discord is not inevitable, that there is not some Balkan disease that has been there for centuries, always waiting to break out. They are drawing on a rich past where peoples of the region did, in fact, live together in peace. Now, we and our Allies have been helping to build that future, but we have to accelerate our efforts. We will work with the European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, and others to ease the immediate economic strains, to relieve debt burden, to speed reconstruction, to advance economic reforms and regional trade. We will promote political freedom and tolerance of minorities. At our NATO Summit last month we agreed to deepen our security engagement in the region, to adopt an ambitious program to help aspiring nations improve their candidacies to join the NATO Alliance. They have risked and sacrificed to support the military and humanitarian efforts. They deserve our support. Last Saturday was the anniversary of one of the greatest days in American history and in the history of freedom, V E Day. Though America celebrated that day in 1945, we did not pack up and go home. We stayed to provide economic aid, to help to bolster democracy, to keep the peace and because our strength and resolve was important as Europe rebuilt, learned to live together, faced new challenges together. The resources we devoted to the Marshall plan, to NATO, to other efforts, I think we would all agree have been an enormous bargain for our long term prosperity and security here in the United States, just as the resources we are devoting here at this institution to reaching out to people from other nations, to their officers, to their military, in a spirit of cooperation are an enormous bargain for the future security of the people of the United States. Now, that's what I want to say in my last point here. War is expensive peace is cheaper. Prosperity is downright profitable. We have to invest in the rebuilding of this region. Southeastern Europe, after the cold war, was free but poor. As long as they are poor, they will offer a less compelling counterweight to the kind of ethnic exclusivity and oppression that Mr. Milosevic preaches. If you believe the Marshall plan worked and you believe war is to be avoided whenever possible and you understand how expensive it is and how profitable prosperity is, how much we have gotten out of what we have done, then we have to work with our European Allies to rebuild southeastern Europe and to give them an economic future that will pull them together. The European Union is prepared to take the lead role in southeastern Europe's development. Russia, Ukraine, other nations of Europe's east are building democracy they want to be a part of this. We are trying to do this in other places in the world. What a great ally Japan has been for peace and prosperity and will be again as they work to overcome their economic difficulty. Despite our present problems, I still believe we must remain committed to building a long term strategic partnership with China. We must work together with people where we can, as we prepare, always, to protect and defend our security if we must. But a better world and a better Europe are clearly in America's interests. Serbia and the rest of the Balkans should be part of it. So I want to say this one more time Our quarrel is not with the Serbian people. The United States has been deeply enriched by Serbian Americans. Millions of Americans are now cheering for some Serbian Americans as we watch the basketball playoffs every night on television. People of Serbian heritage are an important part of our society. We can never forget that the Serbs fought bravely with the Allies against Fascist aggression in World War II, that they suffered much that Serbs, too, have been uprooted from their homes and have suffered greatly in the conflicts of the past decade that Mr. Milosevic provoked. But the cycle of violence has to end. The children of the Balkans, all of them, deserve the chance to grow up without fear. Serbs simply must free themselves of the notion that their neighbors must be their enemies. The real enemy is a poisonous hatred unleashed by a cynical leader, based on a distorted view of what constitutes real national greatness. The United States has become greater as we have shed racism, as we have shed a sense of superiority, as we have become more committed to working together across the lines that divide us, as we have found other ways to define meaning and purpose in life. And so has every other country that has embarked on that course. We stand ready, therefore, to embrace Serbia as a part of a new Europe if the people of Serbia are willing to invest and embrace that kind of future if they are ready to build a Serbia, and a Yugoslavia, that is democratic and respects the rights and dignity of all people if they are ready to join a world where people reach across the divide to find their common humanity and their prosperity. This is the right vision and the right course. It is not only the morally right thing for America it is the right thing for our security interests over the long run. It is the vision for which the veterans in this room struggled so valiantly, for which so many others have given their lives. With your example to guide us, and with our Allies beside us, it is a vision that will prevail. And it is very, very much worth standing for. Thank you, and God bless you. May 12, 1999 Thank you very much. Please be seated and good afternoon. Madam Attorney General, Mr. Holder, Officer Hall, Senator Leahy, Congressman Stupak, Senator Biden, Senator Specter. There are now over 50 Members of Congress here, I think at least that many had accepted to come. And we see our mayor there, Mayor Williams Mayor Schmoke Mayor Rendell, and other officials Associate Attorney General Fisher Treasury Under Secretary Enforcement Jim Johnson and the Director of our COPS Office, Joe Brann. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here today, and welcome. Five years ago this summer, after a remarkable effort in Congress which required, among other things, the breaking of an intense filibuster, with the support of many of the people here today, I was able to sign into law a crime bill that was the first of its kind a comprehensive bill that funded local solutions to local problems and enhanced the promising practice of community policing a bill that also banned assault weapons and demanded tougher punishment for the toughest criminals and provided innovative prevention strategies to keep our young people out of trouble in the first place. It was a crime bill that brought our laws into line with our oldest values, requiring all of us to take responsibility at every level of government and every community in America to prevent crime and protect our families. I'd like to say a special word of thanks to Senator Biden who is here today for his extraordinary efforts in what seems like, at once, a long time ago and only yesterday. Today we know that the strategy embodied in the crime bill, which was really written by local police officers and law enforcement officials, is working. The murder rate is down to its lowest level in 30 years violent crime has dropped 20 percent in the last 6 years alone and in many smaller ways, reducing crimes like vandalism and littering that undermine the quality of life. We are beginning to repair the social fabric and restore civility to everyday life. There are many reasons for this success. The Brady bill has stopped over 250,000 illegal handgun sales to felons, fugitives, and stalkers. The assault weapons ban has helped so have tougher penalties and the waning of the devastating crack epidemic. But police chiefs, politicians, and people on the street all agree that the most important factor has been community policing. After all, until the crime bill passed, the violent crime had tripled over the preceding 30 years, but the size of our police forces had increased by only 10 percent. Where police officers, therefore, used to cruise anonymously through the streets, now community police officers walk the beat and know the people in the neighborhoods, becoming involved in the lives of the people they protect and involving them in the fight against crime. Community policing has worked miracles in many of our cities, where violent crime once was out of control and law abiding citizens mistrusted police often as much as they feared gangs. Now, in cities and communities all across America, residents work with police officers forming neighborhood watches, banding together against drug dealers, building connections that are the core of community life and the heart of civil society. When I signed the crime bill I pledged to help communities all over our Nation fund 100,000 community police officers by the year 2000. Today we are keeping the pledge. Since 1994, the COPS program has funded 99,000 new police officers, over half already on the beat. Today I am pleased to announce the latest COPS grants, over 96 million for nearly 1,500 police officers in more than 500 communities. This will bring us to over 100,000 community police officers funded, ahead of schedule and under budget. And I thank you for all of your efforts in that regard. In making America's thin blue line thicker and stronger, our Nation will be safer. But you and I know our job is far from finished. Last week I sent new legislation to Congress to close the loopholes in our gun laws, raise the age of handgun ownership to 21, hold adults liable for keeping, recklessly keeping guns and ammunition within the reach of children, and asking for background checks for the purchase of explosives. Today I will send to Congress a new crime bill for the 21st century, to advance our crime fighting strategy in several respects and build on the successes of the 1994 crime act. We know what works, and we should make certain that those efforts continue and are expanded. We know, too, that crime is still too high in too many communities. And the next stage of our crime fighting strategy must focus with renewed intensity on the high crime areas, to break the cycle of violence on our meanest streets. Finally, we know we face new threats as a result of the new technologies of the information age. So here's what the bill does. First, and most important, it expands the COPS program, helping communities to hire up to 50,000 more police officers, especially those hardest hit by crime. It will help them hire local prosecutors who work much as community police officers do in the neighborhoods where they can make the biggest difference. The bill will also give 21st century tools to our police officers to fight the criminals who, themselves, increasingly use technology to commit crimes and to avoid capture. The bill will provide grants to help communities encourage schools, faith based groups, and citizens, themselves, in restoring peace to our neighborhood. School districts can use the grants for preventive efforts that will reduce the likelihood of tragic violence. The second thing the bill will do is to help steer young people away from crime and gangs by strengthening antitruancy and mentoring programs, by cracking down on gang members who intimidate witnesses. Third, the bill will help to break the cycle of crime and drugs. Three out of four people in the criminal justice system have drug problems. If we treat those drug problems, we can cut the crime rate dramatically. The bill says to prisoners, "If you stay on drugs, you stay behind bars to those on parole, if you want to keep your freedom, you must stay free of drugs." Fourth, the crime bill will do more to protect our most vulnerable citizens. It will punish retirement rip off artists, nursing home operators who abuse and neglect their residents, telemarketers who prey on older Americans. It will toughen penalties for people who commit violent crimes in the presence of children and reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Finally, the crime bill will strengthen our efforts to combat international crime and terrorism. The threat of weapons of mass destruction is real and increasing in an age of technological change and open borders. The bill will make it a Federal crime to possess the biological agents used in such weapons without a legitimate, peaceful purpose. This is the kind of comprehensive approach that has brought crime down 6 years in a row now. It is the kind of tough but smart approach we need in the new century. I am pleased that so many Members of the Congress are committed to move this agenda forward this year. I thank the Democrats who have come out in support of the legislation, and I hope that, as in 1994, we will enjoy strong support from Republican Members who share our objectives. And I thank those who are here today. I look forward to working with members of both parties to protect our families and to make our communities safe. Now, as you all know, this is Police Week, and you see a number of police officers behind me and out in the audience. It's a week where we pay tribute to our Nation's law enforcement officers. Without their courage, commitment, and ability to meet the challenges of our time and to help keep our streets safe, life would be much more difficult in America. It is fitting, therefore, that the next speaker is a young community police officer from the Wilmington, Delaware, Police Department, funded through our COPS program, who used to be, I might add, a fifth grade teacher and who truly represents the changing face and the bright future of policing in America. Officer Jonathan Hall was a teacher when he decided to become a police officer, but he still finds time to be a mentor to at risk young people. And he takes every chance he can to talk to children about how they can protect themselves from crime. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming a man who symbolizes what we have been working to bring to America for the last 6 years, Officer Jonathan Hall. May 07, 1999 Thank you very much. You know, when Roy was doing that riff, you know, "Before he came, I didn't know I needed new furniture I didn't know I needed new art work I didn't know I needed" Mary kept getting redder and redder, and finally she says, "He may not know he needs another place to spend the night tonight." Laughter I must say this is a lot better than the last hovel we spent the night in. Laughter Let me say to all of you, I've had a wonderful time here tonight, seeing so many of my old friends. There are a lot of people here the ones Roy mentioned and also Carlos Truan, Gonzalo Barrientos a lot of other people who were with Roy and Garry and Judy and Nancy and Tom, all the rest of us, way back in 1972. And we have remained friends for a long time. And during most of that time, with the odd interruption, sometimes the odd, wonderful interruption like the reign of Governor Richards, the election of Lloyd Doggett, we've been in the minority. And I want to talk tonight a little bit about I want to have kind of a serious conversation tonight about why I really came here, because what Joe said is right. I'm not running for anything. And I would seize any excuse to come here to Austin, because I had some of the happiest days of my life here, and I have a very jealous wife who wishes she were here today. But for the next 2 years, I'm helping the Democratic Party because I believe it's the right thing to do for America. I hear a lot of folks on the other side kind of licking their lips and saying, "Well, wait until the next election, and we'll have Clinton out of the way. Maybe it will be better." What I want to say to you is that I am very grateful that I've had the chance to serve you. And I am profoundly grateful that we have the lowest unemployment in 30 years and the lowest welfare rolls in forever and a day they're half the size they were before and the lowest crime rate in 25 years. Roy was saying that we've got 90 percent of our children immunized against serious diseases for the first time in history. The doors of college are virtually open to every American now because of our HOPE tax credit and the student loan changes we've made. We've set aside more land in perpetuity than any administration, except for the two Roosevelts, in American history. I'm grateful for all that. But what I want you to understand is that I'm grateful because I got a chance to implement a set of ideas that now represent the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party. And it is very different from the driving philosophy of the other party. And if the American people like the results that have been achieved, then we need to support those people running for the Congress and the White House who believe in these ideas. In 1991, when the incumbent President was at 75 percent approval and I decided to make this race when nobody but my mother and my wife thought I could win, I did it because I was worried about my country and my Capital. Because it seemed to me that there was nothing particularly wrong with America that couldn't be fixed if we would just open our eyes and go to work. The unemployment rate was high, inequality was increasing, the social problems were worsening, and we had a lot of problems around the world that we didn't seem to have any governing idea of dealing with. But I felt great about America. I just thought we had to change the way Washington worked. Just go back in your mind to that period and that long period where the other party spent 12 years telling us how terrible the Government was, and a lot of our guys were sort of fighting a rearguard action defending it. But most of the ideological battles which took place in Washington were about yesterday instead of about tomorrow. And so I set off on this crazy journey with a lot of you, based on a few simple ideas. First of all, I asked myself, what is the problem? The problem is that we have not thought about how to take full advantage of this explosion in technology and the globalization of the economy in society and at the same time figure out how not to leave anybody behind and make our families and our communities stronger and maintain our push for peace and prosperity around the world. We haven't thought about how to make the transition in a way that not only provides vast opportunities for people like those of us in this beautiful setting tonight, but makes America as a nation stronger. And it seemed to me that what we had to do is to go back to some very basic things that we had an obligation to try to have opportunity for every person who was responsible enough to deserve it that we had to try to build a community made up of every law abiding citizen without regard to what other differences they had that we had to commit ourselves to be more involved in the rest of the world, not less involved, because the world is growing smaller and smaller and that we needed a different sort of Government that could be much smaller and it is today, by the way. It's the same size it was in 1962. That's the size of your Federal Government today. And I'm proud of that. But what you need to know, we made it smaller but more active, focused not so much on telling people what to do or maintaining old bureaucracies but giving people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives. Those were my ideas opportunity, responsibility, community, a Government that gives people the tools to make the most of their own lives. And I thought to myself, there are a whole lot of things people believe that I don't think are true. I believed if we work at it, we could reduce the deficit and still increase our spending in education and health care if we did it right. Well, 6 years later, we've got a huge surplus, and we've nearly doubled spending in education and health care. I believed we could improve the economy and improve the environment. The air is cleaner and the water is cleaner than it was 6 years ago. We've reduced chemicals in the atmosphere from chemical plant emissions by 90 percent in the last 6 years. I believed that we could help people succeed at work and at home. And I still think that's one of the biggest problems we've got in this country, people trying to be good parents and trying to meet their obligations at work at the same time. I believed that we could promote entrepreneurialism and trade around the world and still help people who, because of their education or where they live, are at risk of being left behind. Those are the things that I believed. I believed that we can be a force for peace and recognize that there are some times when we have to use our overwhelming military force. I believed that in welfare we could reduce the welfare rolls, get more people to work, and at the same time help people who were on welfare to do a better job of raising their children, that we didn't have to hurt people in their responsibilities as parents to say, "If you're able bodied, you ought to work if you can." I didn't believe that all those choices and all those debates that I kept hearing in Washington. And so we set out to do it, and the public responded, and the people gave me a chance to serve and then in '96, another chance and then in '96 and '98, kept returning more of our people to the Congress so that we're at the point where we can almost reverse the election of '94. I think the election in '94 happened, by the way, because we made the tough decisions as a party, all alone, to reduce the deficit, without a single vote from the other party, and increase our investment in education. We made the tough decision almost all alone to pass a crime bill that put 100,000 police on the street, banned assault weapons, and required the Brady bill's waiting period. And by the election in '94 and we tried to provide more health insurance, all alone, and didn't have enough votes to do it. And by '94, what happened was people knew what we'd done on the economic plan, but they didn't feel the economy was getting better they knew what we'd done on the crime bill, but the NRA convinced a bunch of hunters we were going to take their rifles. By '96, everybody still had their rifles and the crime rate had gone down, the economy had gone up, and we got reelected. And the Congress is doing better ever since our elections. So now we're poised for this election in 2000. And what I want to say to you is, I appreciate what Roy said about me, and it's nice to be introduced by your old friends. They'll lie about you a little now and then. But the truth is, you must believe this, this administration has succeeded because we had the right ideas and the right approach and we're grounded in the right values, and it's what represents the heart and soul of the Democratic Party today. And that's why I'm here. We've got a lot of big decisions to make. And you have to decide who is going to make them. We have to deal with the aging crisis twice as many people over 65 by 2030. I hope to live to be one of them. Laughter I've given the Congress a plan that will save Social Security, save Medicare, provide help for people taking care of their parents and long term care, allow middle income people and lower income people to save for their own retirement for the first time and do it in a way that pays down the national debt by 2015 to the lowest point it has been since before World War I. And that's really important to keep the economy going, because we'll be less dependent on the vagaries of the global financial system. I've given the Congress a plan that will improve the quality of education by ending social promotion, by providing after school and summer school programs for our kids, by finishing the work of hooking all our classrooms up to the Internet, by modernizing a lot of these old school buildings and helping the school districts that are having kids in housetrailers, by supporting better teaching, and by having national academic standards, which I hope our whole party will embrace and help us in this great battle we're in, because I think you should have local control of the school about how to implement national academic standards. There's an international standard that all of our children need to meet if we want them to make a good living. And we're about the only advanced country in the world that doesn't have that. As a result, we've got the finest system of higher education in the world no one believes that our system of elementary and secondary education is uniformly the finest in the world. And yet, it can be. And all the diversity we have in our schools is a great asset in a global society, but every one of those kids deserves a chance at the brass ring. I was in the Alexandria school system the other day, across the river from the Capitol and the White House. There are kids from a hundred different racial and ethnic groups there, nearly a hundred different native languages. Every one of them can make a contribution to America if he or she gets a world class education. And to pretend that it ought to be a local option whether they get it is, I think, obscuring what is plainly real here. So we Democrats stand for more flexibility about how to do things, but for national standards of excellence based on international standards of what our children need to know. And I think the American people are with us on that. I could talk about a lot of other issues. I'd just like to mention one or two more. The Vice President is coming down here to south Texas in a couple of weeks to our annual empowerment zone conference. Since 1993, we've been trying to figure out ways to get more investment into poor urban neighborhoods and poor rural areas and poor Native American reservations, because there are still a lot of people that haven't participated in this economic recovery. And I worry a lot about how we're going to keep America's growth going and our unemployment low without any inflation, especially if we have trouble overseas. One way is to make more markets here at home. And there are lots of places right here in Texas where unemployment is still too high, too many hardworking people still don't have the skills they need, and where if we could attract the right investment in the right way we could have dramatic growth. So this is going to be a big challenge. If we can't get around now to giving poor rural areas and urban areas that have been left behind the chances they need, we'll never get around to it. Let me just mention one or two other things. I am very interested in this whole issue of balancing work and family. And I think there's some things we ought to do. I think we ought to raise the minimum wage again. I think we ought to strengthen the family and medical leave law. I think we ought to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. I think we ought to pass our child care plan to help lower income people with their child care costs. We have to realize that most parents have to work and every parent ought to have the option to do it, but no parent should have to sacrifice the most important job any woman or man has, which is to raise strong, good kids. There are a lot of things out there we have to do. We've got a big job to do in the world. You can see it today with some of the problems we have. Now, I'd like to close by just asking you to think about three things and giving you examples of what my philosophy is, that I think is our party's philosophy. These are the best of times for Americans, but we're all pretty sobered up right now because of three events of the recent days. One are the terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma and Kansas and, to a lesser extent but still sad, in Texas and Tennessee two is the heartbreaking incident in Littleton, Colorado and third is the continuing conflict in Kosovo. Now, let me tell you what they mean to me. First, the tornadoes mean that none of us should get too big for our britches. We're not in control. We have to maintain a certain humility when thinking about all the problems of the world. But as our hearts go out to those people I'm going up to Oklahoma City tomorrow to tour the damage and talk about what we can do to help them put their lives back together I'm thinking about what we can do to try to prepare better for the next one. I'm thinking about what we can do if we know we're going to grow and expand in areas that have been tornado alleys, what we ought to do to build houses that will do a better job of withstanding them or have quicker escapes to places that will be safer. In other words, I think what we always should be thinking about is How can we make it better? How can we deal with what is going to come? In the case of Littleton, on Monday, Hillary and I and Al and Tipper Gore are going to sponsor a big meeting at the White House with people from the entertainment and Internet communities, people from the gun manufacturers, people from the religious communities, people who work in schools on problems of violence, students, a lot of other segments of our society, coming together to talk about how we can start a national campaign to reduce the likelihood of violence against our children. Now, I think it is important that you know how I look at this. I think the world's worst thing we can do is to use this awful heartbreak to get into a fingerpointing session, because the truth is that not a single soul here knows exactly what triggered those kids. And we all know that in any given time there will be people who are more vulnerable than others to whatever influences to which they're exposed to. But I do think we would all admit, if we sort of take our defenses down, that the society in which our children grow up today, number one, throws things at them faster number two, gives them even more opportunities to be isolated from their parents and from their peers number three, exposes them at an earlier age and in greater volume and intensity to more violence and the coarsening of human relationships and number four, it's way too easy for them get things like Tech 9 assault pistols. And I think we can all sort of admit that. And what I'm trying to do is to figure out what we should all do here to launch a genuine grassroots national campaign where I try to pass the laws I should pass the gun manufacturers come forward and do what they ought to do to try to protect our kids the entertainment community makes a contribution the Internet community makes a contribution they've worked hard, by the way, with the Vice President to try to give parents more screening technologies and the religious community comes forward the mental health community comes forward the schools provide more adequate counseling services and peer mediation for the kids, and what some of our schools are doing now, providing a hotline so kids who know what's going on in the school can call and tell somebody without being subject to abuse. There are lots of things to be done here. But there's also something to be said here for recognizing the incredible pressures that parents and children are under because life is so fast and so crowded. And it is easy for all of us, if we're not careful, to wind up being strangers in our own homes. And our children need to understand also that no matter how solid and rooted they are, childhood is a fragile and difficult time. Every school will always have its cliques. Every school will always have its groups. But we've got to teach our kids that they can enjoy being in their crowd without looking down on the others because people who are constantly subject to ridicule and abuse are going to have their lives twisted or distorted in some ways, unless they are really superhuman. So I'm looking forward to this. And all the cynics who say it can't be done, I would remind you that teen pregnancy is now down 5 years in a row because of a national grassroots movement, not because of any law we passed in Washington. Drunk driving is down because of Mothers and Students Against Drunk Driving. We now have 10,000 companies that have voluntarily joined an alliance that we organized a couple years ago to hire people from welfare to work, and they've hired over 400,000 people without a single law being passed. We can do this. And I believe we can do it, but only if our political, public life brings us together and not drives us apart. And the last thing I'd like to say is about Kosovo. I know this is a difficult issue. I saw the people with their signs on the way in, saying we ought to end the fighting. Nobody wants to do it more than me. I think those of you who've known me for 30 years know that the most difficult thing that I ever have to do is use a superior position to put pressure on somebody else, particularly if it involves the use of violence. I'm not that sort of person. But let me tell you, since the end of communism, we have seen the inevitable rise of national aspirations and ethnic aspirations, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. In one place only, the former Yugoslavia, we have seen that turned into a credo that says it is all right to burn the homes, destroy the records, destroy the churches the mosques, in this case and the museums, and the libraries, and the very lives of families it's all right to rape the daughters it's all right to shoot the sons it's all right to do this. And for 3 years, we worked, through the United Nations and negotiations and everything else, to end the war in Bosnia. And finally, we ended the war in Bosnia when NATO bombed and when the opposition forces started winning some battles on the ground. And we've been able to maintain a peace there. People don't have to like each other. People may have legitimate grievances. But ethnic cleansing and killing people wholesale because of their race or religion is wrong. And the United States is in a position to stand against it, and we ought to. I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me. They say, "Well, we don't have any vital national interest." I would argue to you that we do. It's not only a moral, humanitarian issue. We'll be better off if our best allies in the world, in Europe, live in a continent that is whole and democratic and at peace and free of this sort of thing. First of all, they won't be wasting their money tearing each other up. Secondly, they'll be better trading partners. Thirdly, they'll be better partners in helping us solve problems in other parts of the world. And if we can put an end to ethnic cleansing in Europe, then we can put an end to it in Africa, and we can put an end to it wherever else it rears its ugly head. If we can't solve this problem, it's very difficult to understand how our children are going to live in peace in a world where every radical terrorist group can get on the Internet and figure out how to build a bomb or get weapons or do anything else they want to do. We have got, at least, to tell people that in the world of the 21st century, it is not okay to kill people just because they're of a different race or ethnicity or religion. That's why I must say, I want to applaud the senators who are here, who are trying to pass that hate crimes act in the legislature in honor of James Byrd. I think it's very important. It makes a statement. This is the last thing I'll say about this. I've already talked longer than I meant to, but if you don't remember anything else I say, remember this It is one thing to say that we all ought to get along together and quite another to do what is necessary for us to do so in decency and honor. The differences among us are a part of what makes life more interesting and makes this country so successful, as long as they are contained. When the differences among us are used, as they are in Kosovo today, as they were in Bosnia before, as an instrument of human destruction, they can quickly make life unbearable. Now, we can't force anybody to like anybody else. Maybe not everybody in this place tonight likes everybody else. But we live according to certain rules, and we do it not only because it is morally right but because we do better when other people do well. When we do the right thing or, as Hillary says, when we act like we're in a village, we all are better off. So I ask you to think about this. The Democratic Party has stood for community and for opportunity and for citizen responsibility. We have refused to accept all these phony choices we were presented with, between economic growth and the environment, between accountability and help in education, and all the other things. These ideas have led America to a better place. That's why I'm here. I'm glad I was President. I hope I was the instrument of a lot of the good things that have happened in this country. But the most important thing is that we continue in this direction, that we stay on this course, that we embrace these ideas. And that is why it is important to support this party. I'm very grateful to you. Thank you, and God bless you. April 24, 1999 Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary General. Yesterday we recalled NATO's history, embraced our new members, deepened our unity and our determination to stand against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and to build a broader transatlantic community that respects human rights of all ethnic and religious groups and offers all Europeans the chance to build better lives together. I want to begin by thanking the Secretary General for his leadership. I thank all of you for your leadership and your unity, the foreign and defense ministers, General Naumann and General Clark, and all the people in our governments who worked so hard to support our efforts. I know I speak for all of us when I say we are very proud of our men and women in uniform in the Balkans. And we remember today, especially, the three who are being held prisoner by Mr. Milosevic and who still have not received the Red Cross visits required by the Geneva Convention, even though he is on television in the United States saying they will receive them. The crisis in Kosovo has underscored the importance of NATO and the imperative of modernizing our Alliance for 21st century challenges. Today we will embrace a comprehensive plan to do just that, so that NATO can advance security and freedom for another 50 years by enhancing our capacity to address conflicts beyond our borders, by protecting our citizens from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, by deepening our partnerships with other nations and helping new members enter through NATO's open doors. In preparing NATO for the 21st century, we will make our Alliance even stronger. Thank you very much. April 23, 1999 Mr. Secretary General, leaders of NATO, other distinguished foreign guests, my fellow Americans. It is a profound honor for the United States to welcome NATO back to Washington for its 50th anniversary, an occasion to honor NATO's past, to reaffirm its present mission in Kosovo, to envision its future. In 1949, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, the American novelist William Faulkner acknowledged the fear of nuclear holocaust that then gripped the world. But he declared firmly that humanity will not merely endure, it will prevail. In that same year, 12 nations came here to pledge to vindicate that faith. They were North Americans and Europeans determined to build a new Europe on the ruins of the old through a mutual commitment to each other's security and freedom. In this auditorium, the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, said that NATO's fundamental aim was not to win a war that would, after all, leave Europe ravaged but to avoid such a war, and I quote, "by becoming, together, strong enough to safeguard the peace." He was right. No member of NATO has ever been called upon to fire a shot in anger to defend an ally from attack. The American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, said that NATO would "free the minds of men in many nations from a haunting sense of insecurity and enable them to work and plan with confidence in the future." And he was right. NATO bought time for the Marshall plan. It encouraged allies to pool their military and economic strength, instead of pitting it against their neighbors. The Prime Minister of Canada, Lester Pearson, predicted that the NATO Pact's achievement would "extend beyond the time of emergency which gave it birth, or the geographical area which it now includes." And he, too, was right. NATO gave hope to West Germany and confidence to Greece and Turkey. Ultimately, NATO helped break the grip of the cold war. Yesterday, Europe divided by an arbitrary line on one side, free people living in fear of aggression on the other, people living in tyranny who wanted to be free. Today, thanks in no small measure to NATO, most of Europe is free and at peace. Today we are joined by the leaders of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, whose descent into darkness helped to spark NATO's creation. Today they are a part of NATO, pledged to defend what was too long denied to them. So we say to Prime Minister Orban, President Havel, President Kwasniewski Welcome to NATO, welcome home to the community of freedom. As we look to the future, we know that for the first time in history we have a chance to build a Europe truly undivided, peaceful, and free. But we know there are challenges to that vision in the fragility of new democracies in the proliferation of deadly weapons and terrorism and surely, in the awful specter of ethnic cleansing in southeast Europe, where Mr. Milosevic first in Croatia and Slovenia, then in Bosnia, now in Kosovo has inflamed ancient hatreds to gain and maintain his power. He is bent on dehumanizing, indeed, destroying a whole people and their culture and, in the process, driving his own people to deep levels of distress. We're in Kosovo because we want to replace ethnic cleansing with tolerance and decency, violence with security, disintegration with restoration, isolation with integration into the rest of the region and the continent. We want southeastern Europe to travel the same road as Western Europe half a century ago and Central Europe a decade ago. But we are fundamentally there because the Alliance will not have meaning in the 21st century if it permits the slaughter of innocents on its doorstep. This is not a question of territorial conquest or political domination but standing for the values that made NATO possible in the first place. This is the mission of NATO at the age of 50 on the edge of a new century, determined to reach forward into the future with a united continent, with a collective defense, remaining open to new members from the Baltics to the Black Sea, remaining committed to work with partners for peace and progress, including Russia and Ukraine, and others who are willing to work for the values and the future we dream of. This is the kind of alliance we come to this summit to reaffirm and to build for the future. Almost 100 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt said something that could well be applied to a united Europe and to our united transatlantic Alliance today. Of America's coming of age in the world, he said, "We have no choice as to whether we will play a great part in the world. That has been determined for us by fate, by the march of events. The only question is whether we will play it well or ill." Our nations played our part well after World War II, from the Berlin airlift to the founding of NATO, to the restoration of hope and confidence in Western Europe. We played it well after the cold war, from the reunification of Germany to the enlargement of NATO, to the support we have offered democratic open government in Russia and Ukraine, and the reach out we have done to other partners for peace. We played it well when we joined together to end the slaughter in Bosnia. Now we rise, as we must, to this new and fundamental challenge to the peace and humanity of Europe. Our message is clear Peace and humanity will prevail in Kosovo. The refugees will go home they will have security they will have their self government. The last European dictatorship of the 20th century will not destroy Europe's long awaited chance to live, at last, together in peace and freedom. Thank you very much. April 22, 1999 The President. Good afternoon. Secretary General Solana and I have just had a good meeting reviewing the NATO Summit. Our alliance is strongly united today, in no small measure because of his leadership. He has made a tremendous difference as we have worked to reshape NATO to meet new challenges and as we have responded to Mr. Milosevic's repression in Kosovo. Serb forces there have pushed nearly 1.4 million people, three quarters of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, from their homes. They have killed thousands, confiscated identity papers, separated parents from children, buried victims in mass graves, told Kosovars, "Take a last look around, for you will never return to Kosovo." NATO's response has been firm and persistent. Our objective is clear We want all the people of Kosovo restored to their homes, free of the hostile presence of Mr. Milosevic's forces protected by an international security force enjoying liberty and self government. Mr. Milosevic can accept this outcome, or he can watch as NATO grinds down his war machine and the Serb people he claims to represent face mounting hardship. Our allied forces come from many backgrounds, but they are working together, now, through some 9,000 air sorties. They have weakened Mr. Milosevic's defenses, command and control, and capacity to produce fuel and ammunition. We are attacking the infrastructure that supports the military offensive, including bridges and electrical power. Increasingly, we are striking at tanks, artillery, and aircraft, and in recent days we've begun to strike key facilities used to direct and incite the campaign of ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, our relief efforts are working to bring order out of chaos and hope to those in despair. I am grateful to all the Americans, and indeed, to people around the world who have provided assistance. Now, tomorrow, the leaders of 42 nations will gather here for NATO's 50th Anniversary Summit. This summit will enable our alliance to advance our mission in Kosovo and to plan for a better future to build a Europe that is undivided, democratic, and at peace. This crisis in Kosovo has underscored the importance of the efforts we have been making for 5 years now to strengthen and adapt NATO for the new century, to enhance our capacity to address regional and ethnic conflicts on NATO's doorstep, to protect our citizens against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, to improve security cooperation with partner nations across Europe, to help aspiring members improve their candidacies so they can join NATO. At our summit, we will advance these efforts, meet with partner nations, including Ukraine and the nations of the frontline of the Kosovo crisis. We will reaffirm our commitment to advancing our cooperation for peace and stability with Russia, for though we have differences on Kosovo, the world benefits when we work together. And we will further our efforts for deeper democracy, tolerance, economic development, and regional integration in southeastern Europe, in the hopes that soon all the people there, including the Serbs who are now suffering from Mr. Milosevic's reckless tyranny, can have peace, prosperity, and true freedom. Now I'd like Secretary General Solana to say a few words. Mr. Secretary General. Secretary General Solana. Thank you very much, Mr. President. Let me start by saying that this NATO Summit here in Washington will be one of the most important meetings that the alliance has ever held. Our focus will be on the immediate, particularly in Kosovo. It is no doubt the gravest crisis that Europe and NATO have faced for many years. And it is with respect that I would like to salute the leadership that you, Mr. President, and your country, the United States, have shown since the very beginning of this crisis. Without that leadership, without the enormous contribution that the United States is making to the Operation Allied Force, we could not succeed in our goal. And our goal is to stop the human tragedy in Kosovo. If Europe is to enjoy a stable, democratic peace, it is essential that our values prevail in Kosovo, and not those values of Milosevic. At our summit tomorrow, we will demonstrate our alliance unity, the alliance resolve. We will not be divided we will not be diverted from our objective. And the objective is clear the removal of Serb forces from Kosovo, and as the President has said, an international force that will be able to assure that the refugees, the people which are really suffering now, can go back to their country, to their homes with security. Ethnic cleansing is a crime, and we have to reverse it. We will also signal our determination to intensify the political and military pressure on Belgrade until our goals are met. And we will state our commitment to both an immediate and a longer term effort to assist and rebuild southeastern Europe, a region which has seen too much human suffering and too much instability for far too long. We know that our values are the right ones, but if they are to have meaning, they have to be defended. This sometimes requires patience and, in any case, requires perseverance. We must take care not only of Milosevic's aggression but also of his victims. This is what NATO is doing with its effort to solve the refugee crisis. Let there be no doubt NATO will see this through to the end. We have the means, and we have the will. That will be, no doubt, the message of this Washington Summit. But as the President has said, at the same time, in the summit we are going to look to the future. We're going to take decisions that will equip this alliance to be fully ready for all its new roles and new missions for the 21st century. We're going to build a new security order in Europe, in cooperation with our many partner countries. As the President has said, on Sunday the Euro Atlantic Partnership Council will bring, on top of the 19 countries of NATO, another 20 partners. It will take place here in Washington. It seems to me that it will be not only the largest international meeting that this Capital has ever seen but one of the most important ever to have taken place. Let me say that it will also be another important moment in building a Europe in which the barbarities we see in Kosovo have no place and will not be tolerated. Mr. President, it was great. Thank you very much for your leadership. Q. Mr. President Q. Mr. President Q. Mr. President, are you as committed now to now using The President. One at a time, one at a time. Situation in the Balkans Q. Mr. President, I wonder if you could clarify the U.S. Government's position on Secretary General Solana's decision yesterday to authorize a reassessment of last year's plan to possibly introduce ground forces into Kosovo. Does this represent a precursor to that kind of decision? The President. Well, the answer to your last question is, no. The answer to your first question is, I support the Secretary General's decision to update the assessment. I think it is a wise and prudent course. Now, my position is still the same. I support the strategy we have embraced. It has the unity of the alliance, and it will be vigorously prosecuted. A vigorous prosecution of the air campaign, an intensification of economic pressures, along with our continuing diplomatic efforts, I believe is the correct strategy. And I believe it will succeed. But I support the decision he made. I think it's only prudent. Q. Mr. President, there are reports of a new offer by Milosevic to the Russians to allow some type of security force into Kosovo. Number one, what do you know about this offer? And number two, will any security force have to have not only NATO troops but also American forces on the ground as well? The President. Well, first of all, it's hard I cannot comment on the offer because I literally don't know anything other than what you just said that is, I heard about it just a few minutes before you did or after you did or at the same time, so I cannot comment on the details. If there is an offer for a genuine security force, that's the first time that Mr. Milosevic has ever done that, and that represents, I suppose, some step forward. My interest here is in something that will work that will have the support of the parties. My belief is that the members of our alliance want us all to be able to go in there and that the Kosovar Albanians want to feel protected and will expect us to be there. I have always said from the very beginning that I would hope that there would be Russian troops there, Ukrainian troops there, troops from Slavic countries, from Orthodox Christian countries, because I would not entertain going into Kosovo unless our mandate was to protect all the people there, including the Serb minority. There will be after all the stuff the Albanians have been through and all the people who have been killed and the families that have been wrecked and the homes that have been burned and the records that have been destroyed, there will be people who will inevitably be looking for some outlet for vengeance there. So I can't comment on this except to say if it is true, then it is at least the first acknowledgement by Mr. Milosevic that there will have to be a security force there. But for the security force to work, it will have to have the confidence of the people who live there. And it will have to operate in a way that protects all the people there, including the Serb minority. Q. Secretary Solana and President Clinton, is NATO targeting Slobodan Milosevic directly? They destroyed one of his residences. Secretary General Solana. The objective of this military campaign, as you know it very well, is very clear, has five points. We want to stop the killing. We want to have all the troops withdrawn from Serbia, from Kosovo. We want an international force, military force, to guarantee the security of Kosovo and to guarantee, fourth, the return of refugees. And for us, this is the most important commitment. The refugees that have been expelled brutally from that country, they have to return. And fifth, we want a political agreement in the terms that the President has mentioned. Q. Yes, but I'm talking about the attack against one of the residences of Milosevic. The President. The answer to your yes, I understand your question. The answer to your question is, no, but we are targeting command and control facilities. And I think it is important. You know, when the weather permits, we go after the tanks and we go after the soldiers. But the tanks and the soldiers are there because people who believe in ethnic cleansing ordered them to go there. And in this conflict, it would be wrong and unfair not to target the command and control operations as well. And that's why the Socialist Party headquarters in Belgrade, for example, was targeted. Q. Mr. President, can the Kosovar refugees ever go home, with an international security force, without Mr. Milosevic giving his okay? The President. Well, that's a hypothetical question, but, of course, there are scenarios under which that could occur. Q. Mr. President, can you imagine an outcome in this war, sir, that would leave Milosevic in power? The President. Well, we set forth certain conditions, and if he meets those conditions and the Serbian people are willing to continue him in power, then I could imagine such an outcome. Now, that begs the question of what the War Crimes Tribunal will do or what other action might be taken. But we NATO has never taken a position on that issue. Our concern has been for the Kosovar people, for the welfare of the refugees, for the integrity of their life and how they are treated. Secretary General Solana. I would like to add to what the President has said, it would really concern us in the future of the people who have been suffering being expelled from their houses, from their country to see them returned. That we are going to see, and that's our main concern and the concern that we have now to continue. The President. Thank you very much. April 16, 1999 Well, first of all, I would like to thank Senator Kennedy and Senator Daschle for their introductions. Laughter I don't want Senator Kennedy to be upset at Senator Daschle. I told Senator Daschle I did not want Kennedy to introduce me. Laughter And he drew the wrong conclusion I just didn't want Patrick up here making those gestures introducing me. Laughter I tell you, Patrick, I have never heard you so funny you've got a second career. Laughter Like everyone else, I want to thank Alan and Susan and all of the others who helped to raise the funds tonight. I'd also like to thank the people who provided our meal and those who served it. And I want to thank our wonderful, wonderful musicians, Gary Burton and his pianist. They were terrific. Thank you very much. You guys were great. Thank you. As Senator Kennedy said, I am profoundly indebted to the people of Massachusetts. Massachusetts has been wonderful to me and to Hillary, to Al and to Tipper Gore, to give our administration the support that we need and to send such remarkable people to the Congress. A majority of all of the Congress people from Massachusetts, all the Democrats, are here tonight. And I thank Congressman Moakley, Congressman Delahunt, Congressman Meehan, Congressman Markey, and Congressman Tierney, along with Congressman Kennedy. We're also glad to be joined tonight by Congressman Earl Blumenauer, who is from Oregon. He's a long way from home, and we're glad he's here. Thank you very much. And our wonderful Democratic whip, Dave Bonior, who took me to his district in Michigan today to meet with the Albanian Americans and to hear their stories, along with Congressman Gephardt. I, too, want to say how profoundly grateful I am for what Senator Kerry said, how much it means, and for what he does for you, and for Senator Kennedy. And as others have said, we could not have better leaders in the United States Congress than Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt. I could give you 1,000 examples. But suffice it to say that I do not believe that we would be here tonight in the position we're in, with the country in the position it is in, had it not been for their leadership and their support for me, and their always willingness to come in and have these fascinating discussions and, even when they think I'm wrong, to tell me they think I'm wrong. And we try to work it out, work together, and go forward together. And it's been a remarkable partnership. I also would say, to echo something Dick Gephardt said and I want all of you to know you know, most of you have been to enough of these political fundraisers that you're used to politicians getting up and blowing smoke over one another, you know, and saying that they think this one is the greatest person since the redwoods began to grow in California and all of that laughter the other one was born in a log cabin he built himself all of those. Laughter You're used to hearing all that sort of stuff. I know that. And you think that we all leave, we go back to telling bad stories on one another and cutting each other down. I'm telling you, the team of leaders we have now and the people that represent you in Massachusetts there is a profound mutual respect born of shared goals and shared dreams for the American people. I told all my folks when I became President, I said, "I didn't work in Washington before, and I'm going to make my fair share of mistakes. But one of the great advantages that I have is that I lived in a little State where I was expected to show up for work every day, and where I didn't have to spend half my time worrying about what was in the newspaper that day and who was up and who was down and who was leaking and who was not." And my theory is, if we stay together and work together and we're loyal to each other and we air our differences honestly and we show up for work every day, eventually something good will happen for the American people. Now, I think the evidence is that that happened. But what you need to know is, that's the sort of leadership we have in our party. Dick and David and Tom and the rest of our crowd, they're like what you expect from the Massachusetts delegation. They show up for work every day. They do not get paralyzed by this story or that story or spending all their time trying to manipulate who's up and who's down in Washington today. They have an agenda rooted in their concerns for you and our children's future, and they show up. And it's just like any other job. I know we'd like for you to believe that you've got to be just one step short of Albert Einstein to do all these jobs we do. But a lot of it is deciding what the right thing to do is, clearly laying it out, and going at it day in and day out, year in and year out. So I want to thank you for investing in the future of the Democratic majority in the Congress, because they have proved for 6 long years that they have good ideas, good values, and great work habits, and they will deliver for the United States of America, thanks to your help. And I thank you very much. I also want to say, Alan, thank you very much for collecting the money for the relief effort in Kosovo. Let me just briefly say, the camps in Albania are teeming. Tiny Macedonia, with its own ethnic difficulties to deal with, trying to preserve its democracy, it's deeply strained. We need all the help we can get. And frankly, the relief agencies are very, very good they are very efficient they don't waste the money. And cash is better than in kind contributions, because the needs shift daily. And anything you can do to help that, I hope you will. Now, I'm not going to put you through another speech of any length, but I want to take 5 minutes and ask you to think about why you should want these people in the majority in 2000. And when it happens, I'm going to miss it. Laughter But I just want to tell you for 5 minutes, I want you to think about this. Yes, our economy is going well, and I'm grateful for it. And the welfare rolls are about half what they were, and I'm grateful for it. And the crime rate is at a 30 year low, and I'm grateful for it. America is working again. And we've been a force for peace from Northern Ireland to the Middle East and to Bosnia, and I'm grateful for it. We've asked the world to join with us in fighting the more modern threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and global warming. And we've got a direction that we're on that's good, and I'm grateful for it. But I want to ask you to just take a couple of minutes and think about why you should want these people in the majority. Because in the year 2000, when the voters are asked to vote, there will be those who come forward and basically say, "Well, things are rocking along, and I'll tell you what you want to hear, and I'll give you what you want to get, and let's just go back to business as usual." The worst thing we could do is to forget what got us here over the last 6 years. What got us here was taking on the hard problems and working like crazy, day in and day out, week in and week out, and challenging the American people and challenging the elite leaders of all the major sectors of our society to think about unmet problems and unseized opportunities. And as I look ahead to the 21st century, I am grateful America is working again. I'm grateful that the economy is benefiting ordinary people more than ever before. We have the lowest unemployment rate we've ever recorded among minorities in this country, since we started keeping separate statistics almost 30 years ago. I'm grateful for that. But we have some big unmet challenges, and I won't go through our whole agenda, but we've got an agenda to deal with every one. The aging of America is a huge challenge. And if we don't deal with Social Security and Medicare and long term care, and do it in a responsible way, then when all of us baby boomers retire, we will put an unconscionable burden on our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. We have a strategy that will deal with it. We have more and more families who work and raise children at the same time, both single parent and two parent households. We have not done enough in the United States to help people balance work and family. We are better than any other major country at creating jobs. We have many strengths that other countries would give anything to have. But we have not done as well as we should, and as well as we can without in any way hurting economic growth, in helping our families to balance their childrearing responsibilities and their work responsibilities. We have to do more in health care, more in child care, more in providing leave time from work without losing jobs. We must do it. There is no more important work than raising our children, and we can do better. The third thing we have to do is to make sure we're Democrats this is our job we have to make sure everybody gets a chance to be a part of the new economy. As low as unemployment is, there are still places where it's high. There are places where there has been no new investment. We have a strategy to keep the economy growing and to spread the benefits of it. For one thing, if our plan prevails over the Republican plan, we're going to pay the debt of this country down to its lowest point since before World War I, over the next 15 years. That means low interest rates, high investment, and more jobs everywhere. And we're going to give the same incentives for people to invest in poor parts of America we give them today to invest in poor countries in the rest of the world. I think that is nothing but right. Don't take it away from the rest of the world just give the poor parts of America a chance to get their piece of the American dream, as well. And I think that is terribly important, and Democrats ought to be for that. We have to keep working to prove we can clean up the environment and grow the economy, and we have an agenda to do that. The most important thing I want to say to you tonight is that we have a job to do at home that mirrors the job we are trying to do in Kosovo today. Isn't it ironic that, on the verge of a new century and a new millennium, where most of us most of the people in this room have this great dream of a 21st century world that is more peaceful, more prosperous, and more free than any time in all of human history where people work together across national lines to lift each other up and solve problems together, whether they're the spread of disease or climate change or the threat of terrorism or narcotrafficking or weapons of mass destruction. We're working together to make good things happen and to press bad things down. And this whole vision, with this explosion of modern technology and science, is threatened by the prospect that we will marry modern technology with the most ancient hatreds known to human society, rooted in the fear of people who are different from us. Now, we are in Kosovo I think Dick referred to this, to the E mails we were reading coming out of Albania. We're in Kosovo, first of all, because innocent people are being driven from their homes, having their villages burned down, having their family records destroyed, with their children being raped, and people being murdered because we think we can help to stop it and because we have learned the hard way in the 20th century, if something like that's going on and you think you can help to stop it and you don't, in that part of the world, it's just going to get worse. So it's a humanitarian thing. But it's also a part of what we want the 21st century to be like. Doesn't it seem bizarre to you that on the one hand, we talk about the Internet being the fastest growing human communications instrument in all of human history. We talk about having our kids study halfway around the world. We relish in the ethnic and racial and religious diversity of Boston. Detroit, we used to think of Detroit as being diverse because and I can say this because I'm from the South because Southern blacks and Southern whites couldn't make a living in the South after the Second World War, so they went to Detroit to get a job in the auto plant. That was our definition of diversity. Wayne County now has people from 150 different national and ethnic groups not Chicago, not New York, not Los Angeles Detroit. And we're sitting here worried about people who still want to kill each other over 600 yearold grievances. They want to fight over smaller and smaller and smaller pieces of land instead of thinking bigger and bigger and bigger about how, if they all got together, what a future they could make for their children. And so I tell you that we're there for humanitarian reasons. We're there for strategic reasons. And we're there because we do not want our children to live in a 21st century world where very smart people filled with very narrow hatreds can access technology, weaponry, missile technology, and torment the world because they're growing smaller in spirit, when they should be growing larger in vision especially in the heart of Europe, which is so critical to our security. And we have to keep working against it here, which is why the Democrats are for stronger hate crimes legislation and for the "Employment and Non Discrimination Act," and why we have supported national service. Alan Khazei is here he founded City Year. I'm the biggest flack he's got. I go all over the world talking about City Year. I knew when I ran for President in 1991 and 1992 that one of the things that we needed to do was to build a stronger sense of community in America, across racial and cultural and religious and economic lines. And I had this vision that we could get young people involved in service and help them go to college. And I went to City Year in Boston, and I knew what it was I wanted America to do. I'm very proud of the fact that in its first 4 years the national service program, AmeriCorps, has had as many volunteers as the Peace Corps did in its first 20 years. And you owe that to them. Now, I want to close with this thought. One of my favorite lines that President Kennedy ever spoke was the speech he made about Germany and the cold war in Berlin. Most people remember, "Ich bin ein Berliner," and all that. But he said this I want you to think about this in terms of Kosovo in the middle of the cold war, John Kennedy said, "Freedom has many difficulties, and our democracy is far from perfect, but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in." Now the Berlin Wall is down. The barriers of communism have fallen. But all over the world today, there are places where people are building walls in their hearts because they feel that they only count if they can look down on somebody who is different from them. And those walls are every bit as powerful as the Berlin Wall was, and in a profound way, harder to tear down. America must both do good and be good on this issue of community and our common humanity. It is our great challenge and perhaps the most compelling reason that the Democratic Party should be America's majority party in the 21st century. Thank you, and God bless you all. April 16, 1999 Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your warm welcome. I want to thank all of those who have spoken and been introduced. This is, because of the operation going on in Kosovo and I know that all Americans are proud of what our young people in uniform are doing there it is an unusual moment for me to be here, but a very important moment for Americans to reexamine what it means to be a good citizen on the edge of the new century. There are a lot of things I'd like to say, but the first thing I want you to do is to hear me. I am here you know, I won't be a candidate in 2000. I wish I could be, but I can't. Laughter And I'm here because I care about my country's future. I am profoundly grateful to the people of Michigan for having given Al Gore and me a chance to serve twice by their votes in the elections of 1992 and 1996, profoundly grateful to the Members of this delegation who have all been introduced, Mr. Dingell and Mr. Bonior and Debbie thank you for running for the Senate. You can't beat anybody with no one people have to show up and run. And Debbie could stay in Congress and have a good time and enjoy this and be a part of a majority, and she's taken a significant personal risk because she has a significant personal commitment to the future of this State and this Nation. And I appreciate it, and I know you do. And I think she has more than a significant chance to be victorious because of that. I was talking to the people at our table it seemed like every time somebody from the Michigan delegation was introduced, I had some new or different thing to say, but it is an unusual House delegation, really unusually remarkable people, each with their own strengths. And I cannot say enough about Senator Carl Levin, who is off on our common mission of securing a just resolution to the problem in Kosovo. I also want to thank Senator Riegle and Frank Kelley and my good friend Jim Blanchard, my former colleagues in different ways over the years. I've been at this so long, Frank Kelley and I served together in the 1970's. Laughter I want to congratulate your new attorney general. I know she's doing a wonderful job. And Mayor Stanley, I'm glad to see you. And I can't say enough about Dennis Archer, and I want to say that I admire the effort you are making to reform your schools. And I believe you will succeed. Let me tell you something One thing I've learned in this business over a long period of time, having spent countless hours in our Nation's schools All of our kids can learn, and all of our schools can succeed, but someone has to be in charge. Change has to be possible expectations have to be high. There have to be clear standards, and then there has to be support. And I want the rest of you to support it. I've heard a lot of people say today, "I'm so glad that we're making these changes in our school systems." If you want the kids to be held to higher standards, then you have to support them. And if you have to raise the funds for more after school programs or summer school programs or whatever it takes, you have to support them. So you have made a commitment now to change the way you're going to run your schools. Nothing is more important. I want you to support the mayor and make sure he has what he needs to get the job done for the children. I want to thank the leaders of the Michigan House and Senate for being here. I have enjoyed my opportunities to be with the legislature and to speak to the legislature recently. And I want to thank Patrick Kennedy for going around the country and trying to make sure we can run a race. Last time, in 1998, when the party of the President gained seats in the House of Representatives in a midterm election, in the sixth year of a Presidency, for the first time since 1822 1822 when we lost no seats in the Senate, and it was projected that we would lose five or six, we were outspent by over 100 million. And still these fine people, with a lot of your help, achieved that result. Thanks to the efforts of Dick Gephardt and Patrick Kennedy and a lot of other people, that won't happen this time, I don't believe, and I'm really grateful to them. And finally let me say, I think you could see from what has been said by all these people about each other, we have a real commitment to each other personally and a commitment to our shared agenda, and I think that is a very good thing. I admire Dick Gephardt and David Bonior enormously, not only because of the positions they take, not only because they stuck up for me when I was down as well as when I was up, but because they are truly good human beings. They're the kind of people you would be proud to live next door to, the kind of people you'd be proud to have raise your children if something terrible happened to you, the kind of people you would trust with your life's possessions if you had to turn your back and go away and do something else for an extended period of time. And they're the kind of people that ought to be directing the Congress into the 21st century. And I want to say something to all of you today in the midst of what is a difficult period. I want to tell you how this business in Kosovo fits with all the other things that we'd rather be here talking about today, with Social Security or education of our children or all the rest of it, and why it is an appropriate thing for us to be here today to talk about our responsibilities as citizens, which includes making choices about candidates, supporting them, and showing up and being counted. Now, in 1992 when I ran for President, I spent a great deal of time in Michigan, partly because one of my secrets was that an enormous number of people who live in Michigan came from Arkansas. Laughter It's one of the benefits of a depressed southern economy after World War II, is that I got elected President 40 years later because Michigan and Illinois were full of people from my home State. But I knew that this State, with all of its diversity, with its traditional industrial economy, its emerging high tech economy, its magnificent agricultural economy, its big cities and small towns, really carried the future of America in its life. And I came here, and I said to the people, "Look, here's the deal. Things aren't going very well, and if we keep doing the same thing over and over again, we're going to keep getting the same results. And I believe that we need to imagine what we want America to look like in the 21st century. I know what I want it to look like. I want a country where there is opportunity for every responsible citizen. I want a country where we're part of one community across all the lines that divide us. And I want us to build a world where there is more peace and freedom, more security, and more harmony. And we're going to have to change some things to do that. We're going to have to stop talking about how terrible the deficit is and do something about it. We're going to have to stop talking about how we wish our schools were better and invest not only money but the right kind of policies. We're going to have to stop talking about how we wish people weren't trapped in a lifetime of welfare dependency and say that able bodied people have to move off, but we're not going to punish their children, and we're going to give them the education and training and support they need," and on and on and on. I said, "You know, we're going to take a different policy." And a lot of it was controversial. And frankly, one of the reasons I'm here today is that the Democrats might not be in the minority today if we hadn't had to go all alone to reduce the deficit while we increased our investment in education. But it led to the balanced budget it led to lower interest rates, which was a huge, huge income increase to people who benefited from those lower interest rates it's given us record high homeownership in America. Millions of people have refinanced their homes and saved a lot of money. There have been more businesses, more jobs, and for the last 2 years, finally, for the first time in over two decades, incomes are rising for all economic groups in the country. We have the lowest African American, the lowest Hispanic poverty ever recorded since we have been keeping statistics and the lowest unemployment rate among African Americans and Hispanics recorded since we have been keeping statistics, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. And this is important. This is important. Now, we also have the first balanced budget in a generation, 2 years of surpluses now, the lowest crime rate in 30 years. We've genuinely opened the doors of college to everybody with tax credits and better loans and work study programs and scholarships, the Pell grants. We've got 90 percent of our children immunized for the first time in our history against basic childhood illnesses. The air and the water are cleaner. We've increased we've tripled the number of toxic waste dumps we've cleaned up. All these things have flowed from a few very tough decisions. Welfare rolls cut nearly in half. Our country has been a force for peace and freedom from Northern Ireland to the Middle East. We have reached out in partnership to democracies all over the world. We are joining in an international fight against terrorism and the spread of chemical and biological weapons. We have tried to hope for the best and work for the best in the new century and prepare for any eventuality. And this country is in a better place than it was 6 years ago. And because of our success, we have heavier responsibilities to ourselves and to others. But none of that would have happened none of it if it hadn't been for the people in this room that I came here to support today. There are very few things that a President can do that the Congress does not either have to support on the front end or that the Congress cannot stop on the back end. And Dick talked about playing offense and defense. It isn't right that we have to play defense all the time we ought to be working together from the beginning. But when we work together at the end of every budget year, we get to play a little offense, because if the President says, "I'm not going to sign this budget, and I'm not going to sign these laws," and they say, "I'll stick with him," then we get to play offense. But it would be so much better the point I want to make to the American people is these folks were right. We now have evidence we have 6 years of evidence. We were right to put 100,000 police on the street. We were right to drive the deficit down and give us a surplus. We were right to do these things. And I ask the American people, when these Democrats go back into the field for the 2000 election for the House races and the Senate races, to look at the record of the last 6 years. And I will always accord the Republicans the credit they deserve when we have done things together. But the driving force the driving force and the way we came out with the economy, with our crime policy, with our education policy, so many other policies, and the foreign policy we have pursued, came out of these Democrats in the Congress who stayed with me and supported my ideas. And I think they deserve the support of the American people because they're doing the right thing. And let me be quite specific here and, again, keep the pledge I made at the beginning of the talk. What's all this got to do with what we're doing in Kosovo? The country is working again. And we have now, I would say, both the opportunity and the obligation to say, "Okay, we've got things going right again. Now what do we have to do to have the kind of America and the kind of world we want for our children in this new century? What are the big challenges?" You might ask yourself that when you leave here. What do you think they are? Here are what I consider to be the big five, if you will, and what I hope the 2000 elections will be about, unless we can resolve more of them between now and then, which we're working to do. Number one, we must deal with the aging of America. The number of folks over 65 will double by 2030. There will only be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. The older I get, the better that problem looks. Laughter This is a very high class problem faced by all wealthy societies. But unless you deal with it in a responsible way, you run the risk that when all of us baby boomers retire, we impose big burdens on our kids and their ability to raise our grandkids. And instead, there is an enormous opportunity here for those of us anybody that lives to be 65 now has already got a life expectancy of about 82 years, if you get to be 65 in decent health. So this is an enormous opportunity, but we have to re think our whole way of dealing with these things. Number two, we have to do more to balance work and family, both because there are more single parent households and there are far more households in which both parents are working, where there are two parents. But there is no more important job in the world than raising children right. And we have to admit that while America has done a lot of things better than other countries we have generated more jobs we've got lower unemployment we've done great we have not done enough to balance work and family. And too many parents, every day in this country, have to make decisions about health care, about child care, about time off work, all kinds of challenges that, in my judgment, we could alleviate and still have a very strong economy, indeed, strengthen our economy if we did it in the right way. Number three, we need to have an economy that leaves no one behind, nobody responsible enough to work. I am encouraged that finally all income groups have their incomes rising. I'm encouraged that there are cities like Detroit where the unemployment rate has gone down. But you know as well as I do that in most of the big urban areas of this country there are still huge parts of the cities where there has been no new investment and where unemployment is still high. There are many medium sized industrial cities that have had more trouble changing their economy than the larger cities have. There are many small towns and rural areas in my home State and many other places, from Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to south Texas, where there are problems. You want to know how we're going to keep the economy growing with low inflation? Get more investment in the underdeveloped areas of America. That's our biggest untapped market. Number four, we have to have a way of continuing to improve the environment and continuing to grow the economy. Our administration has spent, I think, probably more time and effort trying to pursue both these goals and reconcile them, not always to the satisfaction of everybody in this room or this country, but we have really made an effort. Why? Because I think if the country ever gets in a position where we really are making a choice between whether we're going to preserve the global environment or have our kids breathe clean air or drink safe water and seeing our economy grow, we're going to be in a terrible position. The developments in technology have given us more and more opportunities to find ways to both improve the economy and the environment. But I think I predict to you that it will be a huge challenge for our country and our world for the next 20 to 30 years. And the fifth thing is that we have to learn how to reconcile unity and diversity at home and around the world. Now, what does that mean in practical terms? On the aging in America, we've got a plan. We, the Democrats, have a plan. Set aside 62 percent of the surplus to make sure Social Security will be all right until 2055. And make some other modest changes in the Social Security program that will enable us to lift the earnings limit on people on Social Security, so those who want to work will be able to do so and contribute to our country, and that will enable us to do something for the elderly women who are living alone. Their poverty rate is twice the regular poverty rate. On Medicare, set aside 15 percent of the surplus, run the Medicare Trust Fund out at least 20 years, and finally begin to provide a prescription drug benefit to seniors on Medicare. It will cost money in the short run. It will save lives and save money in the long run because it will keep more people out of hospitals, more people out of procedures, and it will improve the quality of life. It will keep more people well. So that's our program. We also have a tax credit for long term care. I think this is very, very important. Finally, we have what I think is the right sort of tax cut. Our USA accounts would basically give tax credits and matching funds for about 12 percent of the surplus to working families to set up their own pensions. When Social Security was started, it was always assumed that you would have Social Security, and then people would get a pension at work, and then they would have some private savings. Well, today, a lot of people live on just Social Security. More and more pensions are shifting from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans. And the personal savings rate in America is way down. So what we propose to do is to say to people Families with incomes up to 80,000, you can get a tax credit and some matching funds from the Government to set up a private savings plan for your retirement up to 100,000, you can get tax credits but not matching funds over 100,000, if you have no present private pension fund, you can still qualify. We haven't tried to start a class war here, but you should know that fewer than one third of the tax benefits associated with retirement in America go to people with incomes of under 100,000. Fewer than 7 percent of the tax benefits of retirement savings go to people with incomes of 50,000 a year or less. So wouldn't it be good, with the stock market having done what it's done, gone from 3,200 to 10,000 in the last 6 years I think it would be better if more Americans owned a share of our national wealth. I think it would be better if more working families had some personal savings to go along with their retirement savings and Social Security and whatever they get from a pension plan. And this would be a good thing. That's our program for the aging of America. When it comes to balancing work and family, we want to do more for child care. We want to pass the Patients' Bill of Rights and do more for health care access. We want to broaden the family and medical leave law some, so that more people are covered by it. It's been immensely successful. I think still today more ordinary citizens come up to me on the street, after all this time, and mention an experience they had, a positive experience because of the family and medical leave law, than any other thing we have done, and that's the first bill I signed as President in early 1993. In terms of leaving no one behind, what's the most important thing we can do? Build 21st century schools everywhere, as you're trying to do here in Detroit smaller class sizes with our 100,000 new teachers modernize school buildings hook up all the classrooms to the Internet and help all the schools take advantage of it give more school districts the ability to have after school and summer school programs. I believe we should have a national change in our policy and end social promotion and require States to turn around failing schools, as Detroit has now taken on the responsibility of doing. But I do not believe children should be branded failures when the system fails them. I do not believe that. What else can we do to leave no one behind? We can recognize what I just said A lot of places still haven't really fully participated in the economy. And I have asked the Congress to adopt what I call a 21st century markets initiative to provide for loan guarantees and tax credits to people who will invest in high unemployment areas in America. The same sort of benefits we now give people to invest in low income countries overseas. All I say I'm for that, by the way. I want us to be good neighbors to Central America. I want them to be good democracies. I don't want us to have problems in the future. They should have a good life. They should be good markets. They can buy our products. But I say, why shouldn't we have the same incentives for people to invest in the low income areas of America where people are dying to go to work, dying to start businesses and capable of contributing to our future. We should be for that. We have a whole livability agenda that the Vice President and I worked up that I think has enormous support, grassroots support among communities in the country to help balance the environment and the economy. But finally, let me say what I started to say. I've worked hard, as Dick Gephardt said, on this whole issue of race in America. And you remember after the Oklahoma City bombings and there was all this talk about paramilitary operations in America, and I came to Michigan and gave a speech about it, talked about it. I grew up in the segregated South. I grew up with people who were taught not to like people who were different from them. And if you think about it, it is the oldest negative force in human society. You go back to prehistorical times people fought each other because they were in different tribes and they were afraid of difference. And sometimes there is a rational basis for it. But in the world we live in, the forces of global economy bringing us closer together, the technological opportunities to share the future with people beyond our immediate reach increasing, our diversity the diversity you have just here in Detroit in Wayne County I remember the first time, I think, when Ed McNamara had me out to the airport dedication I think it's the first time Dennis or Ed, one told me you had over 140 languages spoken in this county. This is an incredible gift for the future. But it is a gift only if we make a virtue of it. Now, how do you make a virtue of it? Let's take what's going on in Kosovo. We have Albanian Americans here, and we have some Serbian Americans outside demonstrating against us, right? It's okay. That's America. We don't tell people they have to shut up in this country. They can speak their piece and do their thing and be there. But what we have to find is a way to respect our diversity and lift it up and still say what unites us underneath is more important. And that's what they have to find a way to do in the Balkans, too. And our quarrel there is not with the people of Serbia. Because of the state run media, most of them don't have any idea what their people did in Kosovo. Most of them don't have a clue about the ethnic cleansing. I mean, people walking around on the street in Belgrade they don't know, because they have a state run media, they don't have a free press. So they think it's some political disagreement, and we're just trying to keep their country down. I have no quarrel with them. The Serbs were our allies in World War II. My quarrel is with Mr. Milosevic and his policies. He has sought to establish the principle that the most important thing in the Balkans is having a Greater Serbia. And if you have to kill the Bosnian Muslims and the Croats in Bosnia and the Croats in the Krajina, and then if you have to clean out all of Kosovo and run all the Albanians into Albania and Macedonia and crush them, most of them Muslim but not all of them, that's okay. I don't think it's okay. I don't think it's okay. What I want you to think about is, look what we've tried to do in the Middle East. We have tried to be a fair and honest interlocutor in bringing the Palestinians and the Israelis together. We have worked hard, and we have a bill before the Congress now to try to help our friends in Jordan to stabilize their economy and keep being a force for peace. In Northern Ireland, we've tried to help the Catholics and the Protestants put aside three decades of conflict. Why? Because in a global economy and Lord knows that if the American people hadn't learned anything in the 20th century, it's that sooner or later, if the world goes haywire, we get pulled into it World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. So, increasingly, we have done things to try to get involved to stop things from happening. Now, this war in Bosnia went a long along time. It went on nearly 3 years before we really got the coalition together among the allies to try to go in and stop it. And by that time, there were over 2 million refugees and about 250,000 people had been killed, lost their lives. Now, we've had a few thousand people killed and a million plus refugees in Kosovo. And what I have tried to say to the American people is, this is not some crusade America went off on its own. We've got all of our NATO Allies, 19 countries, all believing that this is something that needs to be contained and reversed not because we have a quarrel with the Serbian people. And I want to point out, I said, I made it absolutely clear that we would not go in there even in a peaceful environment unless it was absolutely clear that our charge in Kosovo was to return all the refugees to their rightful homes and their neighborhoods and their communities, under conditions of peace, and then have a secure environment that would also protect the Serb minority within Kosovo. What I'm trying to do is to establish a principle here that we have to resolve our differences by force of argument, not by force of arms. And you cannot tell somebody you love the land but you hate the people that inhabit it because of their ethnic, their racial, or their religious affiliation. And if you think about the world we want our kids to live in, and if you think about how we want it to be free of war, free of conflict, there is no way to get there no way unless our historic alliance with Europe includes a Europe that is undivided, democratic, and at peace, and unless we are standing for the principle that we're not afraid of people that are different, not just in terms of racial or religious or ethnic differences but in terms of political opinions. We don't have to be afraid. All we need is a system that gives people a legitimate way to express their grievances, to fight their political battles, and limits the ability of people to oppress each other. And I believe we've done the right thing there. I cannot tell you how strongly I think that we would feel, no matter what apprehensions you may have in the moment and I'm quite confident of the ultimate success of our mission but no matter how many apprehensions you have, ask yourself how you would feel today if I were up here giving this speech, after what we did in Bosnia, after what we stood for in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, after all the work we've done in America to get people to live together across racial and religious lines, after the work we've done to end employment discrimination and to stand against hate crimes, and all the things this administration has stood for and this party has stood for and our people have stood for how would you feel if I had come here to give this speech today and the headlines were full of all those people being killed and all those people being thrown out of the country, and we were having to explain to people why we couldn't lift a finger to do anything about it? So life is full of hard decisions, and sometimes the most important things in life are difficult. This has been a difficult period for Dick Gephardt and for Dave Bonior and for John Dingell. For all of us it's been so frustrating these last 6 years, going through this position where we've had to fight so many rearguard actions. But they have grown stronger and deeper and wiser and more determined. And this is what I want for our country in this moment. We must always keep our hearts and our ears open. We must always be open to the possibility of constructive resolution. But I think that we ought to say, "Look, the 21st century world we want to be a place where people live free of this sort of madness, of hating each other because of their differences." And we have to be free of it in America because we will be the most diverse democracy in the world. That is what is at stake. And that's why it's good that we're all here today. Because, in the end, the political leadership of the country cannot go where the people will not travel. That's what a democracy is. So it matters what you believe. It matters whether you will support candidates. It matters which candidates you support. And all I can say to you is, I am profoundly grateful to you because you and the people of Michigan have been good to me and to my family and to my Vice President, to our administration. You have been good to the Members of Congress that are here. And we have tried in turn to do things that were good for America and good for Michigan. We face big challenges. But if you look at the record of the last 6 years, two things should come forth Number one, you should be very optimistic about the future but number two, you should be willing to make tough decisions and be firmly in the camp of those who are committed to what is truly in the best interest of the children of this State and this country. They I have come to stand with today, and I'm very proud to be here with them and with you. Thank you, and God bless you. April 15, 1999 The President. Thank you very much, Mr. Seaton, distinguished officers, and members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to address the crisis in Kosovo, why we're there, what our objectives are, how this fits in with our larger vision of the future. Since I'm here I can't help noting that one of the truly striking aspects of this moment is the stark contrast it illuminates between a free society with a free press, and a closed society where the press is used to manipulate people by suppressing or distorting the truth. In Belgrade today, independent journalists are being persecuted. This week, one brave editor was murdered in cold blood. Meanwhile, the Government run press has constructed an alternative reality for the Serbian people in which the atrocities their soldiers are committing in Kosovo simply don't exist. Under those conditions, decent people can remain in denial, supporting policies that lead them to political and economic ruin. Thank goodness our press and free press throughout the world have tried to get at and get out the truth, to ensure that words like refugees, displacement, ethnic cleansing don't become stale and lifeless but remain causes for action. The tragedy in Kosovo is the result of a meticulously planned and long premeditated attack on an entire people simply on the basis of their ethnicity and religion, an attack grounded in a philosophy that teaches people to dearly love a piece of land while utterly dismissing the humanity of those who occupy it. That is what Mr. Milosevic has been doing ever since Yugoslavia started breaking up in 1989. For a decade, he has been trying to build a Greater Serbia by using military force to rearrange the ethnic character of the nations which emerged from Yugoslavia. That is what he did for years in Croatia and, horribly, in Bosnia what he is doing in Kosovo now. Last year he drove hundreds of thousands of people from their homes into the frigid mountains and let them back only after NATO threatened to use force. He is now determined to crush all resistance to his rule even if it means turning Kosovo into a lifeless wasteland. As these difficult days proceed, it is important to remember that we have no quarrel with the Serbian people. They were our allies in World War II they have often been our allies. In a sense, they are victims of this tragedy, too. And we must understand the anguish of Serbian Americans who, like Albanian Americans, are worried about their loved ones back home. Americans should not blame Serbs or look down on Serbian Americans because we disagree with the Milosevic government. We must not let his ethnic cleansing provoke us to ethnic bias. We and our 18 NATO Allies are in Kosovo today because we want to stop the slaughter and the ethnic cleansing because we want to build a stable, united, prosperous Europe that includes the Balkans and its neighbors and because we don't want the 21st century to be dominated by the dark marriage of modern weapons and ancient ethnic, racial, and religious hatred. We cannot simply watch as hundreds of thousands of people are brutalized, murdered, raped, forced from their homes, their family histories erased, all in the name of ethnic pride and purity. NATO was pivotal to ending the killing and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. We can do so again, and this time we have responded more quickly. Were we to stand aside, the atrocities in Kosovo would go on and on. Neighboring democracies, as you see, would be overwhelmed by permanent refugees and demoralized by the failure of democracy's alliance. The Kosovar Albanians would become a people without a homeland, a burden to host countries, a magnet for radical ideologies, a breeding ground for unending warfare in the Balkans. NATO would be discredited, yes, because it made promises not kept but, more important, because its values and vision of Europe would be profoundly damaged. Ultimately, the conflict in Kosovo would spread anyway, and we would have to act anyway. Now, when we decided to launch the air campaign, after Mr. Milosevic rejected peace, we believed there was at least a possibility that our readiness to act would deter him from moving forward as it had in the past. But we also understood clearly that with 40,000 troops and over 250 tanks massed in and around Kosovo he might intensify his repression and go on with his planned attack, as I made clear in my address to the Nation the night the airstrikes began. There was only one possibility that we and our NATO Allies were not willing to entertain, that the international community would look the other way in the face of this brutality. Now the NATO air campaign has been underway for 3 weeks, often interrupted or limited by bad weather. This is, however, a good time to assess what has been accomplished and where we're going. Mr. Milosevic's strategy has been to complete the ethnic cleansing, then break the unity of NATO by taking the bombs and offering phony concessions. But NATO is more united today than when the operation began. Whether they are Conservatives in Spain, Socialists in France, New Labor in Britain, or Greens in Germany, the leaders of Europe and the people they represent are determined to maintain and intensify our attacks until Mr. Milosevic's forces leave Kosovo and the refugees return under the protection of an international force or until his military is weakened to the point when he can no longer keep his vise like grip on Kosovo. At the beginning of the operation, we focused, properly, on Serbia's highly developed air defenses, to reduce the risks to our pilots. There are still significant air defenses up, and therefore, there is still risk with every mission. But we have degraded the system to the point that now NATO can fly 24 hours a day, not simply at night. We've struck at Serbia's machinery of repression, at the infrastructure that supports it. We've destroyed all of Serbia's refineries, half of its capacity to produce ammunition. We've attacked its bridges and rail lines and communications networks to diminish its ability to supply, reinforce, and control its forces in Kosovo. Increasingly now, we are striking the forces themselves, hitting tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, radar missiles, and aircraft. As the allies have said, all of us, repeatedly, Mr. Milosevic can stop NATO's bombing by meeting these conditions One, Serbian security forces must leave Kosovo two, the displaced Kosovars must be able to return three, there must be an international security force to protect all Kosovars, including the Serb minority there, as they work towards self government. If he refuses, our military campaign will continue to destroy as much of his military capability as we can so that each day his capacity for repression will diminish. Meanwhile, his actions, though absolutely devastating to the civilian population and horribly burdensome to the frontline states of Macedonia and Albania, have not destroyed the armed opposition among Kosovars. Indeed, their numbers and determination are growing. Ultimately, Mr. Milosevic will have to choose, either to cut his mounting losses or lose his ability to maintain his grip on Kosovo. As for NATO, we are prepared to continue this effort as long as necessary to achieve our objectives. Our timetable will be determined by our goals, not the other way around. In the meantime, we must do more to aid the refugees. They are pouring out of Kosovo. We must help to preserve their lives and health and their hope of return. This week, NATO approved Operation Allied Harbor, under which 8,000 troops will work with relief agencies in Albania to establish camps, provide logistical support, deliver aid, and ensure security. Thus far, we have contributed in the United States 150 million to this effort. Conditions at the borders are beginning to improve. Now we are most concerned about the fate of the refugees, hundreds of thousands of them, trapped inside Kosovo. They are unable to leave but afraid to go home. Mr. Milosevic apparently wants to use them as hostages and human shields, and he's preventing relief groups from getting to them. People of good will all around the world today are trying to find ways to overcome this cruel and cynical manipulation of innocent human beings. Mr. Milosevic also continues to hold on to the three American servicemen his forces seized in Macedonia. He continues to flout his obligation to allow the Red Cross to visit them. I want to say again as clearly as I can The United States will hold him personally responsible for their welfare. Now, the stand we have taken, first in Bosnia, now in Kosovo, against organized ethnic hatred is a moral imperative. But it is also a strategic imperative. And I'd like to talk with you a little about that and ask all of you to ask yourselves how you view the history of the last 50 years and how you imagine the next 50 years unfolding. The history of the United States, for a very long time, was dominated by a principle of nonintervention in the affairs of other countries, even when we strongly disagreed. Indeed, for most of our history, we have worn the principle of nonintervention as a badge of honor, beginning with George Washington's warning against entangling alliances. The 20th century changed all that, with two World Wars, the cold war, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Panama, Lebanon, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and others. Our steadily increasing involvement with the rest of the world, not for territorial gain but for peace and freedom and security, is a fact of recent history. During the cold war, it can be argued that on occasion we made a wrong judgment because we tended to see the world solely through the lenses of communism or anti communism. But no one suggests that we ever sought territorial advantage. No one doubts that when America did get involved, we were doing what at least we thought was right for humanity. Now, at the end of the 20th century, we face a great battle between the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration, the forces of globalism versus tribalism, of oppression against empowerment. And the phenomenal explosion of technology, including that of advanced weaponry, might be the servant of either side or both. The central irony of our time, it seems to me, is this Most of us have a vision of the 21st century world with the triumph of peace and prosperity and personal freedom with respect for the integrity of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities within a framework of shared values, shared power, and shared plenty making common cause against disease and environmental degradation, against terror, organized crime, and weapons of mass destruction. This grand vision, ironically, is threatened by the oldest demon of human society, our vulnerability to hatred of the other, those who are not like us. In the face of that, we cannot be indifferent at home or abroad. That is why we are in Kosovo. Kosovo is a very small place on a very large fault line, on the borderlands of Central and Eastern Europe, at the meeting place of the Islamic world and the Western and Orthodox branches of Christianity, where people have settled in a complex patchwork of ethnic and religious groups and where countless wars have been fought over faith, land, and power. Kosovo is far from unique in its region. It is surrounded by nations with similar challenges of history and diversity. The only difference today is that they think of them, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Bosnia are now at least struggling to realize the vision of multi ethnic democracy that Mr. Milosevic is struggling to kill. Much of the former Soviet Union faces a similar challenge, including Ukraine and Moldova, southern Russia, the Caucasus nations of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, the new nations of central Asia. These nations spent most of the last half century under Communist rule. In the years when Western Europe was overcoming its old animosities by integrating its economies and embracing democracy, in the years when Americans began confronting our own legacy of racial hatred through open debate and political activism, these nations saw their problems frozen in time, kept in place by a rigid system that allowed no talk of change. They projected to the world a picture of stability, but it was a false picture, a stability imposed by rulers whose answer to ethnic tensions was not to resolve them but to suppress and deny them. When the weight of Communist repression was lifted, these tensions naturally rose to the surface, to be resolved by statesmen or exploited by demagogues. The potential for ethnic conflict became, perhaps, the greatest threat to what is among our most critical interests the transition of the former Communist countries toward stability, prosperity, and freedom. We are in Kosovo because we care about saving lives and we care about the character of the multiethnic post coldwar world. We don't want young democracies that have made the right choices to be overwhelmed by the flight of refugees and the victories of ethnic hatred. We don't want to see Europe re fight with tanks and artillery the same battles they fought centuries ago with axes and arrows. And because stability in Europe is important to our own security, we want to build a Europe that is peaceful, undivided, and free, a Europe where young Americans do not have to fight and die again to deal with the consequences of other people's madness and greed. Who is going to define the future of this part of the world? Who will provide the model for how the people who have emerged from communism resolve their own legitimate problems? Will it be Mr. Milosevic, with his propaganda machine and his paramilitary thugs, who tell people to leave their country, their history, and their land behind, or die? Or will it be a nation like Romania, which is building democracy and respecting the rights of its ethnic minorities, or Hungary, which has accepted that ethnic Hungarians can live beyond its borders with security and freedom, or Macedonia, which is struggling to maintain a tolerant, multiethnic society under the unimaginable pressures of the human and economic costs imposed by Mr. Milosevic's policies? Now, after our recent experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, it's easy to forget that despite all the violence and turmoil they have experienced, the people of this region have, in fact, found ways to live together through the years. If the nations of the Balkans had truly experienced a thousand years of unceasing ethnic cleansing, their ethnic makeup wouldn't be anything like what it is. They would be utterly homogeneous, not so diverse. Today, most of those countries are democracies. Most are trying to resolve their problems by force of argument, not force of arms. We cannot allow the Milosevic vision, rooted as it is in hatred and violence and cynicism, to prevail. But if we truly want a more tolerant, inclusive future for the Balkans and all of southeast Europe, we will have to both oppose his efforts and offer a better vision of the future, one that we are willing to help build. Now, what does all this mean for the future of Kosovo and the region as a whole, starting from where we are right now? What many Kosovars want is independence. That is certainly understandable. After what they've been through, it's only natural that they should equate sovereignty with survival. But I continue to think it is not the best answer. Kosovo lacks the resources and infrastructure to be viable on its own. Moreover, Yugoslavia's long suffering neighbors fear that an independent Kosovo would be unstable and that the instability itself would be contagious. Finally, we must remember the principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multiethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity. Some people think the best way to solve Kosovo's problems, and Serbia's and Bosnia's, is to withdraw their borders and re arrange their people to reflect their ethnic distinctions. Well, first of all, a lot of people who say that haven't looked very closely at the maps. It is a problem of staggering complexity. Once it starts, it would never end. For every grievance resolved, a new one would be created. For every community moved to a new place, another community would, by definition, be displaced. If we were to choose this course, we would see the continuous fissioning of smaller and smaller ethnically based, inviable states, creating pressures for more war, more ethnic cleansing, more of the politics of repression and revenge. I believe the last thing we need in the Balkans is greater Balkanization. The real question today is not whether Kosovo will be part of Serbia. The real question is whether Kosovo and Serbia and the other states in the region will be part of the new Europe. The best solution for Kosovo, for Serbia, for Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, and all the countries of southeast Europe is not the endless re jiggering of the borders but greater integration into a Europe in which sovereignty matters but in which borders are becoming more and more open and less important in a negative sense. It is to affirm the principle that Mr. Milosevic has done so very much to undermine, that successful modern states make a virtue, not a blood feud, out of ethnic and religious diversity. That is the solution that Western Europe accepted not too long ago, really, when you think of it after Europe had been consumed by two of the bloodiest wars in all of human history, after the Holocaust almost erased an entire people from the face of the Earth. It is hard to visualize today, hard to remember, when you drive across Belgium and Holland, across the border between France and Germany, that twice in this century millions of people spilled blood fighting over every inch of that land. It is hard to imagine the immediate postwar Europe Winston Churchill described as a rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate. But because of the changes which have occurred, it is not unimaginable today that the nations of southeastern Europe will choose integration and peace, just as their Western neighbors have. To achieve that future, we must follow the example of the World War II generation by standing up to aggression and hate and then by following through with a postconflict strategy for reconstruction and renewal. If we don't want people to remain mired in the miseries of yesterday, we must give them a better tomorrow to dream of and work for. Even as we fight this conflict, we must look beyond it to what the Balkans, southeastern Europe, indeed, the whole continent of Europe should look like in 10 or 20 years. We should try to do for southeastern Europe what we helped to do for Western Europe after World War II, and for Central Europe after the cold war, to help its people build a region of multi ethnic democracies, a community that upholds common standards of human rights, a community in which borders are open to people in trade, where nations cooperate to make war unthinkable. That is why my request to Congress for supplemental funding for our military and humanitarian operation in Kosovo will also support emergency assistance to Yugoslavia's neighbors, which do not want their dreams of democracy and integration undermined by a flood of refugees and the fear of violence. That is why we've been working to help the countries of the region consolidate democratic reform and build professional armed forces under civilian control. We need to intensify these efforts and to work with the European Union and the international financial institutions to mobilize more support for these countries. And we need to condition this help, just as we did with Western Europe 50 years ago, on closer cooperation among the beneficiaries and a new understanding of their sovereignty. This will take constant, steady American engagement, together with our European allies, old and new. It will demand keeping institutions, including NATO and the European Union, open to new nations who make the right choices. It will take money in the form of investment and aid. It will require a willingness to provide material and moral support to people and leaders across the region who are standing up for multi ethnic democracy. Realistically, it will require a democratic transition in Serbia, for the region's democracies will never be safe with a belligerent tyranny in their midst. It will demand from us a recognition that there is no easy way out of the region's troubles, but there is a solution that advances our interests and keeps faith with our values if we are ready to make a long term commitment. Of course, all of this will take time and effort. In the meantime, the people of Kosovo should have protection, security, and self government. That can only be assured by an international security force with NATO at the core. As in Bosnia, this force should also include members of NATO's Partnership For Peace that represent the whole range of ethnic groups in Europe. This is precisely the kind of mission we envisioned for the Partnership For Peace when it was created 5 years ago, and the kind of mission I very much hope Russia could join as well, just as it did so constructively in Bosnia. In the long run, our goal for Kosovo should not be independence but interdependence. Our watchword for the region should be integration, not disintegration. The ultimate answer for Kosovo, for Serbia, for Bosnia, Croatia, all the Balkans is not to withdraw behind barriers of mistrust and insecurity but to join a Europe where borders unite rather than divide, to build a richly textured fabric of civilization that lifts all God's children and resists those who would tear it apart by appealing to the dark recesses of the soul that lead only to dead ends. The Balkan war that began in Kosovo 10 years ago must end in Kosovo. It should be the last conflict of the 20th century. It should not be the defining conflict of the 21st century. The United States has the opportunity and the responsibility to make that decision come out right for our children and our grandchildren. We can help to lead to a new day for the people of this long suffering region, a more peaceful time for Europe, and a better future for the United States. Thank you very much. Edward Seaton. The President has kindly agreed to take questions. You must be an ASNE member to ask a question. I would invite you to go to the floor mikes, as I see you're doing. Please identify yourself and your newspaper. We'll start over here with Rich Oppel. April 14 Attack on Kosovar Albanians Q. Mr. President, Rich Oppel, Austin American Statesman. Would you help us sort out what happened yesterday on the road from Prizren to Kukes? According to press accounts you had your choices, I guess NATO aircraft either bombed a convoy that includes refugees or the Serbs attacked the Albanians in response to our bombing. Did we screw up? Can the prosecution of this war be sustained can it sustain the support of Americans if the newspapers of this country are publishing front page stories showing dead civilians? And what word went out from you and Sandy Berger today to the Pentagon and to the NATO High Command about yesterday's events? The President. Well, first of all, what we believe happened is that the pilot thought it was a military convoy and that there were apparently civilians in the convoy who were killed. That is regrettable. It is also inevitable in a conflict of this kind, with planes traveling at high speeds, doing their best to fulfill their mission. And if the requirement is that nothing like this can ever happen, then we're saying it's okay with us if Mr. Milosevic displaces over a million Kosovars, kills and rapes thousands upon thousands of them. And keep in mind, in Bosnia there were more than 2 million refugees and a quarter of a million people killed. You cannot have this kind of conflict without some errors like this occurring. This is not a business of perfection. I ask you to think about the hundreds and hundreds of sorties which have been flown in the last 3 weeks and the small number of civilian casualties. It should be obvious to everybody in the world that we are bending over backwards to hit military targets, to hit security targets, even to hit a lot of targets late at night where the losses in human life will be minimized. These efforts have been made, and they have been remarkably successful. So, certain regrettable things will happen. We will do our best. The military will evaluate this incident, as it does every other one so will the NATO command. But I have to tell you, if anyone thinks that this is a reason for changing our mission, then the United States will never be able to bring military power to bear again, because there is no such thing as flying airplanes this fast, dropping weapons this powerful, dealing with an enemy this pervasive who is willing to use people as human shields, and never have this sort of tragic thing happen. It cannot be done. I believe when the scales are weighed, it will be obvious that this is a result of Mr. Milosevic's policies. If he doesn't want this to happen, he ought to get out of Kosovo, let the Kosovars come home, and let people come in there who can protect them. That is the answer to this. Effectiveness of NATO Strategy Q. Mr. President, thank you very much for coming to speak to us. I'm Dave Seaton of the Winfield Daily Courier in Kansas. If the people, the hundreds of thousands of people hiding in the hills in Kosovo, the Albanian Kosovars, perish from natural causes or as a result of this slaughter of paramilitary forces, won't NATO's hoped for victory from bombing be hollow? And won't we have failed to prevent the kind of repeat of the Holocaust that you've said is what we don't want to enter the 21st century with? The President. Well, first of all, I believe that our strategy will prevail. We do have, as I said, a very difficult problem here, to figure out what to do about the refugees within Kosovo. We are working at it. The international relief agencies are working at it. A lot of countries that have some relationship with Serbia are working at it. And we are doing our best to try to figure out how to resolve it. I think the answer is, what is the alternative? So far, we still don't have as many refugees and nowhere near as many people dead as we did in Bosnia. And I think it's because we have moved more quickly. I think we have a chance to put this back together without having as much wreckage as we had there. And we are working as hard as we can to do it. It is a difficult situation, but we are working as hard as we can. And we are doing it while keeping this NATO Alliance together. And keep in mind, that is also very important, I think, that this is not an action by the United States alone. This is not one we engineered or dominated. This is a decision we made as partners with the 18 other NATO Allies, and we are doing our best to deal with it. And I assure you that we're trying to deal with all the contingencies. I do not think it is including trying to figure out what's the worst thing that can happen and how to avoid it. But we're doing our best to deal with that. It's not possible to fly helpless cargo planes over and do airdrops to people, for example, if we know there is a better than 50 percent chance they won't get the supplies in the first place and a much better than 50 percent chance that the planes would be shot out of the air, even though they are not warplanes at all. So we're struggling to come to grips with this. But I think we moved very quickly, and we've made a lot of progress in a short time in dealing with the massive refugee problem on the borders in the other countries, and I hope in the next few days we'll have some progress to report on this. President's Response to Criticism Q. Mr. President, Ken Bunting with the Seattle Post Intelligencer. I haven't listened to any talk radio today, but, I apologize, I do often. And I'm often reminded of your wife's comment about the rightwing conspiracy, the critics who want to get at you for anything and undermine your Presidency and discredit you, personally. But there is a common drumbeat on the airwaves now, and it is that you personally lack the moral authority to be Commander in Chief. And certainly, I guess there is a powerful inclination to ignore those criticisms. But if you had to address it to an Air Force pilot, who had listened to the same radio shows and perhaps been persuaded to that point of view, how would you address that? The President. Well, I don't have to address it to the Air Force pilot. I am his Commander in Chief, and they swore an oath to the Constitution, and they have performed admirably. And they don't deserve to hear that. I just have seen a lot of our Air Force pilots. I just went down to Barksdale Air Force Base in Shreveport, Louisiana. I spent endless amounts I spent hours talking to the families, the friends, the people that were there, encouraging people to say what they think. One person said something critical. Several hundred said, "We believe in what we're doing. It is the right thing to do. Thank you for doing it. We are proud to do it. This is what we signed on for." This is a democracy, and people can say whatever they want to say. But I have found that the American people, vast majorities of them, at least, appreciate it when I don't spend my time responding to them, and instead I spend my time working for the American people and trying to do what I think is right. I let other people be their judge about whether they think I should or shouldn't do something. But I have no response, except to get up every day and try to do my job. And I think that this country is in a better place than it was 6 years and 3 months ago because we have followed that policy, instead of being totally consumed with spending all of our time answering our critics. I'd rather work on what I can control, and the opinion of some of the talk show people is something that's way beyond my control and happily so. Laughter Mr. Seaton. We have time for only one more question, and if I could, I'd like to break the line over here. Q. I really have an important question, if I may. Mr. Seaton. Okay, but if Len Downey would get his question right afterward. Serb Weapons of Mass Destruction Q. Chris Waddle, executive editor of the Anniston Star. Mr. President, we're a center for chemical warfare training and storage in Anniston, Alabama, and Pentagon officials confirm to us the chemical weapons capability of the former Yugoslav forces. How does that availability of weapons of mass destruction among the Serbs impact American and NATO operations in the Kosovo conflict? And what is your administration's policy of response or retribution in the however unlikely event of enemy use of such weapons of mass destruction against insurgents or refugees or even the NATO Alliance? The President. My response would be swift and overwhelming. And we have, obviously, intelligence about the capabilities of the Serbs in a number of areas militarily, just as we do with other countries. But I think they are quite well aware of the dangers of overly escalating this. And I think that's all I should say about it right now. Mr. Seaton. Mr. President, I'm told we have to you can take one from Len. Q. I'm the only woman in line, so I'd like laughter The President. I'll take a couple more. You know what's going on, don't you? The people that help me don't trust you not to write a story that's about something other than Kosovo, and they think the longer I stay up here, the greater my chances of screwing up. Laughter That's really what's going on here. And it's wonderful when you're not running for anything, you can say just exactly what's on your mind. Laughter But have at it, go ahead. Laughter Human Rights in Afghanistan Q. Okay, great. Thank you. I'm Narda Zacchino with the Los Angeles Times. Knowing your interest in human rights and having had you refer to all God's children, I'd like you to focus some attention for just a moment on some of God's children in Afghanistan. And what I'm speaking about is, this is a country that's under the harsh rule of the Taliban, some of whose leaders we helped finance and arm in their fight against the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan today, there are 11 1 2 million women and children, women and girls, who are virtually under house arrest. Male doctors are not permitted to treat women and girls, and female doctors are not allowed to practice. Women are kept in their homes and may only leave if they're in the company of a brother, a father, or a husband. Windows of homes where women live are painted black so that no man may, per chance, see them without their burkha. When they go outside, they're totally shrouded. A 70 year old woman was beaten severely because her ankles showed to a man. A teenage girl was almost stoned to death because her ankles showed when she was riding her bicycle. Women in this country are not permitted to do anything except stay in their homes, unless they leave in the company of a man. It's a terribly repressive regime. And a number of people think that we have some obligation to these 11 1 2 million women and girls, because of our relationship former relationship to these people who are in power. What do you think? The President. Well, I absolutely do, and I think we would even if we hadn't supported the Taliban on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle years ago. I think, independent of that, we do. I think that what has happened to the women and children of Afghanistan is atrocious. The First Lady and I had an event at the White House to highlight that on Human Rights Day, including having two Afghan women there who talked to the press about what was going on. I met with a group of leaders from the Feminist Majority the other day and talked about how we could do more to bring more to the United States, what other things we could do to put pressure on Taliban and on other states, other countries, to try to help us to change conditions. And I think it is very, very important to do. I think it is one of the worst examples of systematic human rights abuses in the world today, and a terrible perversion of Islam. Mr. Seaton. We asked Len Downey to raise a question that was of concern to ASNE, so I invite him to do so if he could. Availability of Information Q. Len Downey of the Washington Post. Mr. President, a growing number of newspaper editors and broadcast news executives are very concerned about the relatively little reliable information and specific information that has been released so far by the Defense Department about the bombings and the other military activities so far during Operation Allied Force much less information, for instance, than was provided daily during the Persian Gulf war or Operation Desert Fox. In view of the need, Mr. President, that you discussed today to have the American people support this military action, will you instruct the Defense Department to provide us and the American people with more specific information about the bombing? The President. Well, Mr. Downey, you know, late last week the Defense Department had a big, long briefing. And there are basically two issues here, and we're trying to resolve them. I actually had a rather extended conversation yesterday with two of the other leaders of the NATO alliance about this because I think it's important, not just in the United States but throughout Europe, to get more information out more quickly. There have been two problems from the point of view of the Pentagon One is trying to work through the NATO command structure and let them do the daily briefings and try to determine by consensus, if you will, what should be gotten out and how and then to have the Pentagon play a supporting role in that. The other problem is a practical one, which is sometimes it takes in the Gulf, when we fought in Iraq in Desert Storm and later when we had our actions there, neither the weather nor the terrain presented the barriers to actually assessing quickly what the impact of the action was that is presented in the Balkans. So sometimes there is just an inevitable delay, which is one of the reasons that last week I talked to Secretary Cohen and General Shelton about having the Pentagon do a big briefing to be much more detailed about what, in fact, had happened and what conclusions we drew from it. So all I can tell you is, I'm aware that this is a difficulty. I agree that we should try to do more, more simultaneous with the actions. And I am working on it and trying to get NATO to do more as well. Unless there is some specific security related reason that some issue shouldn't be talked about, I think the more information we can get out there the more quickly, the better off we are. Q. Thank you. The President. But I know that whenever there's a conflict between any Government and the press, there's always the assumption that there is some deliberate scheme at work here. And I don't think that's the case here. I think really, we're trying to work through NATO has never done this kind of operation before, in this way, and there are a lot of things that have to be worked through. But I am working on it, and I hope that most of you will be generally satisfied within the next few days. Do you want to take a couple more? Mr. Seaton. We could it's up to you. The President. He's been standing there a long time. Laughter President's Legacy Q. I have. And I'm the only resident from Vancouver, Washington, standing here, so laughter Tom Koenninger, the Columbian, Vancouver, Washington. Mr. President, my question has two parts. The first is, as you near the end of your second term in office and deal with such issues as the Balkans, what legacy do you believe you are leaving to the American public? Secondly, would you be specific, sir, in telling us ways in which America is better off for your Presidency? The President. Well, I think, first of all let me answer the first question first. I think others will determine the legacy of this administration, and most of it will have to be done when all the records are there and time passes and people without an axe to grind one way or the other have a chance to have their say. I can only tell you what I have tried to do. I have tried to lead America into a new century and into a whole new era in the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world. And I have tried to help build a world that was more peaceful, more prosperous, and more secure. I think that among the things that people will say this administration did and made progress on was, we gave the United States a modern economic policy and got out of 12 years of horrible deficit spending during which we quadrupled the debt. I think that the work we did to support the solution of social problems, in reducing the welfare rolls by half and reducing the crime rate and putting 100,000 police on the street, would be important. I think the work we did in education will be important. I think the systematic effort we made to promote reconciliation among people of different racial groups will be important. I think the work we have done in the Middle East to Northern Ireland in promoting peace will be important. I think the work we've done in Latin America through the Summit of the Americas and the work we've done with our allies in Central America will be important. I think there are a lot of things that will altogether add up to preparing America for the 21st century, building a stronger American community, and repairing the social fabric. And let me just say one thing. When I got off the airplane today there were a bunch of young people who are AmeriCorps volunteers. That's a program we started back in the second year of my Presidency. And one young woman said to me, "I'm 30 years old. You're the first President I ever voted for. I've kept up. You did what you said you'd do, and it's worked." And her saying that to me meant more than just about anything any American could say. When I was in New Hampshire for the seventh anniversary of the New Hampshire primary, there were schoolchildren along the highway waiting in the cold rain. And person after person said to me, "You had to come to these little town meetings in 1991, and we listened to you, and you've done what you said." So what I think will also happen is people will see Americans can solve their problems. Government has a role to play, and it can produce. So I think there's a sense of possibility, a sense of optimism, a sense of eagerness about the future that the present difficulties in Kosovo cannot begin to overshadow. And I think the country is clearly better off than it was 6 years ago. Q. Thank you. Success of Post Cold War Policies Q. Mr. President, my name is Dave Zeeck. I'm the editor at the newspaper in Tacoma, Washington, the News Tribune. And part of a little known function of this convention is to help train young journalists. There are some journalists here who produce the AS E report. I'd like to ask them to stand because they gave me this question. If you all would stand, please. Their question was and you made an indirect reference to this in your speech you didn't mention the Marshall plan by name, but that seemed to be what you were talking about as a way to resolve this later. And their question was, could a greater effort have been made after the fall of the Berlin Wall to do more along the lines of a Marshall plan, particularly in the Balkans, and might that have prevented something like we're facing today? The President. Perhaps. I wasn't President then, and I don't know. I don't say that in a blameworthy sense I just wasn't. And I don't think it's fair for me to make judgments where I don't have all the facts, and I can't say. I don't mind saying that I missed the boat somewhere if I know it, or if I know enough about somebody else to say that, but I don't know the answer to that. Let me say it in another way. I am convinced that after communism fell, that the work that we had a chance after the Berlin Wall fell, after the end of communism, to build a Europe that was united, democratic, and at peace for the first time in history. You go back since the rise of nation states on the continent of Europe, that had never been true before. There had always been some conflict there had always been some division there had always been some absence of democracy never before possible. At that moment there were three great challenges, I would argue, to that vision. One is, what happens to Russia? Does Russia become a democracy? Does it become stable? Can it be prosperous enough in the painful transition? The other was, what happens to all the states around that were Communist, non Russian states, basically the Balkans and Central Europe and southeastern Europe second question. Third question is, would there be a conflict between Islam and the Orthodox branch of Christianity, manifest most obviously in the tension between Greece and Turkey but also up in the Balkans? If those three things could be resolved in a satisfactory way, then we could build a Europe that was united, democratic, and at peace. Now, what happened? The Germans took on East Germany, in an act of patriotism and generosity and costliness of staggering proportions. They're still paying the economic price today, but it was a brave and good and generous thing to do. The major countries in Europe supported the European Union. NATO took in Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. There was a massive effort made to try to deal with Russia. The United States put a lot of money into the denuclearization program and other things. After all is said and done, where are we? And we dealt with the Balkans in a more halting way. I think everyone would have to admit that. And we've continued without great success to resolve the difficulties between Greece and Turkey, but they haven't gotten worse, either. And we may have some Americans of both heritages here today that could have some ideas about that. So where are we today? Today, we're concerned that Russia has maintained its democracy, but its economy has been so burdened, it's caused all kinds of other problems, and that takes a lot of time for us. We're working on that. We're trying to maintain our strategic partnership with them even as we disagree about the conflict in the Balkans. Central Europe is in very good shape, Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Romania, Bulgaria, a lot of other countries Slovenia are doing better than most people would have imagined they would do. But the Balkans are in trouble, and the trouble in the Balkans has exacerbated the tensions with Russia, at least in the short run. And all I can tell you is, I don't know whether we could have done more before. I always prefer to look to tomorrow. I'm not blaming anybody for what happened before. I can't do that. I don't know enough to know. Everybody had their hands full, and there were so many changes going on at once, I'm not sure anyone could have figured out more to do. But I can tell you that if you want to think about what you want your children to live like, you imagine what do you want to happen in Asia how are we going to work out our relationships with China and deal with the remaining security threat in North Korea and try to help Japan and the other countries come back? How are we going to have the strongest possible alliance in Latin America? What kind of new partnership can we have with Africa? But it all could come a cropper unless we have a united, democratic, and free Europe. And the three things are what I said our relationship with Russia what happens in the Balkans and southeastern Europe and will Islam and Christianity be able to coexist in a positive way in the underbelly of Europe. And so I would say, maybe more could have been done I don't know. I just know now, right now, all those people are fighting over smaller and smaller pieces of land. It's like life is a zero sum game. You kick me out of my village I'll kick you out of your village. The Bible says, wisely, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." We need to have an alternative vision. They need to be brought into the vision of a prosperous Europe. They need to have more to gain by working together than they do by having constant fights with one another. They need to have and we need to reach out and lift up, there. So, however this conflict ends, or whenever it ends I think I know how it's going to end but whenever it ends, we have some building to do. They have to have something to live for. You just can't tell people what they can't do they've got to have something to be for, something to dream of, a future to build. And we ought to be a part of it. Thank you. April 12, 1999 The First Lady made brief opening remarks and introduced Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, who then gave the evening's featured lecture entitled "The Perils of Indifference Lessons Learned From a Violent Century." The President. Ladies and gentlemen, we have all been moved by one more profound example of Elie Wiesel's lifetime of bearing witness. Before we open the floor for questions, and especially because of the current events in Kosovo, I would like to ask you to think about what he has just said in terms of what it means to the United States, in particular, and to the world in which we would like our children to live in the new century. How do we avoid indifference to human suffering? How do we muster both the wisdom and the strength to know when to act and whether there are circumstances in which we should not? Why are we in Kosovo? The history of our country for quite a long while had been dominated by a principle of non intervention in the affairs of other nations. Indeed, for most of our history we have worn that principle as a badge of honor, for our Founders knew intervention as a fundamentally destructive force. George Washington warned us against those "entangling alliances." The 20th century, with its two World Wars, the cold war, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Panama, Lebanon, Grenada, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, it changed all that. For good or ill, it changed all that. Our steadily increasing involvement in the rest of the world, not for territorial gain but for peace and freedom and security, is a fact of recent history. In the cold war, it might be argued that on occasion we made a wrong judgment, because we saw the world through communist and noncommunist lenses. But no one doubts that we never sought territorial advantage. No one doubts that when we did get involved, we were doing what at least we thought was right for humanity. Now, at the end of the 20th century, it seems to me we face a great battle of the forces of integration against the forces of disintegration, of globalism versus tribalism, of oppression against empowerment. And this phenomenal explosion of technology might be the servant of either side or both. The central irony of our time, it seems to me, is this Most of us have this vision of a 21st century world with the triumph of peace and prosperity and personal freedom with the respect for the integrity of ethnic, racial, and religious minorities within a framework of shared values, shared power, shared plenty making common cause against disease and environmental degradation across national lines, against terror, organized crime, weapons of mass destruction. This vision, ironically, is threatened by the oldest demon of human society, our vulnerability to hatred of the other. In the face of that, we cannot be indifferent, at home or abroad. That is why we are in Kosovo. We first have to set an example, as best we can, standing against hate crimes against racial minorities or gays, standing for respect, for diversity. Second, we have to act responsibly, recognizing this unique and, if history is any guide, fleeting position the United States now enjoys of remarkable military, political, and economic influence. We have to do what we can to protect the circle of humanity against those who would divide it by dehumanizing the other. Lord knows we have had enough of that in this century, and Elie talked about it. I think it is well to point out that Henry Luce coined the term "the American Century" way back in 1941. A lot of terrible things have happened since then, but a lot of good things have happened as well. And we should be grateful that, for most of the time since, our Nation has had both the power and the willingness to stand up against the horrors of the century, not every time, not every place, not even always with success, but we've done enough good to say that America has made a positive difference. From our successes and from our failures, we know there are hard questions that have to be asked when you move beyond the values and the principles to the murky circumstances of daily life. We can't, perhaps, intervene everywhere, but we must always be alive to the possibility of preventing death and oppression and forging and strengthening institutions and alliances to make a good outcome more likely. Elie has said that Kosovo is not the Holocaust but that the distinction should not deter us from doing what is right. I agree on both counts. When we see people forced from their homes at gunpoint, loaded onto train cars, their identity papers confiscated, their very presence blotted from the historical record, it is only natural that we would think of the events which Elie has chronicled tonight in his own life. We must always remain awake to the warning signs of evil. And now, we know that it is possible to act before it is too late. The efforts of Holocaust survivors to make us remember and help us understand, therefore, have not been in vain. The people who fought those battles and lived those tragedies, however, will not be around forever. More than 1,000 World War II veterans pass away every day. But they can live on in our determination to preserve what they gave us and to stand against the modern incarnations of the evil they defeated. Some say and perhaps there will be some discussion about it tonight that evil is an active presence, always seeking new opportunities to manifest itself. As a boy growing up in my Baptist church, I heard quite a lot of sermons about that. Other theologians, like Niebuhr, Martin Luther King, argued that evil was more the absence of something, a lack of knowledge, a failure of will, a poverty of the imagination, or a condition of indifference. None of this answers any of the difficult questions that a Kosovo, a Bosnia, a Rwanda present. But Kosovo is at the doorstep or the underbelly of NATO and its wide number of allies. We have military assets and allies willing to do their part. President Milosevic clearly has established a pattern of perfidy, earlier in Bosnia and elsewhere. And so we act. I would say there are two caveats that we ought to observe. First of all, any military action, any subsequent peacekeeping force cannot cause ancient grudges and freshly opened wounds to heal overnight. But we can make it more likely that people will resolve their differences by force of argument rather than force of arms and, in so doing, learn to live together. That is what Romania and Hungary have done recently, with their differences. It is what many Bosnian Croats, Serbs, and Muslims are struggling to do every day. Second, we should not fall victim to the easy tendency to demonize the Serbian people. They were our allies in World War II they have their own legitimate concerns. Any international force going into Kosovo to maintain the peace must be dedicated also to protecting the Serbian minority from those who may wish to take their vengeance. But we cannot be indifferent to the fact that the Serbian leader has defined destiny as a license to kill. Destiny, instead, is what people make for themselves, with a decent respect for the legitimate interests and rights of others. In his first lecture here, the first Millennium Lecture, the distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn argued how much we are still shaped by the ideals of our Founding Fathers and by their realism, their deeply practical understanding of human nature, their understanding of the possibility of evil. They understood difficult moral judgments. They understood that to be indifferent is to be numb. They knew, too, that our people would never be immune to those who seek power by playing on our own hatreds and fears and that we had more to learn about the true meaning of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. Here in this house, we have tried to advance those ideals with our initiative against hate crime, the race initiative, AmeriCorps, the stand against the hatred that brought us Oklahoma City and paramilitary groups, the efforts to forge peace from Northern Ireland to the Middle East. But our challenge now, and the world's, is to harmonize diversity and integration, to build a richly textured fabric of civilization that will make the most of God's various gifts, and that will resist those who would tear that fabric apart by appealing to the dark recesses that often seem to lurk in even the strongest souls. To succeed, we must heed the wisdom of our Founders about power and ambition. We must have the compassion and determination of Abraham Lincoln to always give birth to new freedom. We must have the vision of President Roosevelt, who proclaimed four freedoms for all human beings and invited the United States to defend them at home and around the world. Now, we close out this chapter of our history determined not to turn away from the horrors we leave behind but to act on their lessons with principle and purpose. If that is what we are, in fact, doing, Kosovo could be a very good place to begin a new century. Thank you very much. Applause Thank you. We have hundreds of questions, I know. Ellen, do you want to describe what we're going to do? White House Millennium Council Director Ellen Lovell. Well, I think, Mr. President, you have a question for Mr. Wiesel. And then I'm going to begin the questioning from the room, and Mrs. Clinton will take the questions from the Internet. The President. I would like to ask you a question about what you think the impact of the modern media and sort of instantaneous news coverage will be. It is obvious to me that we built a consensus in the United States and throughout Europe for action in Bosnia in no small measure because of what people saw was going on there. It is obvious to me that the support in the United States and Europe for our actions in Kosovo have increased because of what people see going on. And I think I worry about two things, and I just would like to hear your thoughts on it. Number one, is there a chance that people will become inured to this level of human suffering by constant exposure to it? And number two, is there a chance that even though people's interest in humanity can be quickened almost overnight, that we're so used to having a new story every day that we may not have the patience to pay the price of time to deal with this and other challenges? A lot of these things require weeks and months, indeed, years of effort. And that seems to be inconsistent with, kind of, rapid fire new news we are used to seeing. Mr. Wiesel. Mr. President, usually, in this room, people ask you questions. Laughter The President. That's why I like this. Laughter Mr. Wiesel. What you said is correct. The numbness is a danger. I remember during the Vietnam war, the first time we saw on television, live, the war in Vietnam usually, of course, the networks broadcasted during dinner. So we stopped eating. How can you eat when people kill each other and people die? After 2 weeks, people went on eating. They were numb. And it's a danger. But nevertheless, I don't see the alternative. Except I hope that in the next millennium, the next century, those who are responsible for the TV programs, for the news programs, will find enough talent, enough fervor, enough imagination to present the news in such a way that the news will appeal to all of us day after day. I do not see an alternative. We must know what is happening. And today we can know it instantly. If the American people now are behind you, it is because they see it on television and they see it in newspapers. They see the images. They see the pictures of children in the trains, as you said, in the trains. So how can they remain indifferent? And therefore, I am the risks are there, but I have faith that we shall overcome the risks. But we must know. At this point, Ms. Lovell and the First Lady led the question and answer portion of the evening. Ms. Lovell called on Chief Joyce Dugan of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, who briefly described atrocities in her people's history and asked Mr. Wiesel how to overcome indifference to suffering, in order to avoid having to resort to military action. Mr. Wiesel responded that those who listened to the beauty in another culture's past would not be indifferent. The First Lady cited Bernard Bailyn's remarks at the first Millennium Evening, that people too often overlook or ignore painful segments of history. The President. I'd just like to say one thing specifically, Chief. First of all I'm glad you're here, and I'm glad you're here for this. I think that Hillary and I have spent more time on Native American issues and with Native American leaders than any previous administration, at least that I know anything about. And with all respect, one of the things that I think is killing us in this country still is a big problem is a phenomenal amount of ignorance, on the part not just of schoolchildren but of people in very important positions of decisionmaking, about the real, factual history of the Native Americans in the United States. And you can almost find no one who understands the difference in any one tribe or another. And you can almost find no one who understands that, yes, a few tribes are wealthy because of gaming, because of the sovereignty relationship, but also the poorest Americans are still in Native American communities. And I think this disempowerment, this stripping of autonomy and self respect and self reliance and the ability to do things that started over a century ago, still in subtle ways continues today. And from my perspective, I've been terribly impressed with a lot of the elected leaders of the tribes all across the country. And I think that we really have a huge job to do to not have kind of a benign neglect or not benign, a malign neglect, under the guise of preserving this sovereignty relationship. And we need to recognize what we did and what is still there that's a legacy of the past, so that we can give the children of the Native American tribes all over this country the future they deserve. I think it's a huge issue, and I still think ignorance is bearing down on us something fierce. And I thank you for being here. The question and answer portion of the evening continued. Dr. Odette Nyiramilimo of Rwanda, a Tutsi survivor of the 1994 genocide, asked how governments and individuals could now demonstrate that they were not still indifferent to the fate of Rwanda. Mr. Wiesel responded that nations might be intervening in Kosovo because they had not prevented the massacre in Rwanda. The President. I think we could have prevented a significant amount of it. You know, it takes the thing about the Rwanda massacre that was so stunning is it was done mostly with very primitive weapons, not modern mass killing instruments, and yet it happened in a matter of just a few weeks, as you know. And I want to give time for others to ask their questions, but let me say I have thought about this a great deal, more than you might imagine. And we went to Kigali when we were in Africa, and we talked to a number of the survivors, including a woman who woke up to find her husband and six children all hatcheted to death, hacked to death. And she, by a miracle, lived and was devoting herself to the work of helping people like you put your lives back together. One of the things that made it, I think, more likely that we would act in Kosovo, and eventually in Bosnia, is that we had a mechanism through which we could act, where people could join together in a hurry, like with NATO. And one of the things that we are trying to do is to work with other African countries now on something called the Africa Crisis Response Initiative, where we send American soldiers to work with African countries to develop the ability to work with other militaries to try to head these kinds of things off and to do it in a hurry. I can only tell you that I will do my best to make sure that nothing like this happens again in Africa. I do not think the United States can take the position that we only care about these sorts of things if they happen in Europe. I don't feel that way. And I think that we will, next time, be far more likely to have the means to act in Africa than we had last time, in a quicker way. An Internet questioner asked about the definition of human rights, and the First Lady pointed out that the United Nations had adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mr. Wiesel commented that human rights organizations had proliferated because people had lost confidence in the ability of government to ensure those rights. He then suggested that the worst violation of human rights was humiliation, such as by poverty, disease, or injustice. The President. Let me just say there was another part to that question. The young man asked a very good question. The only thing I would say is you should get a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You should read it. You will find that it also says, in addition to what Mr. Wiesel says, that all people should have certain rights against government. They should have the right to speak their mind. They should have the right to dissent. They should have the right to organize. They should have the right to chart their own course. And then the last question you ask is a very important one. He said, "Is human rights are they different from country to country?" And the truth is that to some extent they are, but that's not because people can use their own cultures or religion as an excuse to repress women and young girls, for example, the way the Taliban does in Afghanistan. It's because countries should be free to go beyond the baseline definition if they choose. For example, we have an Americans with Disabilities Act, which we believe is sort of a further manifestation of the basic human rights. So we don't want when you say, are they the same in all countries? no, countries normally, when they have more wealth or a more advanced democracy, find new ways to manifest those rights. And to that extent, they can be different from country to country. Countries do have different religious and cultural institutions, but the whole purpose of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was so that no country could get away with oppressing the basic humanity of any person on the grounds that they were somehow different from some other country. That's the most important point to be made. That's why there needed to be a Universal Declaration. The question and answer portion of the evening continued. Professor Azizah al Hibri, University of Richmond School of Law, founder of Karamah Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, pointed out that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all preach love, kindness, and compassion, but that each had been used as a tool of oppression and suffering. Mr. Wiesel responded that this was due to fanaticism and that part of the solution had to be education. The President. I would like to just offer a couple of observations, if I might. First of all, I think one of the most hopeful signs I have seen to deal with this whole issue of religious fanaticism in the last few years is the enormous support of Jews in America and throughout the world for the Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo. I think it doesn't answer all the questions of what should be the details of the resolution between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It doesn't solve all the problems, but everybody should see that this is a good thing. I think that the American Jewish community was maybe the most ardent community, earliest, for the United States stepping forward in Kosovo. And I think we have to see that as a good thing. Secondly, I think this whole question of the treatment of women and children by the Taliban has aroused a vocal opposition among members of the Muslim community around the world who feel that they can say this and not be betraying their faith. I think this is a good thing. Now, I would just like to make two other points, one of which is to agree with Elie on this one point. I agree on education, but education for what? There are a lot of geniuses that are tyrants. What is it that we're going to educate? I believe that every good Jew, every good Christian, and every good Muslim, if you believe that love is the central value of the religion, you have to ask yourself, why is that? The reason is, we are not God we might be wrong. Every one of us I might be wrong about what I've been advocating here tonight. It's only when you recognize the possibility that you might be wrong or, to use the language of Saint Paul, that we see through the glass darkly, that we know only in part, that you can give the other person some elbow room. And somehow, one or two central scriptural tenets from Judaism, from Islam, from the Koran, and from Christianity, need to be put in one little place and need to be propagated throughout the world to preach a little humility, if you please. Otherwise, we'll never get there. The second point I wanted to make is this A lot of these people that are saying this in the name of religion, they're kidding. They know perfectly well that religion has nothing to do with it. It's about power and control, and they're manipulating other people. And when it is, if it's someone who practices our faith, we've got to have the guts to stand up and say that. And it's hard, but we have to. The First Lady agreed, saying that the new century offered an opportunity for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to work together against fanaticism. The President. I would like to make one more point which I think is very important in the dealings between the West and the Islamic countries, generally, and I will use Iran as an example. It may be that the Iranian people have been taught to hate or distrust the United States or the West on the grounds that we are infidels and outside the faith. And therefore, it is easy for us to be angry and to respond in kind. I think it is important to recognize, however, that Iran, because of its enormous geopolitical importance over time, has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it's quite important to tell people, "Look, you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or others that are generally allied with us today did to you 50 or 60 or 100 or 150 years ago. But that is different from saying that I am outside the faith, and you are God's chosen." So sometimes people will listen to you if you tell them, "You're right, but your underlying reason is wrong." So we have to find some way to get dialog, and going into total denial when you're in a conversation with somebody who's been your adversary, in a country like Iran that is often worried about its independence and its integrity, is not exactly the way to begin. So I think while we speak out against religious intolerance, we have to listen for possible ways we can give people the legitimacy of some of their fears or some of their angers or some of their historic grievances, and then say they rest on other grounds now, can we build a common future? I think that's very important. Sometimes I think we in the United States, and Western culture generally, we hate to do that. But we're going to have to if we want to have an ultimate accommodation. The question and answer portion of the evening continued. Atiba de Souza, a University of Maryland student who emigrated from Trinidad as a child, suggested that in the next few years the Nation's minorities would become the majority, and asked if and how a global society could be achieved. Mr. Wiesel emphasized the importance of education, in schools and through the media. The President. I would just make two points, I think. First of all, I think given the fact that we're living in an age of globalization, where, whether we like it or not, more and more of our economic and cultural and other contacts will cross national lines, it is, in fact, a very good thing that sometime in the next century there will be no single majority racial group. But I should also tell you that before we had large numbers of African Americans coming, who were not here or direct descendants from slaves but others coming, like you did, from the Caribbean, and before we had large numbers of Hispanics, 100 years ago, Irish immigrants to this country were treated as if they were of a different racial group. So we've always had these tensions. But I think if we can learn to live together across our racial and religious lines, in a way that not just respects but actually celebrates our diversity, that does it within the framework, as I said, of a common fabric of shared values and shared opportunity, I think that will be quite a good thing for the 21st century. I think it will make America stronger, not weaker. So I look forward to that. The second thing I want to say is I think that to get there we're going to have to more broadly find a way to have more economic and educational balance in the share of wealth, in the share of knowledge, across all of our racial and ethnic groups. There is no easy way to achieve that. But I am convinced that and I see your colleague, Mr. Silber, out here, who's thought about this a great deal in his life I'm convinced that lowering standards for people who come from poor backgrounds is not the answer. I think we should raise standards and invest more resources in helping people achieve them. And then I think we need to provide the incentives in every neighborhood, in every Native American reservation, in every rural area, that have made the economy work elsewhere. It will never be perfectly done, but we can do a much, much better job of it. And unless we do a much better job educationally and economically, then we won't have all the benefits from our racial diversity that we could otherwise enjoy. The question and answer portion of the evening continued. Ms. Lovell then thanked the participants and invited the President's closing remarks. The President. I don't think there's much more to say, except to thank you again for once again giving us your witness and for the powerful example of your life. We thank your family for joining us. And I thank all of you for caring about this. I believe there's grounds for hope. I think the history of this country is evidence. I think the civil rights movement is evidence. I think the life and triumph of Nelson Mandela is evidence. I think evidence abounds. What we all have to remember is somehow how to strike the proper balance of passion and humility. I think our guest tonight has done it magnificently, and I thank him. Thank you very much. April 12, 1999 Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking Secretary Cohen and General Shelton for their truly outstanding leadership on behalf of our Nation's military. They are eloquent and profound representatives of what is best about this country, and I thank them. I want to thank Senator Breaux, Senator Landrieu, Representative McCrery for their support for you and for our country. I would like to acknowledge in the audience today, or here with us, other Members of Congress Congressmen Bill Jefferson and Chris John, from Louisiana, and Congressman Thornberry and Congressman Sandlin, who've come from the neighboring State of Texas to be with us. So I thank all of them for their support. I would like to thank the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Mike Ryan, for coming down here with me the Acting Secretary of the Air Force, Whitt Peters my National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger. We also have the FEMA Director here, James Lee Witt, because, you know, you've had some pretty tough natural disasters here recently, and we're here doing double duty. And General Marcotte and General Smoak, thank you for welcoming me here and for giving me the chance to meet with some of the fine people with whom you work who have also been involved in our work over Kosovo. I thank the adjutant general, Bennett Landreneau, who is representing Governor Foster Treasurer Ken Duncan and the mayor of Bossier City, George Dement and the mayor of Shreveport, Keith Hightower, for coming to meet me as well. Now, the nice thing about speaking last is that everything that needs to be said has been said, but not everyone has said it. Laughter What I would like to do is to be just serious for a moment and first thank all the previous speakers for what they have said and try to put this in some larger context. The conflict in Kosovo in which we are involved is really about two things first, what you know and see every night all those hundreds of thousands of innocent people uprooted, many of them killed, some of them dying from disease in refugee camps, some families divided forever not because of anything they did but because they happen to be Albanian instead of Serbian, Muslim instead of Orthodox Christian. It is a human tragedy that touches everyone. But there is a second issue here, as well, and that is whether we and our allies in Europe are going to allow that kind of problem hatred based on race or ethnicity or religion to be the defining force of the next 20 or 30 years. In other words, whether we're going to go into the 21st century, this great modern time where all our kids can do amazing things on the Internet, where all of our planes can do amazing things with high technology, and have all of the tools of the modern world put at the service of the most primitive hatreds known to man or whether our European allies 18 other countries in NATO and their friends and sympathizers across Europe will stay united with us and with our neighbors to the north in Canada and say, "We would like the 21st century to be different for our children. We would like to nip this conflict in the bud before it destabilizes all of Europe. We would like to see us make a statement that we don't want the 21st century to be defined, and we don't want American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines, to die on distant battlefields in large numbers because we walked away from these ethnic, religious, and racial atrocities." And that's what's going on. Now, I wanted to come here to Barksdale today for two reasons. One is, you're involved with the B 52's and what we're trying to achieve there. The other is, Barksdale has a rich heritage of being part of an allied effort, where America does not act alone but with others who love freedom and are prepared to defend it. This base was named for Lieutenant Eugene Barksdale of the U.S. Army Air Corps, who flew combat missions alongside British pilots in World War I with enormous skill and bravery. This base was where Jimmy Doolittle's famed bomber unit and so many others, including French pilots, trained to fight for freedom in World War II. It was from this base, during the very large coalition effort in the Gulf war, that crews launched the longest strike mission in the history of aerial combat, 35 nonstop hours in the air, when B 52's left Barksdale to strike at Saddam Hussein's war machine and returned safely here. Now you have this new mission, one that echoes the allied achievements of the past and embodies our determination to create a better future. As I said, I met earlier with aircrews who have returned from Kosovo, where with the aircraft from other NATO countries, they struck at the Serbian forces who have so brutally attacked the civilian population of Kosovo. The forces are working to save innocent lives, to protect the peace and freedom and stability of Europe, to stand against the notion that it's okay to uproot, destroy, and murder people because of their race, ethnic background, or religion. I am grateful for your service and grateful for the sacrifice of your families. We are all those of us in positions of responsibility committed to support you. I listened very, very carefully today when the crewmembers talked to me about the challenges of maintaining a long term career in the military today, about the challenges they face, the challenges their families face, the challenges that relate to income, the challenges that relate to health care, the challenges that relate to housing, the challenges that relate to operations tempo. We are working on that. We know that, now that we have downsized the military and the economy in the civilian sector has picked up, we're going to have to work harder to get and keep good people. Our new budget provides for an increase in pay and more money for housing and other quality of life supports, for more support for training and equipment. It is the first sustained increase in overall defense spending since 1985. There's something else that, since it is now April 12th, I think I ought to do. Our tax laws give the President the authority to issue an Executive order granting tax benefits to Americans serving in a combat zone or supporting combat efforts. I want you to know that I will issue that Executive order for our forces who are working to save Kosovo. This will mean that for military personnel serving in the combat zone, most or all pay for each month served will be tax free, not withheld from paychecks, not subject to IRS claims later. They will also be eligible for some additional pay for service. There's another advantage to the Executive order that will apply not only to personnel in the combat zone and others deployed overseas but also for some civilian personnel as well, including accredited journalists and relief workers. It will suspend the time for filing tax returns and related obligations to the IRS. With our citizens working so hard to protect the people of Kosovo, they shouldn't have to worry about their taxes. Now, Secretary Cohen will work out all the details with the Treasury Department as soon as possible. Laughter He's got 72 hours. Laughter You all have to have quicker turnaround than that. So he's going to fight with the tax person for you. Let me say again, I know I speak for all of the Members of Congress here in saying they support this. We have had remarkable bipartisan support from the leadership in Congress for this Congressmen Archer and Rangel, Senators Roth and Moynihan, who have made it quite clear that they support what we are doing. Let me just say one other word or two about this mission, because more of you will be going in the days ahead. Hundreds of thousands of these Kosovars are now refugees. There have been thousands of innocent victims. Many are just dying because they're stuck in these refugee camps and can't get adequate health care or support some of them from severe dehydration. There is also the possibility that Albania, Macedonia, and other countries around there receiving these refugees will be destabilized because they have ethnic problems of their own. There are also countries, believe it or not, in the Balkans that have worked hard to resolve their ethnic differences, and they have things going pretty well. Pretty soon, their malcontents may wonder whether they could have gotten a better deal by behaving in a more destructive way. We've learned the hard way through two World Wars and through what we saw in Bosnia that with these kinds of conflicts, if you don't halt them, they spread, to be stopped later at greater cost and greater risk. I have worked hard for the last 6 years to build in the aftermath of the cold war a Europe that is united, democratic, and at peace for the first time in history. The two great World Wars of the 20th century started in Europe. We have learned that so much of our liberty, our safety, our prosperity depends upon an alliance with a democratic Europe. That's what NATO has been all about. We know in the years ahead, when we're going to have to fight terrorism, when we're going to have to fight organized crime and drug trafficking, when we're going to have to fight the spread of weapons of mass destruction, when we're going to have to join together with countries to fight the spread of disease and environmental problems across national boundaries, that we will have to work with Europe. That is why we have taken new members into NATO. That is why we've established new partnerships with many other countries across the whole expanse of Europe. That's why we are adopting new missions, to be ready when somewhere, someone again challenges the peace and stability of Europe. That is what Mr. Milosevic has done. Keep in mind, before Kosovo, he started wars of ethnic hatred in Croatia and in Bosnia, with a quarter of a million killed and more than 2 million refugees. And the fighting there did not end until we and our allies acted. Now, we did everything we could possibly do to avoid the conflict which is now occurring. We worked and worked and worked for a peaceful solution. Last year we stopped the threatened assault in October. We had a peace agreement. The Kosovar Albanians agreed to sign it, even though it didn't give them everything they wanted. Mr. Milosevic rejected it because he had 40,000 troops and nearly 300 tanks on the border and already in Kosovo, and he knew that he could move his troops and his tanks at will and do to the Kosovars what he had supported being done to the other ethnic minorities in the former Yugoslavia. The stories we are hearing now are truly chilling Serb security forces herding Albanian villagers together, gunning them down with automatic weapons, and setting them on fire telling villagers, "Leave or we will kill you " separating family members loading up buses and trains, carrying some to the borders and some to be slaughtered confiscating identity papers and property records, seeking, literally, to erase the presence of these people in their own land forever. We must not let that happen. We must stand against that. As I speak, Secretary Albright and the other NATO foreign ministers are in Brussels, reaffirming our common commitment to do what is necessary to prevail. There are a lot of people who didn't think that an alliance of 19 countries could do what we have done and could stay together as we have stayed together, would have the patience to endure the inevitable progress that the tanks and the pre positioned troops would make and the patience to deal with the bad weather and the patience to deal with all the questions to stay the course. But when American B 52's like the ones here at Barksdale take to the skies, they're joined by British Harrier jets, German and Italian Tornadoes, French Mirages, Canadian and Spanish F 18's, Dutch, Danish, Belgian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Turkish F 16's. We are united in this effort. And we are united in our humanitarian effort. And I say to all of you I am very proud of you. I hope you are proud of your mission. This is America at its best. We seek no territorial gain we seek no political advantage. We have promised, if we are a part of a multinational force in Kosovo, we will protect the Serb minority with exactly the same vigilance as we stand up for the Kosovar Albanian majority. This is America trying to get the world to live on human terms, so we can have peace and freedom in Europe, and our people will not be called to fight a wider war for someone else's madness. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Applause I also want to thank the American people for their work in the humanitarian relief effort, and I thank our forces for their support. Thousands and thousands of Americans have called the number I announced a week ago, the 1 800 USAID RELIEF. It's hard to believe it's an 11 digit 1 800 number, but it works. A pastor friend of mine called me the other day to say, just spontaneously, his church had taken up a donation for the relief in Kosovo and had collected 15,000 last Sunday. This kind of thing is happening all over America, and I am very grateful for that. As I said, our Government is doing its part there. And when I introduced Mr. Witt, I said that we are trying to do our part in helping Louisiana deal with its disaster, as well, expanding aid and individual assistance for families in affected parishes. It's ironic but I think it's appropriate that under the leadership of Mr. Witt, our Federal Emergency Management Agency is playing a vital role in both the Kosovo relief efforts and the work here in Louisiana today. Let me say one final word Mr. Milosevic can end this tragedy tomorrow. What has to be done is clear Withdraw the forces, as he himself promised to do last October have the refugees come home freely and in security establish an international force to protect all the people of Kosovo, of whatever ethnic or religious group and let the people begin to work toward the self government that they were promised and then robbed of years ago. This is not complicated. The United States seeks no territorial advantage. I will say again Europe seeks only stability, security, freedom, and democracy for those people. He can end it tomorrow. But until he does, he should be under no illusions that we will end it from weariness. We are determined to continue on this mission. And we will prevail because of you and people like you. The last thing I want to say is something you know very well here at Barksdale. You are the proud heirs of a great tradition, a tradition of serving the United States and a tradition, as I said at the beginning of my remarks, of doing it in cooperation with freedom loving allies from other nations. You are doing it again. Make no mistake about it. You are doing two things You are trying to save the lives of innocent people, and you are trying to do it in a way that creates a 21st century world that you can be proud to have your children live in. Thank you, and God bless America. April 08, 1999 President Clinton. Good afternoon. Please be seated. Premier Zhu and members of the Chinese delegation, I want to thank you again for coming to the United States. It is important for the leaders of America and China to meet regularly. Today we were able to make progress in areas that benefit both the American and Chinese people. We had the chance to speak directly and openly on matters where we have disagreements. We reviewed our ongoing efforts to enhance the security of both our nations and to build world peace and stability in our efforts to seek peace on the Korean Peninsula, to work with India and Pakistan to curb their nuclear competition, to join in adherence to international agreements limiting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In that regard, let me say I hope that both our nations soon will ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to end all nuclear testing. We also discussed our common efforts to increase prosperity for both our nations. Economics is Premier Zhu's primary portfolio. With his leadership, China's economy has withstood Asia's financial turmoil and helped to mitigate its impact on other nations in the region. Now, with Asia's recovery underway but regional growth still fragile, Premier Zhu has been squarely addressing China's toughest economic challenges reforming state owned industries and financial institutions, rooting out corruption, bringing China into the information age, and expanding international trade. These efforts will benefit China and its trading partners, including America's businesses, workers, and farmers. Our nations also will benefit from new cooperative initiatives we have agreed upon in recent days to develop a private housing market in China, to create a U.S. China dialog on job training and labor rights, to support clean energy projects in China. Today we will sign a civil aviation agreement that will double passenger and cargo flights between our countries, bringing jobs and economic activity to both. And after extensive efforts by our negotiators, China has agreed to direct all its government agencies to use only licensed computer software, which will greatly assist our software industry in China, now the world's fifth largest personal computer market. Additionally, we have reached an important agreement that will open China's markets for U.S. exports of citrus, meat products, and Pacific Northwest wheat, all highly important for our farmers. I am also pleased we have made significant progress toward bringing China into the World Trade Organization on fair commercial terms, although we are not quite there yet. A fair WTO agreement will go far toward leveling the playing field for our companies and our workers in China's markets, will commit China to play by the rules of the international trading system, and bring China fully into that system in a way that will bring greater opportunity for its citizens and its industries as well. Today we are issuing a joint statement recording the significant progress we have made on WTO and committing to work to resolve all remaining issues this year. Ultimately, to succeed in the market based, information driven world economy, China must continue its efforts toward reform. Premier Zhu has worked very hard on them. There is still work to be done, and we want to support China in its efforts to strengthen its legal system, impose stronger labor and environmental protections, improve accountability, give citizens greater freedom, and increase their access to information. We disagree, of course, on the meaning and reach of human rights, because I am convinced that greater freedom, debate, and openness are vital to improving China's citizens' lives as well as China's economy over the long run. It is troubling that in the past year, China has taken some steps backwards on human rights, in arresting people basically for seeking to express their political views. I also regret that more progress has not been made to open a dialog with the Dalai Lama. We honor China's remarkable achievements, its greater prosperity, and the greater range of personal choices available to its citizens, as well as the movement toward local democracy. We appreciate the magnitude of its struggles, far greater than those faced by any other country in the world. But the American people and, indeed, people all around the world believe that all persons are entitled to fundamental freedoms that include freedom of speech, religion, and association. I hope that China's leaders will conclude that in these areas, too, benefits of change outweigh the risks. I hope and believe we can make the kind of progress together that will enable both of us to have the kind of strong partnership that would be very much in the world's interest in the 21st century, a partnership against war and terrorism, against dangerous weapons and crime, for better health care and education, for a cleaner environment, achievements in the arts and the sciences, a deepening of democratic values, and prosperity for all our citizens and, indeed, for all the world. I have no illusions that cooperation with China can resolve all of our differences. Our countries are too large. Our backgrounds are too different. Where our interests diverge, we will continue to stand for our values and to protect our national security. But a policy of confrontation for confrontation's sake, as I said yesterday, will accomplish nothing but the fulfillment of the bleakest prophecies held by people in both the United States and China. Yesterday I said we should not see this relationship through rose colored glasses, nor should we see it through a glass darkly. We should see it with clear eyes. It is in the interest of the American people and the Chinese people that whenever we can cooperate, we should. This relationship, complex though it may be, is profoundly important to the future of every American and every Chinese citizen and, indeed, to all the world. Premier Zhu. Premier Zhu. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank President Clinton for his invitation, and now the delegation of the People's Republic of China is visiting the United States. And today I'm very honored to join President Clinton, to meet all the friends coming from the press. And I am ready to convey through the friends from the media my most sincere greetings and best regards to the American people. From the moment since I set foot on the American soil, which started from Los Angeles, when maybe God did not welcome me very much, for it rained very hard, but it appears to me that the American people like me. And today we received a very grand welcome from the President, and we had a very good talk with the President and his colleagues. And at noon I also attended a very grand luncheon hosted by Secretary Albright, which was an opportunity for me to meet many old friends. I believe that our talks were frank and candid, and they were constructive and fruitful. Naturally, the result has not been measured by how many agreements we may have reached I believe we've already reached quite a number of agreements. What is the key that the PRC delegation is able to have the opportunity of meeting people from different walks of life in the United States and that we can have an opportunity to talk directly to the American people to explain to them what is our views. As I said in the morning, it is not that only friends who say yes to you are good friends. We believe that maybe the friends who are able to say no to you are the best friends for you. And from Washington, I will also travel to Denver, to Chicago, to New York, and to Boston, where I will meet quite a lot of friends from the United States. I'm ready to talk to them, and I'm also prepared to argue, to debate with them. I believe by doing so, we will be able to promote the communication and mutual understanding between our two peoples, thus promoting the relationship between us, or rather, the objective of working to build a constructive strategic partnership between the two sides as opened up by the two Presidents, and also to continue to develop the friendship between us. As the President said earlier this morning, we also reached certain agreement on the WTO question, and we shall issue a joint statement on this question. And also on these areas we've already agreed upon, such as on the agricultural questions, we will sign certain agreements. In my view, all these will further promote the development of friendship and cooperation between China and the United States. And today I am ready to answer your questions in a very candid manner. But as the Premier of China, I took my office only on the 17th of March last year, and today is my first time to experience such press conference so my heart is now beating. Laughter I'm not as experienced as the President, because the President is very experienced in dealing with you. Laughter I'm not that experienced, so should I say something which is not appropriate very much, I do hope that you will exercise certain leniency and try to promote what is good and try as much as you can to cover what may not be that appropriate. Laughter Thank you. Premier Zhu's Visit Q. Thank you, Mr. Premier. As a matter of fact, before your visit to the United States, and also since you set your foot on the American soil, many of our leaders have such a question that is, given such difficulties that the China U.S. relations encountered, why did you still decide to visit the United States as scheduled? What are your real thoughts? And how do you think China U.S. relations should develop at the turn of the century? Premier Zhu. Are you asking me to tell you the truth? To tell you the truth, I was really reluctant to come. Laughter Two days before my departure from China for the United States, I received two congressional delegations from the United States, one headed by Mr. Thomas, the other by Mr. Roth. All together, more than 20 Senators and Congressmen were at the meetings. I said to them, "As the current political atmosphere in the United States is so anti China, I really lack the guts to pay the visit to the United States at present." And they told me that "You should go. We welcome you, because we Americans like your new face." I said, "My old friend Ambassador Sasser told me he was going to go back to the United States before me, and he was going to each and every place that I was going to visit to introduce me to the local people and also to promote my trip. And he also told me that he was fully prepared to be even beaten black and blue, and maybe with a bandage wrapped around his face when he saw me in the United States." Then I said, "Even your Ambassador Sasser, an American, had such a risk of being beaten black and blue, then what would my fate be as a Chinese? Will my new face be turned into a bloody face?" Laughter The Senators and the Congressmen didn't give me any guarantee. But President Jiang Zemin decided that I should come according to a schedule, and he is number one in China, so I had to obey him. Laughter Now, I can tell you that I am now in a much better mood than when I was just about to make the trip, because since I came to the United States I've seen so many friendly faces, and I've been accorded very warm welcome and reception. I believe that through my current visit to the United States I will be able to contribute some of my part to the continued growth of the friendly relations and the cooperation between China and the United States. And more than that, I will also be able to get more understanding from the American people and maybe develop more consensus with the American side on the issues over which we still argue. And we'll also be able to conclude several agreements in the economic field, for instance on SPS. And actually, our negotiations in the field of WTO have been going on for 13 years. And on the part of the Chinese side, we have already made a lot of concessions. For instance, in the area of TCK wheat, now we have already agreed to lift the ban on the exports of wheat from seven American U.S. States to China. And now we have also decided to lift the restriction on the export of citrus from four States of the United States, including California, to China. On the question of China's accession into the WTO, in my view, the gap between the two sides is really not very significant. Maybe Mr. President does not quite agree with me on that their side still believes that the gap is significant. So that's why at present we are only in a position to sign a joint statement instead of a full package agreement. If you want to hear some honest words, then I should say that now the problem does not lie with this big difference or big gap but lies with the political atmosphere. But we are very optimistic about the prospect of the development of friendly relations and the cooperation between China and the United States. As I said this morning, I don't think there's any problem or question between our two countries that cannot be resolved satisfactorily through friendly consultations. As for some other issues, such as human rights and the Dalai Lama, President Clinton mentioned all these issues in his opening remarks. I think we have enough time to argue over these questions, so I don't want to dwell on these questions long here. President Clinton. Helen Helen Thomas, United Press International . Situation in the Balkans Q. Mr. President, I have a three part question on laughter President Clinton. You learned from her, right? Q. on Kosovo. Solana says that there are ongoing discussions on ground troops. Has the U.S. position changed? Two, has the Cypriot intervention helped to pave the way for the release of the American servicemen? And three, is Milosevic a war criminal by Nuremberg standards? President Clinton. The answer to the first question is no. I believe our present strategy will work if we can keep the allies with it. The answer to the second question is, I don't know. I hope so. We would like to see the servicemen released, because they never should have been detained in the first place. They were in Macedonia. They had nothing to do with the operations against Serbia. And I would be for anything honorable that would secure their release, obviously. The answer to the third question is that that is, strictly speaking, a legal decision that has to be made, but I certainly think it should be looked into. Q. Why are nine commanders named by the State Department to be possibly indicted, and you don't mention Milosevic? President Clinton. The answer to that is, I'm not sure. The question I want to emphasize to you is, when you start talking about indicting people, there are laws, there are standards of proof, there are coverages, there are all those issues. We have asked that this be looked at. What we do know is this. Let's look at what we know. What we know is that by a deliberate policy he has caused hundreds of thousands of people to be refugees. We know that thousands of innocent people have been killed defenseless, completely defenseless people. We know that people were herded up and pushed to the borders and pushed over the borders. And today you all have stories saying that the same borders that people were herded up and pushed over or pushed up next to are now being mined, so if they try to get across them to save their lives they can be blown up. We know that he supported, strongly, the Serbian actions in the Bosnian war, which led to the deaths of over a quarter of a million people and over 2 1 2 million people being made refugees. Now, the important thing to me is to stop the killing, to stop the exodus, to see the refugees return, to see them safe, to see a political solution that gives them the autonomy that they were promised, to have an international peacekeeping force that will prevent this from happening again. But I have been very clear, Helen I think quite unambiguous that, on the war crimes issue, that is something we have a tribunal set up for that. We have people whose job it is to make that determination. They should examine it and make that determination. And I think that's all that is appropriate for me to say, because it's not my job, and I'm not a legal expert on that question. But I do think that the facts are clear. The humanitarian suffering and loss here is staggering, and it is a repeat of what we saw in Bosnia. And it is his direct political strategy for first getting and then maintaining power. And the human loss has been breathtaking. Taiwan Q. Seven hours before you landed in Andrews Air Force Base yesterday, President Clinton made a foreign policy speech in which he mentioned the sending of carriers to the waters in the Taiwan Straits in March 1996. And he said that that move had helped maintain the security in the Taiwan Straits. So in your view, how do you see the effect of the military capabilities of the United States on the situation across the Taiwan Straits? And do you think there should be a timetable for the reunification of the mainland and Taiwan of China? And do you wish to pay a visit to Taiwan? Premier Zhu. The policy of China and the reunification of the mainland and Taiwan of China is a very clear cut one and the President, Jiang Zemin, has already expounded on China's policy in this regard. So I don't see the need for me to reiterate here. Since the return of Hong Kong to the motherland, the policy of one country, two systems, Hong Kong people administering Hong Kong, Hong Kong enduring a high degree of autonomy, have been fully implemented, which is a fact there for the people in the entire world to see. And our policy for the reunification of China with Taiwan is more generous than our policy towards Hong Kong. That is to say, Taiwan will be allowed to maintain its army, and we're also prepared to let the head of Taiwan come to the central government to serve as the deputy head. But as for whether he or she is able to be the head, then I'm not sure. But I'm afraid it would not get enough votes. Nobody would vote for him. On the question of the reunification, the Chinese Government has repeatedly stated that we strive for a peaceful reunification of the motherland. But we have never undertaken to renounce the use of force in this regard, because if we were to make such a pledge, make such an undertaking, then I'm afraid that Taiwan would be in the perpetual state of separation from the motherland. Just now, in the Oval Office of President Clinton, I saw the portrait of President Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln, in order to maintain the unity of the United States and oppose independence of the southern part, he had resorted to the use of force and fought a war for that, for maintaining the unity of the United States. So I think Abraham Lincoln, President, is a model, is an example. As for whether I'm going to visit Taiwan, since none of them have issued an invitation to me, so how can I go there and in what capacity should I go there? I hope you will also help me to think of this. Laughter Thank you. President Clinton. I think I have to say just one thing, if I might, since I got zapped by Abraham Lincoln. Laughter First of all, the United States has a "one China" policy, and I have reaffirmed that at every opportunity. I do so again today. Secondly, we believe that this matter should be resolved peacefully. The facts of the relationship between Taiwan and China over the last 50 years are somewhat different than the facts leading up to the American Civil War, as I'm sure that you would all agree. It does seem to me that China and Taiwan, apart from the blood ties of being Chinese even the native Taiwanese that you have a lot to offer each other, including economic power but beyond that as well. And so I hope that we will see a resolution of this. And I think if the Premier is as humorous and clever in Taiwan as he is here, I think it would be a good thing for him to go. Laughter Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Premier Zhu. President Clinton's black and blue. Laughter Chinese Nuclear Espionage 1996 Campaign Financing Benefits of Engagement Q. A question to the Premier. Sir, how do you respond to charges that China stole nuclear warhead designs and perhaps neutron bomb technology from the United States, and also funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to President Clinton's reelection campaign? Laughter And Mr. Clinton, do you find any of these charges credible? And what do you say to criticism that your policy of engaging China has benefited China and not penalized them at all for human rights abuses, trade problems, and espionage? Premier Zhu. In the capacity of the Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, I'd like to make a very solemn statement here that I have no knowledge whatsoever of any allegation of espionage or the theft of nuclear technology. And I don't believe such a story. I've also asked President Jiang, and he does not have any knowledge of that at all. It is not the policy of China to steal so called military secrets from the United States. And I don't think there can be such a problem, given the tight security measures in the United States and advanced technology. Although, it seems that to the technology, with regard to this microphone, is not that advanced. Laughter I think it's entirely impossible for China to have any effective or to steal any nuclear technology or military secrets from the United States effectively under such conditions, such tight security measures. In the scientific exchanges between scholars of our two countries, they may have some exchanges concerning defense technologies. But I don't believe that such exchanges will involve any substantive or key technologies. As a senior engineer, I've been in charge of the industry in China for more than 40 years, and I have never known any of our most advanced technology came from the United States. But the technology development, or technologies, are the common heritage or common property of mankind. And in scientific inventions, actually, all roads lead to Rome. And in terms of the missile and the nuclear technologies, indeed, we have learned that from foreign countries. While in the area of missile technology, the pioneer in China is Mr. Tsien Hsueh sen, who returned from the United States. And in terms of the nuclear technology the pioneer in China is Qian Sanqiang, who returned from the lab of Madame Curie of France. But I can assure you that when they returned back, they didn't bring back even a piece of paper they just brought back with them their brains. That's why I said at the press conference last March that I hope you don't underestimate your own ability, your own security ability, or your own ability to keep secrets, and don't underestimate the capability of the Chinese people to develop their own technology. At a luncheon hosted by the mayor of Los Angeles, the wife of the mayor asked me, "How are you going to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic?" I told her that we planned to hold a very grand military review and also the latest weaponry will be on display. And I also told her that all the weaponry are developed by China itself, not stolen from the United States. The wife of the mayor gave me advice, and she said, "Maybe you should put a sign on the weaponry, the missiles, that they are Made in China, not from the United States."' I appreciated her sense of humor very much, and I said, "That's a good idea." Laughter Mr. Clinton stated in the speech that the United States has more than 6,000 nuclear missiles, while China only has less than two dozen. I think he knows better than I do. I, to tell you the truth, don't know the exact number of missiles that we have. Laughter Although I do not know the exact number of our missiles, I agree with you in your conclusion that is, we have a very small number of missiles, and you have a very large number. So China does not constitute a threat whatsoever to the United States. On the allegation of political contributions or campaign financing, I can also state in a very responsible manner here that neither I nor President Jiang Zemin know anything about that. And we, too, also once asked the senior military leaders in China, and they told us they didn't have any knowledge of that. I think this shows that some Americans really had underestimated us. If the political contribution were to be really that effective, then now I have 146 billion U.S. of foreign exchange reserve, so I should have put out at least 10 billion U.S. for that purpose. Why just 300,000? That would be too foolish. Laughter I've learned that some people have spent a lot in lobbying here, but I never believed such rumors. I think through such mutual discussions and even debates, we can develop consensus and reach agreement on many issues that will serve the interests of both the Chinese and American peoples. And we also trust the American people, and we, actually, we have never and we would not do such kind of thing. Thank you. President Clinton. Let me respond to the question you asked me. First of all, with regard to the two issues, the campaign finance issue and the espionage allegations, I raised both these issues with Premier Zhu last night. He gave me the same answer he just gave you today. And my response was that I hope that he and his Government would cooperate with these two investigations. You know, China is a big country with a big Government. And I can only say that America is a big country with a big Government, and occasionally, things happen in this Government that I don't know about. And so I think it's important that we continue the investigation and do our best to find out what happened, and I asked for his cooperation. Now as to the second part of your question, which is, "What do we get out of this" the sort of anti China crowd in America says first of all, the implication is that if someone wants to have a relationship with us, they should agree with us about everything. That's just not going to happen. But I would like to point out the following things Because of our cooperation with China, we have lessened the tensions on the Korean Peninsula for several years. China has participated with us in any number of arms control initiatives, including an agreement to restrain its transfers of dangerous weapons and technology to other countries. China is a signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And China has worked very hard, as I already said, to stabilize the Asian economy at a time when it was not only hurting people in Asia but it was beginning to affect the American economy. So we get quite a lot out of our cooperation with China. Last point. When you say, "What do we get out of it," he could have people asking him that in China. They could say, "It is the United States, not the European Union, that sponsors the human rights resolution. The United States has stricter controls on technology transfer to China than any other country with which it deals." Both of which are true. But let me just give you one final example take the WTO. How could it possibly serve America's interests not to open more Chinese markets to America's workers and businesses and farmers? They have a much bigger share of our market, in terms of exports, than we have of theirs. How could it possibly be against our interest to bring more Chinese into contact with more Americans and to give more opportunities for America to honestly compete in the Chinese market? I think it is clear that the more we work together and talk together, and the more China is involved with the rest of the world, the more likely we are to reach positive outcomes. That is the logic of the policy and the logic of what we are doing in particular on WTO. Premier Zhu. I agree to cooperate with your side in investigation, so long as you can provide some clues. And no matter who it may involve, we will investigate into it. I'd like here to respond to what President Clinton said on WTO. He said that to allow China in the WTO will be in the best interest of the American people. And I want to say that, although China has made the biggest concessions, that will also be in the interest of the Chinese people. Many Hong Kong newspapers say that I've come to the United States to present a very big gift. I don't think such a suggestion is right. I'm sorry I'm afraid I've offended the press. Laughter Because if China wants to join the WTO, wants to be integrated in the international community, then China must play by the rules of the game. China cannot do that without making concessions. Of course, such concessions might bring about a very huge impact on China's national economy, on some state owned enterprises, and also on China's market. But I have every assurance to say here, thanks to the achievements made in our reform and opening up process, we will be able to stand such impact. And the competition arising from such impact will also promote a more rapid and more healthy development of China's national economy. Here I'd like to call the attention of the Hong Kong press people. In your future reports, don't ever write things like "present a big gift," because that would be interpreted equivalent to a political contribution or campaign financing. That would be very much detrimental to President Clinton. Laughter China and the Asian Economies Q. I'm a correspondent with CCTV China. Recently, there has been much talk within and out of China about China's economic development, reform, and opening up policy. So, Mr. Premier, would you please make some observations on the current state of China's economy and the prospect of economic development in China? And what impact do you think China's economic development will have on the stability and the development of the economy in Asia and the world at large? Premier Zhu. Last year, China's economy experienced extreme difficulties due to the Asian financial crisis and the devastating floods hitting some areas in China. But we have tided over these difficulties and managed to achieve a 7.8 percent growth of our GDP. And we have maintained a policy of not to devaluate the RMB currency. And the prices in China have been maintained basically stable, and some have somewhat declined or have dropped. As for the economic development in China this year, many foreigners are predicting that China will be the next to be hit by an economic crisis. But I don't think that will be the case. This year the projected GDP growth is 7 percent, but in the first quarter of the year the growth rate was 8.3 percent. So I expect China's economic development this year to be better than that of last year, not in terms of the speed, simply in terms of speed, but in terms of the economic efficiency, economic results. Secondly, some foreigners are saying that China's economic reform has come to a stop. I wish to state here in very explicit terms that last year, instead of coming to a standstill, China's reforms made greater progress than originally planned. Firstly, in terms of the reform of the Government institutions, last year we set the objective of cutting the size of the central Government by half in 3 years' time that is, from 33,000 people to 16,000 people. And this objective had been realized last year, just in one year. Apart from 4,000 Government functionaries who have now gone to universities or colleges for further study, all the rest have been reemployed by other sectors, by enterprises. And so I think that represents a very major achievement. And this year, we plan to press forward the reform of the local governments. We also plan to cut the size of the local governments by half in 3 years' time that is, to cut from 5 million people to 2.5. Third, some foreigners are saying that there is a very serious problem of unemployment in China, a lot of people have been laid off from state owned enterprises, and this has caused a social instability in China. I think anybody who has been to China will know that this is not true. In the beginning of last year, indeed, there were 10 million laid off workers or unemployed workers. Thanks to our efforts over the past year, we have put in place a social security system. Now all those laid off workers or unemployed workers can get basic living allowances. And many of them have been reemployed. Now there are 6 million unemployed or laid off workers who are in those reemployment service centers waiting for being reemployed, while the establishment of such a social security system is very helpful to our efforts to revitalize, rejuvenate the state owned enterprises by introducing shareholding system into the large state owned enterprises and also to reform the small and the medium sized enterprises in various ways, including to privatize some of the small ones. Lastly, China now is introducing an unprecedented reform in its banking system. We are drawing on the experience of the RTC in the United States to form the assets management companies in China to handle the nonperforming loans of the state owned banks. I believe that such reform is conducive to turning the state owned commercial banks into genuine commercial banks, and is also conductive to helping enhance the ability of the central bank to supervise and to regulate according to international practice. So here I'd like to say that China's RMB will not be depreciated, and it will remain stable. So here I'd like to call on the American business people to go to China for investment. You will not face the risk of devaluation of RMB. If you don't believe me, then I would take the advice from Professor Milton Miller of Chicago University. He advised me to offer a put option to those who don't believe me. Thank you very much. President Clinton. Larry Larry McQuillan, Reuters ? At this point, while the microphone was being passed to Mr. McQuillan, Sam Donaldson, ABC News, feigned asking a question. Q. That was tough. President Clinton. That was real statesmanship. Laughter Human Rights Chinese Nuclear Espionage Q. I think it was more of a ham, but I have questions for both you gentlemen. Mr. Premier, as you know, the U.S. State Department issued a rather scathing report on human rights abuses in your country, and the United States is in the process of sponsoring a resolution before a U.N. group to criticize human rights in your country. Do you consider these assessments totally unfair, or do you think it's possible that there are problems within your country that need to be corrected? And President Clinton, at your last formal news conference, you spoke about the problems, or at least allegations, of Chinese spying, and you said that it mainly dealt in the 1980's, that there were no indications that it involved your Presidency. In the wake of today's New York Times report, can you still make that statement? Or are you concerned that perhaps you were misled or had information withheld from you about the extent of the allegations? Premier Zhu. Me first? Laughter President Clinton. You're the guest. Laughter Premier Zhu. Thank you. Firstly, I wish to say I'm firmly opposed to the U.S. tabling of a draft resolution directed at China at the Human Rights Commission session. I not only regard that as unfair but also take it as an interference in China's internal affairs. I wish to make three points here. Firstly, China has made very big progress in the human rights area over the past several decades since the founding of new China. And the Chinese people today enjoy unprecedented extensive democratic and political rights. Through certain legal procedures, through certain procedures, the Chinese people can voice their criticisms of the Government, and they can also exercise supervision over the Government. And they can express fully their opinions. And in my view, in terms of the freedom of speech and freedom of press, China indeed has made very great progress. Secondly, I also think that we should put the question of human rights in a historical perspective. And I think different countries may have a different understanding of this question. In terms of the human rights concept, Mencius, who lived in a period more than 2,000 years ago in China, he stated that people are the most important and the most precious, while the state is next to that, and the emperor or the kings are the least important. So that kind of thought was much earlier than Rousseau of France and then the Human Rights Declaration of France. And also, different countries have different conditions, and human rights actually is also a concept that has evolved in history. In terms of per capita income, the per capita income of the United States is 20 times that of China. And also, in terms of education, the ratio of university graduates in the United States, in its total population, is higher than the ratio of the illiterate people, plus the primary school graduates to the total population in China. So given such different levels of education and also income, it's natural that people may have different concepts of human rights. For instance, if you want to talk about human rights to a very poor person, maybe what he is more interested in is if you want to just talk to him about direct election. But maybe that is not what he is most interested in. What he is interested in most is the other aspects of human rights, such as the right to education, the right to subsistence, the right to development, the right to a cultural life, and the right to medical care, health care. So I think human rights actually include so many aspects. So I think every country has its own approach in improving its human rights. One should not be too impatient, but to tell the truth, I'm more impatient than you are in how to further, constantly improve the human rights in China. Thirdly, I concede that there is room for improvement in human rights conditions in China. As you may know, China has a history of several thousand years of a feudal system, feudal society, so people have very deep rooted concepts influenced by this historical background. It's quite difficult to change such mentality or concept overnight. And also in China, the legal workers, the people working in the legal and the judicial field, some of them are not that qualified, are not that competent, so sometimes in dealing with certain cases they need to improve their work. So under such conditions it's really not realistic to demand a very perfect practice in the human rights field. So we are willing to listen to you, and we are willing to have channels of dialog on human rights questions. We don't want to stage a confrontation in this regard. Actually, in China, when I received some foreign visitors, they tend to put forward a list of so called dissidents and ask me to release these people. Well actually, we took this matter very seriously, and we have looked into all these cases, and if we found that the person on the list has not committed any criminal offenses, then we will just release him. Well, before I came to the United States, many of my friends mailed me a lot of materials in which they contained a lot of information about the problems of human rights in the United States. And they urged me to bring such materials to President Clinton, but I haven't brought them with me. I don't want to hand that over to President Clinton because I trust you are able to resolve your own problems. President Clinton. Actually, sometimes we could use a little outside help, too. Laughter Let me say, first of all, in response to the question you raise, I read the New York Times article today, and while I can't comment on specific intelligence reports as a matter of policy, I noted that even the article acknowledged that the alleged espionage might not have been connected to the national labs, which is the question I was asked in the press conference. But let me say, I've looked into it, and we're doing our best to resolve all outstanding questions. And I've asked the law enforcement agencies to try to accelerate their inquiries insofar as they can. The real issue is, and one that we made perfectly clear last week, is that for quite a long while, from the eighties coming right up through the time I became President, the security at the labs was inadequate. And I think it grew out of, partly, the kind of dual culture of the labs part of they're great centers of science and learning, and they've done a lot of path breaking work in energy and alternative sources of energy and computer processing and the use of software for all kinds of very important nondefense matters, while maintaining their responsibilities in the nuclear area. And to me, the most important thing of all now, besides finishing the investigations in an appropriate way, is making sure we get the security right. You know that I signed that Executive order in early 1998. You know what Secretary Richardson has done recently. And I have also asked the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Chairman, Senator Rudman, to head a bipartisan panel to look into what we have done and to tell us if we haven't done enough and what else we ought to do. So I think the most important thing now is to recognize that for quite a long while, the security at the labs was not adequate, that we have been moving to do a lot of things in the last year plus, that we have much more to do, perhaps, and we asked somebody to look into it, and then to do these investigations and do them right and do them as quickly as possible. April 06, 1999 Thank you very much. Senator Leahy, Senator Specter, Congressmen Cardin and Delahunt, Secretary Riley, Acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee to our DC Police Chief, Charles Ramsey, and the other distinguished guests in the audience who are in support, broadened support, of the "Hate Crimes Prevention Act." Let me begin by thanking Attorney General Ketterer and Bishop Jane Holmes Dixon for being here. I want you to know that the attorney general got up at 3 o'clock this morning to drive down here from Maine. And of course, he got up that early so he could stay lawfully within the speed limit laughter coming down here. And he set a good example, and he was wide awake and very persuasive on the law. Bishop, we thank you for your very moving remarks. Remind me never to speak behind you again. Laughter It was so much of what the bishop said about the setting of this is many things that I have thought. I think you know she and I and those of us who grew up in the segregated South are perhaps more sensitive to all these various hate crimes issues, because we grew up in a culture that was dominated for too long by people who thought they only counted if they had somebody to look down on, that they could only lift themselves up if they were pushing someone else down, that their whole definition of a positive life required a negative definition of another group of people. That's really what this is all about. And if you as she said, if you look at the whole history of this violence we see in Kosovo, what we went through in Bosnia, this, the fifth anniversary of the awful Rwandan genocide, that I regret so much the world was not organized enough to move quickly enough to deal with it before hundreds of thousands of lives were lost with the oppression of women in Afghanistan, with the lingering bitterness in the Middle East you see all these things. When you strip it all away, down deep inside there is this idea that you cannot organize personal life or social life unless some group feels better about itself only when they are oppressing someone else. Or people at least believe that they ought to have the right to do violence against someone else solely because of who they are, not because of what they do. Now at the bottom, that's what this is all about. And I have said repeatedly since I have been President that one of the things I have sought to do in our country is to bridge all these divides and to get all of our people not to agree with one another, not to even like one another all the time goodness knows, we can't like everybody all the time but to recognize that our common humanity is more important than these categorical differences and also to recognize that over the long run, America will not be able to be a force for good abroad unless we are good at home. If you think about the brave men and women who are working with our NATO Allies today in Kosovo and you remember that this basically all started 12 years ago when Mr. Milosevic decided to rally the support of his ethnic Serbian group by turning their hatred against the Kosovar Albanians and later the Bosnian Muslims and the Croatian Catholics and the others, it is very important that we deal with these challenges here at home, even as we continue to support the work of our people in uniform in the Balkans. I want to say again, the United States would never choose force as anything other than a last option. And Mr. Milosevic could end it now by withdrawing his military police and paramilitary forces, by accepting the deployment of an international security force to protect not only the Kosovar Albanians, most but not all of whom are Muslims, but also the Serbian minority in Kosovo everybody we're not for anybody's hate crimes and by making it possible for all the refugees to return and to move toward a political framework based on the accords reached in France. Now, as I said, we can't continue to organize ourselves to try to stand against these things around the world which I firmly hope we will. I applaud the women in America who have done so much to bring to the world's attention the terrible treatment of women in Afghanistan, for example. And we have worked hard in Africa to work with other African forces to build an Africa Crisis Response Initiative so that something like the Rwanda genocide cannot happen again. We have to keep working on these things. But first of all, we must always be working on ourselves. That's really what this is about. Because we know this is more the work of the bishop than the President, but we know that inside each of us there are vulnerabilities to dehumanizing other people simply by putting them in a category that permits us to dismiss them or that permits us to put them in a category so that on a bad day, when we're feeling especially bad about something we've done, we can say, "Well, thank God I'm not them." And it is a short step from that a short, short step from that to licensing or even participating in acts of violence. As I said, it may be I was standing here looking at Secretary Riley and Bishop Dixon I was thinking about all the years that Secretary Riley and I worked together. It may be that the three of us are more sensitive to this because we grew up in the segregated South, but it is very easy to get into a social system where you always get to think a little better of yourself because you've always got someone that you can dehumanize. And that's really what this whole issue with gays is today in America. We're not talking about everybody agreeing with everybody else on every political issue. We're talking about whether people have a right, if they show up and work hard and obey the law and are good citizens, to pursue their lives and dignity without free of fear, without fear of being abused. And this should not be a partisan issue. I want to thank Senator Specter for showing up here today. This ought not to be anything other than a basic, simple statement of American principle. But I would like to say one other thing, just as a practical matter. Isn't it interesting to you that we are on the eve of a new century and a new millennium, which will be largely characterized by globalization, the explosion of technology, especially information, and the integration of people, and the number one security threat to that is the persistence of old, even primitive, hatreds? Don't you think that's interesting? So what I worry about all the time is whether terrorists can get on the Internet and figure out how to make chemical and biological weapons to pursue agendas against people of different ethnic or religious groups. And so it's very humbling, I think, for those of us who think we have brought the modern world and prosperity and rationality to all of human affairs, to see what is going on in the Balkans and to see these terrible examples of violence here in our own country. It's very humbling. We should remember that each of us almost wakes up every day with the scales of light and darkness in our own hearts, and we've got to keep them in proper balance. And we have to be, in the United States, absolutely resolute about this. That's why I think this hate crimes issue is so important. That's why I convened the first White House Conference on Hate Crimes a year and a half ago. Since then, I would like to say, we have substantially increased the number of FBI agents working on these crimes. We have successfully prosecuted a number of serious cases. We have formed local hate crimes working groups in U.S. Attorneys' offices around the country. But this is a significant problem. In 1997, the last year for which we have statistics, over 8,000 hate crime incidents were reported in the United States. That's almost one an hour almost one an hour. So, what are we going to do about it? I would like to mention we've already talked about the law and I'll say more about that in a minute, but first of all, let me mention three other things. I've asked the Justice Department and the Education Department to include in their annual report card on school safety crucial information on hate crimes among young people both at and away from schools, not only to warn but to educate. Secondly, I'm asking the Department of Education to collect important data for the first time on hate crimes and bias on college campuses. Another cruel irony, isn't it college, the place where we're supposed to have the most freedom, the place where we're supposed to be the most rational, the place where we're supposed to think the highest thoughts with the greatest amount of space. We have significant hate crime problems there, and we need to shine the light on that. Third I'm very pleased about this we are going to have a public private partnership to help reach middle school students to discuss this whole issue with them and talk about tolerance, why it is a moral, as well as a practical imperative. And the partnership includes AT T, Court TV good for them laughter the National Middle School Association, the Anti Defamation League, Cable in the Classrooms, as well as the Departments of Education and Justice. I would like to thank them all, because we have to not only punish bad things when they happen, the larger mission is to change the mind, the heart, and the habits of our people when they're young to keep bad things from happening. Finally, let me join the others the attorney general and the bishop in saying, Congress should pass this law this year. The Federal laws already punish some crimes committed against people on the basis of race or religion or national origin, but as the attorney general made so clear, not all crimes committed for that purpose. This would strengthen and expand the ability of the Justice Department by removing needless jurisdictional requirements for existing crimes and giving Federal prosecutors the ability to prosecute hate crimes committed because of sexual orientation, gender, or disability, along with race and religion. Now, again I say, when we get exercised about these things, in particular, when someone dies in a horrible incident in America or when we see slaughter or ethnic cleansing abroad, we should remember that we defeat these things by teaching and by practicing a different way of life and by reacting vigorously when they occur within our own midst. That is what this is about. And we should remember, whenever we, ourselves, commit even a small slip, where we dehumanize or demonize someone else who is different from us, that every society must teach, practice, and react, if you want to make the most of the world toward which we are moving. Our diversity is a godsend for us and the world of the 21st century. But it is also the potential for the old, haunting demons that are hard to root out of the human spirit. The "Hate Crimes Prevention Act" would be important, substantively and symbolically, to send a message to ourselves and to the world that we are going into the 21st century determined to preach and to practice what is right. Thank you very much. March 30, 1999 Thank you. First of all, I want to thank you all for giving me a chance to come tonight. I thank my longtime friend Dave McCurdy for his introduction and for his leadership of EIA. You made a good decision when you named him your president. And I know what you're laughing about out there. Laughter Two or 3 years from now, you'll think it's an even better decision. Laughter I want to also pay my respects to your vice president, John Kelly, who went to Georgetown with me, although he's a much younger man. Laughter John when I was a senior, John was actually president of the freshman class. And I've been trying to think out of respect for the will of the people the only people we knew back then whether I should still address him as "Mr. President." Laughter But then that would confuse the EIA, so I didn't do it. Mr. Major, thank you for your invitation. Mr. McGinn, thank you for your remarks. That was very impressive. I couldn't even keep up with all the new things you announced tonight. I'm glad that our FCC Chairman, Bill Kennard, is here, and I think Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera is also here. And General Jones, I thought you gave a terrific invocation. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. You know, I was trying to think tonight whether there was any way I could say what I originally wanted to come here and say, which is to talk about some of the technology policies that we're trying to pursue that I hope will help you, but in the process will strengthen our democracy and the sweep of opportunity and freedom around the world, and at the same time say a few words, as I feel I must, about our important mission in Kosovo. And before I came over here tonight, I had a long meeting, and I went and had what has now become almost my daily phone call with Prime Minister Blair. And I sat down and I thought about it. I thought about how grateful I am to the members of this organization for the phenomenal successes you have enjoyed in these last few years and the major contributions you have made to the economy of the United States, the opportunities you have given our people. And I thought about this terrible brutality that is going on in Kosovo, replaying what happened not so long ago in Bosnia and in a way replaying what we see around the world, the modern world, that seems to be troubled with ancient hatreds rooted in racial and ethnic and religious differences. If you think about the major forces alive in the world today, the move toward globalization and the explosion in technology, especially in information and communications, they really not only, as all of you know better than I, are dramatically changing the way we work and live and relate to each other and to the rest of the world. They represent both a pull toward integration and a dramatic force toward decentralization. And I would argue to you that both forces have within them the potential for enormous good and enormous trouble for the world of the 21st century. If you think about the forces toward integration of the global economy, for example, that's a wonderful thing. But it can be very destabilizing if we leave whole countries and vast populations within countries behind. If you think about the explosion in technology and how wonderful it is in empowering individuals and small firms and communities, in enabling communities, little schools I've seen in poor African and Latin American villages to hook up to the Internet and have access to learning that would have taken them a whole generation, at least, to achieve through traditional economic development processes in their countries, it is breathtaking. But looked at another way, it also provides access to technology for every terrorist in the world to have their own website and for independent operators to figure out how to make bombs and set up chemical and biological labs. And when married together with the most primitive hatreds, like those we see manifest in Kosovo today, the advent of technology and decentralized decisionmaking and access to information can be a very potent but destructive force. When I ran for President in 1992, what I was seeking to do was to articulate a vision to the American people of the way I wanted America to look in the 21st century, in a world I hope we would be living in then, and what I thought the President and the Government of the United States should do to take advantage of the benefits of globalization and the explosion of technology and to provide those policies and bulwarks necessary to guard against the deepest problems of the modern world. There are so many things bringing us together and so many things breaking apart. We have to decide a lot of new questions. And if I could just say a word about what we tried to do and Dave McCurdy and I have been working on this through the Democratic Leadership Council for more than 15 years I believe that if we could create a country in which there was genuine opportunity for every responsible citizen, and in which we had a real sense of community, of belonging, of mutual responsibility, one to another, so we all felt we would be better off if everybody had a chance as well and that if we could maintain America's sense of responsibility for leading the rest of the world toward peace and prosperity and harmony, both with the environment and with others across all the lines that divide us, that the best days for our country and the best days for humanity were still ahead. I still believe that. Every story you can tell about every company represented in this room reflects that. But we cannot forget that there will never be a time when life is free of difficulties and where the organized forces of destruction did not seek to move into the breaches of human conduct for their own advance. And that is what we see in Kosovo. It is a sad commentary, indeed, that on the edge of a new millennium there are still people who feel they must define their own self worth and merit in terms of who they are not and who believe that their lives only really count not when they are lifting themselves up but when they are holding someone else down and sometimes who believe that it is literally legitimate not only to uproot totally innocent civilians from their homes and their villages but to kill them in large numbers. This is, of course, not confined to the Balkans. It is still at the root of the troubles in the Middle East. It is still at the root of the problems we are oh so close to getting finally resolved in Northern Ireland. It was at the root of an ancient tribal difference that led to the deaths of somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 people in 100 days in Rwanda just a few years ago. We see it everywhere, the fear of the other. It led a couple of demented people in a little Texas town to dismember and drag an African American to death and a couple of other people in Wyoming to kill a young man at the dawn of his life, apparently because he was gay. We have to find a way to use all this technology in a way that celebrates our differences instead of uses them for destructive ends. And the only way to do that, I am convinced, is to somehow reaffirm that amidst all our differences, what it is we have in common as human beings is more important. And ultimately, that is the liberating logic of the telecommunications revolution so much of you have powered, the idea that if we just gave everybody a chance, ordinary people would do extraordinary things, and so they have. And so I ask all of you tonight to support what the United States and our 18 other NATO Allies are trying to do in the Balkans first, because of all the little people who may never even see most of the things you invent and sell and market, but who could if they could live in peace. Second, because the problems could spread, and you see them beginning to spread with the outflow of refugees. And third, because the United States and our allies will always have to provide for some order in a world where you want to maximize freedom and individual initiative. There have to be some limits beyond which we collectively do not wish to see our country go, our world go. I know you had Congressman Davis and Governor Gilmore here today. The White House, as all of you know, is quite close to the Potomac River. Right across the river in Virginia I used to run down there every day and look at this and just be amazed in the Fairfax County School District, there are children from 180 different racial, ethnic, and national groups. They speak about 100 different languages as their first language. It is the most diverse of all American school districts but what they represent is happening everywhere. I went home a couple of weeks ago to the little town in Arkansas where I was born. There are about 9,700 people there now. It's a lot bigger than it was when I was born there. And there is a little grade school in this little town in southwest Arkansas named for me which I appreciate usually you have to die before they do that. Laughter And anyway, in this little grade school in my little hometown there are 27 immigrant children, first generation immigrant children whose parents, by and large, were migrant farmworkers who settled there. This is an incredible asset for America. But we have to say to people, whatever your national background, whatever your racial background, whatever your religious convictions, you can have a home here in this country and you ought to be safe in the world if you are willing to abide by the norms of civilized conduct everywhere. We must not allow, if we have the ability to stop it, ethnic cleansing or genocide anywhere we can stop it, particularly at the edge of Europe. So I ask you to support our men and women in uniform, but to support the proposition that the 21st century world will be a case of yes, there will be a lot more decentralization, there will be a lot more individual empowerment, but it will not be a time of chaos and madness. We will not let it descend into the vision of the darkest of the science fiction writers, because we believe our common humanity is better than that. Thank you. Applause Thank you thank you. Now I want to say what I came to say. Laughter But it relates to what I just said. I believe in the information age the role of Government is to empower people with the tools to make the most of their own lives, to tear down the barriers to that objective, and to create the conditions within which we can go forward together. Now, the answers to all the questions will not always be easy. But at least I want you to know that's how I think about this. I see myself trying to help create the conditions of dynamic balance so we can get the maximum benefit from market economics without giving up the idea of community and without leaving anyone behind who's willing to try to do the right thing. And I see our environmental policy in the same way. I think we have to take on the challenge of climate change because I'm convinced the science is real but I believe we can do it in a way that grows the economy, not undermines it. And all the big questions we're facing this year as a country require that sort of decisionmaking. You don't have to agree with the decision I make, but you ought to ask yourself what is the basis of your decision. We're dealing with the challenge, for example, of the aging of America. And the older I get, the better I like that challenge. Laughter I've never understood all this handwringing about Social Security and Medicare. This is a high class problem. Laughter Some of you have helped to bring it about. Laughter We're living longer, and that's good, isn't it? And there's more medicine, and that's good, isn't it? But as a consequence, you know, the average age in America is 76.7 years. Anybody in this room over 60 who still doesn't have any life threatening conditions has probably got a life expectancy well in excess of 80 years already. Any child born in America that's under the age of 15 that's healthy and stays healthy has probably got a life expectancy of about 84. And with the baby boomers retiring, this is an issue we have to deal with. Now, I'll tell you how I think about this. I believe we should make maximum use of technology, maximum use of modern business organizations and competition. I think that we have to be willing to reform the Medicare system. But I don't believe we should turn the Medicare system into, in effect, a defined contribution as opposed to a defined benefit plan, because health care is not like retirement, and it's a lifesaver for people. And I'm willing to work with Congress to save it. And we'll have some philosophical differences, but I'm trying to achieve the dynamic balance of maximizing the change while maximizing the sense of community and the fact that it's a lifesaver for so many people. Social Security we're going to have an interesting debate. By 2030 we'll only have two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. Now, by 2034, 35 years from now, the Social Security system is projected to run out of money, the Trust Fund, which means you only have three choices You can raise revenues, reduce benefits, or increase the rate of return on what we're investing. And there are a lot of people who believe that we should, in effect, take this surplus and give it back to the American people as mandatory individual retirement accounts let them invest it in the stock market, because the stock market always outperforms the Government bonds over any long period of time. And if you happen to be one of those unfortunate people who retire in a period like we had between in the 1960's and early seventies, where the value of the stock market is going down, then the Government would make up the difference between what you would have gotten under the old Social Security program and what you in fact get. The other way to do it is to do what Canada does, which is set up an independent board, like the Federal Reserve, and let the whole Trust Fund earn money. And then you'll know you'll always be able to have uniform, but higher, returns for people. None of us want no Republican or Democrat I've talked to believes we should raise payroll taxes, because the tax is regressive. More than half the working people in the country already pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes and small businesses just getting started have to pay that, whether they make money or not, unlike the income tax. So we don't believe that's an acceptable thing. So when you hear this debate, think of the dynamic balance think of how you can maximize the market forces that are good and still preserve a sense of community so and maybe even improve it. For example, I want to lift the earnings limitations because people are living longer, and I think once you earn Social Security, you ought to be able to work. I want to do something about single women, because the poverty rate among elderly single women, if they're living alone, is about twice the poverty rate for other seniors in our country. That's the framework in which I hope this debate will play itself out and get resolved this year. The last issue I'll tell you is that I firmly believe we ought to deal with Social Security and Medicare in a way that maximizes the amount of the surplus we use over the next 15 years to buy down the public debt. Now, that is much less popular than the alternative proposal by the congressional majority, which is to give most of the surplus away right now in a tax cut. It's your money anyway, they say. And of course, it is. It is your money anyway. But keep in mind, our country quadrupled the national debt between 1981 and 1993. And in an uncertain economic climate in the rest of the world, with all the financial troubles you've seen in Asia, it seems to me to be given a chance to pay down our debt to the lowest level we've had since before World War I is better for most of you than a short term impact of a tax cut. Why? Because it will give us lower interest rates, lower inflation it will lower interest rates for countries that have to borrow money that you want to sell your products to it will maximize growth it will, therefore, maximize income and job generating potential in America. And to me, the benefits of having an America that could be out of debt in 17 years, that's quite staggering. Because we might have to borrow money ourselves someday again, and we don't ever want to do ever get back to the way we were when we were having to borrow money just to pay the bills. Most of your companies have borrowed a lot of money, but presumably you didn't do it very often just to make payroll. And that is what we that's the decision we've been given the opportunity to deal with. So it seems to me that's the right decision to do. And I think that when I look at our technology policy, I think about that. I think about how can we have the dynamic balance, how can we maximize this. This is almost 100 percent positive good. And if there is something that has to be done to limit it in any way, shape, or form, how can we minimize the damage to the economy and to the rapid spread of opportunity. Now, that's what we've tried to do for 6 years, and it's worked pretty well. So we've cut the deficit and balanced the budget, but almost doubled investment in education and training. I believe very strongly that we have to continue to expand trade. That's another issue. Most of you support that position. Most of you believe the President should be given fast track authority. And most of you believe if we can get an agreement with China that is good for the American economy, we should extend the opportunity to them to join the World Trade Organization. I believe that. But I ask you to think about how are we going to get this passed in a Congress where there are some people who are afraid of trade and some people who are basically they're afraid trade hurts more of the people they represent than it helps. And others just are afraid trade gives power to countries that they feel will be adversaries of the United States over the long run. Some people feel that about China now, that they're inevitably our adversary. I say there has to be a dynamic balance here. We should be trading more. We should be opening our markets more. We should be getting more open markets. But we should make sure we're investing what is necessary here to help people who are dislocated by trade through no fault of their own, and we should support the same thing in other countries. When we elevate trade, if we increase national income it should lift the incomes of all working people. It should be a race to the top, not a race to the bottom. And when we deal with China, we should recognize that we're advantaged when we open China more, economically, informationally, culturally. But if we have honest differences with them over political and human rights, we ought to say it. And we ought to encourage them to air their differences with us, but not in a way that isolates us one from another. Keep in mind what I said to you about these ethnic wars. There are people who cannot bear to live without somebody to be afraid of or look down on. And there are sometimes I have the feeling that we're looking for a new enemy in America. I'm not looking for a new enemy. I didn't pick Mr. Milosevic, for example. His conduct made him the adversary of the United States and people who believe in the inherent dignity of every religious and ethnic group in the world. I did not look for a new enemy. So I say to you, if you want us to go forward with China, then remind everybody the same debates we're having about China today are being held about the United States in China. I promise you there are people inside the high councils of government who say, "Those Americans don't want us to amount to a hill of beans. Those Americans want us to be their enemy so they will have a way to increase the defense budget. Those Americans will do everything they can to promote discord in our country that's why they're all for political and human rights. They want us to just pure disintegrate, just like we did once before." And by the time you know, you just keep on talking like that, and there is enough mutual misunderstanding until finally you get the political equivalent of a divorce. So I say we should be careful. We should evaluate our partners, our friends, our potential adversaries based on the facts at hand. But we should always be working for the best future, even as we prepare for something we might not like. And that's where I think you are. So I ask you to work with us to help to fashion a fast track bill, for example, that will reflect a new consensus on trade, that will be able to say We want more trade, but we want to lift people up and we don't want to tear the environment up, and there is a way to do that. And yes, we would like to have a good relationship with China that includes a frank, sometimes even uncomfortable airing of our differences, but we recognize that the Chinese people will be better off and we'll be less likely to have conflict in the 21st century if there is more constructive relationships, not just commerce but also culture, education, all kinds of information. And so let's try to build that sort of relationship. And that again I say, it seems to me you folks are in a unique position to make these arguments because if you take well, Rich was giving his speech tonight, and I was thinking about what his company does in Newark, New Jersey. Now, most of the people they're helping in Newark, New Jersey, will never work for Lucent. But it will be a more successful company if everybody is at least literate enough to make a decent living, have a good job, and buy those products. And life will be a lot better if every inner city in this country has a set of thriving businesses beyond the drug trade, and where the children feel safe walking on the street, and where the schools are functioning at a high level and people aren't dropping out of school. And so they invest in that, not because it immediately shows up on the bottom line but because they have a sense that life is of a whole texture and you have to understand what these relationships are. That's what we have to do as Americans. And that's how we have to look at this. So let me just mention two or three specific things that I think we should do in your area, and I ask you for your help. First, we have to work to keep America's lead in science and technology, which means you have to do your part, but we have to do ours. Basic Government investment in research and development is important and fulfills a role fundamentally different from that done by most companies. Tonight I ask you to help us to increase our investment for the seventh straight year in research and development. Our budget provides those kinds of investments that will spur the next generation of information technology, meet the challenge of climate change, find new cures for medical difficulties, explore space, protect our infrastructure against terrorist attacks. The budget resolution passed by the congressional majority would inevitably lead to big reductions in many of these investments. It is not necessary for us to do this. We can find a way to be fiscally responsible without cutting our R D investments, and I ask for your help in that regard. Second, I ask you to work with me to maintain the right conditions for entrepreneurship in electronics. Just a few years ago, E commerce did not exist. In 4 years, retail trade on the Internet could reach 100 billion, business tobusiness trade above a trillion. Two years ago the Vice President and I released a framework for seizing the potential of global electronic commerce. We said the Internet should be a free trade zone, with incentives for competition, protection for consumers and children, supervised not by Government but by the people who use the Internet every day. Most of you thought that was a pretty good idea. Now, in the coming months we've got to fill in the blanks of that nice sounding general statement. I want to work with you to find ways to give consumers the same protection in the virtual mall they now have at the shopping mall, to enhance the security and privacy of financial transactions on the Internet, an increasingly deep concern of citizens everywhere, and to bring advanced, high speed connections into homes and small businesses. I may not know as much about cable modems or T1 lines as the Vice President laughter "may" is a misleading word there. Laughter But I know what this can do for our children's future. The third thing I'd like to ask you to do relates to something Dave McCurdy talked about. I want you to help us continue to work to bridge the digital divide. We have to have shared prosperity and leave no one behind. Today, affluent schools still are more likely than disadvantaged ones to have Internet access in the classrooms. And white households are more than twice as likely to own a computer as black or Hispanic ones. The digital divide has begun to narrow, but it won't disappear on its own. We'll have to work at it. Dave talked about the first NetDay in 1996. Listen to that before that day, only 8 percent of our classrooms were wired to the Internet. Today, well over half of them are, and we are well on our way to connecting every classroom to the Internet by the end of next year. I'd like to ask you to do one other thing, as well. A lot of you have had a hard time finding sufficiently trained workers in the United States to do the work you need done. Last year I agreed to increase the number of H 1B visas as an emergency measure. But over the long run, the answer to this problem of the lack of skilled workers cannot simply be to look beyond our borders. Surely, a part of it has to be to better train people within our borders to do this work. For many years, your foundation has made this a top priority, and many individual firms have, as well. Cisco Systems is now working to establish a networking academy, for example, in every empowerment zone high school that wants one. These academies will provide students with the skills they need to get certified for jobs in information technology. It's like giving a student a first class ticket to a high skill, high wage future. We have to do more of that. Because you have done so well, I would argue that you have larger responsibilities as citizens than those who have not. And many of you are fulfilling them remarkably. The last thing I'd like to say is this You were very kind when I spoke about Kosovo earlier kind to stand, maybe just hoping I was through with my speech. Laughter I believe there is a hunger for substantive information on the part of our citizens greater than I have ever seen before. And the more you give them ways to get information, the more hungry they feel. But keep in mind, you can sit in front of your television and channel surf all night long. You can have 50 channels, or 70 or 80 or 90. You may pick up a lot of facts, and you may go to bed bleary eyed at 3 in the morning, and the next day your understanding of what it is you have seen or heard might not be any greater. And so the last thing I would like to say is, with your employees, with those in the community with whom you work, help people to understand that the forces of globalization can be good, but they present challenges that must be met. Help people understand that the forces of decentralization, of the breaking up of old blocs can be a magnificent story of individual empowerment and democratization, but they, too, present challenges that must be met. I have done everything I could to fashion a Government that could do its part to meet those challenges. It's the smallest Government we've had since President Kennedy was here. It has given more power to States and localities. It works more with community groups and churches and social programs. It does a lot of things that need to be done badly, and I'm sure we can do better. But in the end, there will be these gaps, and someone must be standing in the gap to reaffirm our basic devotion to freedom and democracy, to peace and prosperity, and to the principle that we must be a community, that out of many we are one, and that we are still about the business of our Founding Fathers, forming a more perfect Union. Thank you, and God bless you all. March 25, 1999 As you know, the United States and its NATO Allies have begun a military campaign to reduce President Milosevic's ability to make war on the people of Kosovo. I want to speak candidly to all Serbian people, to explain our reasons for this action and how there could be a quick resolution of the crisis. First, I cannot emphasize too strongly that the United States and our European allies have no quarrel with the Serbian people. We respect your proud history and culture. We joined together on many occasions, including our victory over nazism in World War II. Our own history has been honored by the contributions of Serb families who came to America to start a new life. But our common future has been put in jeopardy by a war that threatens the peace of Europe and the lives of thousands of innocent people in Kosovo. After exhausting every other option, all 19 members of NATO from France to Poland, from Italy to Greece, from across Europe to Canada and the United States in North America all of us agree that only swift action can save peace in the Balkans. Let us turn from Serbia's history to the facts of the last 10 years. There has been too much propaganda and too little plain truth. President Milosevic has spoken often of Serbia's standing in the world, but by his every action he has diminished your country's standing, exposed you to violence and instability and isolated you from the rest of Europe. He waged senseless wars in Bosnia and Croatia, which only ended after enormous bloodshed on all sides. And he launched a cruel campaign against the Albanian people of Kosovo. It was not simply a war against armed Kosovar forces but also a campaign of violence in which tanks and artillery were unleashed against unarmed civilians. Now, one out of eight people in Kosovo have been driven from their homes entire villages have been burned and cleared of their people. Thousands of Serbs also have suffered and been forced from their homes. As a result, the bitterness in Kosovo is deeper than ever, and the prospect that Kosovars and Serbs will be able to live together in the same country has been harmed. No one has benefited from all this, certainly not Serbia. We understand the region has more than its share of painful history, and we know that all peoples of the former Yugoslavia have their legitimate grievances. The NATO Allies support the desire of the Serbian people to maintain Kosovo as part of your country. With our Russian partners, we insisted on that in the peace talks in France. The result was a fair and balanced agreement that would guarantee the rights of all people in Kosovo, ethnic Serbs and Albanians alike, within Serbia. The Kosovar leaders accepted that. They agreed to demilitarize their forces and to end the paramilitary attacks on Serbs that also have contributed to the crisis. At the invitation of Serbs and Kosovars, NATO troops, under the agreement, would be deployed in Kosovo as keepers of the peace, not as some occupying force. Now, I know the Serb Government and many Serbian people may not see NATO that way. And it is true that it was the Kosovar Albanians who insisted on NATO peacekeeping forces, but largely because of President Milosevic's violations of his own commitments regarding the use of police and military units. Nevertheless, I want you to understand that NATO only agreed to be peacekeepers on the understanding that its troops would ensure that both sides kept their commitments and that terrorism on both sides would be brought to an end. They only agreed to serve with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold. Now, only President Milosevic rejected this agreement. He could have kept Kosovo and Serbia and given you peace. But instead, he has jeopardized Kosovo's future and brought you more war. Right now he's forcing your sons to keep fighting a senseless conflict that you did not ask for and that he could have prevented. Every time he has summoned Serbia's history as a justification for such action, he has imperiled your future. Hopefully, he will realize that his present course is unsustainable ultimately, it is self destructive. The sooner we find a peaceful resolution of this dispute, preserving Kosovo within Serbia while guaranteeing the rights of its people under your law, the sooner Serbia can join the rest of Europe and build a nation that gives all its citizens a voice and a chance at prosperity. The NATO nations have tried to avert this conflict through every means we knew to be available. Each of us has ties to Serbia. Each respects the dignity and the courage of the Serb people. In the end, we decided that the dangers of acting are outweighed by the dangers of allowing this conflict to continue, to worsen, to claim the lives of more innocent civilians, including children, to result in tens of thousands of more homeless refugees. Now all of us Americans, Europeans, Serbs, Kosovars must join together to stop driving wedges between people simply because they belong to different ethnic groups and to start accepting that our differences are less important than our common humanity and our common aspirations. I call on all Serbs and all people of good will to join with us in seeking an end to this needless and avoidable conflict. Instead, let us work together to restore Serbia to its rightful place as a great nation of Europe included, not isolated, by the world community respected by all nations for having the strength to build peace. March 23, 1999 Thank you so much. Walker, if I had any sense, I'd just quit while I'm ahead. That was a wonderful introduction. Thank you for your years of support and for being there for us when we couldn't have had such a successful dinner. I thank my longtime friend Governor Roy Romer, who like me put in a dozen years as the Governor of a State. And on the bad days I still think it was the best job I ever had. Laughter But there aren't many of them. I thank my longtime friend Mayor Archer, whom I met when he was an august judge working with my wife with the American Bar Association, for his service and in her absence, Congresswoman Sanchez. And I know Congressman Matsui and Congressman Menendez meant to be here tonight, but they're still voting. And we're glad Congressman Menendez's daughter joined us. She'll be more affected by the decisions we make this year than most of the rest of us will. I'm glad all the young people who are here tonight are here. I would like to thank our new officers, Joe Andrew, Andy Tobias, Beth Dozoretz. I thank Janice Griffin, who is the vice chair of our Women's Leadership Forum. And I was glad that Roy acknowledged the presence of former Congressman Dave McCurdy here and also our former DNC chairman Chuck Manatt who, if every thing works all right, will be an Ambassador pretty soon. And you ought to talk to him tonight. I'm sure once he gets the title he'll be insufferable, but anyway laughter . Let me say, when Walker was up here talking and Roy mentioned Dave McCurdy, I thought about the years when some of you in this room worked with Dave and me and others on the Democratic Leadership Council. One of our goals was to try to prove that the Democrat Party could be a genuinely progressive party and be good for American business. But I want to make a larger point here and try to just talk for a few moments tonight. When I ran for President in 1991 and '92, I did so because I thought that the natural rhetoric of Washington, DC, had become increasingly polarized and divorced from the real experiences of ordinary Americans, and that there was and I felt a lot of sympathy because I had spent enough time here as a Governor to know that Members of Congress, even the President Congressman Menendez, welcome didn't know you were back. We're glad to see you. Thank you. But anyway, I spent enough time up here and then going back home to Arkansas to know that it was so hard on a daily basis for people in public life to get their message out, that you knew maybe you would get your 10 seconds on the evening news. And it led to the sort of natural impulse to sharpen the rhetoric and to stay within the comfortable contours of conflict that had defined the two parties for so long, that it maybe worked for individual people in public life, but it wasn't working very well for America. And it didn't really match up to the world we were living in, and certainly not to the world that these young people will dominate when they come of age. And yet I saw people like Roy Romer in Colorado, a predominantly Republican State, mayors like Dennis Archer, finding ways to pursue progressive politics that try to include everybody and give everybody a stake and take care of people that needed to be taken care of and give people opportunity who didn't have it and still make the trains run on time, pay the bills, get the economy to work, deal with the difficult issues that keep our system going strong and growing and changing. And so what I tried to do in 1992 was to tell the American people there were enough hard choices in life to make that we shouldn't be going around making a lot of false choices. We shouldn't be defeating ourselves before we started by saying, for example, if you want to have a compassionate social policy, you have to run a big deficit. Why? Because sooner or later you don't have any money left to spend anyway, even with a deficit. And meanwhile, the very people you say you're trying to help, you're hurting, because every year the Congress has to spend more and more money they could spend on education or housing or health care, paying interest on the national debt it was up over 14 cents on the dollar when I got here keeping interest rates high, keeping economic growth low, depriving people of the best social program of all, a decent job. And the same thing was true about business and labor. It seemed to me that in a global economy, with also a phenomenal increase in productivity being driven by technology, with more and more benefits to labor being added by higher levels of education, and a lot of external challenges not only competition but these environmental challenges that I'll say more about in a minute, just to mention a few that the best course was to find out what was good for business and labor, and that the best companies in America had figured that out decades ago. And I could give you just example after example after example where I thought, yes, there were hard enough choices to make, but if we kept ourselves within these categories we were doomed to defeat. And so my idea was that, if I could ask America to join with me in a common vision, then we could ask ourselves, what will work to achieve that? And forget about the fights we've been having. Let's have some new fights. I once the late Edmund Muskie, who was a distinguished Senator from Maine, nominee for Vice President, Secretary of State, once spoke to a Governors' Conference in Maine in 1983, and I'll never forget what he said. He said, "In all my years in public life, I defined my success by whether I left my successor a new set of problems." You think about that. He said, "You know, life is full of problems. There will never be an end to human challenges as long as people are around on this Earth. But if we had to keep retreading the same old ground, we'd never get anywhere." So we said, "We'll have an economic policy that will reduce the deficit and increase investment in education and technology and the other things that are important. We will have a trade policy that will expand trade, but value environment and humane labor conditions. We'll have an environmental policy that will clean up the environment, but will emphasize, insofar as humanly possible, market mechanisms and incentives and technology and creativity to clean the environment up, so that we don't overly burden the economic machine when we're doing it." And to be fair, a lot of these things are possible today, and they might not have been possible in former years. For example, it is now literally possible, as a lot of our most innovative utilities have proven, to generate more energy capacity through conservation, through alternative sources of energy, through partnering with your customers, than ever before. It is also now possible to grow an economy without increasing the use of fuel that burn greenhouse gases. But most people don't believe it still, even in America, and certainly not in a lot of developing countries. And what I'd like to ask you to think about tonight just briefly is Okay, I'm grateful, we've had a good economic policy. And Walker did a better job of bragging on it than I should. And we did have something to do with that so did all of you and millions of other people in this country. And we've got crime at a 30 year low. Why? Because we said that this is a false choice between whether you're going to try to rehabilitate people or keep them out of trouble in the first place or punish people who do wrong. The vast majority of serious crimes are committed by a very small number of people. They ought to be identified. They ought to be punished. Then we ought to kill ourselves trying to keep our kids out of trouble in the first place. And we ought to try to prevent as much crime as possible. That's why we put these 100,000 police out there on the street and sponsored after school programs and other kinds of preventive programs. I'm glad that welfare is at a 30 year low. Almost half it's been cut almost in half partly by the growing economy and partly by a new welfare strategy that says Now, we should keep the guarantee poor families have for health care and nutrition for the kids, but if a person is able bodied, the person ought to go to work if there's a job. You know that one of the things that got lost in a lot of the rhetoric the two welfare bills I vetoed would have taken away the guarantee of food and medicine and medical care for children. But I told the Congress if they would put those things back in, I would give the States the power to create their own designs, to figure out the most innovative ways of putting people to work. And these kinds of things actually do work. And for progressives, I would like to say we have the lowest poverty rate we've had in quite a long time. We have much lower poverty rates among minorities than we've recorded in 30 years. We're finally beginning to see in wages an increase in equality, with wages growing more rapidly for people in the lower income rungs. We've got 90 percent of our children immunized for the first time. The budget in '93 really worked to relieve the tax burden on the hardest pressed working families. The Family and Medical Leave Act has done the same thing. So it is possible to have a good economic policy, to be tough where you ought to be tough, and to have a more humane society. And what I have been trying to do is to get not to say that I'm right about every issue but to get people to think in those terms. What kind of America do we want to leave our children in the 21st century? I think we want a country where every responsible person has an opportunity to live out his or her dream. I think we want a country that is genuinely committed to the idea of community. And I want to tell you what I mean by that. I mean a sense of belonging, a sense of being responsible to other people, not only because it's morally right but because we believe we do better individually when our friends and neighbors are doing better and because we believe that our differences, whether they're racial, ethnic, religious, or whatever, are quite exciting and interesting, but they're not nearly as important as the humanity we share. And that is a profoundly important issue as we become more and more diverse in a world that is being consumed, as you see in the Balkans, in the Middle East, in Africa, and elsewhere, by ethnic and regional ethnic and racial and other kinds of divisions. And I think it is very, very important that America recognize that another false choice is trying to say, "Well, I'm going to concentrate on domestic policy but not foreign policy." I said this all during the '92 campaign, and I don't think anyone ever heard this, but there is no longer an easy dividing line between our policy at home and our policy around the world that the world is becoming a smaller place. And that's why we tried to establish new partnerships with Africa, with Latin America, a whole new, broader relationship with a lot of Asian countries we weren't involved with before, and a lot of other things that I've tried to do, to work with the Europeans to help them deal with these horrible problems in the Balkans and become united and free because I know that if we want good trading partners, we've got to be good citizens of the world. And America, still we've got 4 percent of the world's population and 22 percent of the income. If we want to keep it, the only way we can keep it is to sell some of what we provide to people beyond our borders. And for them to buy it, they need to be doing well, and they need to be safe and free and secure. And so, very often what is the right thing to do is also economically the right thing to do. Now, having said that, I'd just like to say that that is the perspective that's the world I've tried to leave for our children. And what I hope that all of you will be able to do as members of our Business Council is to keep us moving down that path, keep us making the tough decisions, but not with false categories, not with presuppositions about what has to be done, not with the idea that we can't reconcile a lot of these internal difficulties that are there. If you look ahead at the big challenges facing us in the 21st century and I'd just like to mention a few of them, not all of them but a few of them, and what I'm trying to get this Congress to help me do. I think they are as follows, in no particular order Number one, how to keep the economy going at home and how to build a better economy in the world how to keep the difficulties in Asia from biting us here and taking America's economic engine down and, instead, how to grow together. And I would just say I think there are three things we have to do. One, abroad, I think we need to continue to expand trade. I think we have got to find a new consensus in America on trade. The Democratic Party should not be afraid of trade. It has generated more jobs than it has cost, and the jobs it has generated have higher wages. The Republican Party should not be afraid of the notion that we need new international understandings, just like we have national understandings, that lift environmental standards and lift labor standards, even as we expand trade so we have a race to a higher level of life, a higher quality of life, not a race to the bottom. And we've got to find a new consensus on it. But we can't run away from it. The second thing we need to do is to deal with the world financial problems. And I won't bore you with the long exegesis on that, but the G 7 countries, the big economies, are going to meet in Germany this summer, and I'm hoping that we will have the next big step to take there to try to stabilize the world financial system so we don't have the kind of rampant crash we had in Asia in the last few years. And let me just tell you what the basic problem is and some of you who are involved in trading understand this. But if we're going to have a global economy where we have global trade and global investment, you have to move money around. And money is like anything else if you move around enough of it, there will be a market for money. And farmers have known this for years with their crops, where they have to hedge against their crops. But today 1.5 trillion trillion is exchanged around the globe every day in currency exchanges. That's many, many times more than the aggregate value of total trade in goods and services every day. And when the people that set up this system 50 years ago and those of us who have been working in it for many years never focused clearly enough on that until the last couple of years. But that's going to be very important, because you're not going to be able to keep support for free markets and maybe even for freely elected governments in some of these countries if they think in a month they could lose what they worked for 10 years for, and all these people in the middle class all of a sudden are plunged into poverty. The third thing we have to do is to recognize that a lot of people in America have not yet been touched by our recovery, as sweeping as it has been, and that they offer us a market to continue to grow our economy in a noninflationary way, whatever is happening overseas. That's the new markets initiative I talked about in the State of the Union. Essentially, what I have asked the Congress to do is to pass a series of tax credits and loan guarantees to get private capital into poor inner city and rural areas that are underinvested in, where the unemployment rate is too high. The unemployment rate in this country is 4.4 percent. But there are neighborhoods in New York where it's 12 or 15 percent and in most big cities in this country and in an awful lot of rural counties in this country, which are capable of getting investment and putting people to work. And let me just tell you how it works. For example, suppose I'll just take suppose Newark, New Jersey, wanted to build some big facility in an area of high unemployment, and it cost 100 million. If my proposal were adopted by Congress, the investors if they put it in a high unemployment area and guaranteed a certain percentage of the jobs people would be trained for them, and then the permanent jobs would be given to people who could compete in that area would get a 25 percent tax credit and would get then two thirds of the remaining investment with a guarantee. The investment would be guaranteed. That's just what we do with the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, Export Import Bank, other things. It seems to me that it's the least we can do in America is to give the same incentives to people who invest in under invested areas in America we do to get them to invest in underinvested areas around the world. And I think that we ought to be for that. The second thing I think we ought to do is to continue our work in education. We've got the best system of higher education in the world. One of the proudest achievements of this administration is that we virtually opened the doors of college to all with the tax credits and loans and scholarships and the AmeriCorps program and all that. But nobody thinks that every American child has the best access to elementary and secondary education. So we need to have higher standards. And I recommended five things in the State of the Union Address, including ending social promotion, but giving children all children the right to go to summer school and after school and mentoring programs if they're not learning, in return for the continued investment of Federal money. But I also want to continue putting more teachers in the classroom, to have smaller classes, and modernizing schools, hooking them all up to the Internet. I think we have to deal with the applause . Thank you. I think but see? That's the false are you going to be for spending more money on education or higher standards? Why should we make that choice? Why shouldn't we be for spending more money and having higher standards? You know, a lot of people say it's not a money problem, but it's been my experience in life that anytime somebody tells you it's not a money problem, they're usually talking about someone else's problem, not theirs. So why should we make that choice? And I'll just give you one last issue, which goes back to economics, and that's dealing with the aging of America. There's been a lot of handwringing in our country for years about Social Security and increasingly about Medicare. But I hope you will forgive me when I tell you that these are very high class problems. First of all, they're problems that we share with every other wealthy country in the world, because life expectancy is going up just at the time the baby boomers are aging. And medical science is providing people the opportunity to extend their lives and to extend the quality of their lives. But as you get older, you consume more health care, and if you access technology, it costs more. So we have to make some fundamental changes in both the Medicare program and the Social Security program. But first we have to recognize that we have to put some more funds in them, because by 2030, there will be twice as many people over 65, only two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. And what I've recommended is that we, in effect, use the surplus 77 percent of it over the next 15 years to pay the debt down in a way that, in effect, gives claim on that money in the ensuing years when it will be needed for Medicare and Social Security. Now, if you do that, we can take the amount of money we're spending on debt service in the budget it will make it a lot more fun to be in Congress you can take the amount of money you're spending on debt service from about, now, down to 13 cents, down to 2 cents in 15 years. We'll have the lowest debt as a percentage of our income we've had since World War I. And whatever happens to the global economy, interest rates in America will be lower investment will be higher incomes will be higher and jobs will be more plentiful. So I think this is a very important thing. Now, it will sound a lot better when somebody else who comes along and the other party says, "No, let's give half of it away in a tax cut." But we can give tax cuts to people who need it to keep body and soul together or who need it for specific purposes, like to deal with the climate change challenge or to deal with the challenge of long term care in their families or to deal with the child care challenge and their families or to help more people save for their own retirement, and still save this money, save the bulk of this surplus. Look, we were in debt for 30 years we had a structural deficit for 12 years, and during that 12 years we quadrupled the national debt. If we were to pay it down two good things would happen to us economically. First, what I just said we'd pay down the debt and have lower interest rates and higher investment. Secondly, we'd make it a lot cheaper for our trading partners to borrow the money in the world. And these poorer countries would get more money, get more investment. They would grow faster, and they'd buy more of our goods. We've got someone here from Boeing tonight. You just talk to them about what the global financial crisis has done to them. Talk to the farmers in this country about what the global financial crisis has done for them. If our trading partners aren't doing well, they don't have the money to buy our output. So these are the kinds of things that I want to do, deal with these big challenges the aging of America, the education issues, keeping the economy growing, the challenge of climate change these huge, big challenges in a way that benefits all people, because we do recognize we're in a community. Now, I may not be right about all of this. But on the Social Security and Medicare and budget deficit, which will be the big questions we have to face this year, I think this administration is at least entitled to the benefit of the doubt based on the consequences of the policies of the last 6 years. On the other issues that are very important the trade issues, particularly I asked the members of the Democratic Business Council to work with our friends in labor, work with our friends in the Democratic Party, and remind everybody that one of the reasons we got where we are in the last 6 years is we became the greatest trading nation in the world again. And that's one of the reasons we're here. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't do something for El Paso, Texas, if they lose 6,000 jobs. It's not a choice. You don't have to say, "Oh, goodness, too bad about them. We're doing great." You should say, "We should do what's best for the country as a whole and help them because they're smart, too they're hardworking, too they're entitled to have their chance in the Sun, as well." So these are the kinds of thing we're trying to do. And one last thing. I gave a long speech about Kosovo today, and I don't want to talk about that in any detail tonight, but I will say this It is interesting that at the end of the cold war with this incredible explosion of technology and opportunity to create wealth, that the world is convulsed by people obsessed with making their lives on holding other people down because they're different. That's why I think it's important that we continue the President's Initiative on Race, which we're doing why I think it's important that we pass the "Employment Non Discrimination Act" and the hate crimes law that I put before the Congress why I think it's important we stand up against ethnic cleansing and keep fighting for peace in the Middle East. And the darkest nightmare I told you my happy dream for the future the darkest nightmares of the future are the marriage of modern technology and primitive hatred, because terrorists can figure out how to get on the Internet and make bombs. You can get on the Internet and figure out how to make that bomb that blew up the building in Oklahoma City. You can have a little biological lab in a garage somewhere if you know enough. And what we don't want to do is to leave our children with a world in which we've done a whiz bang job with all the mechanical and economic things, but we haven't done anything to purge the collective spirit of our country and, insofar as we are able, the world of the foolish notion that our lives only can count when we've got our heel on someone else's neck, and we can say we're better than they are. This is a profound thing. This is this goes back to prehistory, folks. When people first aggregated themselves in tribes, they had to be suspicious of the other. And we have different skin pigmentations today and different facial features and all that for reasons that go back thousands, even tens of thousands of years. And it falls now to America not to be a wild eyed idealist but just to remind the people that we are trying to set a model for the world. And we're not perfect, but we're trying to say that any responsible citizen can be part of our community. And if we're going to have the world we want, that has to be true everywhere. America has to try to be good at home and to be a force for good abroad. And all the work we do on economics and technology and trade and everything else will, in the end, also have some very twisted manifestations, which will bedevil our children unless we also stand up for old fashioned ideals. We believe in equality and freedom and our common humanity. That's what I want the Democratic Party to be in the 21st century, and I want you to be a big part of it. Thank you very much. March 18, 1999 Leah and Dahlia, Noa, Yuval, Tali, Rachel Hillary and I are honored to welcome you here. We are honored by the Shalom Chaver Award and the Peace Garden and the power of your example. Thank you, Noa, for the beautiful song. I thank the members of the Cabinet who are here, the administration, especially Secretary Albright and Mr. Berger, and I want to say a special word of thanks to all those who have been on our peace team, now and for the last 6 years Mr. Ross, Mr. Indyk before them, Secretary Christopher, Mr. Lake, and others. I welcome the members of the diplomatic corps who are here. I think it would be worth noting, as a particular tribute to Prime Minister Rabin, that the members of the diplomatic corps who are here are the Ambassadors of Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Qatar, Oman, and the PLO. Welcome. I thank Congressmen Lantos, Lewis, and Lowey for being here. We have many distinguished guests from Israel, including General and Mrs. Mordechai and Mrs. Barak. We thank you for being here, all of our guests from Israel, and all of our American guests. Thank you for coming, in the words of Prime Minister Rabin, to make a stand against violence and for peace. We are gratified to know that this Rabin Center will promote Yitzhak's legacy and his vision of a Middle East in a world where people do not have to die for peace but can actually live in peace and enjoy it. I still remember quite clearly the meeting we had in March of 1993, when the Oslo agreement was still months away, but he had already foreseen the bold steps he would have to take. He shared with me his assessment of the danger posed by the adversaries in the Middle East. As I recall, he called it a marriage of extremists and missiles. He understood that Israel needed a strategic peace, a circle of peace with others in the region to isolate and weaken extremists. All I could say to him then and all I can do now is to state again that as Israel takes risks for peace, the United States will do everything in its power to minimize those risks and advance that cause. Today I also thank Leah and Dahlia for remembering our friend His Majesty King Hussein. In a humorous moment in an otherwise profoundly somber day, at his funeral, I was standing with another leader of the Arab world whom I dare not mention for fear of embarrassing him, and we noticed standing there at the King's funeral Prime Minister Netanyahu, General Barak, and General Mordechai. And the leader looked at me, and he said, "This is truly an amazing world. King Hussein is the only thing they agree on." Laughter Hussein and Yitzhak Rabin were brave soldiers who had the courage to tell the hard truth that there would be no security for any in the Middle East without fairness for all, that the time had come to lift people's hopes, not exploit their fears, to reach across the divide of history and hatred, to fulfill the true promise of the Promised Land. They knew well enough that extremists would try to derail the peace accord by keeping fear and frustration, mistrust and misery dominant in the lives of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis. But they were determined to turn back the tide, and so they did. How we gloried in those brilliant days in 1993 and 1995 when the leaders of the Middle East gathered here to grasp hands and pledged to build a safer and better future. How we enjoyed those first halting steps toward reconciliation. Even then there was humor I will never forget when Yitzhak promised me in September of '93 that he would shake Mr. Arafat's hand as long as there was no kissing. Laughter But it wasn't long after that when they came here to sign all the maps to embody in concrete terms the accord which had been reached, when a dispute arose. And it was at the last minute, and no one knew how to resolve it. So I showed them back to my private dining room, and I said, "I believe I could find Jericho, but otherwise I don't know much about this map. You guys go in that room and solve it. We'll wait until it's done." And they sat there alone and resolved the problem. Today, the people of the Middle East still have a chance to build the secure peace of Prime Minister Rabin's dreams, to isolate the extremists, to weaken their ability to shatter the peace with terrorism or missiles or weapons of mass destruction. But it is just a chance. I can still hear the strong voices of Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein speaking to us today and saying Push ahead with the peace process. Build on Oslo and Wye River before it is too late. But today, their voices must be embodied by others all across the Middle East. Tzarich chaverim li shalom. We need friends of peace. The loss of Yitzhak Rabin, the premature death of His Majesty King Hussein make it time and past time for all in the Middle East to remember the wisdom of the ages Life is fleeting. When we return to dust, our differences are as nothing. All that remains is our legacy. It must be an affirmation of our common humanity. Why is it we can only see the humanity we share when we lose someone we love? Long ago, Leah said it very well in 1975 at a women's conference in Mexico City. She said this "War solves nothing. Our area thirsts for peace, for the benefit of all peoples living there. Our true enemies are poverty, illiteracy, disease, and inequality of opportunity." Leah, you and Yitzhak lived the history of Israel together, from your marriage in the year of your nation's birth, from the ashes of the Holocaust and the seeds of the Diaspora. You fought for independence and survival. You helped to build the enlightened, vibrant democratic society that Israel is today. And I want to say that we are very grateful to you for your sacrifices, for your contributions to help build an Israel that is strong and free, prosperous and at peace. We thank you. That is also America's cause in the Middle East and in Central America, where I visited last week, and where longtime adversaries in civil wars now reach across great divides and in Northern Ireland, the land of my ancestors, whose leaders I met with yesterday, where we are so close to finishing the job and in the former Yugoslavia, where we are determined to avoid in Kosovo a repeat of the terrible senseless bloodshed of Bosnia and in Africa, where too much blood still is being shed, but whose leaders came here this week in a remarkable display of unity to seek a partnership of freedom and opportunity with the United States. In all these places the struggle for peace continues. And we must continue it in the Middle East, between Israelis and Palestinians and all across the region, because every day we delay the process of peace strengthens the extremists and supports their violent designs. I would like to close with three admonitions. We must not grow weary. The psalmist says, "Do good seek peace, and pursue it." We must not harden our hearts in the face of all that has been lost. Shakespeare said it best The quality of mercy is not strain'd,It droppeth as the gentle rain from heavenUpon the place beneath. It is twice blest It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. Let us give it and take it. And finally, we must not lose faith. Yitzhak Rabin once quoted these words from the poet Tchernichovsky "I believe in the future. That day will come when peace and blessings are borne from nation to nation." And he added, "I want to believe that that day is not far off." With the help of a merciful God, we will hasten the day of Yitzhak Rabin's dreams. Shalom. Salaam. Thank you, and God bless you. March 16, 1999 Thank you. Good morning. Let me say, first of all, to Minister Ouedraogo, thank you for your fine address and for your leadership. Secretary General Salim, Secretary General Annan, Secretary Albright, to our distinguished ministers and ambassadors and other officials from 46 African nations and the representatives of the Cabinet and the United States Government. I am delighted to see you all here today. We are honored by your presence in the United States and excited about what it means for our common future. A year ago next week I set out on my journey to Africa. It was, for me, for my wife, and for many people who took that trip, an utterly unforgettable and profoundly moving experience. I went to Africa in the hope not only that I would learn but that the process of the trip itself and the publicity that our friends in the press would give it would cause Americans and Africans to see each other in a new light, not denying the lingering effects of slavery, colonialism, the cold war, but to focus on a new future, to build a new chapter of history, a new era of genuine partnership. A year later, we have to say there has been a fair measure of hope, and some new disappointments. War still tears at the heart of Africa. Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan have not yet resolved their conflicts. Ethiopia and Eritrea are mired in a truly tragic dispute we have done our best to try to help avoid. Violence still steals innocent lives in the Great Lakes region. In the last year, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam became battlefields in a terrorist campaign that killed and wounded thousands of Africans, along with Americans working there for a different future. But there have also been promising new developments. The recent elections in Nigeria give Africa's most populous country, finally, a chance to realize its enormous potential. It's transition may not be complete, but let's not forget, just a year ago it was unthinkable. This June, for the first time, South Africa will transfer power from one fully democratic government to another. More than half the sub Saharan nations are now governed by elected leaders. Many, such as Benin, Mali, and Tanzania, have fully embraced open government and open markets. Quite a few have recorded strong economic growth, including Mozambique, crippled by civil war not long ago. Ghana's economy has grown by 5 percent a year since 1992. All of you here have contributed to this progress. All are eager to make the next century better than the last. You share a great responsibility, for you are the architects of Africa's future. Today I would like to talk about the tangible ways we can move forward with our partnership. Since our trip to Africa, my administration has worked hard to do more. We've created a 120 million educational initiative to link schools in Africa to schools in this country. We've created the Great Lakes Justice Initiative to attack the culture of impunity. We have launched a safe skies initiative to increase air links between Africa and the rest of the world given 30 million to protect food security in Africa and more to be provided during this year. In my budget submission to Congress I have asked for additional funds to cover the cost of relieving another 237 million in African debt on top of the 245 million covered in this year's appropriation. We're working hard with you to bring an end to the armed conflicts which claim innocent lives and block economic progress, conducting extensive shuttle diplomacy in an effort to resolve the dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea. In Sierra Leone, we're doing what we can to reduce suffering and forge a lasting peace. We have provided 75 million in humanitarian assistance over the last 18 months. And with the approval of Congress we will triple our long standing commitment of support for ECOMOG to conduct regional peacekeeping. We have also done what we can to build the African Crisis Response Initiative, with members of our military cooperating with African militaries. We've provided 8 million since 1993 to the OAU's Conflict Management Center to support African efforts to resolve disputes and end small conflicts before they explode into large ones. Nonetheless, we have a lot of ground to make up. For too much of this century, the relationship between the United States and Africa was plagued by indifference on our part. This conference represents an unparalleled opportunity to raise our growing cooperation to the next level. During the next few days we want to talk about how these programs work and hear from you about how we can do better. Eight members of my Cabinet will meet their African counterparts. The message I want your leaders to take home is, this is a partnership with substance, backed by a long term commitment. This is truly a relationship for the long haul. We have been too separate and too unequal. We must end that by building a better common future. We need to strive together to do better, with a clear vision of what we want to achieve over the long run. Ten years from now, we want to see more growth rates above 5 percent. A generation from now, we want to see a larger middle class, more jobs and consumers, more African exports, thriving schools filled with children boys and girls with high expectations and a reasonable chance of fulfilling them. But we need the tools to get there, the tools of aid, trade, and investment. As I said when I was in Africa, this must not be a choice between aid and trade we must have both. In my budget request for the next fiscal year, I've asked for an increase of 10 percent in development assistance to Africa. But the aid is about quality and quantity. Our aid programs are developed with your involvement, designed to develop the institutions needed to sustain democracy and to reduce poverty and to increase independence. To expand opportunity, we also need trade. Our administration strongly supports the "Africa Growth and Opportunity Act," which I said in my State of the Union Address we will work to pass in this session of Congress. The act represents the first step in creating, for the first time in our history, a genuine framework for U.S. Africa trade relations. It provides immediate benefits to nations modernizing their economies, and offers incentives to others to do the same. It increases U.S. assistance, targeting it where it will do the most good. The bill clearly will benefit both Africa and the United States. Africans ask for more access to our markets this bill provides that. You asked that GSP benefits be extended this bill extends them for 10 years. You said you need more private investment this bill calls for the creation of two equity investment funds by OPIC, providing up to 650 million to generate private investment in Africa. We agree that labor concerns are important. This bill removes GSP benefits for any country found to be denying worker rights. You told us we needed to understand more about your views on development. This bill provides a forum for high level dialog and cooperation. It is a principled and pragmatic approach based on what will work. No one is saying it will be easy, but we are resolved to help lower the hurdles left by past mistakes. I believe it represents a strong, achievable, and important step forward. There are many friends of Africa in Congress and many strong opinions about how best to help Africa. I hope they will quickly find consensus. We cannot afford a house divided. Africa needs action now. There's another crucial way the United States can hasten Africa's integration. One of the most serious issues we must deal with together, and one of truly global importance, is debt relief. Today I ask the international community to take actions which could result in forgiving 70 billion in global debt relief global debt. Our goal is to ensure that no country committed to fundamental reform is left with a debt burden that keeps it from meeting its people's basic human needs and spurring growth. We should provide extraordinary relief for countries making extraordinary effort to build working economies. To achieve this goal, in consultation with our Congress and within the framework of our balanced budget, I proposed that we make significant improvements to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative at the Cologne Summit of the G 7 in June first, a new focus on early relief by international financial institutions, which now reduce debt only at the end of the HIPC program. Combined with ongoing forgiveness of cash flows by the Paris Club, this will substantially accelerate relief from debt payment burden. Second, the complete forgiveness of all bilateral concessional loans to the poorest countries. Third, deeper and broader reduction of other bilateral debts, raising the amount to 90 percent. Fourth, to avoid recurring debt problems, donor countries should commit to provide at least 90 percent of new development assistance on a grant basis to countries eligible for debt reduction. Fifth, new approaches to help countries emerging from conflicts that have not had the chance to establish reform records, and need immediate relief and concessional finance. And sixth, support for gold sales by the IMF to do its part, and additional contributions by us and other countries to the World Bank's trust fund to help meet the cost of this initiative. Finally, we should be prepared to provide even greater relief in exceptional cases where it could make a real difference. What I am proposing is debt reduction that is deeper and faster. It is demanding, but to put it simply, the more debtor nations take responsibility for pursuing sound economic policies, the more creditor nations must be willing to provide debt relief. One of the best days of my trip last year was the day I opened an investment center in Johannesburg, named after our late Commerce Secretary, Ron Brown, a true visionary who knew that peace, democracy, and prosperity would grow in Africa with the right kind of support. I can't think of a better tribute to him than our work here today, for he understood that Africa's transformation will not happen overnight but, on the other hand, that it should happened and that it could happen. Look at Latin America's progress over the last decade. Look at Asia before that. In each case, the same formula worked Peace, open markets, democracy, and hard work lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty. It has nothing to do with latitude and longitude or religion or race. It has everything to do with an equal chance and smart decisions. There are a thousand reasons Africa and the United States should work together for the 21st century, reasons buried deep in our past, reasons apparent in the future just ahead. It is the right thing to do, and it is in the self interest of all the peoples represented in this room today. Africa obviously matters to the 30 million Americans who trace their roots there. But Africa matters to all Americans. It provides 13 percent of our oil, nearly as much as the Middle East. Over 100,000 American jobs depend upon our exports to Africa there could be millions more when Africa realizes its potential. As Africa grows it will need what we produce, and we will need what Africa produces. Africa is home to 700 million people, nearly a fifth of the world. Last year our growing relationship with this enormous market helped to protect the United States from the global financial crisis raging elsewhere. While exports were down in other parts of the world, exports from the United States to Africa actually went up by 8 percent, topping 6 billion. As wise investors have discovered, investments in Africa pay. In 1997 the rate of return of American investments in Africa was 36 percent, compared with 16 percent in Asia, 14 percent worldwide, 11 percent in Europe. As has already been said, we share common health and environmental concerns with people all over the world, and certainly in Africa. If we want to deal with the problems of global warming and climate change, we must deal in partnership with Africa. If we want to deal with a whole array of public health problems that affect not only the children and people of Africa but people throughout the rest of the world, we must do it in partnership with Africa. Finally, I'd like to just state a simple truth that guides our relations with all nations Countries that are democratic, peaceful, and prosperous are good neighbors and good partners. They help respond to crises. They respect the environment. They abide by international law. They protect their working people and their consumers. They honor women as well as men. They give all their children a chance. There are 46 nations represented here today, roughly a quarter of all the countries on Earth. You share a dazzling variety of people and languages and traditions. The world of the 21st century needs your strength, your contribution, your full participation in the struggle to unleash the human potential of people everywhere. Africa is the ancient cradle of humanity. But it is also a remarkably young continent, full of young people with an enormous stake in the future. When I traveled through the streets of the African cities and I saw the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of young people who came out to see me, I wanted them to have long, full, healthy lives. I tried to imagine what their lives could be like if we could preserve the peace, preserve freedom, extend genuine opportunity, give them a chance to have a life that was both full of liberty and ordered, structured chances chances that their parents and grandparents did not know. The Kanuri people of Nigeria, Niger, and Chad say, "Hope is the pillar of the world." The last decade proves that hope is stronger than despair if it is followed by action. Action is the mandate of this conference. Let us move beyond words and do what needs to be done. For our part, that means debt relief, passage of the "Africa Growth and Opportunity Act," appropriate increases in assistance, and a genuine sense of partnership and openness to future possibilities. For your part, it means continuing the work of building the institutions that bring democracy and peace, prosperity and equal opportunity. We are ending a decade, the 1990's, that began with a powerful symbol. I will never forget the early Sunday morning in 1990 when I got my daughter up and took her down to the kitchen to turn on the television so that she could watch Nelson Mandela walk out of his prison for the last time. She was just a young girl, and I told her that I had the feeling that this would be one of the most important events of her lifetime, in terms of its impact on the imagination of freedom loving people everywhere. We could not have know then, either she or I or my wife, that we would have the great good fortune to get to know Mr. Mandela and see his generosity extended to our family and to our child, as it has been to children all over his country. But in that walk, we saw a continent's expression of dignity, of self respect, of the soaring potential of the unfettered human spirit. For a decade, now, the people of South Africa and the people of Africa have been trying to make the symbol of that walk real in the lives of all the people of the continent. We still have a long way to go. But let us not forget how far we have come. And let us not forget that greatness resides not only in the people who lead countries and who overcome persecutions but in the heart and mind of every child and every person there is the potential to do better, to reach higher, to fulfill dreams. It is our job to give all the children of Africa the chance to do that. Thank you very much. March 15, 1999 Thank you. That's a true story. Laughter But the truth is that Al didn't need to have any fear because by the time I called him, Harold had gone over the whole list, and I had written it down. Do you remember that? I mean, he had been very tough, very specific, very firm. And I actually wrote it down. And I think if I hadn't written it down, he would never have let me off the hook. Laughter I just called Al because sometimes people get better care in the hospital after I call them. Laughter I was with a guy over the weekend I went home to Arkansas over the weekend I was with a guy over the weekend who is about 83 years old. And he literally was at death's door. And I called him in the hospital, and I don't this sounds more insensitive than it is, but this guy is like a brother to me, and we've been friends for 30 years. And I call him up, and I say, "You old coot. You can't die. I'm not done with you yet." Laughter And all of a sudden, everybody rushed into his room. The next thing I know, 2 weeks later he's at a Democratic event, last weekend. So if you get in the hospital and you don't think they're doing right by you, let us know, and I'll see what I can do. Laughter I want to thank Al and Harold and Vince and all the officers of the IAFF for working with us. I want to thank my good friend James Lee Witt, and Kay Goss, who has now worked with me as my liaison to firefighters as Governor and as President. Thank you very much. I want to thank Congressmen Neil Abercrombie and Bill Pascrell, both of whom are here and are good friends of the firefighters and good friends of mine. You know, I was thinking about how much we have in common on the way over here. When I was a boy, like most kids I used to love to go to the fire station, slide down the pole, crawl on the truck, do all that. I never became a firefighter, but I believe I've learned about as much as you have about putting out fires in the last few years. Laughter I'm working on about 20 years now of working with firefighters, working with the IAFF. When I was Governor, I worked with our local IAFF members to create a statewide fire and police pension system and to establish death benefits for firefighters killed in the line of duty. And I asked Al where Pete Reagan was standing over there because he's the president of the Arkansas Professional Fire Fighters, and whenever I go back to northwest Arkansas, he still leads the motorcade. I haven't been asked to pick up a hose or anything on any of these trips, but a few years ago when we were in Fayetteville, where I used to teach and where Hillary and I were married, I asked him if we could go by and see the home where we first lived in and where we were married. Pete redirected the entire motorcade to go past the house. You cannot imagine how this traumatized the Secret Service. Laughter Everybody else I just said, "I want to go by my house." And so, boom, boom, boom, all of a sudden we're going by the then, they had to take us down a dirt road in order to get back on the motorcade route, which makes the point I want to get into, which is that now people who are firefighters have to do a lot more than battle fires. You all know that Benjamin Franklin started the country's first fire department in 1736. It was called the Union Fire Company, but it was not a union shop. It was a private company. And in those days, different companies would actually show up at a fire, and then they would fight over who would put it out, because you actually got paid if you put the fire out. Meanwhile the building would burn down. Kind of the way Washington works today. Laughter That bickering system ended with the rise of municipal fire departments in the 19th century. And ever since, I think that almost every American would agree that firefighters have embodied the best values of this country teamwork, professionalism, helping your neighbor, showing courage when it's necessary. These things are at the core of this country's character, and they're what we think about the rest of us when we think about you and the people you represent. But the job has changed. From reviving heart attack sufferers, to cleaning up hazardous chemical spills, to rescuing victims of earthquakes and floods, firefighters have been called upon to assume ever broadening responsibilities for helping our fellow country men and women. As we approach a new century, we have to ask our firefighters to meet yet a new challenge to protect our citizens from terrorists armed with chemical and biological weapons. Today I want to talk about these new threats and about the efforts we're undertaking to equip and train our Nation's firefighters to deal with those threats, thanks in large part to the IAFF. America's municipal firefighters are already the best trained and best equipped in the world. All Americans benefit from that. The number of Americans killed in fires has dropped by one third since 1988. I don't think the American people know that, and since the press is covering it, I want to say that again I hope this gets on, if nothing else does the number of Americans killed in fires has dropped by one third since 1988. Thank you very much. This is due, of course, to the prevention measures you have tirelessly advocated, to your bravery and skill. With the help of better safety equipment that you have fought for, such as flame retardant suits, firefighters have been able to get to the heart of fires quicker and pull more victims to safety. Firefighting is still extremely dangerous. Firefighters are 6 times more likely to be injured on the job than the average private sector worker. That's why I have worked very hard with your leaders to better the lives of firefighters. We've improved the pay system for Federal firefighters, supported efforts to give all firefighters the right to join unions and bargain collectively, strengthened Federal rules applause thank you. Thank you. And we strengthened the Federal rules that protect the lives of firefighters. But we have to do more. The 21st century will be a fascinating time. I envy those of you who are in this audience who are younger than me, which is most of you, because you'll live to see more of it. It will be a century in which limitless opportunities will be linked to dangerous new threats. Here's why Open borders and fast paced technological change fuel our prosperity they create new job opportunities, new business opportunities every day they also make life more interesting and they spread the message of freedom quickly around the globe. You may have noticed last week I was in Central America visiting four countries that were ravaged by the hurricane. All these countries once were gripped by horrible civil wars. Today, they're all governed by freely elected leaders, people sitting in the assemblies who fought each other for years. There's a lot of good things going on. But the more open and flexible societies are, the more vulnerable they can become to organized forces of destruction. They give new opportunities to the enemies as well as the friends of freedom. For example, scientists now use the Internet to exchange ideas and make discoveries that can lengthen lives. But fanatics can also use it to download formulas for substances and bombs that can be used to shorten lives. In most instances of domestic terror, the first professionals on the scene will be the firefighters. They're becoming the frontline defenders of our citizens, not just from accidents and arsonists but from those who would seek to sow terror and so undermine our way of life. The truth of this is apparent to anyone who saw that unforgettable photograph of firefighter Chris Fields, cradling in his arms a tiny victim of the Oklahoma City bombing. Since 1996, the number of weapons of mass destruction threats called in to firefighters, police, and the FBI has increased by fivefold. The threat comes not just from conventional weapons, like the bomb used in Oklahoma City, but also from chemical weapons, like the nerve agent that killed 12 but injured thousands in Tokyo in the subway just 4 years ago, and even from biological weapons that could spread deadly disease before anyone even realizes that attack has occurred. I have been stressing the importance of this issue, now, for some time. As I have said repeatedly, and I want to say again to you, I am not trying to put any American into a panic over this, but I am determined to see that we have a serious, deliberate, disciplined, long term response to a legitimate potential threat to the lives and safety of the American people. Applause Thank you. The only cause for alarm would be if we were to sit by and do nothing to prepare for a problem we know we could be presented with. Nothing would make me happier than to have people look back 20 years from now and say, "President Clinton overreacted to that. He was overly cautious." The only way they will say that is if we are over cautious, if we're prepared, we can keep bad things from happening. Now, last fall the Attorney General announced plans to create a national domestic preparedness office, a one stop shop where State and local first responders can get the equipment, the training, the guidance they need from a variety of Federal agencies. I proposed and Congress agreed to a 39 percent increase in resources for chemical and biological weapons preparedness. In the budget I submitted last month to Congress, I asked for 10 billion to combat terrorism, including nearly 1.4 billion to protect citizens against chemical and biological terrorism here at home, more than double what we spent on such efforts just 2 years ago. Today I want to talk about the specifics of our domestic antiterrorism initiative that will most affect the people in this room and those whom you represent. First, equipment Later this year, the Justice Department will provide 69 1 2 million in grants to all 50 States and the large municipalities to buy everything from protective gear to chemical biological detection devices. Next month, we'll be asking you to tell us what you need. Second, training This year, the Departments of Justice and Defense, along with FEMA, will invest nearly 80 million in new and existing training efforts for firefighters, EMS personnel, and other first responders. We want all of these resources to be accessible to the National Domestic Preparedness Office. Third, special response teams The Department of Health and Human Services has helped 27 metropolitan areas develop specially trained and equipped medical response teams that can be deployed at a moment's notice in the event of chemical or biological attack. These teams, composed of local medical personnel, will get to the scene quickly, work closely with firefighters and police, and ensure that patients are safely transported to hospitals. Our goal is a response team in each of the Nation's major metropolitan areas, and my new budget moves us in that direction. But the need is too urgent to wait for Congress to act on the budget at the end of the year. Therefore, Secretary Shalala will notify Congress today that she plans to spend an additional 11 million this year to create medical response teams in 12 more metropolitan areas, including Salt Lake City, the home of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Fourth, advice from the frontline Later this year, the Department of Defense will name members of a new weapons of mass destruction advisory panel. Three of the seventeen panel members will be firefighters. Applause Thank you. Next month, the National Domestic Preparedness Office will hold a conference with fire and police chiefs and hazardous materials experts to develop guidelines for dealing with biological and chemical threats and incidents. With action in these four areas, to better equip and train local firefighters and other first responders, we can save lives and show terrorists that assaults on America will accomplish nothing but their own downfall. Let me tell you again how grateful I am to have had the chance to work with you over these last 6 years, and for the next 2, how important I think it is that we always be preparing for the future, how strongly I believe I was glad when you and touched when you stood up when I said I believed in the right of firefighters to organize and bargain collectively. I do. I think most people don't understand, until they go through a fire or some other emergency, exactly how many different things you do and how dangerous it can often be. I also think that because you are leaders of your community, because your kids play on the ball teams, because you show up at the PTA meetings, because you're involved in the civic clubs and the other activities, you can help to sensitize people to this issue I've talked with you about today. And again I say, I don't want any American to go around in mortal fear of a biological and chemical attack. But you have a lot of you have kids that are better on the computer than you are. As a matter of fact, anybody here who is better than his or her child on a computer deserves a medal. Laughter But you know there are millions of websites now. You know what people can pull up. Now, it's not unusual now for children to turn in term papers where they never have to go to the library, and every single source they cite came off the Internet. And with that sort of access to information, people who want to do bad things with elemental chemical and biological products that can be poisonous or spread disease is a legitimate possibility. I will say again, the best chance we have for this not to be a problem is to understand the dimensions of it and prepare for it, with discipline, in the quickest possible way. And so I hope you will talk to your friends and neighbors about it, again, not to overly frighten them but to sensitize them so they expect their elected officials and their other leaders to take appropriate steps. That is the way to deal with it. You know, I remember, it wasn't so many years ago that people were panicked that every airplane they took might be hijacked. And then we had the airport metal detectors. And then some people said, "Well, is this too much of an infringement on our liberty?" I can only speak for myself I never once minded being stopped and asked to empty my pockets when I set off the metal detector, because I knew it was a way that we could prepare for a problem so that we wouldn't have to go around frightened all the time. That's all we've got to do here, to deal with this in an aggressive, comprehensive, professional, disciplined way. And I really think that you understand this. And I ask you when you go home, try also to make sure in all kinds of ways, perhaps formal and informal, that your fellow citizens do as well. Al said today that this is the first time a President has ever addressed the IAFF in person. The others made a mistake that's all I can say. Applause Thank you. And I was a little slow off the mark. Laughter But I would like to point out that IAFF has hardly gone unnoticed by past Presidents. One I particularly admire, Harry Truman, sent this letter on August 1st, 1952, to the then president of your organization, John Redmond. He described you and your union in plain words that I cannot improve upon. So I would like to close with them "Your members are at their posts, day and night, ready to accept the call of duty, to protect the lives and property of their fellow citizens. They do so at risk of life and limb. For their devotion and heroism, they deserve the praise of all Americans." Amen. Thank you, and God bless you. March 12, 1999 The President. Thank you very much. Thank you. You know, I told Leslie, I said, "Max is doing so well I don't need to say anything. If I say anything now, it's going to be an anticlimax." Laughter He had me halfway believing that stuff by the time he got through. Laughter Let me say to all of you, I am delighted to see such a large crowd. I'm sorry, apparently some people had to be turned away I wish I could have seen them as well. I thank you for coming. I thank you for coming to see me and for coming to support your Congressman. I want to thank Mr. Mayor, thank you for making me feel so welcome. And I thank the whole committee that was involved in this my longtime friend Judge Ed Miller thank you, Judge Molly Beth Malcolm and Willie Ray and all the others who are here on the host committee. I want to thank my friend of many years, once my law student, John Rafaelli, who has got a lot more money than I do and is putting us up in this beautiful hotel now. I thank him for that. Let me say just a couple of words. You know, I came today for two reasons. I came here to help Max, and I also went home to Hope to dedicate the birthplace that the local foundation there set up. They restored the old home that I lived in from the time I was born until I was 4 years old. And it was an interesting day. You know, it was cold and rainy, and the wind was blowing. I said, you know, I always got humbled when I came home, but this was the worst. I mean, for 5 years I've been trying to convince the American people that this global warming was for real. Laughter And we have the coldest March day in 100 years in Hope I don't know how much ground I lost today on that. Laughter But as you might imagine, it was a very emotional day. A lot of my my brother and his wife and my wonderful young nephew came in from California. My stepfather was there a lot of my kinfolks from all over southwest Arkansas and from Texas came in on my mother's and my father's side of the family. And last night, when I was coming back from a remarkable trip I had to Central America to see the victims of the hurricanes there and the associated disasters and to reaffirm the partnership that we have for the future, I sat and tried to write down a few things that I wanted to say. And I had, surprisingly, since I was 4 when I moved out of that place, a lot of memories still of that wonderful old house. And it occurred to me that in that little town where I was born and where I spent so much time in the intervening years, when I was a kid, nearly 50 years ago, there were two things that we were raised to believe in that town that I have tried to bring to this country and that I have tried to get every child in this country to believe One is to be optimistic, to believe that you can create a life for yourself and live out your dreams. The other is to have a sense of belonging, to believe that we are part of one community in our towns, in our States, in our country, and increasingly with like minded people all around the world, that we belong, and that because we belong we have a responsibility not only to ourselves and our loved ones but to others, and that the better our neighbors do, the better we'll do. I've tried to convince every child in this country that both those things are true. And the evidence is I may have done better out in the country than I have in Washington, DC laughter but making the effort has been a joy for me. I can say without any hesitation that much of the good things that have happened I was a part of, but certainly not solely responsible for. Many of the things which Max talked about could not have been achieved if I hadn't had strong allies in the United States Congress. And I came here for him today not simply because he is a member of my party but because we share the same values, the same convictions, the same vision for the future of the country, because he fights for you up there, because he and he does it, I think, in three ways. Number one, on issues that are specific to this district, he speaks to me about them. Number two, he believes in things that are good for America that will have a special impact here our efforts to lower class sizes in the early grades, our efforts to open the doors of college to all people with the tax credits and the student loans and the other initiatives of the administration. He believes that we ought to have a Patients' Bill of Rights to protect the quality of health care for people in managed care programs throughout the country. And I do, too. Laughter He believes in the proposal I made to save Social Security and Medicare before we spend the surplus, and I want to talk about that a little in a minute. And finally, in this last year, even though he is a very junior Member of the United States House of Representatives, he was one of the most serious, substantive, thoughtful, and effective advocates, asking all the Members of Congress to read the Constitution, read the history, and uphold their oath to protect the kind of Government that we have preserved in this country for over 220 years. For all those reasons, you should be very, very proud of your Congressman, who is a remarkable person. Now, I'm having a great time. You know, I can now go around, and I can go to fund raisers like this, and none of them are for me. Laughter And I love that. I love the idea that if I can stay healthy, I can spend quite a few years trying to give back to this political system and to candidates and to people that I believe in who have given me so much. I want you to know that in the 2 years I have left, what I'm going to try to do is to take advantage of the good times we have now and the optimism and the self confidence we have to ask the American people to look at the big, unmet challenges this country still has ahead of us when we start this new century. You know, when I ran for President in 1991 and 1992, we had to get the country working again literally, working. The unemployment rate was too high. Real wages for working people hadn't gone up in 20 years. The crime rate was going up. The welfare rolls were exploding. We had increasing social tensions between people of different racial and religious groups, manifested in civil disturbances in some of our cities. And it seemed to me that we clearly had to stop doing the same things we've been doing for the last dozen years and take a different course. And we did, and the results have been good, and Max talked about them. But now we have to say, "Well, so now what?" Should we just sort of, like being at school, should we call a recess and just say, "Gee, we feel good. We're going to go out and play a while?" I think that would be a big mistake. I think it would be a big mistake for several reasons. Number one, we've still got some unaddressed problems. Number two, there are big challenges looming ahead of us that are not right in front of us now. Number three, the world is changing very, very fast, and people get punished for sitting on their laurels. You don't hire people to be Presidents, Senators, Members of Congress, Governors, mayors, hold other positions of responsibility, to go around and smile and say how great things are. I never will forget one time in 1990 I was trying to decide whether to run for Governor again in Arkansas, and I had been Governor 4 times, and I had served 10 years. And I used to have Governor's Day at the State Fair, and I'd just sit out there in a little booth, and anybody that wanted to come by could come by and talk. And this old boy in overalls came up to me, looked to be about 70 years old, and he said, "Bill, are you going to run for Governor again?" And I said, "I don't know. If I do, will you vote for me?" He said, "I guess so. I always have." "Well," I said, "aren't you sick of me after all these years?" He said, "No, but everybody else I know is." Laughter And I said it's a true story. And I said, "Well" and I was sort of hurt, you know. I said, "Well, don't you think I've done a good job?" He said, "Yes, but you also drew a paycheck every 2 weeks, didn't you?" He said, "That's what we hired you to do. What I want to know is what you're going to do tomorrow." Interesting point. Smart guy. Smart man. And so while it's important to take our time to do what I did today to honor our past, to water our roots, to cherish the ties that bind it's also important to realize that the fundamental obligation of life is to make the most of today and tomorrow and to always be thinking ahead. Now, let me tell you about this Social Security issue, for example. Here are the big challenges I think we face, and there are more, but I'll just say a few. Number one, we've got to figure out how to keep this economy going, because it's beginning to work for people. I mean, average people are finally beginning to get pay raises, with inflation under control, and we're beginning to get jobs to people who haven't been able to get jobs. So we've got to keep the economy going, and we've got to bring opportunity to people who haven't had it. There are still urban areas, there are still small towns, there are still rural areas, there are still Indian reservations where you couldn't prove it by the people who live there that we've got 18 million new jobs. And we've got to figure out one of the reasons I went to Central America, one of the reasons I travel around all over the world is, a bunch of our growth comes from our ability to sell what we make to other people, and if half the world is in a recession as they are today, it's hard. I'm telling you, we've got a lot of farmers in terrible shape terrible shape record low prices for commodities but partly because we've been selling a ton of stuff to Asia and a lot of stuff to Latin America, and they can't buy, in the case of Latin America, as much as they did, and in some cases in Asia they can't buy anything they were buying before because of the economic problems. So I want to deal with that. Now, the second problem we've got is the aging of America. Now, the older I get, the more I see that as a high class problem. Laughter But the truth is, the average age in America today is over 76 years. If you're in this audience tonight and you're over 60 years old, if you're still in pretty good shape, you have a life expectancy of 80 or more. Audience member. I hope so. The President. Yeah. Laughter That's right. So it's a high class problem. This is the kind of problem every society wants. Wouldn't it be terrible if our friends and I say that in a serious way. Our friends in Russia who are struggling to make their democracy stay alive and get their economy going again, because they've had such terrible economic problems, because their health care system has been in terrible disrepair, their life expectancy is going down they don't have a Social Security problem. You wouldn't like it. This is a high class problem, okay? So let's just we have a challenge to Social Security and Medicare because we're going to have twice as many people over 65 in 30 years as we've got today. But it is as a result of the hard work of the American people, of our economic success, of better health care habits by ordinary citizens, and of stunning advances in medical science. Nonetheless, we've got to deal with it. In about 30 years, there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. In 10 years, if we don't do something, Medicare is going to run out of money. And there are a lot of people who wouldn't have the life they have today if Medicare weren't in good shape. So the aging of America is a big challenge. We've got the economy. We've got the aging of America. The third thing we have to realize is that for the future, more and more people are going to work and have children, and we have a big stake in seeing them do well at both jobs. If we have to choose, if parents have to choose between succeeding at home and succeeding at work, we're in trouble, because the most important job of any society is raising children well ever and because if people are sick at heart worrying about their kids when they're at work, they're not going to be very effective on the job. So we have to do more in that regard, to help people with quality child care, to get them some time off without losing their job if the kids are sick or they've got sick parents or other problems. We have to do this to make sure we do continue to raise the minimum wage where it's appropriate, so people who work 40 hours a week and are doing the right thing and paying their taxes, they're not still living in poverty. These things are important. The fourth thing we have to do is to make sure we give all our kids a world class education. We now have the most diverse student population in history. At this little grade school in Hope, Arkansas, just up the road, named for me, there are 27 immigrant children in that little school 27 in Hope, Arkansas. In the school district across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, we now have people listen to this from 180 different national, racial, and ethnic groups. I went out to a school the other day, not very far from Washington, where the principal was elated to have me there talking to the students and all their parents, and the only thing that made her sad was we weren't able to arrange for a consecutive translation of my remarks, first in Spanish and second in Arabic. Now, this is a good deal in a global society if, but only if, you can educate every child to world class standards. I'm not trying to tell the Texarkana school district how to run their business, but I know we need more teachers. I know we need after school and summer school programs so kids can learn, instead of just passing them whether they learn or not. I know that. So the education of our children is important. And the fifth thing we have to do is, we've got to commit ourselves to live in the world of the 21st century, which means we have to deal with environmental challenges like climate change. It means that we can't run away from our responsibilities to try to be a force for peace, whether it's in Europe or Latin America or Northern Ireland or you name it the efforts I've made in the Middle East. It's all in our interest. It means that we have to stand up against terrorism and chemical and biological weapons and all these things that most people would rather not think about. My first National Security Adviser, Tony Lake, used to tell me that the most important thing a President could do to protect the security of the country was to have a lot of dogs that don't bark in other words, for me to be able to go to Texarkana and tell you I'm working on a biological weapons issue, and you're not quite sure what I'm talking about because the dog has never barked. But the President needs to keep those dogs at bay. So what I've tried to do and what I tried to do in the State of the Union Address, what I try to do in my conversations with Members of Congress, like Max, is to say, "Look, we've got these big issues out there, and if we can take care of them, we're going to be all right." I just want you to think about one I'll just give you one example, though. We do have a surplus that is very strong. Now, you know when the economy is good, you have more surplus because you've got more people working and fewer people spending Government money and more people paying taxes. And then if the economy goes down, then you may run a little deficit because you've got fewer people paying taxes and more people on welfare and taking Government assistance. But what happened to us for the first time in the 1980's was we made a decision to run a big deficit every year. And for 12 years we quadrupled the debt of the country, and we had high interest rates, and wages wouldn't go up. You all remember. And then when the economy went down, we couldn't spend our way out of it. We just got stuck in high unemployment. So I wanted to balance the budget so we wouldn't have to worry about that, so we could keep interest rates down. Now I'm asking the American people to help me do something that may be hard for a lot of people to do. I think we ought to take about three quarters of this surplus we've got and save it to do two things. We should save it in the next few years and save it in the following way We should be buying back the public debt in other words, pay our debt down and as we do it, in effect, give a certificate of obligation for that money to Social Security and Medicare for 15 years, after which the Congress can do whatever they want to about it. But let me tell you what will happen. If you do that, we can help to solve the Social Security problem. We can make Social Security solvent until 2050 or beyond we can make Medicare solvent until 2020. We still ought to make some other changes in it, but we can do those things. We can keep interest rates down. That means more business loans, more jobs, lower car payments, lower mortgage payments, lower credit card payments, lower college loan interest rates, paying the debt down. It means that you know what Max has to do every year when he votes on a budget? The first thing he's got to do this year is to take over 13 cents of every dollar you pay in taxes and put it to the side to pay interest on the debt we've run up. So when you think about what we're spending money on and you say, "Well, Max, I want more for education," or, "Max, I want a tax cut," or, "Max, I want you to spend more money on building us some more highways here" just keep in mind, you're thinking, "Well, I'm giving him 100, right, in taxes." Well, you're not. You're giving him 87 in taxes, because you've got to take 13 off the top just to pay interest on the debt we've run up. Now, if we do what I'm suggesting, not only can we deal with the financial crisis in Social Security and Medicare, 15 years from now and, again, it won't be me, I won't be there but 15 years from now the Members of Congress will only be taking 2 cents on the dollar for interest on the debt. They'll be spending the money on Social Security, Medicare, education, investing in a peaceful world, giving you tax cuts, whatever. But don't you think it makes sense for us to take care of the Social Security and Medicare problems and to pay the debt down and to secure our economic strength? I mean, I think it makes a lot of sense. So I came here today to help a man I admire. I came here today to thank you for sticking with me and for giving me the chance to serve and giving the country the chance to have these good things happen. And I'd like to make just a whoop de do speech. But I owe it to you to tell you that this new century will present us with unparalleled new opportunities and unforeseen new challenges. And our predecessors, the people that were here 5 years ago and 10 years ago and 15 years ago were up to their ears in alligators. They did not have the opportunity that we have to take the confidence, the economic success, the things we've got now, and think about the long term welfare of the country. And if you believe what I said when I started and you clapped 50 years ago I was raised to believe that everybody could live out their dreams, but that we had responsibilities to one another to live in one community then let's act like that now and give those gifts to our children. Thank you, and God bless you. February 26, 1999 Thank you, and good morning. Mr. Mayor, we're delighted to be here in San Francisco. We thank you for coming out to welcome us. Senator Boxer, Representative Pelosi, Representative Lofgren, members of the California Legislature who are here. I'd like to especially thank two people who had a lot to do with the good things that have happened in the last 6 years in our administration, our former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and Mrs. Perry, who are here and General John Shalikashvili, thank you for coming. We're delighted to see you. I very much appreciate this opportunity to speak with all of you, to be joined with Secretary Albright and Mr. Berger, to talk about America's role in the century to come, to talk about what we must do to realize the promise of this extraordinary moment in the history of the world. For the first time since before the rise of fascism early in this century, there is no overriding threat to our survival or our freedom. Perhaps for the first time in history, the world's leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory. The world clearly is coming together. Since 1945, global trade has grown 15 fold, raising living standards on every continent. Freedom is expanding For the first time in history, more than half the world's people elect their own leaders. Access to information by ordinary people the world over is literally exploding. Because of these developments, and the dramatic increase in our own prosperity and confidence in this, the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history, the United States has the opportunity and, I would argue, the solemn responsibility to shape a more peaceful, prosperous, democratic world in the 21st century. We must, however, begin this discussion with a little history and a little humility. Listen to this quote by another American leader, at the dawn of a new century "The world's products are exchanged as never before and with increasing transportation comes increasing knowledge and larger trade. We travel greater distances in a shorter space of time and with more ease than was ever dreamed of. The same important news is read, though in different languages, the same day, in all the world. Isolation is no longer possible. No nation can longer be indifferent to any other." That was said by President William McKinley 100 years ago. What we now call globalization was well underway even then. We, in fact, had more diplomatic posts in the world than we have today, and foreign investment actually played a larger role in our own economy then than it does today. The optimism being expressed about the 20th century by President McKinley and others at that time was not all that much different from the hopes commonly expressed today about the 21st. The rising global trade and communications did lift countless lives then, just as it does today. But it did not stop the world's wealthiest nations from waging World War I and World War II. It did not stop the Depression, or the Holocaust, or communism. Had leading nations acted decisively then, perhaps these disasters might have been prevented. But the League of Nations failed, and America well, our principal involvement in the world was commercial and cultural, unless and until we were attacked. After World War II, our leaders took a different course. Harry Truman came to this city and said that to change the world away from a world in which might makes right, quote, "words are not enough. We must once and for all prove by our acts conclusively that right has might." He and his allies and their successors built a network of security alliances to preserve the peace and a global financial system to preserve prosperity. Over the last 6 years, we have been striving to renew those arrangements and to create new ones for the challenges of the next 50 years. We have made progress, but there is so very much more to do. We cannot assume today that globalization alone will wash away the forces of destruction at the dawn of the 21st century, any more than it did at the dawn of the 20th century. We cannot assume it will bring freedom and prosperity to ordinary citizens around the world who long for them. We cannot assume it will avoid environmental and public health disasters. We cannot assume that because we are now secure, we Americans do not need military strength or alliances or that because we are prosperous, we are not vulnerable to financial turmoil half a world away. The world we want to leave our children and grandchildren requires us to make the right choices, and some of them will be difficult. America has always risen to great causes, yet we have a tendency, still, to believe that we can go back to minding our own business when we're done. Today we must embrace the inexorable logic of globalization, that everything, from the strength of our economy to the safety of our cities to the health of our people, depends on events not only within our borders but half a world away. We must see the opportunities and the dangers of the interdependent world in which we are clearly fated to live. There is still the potential for major regional wars that would threaten our security. The arms race between India and Pakistan reminds us that the next big war could still be nuclear. There is a risk that our former adversaries will not succeed in their transitions to freedom and free markets. There is a danger that deadly weapons will fall into the hands of a terrorist group or an outlaw nation and that those weapons could be chemical or biological. There is a danger of deadly alliances among terrorists, narcotraffickers, and organized criminal groups. There is a danger of global environmental crises and the spread of deadly diseases. There is a danger that global financial turmoil will undermine open markets, overwhelm open societies, and undercut our own prosperity. We must avoid both the temptation to minimize these dangers and the illusion that the proper response to them is to batten down the hatches and protect America against the world. The promise of our future lies in the world. Therefore, we must work hard with the world to defeat the dangers we face together and to build this hopeful moment together, into a generation of peace, prosperity, and freedom. Because of our unique position, America must lead with confidence in our strengths and with a clear vision of what we seek to avoid and what we seek to advance. Our first challenge is to build a more peaceful 21st century world. To that end, we're renewing alliances that extend the area where wars do not happen and working to stop the conflicts that are claiming lives and threatening our interests right now. The century's bloodiest wars began in Europe. That's why I've worked hard to build a Europe that finally is undivided, democratic, and at peace. We want all of Europe to have what America helped build in Western Europe, a community that upholds common standards of human rights, where people have the confidence and security to invest in the future, where nations cooperate to make war unthinkable. That is why I have pushed hard for NATO's enlargement and why we must keep NATO's doors open to new democratic members, so that other nations will have an incentive to deepen their democracies. That is why we must forge a partnership between NATO and Russia, between NATO and Ukraine why we are building a NATO capable not only of deterring aggression against its own territory but of meeting challenges to our security beyond its territory, the kind of NATO we must advance at the 50th anniversary summit in Washington this April. We are building a stronger alliance with Japan, and renewing our commitment to deter aggression in Korea and intensifying our efforts for a genuine peace there. I thank Secretary Perry for his efforts in that regard. We also create a more peaceful world by building new partnerships in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Ten years ago, we were shouting at each other across a North South chasm defined by our differences. Today, we are engaged in a new dialog that speaks the language of common interests, of trade and investment, of education and health, of democracies that deliver not corruption and despair but progress and hope, of a common desire that children in all our countries will be free of the scourge of drugs. Through these efforts to strengthen old alliances and build new partnerships, we advance the prospects for peace. However, the work of actually making peace is harder and often far more contentious. It's easy, for example, to say that we really have no interests in who lives in this or that valley in Bosnia or who owns a strip of brushland in the Horn of Africa or some piece of parched earth by the Jordan River. But the true measure of our interests lies not in how small or distant these places are or in whether we have trouble pronouncing their names. The question we must ask is, what are the consequences to our security of letting conflicts fester and spread? We cannot, indeed, we should not, do everything or be everywhere. But where our values and our interests are at stake and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so. And we must remember that the real challenge of foreign policy is to deal with problems before they harm our national interests. It's also easy to say that peacemaking is simply doomed where people are embittered by generations of hate, where the old animosities of race and religion and ethnic difference raise their hoary heads. But I will never forget the day that the leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority came to the White House, in September of 1993, to sign their peace accord. At that moment, the question arose and indeed, based on the pictures afterward, it seemed to be the main question whether, if in front of the entire world, Prime Minister Rabin and Chairman Arafat would actually shake hands for the first time. It was an interesting and occasionally humorous discussion. But it ended when Yitzhak Rabin, a soldier for a lifetime, said to me, "Mr. President, I have been fighting this man for a lifetime, 30 years. I have buried a lot of my own people in the process. But you do not make peace with your friends." It is in our interest to be a peacemaker, not because we think we can make all these differences go away, but because in over 200 years of hard effort here at home and with bitter and good experiences around the world, we have learned that the world works better when differences are resolved by the force of argument rather than the force of arms. That is why I am proud of the work we have done to support peace in Northern Ireland and why we will keep pressing the leaders there to observe not just the letter but the spirit of the Good Friday accords. It is also why I intend to use the time I have remaining in this office to push for a comprehensive peace in the Middle East, to encourage Israelis and Palestinians to reach a just and final settlement, and to stand by our friends for peace, such as Jordan. The people of the Middle East can do it, but time is precious, and they can't afford to waste any more of it. In their hearts, they know there can be no security or justice for any who live in that small and sacred land until there is security and justice for all who live there. If they do their part, we must do ours. We will also keep working with our allies to build peace in the Balkans. Three years ago, we helped to end the war in Bosnia. A lot of doubters then thought it would soon start again. But Bosnia is on a steady path toward renewal and democracy. We've been able to reduce our troops there by 75 percent as peace has taken hold, and we will continue to bring them home. The biggest remaining danger to this progress has been the fighting and the repression in Kosovo. Kosovo is, after all, where the violence in the former Yugoslavia began, over a decade ago, when they lost the autonomy guaranteed under Yugoslav law. We have a clear national interest in ensuring that Kosovo is where this trouble ends. If it continues, it almost certainly will draw in Albania and Macedonia, which share borders with Kosovo, and on which clashes have already occurred. Potentially, it could affect our allies, Greece and Turkey. It could spark tensions in Bosnia itself, jeopardizing the gains made there. If the conflict continues, there will certainly be more atrocities, more refugees, more victims crying out for justice and seeking out revenge. Last fall, a quarter of a million displaced people in Bosnia were facing cold and hunger in the hills. Using diplomacy backed by force, we brought them home and slowed the fighting. For 17 days this month, outside Paris, we sought with our European partners an agreement that would end the fighting for good. Progress was made toward a common understanding of Kosovo's autonomy, progress that would not have happened, I want to say, but for the unity of our allies and the tireless leadership of our Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Here's where we are. The Kosovar Albanian leaders have agreed in principle to a plan that would protect the rights of their people and give them substantial self government. Serbia has agreed to much, but not all, of the conditions of autonomy and has so far not agreed to the necessity of a NATO led international force to maintain the peace there. Serbia's leaders must now accept that only by allowing people in Kosovo control over their day to day lives as, after all, they had been promised under Yugoslav law it is only by doing that can they keep their country intact. Both sides must return to the negotiations on March 15, with clear mandate for peace. In the meantime, President Milosevic should understand that this is a time for restraint, not repression, and if he does not, NATO is prepared to act. Now, if there is a peace agreement that is effective, NATO must also be ready to deploy to Kosovo to give both sides the confidence to lay down their arms. Europeans would provide the great bulk of such a force, roughly 85 percent, but if there is a real peace, America must do its part as well. Kosovo is not an easy problem. But if we don't stop the conflict now, it clearly will spread. And then we will not be able to stop it, except at far greater cost and risk. A second challenge we face is to bring our former adversaries, Russia and China, into the international system as open, prosperous, stable nations. The way both countries develop in the coming century will have a lot to do with the future of our planet. For 50 years, we confronted the challenge of Russia's strength. Today, we must confront the risk of a Russia weakened by the legacy of communism and also by its inability at the moment to maintain prosperity at home or control the flow of its money, weapons, and technology across its borders. The dimensions of this problem are truly enormous. Eight years after the Soviet collapse, the Russian people are hurting. The economy is shrinking, making the future uncertain. Yet, we have as much of a stake today in Russia overcoming these challenges as we did in checking its expansion during the cold war. This is not a time for complacency or self fulfilling pessimism. Let's not forget that Russia's people have overcome enormous obstacles before. In just this decade, with no living memory of democracy or freedom to guide them, they have built a country more open to the world than ever, a country with a free press and a robust, even raucous debate, a country that should see in the first year of the new millennium the first peaceful democratic transfer of power in its 1,000 year history. The Russian people will decide their own future. But we must work with them for the best possible outcome with realism and with patience. If Russia does what it must to make its economy work, I am ready to do everything I can to mobilize adequate international support for them. With the right framework, we will also encourage foreign investment in its factories, its energy fields, its people. We will increase our support for small business and for the independent media. We will work to continue cutting our two nations' nuclear arsenals and help Russia prevent both its weapons and its expertise from falling into the wrong hands. The budget I have presented to Congress will increase funding for this critical threat reduction by 70 percent over the next 5 years. The question China faces is how best to assure its stability and progress. Will it choose openness and engagement? Or will it choose to limit the aspirations of its people without fully embracing the global rules of the road? In my judgment, only the first path can really answer the challenges China faces. We cannot minimize them. China has made incredible progress in lifting people out of poverty and building a new economy. But now its rate of economic growth is declining, just as it is needed to create jobs for a growing and increasingly more mobile population. Most of China's economy is still stifled by state control. We can see in China the kinds of problems a society faces when it is moving away from the rule of fear but is not yet rooted in the rule of law. China's leaders know more economic reform is needed, and they know reform will cause more unemployment, and they know that can cause unrest. At the same time, and perhaps for those reasons, they remain unwilling to open up their political system, to give people a peaceful outlet for dissent. Now, we Americans know that dissent is not always comfortable, not always easy, and often raucous. But I believe that the fact that we have peaceful, orderly outlets for dissent is one of the principal reasons we're still around here as the longest lasting freely elected Government in the world. And I believe, sooner or later, China will have to come to understand that a society, in the world we're living in, particularly a country as great and old and rich and full of potential as China, simply cannot purchase stability at the expense of freedom. On the other hand, we have to ask ourselves, what is the best thing to do to try to maximize the chance that China will take the right course, and that, because of that, the world will be freer, more peaceful, more prosperous in the 21st century? I do not believe we can hope to bring change to China if we isolate China from the forces of change. Of course, we have our differences, and we must press them. But we can do that and expand our cooperation through principled and purposeful engagement with China, its government, and its people. Our third great challenge is to build a future in which our people are safe from the dangers that arise, perhaps halfway around the world, dangers from proliferation, from terrorism, from drugs, from the multiple catastrophes that could arise from climate change. Each generation faces the challenges of not trying to fight the last war. In our case, that means recognizing that the more likely future threat to our existence is not a strategic nuclear strike from Russia or China but the use of weapons of mass destruction by an outlaw nation or a terrorist group. In the last 6 years, fighting that threat has become a central priority of American foreign policy. Here, too, there is much more to be done. We are working to stop weapons from spreading at the source, as with Russia. We are working to keep Iraq in check so that it does not threaten the rest of the world or its region with weapons of mass destruction. We are using all the means at our disposal to deny terrorists safe havens, weapons, and funds. Even if it takes years, terrorists must know there is no place to hide. Recently, we tracked down the gunman who killed two of our people outside the CIA 6 years ago. We are training and equipping our local fire, police, and medical personnel to deal with chemical, biological, and nuclear emergencies, and improving our public health surveillance system, so that if a biological weapon is released, we can detect it and save lives. We are working to protect our critical computer systems from sabotage. Many of these subjects are new and unfamiliar and may be frightening. As I said when I gave an address in Washington not very long ago about what we were doing on biological and computer security and criminal threats, it is important that we have the right attitude about this. It is important that we understand that the risks are real, and they require, therefore, neither denial nor panic. As long as people organize themselves in human societies, there will be organized forces of destruction who seek to take advantage of new means of destroying other people. And the whole history of conflict can be seen in part as the race of defensive measures to catch up with offensive capabilities. That is what we're doing in dealing with the computer challenges today that is what we are doing in dealing with the biological challenges today. It is very important that the American people, without panic, be serious and deliberate about them, because it is the kind of challenge that we have faced repeatedly. And as long as our country and the world is around, unless there is some completely unforeseen change in human nature, our successors will have to do the same. We are working to develop a national missile defense system which could, if we decide to deploy it, be deployed against emerging ballistic missile threats from rogue nations. We are bolstering the global agreements that curb proliferation. That's the most important thing we can be doing right now. This year, we hope to achieve an accord to strengthen compliance with the convention against biological weapons. It's a perfectly good convention, but frankly, it has no teeth. We have to give it some. And we will ask our Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to stop nations from testing nuclear weapons so they're constrained from developing new ones. Again, I say I implore the United States Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty this year. It is very important for the United States and the world. Our security and our safety also depends upon doing more to protect our people from the scourge of drugs. To win this fight, we must work with others, including and especially Mexico. Mexico has a serious drug problem, increasingly affecting more of its own young people. No one understands this better than President Zedillo. He described it as the number one threat to his country's security, its people, its democracy. He is working hard to establish clean government, true democracy, and the rule of law. He is working hard to tackle the corruption traffickers have wrought. He cannot win this battle alone, and neither can we. In any given year, the narco traffickers may spend hundreds of millions of dollars to try to suborn Mexican law enforcement officials, most of whom work for under 10,000 a year. As I certified to Congress today, Mexico is cooperating with us in the battle for our lives. And I believe the American people will be safer in this, as in so many other ways, if we fight drugs with Mexico, rather than walk away. Another global danger we face is climate change. As far as we can tell, with all the scientific evidence available, the hottest years our planet has ever experienced were 1997 and 1998. The two hottest years recorded in the last several excuse me 9 of the 10 hottest years recorded in the last several centuries occurred in the last decade. Now, we can wait and hope and do nothing and try to ignore what the vast majority of scientists tell us is a pattern that is fixed and continuing. We could ignore the record breaking temperatures, the floods, the storms, the droughts that have caused such misery. Or we can accept that preventing the disease and destruction climate change can bring will be infinitely cheaper than letting future generations try to clean up the mess, especially when you consider that greenhouse gases, once emitted into the atmosphere, last and have a destructive environmental effect for at least a hundred years. We took a giant step forward in 1997, when we helped to forge the Kyoto agreement. Now we're working to persuade developing countries that they, too, can and must participate meaningfully in this effort without forgoing growth. We are also trying to persuade a majority in the United States Congress that we can do the same thing. The approach I have taken in America is not to rely on a whole raft of new regulations, and not to propose big energy taxes, but instead to offer tax incentives and dramatic increases in investment in new technologies, because we know we know now that we have the technological capacity to break the iron link between industrial age energy use patterns and economic growth. You're proving it in California every day, with stiffer environmental standards than other States have. We know that the technology is just beginning to emerge to allow us to have clean cars and other clean forms of transportation to dramatically increase the capacity of all of our buildings to keep out heat and cold, and to let in more light. We know that the conservation potential of what we have right now available has only just been scratched. And we must convince the world and critical decisionmakers in the United States to change their minds about a big idea, namely that the only way a country can grow is to consume more energy resources in a way that does more to increase global warning. One of the most interesting conversations I had when I was in China was with the environmental minister there, who thanked me for going there to do an environmental event, because he was having trouble convincing the Government that they could continue to lift the Chinese people out of poverty and still improve the environment. This is a central, big idea that people all over the world will have to change their minds about before we will be open and free to embrace the technological advances that are lying evident all around us. And all of you that can have any impact on that, I implore you to do it. Our fourth challenge is to create a world trading and financial system that will lift the lives of ordinary people on every continent around the world or, as it has been stated in other places, to put a human face on the global economy. Over the last 6 years, we've taken giant steps in opening the global trading system. The United States alone has concluded over 270 different trade agreements. Once again, we are the world's largest exporting nation. There is a lot more to be done. In the first 5 years of my Presidency, about 30 percent of our growth came from expanding trade. Last year, we had a good year, but we didn't have much growth from expanding trade because of the terrible difficulties of the people in Asia, in Russia, and because of the slowdown in growth in Latin America, and because we did not reach out to seize new possibilities in Africa. Those people are suffering more, and our future prospects are being constrained. The question is what to do about it. Some of the folks outside who were protesting when I drove up were saying by their signs that they believe globalization is inherently bad, and there's no way in the wide world to put a human face on the global economy. But if you look at the facts of the last 30 years, hundreds of millions of people have had their economic prospects advanced on every continent because they have finally been able to find a way to express their creativity in positive terms and produce goods and services that could be purchased beyond the borders of their nation. Now, the question is, how do we deal with the evident challenges and problems that we face in high relief today and seize the benefit that we know comes from expanding trade. I've asked for a new round of global trade negotiations to expand exports of services, farm products, and manufacturers. I am still determined to reach agreement on a free trade area of the Americas. If it hadn't been for our expansion in Latin America, from Mexico all the way to the southern tip of South America, we would have been in much worse shape this last year. I have urged Congress to give the trade authority the President has traditionally had to advance our prosperity, and I've asked them to approve the Caribbean Basin Initiative and the "Africa Growth and Opportunity Act" because we have special responsibilities and special opportunities in the Caribbean and in Africa that have gone too long unseized. But trade is not an end in itself. It has to work for ordinary people. It has to contribute to the wealth and fairness of societies. It has to reinforce the values that give meaning to life, not simply in the United States but in the poorest countries, struggling to lift their people to their dreams. That's why we're working to build a trading system that upholds the rights of workers and consumers, and helps us and them in other countries to protect the environment, so that competition among nations is a race to the top, not the bottom. This year we will lead the international community to conclude a treaty to ban abusive child labor everywhere in the world. The gains of global economic exchange have been real and dramatic. But when the tides of capital first flood emerging markets, and then abruptly recede, when bank failures and bankruptcies grip entire economies, when millions who have worked their way into the middle class are plunged suddenly into poverty, the need for reform of the international financial system is clear. I don't want to minimize the complexity of this challenge. As nations began to trade more and as investment rules began to permit people to invest in countries other than their own more, it became more and more necessary to facilitate the conversion of currencies. Whenever you do that, you will create a market against risk, just in the transfer of currencies. Whenever you do that, you will have people that are moving money around because they think the value of the money itself will change and profit might be gained in an independent market of currency exchange. It is now true that on any given day, there is 11 2 trillion of currency exchange in the world many, many, many times more than the actual value of the exchange of goods and services. And we have got to find a way to facilitate the movement of money, without which trade and investment cannot occur, in a way that avoids these dramatic cycles of boom and then bust, which have led to the collapse of economic activity in so many countries around the world. We found a way to do it in the United States after the Great Depression. And thank goodness we have never again had a Great Depression, even though we've had good times and bad times. That is the challenge facing the world financial system today. The leading economies have got a lot of work to do. We have to do everything we can, not just the United States, but Europe and Japan, to spur economic growth. Unless there is a restoration of growth, all the changes in the financial rules we make will not get Asia, Latin America, countries Russia out of their difficulties. We have to be ready to provide quick and decisive help to nations committed to sound policies. We have to help nations build social safety nets so that, when they have inevitable changes in their economic conditions, people at least have the basic security they need to continue to embrace change and advance the overall welfare of society. We have to encourage nations to maintain open, properly financed excuse me properly regulated financial systems so that decisions are shaped by informed market decisions and not distorted by corruption. We also have to take responsible steps to reform the global financial architecture for the 21st century. And we'll do some more of that at the G 7 summit in Germany in June. In the meanwhile, we have to recognize that the United States has made a great contribution to keeping this crisis from being worse than it would have been by helping to get money to Brazil, to Russia, to other countries, and by keeping our own markets open. If you compare, for example, our import patterns with those of Europe or those of Japan, you will see that we have far, far more open markets. It has worked to make us competitive and productive. We also have the lowest unemployment rate in the entire world among all advanced countries now, something that many people thought would never happen again. On the other hand, we cannot let other countries' difficulties in our open markets become an excuse for them to violate international trade rules and dump products illegally on our markets. We've had enough problems in America this year and last year in agriculture and aerospace, especially from countries that could no longer afford to buy products, many of which they had already offered. Then, in the last several months, we've seen an enormous problem in this country in our steel industry because of evident dumping of products in the American market that violated the law. So I want you to know that while I will do everything to keep our markets open, I intend, while this crisis persists, to do everything I can to enforce our trade laws. Yesterday we received some evidence that our aggressive policy is producing some results and, I think, proof that it wasn't market forces that led to what we saw in steel over the last year. The new figures from the Commerce Department show this Imports of hot rolled steel from countries most responsible for the surge Japan, Russia, and Brazil have fallen by 96 percent from the record levels we saw last November. That is not bad news for them that's good news. If they won't if American markets are going to stay open, we have to play by the rules. We have to follow lawful economic trends, not political and economic decisions made to dump on the American markets in ways which hurt our economy and undermine our ability to buy the exports of other countries. Our fifth challenge has to keep freedom as a top goal for the world of the 21st century. Countries like South Korea and Thailand have proven in this financial crisis that open societies are more resilient, that elected governments have a legitimacy to make hard choices in hard times. But if democracies over the long run aren't able to deliver for their people, to take them out of economic turmoil, the pendulum that swung so decisively toward freedom over the last few years could swing back, and the next century could begin as badly as this one began in that regard. Therefore, beyond economics, beyond the transformation of the great countries to economic security Russia and China beyond even many of our security concerns, we also have to recognize that we can have no greater purpose than to support the right of other people to live in freedom and shape their own destiny. If that right could be universally exercised, virtually every goal I have outlined today would be advanced. We have to keep standing by those who risk their own freedom to win it for others. Today we're releasing our annual Human Rights Report. The message of the Human Rights Report is often resented but always respected for its candor, its consistency, for what it says about our country and our values. We need to deepen democracy where it's already taking root by helping our partners narrow their income gaps, strengthen their legal institutions, and build well educated, healthy societies. This will be an important part of the trip I take to Central America next week, which has prevailed against decades of civil war only to be crushed in the last several months by the devastating force of nature. This year, we will see profoundly important developments in the potential transition to democracy in two critical countries, Indonesia and Nigeria. Both have the capacity to lift their entire regions if they succeed and to swamp them in a sea of disorder if they fail. In the coming year and beyond, we must make a concentrated effort to help them achieve what will be the world's biggest victories for freedom since 1989. Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. Tomorrow it holds its first free Presidential election, after a dictatorship that made it the poorest oil rich country in the world. We are providing support for the transition, and if it succeeds, we have to be prepared to do more. Because we count on further progress, today we are also waiving the sanctions we imposed when its Government did not cooperate in the fight against drugs. Indonesia is the fourth largest nation and the largest Islamic country in the entire world. In June, it will hold what we hope will be its first truly democratic election in more than 40 years. Indonesia desperately needs a government that can help it overcome its economic crisis while maintaining the support of its people. We are helping to strengthen the social safety net for its people in providing the largest contribution of any nation to support the coming elections. Whether these struggles are far or near, their outcome will profoundly affect us. Whether a child in Africa or Southeast Asia or Russia or China can grow up educated, healthy, safe, free from violence, free of hate, full of hope, and free to decide his or her own destiny, this will have a lot to do with the life our children have as they grow up. It will help to determine if our children go to war, have jobs, have clean air, have safe streets. For our Nation to be strong, we must maintain a consensus that seemingly distant problems can come home if they are not addressed and addressed promptly. We must recognize we cannot lift ourselves to the heights to which we aspire if the world is not rising with us. I say again, the inexorable logic of globalization is the genuine recognition of interdependence. We cannot wish into being the world we seek. Talk is cheap. Decisions are not. That is why I have asked Congress to reverse the decline in defense spending that began in 1985, and I am hopeful and confident that we can get bipartisan majorities in both Houses to agree. I hope it will also agree to give more support to our diplomats and to programs that keep our soldiers out of war, to fund assistance programs to keep nations on a stable path to democracy and growth, and to finally pay both our dues and our debts to the United Nations. In an interdependent world, we cannot lead if we expect to lead only on our own terms and never on our own nickel. We can't be a first class power if we're only prepared to pay for steerage. I hope all of you, as citizens, believe that we have to seize the responsibilities that we have today with confidence, to keep taking risks for peace, to keep forging opportunities for our people and seeking them for others as well, to seek to put a genuinely human face on the global economy, to keep faith with all those around the world who struggle for human rights, the rule of law, a better life, to look on our leadership not as a burden but as a welcome opportunity, to build the future we dream for our children in these, the final days of the 20th century and the coming dawn of the next. The story of the 21st century can be quite a wonderful story. But we have to write the first chapter. Thank you very much. February 24, 1999 President and Mrs. Rawlings, distinguished members of the Ghanaian delegation, my fellow Americans. Mr. President, Hillary and I are delighted to welcome you and Mrs. Rawlings to the United States. Nearly a year ago, your country gave us a greeting I will always remember. On that great day, it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit laughter and we had a half million people in Independence Square in Accra. We thought we should arrange a similar meeting here today. Laughter Actually, for the South Grounds of the White House, we have a large crowd of people, young and old, from all parts of America, including a significant number of people whose roots are in your country. And in our hearts, our welcome is warm. In Independence Square, before the largest crowd I had ever addressed, I learned the meaning of akwaaba, your word for "welcome." It was also written on billboards and on posters, and unforgettably written in the faces of all the Ghanaian people we saw. Mr. President, Mrs. Rawlings, it gives me great pleasure to say to you this morning, akwaaba. Welcome to the United States. Our trip to Ghana marked an important step forward for Africa and the United States, symbolizing a new beginning for both of us, a partnership built on mutual respect and mutual benefit. On our part, it signaled to the world our respect for Africa's achievements and aspirations after centuries of colonialism and decades of cold war. On Africa's part, it signaled your readiness to work with us to forge a better future of open societies and shared responsibilities. Mr. President, under your leadership, Ghana has continued to flourish. It remains a vivid example of what democracy and open markets can do for the African people. Over the past 5 years, your economy has grown steadily. You have an independent judiciary, a lively Parliament, a thriving civil society. Ghana is a partner with other African nations, seeking to preserve peace in the region, in Liberia and Sierra Leone, where you support the ECOMOG regional peacekeeping forces, and through your partnership in the Africa Crisis Response Initiative. You also send peacekeepers to other spots far from home, from Lebanon to the former Yugoslavia. And for that, we are grateful. The United States needs strong partners like Ghana. It is no secret that hard challenges lie ahead for Africa. Recent headlines have described the continuing upheaval caused by terrorism, civil war, military aggression, the senseless cruelty suffered by innocent people caught in a web of violence. Clearly, there remains much to be done. But equally clearly, these headlines do not tell the full story of Africa, of more than 700 million people who want what people the world over want to work, to raise a family, to live a full life, to bring a better future to their children. A year after my trip to Africa, it is important to highlight what the headlines often don't the hard work of the African people toward these lofty goals, the progress we are making in spite of setbacks. In Ghana, as in other African nations, we are deepening our link through growing trade and investment, air travel, and Internet access. I look forward to discussing this progress with the President and to talking about how we can build on it. Something else of far reaching importance is happening in Africa, something unthinkable last year when I visited Accra. Three days from now there will be a democratic Presidential election in Africa's most populous country, Nigeria. For 28 of its 38 years of independence, Nigeria has been run by military dictators. Now it has a chance to start anew. The friendship between Ghana and the United States grows deeper every year. Ghana received our very first Peace Corps volunteers in 1961, and nearly four decades later, new Peace Corps volunteers still make a difference there. Across a wide range of common endeavors, our nations cooperate and learn together. More and more Ghanaians are coming to America to help us build our future. More and more Americans visit Ghana and the rest of the continent to understand the history that binds us together. Mr. President, your visit underscores the debt all Americans owe to Ghana and to Africa for the brilliant contributions that African Americans have made and continue to make to the United States. The writer and crusader W.E.B. Du Bois was a citizen of both Ghana and the United States. Near the end of his life, he wrote his greatgrandson that his very long life had taught him two things first, that progress sometimes will be painfully slow, and second, that we must forge ahead anyway because, and I quote, "the difference between 100 and 1,000 years is less than you now think." He concluded, "doing what must be done, that is eternal." Mr. President, you have done so much of what must be done. It will live eternally, and we will be eternally grateful for the friendship between our two nations. Let us extend it in the new century for the new millennium. Mr. President, Mrs. Rawlings, welcome to the United States. February 19, 1999 President Clinton. Please sit down. Good afternoon. President Chirac and I, as always, have had a very good meeting. We had a lot to discuss, and we have a lot to do together. Most importantly, today we are working together to end the fighting in Kosovo and to help the people there obtain the autonomy and self government they deserve. We now call on both sides to make the tough decisions that are necessary to stop the conflict immediately, before more people are killed and the war spreads. The talks going on outside Paris are set to end on Saturday. The Kosovo Albanians have shown courage in moving forward the peace accord that we, our NATO Allies, and Russia have proposed. Serbia's leaders now have a choice to make They can join an agreement that meets their legitimate concerns and gives them a chance to show that an autonomous Kosovo can thrive as part of their country, or they can stonewall. But if they do that, they will be held accountable. If there is an effective peace agreement, NATO stands ready to help implement it. We also stand united in our determination to use force if Serbia fails to meet its previous commitment to withdraw forces from Kosovo and if it fails to accept the peace agreement. I have ordered our aircraft to be ready, to act as part of a NATO operation, and I will continue to consult very closely with Congress in the days ahead. The challenge in Kosovo and the one we have addressed in Bosnia underscore the central role NATO plays in promoting peace and stability in Europe. Today the President and I discussed the 50th anniversary summit, which will be held here in Washington in April, to admit Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic as new members, and to set NATO's course for the new century. The conflicts in the Balkans also highlight the need to strengthen stability across southeast Europe. The United States and France are pleased to announce today that we will pursue a new initiative we hope other allies will join, to increase cooperation with southeast Europe's emerging democracies on security matters, to coordinate security assistance to them from NATO countries, to promote regional cooperation and economic development. The President and I also discussed our common efforts to reform the global financial system and to support economic recovery in countries that have been so hard hit. Last fall, working with other G 7 nations and key emerging economies, we set out a comprehensive agenda making financial systems more open and resilient, improving international cooperation on financial oversight. Just this weekend in Bonn, our finance ministers will address these topics and the creation of a new financial stability forum. We're moving ahead on promoting sound lending practices and strengthening protections for the most vulnerable members of societies when crisis strikes. We need to do more to reduce the debts of the poorest, most heavily indebted nations, as they seek to meet basic human needs and undertake economic reforms. And I thank President Chirac for championing this cause for such a long time. Our budget makes a significant new investment in that challenge, and we proposed ways to help the IMF, with its existing resources, do the same. On these issues we're aiming to make real progress by the time of the June G 8 summit in Cologne, Germany. I very much appreciate the President's leadership in this area. We discussed the continuing challenge of promoting economic recovery in Russia and working with Russia to prevent its weapons of mass destruction, missiles, and technologies from falling into the hands of outlaw nations and terrorists. We will continue our cooperation on securing peace in the Middle East. We talked about the Middle East peace process at some length. We talked about our common determination to restrain Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. We want to expand cooperation in Africa, promoting peace in the Great Lakes region, encouraging an African Crisis Response capability. And today we are announcing that we're joining together with African nations in an effort I spoke about first last year in Senegal, building an African Center for Security Studies, to promote peace and democracy. Finally, Mr. President, I want to thank France for showing leadership by ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. One hundred fifty two nations have signed the treaty, which would end nuclear testing forever and make it harder for more nations to develop nuclear weapons. Once again, I want to express my hope that our Senate will also provide its advice and consent for ratification this year. Mr. President, the floor is yours. President Chirac. Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, I want to say how happy I am to be once again here in the United States and here in Washington. I'm happy to be in this country, which is where everything is always moving, this country which constantly surprises the world, and a country which for a long time I have been very fond of. And when I feel well, I feel happy, and once again I'm happy to be the guest of President Bill Clinton. And I think everyone knows the regard and the friendship I have and I've had for a long time for President Clinton, and I want to thank him once again for his hospitality. The President has covered, more or less, all the subjects that were on the agenda of our talks, so I'm going to make two remarks only. The first is to say that our agreement on the present problems in Kosovo is an unqualified agreement. It's complete agreement. We're almost at the end of the time allotted for trying to work things out at Rambouillet, and after President Clinton, I would like to say to the two parties and in particular to President Milosevic, who in fact holds more or less the key to the solution, that the time has come to shoulder all his responsibilities and to choose the path of wisdom and not the path of war, which would bear very serious consequences for people who would make that choice, for themselves and for their people. It's a very heavy responsibility that they would be taking if they were to do that. I've already had occasion to say that, as far as the Europeans are concerned, it is our continent which is involved here, and we want our continent to be at peace, and we will not accept that situation, such as the present situation in Kosovo, should continue. My second remark concerns a subject which President Clinton has not mentioned but that we have talked about at some time and that for me it's the big problem, for the big issue for the beginning of the next century, and that is what President Clinton raised himself about a couple of months ago, in a talk he gave the question of humanizing globalization, making globalization more human. Everyone understands that globalization is both inevitable and also it bears progress, and this can be understood every day, ever more. And this is something that must be a process that must be encouraged. It's a good thing. But everyone I think can also understand that there are or can be social consequences of this, and it's really our job to control them. And it's one of the big challenges I think of this society in the years to come. And for we, the Europeans, it was really very gratifying to hear the President of the United States put this issue to the fore of matters that the world has to contend with. And I entirely agree with what he has said. And it's also a question that we have talked about among ourselves. Otherwise, President Clinton has, in fact, covered everything we have been talking about, so I won't add anything because I entirely agree with him. And of course, I also agree to reply to your questions on these important issues for the whole world. President Clinton. Inaudible French and American journalists, beginning with Mr. Hunt Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Kosovo Iraq Q. President Clinton, President Milosevic refused to meet with the U.S. Envoy today, Christopher Hill, and said that he would not give up Kosovo, even at the price of a bombing. Is there any possibility that NATO would extend the Saturday noon deadline for reaching an agreement? And what do you say to President Yeltsin of Russia when he said that, "we will not allow Kosovo to be touched?" And for President Chirac, did you and President Clinton find agreement today on the issue of Iraqi sanctions? President Clinton. First, let me say I think it would be a mistake to extend the deadline. And I respect the position of Russia, and I thank the Russians for supporting the peace process, as well as the proposed agreement. We had many of the same tensions in Bosnia, where ultimately we wound up working together for peace. I believe that is what will happen. I would like to go back to the just very briefly to the merits of the argument that Mr. Milosevic made. He says that if he accepts this multinational peacekeeping force, it's like giving up Kosovo. I personally believe it's the only way he can preserve Kosovo as a part of Serbia. Under their laws, Kosovo is supposed to be autonomous but a part of Serbia. Its autonomy was effectively stripped from it years ago. We are now trying to find some way to untangle the injuries and harms and arguments that have come from both sides and permit a period of 3 years to develop within which the Serbian security forces can withdraw, a police force, civil institutions can be developed we can give them a chance to prove that they can function together. I don't think, unless we do this, there is any way for the integrity of Serbia ultimately to be preserved, because of the incredible hostility and the losses and the anger that's already there. So I'm not trying to at least from our part, and I believe President Chirac and all the Europeans feel the same way we're trying to give this a chance to work, not trying to provide a wedge to undo Serbia. Mr. President. President Chirac. Well, I entirely share the position expressed by President Clinton. I would doubt that I'm convinced that the only possibility for Mr. Milosevic, the only way he can keep Kosovo within internationally recognized frontiers, as of course, planned in the Yugoslav constitution, a high degree of substantial autonomy, substantial autonomy the only way he can keep the situation is to accept the proposals that are made today. Any other solution, I repeat, would involve for Mr. Milosevic some very serious consequences, indeed. Q. If everything fails tomorrow, what could then prevent a military strike on the part of NATO? If there is no agreement tomorrow, what would then prevent President Clinton. I think there would have to be an agreement before the strikes commence. I don't think there is an option. Because keep in mind, part of what we have asked is that President Milosevic do things that he has already agreed to do, as I said in my opening statement. And we would the NATO nations have decided and have given the Secretary General authority to pursue a strategy which would at least reduce his capacity to take further aggressive military action against the Kosovar Albanians. This assumes, of course, that he doesn't accept it and that they do, as we discussed. But that would be my position. I believe that is both our positions. President Chirac. Without a shadow of a doubt. President Clinton. Helen Helen Thomas, United Press International ? Lessons of Impeachment Q. President Clinton, what lessons have you learned from your 13 month ordeal? Do you think the office of the Presidency has been harmed? And what advice would you give to future Presidents? President Clinton. Well, of course, I've learned a lot of personal lessons, most of which I have already discussed. And Presidents are people, too. I have learned, again, an enormous amount of respect for our Constitution, our framers, and for the American people. And my advice to future Presidents would be to decide what you believe you ought to do for the country and focus on it and work hard. The American people hire you to do that and will respond if you work at it and if they sense that you're doing this for them. Q. And you don't think the office of the President has been harmed? President Clinton. Oh, I think the Constitution has been, in effect, reratified. And I hope that the Presidency has not been harmed. I don't believe it has been. I can't say that I think this has been good for the country, but we will see. I expect to have 2 good years here. I think the American people expect the Congress and me to get back to work, expect us either not to have any destructive feelings or, if we do, not to let them get in the way of our doing their business. These are jobs these are positions of public responsibility. These are and the United States has great responsibilities to its own people and to the rest of the world. And I don't believe that any of us can afford to let what has happened get in the way of doing our best for our own people and for the future. And I'm going to do my very best to do that. And I think that we should all discipline ourselves with that in mind. Banana Trade Dispute Q. My question is to both Presidents. Have you talked about bananas? Because this is an American European problem but also a problem for France because of the Caribbean bananas. And have you found a compromise? Could President Clinton explain to me why the United States is being so aggressive on this business? Because to my knowledge, and contrary to France and Europe, the United States themselves don't produce bananas. President Clinton. Yes, we talked about it. Laughter And we're being quite strong about it because we do have companies involved, and there are people involved in other countries, not just the Caribbean Central America, for example and because we think the trade law is clear. We won a trade dispute. We won. And we have been trying to there's been a finding here, and we've been trying to work out a reasonable solution with the Europeans, especially with the British, and others, and there has been no willingness to resolve this. We don't want to provoke a trade crisis, but we won. And from our point of view this is one place where we disagree the Europeans are basically saying, "Well, you won this trade fight under the law, but we still don't think you have a meritorious position. Therefore, we will not yield." Well, when we lose trade fights, we lose them. And if we're going to have a global trading system and a system for resolving disputes which, most of us believe, normally take too long, anyway and if we're, all of us, expected to have a reasonable resolution when we lose and that's what you'd expect the United States to do then that's what we want from Europe. We took this matter through the normal chain of events, and we won. And I think most people in Europe believe we shouldn't have won, but sometimes we lose cases we think we shouldn't have lost, too. And therefore, we would like a resolution of this consistent with the finding of international trade law. President Chirac. I would simply add this, that yes, we did talk about this problem, and President Clinton just said that the United States had companies corporations involved. And my answer is that we have the actual workers who are involved. And I also added that the banana in the Caribbean was obviously the best, the best banana in the world, and that, therefore, they had to be safeguarded and in the interest of mankind, and I counted on him to understand this. Laughter Hillary Clinton's Possible Senate Candidacy Q. I wonder if you could share with us some of your thoughts about the pros and cons of Senate seat in New York Mrs. Clinton President Clinton. Well, first of all, I think it's important that you all understand I think you know this this is nothing that ever crossed her mind until other people began to mention it to her. To me, the most important thing is that she decides to do what she wants to do. And I will be strongly supportive of whatever decision she makes and will do all I can to help on this and any other decision from now on, just as she's helped me for the last 20plus years. If she decided to do it and she were elected, I think she would do a fabulous job. But I think that it's important to remember this is an election which occurs in November of 2000, and she has just been through a very exhausting year. And there are circumstances which have to be considered, and I think some time needs to be taken here. I also think that even in a Presidential race, it's hard to keep a kettle of water boiling for almost 2 years. And so I just from my point of view, this thing is it's a little premature. And I would like to see her take my advice has been to take some time, get some rest, listen to people on both sides of the argument, and decide exactly what you think is right to do. And then, whatever she decides I'll be for. Kosovo Q. Mr. President, if it appears that the Serbs they have to be sanctioned because they refuse the presence of NATO troops in Kosovo, have you the assurance that the Kosovo Liberation Army will renounce its demands on independence? President Chirac. Well, as I said before, the pressure that we are exerting, legitimately, especially we're exercising on both parties, on both sides. And we replied to a question on Serbia because the question was on Serbia, but let's be perfectly clear A lot will depend on the personal position adopted by Mr. Milosevic. But it goes without saying that if the failure, the breakdown, was caused by the Kosovars, their responsibility, sanctions of a different kind, probably, but very firm sanctions would be applied against them. We haven't there's no choice. I mean, we don't have to choose. We want peace that's all. President Clinton. First of all, I can entirely support what President Chirac said. But if I could just emphasize that the agreement requires that they accept autonomy, at least for 3 years, and sets in motion a 3 year process to resolve all these outstanding questions. Three years would give us time to stop the killing, cool the tempers. And it would also give time for the Serbs to argue that if they return to the original constitutional intent, that is, to have genuine autonomy for Kosovo, as Kosovo once enjoyed that that would be the best thing for them, economically and politically. And people would have a chance to see and feel those things. Right now after all that's gone on and all the people that have died and all the bloody fighting and all the incredibly vicious things that have been said, you know, we just need a time out here. We need a process within which we can get the security forces out, as Mr. Milosevic said he would do, before and build some internal institutions within Kosovo capable of functioning, and then see how it goes. I think that's the most important thing. And so, yes, to go back to what President Chirac said, yes, both sides have responsibility. Their responsibility would be to acknowledge that that is the deal for the next 3 years, during which time we resolve the long term, permanent questions. Thank you very much. February 15, 1999 Mr. President, Mrs. Zedillo, distinguished Mexican officials, members of the Mexican Congress, the Governor and First Lady of Yucatan, the mayor and the people of Merida Let me begin by thanking all of you for the wonderful reception you have given to me and to Hillary, to the members of our Cabinet, the Members of Congress, our entire American delegation. Hillary and I came to Mexico 24 years ago for what I believe you call our luna de miel, our honeymoon. And your country has been close to our hearts ever since. I want to especially thank President Zedillo for joining me in building the closest, most candid, most comprehensive relationship in the long history of our two nations. Merida faces the Caribbean and the interior. It looks north and south. It combines Old World architecture with a thriving indigenous culture. In many ways, therefore, this city symbolizes the new, inclusive community of the Americas, a community of shared values and genuine cooperation. I thank the Members of the American Congress of both parties whose presence here with me today is evidence of America's commitment to the common future we will make together. Nothing better symbolizes the sea change in our sense of hemispheric community than the partnership between the United States and Mexico. Not so long ago, the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz said, "The North Americans are outstanding in the art of the monolog." I'm glad to say we have turned the monolog into a dialog a dialog of mutual respect and interdependence. Today, we speak with each other, not at each other. From different starting points, our courses are converging in our common commitment to democracy and in the absolute certainty that we will share the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. We honor President Zedillo and all the people of Mexico for the steps you have taken and are taking to deepen your democracy. Now, as your people deliver their votes for democracy, we must all do what we can to make sure democracy delivers for them, for democracy will only endure if we can build the quality of life it promises. That is the challenge we are addressing here today. I start with the good news As President Zedillo has said, our economic relationship is strong, and we are making it even stronger. Our decision to let Mexican and U.S. airlines engage in joint sales and marketing will generate many millions of dollars in new revenues, not only for the airlines but for the travel and investment potential of our countries. It will benefit especially tourism regions like the Yucatan. We also agreed today to enable the Ex Im Bank to provide up to 4 billion to keep U.S. exports such as aircraft and construction equipment flowing into Mexico and to maintain Mexico's position as Ex Im's top market. This year we celebrate 5 years since NAFTA entered into force. There were many doubters then. But look at the facts now Since 1993, our exports to each other have roughly doubled. In the United States alone, a million jobs depend on this trade that is up 43 percent since 1993. Of course, we still have work to do on labor, environmental, and other issues. But NAFTA has taught us that we have far more to gain by working together. We learned that lesson again 4 years ago when the United States was proud to assist Mexico in restoring confidence in the peso. President Zedillo acted decisively and courageously. The Mexican people made tough sacrifices to speed recovery. The United States was right to support you, and you have followed the right course. More recently, we all agree that our trade relationship has helped to insulate both countries from the global financial crisis that has caused such hardship elsewhere. In 1998, while U.S. exports to the Pacific Rim dropped 19 percent, our exports to each other went up about 10 percent. We must expand this oasis of confidence and growth in our hemisphere by creating a free trade area of the Americas. And we must stand by our friends in the hemisphere when they face the difficulties of the moment particularly President Cardoso of Brazil, whose reforms ultimately will help the Brazilian people and all the rest of us as well. Today we did good work to deepen our partnership beyond economics. As the President said, we are joining together to help our Central American neighbors. We're improving public health along our border. We're working hard to protect the natural resources we share. As we learn more about pollution problems along the border, we're better able to respond to them, including through the institutions created by NAFTA. Today we've agreed to strengthen our cooperation in fighting forest fires and air pollution, in cleaning our water, and in moving against climate change, the greatest global environmental challenge of the next century. We have also made progress in areas today where, to be charitable, we have not always agreed. Not long ago, we could not have had a conversation about drugs without falling into an unwinnable argument about who is to blame. That has changed. The American people recognize we must reduce our demand for drugs the Mexican people recognize that ending the drug trade is a national security and public health imperative for you. We can talk candidly about this now because we have started to speak the same language the language of parents who love their children the language of citizens who want to live in communities where streets are safe and laws are respected the language of leaders who recognize that our responsibility is to protect our people from violence and our democracy from corrosion. In 1997 President Zedillo and I committed our countries to an alliance against drugs. "Alliance" is not a word to be used lightly. It means that what threatens one country threatens the other and that we cannot meet the threat alone. If a town in Mexico lives in fear of traffickers who enrich themselves by selling to our citizens and terrorizing Mexican citizens, that is a problem we have a moral duty to solve together. We have increased our cooperation. I welcome the plan Mexico announced 2 weeks ago to invest an additional 500 million in the fight against drugs. The United States is ready to do all we can to support you. I offered our support to Mexico's newly established Federal preventive police force. We will expand consultation on cross border law enforcement. We agreed to important new benchmarks that will actually measure our mutual success in the war on drugs. We must also tackle the problem of corruption that bedevils every nation fighting drugs. I want to acknowledge President Zedillo's efforts in Mexico's interests to root out this scourge. Much has been said in my country about the extent of the problem you face. But let us not forget that what we know in America comes largely from Mexico's brave efforts to get to the truth and air it. Mexico should not be penalized for having the courage to confront its problems. Another sensitive issue that has divided us all too often is immigration. The United States is a nation of immigrants, built by the courage and optimism of those who came to our shores to begin life anew. We continue to accept large numbers of legal immigrants, and we continue to have our borders crossed every year by large numbers of illegal immigrants. As we welcome new immigrants, we must also strive to manage our borders. I say to you that we will do so with justice, fairness, and sensitivity. We will also work to promote safety and human rights at the border. And as we agreed today, we must work together to stop the deadly traffic in human beings into and through our nations. Ten years ago our relationship was marred by mistrust. Today, we recognize that any complex relationship will have its ups and downs, but we know our differences cannot divide us. President Zedillo and I have invested a great deal in our partnership. We intend to lay the groundwork for the next generation of leaders to follow, people who will build on the legacy all of us have worked hard to create. The way we approach our problems now will define how our successors not just our leaders but ordinary citizens in Mexico and the United States will live their lives for decades to come. Mexico is the largest Spanish speaking country in the world. Before long, the United States will be the second largest Spanish speaking country in the world. Almost 15 million United States citizens trace their ancestry to Mexico. Twenty eight percent of our foreign born population come from here. Every year our border is legally crossed about 250 million times. With each crossing, we move beyond mere diplomacy, closer to genuine friendship, a human friendship between two peoples who share the same continent, the same air, the same ancestors, the same future. We are more than neighbors. More and more, we belong to the same American family. Like any family, we will have our differences, born of history, experience, instinct, honest opinion. But like any family, we know that what binds us together is far, far more important than what divides us. Not long after Merida was founded, a Mexican poet described the renewal that comes every year at this time to those who wisely till their fields and plant ahead, in these words "Here, by the Supreme Giver, one and all, in stintless grace and beauty, are bestowed. This is their dwelling. These, their native fields. And this, the tide of spring in Mexico." This tide of spring has brought a new season of friendship between Mexico and the United States. President Zedillo, people of Merida and Yucatan, I wish you a happy Carnival. For all of us, I pray that we will reap the full harvest of the season. Agradezco a los Mexicanos de todo corazo n. Thank you, Mexico. January 22, 1999 Thank you very much. Jamie, Dr. Lederberg, I'd like to thank you for your service in this and so many other ways. I would like to thank Sandy Berger for many things, including indulging my nagging on this subject for the better part of 6 years now. I was so relieved that Dr. Lederberg, not very long ago well, last year brought a distinguished panel of experts together to discuss this bioterrorism threat, because I then had experts to cite for my concern and nobody thought I was just reading too many novels late at night. Laughter Madam Attorney General, Secretary Shalala, Secretary Richardson, Director Witt, Deputy Secretary Hamre, Commandant of the Coast Guard and our other military leaders who are here, Mr. Clarke, ladies and gentlemen. I'm delighted to be here to discuss this subject with some trepidation. Sandy Berger noted that Dr. Lederberg won a Nobel Prize at 33, and I was Governor you can infer from that that I was not very good at chemistry and biology. Laughter But any democracy is imbued with the responsibility of ordinary citizens who do not have extraordinary expertise to meet the challenges of each new age. And that is what we are all trying to do. Our country has always met the challenges of those who would do us harm. At the heart of our national defense, I have always believed, is our attempt to live by our values, democracy, freedom, equal opportunity. We are working hard to fulfill these values at home. And we are working with nations around the world to advance them, to build a new era of interdependence where nations work together not simply for peace and security but also for better schools and health care, broader prosperity, a cleaner environment, and a greater involvement by citizens everywhere in shaping their own future. In the struggle to defend our people and values and to advance them wherever possible, we confront threats both old and new Open borders and revolutions in technology have spread the message and the gifts of freedom, but have also given new opportunities to freedom's enemies. Scientific advances have opened the possibility of longer, better lives they have also given the enemies of freedom new opportunities. Last August, at Andrews Air Force Base, I grieved with the families of the brave Americans who lost their lives at our Embassy in Kenya. They were in Africa to promote the values America shares with friends of freedom everywhere, and for that they were murdered by terrorists. So, too, were men and women in Oklahoma City, at the World Trade Center, Khobar Towers, on Pan Am 103. The United States has mounted an aggressive response to terrorism, tightening security for our diplomats, our troops, our air travelers improving our ability to track terrorist activity enhancing cooperation with other countries strengthening sanctions on nations that support terrorists. Since 1993, we have tripled funding for FBI antiterrorist efforts. Our agents and prosecutors, with excellent support from our intelligence agencies, have done extraordinary work in tracking down perpetrators of terrorist acts and bringing them to justice. And as our airstrikes against Afghanistan or against the terrorist camps in Afghanistan last summer showed, we are prepared to use military force against terrorists who harm our citizens. But all of you know the fight against terrorism is far from over. And now, terrorists seek new tools of destruction. Last May, at the Naval Academy commencement, I said terrorist and outlaw states are extending the world's fields of battle from physical space to cyberspace, from our Earth's vast bodies of water to the complex workings of our own human bodies. The enemies of peace realize they cannot defeat us with traditional military means, so they are working on two new forms of assault, which you've heard about today cyber attacks on our critical computer systems, and attacks with weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, potentially even nuclear weapons. We must be ready ready if our adversaries try to use computers to disable power grids, banking, communications and transportation networks, police, fire, and health services, or military assets. More and more, these critical systems are driven by and linked together with computers, making them more vulnerable to disruption. Last spring, we saw the enormous impact of a single failed electronic link when a satellite malfunctioned disabled pagers, ATM's, credit card systems, and television networks all around the world. And we already are seeing the first wave of deliberate cyber attacks, hackers break into Government and business computers, stealing and destroying information, raiding bank accounts, running up credit card charges, extorting money by threats to unleash computer viruses. The potential for harm is clear. Earlier this month, an ice storm in this area crippled power systems, plunging whole communities into darkness and disrupting daily lives. We have to be ready for adversaries to launch attacks that could paralyze utilities and services across entire regions. We must be ready if adversaries seek to attack with weapons of mass destruction, as well. Armed with these weapons, which can be compact and inexpensive, a small band of terrorists could inflict tremendous harm. Four years ago, the world received a wake up call when a group unleashed a deadly chemical weapon, nerve gas, in the Tokyo subway. We have to be ready for the possibility that such a group will obtain biological weapons. We have to be ready to detect and address a biological attack promptly, before the disease spreads. If we prepare to defend against these emerging threats, we will show terrorists that assaults on America will accomplish nothing but their own downfall. Let me say first what we have done so far to meet this challenge. We've been working to create and strengthen the agreement to keep nations from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, because this can help keep these weapons away from terrorists, as well. We're working to ensure the effective implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, to obtain an accord that will strengthen compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention, to end production of nuclear weapons material. We must ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to end nuclear tests once and for all. As I proposed Tuesday in the State of the Union Address, we should substantially increase our efforts to help Russia and other former Soviet nations prevent weapons material and knowledge from falling into the hands of terrorists and outlaw states. In no small measure we should do this by continuing to expand our cooperative work with the thousands of Russian scientists who can be used to advance the causes of world peace and health and well being but who, if they are not paid, remain a fertile field for the designs of terrorists. But we cannot rely solely on our efforts to keep weapons from spreading. We have to be ready to act if they do spread. Last year, I obtained from Congress a 39 percent budget increase for chemical and biological weapons preparedness. This is helping to accelerate our ongoing effort to train and equip fire, police, and public health personnel all across our country to deal with chemical and biological emergencies. It is helping us to ready Armed Forces and National Guard units in every region to meet this challenge and to improve our capacity to detect an outbreak of disease and save lives, to create the first ever civilian stockpile of medicines to treat people exposed to biological and chemical hazards, to increase research and development on new medicines and vaccines to deal with new threats. Our commitment to give local communities the necessary tools already goes beyond paper and plans. For example, parked just outside this building is a newly designed truck we have provided to the Arlington, Virginia, Fire Department. It can rapidly assist and prevent harm to people exposed to chemical and biological dangers. Our commitment on the cyber front has been strong, as well. We've created special offices within the FBI and the Commerce Department to protect critical systems against cyber attack. We're building partnerships with the private sector to find and reduce vulnerabilities, to improve warning systems, to rapidly recover if attacks occur. We have an outstanding public servant in Richard Clarke, who is coordinating all these efforts across our Government. Today I want to announce the new initiatives we will take to take us to the next level in preparing for these emerging threats. In my budget, I will ask Congress for 10 billion to address terrorism and terrorist emerging tools. This will include nearly 1.4 billion to protect citizens against chemical and biological terror, more than double what we spent on such programs only 2 years ago. We will speed and broaden our efforts, creating new local emergency medical teams, deploying in the field portable detection units the size of a shoebox to rapidly identify hazards, tying regional laboratories together for prompt analysis of biological threats. We will greatly accelerate research and development, centered in the Department of Health and Human Services, for new vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tools. I should say here that I know everybody in this crowd understands this, but everyone in America must understand this The Government has got to fund this. There is no market for the kinds of things we need to develop, and if we are successful, there never will be a market for them. But we have got to do our best to develop them. These cutting edge efforts will address not only the threat of weapons of mass destruction but also the equally serious danger of emerging infectious diseases. So we will benefit even if we are successful in avoiding these attacks. The budget proposal will also include 1.46 billion to protect critical systems from cyber and other attacks. That's 40 percent more than we were spending 2 years ago. Among other things, it will help to fund four new initiatives first, an intensive research effort to detect intruders trying to break into critical computer systems second, crime excuse me detection networks, first for our Defense Department, and later for other key agencies so when one critical computer system is invaded, others will be alerted instantly, and we will urge the private sector to create similar structures third, the creation of information centers in the private sector so that our industries can work together and with Government to address cyber threats finally, we'll ask for funding to bolster the Government's ranks of highly skilled computer experts, people capable of preventing and responding to computer crises. To implement this proposal, the Cyber Corps program, we will encourage Federal agencies to train and retrain computer specialists, as well as recruiting gifted young people out of college. In all our battles, we will be aggressive. At the same time I want you to know that we will remain committed to uphold privacy rights and other constitutional protections, as well as the proprietary rights of American businesses. It is essential that we do not undermine liberty in the name of liberty. We can prevail over terrorism by drawing on the very best in our free society the skill and courage of our troops, the genius of our scientists and engineers, the strength of our factory workers, the determination and talent of our public servants, the vision of leaders in every vital sector. I have tried as hard as I can to create the right frame of mind in America for dealing with this. For too long the problem has been that not enough has been done to recognize the threat and deal with it. And we in Government, frankly, weren't as well organized as we should have been for too long. I do not want the pendulum to swing the other way now and for people to believe that every incident they read about in a novel or every incident they see in a thrilling movie is about to happen to them within the next 24 hours. What we are seeing here, as any military person in the audience can tell you, is nothing more than a repetition of weapons systems that goes back to the beginning of time. An offensive weapons system is developed, and it takes time to develop the defense and then another offensive weapon is developed that overcomes that defense, and then another defense is built up as surely as castles and moats held off people with spears and bows and arrows and riding horses, and the catapult was developed to overcome the castle and the moat. But because of the speed with which change is occurring in our society, in computing technology, and particularly in the biological sciences, we have got to do everything we can to make sure that we close the gap between offense and defense to nothing, if possible. That is the challenge here. We are doing everything we can, in ways that I can and in ways that I cannot discuss, to try to stop people who would misuse chemical and biological capacity from getting that capacity. This is not a cause for panic. It is a cause for serious, deliberate, disciplined, long term concern. And I am absolutely convinced that if we maintain our clear purpose and our strength of will, we will prevail here. And thanks to so many of you in this audience and your colleagues throughout the United States and like minded people throughout the world, we have better than a good chance of success. But we must be deliberate, and we must be aggressive. Thank you very much. January 21, 1999 Terrorist Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction The President. Before you ask questions, I just want to say that I really have appreciated the stories you've done, because I think it's so important that it's sort of a balance thing, but I want to raise public awareness of this and awareness also with people with influence who can influence decisionmaking without throwing people into an unnecessary panic. And I think these stories have been exceedingly valuable. Sandy was making fun of me today before you came in Sandy Berger was. He said, "When you started talking about this 6 years ago, nobody around here people just didn't they hadn't thought about it." Q. Six years ago. The President. I've been asking them to think about this for a long, long time. And of course, we had it more or less in the context of terrorism because we had the World Trade Center and all the other things to worry about. But anyway. Q. But actually, one of my first questions because we've heard so many rumors about how you got interested, and none of what has happened would have happened without your interest. But what was it? The President. Well, it was first of all, I spend a lot of time thinking about 5 years from now, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. I think that's one of the things that Presidents are supposed to do and especially when things are changing so much. But we had keep in mind, we had the World Trade Center issue we had the CIA killer and then later you had the incident in the Tokyo subway and then Oklahoma City. We've had a lot of terrorist incidents, culminating in the bombing of our Embassies in Africa and what happened in Khobar, other things. One of the things that I have worried about from the beginning, with the breakdown of the Soviet Union before my time here, was how to help them deal with the aftermath of the massive nuclear system they have, and starting with the Nunn Lugar funds, going all the way up to our threat reduction proposals in this year's budget you know, we tried to hire keep the scientists and the labs working and do joint projects of all kinds that would be constructive. But it was pretty obvious to me that, given the size of the Soviet biological and chemical programs and the fact that we know a lot of other nations are trying to develop chemical capacity and some biological capacity, that we had not only nuclear problems but we have a chemical and biological problem. And of course, the Vice President and others sort of sensitized me to this whole computer problem. We had the incident with the defense computers just a few months ago. But before that, I kept reading about all these non in the line of national security all these computer hackers. You know, I'm technologically challenged. I can do E mail and a few other things, you know. But it struck me that we were going to have to find some way to try to deal with that, too, because of the defense implications, as well as the other possibilities. And I've had all kinds of I also find that reading novels, futuristic novels sometimes people with an imagination are not wrong Preston's novel about biological warfare, which is very much based on Q. "Hot Zone" or "Cobra Event"? Which one impressed you? The President. "The Cobra Event." Q. That's the one. The President. Well, "The Hot Zone" was interesting to me because of the Ebola thing, because that was a fact book. But I thought "The Cobra Event" was interesting, especially when he said what his sources were, which seemed fairly credible to me. And then I read another book about a group of terrorists shutting down the telephone networks in the Northeast and the Midwest. Q. What was that? Do you remember? The President. I can't remember. I read so many things. I can't remember. A couple years ago. But anyway, when I and a lot of times it's just for thrills, but a lot of times these people are not far off. You know, they sell books by imagining the future, and sometimes they're right sometimes they're wrong. So I've gotten I don't want to sound I've gotten a lot of sort of solid, scientific input. I've also solicited opinions from people working on the genome project, for example, and about what the implications of that might be for dealing with biological warfare. And last year, we had a whole group of experts come in here and spend an extended amount of time with me and then follow up with the staff on biological issues in particular. So I've had a real interest in this, and I think we're about to get up to speed. But we just have to be prepared for it. I mean, it's if you look back through all of human history, people who are interested in gaining control or influence or advantage over others have brought to bear the force of arms. And what normally happens, from the beginning of history, is the arms work until a defense is erected, and then there's an equilibrium until there is a new offensive system developed, and then a defense comes up going all the way back to well, even before it, but castle moats which were overcome by catapults. And so, basically, I think what has concerned me is that we, because we're moving from one big issue will there be a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union to now a whole lot of proliferation of issues, dealing with smaller scale nuclear issues, chemical and biological issues, missile technology, and of course, the related computer cyber crime issue is that I just don't want the lag time between offense and defense to be any longer than is absolutely necessary. That, I think, is the challenge for us, is to try to before anything really tragic happens not only in the United States but anywhere else. We've had enough warning signs out there now, enough concrete evidence, and we need to close the door of the gap between the offense and defense. Q. How worried should we be, and how we don't want to panic people. And research has seen some of these warning signs, and readers call, and they want to know, is this how worried should we be? Is this serious today, and is the threat rising? Is it going be more serious in the future? The President. I would say that if the issue is how probable is it in the very near term an American city or community would be affected, I'd say you probably shouldn't be too worried. But if the issue is, is it a near certainty that at some time in the future there will be some group, probably a terrorist group, that attempts to bring to bear either the use or the threat of a chemical or biological operation, I would say that is highly likely to happen sometime in the next few years. And therefore, I would say the appropriate response is not worry or panic but taking this issue very seriously, expecting all elected officials with any responsibility in this area to know everything they can, and to do everything we can both to erect all possible defenses and then to try to make sure we are doing everything we can to stop this. Now, we know right now we know that a lot of what we've done already has delayed WMD programs, some of which I can't talk about, but slowed the development of WMD programs, of missile technology development that might deliver such weapons and other things. And we're doing everything we can to stop or slow down the ability of others, insofar as we know about it and can do something about it. And meanwhile, we're doing everything we can both to develop defenses and emergency responses. But I think we've got an enormous amount of work out there ahead of us, an enormous amount of work. And a lot of this has to be done with great cooperation between the Federal Government we need cooperation of the private sector on the cyber issues, the computer issues. We need cooperation with local government on public health response issues, exposure if there appears to be an outbreak. We had all these sort of false alarms of anthrax in California how many? more than a dozen, I think, in the last month. So we need to be able to diagnose and to treat and also to manage those things. Chemical and Biological Weapons Q. Does one of these threats worry you more than another, and does any one in particular keep you awake at night? The President. Well, I have spent some late nights thinking a lot about this and reading a lot about it. I think in terms of offense versus defense, if you go back to where we started, the thing that I'm most interested in and you will see we've allocated several hundred million dollars basically to research and to applied research the thing that I'm most interested in is developing the ability to quickly contain biological agents. A chemical attack would be horrible, but it would be finite. You know, it's just like for the people who went through Oklahoma City, nothing could be more horrible. But it didn't spread. The thing that bothers people about biological agents is that, unless they're properly diagnosed, contained, and treated, that it could spread. For example, we know that if all of us went to a rally on The Mall tomorrow with 10,000 people, and somebody flew a low flying crop duster and sprayed us all with biological agents from, let's say 200 feet, that no matter how toxic it were, half of us would walk away, for reasons no one quite understands. You know, either we wouldn't breathe it, or we'd have some miraculous resistance to it. And the other half of us, somebody would have to diagnose in a hurry and then contain and treat. Otherwise, it would be kind of like the gift that keeps on giving, you know. Laughter And I don't mean that I'm not trying to be macabre, but you asked me what keeps me awake at night, and that bothers me. And that's why the thing that I thought was most important about what we did last year, and what we learned a little bit from our defense scare even though it was on a computer issue, we had this defense issue, plus we were dealing with all this we'd studied for a year all this especially this biological issue is we had this work going on in 12 different places in the Government. So we had to organize our efforts so that we could be accessible to local governments, so we could work with them to set up their own preventive mechanisms. And I have to tell you, it may be we may have to await it's a note I made to myself that we may have to have a perfect defense, I mean, instantaneous. We may have to depend upon the genome project, interestingly enough, because once the human genes' secrets are unlocked, then if you and I think we've been infected, they could take a blood sample, and there would be a computer program which would show us if we had, let's say, we had a variant of anthrax. Let's suppose some terrorist hired a genius scientist and a laboratory to take basic anthrax and put some variant in it that would be resistant to all known anthrax antidotes. Q. Okay. Or a Russian scientist. The President. Yes. So let's just suppose that happened. And what you would want is to be able to take a blood sample, do an analysis, put it through a software program that had already been developed, and say, "Okay, here is this is how the genes are different. This is the difference." And then presumably, not too long after we've developed this, they will already know, well, therefore, this is how you should how you should change the vaccine. And we know now I know this is kind of bewildering, but keep in mind this is actually good news because, if there were no genome project, if there were no rapid way to do quick analysis that would go right to the tiniest variant, we would be in trouble. And now these scientists are working on this, and we're actually a little bit ahead of the original predicted timetable on unlocking the secrets of the gene. And when that happens, one of the side benefits, I think, will be to be able to tell these things much more quickly. But meanwhile, we've got this plan. We're stockpiling the vaccines, and we're doing all this research which the Government has to fund, because obviously there's no market for it, right? It's not like there's no market for it, and I hope there never will be any market for it. But we have to pay, the Government has to pay for this research to develop new vaccines and to manage it along. And I think we will do I think we've got a very good increase in the budget, and I really think it will have broad bipartisan support. Q. There's a school of worrywarts out there that says this genome stuff is a double edged sword, and at some point you can envision ethnic weapons, looking at racial differences and try to do selective Q. And targeting. Q. Look at Kosovo. Look at how much of the blood that has spilled is just rooted in this ethnic The President. Yes, but I think to be fair, we're a good ways away from that. I think we need to worry far more about the fact that most of these groups we know, for example let's take something I can talk about because it's public record. We know Usama bin Ladin's network has made an effort to get chemical weapons. Q. Biological or just chemical? The President. Well, we know they've made an effort to get chemical weapons they may have made an effort to get biological weapons. We do not know that they have them. It is true if you take this thing out to sort of the science fiction conclusion, obviously the genome project itself carries the seeds of its own misuse. But right now I'm absolutely convinced that the advantages dwarf the disadvantages in this area. Plus, which all the other advantages of it I mean, it's going to lead us to we will save countless lives because we'll know in advance what predisposition people have, what problems they have the genome project would be the seminal event you know, when it's done, of the first part of the 21st century, there's no doubt about that. But to come back to your point, the only point I would make, whenever you ask me a question like that, I think it's best for you to remember the formulation that I started with, and it's interesting to think about the moat and the catapult, the spear and the shield anything. It's all a question of people who have money, organization, and an interest, whether it's political or financial or religious or whatever, in oppressing other people or holding them down, will always be looking for new offensive weapons. Our goal should always be, for the sake of the world as well as the security of the American people, to make sure not only that we can defend ourselves and counter punch, if you will, but to develop with each new wave of technology to close the gap between offense and defense. And if we do that, I think that's the strategy that I hope will become at least an integral part of our national security strategy in the WMD area. Anthrax Vaccinations Q. Mr. President, in the interim we have a lot of Americans, more than 2 million Americans in uniform, being vaccinated against anthrax. Are you vaccinated? The President. The Secret Service told me I couldn't discuss that, and they have good reasons for not wanting me to do it. But let me say, I'm convinced that like any other vaccination, there may be some small rejection, but I think on balance it's a safe procedure. I've looked at the reports, and I think on balance, given the fact that we send so many of our men and women in uniform into places where they could be exposed, I think that they're better off being vaccinated. I do not believe that the threat in the United States is sufficient that I could recommend that to people, to the public at large. Q. What about first responders or people in hospitals who might be exposed to smallpox, anthrax, plague, and things like that? The President. The real answer there is, we haven't reached a conclusion, but we're considering that. Because we have to work with the first responders, we've got the public health people looking into this and other people, and I think that that's a judgment that ought to be made primarily by people who are in the best position to make a professional judgment about it. So that's something that's being considered. Response to the Terrorist Threat Q. We've heard about something else that's being considered that I think Bill wants to ask you about. Q. As you may be aware, Secretary Cohen and people at the Pentagon are talking about trying to create a new position of commander in chief for the continental United States because of the terror threat. And it's moving through the system, and at some point it's going to come to you, probably sometime this summer. Are you inclined to create that kind of position for the military? The President. Let me say, I think that we need to have an organized response, if you will, to what you might call "homeland defense" on CBW and cyber or computer terrorism issues. And now we've established a national coordinator on these issues in the White House. We've got this national domestic preparation office at the Justice Department. We've got a National Infrastructure Protection Center. We've got a joint task force on cyber defense already at DOD in response to what they went through before. So I want them to look at where we are and make some recommendations to me. I'm not sure that that is what they're going to recommend, and I think that I shouldn't give an answer to the question you ask until I see what the range of options are and what the range of recommendations is. Q. Do you have a leaning one way or another? The President. No, just except to say that it is very important that we outline every single responsibility that we have as a nation at the national level and that someone be responsible for it. I want to know as I said, one of the things that we learned last year that I think was a legitimate criticism of what we have done in our administration is that we had 12 different places where these activities were going on, and they weren't being properly coordinated and driven in the proper fashion. And we've tried to resolve this. And this is sort of the last big kind of organizational piece, as far as I know, that is yet to be resolved. So the military is going to make me a recommendation, and I will respond accordingly. Again, the American people this shouldn't be a cause for alarm this should be a cause for reassurance. They should want us to be wellorganized on these things because remember, for years and years, when I was a boy, we used to do all those they had all these fallout shelters, and every school had its drills and all that. I mean, I'm older than you, so you wouldn't remember this, but Q. No, we did it. The President. But you know, and we it was a sensible thing to do under the circumstances. Thank God we never experienced it. But it was the sensible thing to do. And so what I want us to do is everything, within reason, we can to minimize our exposure and risks here, and that's how I'm going to evaluate this Pentagon recommendation. Secretary Cohen, I think, is also real focused on this now. I've been very pleased with the priority he's given it. And I think that all these guys know that after their experience with the computer issue that all this tomorrow's threats may be very different from yesterday's, and we've got to be ready. Q. What do you say to people, to skeptics who say all this is just Pentagon maneuvering, creating new bogeymen to scare us so they can whip up new budget authority? And it's and that's a large crowd. The President. Even though we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars and in the aggregate a few billion dollars, it's nowhere near as expensive as maintaining this sort of basic infrastructure of defense the case of public health, the basic infrastructure of public health. I say to them, they should understand that we have intelligence and a lot of it is in the public arena, you all write about it about all the countries that are trying the countries and the groups that want chemical weapons, that want biological weapons, that are trying to get agents, precursor agents that you can use to develop chemicals or basic agents you can use to develop biological weapons. And everybody knows now the world is full of hackers that seek to intrude on networks, that seek to insert bogus codes into programs, and all this sort of stuff. And it would be completely irresponsible for us not to allocate a substantial investment in trying to protect America from threats that will be, in all probability, as likely or more likely in the future than the threats we think we face today. That's why we started this conversation by saying, I don't want to say anything that will overly alarm anybody. I'm not trying to stir up a lot of false threats. But if you look at just what the UNSCOM people in Iraq they say that they don't believe that the reporting in Iraq is consistent with what they believe the chemical capacity there is. If you look at the fact with regard to chemicals, with the Chemical Weapons Convention, if we can get it properly implemented, at least we will be able to track probably, that plus intelligence, large volumes of chemical stocks. But with biological stocks, a very small laboratory with the right materials to work with, you could develop supplies that could kill a large number of people. It simply is irresponsible for us not to both do the best we can with public health protections, do the best research we can on vaccines, stockpile what we know works, and then get out there and try to build a defense and an ability to interrupt and stop, with export controls and any other way we can, these developments. And it costs money. But to me, it's money well spent. And if there is never an incident, nobody would be happier than me 20 years from now if the same critics would be able to say, "Oh, see, Clinton was a kook nothing happened." I would be the happiest man on Earth. I would be the happiest man on Earth. If they could say, "He overexaggerated it nothing happened all he did was make a bunch of jobs for scientists and build the Pentagon budget," I would be elated 20 years from now to be subject to that criticism because it would mean that nothing happened, and in no small measure because of the efforts we've made. Russia Q. Since we have so little time left, Mr. President, Russia. How can you be sure since they violated the treaty that they signed banning biological weapons for 20 years, does it make sense to work with them now on biological projects? Are you certain that they are not doing biological research? And what do you do? The President. Let me say this. I think that the more we work with them and the more their scientists are working with us and the more successful we are in building a common endeavor, the more it will be in their interest to comply. The real danger in Russia, I think dangers are two. One is I'll take one that is outside the CBW area so it doesn't look like I'm waving the red flag here. When we started the space station you know, John Glenn went up and then we sent the first two components of the space station up it had been months since a lot of those Russian scientists had been paid. That's why it is very, very important, I think, to say we value this enormous infrastructure of scientific expertise they have in the space area, in the CBW area, and we want to work with them. This budget of mine would enable us to do joint work with 8,000 Russian scientists. Now, there are, I think, 40,000 total we think. But that's important. That bothers me. The second thing that concerns me is that when Russia shed communism, they adopted a strategy which was widely lauded at the time in the United States and elsewhere, but they were actually when I went to Russia, and you remember right after my mother died I got on the plane, and I went to the Czech Republic and Russia that was, what, January of '94. Actually, at that time the Czech Republic was doing very well and was sort of the poster child of the new economy in the former Communist countries. But when I was there, Russia had actually privatized more property than the Czech Republic had. And this relates partly to the economic crisis, but when they did it, they did it without having had the benefit of an effective central bank, a securities and exchange commission, all these other things, so that you had money coming in and money flying out now. And one of the problems they have now is that it's not a totalitarian Government anymore there are a lot of private companies all the private companies there by definition used to be part of the state, unless they're new businesses. And so one of the problems we're having is, even when they're trying to help us, is keeping up with what all these companies and their subsidiaries do. And that's been the tension that you've written a lot about and there's been a lot in the press about was there missile cooperation with Iran or not, and does that violate our understanding, and does that call for some action visa vis Russia? And part of the problem is just keeping up with this proliferation of companies and people that used to have some connection to the Soviet State, some connection to the defense apparatus. It's not a simple process, and it's not a perfect process, but I am absolutely convinced that this threat reduction initiative we've got can kind of intensify our efforts to work with them, as well as to really implement the Chemical Weapons Treaty and get some teeth in the Biological Weapons Convention. That's very, very important. I think that is the best strategy. It may not be perfect, but it is better than the alternative. Response to an Attack Q. What do you do if the nightmare comes to pass, and some country hits us, hits us hard, with a biological weapon? What kind of response would you do? The President. Well, first of all, if some country were thinking about doing that, I would certainly hope that they wouldn't have the capacity to do it before we could stop them or interrupt them, if it was a that is, if you're talking about somebody lobbing a missile over here or something like that. I think if it happened, it would be an act of war, and there would be a very strong response. But I think we've demonstrated that. But I think the far more likely thing is somebody representing some interest maybe it could be a rogue state maybe it could be a terrorist network walking around a city with a briefcase full of vials or in spray cans, you know. So what we have to do any country with any sense, if they wanted to attack us, would try to do it through a terrorist network, because if they did it with a missile we'd know who did it, and then they'd be sunk. It would be that's a deal where they're bound to lose, big time. Q. Would you respond with nuclear weapons to a biological attack? The President. Well, I never discuss the nuclear issue. I don't think that's appropriate. But I think that we would have at least a proportionate, if not a disproportionate, response if someone committed an act of war against the United States. That's what we would do. And if somebody willfully murdered a lot of our civilians, there would be a very heavy price to pay. Senate Impeachment Trial Presentation by Senator Dale Bumpers Q. Mr. President, you have time for one more Q. We're about to go. Did you have a chance to watch any of Senator Bumpers' presentation today? The President. I did. It's the only thing I've watched. I watched that. Q. He said he criticized the House managers for lacking compassion for your family. He described your family as a family that has been "about as decimated as a family can get. The relationship between husband and wife, father and child, has been incredibly strained if not destroyed." Is that an accurate representation? The President. Well, it's been I would say it has been a strain for my family. But we have worked very hard, and I think we have come through the worst. We love each other very much, and we've worked on it very hard. But I think he was showing you know, he knows me and Hillary and Chelsea, and we've all been friends, as he said, for 25 years. I think he was just trying to inject a human element into what he was saying. January 19, 1999 Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, honored guests, my fellow Americans Tonight I have the honor of reporting to you on the State of the Union. Let me begin by saluting the new Speaker of the House and thanking him especially tonight for extending an invitation to two guests sitting in the gallery with Mrs. Hastert Lyn Gibson and Wenling Chestnut are the widows of the two brave Capitol Hill police officers who gave their lives to defend freedom's house. Mr. Speaker, at your swearing in, you asked us all to work together in a spirit of civility and bipartisanship. Mr. Speaker, let's do exactly that. Tonight I stand before you to report that America has created the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history with nearly 18 million new jobs, wages rising at more than twice the rate of inflation, the highest homeownership in history, the smallest welfare rolls in 30 years, and the lowest peacetime unemployment since 1957. For the first time in three decades, the budget is balanced. From a deficit of 290 billion in 1992, we had a surplus of 70 billion last year. And now we are on course for budget surpluses for the next 25 years. Thanks to the pioneering leadership of all of you, we have the lowest violent crime rate in a quarter century and the cleanest environment in a quarter century. America is a strong force for peace from Northern Ireland to Bosnia to the Middle East. Thanks to the leadership of Vice President Gore, we have a Government for the information age, once again, a Government that is a progressive instrument of the common good rooted in our oldest values of opportunity, responsibility, and community devoted to fiscal responsibility determined to give our people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives in the 21st century a 21st century Government for 21st century America. My fellow Americans, I stand before you tonight to report that the state of our Union is strong. Now, America is working again. The promise of our future is limitless. But we cannot realize that promise if we allow the hum of our prosperity to lull us into complacency. How we fare as a nation far into the 21st century depends upon what we do as a nation today. So with our budget surplus growing, our economy expanding, our confidence rising, now is the moment for this generation to meet our historic responsibility to the 21st century. Our fiscal discipline gives us an unsurpassed opportunity to address a remarkable new challenge, the aging of America. With the number of elderly Americans set to double by 2030, the baby boom will become a senior boom. So first, and above all, we must save Social Security for the 21st century. Early in this century, being old meant being poor. When President Roosevelt created Social Security, thousands wrote to thank him for eliminating what one woman called "the stark terror of penniless, helpless old age." Even today, without Social Security, half our Nation's elderly would be forced into poverty. Today, Social Security is strong. But by 2013, payroll taxes will no longer be sufficient to cover monthly payments. By 2032, the Trust Fund will be exhausted and Social Security will be unable to pay the full benefits older Americans have been promised. The best way to keep Social Security a rocksolid guarantee is not to make drastic cuts in benefits, not to raise payroll tax rates, not to drain resources from Social Security in the name of saving it. Instead, I propose that we make the historic decision to invest the surplus to save Social Security. Specifically, I propose that we commit 60 percent of the budget surplus for the next 15 years to Social Security, investing a small portion in the private sector, just as any private or State Government pension would do. This will earn a higher return and keep Social Security sound for 55 years. But we must aim higher. We should put Social Security on a sound footing for the next 75 years. We should reduce poverty among elderly women, who are nearly twice as likely to be poor as our other seniors. And we should eliminate the limits on what seniors on Social Security can earn. Now, these changes will require difficult but fully achievable choices, over and above the dedication of the surplus. They must be made on a bipartisan basis. They should be made this year. So let me say to you tonight, I reach out my hand to all of you in both Houses, in both parties, and ask that we join together in saying to the American people We will save Social Security now. Now, last year we wisely reserved all of the surplus until we knew what it would take to save Social Security. Again, I say, we shouldn't spend any of it, not any of it, until after Social Security is truly saved. First things first. Second, once we have saved Social Security, we must fulfill our obligation to save and improve Medicare. Already, we have extended the life of the Medicare Trust Fund by 10 years, but we should extend it for at least another decade. Tonight I propose that we use one out of every 6 in the surplus for the next 15 years to guarantee the soundness of Medicare until the year 2020. But again, we should aim higher. We must be willing to work in a bipartisan way and look at new ideas, including the upcoming report of the bipartisan Medicare Commission. If we work together, we can secure Medicare for the next two decades and cover the greatest growing need of seniors, affordable prescription drugs. Third, we must help all Americans, from their first day on the job, to save, to invest, to create wealth. From its beginning, Americans have supplemented Social Security with private pensions and savings. Yet today, millions of people retire with little to live on other than Social Security. Americans living longer than ever simply must save more than ever. Therefore, in addition to saving Social Security and Medicare, I propose a new pension initiative for retirement security in the 21st century. I propose that we use a little over 11 percent of the surplus to establish universal savings accounts USA accounts to give all Americans the means to save. With these new accounts, Americans can invest as they choose and receive funds to match a portion of their savings, with extra help for those least able to save. USA accounts will help all Americans to share in our Nation's wealth and to enjoy a more secure retirement. I ask you to support them. Fourth, we must invest in long term care. I propose a tax credit of 1,000 for the aged, ailing or disabled, and the families who care for them. Long term care will become a bigger and bigger challenge with the aging of America, and we must do more to help our families deal with it. I was born in 1946, the first year of the baby boom. I can tell you that one of the greatest concerns of our generation is our absolute determination not to let our growing old place an intolerable burden on our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. Our economic success and our fiscal discipline now give us an opportunity to lift that burden from their shoulders, and we should take it. Saving Social Security, Medicare, creating USA accounts, this is the right way to use the surplus. If we do so if we do so we will still have resources to meet critical needs in education and defense. And I want to point out that this proposal is fiscally sound. Listen to this If we set aside 60 percent of the surplus for Social Security and 16 percent for Medicare, over the next 15 years, that saving will achieve the lowest level of publicly held debt since right before World War I, in 1917. So with these four measures saving Social Security, strengthening Medicare, establishing the USA accounts, supporting long term care we can begin to meet our generation's historic responsibility to establish true security for 21st century seniors. Now, there are more children from more diverse backgrounds in our public schools than at any time in our history. Their education must provide the knowledge and nurture the creativity that will allow our entire Nation to thrive in the new economy. Today we can say something we couldn't say 6 years ago With tax credits and more affordable student loans, with more work study grants and more Pell grants, with education IRA's and the new HOPE scholarship tax cut that more than 5 million Americans will receive this year, we have finally opened the doors of college to all Americans. With our support, nearly every State has set higher academic standards for public schools, and a voluntary national test is being developed to measure the progress of our students. With over 1 billion in discounts available this year, we are well on our way to our goal of connecting every classroom and library to the Internet. Last fall, you passed our proposal to start hiring 100,000 new teachers to reduce class size in the early grades. Now I ask you to finish the job. You know, our children are doing better. SAT scores are up math scores have risen in nearly all grades. But there's a problem. While our fourth graders outperform their peers in other countries in math and science, our eighth graders are around average, and our twelfth graders rank near the bottom. We must do better. Now, each year the National Government invests more than 15 billion in our public schools. I believe we must change the way we invest that money, to support what works and to stop supporting what does not work. First, later this year, I will send to Congress a plan that, for the first time, holds States and school districts accountable for progress and rewards them for results. My "Education Accountability Act" will require every school district receiving Federal help to take the following five steps. First, all schools must end social promotion. No child should graduate from high school with a diploma he or she can't read. We do our children no favors when we allow them to pass from grade to grade without mastering the material. But we can't just hold students back because the system fails them. So my balanced budget triples the funding for summer school and after school programs, to keep a million children learning. Now, if you doubt this will work, just look at Chicago, which ended social promotion and made summer school mandatory for those who don't master the basics. Math and reading scores are up 3 years running, with some of the biggest gains in some of the poorest neighborhoods. It will work, and we should do it. Second, all States and school districts must turn around their worst performing schools or shut them down. That's the policy established in North Carolina by Governor Jim Hunt. North Carolina made the biggest gains in test scores in the Nation last year. Our budget includes 200 million to help States turn around their own failing schools. Third, all States and school districts must be held responsible for the quality of their teachers. The great majority of our teachers do a fine job. But in too many schools, teachers don't have college majors or even minors in the subjects they teach. New teachers should be required to pass performance exams, and all teachers should know the subjects they're teaching. This year's balanced budget contains resources to help them reach higher standards. And to attract talented young teachers to the toughest assignments, I recommend a sixfold increase in our program for college scholarships for students who commit to teach in the inner cities and isolated rural areas and in Indian communities. Let us bring excellence to every part of America. Fourth, we must empower parents with more information and more choices. In too many communities, it's easier to get information on the quality of the local restaurants than on the quality of the local schools. Every school district should issue report cards on every school. And parents should be given more choices in selecting their public school. When I became President, there was just one independent public charter school in all America. With our support, on a bipartisan basis, today there are 1,100. My budget assures that early in the next century, there will be 3,000. Fifth, to assure that our classrooms are truly places of learning and to respond to what teachers have been asking us to do for years, we should say that all States and school districts must both adopt and implement sensible discipline policies. Now, let's do one more thing for our children. Today, too many schools are so old they're falling apart, or so over crowded students are learning in trailers. Last fall, Congress missed the opportunity to change that. This year, with 53 million children in our schools, Congress must not miss that opportunity again. I ask you to help our communities build or modernize 5,000 schools. If we do these things end social promotion turn around failing schools build modern ones support qualified teachers promote innovation, competition and discipline then we will begin to meet our generation's historic responsibility to create 21st century schools. Now, we also have to do more to support the millions of parents who give their all every day at home and at work. The most basic tool of all is a decent income. So let's raise the minimum wage by a dollar an hour over the next 2 years. And let's make sure that women and men get equal pay for equal work by strengthening enforcement of equal pay laws. Applause That was encouraging, you know. Laughter There was more balance on the seesaw. I like that. Let's give them a hand. That's great. Applause Working parents also need quality child care. So again this year, I ask Congress to support our plan for tax credits and subsidies for working families, for improved safety and quality, for expanded after school programs. And our plan also includes a new tax credit for stayat home parents, too. They need support, as well. Parents should never have to worry about choosing between their children and their work. Now, the Family and Medical Leave Act, the very first bill I signed into law, has now, since 1993, helped millions and millions of Americans to care for a newborn baby or an ailing relative without risking their jobs. I think it's time, with all the evidence that it has been so little burdensome to employers, to extend family leave to 10 million more Americans working for smaller companies. And I hope you will support it. Finally on the matter of work, parents should never have to face discrimination in the workplace. So I want to ask Congress to prohibit companies from refusing to hire or promote workers simply because they have children. That is not right. America's families deserve the world's best medical care. Thanks to bipartisan Federal support for medical research, we are now on the verge of new treatments to prevent or delay diseases, from Parkinson's to Alzheimer's to arthritis to cancer. But as we continue our advances in medical science, we can't let our medical system lag behind. Managed care has literally transformed medicine in America, driving down costs but threatening to drive down quality as well. I think we ought to say to every American You should have the right to know all your medical options, not just the cheapest. If you need a specialist, you should have a right to see one. You have a right to the nearest emergency care if you're in an accident. These are things that we ought to say. And I think we ought to say You should have a right to keep your doctor during a period of treatment, whether it's a pregnancy or a chemotherapy treatment, or anything else. I believe this. Now, I've ordered these rights to be extended to the 85 million Americans served by Medicare, Medicaid, and other Federal health programs. But only Congress can pass a Patients' Bill of Rights for all Americans. Now, last year, Congress missed that opportunity, and we must not miss that opportunity again. For the sake of our families, I ask us to join together across party lines and pass a strong, enforceable Patients' Bill of Rights. As more of our medical records are stored electronically, the threats to all our privacy increase. Because Congress has given me the authority to act if it does not do so by August, one way or another, we can all say to the American people, "We will protect the privacy of medical records, and we will do it this year." Now 2 years ago, the Congress extended health coverage to up to 5 million children. Now we should go beyond that. We should make it easier for small businesses to offer health insurance. We should give people between the ages of 55 and 65 who lose their health insurance the chance to buy into Medicare. And we should continue to ensure access to family planning. No one should have to choose between keeping health care and taking a job. And therefore, I especially ask you tonight to join hands to pass the landmark bipartisan legislation proposed by Senators Kennedy and Jeffords, Roth, and Moynihan to allow people with disabilities to keep their health insurance when they go to work. We need to enable our public hospitals, our community, our university health centers to provide basic, affordable care for all the millions of working families who don't have any insurance. They do a lot of that today, but much more can be done. And my balanced budget makes a good downpayment toward that goal. I hope you will think about them and support that provision. Let me say we must step up our efforts to treat and prevent mental illness. No American should ever be afraid ever to address this disease. This year we will host a White House Conference on Mental Health. With sensitivity, commitment, and passion, Tipper Gore is leading our efforts here, and I'd like to thank her for what she's done. Thank you. Applause Thank you. As everyone knows, our children are targets of a massive media campaign to hook them on cigarettes. Now, I ask this Congress to resist the tobacco lobby, to reaffirm the FDA's authority to protect our children from tobacco, and to hold tobacco companies accountable while protecting tobacco farmers. Smoking has cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars under Medicare and other programs. You know, the States have been right about this Taxpayers shouldn't pay for the cost of lung cancer, emphysema, and other smokingrelated illnesses the tobacco companies should. So tonight I announce that the Justice Department is preparing a litigation plan to take the tobacco companies to court and, with the funds we recover, to strengthen Medicare. Now, if we act in these areas minimum wage, family leave, child care, health care, the safety of our children then we will begin to meet our generation's historic responsibility to strengthen our families for the 21st century. Today, America is the most dynamic, competitive, job creating economy in history. But we can do even better in building a 21st century economy that embraces all Americans. Today's income gap is largely a skills gap. Last year, the Congress passed a law enabling workers to get a skills grant to choose the training they need. And I applaud all of you here who were part of that. This year, I recommend a 5 year commitment to the new system so that we can provide, over the next 5 years, appropriate training opportunities for all Americans who lose their jobs and expand rapid response teams to help all towns which have been really hurt when businesses close. I hope you will support this. Also, I ask your support for a dramatic increase in Federal support for adult literacy, to mount a national campaign aimed at helping the millions and millions of working people who still read at less than a fifth grade level. We need to do this. Here's some good news In the past 6 years, we have cut the welfare rolls nearly in half. You can all be proud of that. Two years ago, from this podium, I asked five companies to lead a national effort to hire people off welfare. Tonight, our Welfare to Work Partnership includes 10,000 companies who have hired hundreds of thousands of people. And our balanced budget will help another 200,000 people move to the dignity and pride of work. I hope you will support it. We must do more to bring the spark of private enterprise to every corner of America, to build a bridge from Wall Street to Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta to our Native American communities, with more support for community development banks, for empowerment zones, for 100,000 more vouchers for affordable housing. And I ask Congress to support our bold new plan to help businesses raise up to 15 billion in private sector capital to bring jobs and opportunities to our inner cities and rural areas with tax credits, loan guarantees, including the new "American Private Investment Company" modeled on the Overseas Private Investment Company. For years and years and years, we've had this OPIC, this Overseas Private Investment Corporation, because we knew we had untapped markets overseas. But our greatest untapped markets are not overseas they are right here at home. And we should go after them. We must work hard to help bring prosperity back to the family farm. As this Congress knows very well, dropping prices and the loss of foreign markets have devastated too many family farms. Last year, the Congress provided substantial assistance to help stave off a disaster in American agriculture. And I am ready to work with lawmakers of both parties to create a farm safety net that will include crop insurance reform and farm income assistance. I ask you to join with me and do this. This should not be a political issue. Everyone knows what an economic problem is going on out there in rural America today, and we need an appropriate means to address it. We must strengthen our lead in technology. It was Government investment that led to the creation of the Internet. I propose a 28 percent increase in long term computing research. We also must be ready for the 21st century from its very first moment, by solving the so called Y2K computer problem. We had one Member of Congress stand up and applaud. Laughter And we may have about that ratio out there applauding at home, in front of their television sets. But remember, this is a big, big problem. And we've been working hard on it. Already, we've made sure that the Social Security checks will come on time. But I want all the folks at home listening to this to know that we need every State and local government, every business, large and small, to work with us to make sure that this Y2K computer bug will be remembered as the last headache of the 20th century, not the first crisis of the 21st. For our own prosperity, we must support economic growth abroad. You know, until recently, a third of our economic growth came from exports. But over the past year and a half, financial turmoil overseas has put that growth at risk. Today, much of the world is in recession, with Asia hit especially hard. This is the most serious financial crisis in half a century. To meet it, the United States and other nations have reduced interest rates and strengthened the International Monetary Fund. And while the turmoil is not over, we have worked very hard with other nations to contain it. At the same time, we have to continue to work on the long term project, building a global financial system for the 21st century that promotes prosperity and tames the cycle of boom and bust that has engulfed so much of Asia. This June I will meet with other world leaders to advance this historic purpose, and I ask all of you to support our endeavors. I also ask you to support creating a freer and fairer trading system for 21st century America. I'd like to say something really serious to everyone in this Chamber in both parties. I think trade has divided us, and divided Americans outside this Chamber, for too long. Somehow we have to find a common ground on which business and workers and environmentalists and farmers and Government can stand together. I believe these are the things we ought to all agree on. So let me try. First, we ought to tear down barriers, open markets, and expand trade. But at the same time, we must ensure that ordinary citizens in all countries actually benefit from trade, a trade that promotes the dignity of work and the rights of workers and protects the environment. We must insist that international trade organizations be more open to public scrutiny, instead of mysterious, secret things subject to wild criticism. When you come right down to it, now that the world economy is becoming more and more integrated, we have to do in the world what we spent the better part of this century doing here at home. We have got to put a human face on the global economy. We must enforce our trade laws when imports unlawfully flood our Nation. I have already informed the Government of Japan that if that nation's sudden surge of steel imports into our country is not reversed, America will respond. We must help all manufacturers hit hard by the present crisis with loan guarantees and other incentives to increase American exports by nearly 2 billion. I'd like to believe we can achieve a new consensus on trade, based on these principles. And I ask the Congress again to join me in this common approach and to give the President the trade authority long used and now overdue and necessary to advance our prosperity in the 21st century. Tonight I issue a call to the nations of the world to join the United States in a new round of global trade negotiations to expand exports of services, manufactures, and farm products. Tonight I say we will work with the International Labor Organization on a new initiative to raise labor standards around the world. And this year, we will lead the international community to conclude a treaty to ban abusive child labor everywhere in the world. If we do these things invest in our people, our communities, our technology, and lead in the global economy then we will begin to meet our historic responsibility to build a 21st century prosperity for America. You know, no nation in history has had the opportunity and the responsibility we now have to shape a world that is more peaceful, more secure, more free. All Americans can be proud that our leadership helped to bring peace in Northern Ireland. All Americans can be proud that our leadership has put Bosnia on the path to peace. And with our NATO allies, we are pressing the Serbian Government to stop its brutal repression in Kosovo, to bring those responsible to justice, and to give the people of Kosovo the self government they deserve. All Americans can be proud that our leadership renewed hope for lasting peace in the Middle East. Some of you were with me last December as we watched the Palestinian National Council completely renounce its call for the destruction of Israel. Now I ask Congress to provide resources so that all parties can implement the Wye agreement to protect Israel's security, to stimulate the Palestinian economy, to support our friends in Jordan. We must not we dare not let them down. I hope you will help. As we work for peace, we must also meet threats to our Nation's security, including increased dangers from outlaw nations and terrorism. We will defend our security wherever we are threatened, as we did this summer when we struck at Usama bin Ladin's network of terror. The bombing of our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania reminds us again of the risks faced every day by those who represent America to the world. So let's give them the support they need, the safest possible workplaces, and the resources they must have so America can continue to lead. We must work to keep terrorists from disrupting computer networks. We must work to prepare local communities for biological and chemical emergencies, to support research into vaccines and treatments. We must increase our efforts to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons and missiles, from Korea to India and Pakistan. We must expand our work with Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet nations to safeguard nuclear materials and technology so they never fall into the wrong hands. Our balanced budget will increase funding for these critical efforts by almost two thirds over the next 5 years. With Russia, we must continue to reduce our nuclear arsenals. The START II treaty and the framework we have already agreed to for START III could cut them by 80 percent from their cold war height. It's been 2 years since I signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. If we don't do the right thing, other nations won't either. I ask the Senate to take this vital step Approve the treaty now, to make it harder for other nations to develop nuclear arms, and to make sure we can end nuclear testing forever. For nearly a decade, Iraq has defied its obligations to destroy its weapons of terror and the missiles to deliver them. America will continue to contain Saddam, and we will work for the day when Iraq has a Government worthy of its people. Now, last month in our action over Iraq, our troops were superb. Their mission was so flawlessly executed that we risk taking for granted the bravery and the skill it required. Captain Jeff Taliaferro, a 10 year veteran of the Air Force, flew a B 1B bomber over Iraq as we attacked Saddam's war machine. He's here with us tonight. I'd like to ask you to honor him and all the 33,000 men and women of Operation Desert Fox. Captain Taliaferro. Applause It is time to reverse the decline in defense spending that began in 1985. Since April, together we have added nearly 6 billion to maintain our military readiness. My balanced budget calls for a sustained increase over the next 6 years for readiness, for modernization, and for pay and benefits for our troops and their families. We are the heirs of a legacy of bravery represented in every community in America by millions of our veterans. America's defenders today still stand ready at a moment's notice to go where comforts are few and dangers are many, to do what needs to be done as no one else can. They always come through for America. We must come through for them. The new century demands new partnerships for peace and security. The United Nations plays a crucial role, with allies sharing burdens America might otherwise bear alone. America needs a strong and effective U.N. I want to work with this new Congress to pay our dues and our debts. We must continue to support security and stability in Europe and Asia, expanding NATO and defining its new missions, maintaining our alliance with Japan, with Korea, with our other Asian allies, and engaging China. In China, last year, I said to the leaders and the people what I'd like to say again tonight Stability can no longer be bought at the expense of liberty. But I'd also like to say again to the American people It's important not to isolate China. The more we bring China into the world, the more the world will bring change and freedom to China. Last spring, with some of you, I traveled to Africa, where I saw democracy and reform rising but still held back by violence and disease. We must fortify African democracy and peace by launching Radio Democracy for Africa, supporting the transition to democracy now beginning to take place in Nigeria, and passing the "African Trade and Development Act." We must continue to deepen our ties to the Americas and the Caribbean, our common work to educate children, fight drugs, strengthen democracy and increase trade. In this hemisphere, every government but one is freely chosen by its people. We are determined that Cuba, too, will know the blessings of liberty. The American people have opened their hearts and their arms to our Central American and Caribbean neighbors who have been so devastated by the recent hurricanes. Working with Congress, I am committed to help them rebuild. When the First Lady and Tipper Gore visited the region, they saw thousands of our troops and thousands of American volunteers. In the Dominican Republic, Hillary helped to rededicate a hospital that had been rebuilt by Dominicans and Americans working side by side. With her was someone else who has been very important to the relief efforts. You know, sports records are made, and sooner or later they're broken. But making other people's lives better and showing our children the true meaning of brotherhood, that lasts forever. So, for far more than baseball, Sammy Sosa, you're a hero in two countries tonight. Applause Thank you. So I say to all of you, if we do these things if we pursue peace, fight terrorism, increase our strength, renew our alliances we will begin to meet our generation's historic responsibility to build a stronger 21st century America in a freer, more peaceful world. As the world has changed, so have our own communities. We must make them safer, more livable, and more united. This year, we will reach our goal of 100,000 community police officers ahead of schedule and under budget. The Brady bill has stopped a quarter million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from buying handguns. And now, the murder rate is the lowest in 30 years and the crime rate has dropped for 6 straight years. Tonight I propose a 21st century crime bill to deploy the latest technologies and tactics to make our communities even safer. Our balanced budget will help put up to 50,000 more police on the street in the areas hardest hit by crime and then to equip them with new tools, from crime mapping computers to digital mug shots. We must break the deadly cycle of drugs and crime. Our budget expands support for drug testing and treatment, saying to prisoners If you stay on drugs, you have to stay behind bars and to those on parole If you want to keep your freedom, you must stay free of drugs. I ask Congress to restore the 5 day waiting period for buying a handgun and extend the Brady bill to prevent juveniles who commit violent crimes from buying a gun. We must do more to keep our schools the safest places in our communities. Last year, every American was horrified and heartbroken by the tragic killings in Jonesboro, Paducah, Pearl, Edinboro, Springfield. We were deeply moved by the courageous parents now working to keep guns out of the hands of children and to make other efforts so that other parents don't have to live through their loss. After she lost her daughter, Suzann Wilson of Jonesboro, Arkansas, came here to the White House with a powerful plea. She said, "Please, please, for the sake of your children, lock up your guns. Don't let what happened in Jonesboro happen in your town." It's a message she is passionately advocating every day. Suzann is here with us tonight, with the First Lady. I'd like to thank her for her courage and her commitment. Applause Thank you. In memory of all the children who lost their lives to school violence, I ask you to strengthen the Safe and Drug Free School Act, to pass legislation to require child trigger locks, to do everything possible to keep our children safe. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt defined our "great, central task" as "leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us." Today, we're restoring the Florida Everglades, saving Yellowstone, preserving the red rock canyons of Utah, protecting California's redwoods and our precious coasts. But our most fateful new challenge is the threat of global warming 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded. Last year's heat waves, floods, and storms are but a hint of what future generations may endure if we do not act now. Tonight I propose a new clean air fund to help communities reduce greenhouse and other pollution, and tax incentives and investments to spur clean energy technology. And I want to work with Members of Congress in both parties to reward companies that take early, voluntary action to reduce greenhouse gases. All our communities face a preservation challenge, as they grow and green space shrinks. Seven thousand acres of farmland and open space are lost every day. In response, I propose two major initiatives First, a 1 billion livability agenda to help communities save open space, ease traffic congestion, and grow in ways that enhance every citizen's quality of life and second, a 1 billion lands legacy initiative to preserve places of natural beauty all across America, from the most remote wilderness to the nearest city park. These are truly landmark initiatives, which could not have been developed without the visionary leadership of the Vice President, and I want to thank him very much for his commitment here. Now, to get the most out of your community, you have to give something back. That's why we created AmeriCorps, our national service program that gives today's generation a chance to serve their communities and earn money for college. So far, in just 4 years, 100,000 young Americans have built low income homes with Habitat for Humanity, helped to tutor children with churches, worked with FEMA to ease the burden of natural disasters, and performed countless other acts of service that have made America better. I ask Congress to give more young Americans the chance to follow their lead and serve America in AmeriCorps. Now, we must work to renew our national community as well for the 21st century. Last year the House passed the bipartisan campaign finance reform legislation sponsored by Representatives Shays and Meehan and Senators McCain and Feingold. But a partisan minority in the Senate blocked reform. So I'd like to say to the House Pass it again, quickly. And I'd like to say to the Senate I hope you will say yes to a stronger American democracy in the year 2000. Since 1997, our initiative on race has sought to bridge the divides between and among our people. In its report last fall, the initiative's advisory board found that Americans really do want to bring our people together across racial lines. We know it's been a long journey. For some, it goes back to before the beginning of our Republic for others, back since the Civil War for others, throughout the 20th century. But for most of us alive today, in a very real sense, this journey began 43 years ago, when a woman named Rosa Parks sat down on a bus in Alabama and wouldn't get up. She's sitting down with the First Lady tonight, and she may get up or not, as she chooses. We thank her. Applause Thank you, Rosa. We know that our continuing racial problems are aggravated, as the Presidential initiative said, by opportunity gaps. The initiative I've outlined tonight will help to close them. But we know that the discrimination gap has not been fully closed either. Discrimination or violence because of race or religion, ancestry or gender, disability or sexual orientation, is wrong, and it ought to be illegal. Therefore, I ask Congress to make the "Employment Non Discrimination Act" and the "Hate Crimes Prevention Act" the law of the land. Now, since every person in America counts, every American ought to be counted. We need a census that uses modern scientific methods to do that. Our new immigrants must be part of our One America. After all, they're revitalizing our cities they're energizing our culture they're building up our economy. We have a responsibility to make them welcome here, and they have a responsibility to enter the mainstream of American life. That means learning English and learning about our democratic system of government. There are now long waiting lines of immigrants that are trying to do just that. Therefore, our budget significantly expands our efforts to help them meet their responsibility. I hope you will support it. Whether our ancestors came here on the Mayflower, on slave ships, whether they came to Ellis Island or LAX in Los Angeles, whether they came yesterday or walked this land a thousand years ago, our great challenge for the 21st century is to find a way to be one America. We can meet all the other challenges if we can go forward as one America. You know, barely more than 300 days from now, we will cross that bridge into the new millennium. This is a moment, as the First Lady has said, "to honor the past and imagine the future." I'd like to take just a minute to honor her. For leading our Millennium Project, for all she's done for our children, for all she has done in her historic role to serve our Nation and our best ideals at home and abroad, I honor her. Applause Last year, I called on Congress and every citizen to mark the millennium by saving America's treasures. Hillary has traveled all across the country to inspire recognition and support for saving places like Thomas Edison's invention factory or Harriet Tubman's home. Now we have to preserve our treasures in every community. And tonight, before I close, I want to invite every town, every city, every community to become a nationally recognized "millennium community" by launching projects that save our history, promote our arts and humanities, prepare our children for the 21st century. Already, the response has been remarkable. And I want to say a special word of thanks to our private sector partners and to Members in Congress of both parties for their support. Just one example Because of you, the Star Spangled Banner will be preserved for the ages. In ways large and small, as we look to the millennium we are keeping alive what George Washington called "the sacred fire of liberty." Six years ago, I came to office in a time of doubt for America, with our economy troubled, our deficit high, our people divided. Some even wondered whether our best days were behind us. But across this country, in a thousand neighborhoods, I have seen, even amidst the pain and uncertainty of recession, the real heart and character of America. I knew then that we Americans could renew this country. Tonight, as I deliver the last State of the Union Address of the 20th century, no one anywhere in the world can doubt the enduring resolve and boundless capacity of the American people to work toward that "more perfect Union" of our Founders' dream. We're now at the end of a century when generation after generation of Americans answered the call to greatness, overcoming depression, lifting up the disposed, bringing down barriers to racial prejudice, building the largest middle class in history, winning two World Wars and the long twilight struggle of the cold war. We must all be profoundly grateful for the magnificent achievement of our forebears in this century. Yet perhaps, in the daily press of events, in the clash of controversy, we don't see our own time for what it truly is, a new dawn for America. A hundred years from tonight, another American President will stand in this place and report on the state of the Union. He or she he or she will look back on a 21st century shaped in so many ways by the decisions we make here and now. So let it be said of us then that we were thinking not only of our time but of their time, that we reached as high as our ideals, that we put aside our divisions and found a new hour of healing and hopefulness, that we joined together to serve and strengthen the land we love. My fellow Americans, this is our moment. Let us lift our eyes as one Nation, and from the mountaintop of this American Century, look ahead to the next one, asking God's blessing on our endeavors and on our beloved country. Thank you, and good evening. January 05, 1999 Thank you very much. Let me begin by just expressing my appreciation to all who have spoken and to all who are here for the years and years and years of commitment you have manifested in this endeavor. I thank my good friend Senator Leahy and Congressman Rangel. I thank General Reno and General McCaffrey for making it possible for us to continue to emphasize these things and to actually make progress, for being both practical and idealistic. Thank you, Mayor Griffin, for what you said and for what you're doing and for bringing your police chief, Chief Hoover, here with you. I want to say, obviously, a special word of appreciation to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who has literally redefined what it means to be a Lieutenant Governor I would hate to succeed her as Lieutenant Governor of Maryland laughter for her indefatigable energy. I thank the others here from Maryland who are involved in her endeavor. I'd also like to say a special word of welcome to Judge Joel Tauber and all the others who are here from the drug courts throughout America. I'll have more to say about them in a moment, but I am especially grateful for their endeavors. Six years ago, as has already been said, our country was at peace, but too many of our communities were at war. Illegal drugs were ravaging cities on both coasts and the American heartland in between. Crack and methamphetamine use were at near record levels. Drug dealers controlled whole neighborhoods and thought nothing of opening fire on passing police cars. Many communities lived in terror many children feared walking down the street. I actually met, in a school in California I'll never forget this with a group of children who were drilled on how to jump out of their desk and hit the floor if they were subject to drive by shootings. It had a searing impact on me. One of the reasons I ran for President was to give those kids their futures back. And all of you have done a lot to give them their futures back, and I'm very grateful to you. In every successive year, I have proposed a larger antidrug budget. In 1999, we had a 30percent increase just between then and 1996, even as we produced the first balanced budget in a generation. Under General McCaffrey's leadership, we have put these resources to good use unprecedented new tools for domestic enforcement unprecedented new campaigns to convince young people to stay off drugs I hope you saw one of our ads on the football game last night, if you watched it unprecedented new efforts to stem the flow of drugs across our borders unprecedented new efforts to stop the revolving door between the prison and the street. As you've heard from Attorney General Reno and General McCaffrey, this strategy is working. We do have the lowest crime rate in 25 years. Drug use is falling. Finally thank goodness drug use is beginning to fall among our young people. But the crime rate is still too high. The streets are still too violent. There is still too much drug use, especially in our prisons. The mayor of Reno whispered to me when Kathleen was talking that Mayor Daley told him it was easier to get drugs in the Illinois penitentiary than it was on the streets of Chicago. I say this not to criticize the Illinois penitentiary that's a statement that could be made in more than half the States in this country. So we still have a lot to do. There is no better way to start than to help our prisoners break clean from drugs. Today we release a new study from the Department of Justice that offers more convincing evidence that drug use stokes all kinds of crime, from property crimes like burglary, auto theft, to violent crimes like assault and murder. It shows that one in six offenders landed in prison for a crime committed just to get money for drugs, that nearly a third of prisoners were using drugs at the time they committed their crimes, that more than 80 percent of prisoners have a history of drug use. And when you consider that plus the breathtaking statistic that Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend gave us about the volume of heroin and cocaine used by people who are in the criminal justice system it is clear to us that if we are going to continue to reduce the rate of crime, we have to do something to avoid releasing criminals with their dangerous drug habits intact. As you've heard from previous speakers, we've already done a lot to expand drug testing and treatment in Federal prisons and to encourage States to do the same. But today we want to make a dramatic leap forward. The balanced budget I will submit to Congress will contain a 215 million zero tolerance drug program designed to promote drug supervision, our Nation's most comprehensive effort ever to test and treat not only criminals in prison but also those on probation and parole. To inmates in every State, we want to send a message If you stay on drugs, you must stay behind bars. To probationers and parolees, we want to send a message If you want to keep your freedom, you have to keep free of drugs. Through this initiative, we will also expand our efforts to help communities build and administer drug courts. Charlie Rangel mentioned Attorney General Reno's efforts as a young prosecutor. Many years ago, long before I ever thought I would be standing here as President, because my brother in law was a public defender in the Miami drug court that the Attorney General set up, I used to go and visit it in the eighties. I went three times one time I stayed for the whole session of court, almost all day. I have never had a more exhilarating experience in a courtroom in my life, including the sessions of the United States Supreme Court I have attended, because finally I saw something that I thought could actually work to change people's lives, to restore people to productive use in society, to reduce the crime rate, to make people safer, and to stop the policy of warehousing people in ever increasing numbers in order to keep our streets safe. When I took office, there were just a handful of these drug courts in operation, including the one that the Attorney General launched in Miami. Today, there are more than 400. If our budget proposal is approved by Congress, we can move to have more than 1,000 up and running by the end of next year. That is a worthy goal. It will change America for the better. It will give a lot of people their lives back and make our streets safer. I'm also proud to say that on top of these proposals, we will free up another 120 million for drug free prison initiatives this year, funds to help States boost testing and treatment, funds to purge their prisons of drugs with advanced new technologies. At the end of this century, we've made great progress in our efforts to free our children and our communities from drugs and crime. As we begin a new century and a new millennium, we have an enormous opportunity to finish the job, to harness all the resources of the criminal justice system our courts, our prosecutors, our prisons, our probation officers, our police to break the drug habits of prisoners and people on parole and probation. We have to break this cycle. We have to give all these people a chance to be drug free and to be productive citizens again. It is the only way we can ever, in the end, assure our children the future they deserve. Thank you all for what you do. God bless you. January 02, 1999 Good morning. As we celebrate this last New Year of the 20th century, I want to speak to you about the debt we owe to those who make every season a season of peace for America, the men and women of our Armed Forces. Almost 1.4 million Americans are serving our country on active duty today. Nearly a quarter million of them are overseas, doing what needs to be done as no one else can, whether that means thwarting Iraq's ambition to threaten its neighbors or the world with weapons of mass destruction, or standing watch in Korea on the last fortified frontier of the cold war, or safeguarding the peace in Bosnia, or helping our neighbors in Central America or the Caribbean dig out from natural disasters, or simply giving us the confidence that America will be forever strong, safe, and secure. We rely on our Armed Forces because this is still a dangerous world. We're proud of them because they are the best in the world. And we remember today what makes them the best, not just the quality of our weapons but the quality of our people in uniform. Their skill, dedication, and professionalism are unstinting, unquestioned, and unmatched. When we give our service men and women a mission, there is a principle we must keep in mind We should never ask them to do what they are not equipped to do, and we should always equip them to do what we ask. The more we ask, the greater our responsibility to give our troops the support and training and equipment they need. As Commander in Chief, I have no higher duty than this to give our troops the tools to take on new missions, while maintaining their readiness to defend our country and defeat any adversary to make sure they can deploy away from home, knowing their families have the quality of life they deserve and to make certain their service is not only rewarding but well rewarded, from recruitment to retirement. I'm confident our military is ready to fulfill this mission today. Our troops continue to execute complex and dangerous missions far from home with flawless precision, as we've just seen in the Persian Gulf. Our challenge is to retain the ability to do this as we carry out our entire defense strategy. For this reason, we asked Congress to add 1.1 billion to this year's budget to keep our readiness razor sharp and to improve recruitment. And Congress did. I've also worked with our military leaders to ensure their highest readiness priorities are reflected in our budget request for the year 2000. The budget I will submit to Congress for next year will provide an increase of over 12 billion for defense readiness and modernization through a combination of new spending and budgetary savings. This is the start of a 6 year effort that will represent the first long term sustained increase in defense spending in a decade. We want our Armed Forces to remain ready to deploy rapidly in any crisis, and that is what this effort will assure, by funding joint exercises, flight training, badly needed spare parts, and recruiting for critical positions. We want our forces to remain the best equipped in the world into the next century, and that is what this effort will assure, by paying for the next generation of ships, planes, and weapons systems. It will also enable our military to play its part in meeting emerging threats to our security such as terrorism and proliferation. It will help us to do right by our troops by upgrading and replacing aging equipment, barracks, and family housing. It will include a military pay raise of 4.4 percent, the largest since 1982, a restructuring of paid reward performance, and the reinstatement of military retirement benefits that were taken away over a decade ago. We must undertake this effort today so that our Nation will remain strong and secure tomorrow. We must do it as well because we have the most sacred obligation to those who accept dangers and hardships on our behalf. They are our sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors, from cities and towns all over America. We must give them the support they need to keep doing their jobs well and to keep coming home to America, safe and sound. Thanks for listening, and happy New Year. December 21, 1998 Lord Monro, Sir Christopher, chaplain, members of the Cabinet, Senator Kennedy, and most of all, the members of the families of Pan Am 103 I would like to begin by thanking all of you for giving Hillary and me the chance to be here today, and with a special word of appreciation to Jane Schultz for her efforts to bring us all together and to keep us all remembering and acting. Even though it is painful today to remember what happened 10 years ago, it is necessary, necessary to remember that the people on that plane were students coming home for the holidays, tourists going on vacation in America, families looking forward to a long awaited reunion, business people on a routine flight. Their average age was just 27. Last week in the annual report on the condition of the health of the American people, the average life expectancy of Americans has now exceeded 76 their average age was 27. Beneath them, the people of Lockerbie were sitting down to supper on a quiet winter evening. And of course, we have already heard the names those of you who loved them have relived their lives in that awful moment. Now, for 10 years, you have cherished your memories, and you have lived with the thought, I'm sure, of what might have been. You have also, for 10 years, been steadfast in your determination to stand against terrorism and to demand justice. And people all around the world have stood with you, shared your outrage, admired your fellowship with one another, and watched with awed respect your determined campaign for justice. Although 10 years or 20 or 30 or 50 may never be long enough for the sorrow to fade, we pray it will not be too long now before the wait for justice and resolution is over. We dedicate this day of the winter solstice to the memory of all who were lost, to the families who understand its meaning as no others can. We dedicate each day that follows as the Sun rises higher and brighter in the morning sky and the daylight hours lengthen to our common pursuit of truth and justice and to our common efforts to ensure that what happened 10 years ago to those of you here will not occur again. I know I speak for every American citizen when I say a simple, humble, heartfelt thankyou for all you have done to keep the memory and spirit of your loved ones alive by the memorials you have built, the scholarships you have funded, the charities you have supported. We thank you for reaching out to one another, to the people of Lockerbie, to all others who have been victims of terrorism. We thank you for helping to strengthen the resolve of nations to defeat terror, to deny safe haven to terrorists, to isolate those who sponsor them. We thank you for working to improve security for air travelers and for all the lives your work has saved. We thank you for your determination to see that things that are good and meaningful and lasting come out of your overpowering tragedy. And we thank you for not letting the world forget that it is necessary and right to pursue the perpetrators of this crime, no matter how long it takes. I thank you for what you have done to drive me to work harder on your behalf, not just the imperative of fighting terror but the passion and commitment and conviction of the families who have spoken to me and to the members of my administration, who all remind us this cannot be considered a mere misfortune this was deliberate murder. And while all of us have to strive for reconciliation in our hearts, we must also pursue justice and accountability. You know better than anyone else it is beyond your power to alter the past. There is no such thing as perfect justice. No trial or penalty or illumination of the facts can compensate you for the profound loss you have suffered. But as long as we can bring those responsible before the bar of justice and have a real trial, you have a right and society has a need to see that done. We owe this not only to you but to all Americans who seek justice for this was a tragedy felt by every American and, indeed, every man and woman of good will around the world. And none of us want to live in a world where such violence goes unpunished and people can kill with impunity. And none of us will be safe as long as there is a single place on our planet where terrorists can find sanctuary. That is why our Nation has never given up the search for justice. For 10 years we have ensured that Libya cannot be a member of the international community until it turns over suspects in this case. That is why, in late August, after speaking with many of you, we put forward the initiative which has already been referred to try the two suspects before a Scottish court sitting in The Netherlands. Since then the Libyan leader, Mr. Qadhafi, has given us mixed signals. We believe there is still some possibility he will accept our offer. That would be the best outcome, for it would mean that finally there would be a trial. But let me be absolutely clear to all of you Our policy is not to trust Mr. Qadhafi's claims it is to test them. This is a take it or leave it offer. We will not negotiate its terms. If the suspects are convicted, they will serve their time in Scotland. And if the suspects are not turned over by the time of the next sanctions review, we will work at the United Nations with our allies and friends to seek yet stronger measures against Libya. In doing so, we will count on the support of all nations that counseled us to make this proposal in the first place. If the proposal fails, all should make clear that the responsibility falls on Mr. Qadhafi alone. I make that commitment here, amidst the silent white rows and the heroes that rest beneath, at this place of remembrance where we come to pay tribute to those who lived bravely and often died too young for our Nation. This is a place where Americans come to gather the strength of memory to carry on into tomorrow. It is altogether fitting that this cairn was placed here in memory of your loved ones, for we have a duty to them no less profound than our duty to those who are buried here. Each stone in this monument is a memory, and each memory, a call to action. The poet William Blake wrote "To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour." That poem is inscribed at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Ten years ago it was copied down by a young American who carried it on her final flight home, Pan Am 103. It reminds us of the dreams that terrible day left unfulfilled, but also of this eternal significance of all those lives that were lived fully, though too briefly, and of the infinite importance of each act of charity and faith committed in their memory. Like the stones of this cairn, our memories of those we lost remain strong. And so must our determination be to complete on their behalf the unfinished business ahead. To that solemn task, I pledge you my best efforts. And I ask for your continued commitment, your continued involvement, your continued education of your fellow Americans, and your continued loving memories acted out to benefit those you may never know for you are making a safer, fairer, more just world. God bless you all, and God bless America. December 19, 1998 Thank you for this opportunity to address America's friends throughout the Arab and the entire Islamic world. I want to explain why we have taken military action against Saddam Hussein, and why we believe this action is in the interests of the Iraqi people and all the people of the Middle East. Saddam has ruled through a reign of terror against his own people and disregard for the peace of the region. His war against Iran cost at least half a million lives over 10 years. He gassed Kurdish civilians in northern Iraq. In 1990 his troops invaded Kuwait, executing those who resisted, looting the country, spilling tens of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf, firing missiles at Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Israel, and Qatar. He massacred thousands of his own people in an uprising in 1991. As a condition for the Gulf war cease fire, Iraq agreed to disclose and to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and to demonstrate its willingness to live at peace with its neighbors. Iraq could have ended economic sanctions and isolation long ago by meeting these simple obligations. Instead, it has spent nearly 8 years defying them. Saddam has failed to disclose information about his weapons arsenal. He has threatened his neighbors and refused to account for hundreds of Kuwaitis still missing from 1991. Each time Saddam has provoked a crisis, we've tried hard to find a peaceful solution, consulting our friends in the Arab world and working through the United Nations. A month ago we joined the other 14 members of the U.N. Security Council in demanding that Saddam come into compliance immediately. We supported what Iraq said it wanted a comprehensive review of its compliance after it resumed full cooperation with the U.N. weapons inspectors. And we were gratified when eight Arab nations, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Oman, warned that Iraq would bear the blame Iraq alone would bear the blame for the consequences of defying the U.N. Now, I canceled a military strike when, at the last moment, Saddam promised to cooperate unconditionally with the inspectors. But this month he broke his promises again, and again defied the U.N. So, we had to act. Saddam simply must not be allowed to threaten his neighbors or the world with nuclear arms, poison gas, or biological weapons. America understands that Saddam's first victims are his own people. That is why we exempted food and medicine when sanctions were imposed on Iraq. That is why, since 1991, we have offered to allow Iraq to sell its oil and use the proceeds to pay for humanitarian supplies. For 5 years, Saddam rejected that offer while building lavish palaces for himself and diverting resources to his military. Finally, in 1996, Saddam allowed the oil forfood program to take effect. Since then, the U.N. has delivered nearly 3 billion worth of food and medicine to the Iraqi people every year. Without the watchful eye of the U.N., we would soon see the oil for food program become oil for tanks, leading to less food for the Iraqi people and more danger for Iraq's neighbors. No decision to use force is easy, especially at a time when I'm working so hard to build peace in the Middle East and to strengthen our own relations with the Arab world. My visit to Gaza last week reflected my deep commitment to the peace process. I will never forget the warm welcome I received from the Palestinian people, eager to shape their own future at last. Let me also state my deep respect for the holy month of Ramadan. In the days ahead, I hope all Muslims will consider America's sincere desire to work with all people in the Middle East to build peace. We have the most profound admiration for Islam. Our dispute is with a leader who threatens Muslims and non Muslims alike. As the crescent moon rises, and the ninth month begins, Muslim Americans and all Americans wish you the blessings of faith and friendship. May our prayers for a better world soon be answered. Ramadan Kareem Blessed Ramadan . December 14, 1998 Thank you. Mr. Speaker Mr. Za'anoun, Chairman Arafat, Mrs. Arafat members of the Palestinian National Council, the Palestinian Central Council, the Palestinian Executive Committee, Palestinian Council heads of ministries leaders of business and religion to all members of the Palestinian community and to my fellow Americans who come here from many walks of life, Arab American, Jewish American This is a remarkable day. Today the eyes of the world are on you. I am profoundly honored to be the first American President to address the Palestinian people in a city governed by Palestinians. I have listened carefully to all that has been said. I have watched carefully the reactions of all of you to what has been said. I know that the Palestinian people stand at a crossroads behind you a history of dispossession and dispersal, before you the opportunity to shape a new Palestinian future on your own land. I know the way is often difficult and frustrating, but you have come to this point through a commitment to peace and negotiations. You reaffirmed that commitment today. I believe it is the only way to fulfill the aspirations of your people. And I am profoundly grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Chairman Arafat for the cause of peace, to come here as a friend of peace and a friend of your future, and to witness you raising your hands, standing up tall, standing up not only against what you believe is wrong but for what you believe is right in the future. I was sitting here thinking that this moment would have been inconceivable a decade ago no Palestinian Authority no elections in Gaza and the West Bank no relations between the United States and Palestinians no Israeli troop redeployments from the West Bank and Gaza no Palestinians in charge in Gaza, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, Tulkarem, Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, and so many other places there was no Gaza International Airport. Today I had the privilege of cutting the ribbon on the international airport. Hillary and I, along with Chairman and Mrs. Arafat, celebrated a place that will become a magnet for planes from throughout the Middle East and beyond, bringing you a future in which Palestinians can travel directly to the far corners of the world a future in which it is easier and cheaper to bring materials, technology, and expertise in and out of Gaza a future in which tourists and traders can flock here, to this beautiful place on the Mediterranean a future, in short, in which the Palestinian people are connected to the world. I am told that just a few months ago, at a time of profound pessimism in the peace process, your largest exporter of fruit and flowers was prepared to plow under a field of roses, convinced the airport would never open. But Israelis and Palestinians came to agreement at Wye River, the airport has opened, and now I am told that company plans to export roses and carnations to Europe and throughout the Gulf, a true flowering of Palestinian promise. I come here today to talk about that promise, to ask you to rededicate yourselves to it, to ask you to think for a moment about how we can get beyond the present state of things where every step forward is like, as we say in America, pulling teeth. Where there is still, in spite of the agreement at Wye achieved because we don't need much sleep, and we worked so hard, and Mr. Netanyahu worked with us, and we made this agreement. But I want to talk to you about how we can get beyond this moment, where there is still so much mistrust and misunderstanding and quite a few missteps. You did a good thing today in raising your hands. You know why? It has nothing to do with the government in Israel. You will touch the people of Israel. I want the people of Israel to know that for many Palestinians, 5 years after Oslo, the benefits of this process remain remote that for too many Palestinians lives are hard, jobs are scarce, prospects are uncertain, and personal grief is great. I know that tremendous pain remains as a result of losses suffered from violence, the separation of families, the restrictions on the movement of people and goods. I understand your concerns about settlement activity, land confiscation, and home demolitions. I understand your concerns and theirs about unilateral statements that could prejudge the outcome of final status negotiations. I understand, in short, that there's still a good deal of misunderstanding 5 years after the beginning of this remarkable process. It takes time to change things and still more time for change to benefit everyone. It takes determination and courage to make peace and sometimes even more to persevere for peace. But slowly but surely, the peace agreements are turning into concrete progress the transfer of territories, the Gaza industrial estate, and the airport. These changes will make a difference in many Palestinian lives. I thank you I thank you, Mr. Chairman, for your leadership for peace and your perseverance, for enduring all the criticism from all sides, for being willing to change course, and for being strong enough to stay with what is right. You have done a remarkable thing for your people. America is determined to do what we can to bring tangible benefits of peace. I am proud that the roads we traveled on to get here were paved, in part, with our assistance, as were hundreds of miles of roads that knit together towns and villages throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Two weeks ago in Washington, we joined with other nations to pledge hundreds of millions of dollars toward your development, including health care and clean water, education for your children, rule of law projects that nurture democracy. Today I am pleased to announce we will also fund the training of Palestinian health care providers and airport administrators, increase our support to Palestinian refugees. And next year I will ask the Congress for another several hundred million dollars to support the development of the Palestinian people. But make no mistake about it, all this was made possible because of what you did, because 5 years ago you made a choice for peace, and because through all the tough times since, when in your own mind you had a hundred good reasons to walk away, you didn't. Because you still harbor the wisdom that led to the Oslo accords, that led to the signing in Washington in September of '93, you still can raise your hand and stand and lift your voice for peace. Mr. Chairman, you said some profound words today in embracing the idea that Israelis and Palestinians can live in peace as neighbors. Again I say, you have led the way, and we would not be here without you. I say to all of you, I can come here and work I can bring you to America, and we can work but in the end, this is up to you you and the Israelis for you have to live with the consequences of what you do. I can help because I believe it is my job to do so I believe it is my duty to do so because America has Palestinian Americans, Jewish Americans, other Arab Americans who desperately want us to be helpful. But in the end, you have to decide what the understanding will be, and you have to decide whether we can get beyond the present moment where there is still, for all the progress we have made, so much mistrust. And the people who are listening to us today in Israel, they have to make the same decisions. Peace must mean many things legitimate rights for Palestinians applause thank you legitimate rights for Palestinians, real security for Israel. But it must begin with something even more basic mutual recognition, seeing people who are different, with whom there have been profound differences, as people. I've had two profoundly emotional experiences in the last less than 24 hours. I was with Chairman Arafat, and four little children came to see me whose fathers are in Israeli prisons. Last night, I met some little children whose fathers had been killed in conflict with Palestinians, at the dinner that Prime Minister Netanyahu had for me. Those children brought tears to my eyes. We have to find a way for both sets of children to get their lives back and to go forward. Palestinians must recognize the right of Israel and its people to live safe and secure lives today, tomorrow, and forever. Israel must recognize the right of Palestinians to aspire to live free today, tomorrow, and forever. And I ask you to remember these experiences I had with these two groups of children. If I had met them in reverse order, I would not have known which ones were Israeli and which Palestinian. If they had all been lined up in a row and I had seen their tears, I could not tell whose father was dead and whose father was in prison or what the story of their lives were, making up the grief that they bore. We must acknowledge that neither side has a monopoly on pain or virtue. At the end of America's Civil War, in my home State, a man was elected Governor who had fought with President Lincoln's forces, even though most of the people in my home State fought with the secessionist forces. And he made his inaugural speech after 4 years of unbelievable bloodshed in America, in which he had been on the winning side but in the minority in our home. And everyone wondered what kind of leader he would be. His first sentence was, "We have all done wrong." I say that because I think the beginning of mutual respect, after so much pain, is to recognize not only the positive characteristics of people on both sides but the fact that there has been a lot a lot of hurt and harm. The fulfillment of one side's aspirations must not come at the expense of the other. We must believe that everyone can win in the new Middle East. It does not hurt Israelis to hear Palestinians peacefully and pridefully asserting their identity, as we saw today. That is not a bad thing. And it does not hurt Palestinians to acknowledge the profound desire of Israelis to live without fear. It is in this spirit that I ask you to consider where we go from here. I thank you for your rejection fully, finally, and forever of the passages in the Palestinian Charter calling for the destruction of Israel, for they were the ideological underpinnings of a struggle renounced at Oslo. By revoking them once and for all, you have sent, I say again, a powerful message not to the Government but to the people of Israel. You will touch people on the street there. You will reach their hearts there. I know how profoundly important this is to Israelis. I have been there four times as President. I have spent a lot of time with people other than the political leaders, Israeli schoolchildren who heard about you only as someone who thought they should be driven into the sea. They did not know what their parents or grandparents did that you thought was so bad they were just children, too. Is it surprising that all this has led to the hardening of hearts on both sides, that they refused to acknowledge your existence as a people and that led to a terrible reaction by you? By turning this page on the past, you are taking the lead in writing a new story for the future. And you have issued a challenge to the Government and the leaders of Israel to walk down that path with you. I thank you for doing that. The children of all the Middle East thank you. But declaring a change of heart still won't be enough. Let's be realistic here. First of all, there are real differences. And secondly, a lot of water has flowed under the bridge, as we used to say at home. An American poet has written, "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart." Palestinians and Israelis in their pasts both share a history of oppression and dispossession both have felt their hearts turn to stone for living too long in fear and seeing loved ones die too young. You are two great people of strong talent and soaring ambition, sharing such a small piece of sacred land. The time has come to sanctify your holy ground with genuine forgiveness and reconciliation. Every influential Palestinian, from teacher to journalist, from politician to community leader, must make this a mission to banish from the minds of children glorifying suicide bombers, to end the practice of speaking peace in one place and preaching hatred in another, to teach schoolchildren the value of peace and the waste of war, to break the cycle of violence. Our great American prophet Martin Luther King once said, "The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind." I believe you have gained more in 5 years of peace than in 45 years of war. I believe that what we are doing today, working together for security, will lead to further gains and changes in the heart. I believe that our work against terrorism, if you stand strong, will be rewarded, for that must become a fact of the past. It must never be a part of your future. Let me say this as clearly as I can No matter how sharp a grievance or how deep a hurt, there is no justification for killing innocents. Mr. Chairman, you said at the White House that no Israeli mother should have to worry if her son or daughter is late coming home. Your words touched many people. You said much the same thing today. We must invest those words with the weight of reality in the minds of every person in Israel and every Palestinian. I feel this all the more strongly because the act of a few can falsify the image of the many. How many times have we seen it? How many times has it happened to us? We both know it is profoundly wrong to equate Palestinians, in particular, and Islam, in general, with terrorism or to see a fundamental conflict between Islam and the West. For the vast majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the world, tolerance is an article of faith and terrorism a travesty of faith. I know that in my own country, where Islam is one of the fastest growing religions, we share the same devotion to family and hard work and community. When it comes to relations between the United States and Palestinians, we have come far to overcome our misperceptions of each other. Americans have come to appreciate the strength of your identity and the depth of your aspirations. And we have learned to listen to your grievances as well. I hope you have begun to see America as your friend. I have tried to speak plainly to you about the need to reach out to the people of Israel, to understand the pain of their children, to understand the history of their fear and mistrust, their yearning, gnawing desire for security, because that is the only way friends can speak and the only way we can move forward. I took the same liberty yesterday in Israel. I talked there about the need to see one's own mistakes, not just those of others to recognize the steps others have taken for peace, not just one's own to break out of the politics of absolutes to treat one's neighbors with respect and dignity. I talked about the profound courage of both peoples and their leaders which must continue in order for a secure, just, and lasting peace to occur the courage of Israelis to continue turning over territory for peace and security the courage of Palestinians to take action against all those who resort to and support violence and terrorism the courage of Israelis to guarantee safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza and allow for greater trade and development the courage of Palestinians to confiscate illegal weapons of war and terror the courage of Israelis to curtail closures and curfews that remain a daily hardship the courage of Palestinians to resolve all differences at the negotiating table the courage of both peoples to abandon the rhetoric of hate that still poisons public discourse and limits the vision of your children and the courage to move ahead to final status negotiations together, without either side taking unilateral steps or making unilateral statements that could prejudice the outcome, whether governing refugee settlements, borders, Jerusalem, or any other issues encompassed by the Oslo accord. Now, it will take good faith, mutual respect, and compromise to forge a final agreement. I think there will be more breakdowns, frankly, but I think there will be more breakthroughs, as well. There will be more challenges to peace from its enemies. And so I ask you today never to lose sight of how far you have come. With Chairman Arafat's leadership, already you have accomplished what many said was impossible. The seemingly intractable problems of the past can clearly find practical solutions in the future. But it requires a consistent commitment and a genuine willingness to change heart. As we approach this new century, think of this, think of all the conflicts in the 20th century that many people thought were permanent that have been healed or are healing two great World Wars between the French and the Germans they're best friends the Americans and the Russians, the whole cold war now we have a constructive partnership the Irish Catholics and Protestants the Chinese and the Japanese the black and white South Africans the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims in Bosnia all have turned from conflict to cooperation. Yes, there is still some distrust yes, there's still some difficulty but they are walking down the right road together. And when they see each other's children, increasingly they only see children, together. When they see the children crying, they realize the pain is real, whatever the child's story. In each case there was a vision of greater peace and prosperity and security. In Biblical times, Jews and Arabs lived side by side. They contributed to the flowering of Alexandria. During the Golden Age of Spain, Jews, Muslims, and Christians came together in an era of remarkable tolerance and learning. A third of the population laid down its tools on Friday, a third on Saturday, a third on Sunday. They were scholars and scientists, poets, musicians, merchants, and statesmen setting an example of peaceful coexistence that we can make a model for the future. There is no guarantee of success or failure today, but the challenge of this generation of Palestinians is to wage an historic and heroic struggle for peace. Again I say this is an historic day. I thank you for coming. I thank you for raising your hands. I thank you for standing up. I thank you for your voices. I thank you for clapping every time I said what you were really doing was reaching deep into the heart of the people of Israel. Chairman Arafat said he and Mrs. Arafat are taking Hillary and Chelsea and me we're going to Bethlehem tomorrow. For a Christian family to light the Christmas tree in Bethlehem is a great honor. It is an interesting thing to contemplate that in this small place, the home of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, the embodiment of my faith was born a Jew and is still recognized by Muslims as a prophet. He said a lot of very interesting things, but in the end, He was known as the Prince of Peace. And we celebrate at Christmastime the birth of the Prince of Peace. One reason He is known as the Prince of Peace is He knew something about what it takes to make peace. And one of the wisest things He ever said was, "We will be judged by the same standard by which we judge, but mercy triumphs over judgment." In this Christmas season, in this Hanukkah season, on the edge of Ramadan, this is a time for mercy and vision and looking at all of our children together. You have reaffirmed the fact that you now intend to share this piece of land, without war, with your neighbors, forever. They have heard you. They have heard you. Now, you and they must now determine what kind of peace you will have. Will it be grudging and mean spirited and confining, or will it be generous and open? Will you begin to judge each other in the way you would like to be judged? Will you begin to see each other's children in the way you see your own? Will they feel your pain, and will you understand theirs? Surely to goodness, after 5 years of this peace process and decades of suffering and after you have come here today and done what you have done, we can say, "Enough of this gnashing of teeth. Let us join hands and proudly go forward together." Thank you very much. December 13, 1998 Prime Minister Netanyahu. Mr. President, I want to welcome you and your entire delegation, the Secretary of State, the National Security Adviser, and your exceptional team, for coming here on this mission of peace and for your understanding of our concerns. We spent many hours in Wye River, and there and in our conversations this morning, I've come to appreciate and admire your extraordinary ability to empathize and the seriousness with which you examine every issue. Your visit here is part of the implementation of the Wye River accords. Now, this was not an easy agreement for us, but we did our part. And we are prepared to do our part based on Palestinian compliance. When I say that we did our part, you know that within 2 weeks we withdrew from territory, released prisoners, and opened the Gaza airport, precisely as we undertook to do. The Palestinians, in turn, were to live up to a series of obligations in the sphere of security, in ending incitement and violence, in the repeal of the Palestinian Charter, and in commitments to negotiate a final settlement in order to achieve permanent peace between us. I regret to say that none of these conditions have been met. Palestinians proceeded to unilaterally declare what the final settlement would be. Coming out of Wye, they said again and again that regardless of what happens in the negotiations, on May 4th of 1999 they will unilaterally declare a state, divide Jerusalem, and make its eastern half the Palestinian capital. This is a gross violation of the Oslo and Wye accords, which commit the parties to negotiate a mutually agreed final settlement. Mr. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority must officially and unequivocally renounce this attempt. I think no one can seriously expect Israel to hand over another inch of territory unless and until such an unambiguous correction is made. I said that there are other violations. The Palestinians, I'm afraid, began a campaign of incitement. At Wye, as those who are here well know, we agreed to release Palestinian prisoners, but not terrorists with blood on their hands or members of Hamas who are waging war against us. No sooner did we release the agreed number of prisoners in the first installment that the Palestinian Authority refused to acknowledge what they agreed to at Wye. Falsely charging Israel with violating the prisoner release clause, Palestinian leaders openly incited for violence and riots, which culminated in a savage near lynching of an Israeli soldier. And the Palestinian Authority organized other violent demonstrations. Therefore, the Palestinian Authority must stop incitement and violence at once, and they must do so fully and permanently. There has also been some downgrading on parts of the security cooperation between us, and the Palestinian Authority must restore this cooperation again, fully and permanently. They must live up to their other obligations in the Wye agreement in the fields of weapons collections, illegal weapons collections, reducing the size of their armed forces, and the like. Now, I stress that none of these are new conditions. All are integral parts of the Wye and Oslo agreements to which we are committed. We hope that tomorrow the Palestinian Authority will once and for all live up to at least one of their obligations. And if the PNC members will vote in sufficient numbers to annul the infamous Palestinian Charter, that will be a welcome development. And it's important 5 years after the promise to do so at Oslo, to see this happen would be a welcome and positive development. I think this is it's just as important to see strict adherence to the other obligations in order to reinject confidence into the peace process and to get this process moving again, where Israel will also do its part. Mr. President, I'm sure that we can achieve peace between Palestinians and Israelis if we stand firm on Palestinian compliance. I very much hope that you will be able to persuade the Palestinians what I know you deeply believe and I believe, that violence and peace are simply incompatible. Because, ultimately, what is required is not merely a checklist of correcting Palestinian violations but, I think, a real change of conduct by the Palestinian leadership. And they must demonstrate that they have abandoned the path of violence and adopted the path of peace. For us to move forward, they must scrupulously adhere to their commitments under the Wye agreement, on which we have all worked so hard. And may I say, on a personal and national note and international note, that if there's anyone who can help bring the peace process to a satisfactory conclusion, it is you, President Clinton. Your devotion to this cause, your perseverance, your tireless energy, your commitment have been an inspiration to us all. May it help us restore peace and hope to our land and to our peoples. President Clinton. Thank you very much, Prime Minister. I thank you for your statement and for your warm welcome. I would say to the people of Israel, I was told before I came here that no previous President had ever visited Israel more than once, and this is my fourth trip here. I may be subject to tax assessment if I come again in the next 2 years, but I am always pleased to be here. I want to thank you, also, and the members of your team, for the exhausting effort which was made at Wye over those 9 days, the time we spent together, the sleepless nights, and the extraordinary effort to put together a very difficult, but I think sound, agreement. Let me begin by talking about some of the things that we have discussed today. We've had two brief private meetings one, a breakfast meeting with our wives this morning, and then a brief private meeting, and then our extended meeting with our two teams. I want to begin where I always do. America has an unshakable commitment to the security of the State and the people of Israel. We also have an unshakable commitment to be a partner in the pursuit of a lasting, comprehensive peace. I have told the Prime Minister that I will soon submit to the Congress a supplemental request for 1.2 billion to meet Israel's security needs related to implementing the Wye River agreement. Only if those needs are met can the peace process move forward. At the same time, I am convinced, as I think we all are, everyone who has dealt with this problem over any period of time, that a lasting peace properly achieved is the best way to safeguard Israel's security over the long run. Last month, at the conclusion of the Wye talks, Prime Minister and Chairman Arafat and I agreed that it would be useful for me to come to the region to help to maintain the momentum and to appear tomorrow before the PNC and the other Palestinian groups that will be assembled. I also want to commend the Prime Minister for the steps he has taken to implement the Wye agreement which he just outlined. He has secured his government's support for significant troop withdrawal from the West Bank and begun the implementation of that withdrawal, reached an agreement that allowed for the opening of the Gaza airport, and he began the difficult process of prisoner releases. The Palestinian Authority has taken some important steps with its commitments, a deepening security cooperation with Israel, acting against terrorism, issuing decrees for the confiscation of illegal weapons, and dealing with incitement, taking concrete steps to reaffirm the decision to amend the PLO Charter, which will occur tomorrow. Have the Palestinians fulfilled all their commitments? They certainly could be doing better to preempt violent demonstrations in the street. This is a terribly important matter. I also agree that matters that have been referred, consistent with the Oslo agreement, for final status talks should be left there and should be subject to negotiations. But in other areas, there has been a forward progress on the meeting of the commitments. Now, I know that each step forward can be excruciatingly difficult and that now real efforts have to be made on both sides to regain the momentum. We just had a good discussion about the specific things that the Israelis believe are necessary for the Palestinians to do to regain the momentum. And we talked a little bit about how we might get genuine communication going again so that the necessary steps can be taken to resume the structured implementation of the Wye River agreement, which is, I think, part of what makes it work at least, it made it work in the minds of the people who negotiated it. And it can work in the lives of the people who will be affected by it if both sides meet all their commitments, and only if they do. Each side has serious political constraints I think we all understand that. Provocative pronouncements, unilateral actions can be counterproductive, given the constraints that each side has. But in the end, there has been a fundamental decision made to deal with this through honest discussion and negotiation. That is the only way it can be done. It cannot be done by resorting to other means when times get difficult. And again I say, the promise of Wye cannot be fulfilled by violence or by statements or actions which are inconsistent with the whole peace process. Both sides should adhere to that. Let me also just say one other word about regional security. I think Israelis are properly concerned with the threat of weapons of mass destruction development, with the threat of missile delivery systems. We are working with Israel to help to defend itself against such threats, in particular, through the Arrow antiballistic missile program. We've also just established a joint strategic planning committee as a forum to discuss how we can continue to work together on security matters. We're going to take a couple of questions, I know, but again I would like to say in closing, Mr. Prime Minister, I appreciate the courage you showed at Wye, your farsightedness in seeking peace and in taking personal and political risks for it, which should now be readily apparent to anyone who has followed the events of the last 6 weeks. Your determination, your tenacity to build an Israel that is both secure and at peace is something that I admire and support. And I think, if we keep working at it, we can keep making progress. Thank you very much. House Committee Impeachment Vote Palestinian Charter Vote Q. Mr. President, what is your reaction to the decision of the Judiciary Committee of the House yesterday? Do you intend to resign, as did President Nixon? And with your permission, one question to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Hebrew. At this point, a question was asked in Hebrew and translated by an interpreter as follows. Interpreter. Mr. Prime Minister, you have, to some extent, appointed Mr. Clinton to act as a referee between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He will appear tomorrow in Gaza where the decision of the committee will be to revoke its objection to the existence of Israel. What will you do if this decision is taken, and how will you react to issues facing you with the Cabinet regarding a no confidence vote? President Clinton. My reaction to the committee vote is that I wasn't surprised. I think it's been obvious to anyone who is following it for weeks that the vote was foreordained. And now it is up to the Members of the House of Representatives to vote their conscience on the Constitution and the law, which I believe are clear. And I have no intention of resigning. It's never crossed my mind. Prime Minister Netanyahu then answered in Hebrew. Prime Minister Netanyahu. If you can translate all of that, you're a genius. Laughter Interpreter. In essence, we expect to see the Palestinian side revoke the Palestinian Charter. We also expect the Palestinians to meet their commitment to stop incitement. If, in fact, tomorrow the Palestinian Charter is revoked, we will view it as a success of our policy. What we merely expect is the Palestinians honor their commitments. And that's our expectation. Prime Minister Netanyahu. I would say that's a pretty good abbreviation of what I said. Laughter You have a great future as an editor. Laughter The President. We all need one. Laughter House Impeachment Vote Q. Mr. President, how confident are you that you can avoid impeachment in the full House next week, and are you planning any particular kind of outreach additional to lawmakers or the public? President Clinton. Well, I think it's up to it's a question of whether each Member will simply vote his or her conscience based on the Constitution and the law. And I don't know what's going to happen. That's up to them. It's out of my hands. If any Member wishes to talk to me or someone on my staff, we would make ourselves available to them. But otherwise, I think it's important that they be free to make this decision and that they not be put under any undue pressure from any quarter. Many of them have said they feel such pressure, but I can't comment on that because I haven't talked directly to many members of the House caucus, the Republican caucus. And I have talked to those a few who said they wanted to talk to me otherwise, I have not. I don't think it's appropriate for me to be personally calling people unless they send word to me that there is some question they want to ask or something they want to say, I don't think it's appropriate. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, you said that now it's up to the Members of the House to decide Prime Minister Netanyahu. May I ask a favor. You are free to ask any one of your questions, but I think the President has come here on a very clear message, on a very clear voyage of peace, and I believe that it would be appropriate also to ask one or two questions on the peace process. I would like to know the answers, too. Q. This would be exactly my second question. The first one is about what will happen Thursday if the Members of the House will decide about impeachment, if in this case, whether you will consider resignation. And second question, about the peace process, after all what you see now, after you hear the Prime Minister, don't you think you were wrong in the Wye memorandum, that you figured you'd get an agreement which both sides cannot comply? President Clinton. Well, the answer to both questions is no. And let me amplify on your second question. No, I don't think it was wrong. Look, if this were easy, it would have been done a long time ago. And we knew that in the Wye agreement it would be difficult for both sides to comply. Actually, the first 2 weeks were quite hopeful. In the first phase, I think there was quite good compliance on both sides. And I think the Prime Minister feels that way as well. A number of things happened with which you are very familiar which made the atmosphere more tense in the ensuing weeks. And one of the things that I hope to do while I'm here, in addition to going and meeting with the Palestinian groups, including the PNC, is to do what I did this morning, to listen very carefully to the Prime Minister and to his government about what specific concerns they have in terms of the agreement and compliance with it and then try to resolve those and listen to the Palestinians, as I will, so that we can get this process going again. I find that when the parties are talking to each other and establish an atmosphere of understanding of the difficulty of each other's positions and deal with each other in good faith, we make pretty good progress. But there is a long history here. And 9 days at Wye, or 2 weeks of implementing, you know, it can't overcome all that history, plus which there are political constraints and imperatives in each position which make it more likely that tensions will arise. But the fact that this has been hard to implement doesn't mean it was a mistake. It means it was real. Look, if we had made an agreement that was easy to implement, it would have dealt with no difficult circumstances, and so we'd be just where we are now, except worse off. We have seen in the first phase of implementation that good things can happen on the security side from the point of view of the Israelis and on the development of the territory from the point of view of the Palestinians and the airport if there is genuine trust and actual compliance. And so what we have to do is to get more actual compliance and in the process rebuild some of that trust. Perjury Censure Q. Mr. President, some Republicans want you to go further than a statement of contrition. They say that they want an admission of perjury. Are you willing to do that? And what do you think about Chairman Hyde and the Republican leadership opposing a vote in the full House on censure? President Clinton. Well, on the second question, I think you ought to ask them whether they're opposed to it because they think that it might pass since, apparently, somewhere around three quarters of the American people think that's the right thing to do. On the first question, the answer is No, I can't do that, because I did not commit perjury. If you go back to the hearing, we had four prosecutors two Republicans, two Democrats one the head of President Reagan's criminal justice division, who went through the law in great detail and explained that, that this is not a perjury case. And there was no credible argument on the other side. So I have no intention of doing that. Now, was the testimony in the deposition difficult and ambiguous and unhelpful? Yes, it was. That's exactly what I said in the grand jury testimony, myself, and I agree with what Mr. Ruff said about it. Mr. Ruff answered questions, you know, for hours and hours and hours and tried to deal with some of the concerns the committee had on that. And I thought he did an admirable job in acknowledging the difficulty of the testimony. But I could not admit to doing something that I am quite sure I did not do. And I think if you look at the law, if you look at the legal decisions, and if you look at what the Republican as well as the Democratic prosecutors said, I think that's entitled to great weight. And I have read or seen nothing that really overcomes the testimony that they gave on that question. Jonathan Pollard Q. What about Jonathan Pollard, Mr. President? What about Jonathan Pollard? Can you inaudible . President Clinton. Yes, I can. I have instituted the review that I pledged to the Prime Minister. We've never done this on a case before, but I told him I would do it, and we did it. And my Counsel, Mr. Ruff, has invited the Justice Department and all the law enforcement agencies under it, and all the other security, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies in the Government and interested parties to say what they think about the Pollard case, to do so by sometime in January. And I will review all that, plus whatever arguments are presented to me on the other side for the reduction of the sentence. And I will make a decision in a prompt way. But we have instituted this review which as I said is unprecedented. We are giving everyone time to present their comments, and I will get comments on both sides of the issue, evaluate it, and make a decision. Q. I would like to ask President Clinton. What did you say? They're demanding equal time, three and three? Q. I just want to ask the Prime Minister President Clinton. Oh, he wants to ask you a question. That's good. Q. Prime Minister, can you explain, perhaps to the American people, why you think Mr. Pollard is worthy of release at this point? Prime Minister Netanyahu. Jonathan Pollard did something bad and inexcusable he spied in the United States he collected information on behalf of the Israeli Government. I was the first Prime Minister and this is the first government to openly admit it. We think that he should have served his time, and he did. He served for close to 13 years. And all that I appealed to President Clinton for is merely a humanitarian appeal. It is not based on exonerating Mr. Pollard. There is no exoneration for it. It is merely that he has been virtually in solitary confinement for 13 years. It's a very, very heavy sentence. And since he was sent by us on a mistaken mission not to work against the United States but, nevertheless, to break the laws of the United States we hope that, on a purely humanitarian appeal, a way will be found to release him. That is all I can tell you. It is not political. It is not to exonerate him. It is merely to end a very, very sorry case that has afflicted him and the people of Israel. December 13, 1998 Thank you very much. Mr. Prime Minister, Mrs. Netanyahu, leaders and citizens of Israel, my fellow Americans Let me begin by thanking the Prime Minister, his family, and his administration for the warm welcome accorded to me and Hillary and Chelsea and our entire group. This is, as I have said many times today, my fourth visit to Israel since I became President. Perhaps that fact alone says something about the unique relationship between our two nations. Last spring I walked out onto the South Lawn at the White House to lead my fellow Americans in our celebration of your 50th birthday as a nation. And as I did that, I thought about how that great old house where every President since our second President has lived, for almost 200 years now and how for the last 50 years it has been and now will forever be linked to Israel's destiny. It was in the White House that Harry Truman recognized the State of Israel only 11 minutes after you had declared your independence. And, I might add, he did so over the objection of some of his most senior advisers. It was in the White House a year later that President Truman wept when Israel's Chief Rabbi told him, "God put you in your mother's womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after 2,000 years." Mr. Prime Minister, every President since Harry Truman has been strongly committed to the State of Israel and to Israel's security. No one should doubt that the United States will always stand with you. Every President has also believed it is vital to Israel's security that together we seek peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Israel's own leaders again and again have said this, from Ben Gurion to Golda Meir, Begin to Rabin and Peres. Now you, Mr. Prime Minister, have taken your own brave steps on the path to peace. This is the correct course because only through negotiated and implemented peace can Israelis live their dream of being both free and secure. No one knows better the cost the enemies of peace can extract than you, Mr. Prime Minister. You have fought terrorism with your own hands. You have written powerfully about it. You lost your beloved brother to it. The citizens you now lead face the possibility of terrorism every day. America knows something of this struggle, too. Hundreds of our citizens have perished in terrorist attacks over this generation, most recently at our Embassies in east Africa. We know we must stand strong against terrorism. We are determined to do so, just as we are determined to find just and peaceful solutions to conflicts and to overcome longstanding hatred and resentments. We know the closer we get, the more desperate the enemies of peace become. But we cannot let terrorists dictate our future. We will not let their bombs or their bullets destroy our path to peace. Mr. Prime Minister, at Wye River you obtained commitments that will greatly strengthen Israel's security if they are honored. All of us who shared those 9 days and 9 long nights know you are a skilled and tenacious negotiator. Despite your long sojourn in America, there can be no doubt that you remain a sabra to the core, tough, the kind of leader with the potential to guide his people to a peaceful and secure future. Many have pointed out that you are the first leader of Israel born after 1948, actually born in the State of Israel. But I know you never forget that the history of the Jewish people, as you have told us again tonight, is far, far longer, that the issues of today must be considered in light of events of a rich but often turbulent past, including 2,000 years of exile and persecution. We honor your history, your struggles, your sacrifices. We pray for a permanent peace that will, once and for all, secure the rightful place of the people of Israel, living in peace, mutual respect, mutual recognition, and permanent security in this historic land, with the Palestinians and all your neighbors. You mentioned, Mr. Prime Minister, the fact that my devotion to Israel had something to do with the instruction I received from my minister long ago. I will tell you, the real story is even more dramatic. I hesitate to tell it because then you will use it against me when it is helpful. Laughter My pastor died in 1989. Before that, starting in 1937, he came here to the Holy Land more than 40 times. Once in the mid 1980's, we were sitting together long before I had thought that a realistic prospect and he looked at me and he said, "You might be President one day. You will make mistakes, and God will forgive you. But God will never forgive you if you forget the State of Israel." That's what he said. When Hillary first came here with me 17 years ago this month, I was not in elected office. I came on a religious pilgrimage just after we celebrated Christmas. I saw Masada and Bethlehem for the first time, not through political eyes but through the eyes of a Christian. I can't wait to go back to Masada, and I can't wait to go back to Bethlehem. You mentioned that the troubles and travails and triumphs of Jesus, a Jew, gave the world the Christian religion, of which I am a part. In the Christian New Testament, we get a lot of instruction about what it takes to make peace and become reconciled to one another. We are instructed that we have to forgive others their sins against us if we expect to be forgiven our own. We are instructed that they who judge without mercy will be judged without mercy, but mercy triumphs over judgment. And we are told in no uncertain terms that the peacemakers are blessed, and they will inherit the Earth. Please join me in a toast to Prime Minister and Mrs. Netanyahu, the people of Israel, and the promise of peace. L'Chaim. December 13, 1998 Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking the Prime Minister for his leadership for peace and his leadership of Israel Mrs. Netanyahu, members of the Israeli Government to the distinguished American delegation here. I want to say a special word of appreciation to the young man who spoke first, Ben Mayost. Didn't he do a good job? Applause This is my third trip to Jerusalem as President, my third time in this magnificent hall, and the young woman who was with me here last time on the stage, Liad Modrik, is also here. Thank you I'm really glad to see you. I'd like to also thank this magnificent choir, the Ankor Choir. Didn't they do a good job? They left, but they were great. I understand we have students here from Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beer Sheva, Akko, and other cities welcome to you all. We come here today to speak about the future of Israel and the Middle East your future. Six weeks ago Prime Minister Netanyahu came to the United States to seek a new understanding with the Palestinian Authority on the best way to achieve peace with security. Today I come to Israel to fulfill a pledge I made to the Prime Minister and to Chairman Arafat at Wye River, to speak to Israelis and Palestinians about the benefits of peace, and to reaffirm America's determination to stand with you as you take risks for peace. The United States will always stand with Israel, always remember that only a strong Israel can make peace. That is why we were, after all, your partners in security before we were partners for peace. Our commitment to your security is ironclad. It will not ever change. The United States stood with Israel at the birth of your nation, at your darkest hour in 1973, through the long battle against terror, against Saddam Hussein's Scuds in 1991. And today, American marines and Patriot missiles are here in Israel exercising with the IDF. We have also stood with you as you reached out to your neighbors, always recognizing that only Israelis can make final decisions about your own future. And as the Prime Minister said in his remarks about education for peace, we agree that peace must begin with a genuine transformation in attitudes. Despite all the difficulties, I believe that transformation has begun. Palestinians are recognizing that rejection of Israel will not bring them freedom, just as Israelis recognize that control over Palestinians will not bring you security. As a result, in just the last few years you have achieved peace with Jordan, and the Arab world has accepted the idea of peace with Israel. The boycotts of the past are giving way to a future in which goods move across frontiers while soldiers are able to stay at home. The pursuit of peace has withstood the gravest doubts. It has survived terrorist bombs and assassins' bullets. Just a short while ago this afternoon, Hillary and I visited the gravesite of Prime Minister Rabin with Mrs. Rabin, her daughter and granddaughter. He was killed by one who hoped to kill the peace he worked so hard to advance. But the Wye memorandum is proof that peace is still alive, and it will live as long as the parties believe in it and work for it. Of course, there have been setbacks, more misunderstandings, more disagreements, more provocations, more acts of violence. You feel Palestinians should prove in word and deed that their intentions have actually changed, as you redeploy from land on which tears and blood have been shed, and you are right to feel that. Palestinians feel you should acknowledge they too have suffered and they, too, have legitimate expectations that should be met and, like Israel, internal political pressures that must be overcome. And they are right, too. Because of all that has happened and the mountain of memories that has not yet been washed away, the road ahead will be hard. Already, every step forward has been tempered with pain. Each time the forces of reconciliation on each side have reached out, the forces of destruction have lashed out. The leaders at Wye knew that. The people of Israel know that. Israel is full of good people today who do not hate but who have experienced too much sorrow and too much loss to embrace with joy each new agreement the peace process brings. As always, we must approach the task ahead without illusions but not without hope, for hope is not an illusion. Every advance in human history, every victory for the human spirit, every victory in your own individual lives begins with hope, the capacity to imagine a better future and the conviction that it can be achieved. The people of Israel, after all, have beaten the most impossible odds, overcome the most terrible evils on the way to the Promised Land. The idea of the Promised Land kept hope alive. In the remaining work to be done, the idea of peace and security in the Promised Land must keep hope alive. For all you young people today, under all the complexities and frustrations of this moment, there lies a simple question What is your vision for your future? There can be only two ways to answer that question. You could say that the only possible future for Israel is one of permanent siege, in which the ramparts hold and people stay alive, but the nation remains preoccupied with its very survival, subject to gnawing anxiety, limited in future achievement by the absence of real partnerships with your neighbors. Perhaps you can live with that kind of future, but you should not accept it unless you are willing to say and I will try to say properly ein breira, there is no alternative. But if you are not willing to say that, not willing to give up on hope with no real gain in security, you must say, yesh, breira, there is an alternative. If you are to build a future together, hard realities cannot be ignored. Reconciliation after all this trouble is not natural. The differences among you are not trivial. There is a history of heartbreak and loss. But the violent past and the difficult present do not have to be repeated forever. In the historical relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, one thing and only one thing is predestined You are bound to be neighbors. The question is not whether you will live side by side, but how you will live side by side. Will both sides recognize there can be no security for either until both have security, that there will be no peace for either until both have peace? Will both sides seize this opportunity to build a future in which preoccupation with security, struggle, and survival can finally give way to a common commitment to keep all our young minds strong and unleash all your human potential? Surely, the answer must be, yes. Israelis and Palestinians can reach that conclusion sooner, reducing the pain and violence they endure, or they can wait until later more and more victims suffer more loss and ultimately, the conclusion must be the same. Your leaders came to an agreement at Wye because a majority of people on both sides have already said, "Now is the time to change." I want to talk just a little bit about this agreement at Wye. It does not, by itself, resolve the fundamental problems that divide Israelis and Palestinians. It is a means to an end, not the end itself. But it does restore life to a process that was stalled for 18 months, and it will bring benefits that meet the requirements of both sides if both sides meet their obligations. Wye is an opportunity for both that must not be lost. Let me try to explain why. Prime Minister Netanyahu went to Wye, rightly determined to ensure that the security of Israeli citizens is protected as the peace process moves forward. He fought hard, not to kill the peace but to make it real for all those Israelis who only want to live normal lives in their own country. And he succeeded in obtaining a set of systematic Palestinian security commitments and a structure for carrying them out. The Palestinian Authority agreed to a comprehensive and continuous battle against terror. It pledged to combat terrorist organizations, to crack down on unlicensed weapons, to take action against incitement to terror. U.S. Palestinian committees will be set up to review specific actions the Palestinians are taking in each of these areas and to recommend further steps. We also will submit to our Congress a 1.2 billion package to help Israel meet its future security needs, including those growing out of the redeployments agreed to at Wye. The agreement can benefit Israel in another way. It offers the prospect of continuing a process that is changing how most Palestinians define their interests and their relationship with you. More and more, Palestinians have begun to see that they have done more to realize their aspirations in 5 years of making peace than in 45 years of making war. They are beginning to see that Israel's mortal enemies are, in fact, their enemies, too, and that is in their interests to help to defeat the forces of terror. This transformation, however, is clearly unfinished. It will not happen overnight. There will be bumps in the road, and there have been some already. The Palestinian leaders must work harder to keep the agreement and avoid the impression that unilateral actions can replace agreed upon negotiations. But it is vital that you, too, recognize the validity of this agreement and work to sustain it and all other aspects of the peace process. Tomorrow I go to Gaza to address the members of the Palestinian National Council and other Palestinian organizations. I will witness the reaffirmation of their commitment to forswear, fully, finally, and forever, all the provisions in their Charter that called for the destruction of Israel. I will also make it clear that with rights come responsibilities, reminding people there that violence never was and never can be a legitimate tool, that it would be wrong and utterly selfdefeating to resume a struggle that has taken Palestinians from one tragedy to another. I will ask the Palestinian leaders to join me in reaffirming what the vast majority of Muslims the world over believe, that tolerance is an article of faith and terrorism a travesty of faith. And I will emphasize that this conviction should echo from every Palestinian schoolhouse and mosque and television tower. I will point out, of course, all the ways in which this Wye agreement benefits Palestinians It provides for the transfer of more territory, the redeployment of more Israeli troops, safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, the opening of the airport in Gaza, other initiatives to lift their economic condition, and new commitments of international assistance to improve the lives of the Palestinian people. In doing these things, this agreement benefits Israelis as well, for it is in Israel's interest to give the Palestinian economy space to breathe and the Palestinian people a chance to defeat the hopelessness that extremists exploit to unleash their terror. And it is surely in Israel's interest to deal with Palestinians in a way that permits them to feel a sense of dignity instead of despair. The peace process will succeed if it comes with a recognition that the fulfillment of one side's aspirations must come with not at the expense of the fulfillment of the other side's dreams. It will succeed when we understand that it is not just about mutual obligations but mutual interest, mutual recognition, mutual respect when all agree there is no sense in a tug of war over common ground. It will succeed when we all recognize, as Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat did at Wye, that ultimately this can and must be a partnership between Israelis and Palestinians. It will succeed if both sides continue the work that Wye makes possible, if they face the hard decisions ahead so that the future continues to be shaped at the negotiating table, rather than by unilateral acts or declarations. We cannot, of course, expect everyone to see that. There are still people in this region, indeed in every region, who believe that their unique cultures can thrive only behind walls that keep out those who are different, even if the price is mutual mistrust and hatred. There are some who still talk openly about the "threat" of peace because peacemaking requires making contact with the other side, recognizing the legitimacy of different faiths and different points of view, and openness to a world of competing ideas and values. But I don't think that's the majority view in the Middle East any longer. What once was a conflict among mainstreams is evolving into a mainstream seeking peace. We must not let the conflict invade the mainstream of Israel or of the Palestinians or of any other group in this region again. I believe you can not only imagine, you young people, but actually shape the kind of partnership that will give you the future you want. I think you can do it while protecting Israel's fundamental interests. To anyone who thinks that is impossible, I would ask you this How many people thought Israel was possible when your grandparents were just people searching for a land? Who would have imagined the marvel Israel has become? For decades, you lived in a neighborhood which rejected you. Yet, you not only survived and thrived but held fast to the traditions of tolerance and openness upon which this nation was founded. You were forced to become warriors, yet you never lost the thirst to make peace. You turned weakness into strength, and along the way, you built a partnership with the United States that is enduring and unassailable. Now Israel enters its second half century. You have nourished an ancient culture. You have built from the desert a modern nation. You stand on the edge of a new century prepared to make the very most of it. You have given your children a chance to grow up and learn who they are, not just from stories of wandering and martyrdom but from the happy memories of people living good lives in a natural way. You have proven again and again that you are powerful enough to defeat those who would destroy you, but strong and wise enough to make peace with those who are ready to accept you. You have given us every reason to believe that you can build a future on hope that is different from the past. This morning the Prime Minister and Mrs. Netanyahu and Hillary and I had breakfast together, and he said something to me I'd like to repeat to you to make this point to all of you young people. He said You know, there are three great ancient civilizations in the world the Chinese civilization, the Indian civilization, and the Jewish civilization all going back 4,000 years or more. The Chinese are 1.2 billion people the Indians are nearly a billion people. To be sure, they have suffered invasion, loss in war in the Indian case, colonization. But they have always had their land, and they have grown. There are 12 million Jews in the world, driven from their homeland, subject to Holocaust, subject to centuries of prejudice. And yet, here you are. Here you are. If you can do this after 4,000 years, you can make this peace. Believe me, you can do this. Years ago, before the foundation of Israel, Golda Meir said of her people, and I quote, "We only want that which is given naturally to all people of the world, to be masters of our own fate, only our fate, not the destiny of others to live as a right and not on sufferance to have the chance to bring the surviving Jewish children, of whom not so many are left in the world now, to this country, so that they may grow up like our youngsters who were born here, free of fear, with heads high." This hope that all of us can live a life of dignity when respecting the dignity of others is part of the heritage of values Israel shares with the United States. On this, the first day of Hanukkah, may this hope be the candle that lights Israel's path into the new century, into a century of peace and security, with America always at your side. Thank you, and God bless you. December 10, 1998 Thank you very much. I want to welcome all of you here, the Members of Congress, the members of our foreign policy team who have worked on this, National Security Adviser Berger, Under Secretary Loy, Assistant Secretary Koh. I welcome Ambassador Nancy Rubin, the Ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights Theresa Loar, the Senior Coordinator for International Women's Issues members of the Roosevelt family and other distinguished guests. I would like to say also, before getting into my prepared remarks, that someday when I write the memoirs of these last several years, one of the proudest moments of our administration for me will be the work the First Lady has done to advance the cause of human rights. I remember the speech she gave in Beijing on a rainy day when people were struggling through the mud to get into that remote facility the talk she gave just a few days ago at Gaston Hall at Georgetown University about Eleanor Roosevelt I think one of the finest speeches she ever gave but more important, the concrete work, the Vital Voices work in Northern Ireland and Latin America and all the little villages she visited in Latin America and Africa and Asia, on the Indian Subcontinent to try to advance the condition of women and children, especially young girls. And I think that every person who has ever been the parent of a daughter could identify strongly with the remarks she just made and the brave women who were just introduced. You know, most of us, at least who have reached a certain age, we look forward to the holidays when our daughters come home from college, and they have the human right to decide whether they want to come home or not. Laughter When our daughters are married, and they have our grandchildren, we hope they'll find a way to come home. Imagine I just wish there were some way for every American citizen to imagine how they would feel if the people Hillary just discussed were their daughters. I hope we can do more. We are sponsoring these awards today and announcing them because, as all of you know so well, 50 years ago in Paris the U.N. General Assembly voted to approve the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It was a watershed moment for what was then a very young United Nations a new chapter, however, in a much, much older story, the unending striving of humanity to realize its potential in the life of every person. For its time, the Universal Declaration was quite bold. If you look at the way the world is going today, it's still quite a bold document. Like all great breakthroughs, it was an act of imagination and courage, an opening of the heart and the mind with spare elegance. It served notice that for all our differences, we share a common birthright. You know, it's easy for us to forget, but if you think back to 1948, it might not have been particularly easy to affirm faith in mankind's future. After all, it was just 3 years after a cataclysmic war and the Holocaust the cold war was beginning to blight the postwar landscape millions and millions more would die just in the Soviet Union under the terror of Stalin. But this document did reaffirm faith in humankind. It is really the Magna Carta of our humanity. Article I states that "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood." There are no commas or parentheses in this sentence, no qualifications or exceptions, just the power of affirmation. Other articles assert the freedom to worship, to work, to assemble, to participate in a life of meaning and purpose. Those words have now been translated into every language of the United Nations. Though 50 years old, they still ring free, fresh, and powerful, don't they? They resonate today, because today human dignity is still under siege, not something that can be taken for granted anywhere. We all know how much the Declaration owed to the remarkable leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt. She rose to every challenge. She defended American idealism. She honestly admitted our own imperfections. She always called on the best from each delegate, and she called on it again and again and again. Indeed, a delegate from Panama grew so exhausted by the pace that he had to remind Mrs. Roosevelt that the delegates had human rights, too. Laughter Today we celebrate the life of this document and the lives it has saved and enhanced. Mrs. Roosevelt worried that it would be hard to translate ideas on paper into real places, into kitchens and factories and ghettos and prisons. But words have power. Ideas have power. And the march for human rights has steadily gained ground. Since 1948, the United Nations has adopted legal instruments against torture, genocide, slavery, apartheid, and discrimination against women and children. As nations grow more interdependent, the idea of a unified standard of human rights becomes easier to define and more important than ever to maintain. Obviously, all nations have more work to do, and the United States is no exception. We must improve our own record. We must correct our own mistakes, even as we fulfill our responsibility to insist on improvement in other nations in totalitarian states, like North Korea in military dictatorships, like Burma in countries where leaders practice the politics of ethnic hatred, like Serbia and Iraq in African nations where tribal differences have led to unimaginable slaughter in nations where tolerance and faith must struggle against intolerant fundamentalism, like Afghanistan and Sudan in Cuba, where persons who strive for peaceful democratic change still are repressed and imprisoned in China, where change has come to people's daily lives, but where basic political rights are still denied to too many. Some suggest today that it is sheer arrogance for the President or for the United States to discuss such matters in other countries. Some say it is because we are not perfect here at home. If we had to wait for perfection, none of us would ever advance in any way. Some say it is because there are Asian values or African values or Western values dividing the human race into various subcategories. Well, let's be honest There are. There are genuine cultural differences which inevitably lead to different political and social structures. And that can be all to the good, because no one has a corner on the truth. It makes life more interesting. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not say there are no differences among people. It says what we have in common is more fundamental than our differences, and therefore, all the differences must be expressed within certain limits beyond which we dare not go without violating our common humanity. This is a phony attack on those of you who fight every day for human rights. None of us want everyone to be the same none of us want to have all the same religious practices none of us want to have all the same social and political structures none of us say we know exactly how life should be organized everywhere under all circumstances and how every problem should be solved. We say we have a common humanity and whatever you think should be done differently must be done within the limits that respects our common humanity. Now, that means a lot to us on the verge of a new century, where freedom and knowledge and flexibility will mean more to people than ever before, where people in the poorest villages on every continent on this Earth will have a chance to leapfrog years and years and years of the development process simply because of the communications revolution, if we respect universal human rights. The Vice President said so well recently, in Asia, that we believe the peaceful democratic process that we have strongly endorsed will be even more essential to the world on the threshold of this new millennium. Throughout 1998, old fears and hatreds crumbled before the healing power of honest communication, faith in the future, a strong will for a better future. Today in Oslo I'm happy about this today in Oslo, two leaders from Northern Ireland, John Hume and David Trimble, are receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts on the Good Friday accord. In the Middle East, where I will go in 2 days, Palestinians and Israelis are struggling to bridge mutual distrust to implement the Wye accords. In Kosovo, a serious humanitarian crisis has been averted, and the process toward reconciliation continues in Bosnia. All these breakthroughs were triumphs for human rights. Today we recommit ourselves to the ideas of the Universal Declaration, to keep moving toward the promise outlined in Paris 50 years ago. First, we're taking steps to respond quickly to genocidal conditions, through the International Coalition Against Genocide I announced during my visit to Africa and a new genocide early warning center sponsored by the Department of State and the CIA. We will provide additional support to the U.N. Torture Victims Fund and genocide survivors in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Cambodia. We will continue assistance to women suffering under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. And USAID will provide up to 8 million to NGO's to enhance their ability to respond more rapidly to human rights emergencies. Second, we must do more for children who have always been especially vulnerable to human rights violations. This year I sought and Congress provided dramatic new support for the fight against child labor with a tenfold increase in United States assistance to the International Labor Organization. Today the Immigration and Naturalization Service is issuing new guidelines for the evaluation of asylum claims by children, making the process better serve our youngest and most vulnerable asylum seekers. Third, we must practice at home what we preach aboard. Just this morning I signed an Executive order that strengthens our ability to implement human rights treaties and creates an interagency group to hold us accountable for progress in honoring those commitments. Fourth, I am concerned about aliens who suffer abuses at the hands of smugglers and sweatshop owners. These victims actually have a builtin disincentive their unlawful status here that discourages them from complaining to U.S. authorities. So I'm asking the Department of Justice to provide legislative options to address this problem. And I know the Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder, and the Deputy Secretary of Labor, Kitty Higgins, are here, and I trust they will work on this, because I know they care as much about it as I do. Finally, I'd like to repeat my support for two top legislative priorities, an employment nondiscrimination act that would ban discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace, and a hate crimes prevention act. Last year, the entire Nation was outraged by the brutal killings of Matthew Shepard, a young gay student in Wyoming, and James Byrd, an African American in Texas. All Americans are entitled to the same respect and legal protection, no matter their race, their gender, their sexual orientation. I agree with something President Truman once said, "When I say Americans, I mean all Americans." We will never relinquish the fight to move forward in the continuing struggle for human rights. I am aware that much of the best work in human rights has been done by those outside government students and activists, NGO's, brave religious leaders, people from all backgrounds who simply want a better, safer world for their children. Many have done so in the face of great adversity, the imprisoned members of the Internal Dissidents Working Group in Cuba, the political prisoners of the National League for Democracy in Burma, the imprisoned dissidents in China. We make common cause with them all. That is why today we are presenting the first Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights to four outstanding Americans, not only for their own efforts but because we know that, by working together, we can do more. From different backgrounds and generations, they stand, all, in the great tradition of Eleanor Roosevelt, pioneers in the fight to expand the frontiers of freedom Robert Bernstein, a pathbreaker for freedom of expression and the protection of rights at home and abroad Bette Bao Lord, the head of Freedom House, a prolific author and campaigner Dorothy Thomas, a champion of women's rights, the voice of a new generation committed to human rights and John Lewis, a veteran in the civil rights struggle, now serving his Congress with great distinction in the House of Representatives. I would like to ask the military aide to read the citations. At this point, Lt. Comdr. Wesley Huey, USN, Naval Aide to the President, read the citations, and the President presented the awards. I'd like to ask the members of the Roosevelt family who are here to stand. Applause Thank you. The day the U.N. delegates voted to approve the declaration, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "Long job over." Laughter One of the few mistakes she ever made. Laughter She left us and all our successors a big job that will never be over, for the Universal Declaration contains an eternal promise, one embraced by our Founders in 1776, one that has to be reaffirmed every day in every way. In our country, each generation of Americans has had to do it in the struggle against slavery led by President Lincoln, in FDR's Four Freedoms, in the unfinished work of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in the ongoing work here in this room. I have learned in ways large and small in the last 6 years that there is within every person a scale of justice and that people can too easily be herded into hatred and extremism, often out of a belief that they have absolute truth and, therefore, are entitled to absolute power, that they can ignore any constitution, any laws, override any facts. There will always be work to be done. And again, I would say to you that this award we gave to these four richly deserving people is also for all of you who labor for human rights. In the prolog of John Lewis's magnificent autobiography, "Walking With the Wind," he tells a stunning story that has become a metaphor for his life and is a metaphor for your work, about being a little boy with his brothers and sisters and cousins in the house of a relative, that was a very fragile house, when an enormous wind came up. And he said he was told that all the children had to hold hands, and one corner of the house would blow up in the wind and all the children would walk, holding hands, to the corner, and it would go down. And then another would come up, and all the children would hold hands again and go to the other corner until the house came down. And by walking with the wind, hand in hand, they saved the house and the family and the children. John says that that walk is a struggle to find the beloved community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights applies to individuals, but it can only be achieved by our common community. Thank you, and God bless you all. December 02, 1998 President Clinton. Let me begin by saying I am delighted to welcome Prime Minister Sharif and his group here to the White House and to the Oval Office. The United States values its long friendship with Pakistan very, very much. We have a very full agenda today. All of you know of my concern to do everything we can to end the nuclear competition in South Asia, which I believe is a threat to Pakistan and India and to the stability of the world. We also want to work with Pakistan to promote economic growth there, to continue our mutual concern to fight terrorism, and deal with some of the other regional issues. So we have a great deal to discuss, and I'm very much looking forward to it. Would you like to say anything? Prime Minister Sharif. Thank you, Mr. President. I am also very delighted to meet you, and thank you for inviting me to America. We've had meetings also. I am sure that you are taking interest in the affairs of Pakistan, which of course also concern the United States of America, and we hope to work together. And you are doing your best and, of course, it is also my endeavor to remove all the misperceptions which are there in our bilateral relations. And I look forward to working together with you and strengthening our relations with the United States of America. F 16 Aircraft Q. Mr. President, New Zealand has said that it has agreed to lease the 28 F 16's whose sale was blocked to Pakistan in 1990. Has that received the U.S. blessing? And Mr. Prime Minister, would you accept or find acceptable such a deal which would only give you about 105 million, much, much less than you originally paid for the planes? President Clinton. Let me say that I don't presume to answer for the Prime Minister, but we have I have a report to make on this issue which is somewhat more extensive, and after we have a chance to discuss it, then we will make available, obviously, to the public where we are on this. And so I'd like to have a chance to discuss it with him, and then we'll have a statement to make on it. Impeachment Inquiry Q. Mr. President, what about the direction of the Judiciary Committee's investigation, the expansion into campaign fundraising irregularities? What should you and the White House be doing to deal with that new turn in the investigation? President Clinton. Well, you know, I have a group of lawyers handling that, and I presume they'll we'll find some time to talk about that. But the Congress, in the end, has to make its own decisions about what it will do and how it will conduct itself. It's important for me to get on with the work of the country, and that's what I'm doing here, and that's what I intend to continue to do. Q. Mr. President, why have you decided not to Future Visit to Pakistan and India Q. Inaudible on the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and would you consider anything short of that that would allow you to go ahead with the visit to Pakistan and India next year? President Clinton. I hope it will be possible for me to go next year. I've looked forward to it for a long time, and I hope I will be able to go. Obviously, I hope that the treaty will be signed. Q. But is it a condition? Pakistan India Relations Q. Mr. President, are you ready to bring both Prime Ministers from India and Pakistan here in Washington for further talks or to solve the problems of 50 years between the two countries? Prime Minister Sharif. That is inaudible . Laughter President Clinton. You know, that's work that I always like to do. I've enjoyed my opportunities to work with the parties in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland, but it only works when both parties wish the United States to be involved. Otherwise we can't be effective. Let me say that I have been very encouraged that the two Governments have resumed their direct conversations I think it's very hopeful. And I think Prime Minister Sharif has been very forthcoming in this regard. And I think he deserves a lot of credit, and I hope the people of Pakistan support his decision to continue this dialog with India. I think it's very important. At any time there's anything that I can do that both parties will agree to our doing, of course I will be happy to do it. Mergers, Layoffs, and the Global Economy Q. Sir, can I ask you a question on the could I ask you an economic question, please? Could I ask you a question on the economy, please? Thousands of people are losing their jobs at Boeing plants. Kellogg today announced a similar move. The Exxon Mobil merger is going to cause people to lose their jobs. What's your concern about the economic impact, and is there anything that the administration can do for these people? President Clinton. Well, I think on the merger question let's deal with that one first. Of course, you've heard what Exxon and Mobil have said you know where the price of oil is you know what the facts are. My position on mergers has always been that if they increase the competitiveness of the company and bring lower prices and higher quality service to the consumers of our country, then they're good. And if they don't, they aren't. And you know we've got the National Economic Council reviewing this whole merger issue. On this specific one, I have to be very careful in what I say because of the way our law works and the judgment that might have to be made by independent people in the Federal Government about that. On the Boeing and the economy generally, this is particularly with Boeing, which I am very concerned about because I've worked so hard to help Boeing and our aerospace industry generally and to get employment up I think it is clearly a result of the global financial crisis and in particular the economic problems in Asia. And that's why I have given such a high priority for the better part of a year now to trying to actually slightly more than a year now to trying to stabilize the situation there, limit the spread of the financial contagion, and then reverse conditions in Asia and restore economic growth there. I can't tell you how important it is from my point of view for the United States to be actively involved in trying to restore the conditions of growth in Asia. We can only maintain our leadership in the whole aerospace area if there are countries beyond our borders able to purchase the airplanes we produce. And this, I think, is purely and simply a function of the downturn in Asia. We saw it first in our farming communities, where the price of grain dropped because Asian purchases dropped so much. And if we can that's why I went to Korea and Japan. And if we can make progress there and see some growth coming back in Asia, then you'll see these orders the countries will be able to make good on these orders. They'll start buying the airplanes again, production lines will start up again, and they'll call the workers back. And that's my goal, before it affects other industries, to try to get that growth going back in Asia. It's very, very important to the American people to do that. At this point, one group of reporters left the room, and another group entered. Discussions With Prime Minister Sharif President Clinton. Let me say, if everyone is here, I would like to just make a brief remark. I am delighted to have the Prime Minister and members of his Government here in the Oval Office today. We value our friendship with Pakistan very much. We have a very full agenda to discuss. All of you know of my concern to limit nuclear proliferation in South Asia. I don't believe it's good for the peace and stability and security of Pakistanis or Indians or the world. And I hope we can make some progress there. But I also want to be supportive in any way that we can to help the economy of Pakistan to grow, to benefit ordinary citizens of your country. And I hope we can discuss our common interest in fighting terrorism and a number of our other interests in the region. So I am delighted to have the Prime Minister here, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Would you like to say something? Prime Minister Sharif. I have already said, Mr. President, I am delighted to be here, too. I thank you very much for extending this invitation to me. I'd like to work with you Pakistan would like to work with the United States of America. And there are a lot of issues on which we have common interest, and we will be very happy to extend all the help and assistance as far as we are concerned, especially on the issue of terrorism. And we have been fighting terrorism, and you know that we've been cooperating with the United States of America also. And all the other issues, as the President has mentioned, we have a full agenda today. We will discuss each and every thing that concerns America and Pakistan. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia Q. Pakistan has been a victim of unilateral Pakistani specific sanctions, whereas India, the country of Pakistan has been let loose to tear up all their nuclear programs. India was the one who started the first proliferation there, but still Pakistan has been a victim of the U.S. sanctions. Don't you think it was unfair? And if it was unfair, what is your administration going to do to compensate for what Pakistan has already suffered? President Clinton. Well, first of all, we have, as a part of our dialog on nonproliferation, we have actually lifted a large number of the sanctions that were applied against Pakistan to try to get economic activity going there again. And we will continue to discuss with the Prime Minister what we can do to make further progress. In terms of the test, what we were required to do was mandated by an act of Congress. There was no discretion in the executive branch about it. I have worked very hard to put our relationships back on a more normal path, and we have lifted a number of these sanctions already. And I look forward to making further progress on that. Kashmir Q. Mr. President, that's not Q. Inaudible you have been very effective in resolving the Palestine dispute in the Middle East, and would you also The President. That's a Q. I mean, to some extent. Would you also be using those good offices to resolving the Kashmir dispute which has festered and threatens a war in the subcontinent? The President. Well, that is work that I think is important to do. I've worked, as you pointed out, in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. But the United States can be effective in that role only when both parties want us to do so. There is no case in which we have injected ourselves into a dispute in the absence of the agreement of both sides, because otherwise it doesn't work. I will say this. I want to applaud the Prime Minister for supporting resumption of direct talks with the Indians. I think that is very important. I think if you look at, if you imagine what the world could be like in, let's say, 20 years if the dispute over Kashmir were resolved and South Asia India and Pakistan were both reconciled to each other and focused on a positive future, I think the potential for increased prosperity among ordinary citizens and increased global influence that both have is virtually unlimited. I think this conflict is holding both nations back and diminishing the quality of life of ordinary citizens. So I would do anything I could to help to resolve it. But the most important thing is that the leaders are discussing it again they're working on it. And I think what they need, what both leaders need, is a little elbow room from the political forces in their country and from ordinary citizens, because we see in place after place after place, when people can resolve old differences, then they can look to new possibilities. And if you look at the potential that Pakistan and India have for economic growth and for solving a lot of the personal problems that ordinary people have, it's absolutely staggering. There's no place on Earth with a greater potential for development in the next 30 years than South Asia, no place. And if this thorn can be taken from the sides of the people, that will occur. So I would support that in any way I could. Q. Can I have a followup? Q. Mr. President President Clinton. Yes, yes, one more. Future Visit to Pakistan and India Q. Will you renew your plan to visit the subcontinent, that you canceled last year? President Clinton. Let me say two things before you go. First of all, on the question I very much hope it will be possible for me to go next year. I have looked forward to going for many years. As I think you know, my wife had a wonderful trip not very long ago, and I want to go, and I hope it will be possible for me to go. One other thing, Prime Minister, if you'll indulge me before the Pakistani press leaves, I think I would like to say to the people of Pakistan, on behalf of not just myself personally but the United States, our country has been enormously enriched by the presence of Pakistani American citizens and immigrants. And we are a stronger, better place today because of the people who have come from Pakistan to the United States, and that makes me all the more determined to try to be a positive force and a good friend and a good partner. And I hope we're going to make some progress today. November 30, 1998 Thank you very much, Secretary Albright, and thank you for your work for peace in the Middle East. Chairman Arafat, welcome back to the United States. We're delighted to see you. I think it's fair to say that both of us have had more sleep than we had had the last time we met at the Wye Plantation, and I'm delighted to have a chance to meet with Chairman Arafat this morning. I thank all the representatives who are here from Israel, the other countries of the Middle East of course, the Norwegian delegation, the European Union, our friends from Asia, and Mr. Wolfensohn from the World Bank, and others. Let me first of all say I had a good meeting with Chairman Arafat this morning. We reviewed both the progress made by both sides since the Wye memorandum was signed and the essential next steps on the road to peace, including the task of this conference, stimulating Palestinian economic growth. Chairman Arafat reaffirmed his pledge to uphold his side of the agreement and to work with Israeli authorities to promote Israel's security. I promised the continuing support of the United States as we move ahead in the next phase of the peace process. That phase begins today with this conference. Today our purpose is to send a clear signal that this peace is more than a piece of paper, that the promise imagined at Oslo can become a concrete reality a true peace, a growing peace, good for Palestinians, good for Israelis, good for the region and the world. There are roughly 50 international states and organizations represented here this morning. Most of you have traveled a great distance. I thank you for your persistence and for your generosity. We must convince those who have invested so much in this process that it was a sound investment. We must look at Gaza and the West Bank in a new light, not as battlegrounds but as energetic places at the crossroads of the Middle East, endowed with well educated populations, strongly supported by the Palestinian community around the world, ripe for further development once investors see that the peace agreement truly is taking hold. For too long, too many young people have turned to terrorism and old hatreds, partly because they had nothing better to do. We must give them a different future to believe in. Every step toward opportunity is a step away from violence. Palestinians have a right to the same things all people aspire to to be part of a normal, even happy, society where children receive a decent education, where there are jobs to go around and decent health care, where people's memories are reconciled with their hopes for the future and there is no fear. Despite our best efforts since 1993, an honest assessment would lead us to the conclusion that we have not realized all our intentions. There has been too little tangible improvement in the lives of the Palestinian people. Per capita income is down. Unemployment is too high. Living conditions are extremely difficult. At the outset of the next phase of the peace process, we must candidly acknowledge that we have to change these circumstances. No peace stands a chance of lasting if it does not deliver real results to ordinary people. Our challenge today, therefore, is to do more to deliver these results and to do it sooner rather than later. I would like to make just a few more points before I let you move on to the business at hand. First, peace is built on compromise, and with any compromise, it is important to address the genuine needs of both parties. Both sides have made sacrifices to get where we are, including at the recent Wye summit. Both have taken steps since then to keep the process moving forward. There have been bumps in the road, to be sure, but the agreement is on track, and we must keep it on track. By our words and our actions, we must keep lending our support, anticipating problems before they arise, encouraging the parties to uphold their commitments, building confidence in both the Palestinian and Israeli people through sustained external support. These will be my goals when I visit the region in 2 weeks. Second, we must persuade private organizations and individuals to join governments in deepening investments in the region. While public assistance can jump start development, ultimately the private sector holds the key. There must be greater investment of private resources in Gaza and the West Bank. Each vote of confidence makes the infrastructure a little stronger. Each investment makes previous investments more likely to succeed. It is good economic policy, and it's the right thing to do. Third, I am convinced for this peace to be real and lasting, it must be regional. Trade and investment must flourish throughout the Middle East, between the Arab world and Palestinians and also between the Arab world and Israelis. There can be no road different from this that leads to a just and lasting peace. Many nations here have contributed significant resources already, including Norway, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the nations of the EU, and others. We saw a concrete result last week with the opening of the new airport in Gaza, built with international assistance, a powerful symbol of the Palestinian people's connection to the rest of the world. Institutions like the World Bank are helping, too, ensuring that donor pledges are matched with broad development strategies. The United States has been proud to support these efforts and will continue to do so. The Middle East is profoundly important to our country, for all our citizens who love peace, stability, and the kindness of neighbor to neighbor. Virtues can be found in every faith that trace their roots to the Holy Land. Today I want to announce that I intend to work closely with our Congress on developing a package to provide an additional 400 million to assist the Palestinian people, funds to help create jobs, improve basic education, enhance access to water, support the rule of law. This amount is in addition to the regular annual contribution provided by the United States, which will reach 100 million next year. A great deal remains to be done, but I urge you to remember how much can be accomplished in just a year. At the beginning of 1998, Northern Ireland was dominated by its divisions, how they were drawn, and who was on what side. Today, the most important dividing line is whether one believes in the past or the future. Through courageous decision and a steady tide of investment, the people there are seeing peace grow from wish to fulfillment. Prosperity there, too, is the key to making it happen. A breakthrough occurred at the Wye summit because the parties decided to look forward, not backward, to focus on the need for security and on tangible economic benefits like the Gaza airport, the future seaport, the safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, the Gaza industrial estate, which may provide employment for up to 20,000 Palestinians. All these will enable the predictable movement of people and goods, crucial to building a healthy investment climate. Every economy needs a chance to breathe. These steps will provide good breathing room. All of you here today know how important your work is. Too many lives have already been lost in the Middle East, from prime ministers to simple passers by who became random victims of the burning hatred. Today you help again to change this dynamic. Today you know we have the best chance for peace there in our lifetimes. By building prosperity in Gaza and in the West Bank, by promoting regional economic cooperation, by giving young Palestinians a chance to channel their dreams into positive opportunities, you lay the groundwork for a peace that will last not for a year or a lifetime but for generations to come. We are honored to have you in the United States, and we wish you well in this important endeavor. Thank you very much. November 21, 1998 President Kim. Good afternoon. I wholeheartedly welcome President Clinton's visit today, which marks his third visit during his term in office. The fact that in the first year of the new government in Korea we have had an exchange of summit meetings demonstrates to our peoples and the rest of the world the solidity of the alliance that binds our two countries. We, the two heads of state, as we had agreed during the summit meeting in June in Washington, have decided to take the Korea U.S. relationship to a higher level of partnership into the 21st century based on our shared treasured values of democracy and market economy. Through my second summit meeting with President Clinton after my inauguration, I have had a broad and indepth consultation with President Clinton on the political situation on the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia, the East Asian economic crisis, and regional and global issues of common interest. In particular, our consultation focused primarily on the following four areas First, we agreed that the security alliance between the two countries must stand firm and solid. President Clinton reaffirmed the unwavering security commitment of the U.S. toward the Republic of Korea, and we, the two heads of state, agreed that his visit has provided an opportunity to further strengthen the close security alliance. Second, President Clinton and I reviewed North Korea's recent attitudes towards the Republic of Korea and the United States, and we appreciated the present state of exchanges and cooperation between the North and the South. Given the current situation on the Korean Peninsula, we also agreed that the policy of engagement is the best policy from a realistic standpoint and that this ought to be pursued with consistency. We also noted the contribution of the Geneva agreed framework, the contribution the framework is making toward peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula as well as the global efforts for nuclear nonproliferation. We affirmed that we will continue to work together to keep the light water reactor construction going smoothly. However, we, the two heads of state, we made it clear that we will not tolerate any possible attempt of North Korea to proliferate nuclear weapons, missiles, and other weapons of mass destruction, and decided to closely coordinate in talking with the North on a wide range of pending issues. In particular, President Clinton and I had a full exchange of views regarding the suspicion surrounding underground construction activity within the North. I told President Clinton that the Korean Government considers this issue as a very serious one, given its implication for the security of the Peninsula, and we would continue to spare no efforts in supporting the U.S. endeavor to pursue its resolution. We have stressed that all necessary steps should be taken to clarify the purpose and character of the underground sites through full access. We have required North Korea to clear the suspicion and help implement the Geneva agreed framework smoothly. We reaffirmed that the roles that the parties directly concerned, the South and the North, must play in resolving the problems on the Peninsula are important and agreed that the neighboring countries should spare no effort for the South and the North to make progress in dialog and play a leading role. We have noted the establishment of the subcommittees and other positive developments in the third plenary session of the four party talks and decided to continue to work together to produce more substantive results in the future. Third, we, the two heads of state, had an indepth consultation on how to promote economic cooperation between the two countries. President Clinton reiterated his firm support for Korea's efforts to move past the economic crisis. I explained the steps the Korean Government has taken to reform the economy, and President Clinton expressed the view that even though the Government reform measures might accompany short term difficulties, they will eventually lead to an early resolution of the economic crisis. And he offered to lend as much support as possible. I appreciated the leadership the United States has shown in the efforts to help Korea overcome the economic crisis and asked the President for further cooperation in this regard, emphasizing that greater foreign investment is what Korea needs to resolve the economic difficulties at an early date. President Clinton, for his part, said that he will send a trade and investment delegation, led by Commerce Secretary Daley, sometime early next year, and we decided to work together to ensure the early signing of a bilateral investment treaty. I expressed my satisfaction with a smooth implementation of the economic measures that were agreed upon in the last summit meeting. In particular, I noted with gratitude that the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation resumed investment guarantee programs in Korea and welcomed the productive discussions held through the Korea U.S. economic subcabinet consultation that resumed in early November, after a hiatus of 3 years. President Clinton and I also decided to work together to resolve economic and trade issues in a mutually beneficial manner, as seen from the amicable resolution of the automobile talks. We also agreed to make concerted efforts on the basis of internationally agreed principles to expand electronic commerce and to resolve the Y2K problem. Through extra meetings and other means, our two countries will closely cooperate in these areas as well. Fourth, President Clinton and I decided to work together towards a closer partnership in regional and global issues. As part of these efforts, we agreed to search for measures to simultaneously foster democracy and market economy in Asia. In this regard, we decided to create a democracy forum to bring together young leaders from the Asian region, led by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy and the Korean Sejong Research Institute. The two institutions will continue to work out further details. At the same time, President Clinton and I shared the view that coordination through the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, APEC, and other multilateral institutions is needed, and agreed to work together closely to overcome the East Asian economic crisis. Likewise, we found today that our views over a wide range of issues are in total accord. In this respect, I believe today's meeting was a valuable opportunity to deepen the close policy coordination and the mutual trust between the two countries. Thank you. President Clinton. First of all, I would like to thank President Kim for making the American delegation feel so welcome here in Korea. The importance of our relationship with Korea is evidenced by the fact that this is the second meeting President Kim and I have had in just a few months and that I am accompanied on this trip by a very distinguished delegation, including five Members of our United States Congress, who are here with me today, and many distinguished members of our administration. We all view President Kim as one of the world's great champions of democracy, an inspiration because of his longstanding faith, his firmness, his capacity for forgiveness, and his foresight, which I have seen again today. We did a lot of work today to advance our common commitments and interests. Much of it has already been described by the President, but I would like to say a few words. First, with regard to security, our goal is what it has always been, a peaceful Korea, part of a prosperous Asia. America stands by its unshakable alliance with the Republic of Korea. The alliance is based on a history of shared sacrifice and a future of united purpose, to defend freedom and to secure a stable and permanent peace on this Peninsula. President Kim and I continue to support an approach that is a clear eyed mix of diplomacy, through the four party talks and President Kim's engagement policy nonproliferation, through the agreed framework and the missile talks and deterrence against North Korean aggression, through our defense cooperation. I support President Kim's policy of gradual engagement with North Korea. The four party peace talks offer the best avenue to a lasting settlement, but they demand tremendous patience and perseverance. Both President Kim and I, as you heard him say, are convinced that the agreed framework is the best way to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, provided Pyongyang abides by its commitments. Now, North Korea's recent actions, including the Taepodong missile launch and the construction of a suspect underground facility, are cause for deep concern. We have made it clear to Pyongyang that it must satisfy our concerns and that further provocations will threaten the progress we have made. The President and I, as he said, also addressed economics. Let me, first of all, say that the people of the United States extend their great support and understanding for all the pain and dislocation the people of Korea have endured in this economic crisis. But we admire the tough choices that President Kim's administration has made to address the financial crisis and to put Korea back on the path to economic growth. We also admire the support that average citizens here have given to making tough choices for a better tomorrow. It is encouraging to us that interest rates have fallen and Korea's currency has stabilized. The U.S. has worked to support Korea's efforts with bilateral assistance and through the IMF and the multilateral development banks. To aid trade and investment, our Export Import Bank, whose Director is here with us today, has offered an unprecedented 4 billion in credit, which over the next 2 years will support 8 billion in exports. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation has reopened its operations here to help the return of private investment. And we have just agreed to expand our agricultural export credits. Earlier this week we joined with Japan to create the Asian growth and recovery initiative to help accelerating restructuring in the corporate and financial sectors, to help to work through the debt so that private sector growth can occur again here and throughout Asia. And we particularly want to support President Kim's efforts to protect the most vulnerable members of Korean society. I know that Korea has endured much pain and still has a difficult road to travel, including reforming the financial sector, facilitating corporate restructuring, getting all the people back to work. The United States will support your efforts. It is very important that all segments of this society, including all the conglomerates, pay their part, as well. The President cannot do this alone. The Government cannot do this alone. The people, with all their good wishes, still need the help of all segments of this society. The United States looks to Korea for its leadership in maintaining and expanding open markets during Asia's economic difficulties. We are especially grateful for Korea's leadership in APEC and supporting our sectoral liberalization initiative that we have in common. At the same time, we also hope Korea will continue to open its markets, resist the temptation to protectionism. As President Kim said, we are very encouraged by the recent agreement to open Korea's automobile markets to American manufacturers. And I did ask the President to make sure we have special care to prevent unfair trade practices or subsidization in sensitive sectors like steel and semiconductors. Let me finally say that President Kim is one of the world's most eloquent advocates for the proposition that democracy and prosperity must go hand in hand. Here in Asia, countries that are responding to the financial crisis by deepening their democracy, Korea, Thailand, for example, are faring better because the difficult solutions they propose have more legitimacy with their people. Over the long run, democracy and good governance will be vital to economic growth. The information driven economies of the 21st century will be measuring the true wealth of their nations by the free flow of ideas and creativity. Therefore, as President Kim has said, I welcome, too, the establishment here in Korea of a new forum on democracy and free markets to be led by the Korean Sejong Institute and our own NED. I also want to thank President Kim for Korea's many contributions to peacekeeping, its defense of human rights and democracy in places like Burma, its growing support for the fight against global warming. We are proud of our strong alliance with Korea, proud that Korea has a visionary President willing to take on the challenges of today and the dreams of tomorrow. And we are committed to maintaining and improving our partnership in security, in economics, in the pursuit of freedom and democracy. Thank you very much. South Korean official. Thank you very much. And now your questions, please. First, a Korean reporter, and then a foreign reporter we'll take turns. For the Korean reporters, I will be giving the speaking turns. For the foreign, American reporters, the White House spokesman will be giving the turns. North Korea Q. Regarding engagement vis a vis the North, both of you are actively supportive of engagement. There are positive and negative signs. The Kumgang Mountain tourism development is a positive sign. But on the other hand, we have suspicions about its underground construction site. President Kim, without the nature of the underground construction site having been ascertained, do you still plan to stay with engagement? How far can you go? And President Clinton, I know there are hardliners in Congress vis a vis the North. The Congress has said that unless the suspicion is alleviated by May, it will be cutting its support for the heavy fuel oil to the North. Given the situation, do you think you will be able to ascertain the exact nature of the underground facilities? President Kim. I will be answering first. North Korea, as you have said, is showing two sides, both negative and positive sides. Let us discuss the positive side first. As you know, the Kumgang Mountain tourism ship is in the North. The tourism program is smoothly on track. This project was made possible because the North Korean leader, Kim Jong il, personally met with the honorary chairman of Hyundai to conclude the agreement on this project. This, to us, indicates a significant change in the North Korean attitude. Secondly, the military armistice commission, which was halted during the past 7 years, has been revived under a different name. We now call it the general officers talks, but it carries out the same functions. So the military dialog has been resumed. Thirdly, over the suspected underground construction site, the United States continues to engage the North in dialog. And fourth, the North Korean Constitution has been amended to introduce elements of the market economy. And given the nature of the North Korean regime, a very stiff ideologue regime which rules by ideology, the changes in the Constitution is very significant. And finally, in the four party talks in the third plenary of the four party talks, the four sides reached agreement to establish two subcommittees to discuss peace on the Korean Peninsula. These are the positive developments. But as you say, there are the negative signs. For example, the infiltration of North Korean submarines into our territorial waters. The suspected underground construction site is another negative indication. And of course, the Taepodong missile launching has raised tension not only on the Korean Peninsula but in Japan and the United States it was a great shock. These are some of the negative developments. Thus, for the positive signals, we should further encourage that we should try to build upon those positive signs. But on the negative side, these are all serious issues, especially the construction site, the suspicion over the construction site. We must require full access and ways to ascertain the nature and the purposes of the construction site. If it is, in fact, proven that it is nuclear related, we should demand immediate closedown. On missiles, too, we must urge for solutions, for talks with the North toward resolving the issue. So we must be firm on these issues, and depending on how the North reacts, responds to these requirements, the United States, Korea, and Japan and the other countries can consult and come out with a common response. Thank you. President Clinton. I will be very brief. You asked about the feeling in our Congress. I do believe that next year when the time for review comes up, if there is a conviction in the United States Congress that North Korea has not kept its commitments under the agreed framework or has done other things which, in effect, make our efforts to resolve nuclear and other issues doomed to failure, then there will be great reluctance to continue to fund the American responsibilities under the agreed framework. That's why it's so important that we get access to this site, this questionable site where, I want to make it clear, we have strong information that raises a suspicion, but no one yet knows for sure, at least in our camp, what the facility is and what its intended purpose is, specifically. But it raises a strong suspicion. We need access to it. Now, let me back up one step and just make two points very quickly. First point To date, the agreed framework has done its job. We are convinced that without the agreement to prevent the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel rods, North Korea already would have produced a sizable amount of weapons grade plutonium. Also, the agreement framework has given us a forum, if you will, a means to deal with other issues the MIA remains, terrorism, the fourparty talks, and the missile issue, which is very important as well. So, could missile launches without notification, the construction of suspect facilities, other provocations undermine the policy we are pursuing? Of course, it could. I have appointed my former Defense Secretary, Bill Perry, as our Special Coordinator for Korea Policy to intensify our efforts to make sure we have the best possible policy. But if it does not work, it will be because of actions by the North Koreans. I am absolutely convinced that President Kim has done the right thing. I am absolutely convinced that the policies we have followed together have been correct. And it would be a sad thing, indeed, if for no good end over the long run the North Koreans were to make it impossible for us to go forward, because this is the right way forward. Situation in Iraq Q. Mr. President, in another trouble spot, Iraq today balked at a U.N. request for documents relating to its weapons program and laid out conditions for the U.N. inspectors. Is this a breach of Iraq's promise for unconditional cooperation and what would be the consequences? President Clinton. Well, first of all, I think it's important that we not overreact here on the first day. I want to make sure that I know exactly what the facts are. I believe that the one thing that I would like to say, though, to Iraq and to the world, is that we think there are some affirmative obligations here. For most of the last several years, including the time when I've been President and the time before I was President, when most people would say that Iraq was cooperating with UNSCOM, their idea of cooperation was not to do anything affirmative to prevent UNSCOM from moving around a country that is a very large country. But for most of the time, they took no affirmative steps, as was their duty under the United Nations resolutions. Now, I think that Mr. Butler is a professional person. They are testing Iraq's commitments. And I hope that Iraq will comply, as it said it would in the letters just a few days ago, with the letter and the spirit of the U.N. resolutions, and give them the information they seek. Now, if they have some independent grounds for objecting to some of this information that is, if they think it's some effort to find out something having nothing to do with matters covered by the U.N. resolutions they ought to say that, and then we should immediately resolve it. But if they want the sanctions lifted because they have complied with all the U.N. resolutions on weapons, they have to give the information on the documents. And the longer they take to come up with the information on the documents and get to the bottom of this, the harder it's going to be to convince everyone else that they should get what they want. So this documentation, this information issue, is quite important. I will get extensively briefed on it, and we'll see where the other folks are on it. But I think the important thing is, Mr. Butler is a professional, and he's clearly trying to get information that he believes is essential to do his job. And I think the rest of us should support that. North Korea Q. First of all, North Korea's long range missiles development a question to President Clinton. According to Washington Post, according to Madam Albright's comment, North Korea's long range missile development is a cause of great concern. She says that relations with the North are at a critical point. It represented a rather hard line stance. The American administration, in cooperation with our Government, has maintained engagement vis a vis the North, but in light of these comments, the recent comments, and in light of President Clinton's remark that the North must cooperate in the efforts to ascertain the nature of the suspected facilities to our satisfaction, does this in fact require a change in your stance vis a vis the North? President Clinton. Is that a question for me or President Kim? Q. That was a question to you, Mr. President. President Clinton. I don't see this as a change. I see this as the potential for changed circumstances that is, we have proceeded on the assumption that we would be making progress and that North Korea would honor the agreed framework as we have honored it and others have. We just had a very hopeful development in Japan, for example, where the Japanese Government agreed to put in a very large amount of money to support the KEDO project, again in furtherance of this agreement we made with North Korea. So let me say again, I do not want to change policy. I support what President Kim is trying to do here. I think it is a wise policy, and I hope that the North Koreans will not do anything to force us to change policy. Indonesia Q. Mr. President, more than a dozen people have died in Indonesia in the last 10 days in clashes between protesters and Indonesian military forces. In your view, is President Habibie moving fast enough on political and economic reform? And are the Indonesian forces using excessive force in confronting the protesters? President Clinton. On the second question, I think the candid answer is the best. I don't know that I have enough facts at this moment to give you the right answer. On the first, all I can tell you is that there have been some hopeful signs over the last several months and some troubling signs coming out of Indonesia. I think if you look at the experience I'll tell you what I hope will happen. If you look at the experience of Korea and the terrible difficulties the Korean people have endured, it is a profound argument in favor of having a government lead its people through tough times with the support of the people, not relying on power wielded in a military fashion but relying on the spirit and the support of the people. And so I think the important thing is that the United States hopes very much that there will be no backsliding as we come up into the election season in Indonesia, and that every effort will be made to minimize any harm to people who are exercising their voices to make their political views heard. North Korea Q. President Kim, during your visit to the U.S. in June, President Clinton and you, I believe, discussed the easing of economic sanctions to the North. Was this issue discussed during today's meeting? President Kim. During our meeting today, there was no mention regarding the easing of sanctions, but there were some in the discussion I think you can find answers to your question. As of now, North Korea, should it continue to engage in troublesome activities, we will deal with a firm, resolute attitude. If it responds to our calls for peace and cooperation, then we will return that with cooperative measures. That was the extent to which our discussions went. The suspicion over the North Korean suspected underground site, on missiles if the North responds in a cooperative fashion to our requirements in these regards, then, of course, we can respond with positive incentives, favorable responses. And I think the spirit of such an attitude is quite clear in the statement that the two of us made today. President Clinton. I know you didn't ask me a question, but I would like to say something to support President Kim here. Yesterday when we came here, our whole American delegation, including all the members of the press, a lot of us went into our rooms, and we turned on the television. And what was the picture? The picture was the tourist ship going into the North. Right? That's what the picture was. To us, this was amazing, and it was a very beautiful picture. Now, what is the picture in our minds in this press conference? It is of some hole in the ground somewhere in North Korea where something might or might not be done, which might or might not be threatening to us in the future. Now, I ask you I ask the North Koreans to think about this they have a great opportunity here, an historic opportunity with the leadership of President Kim and the position that he has taken. We strongly support it. Never, nothing could ever be put into that hole in the ground given our defense partnership here, nothing could ever be put in that hole in the ground that would give the North Koreans as much advantage, as much power, as much wealth, as much happiness as more of those ships going up there full of people from here. I think that is the most important message I would like to leave with you today. Impeachment Inquiry Q. Mr. President, you said before that it's up to Congress to decide your fate, but you have also said that you want to restore honor to your Presidency and bring closure to the Nation. Sir, do you personally believe that you should face some kind of punishment and that this requires some kind of punishment to bring closure to the Nation, like an apology before Congress? President Clinton. Well, first of all, again I say, there has been a lot of suffering that is different from punishment, although it's hard to see the difference sometimes as you're going through it. For me, this long ago ceased to be a political issue or a legal issue and became a personal one. And every day I do my best to put it right, personally. It is simply not appropriate at this time, in my view, for me to comment on what the Congress should do. The American people and Congress can I hope will do the right I trust the American people, and I hope Congress will do the right thing in a nonpolitical way, if you will, to get beyond the partisanship and go on. I do believe that the long awaited acknowledgment that there is nothing on which to proceed in the travel issue and the file issue and Whitewater which this matter was supposed to be about is a positive thing. I think, surely, it will help us to get this over with. But my only concern, as I said, is that we get this behind us and go on with the business of the country. But I think the less I say about what should happen to me at this point, the better. To me it's I need to focus on the work I came here to do, and others need to make that decision. November 19, 1998 Prime Minister, Mrs. Obuchi, members of the Japanese delegation, and honored guests. First, let me say on behalf of the American delegation, I thank you for your warm hospitality. It is a pleasure to look around this room tonight and see so many friendly faces from my previous trips to Japan your distinguished predecessors, your Ambassador and former Ambassadors, distinguished business leaders. The relationship between our two countries has always been important, but never more important than now. I, too, enjoyed our meeting in New York 2 months ago. Tonight I am delighted to be back in the Akasaka Palace. I also Prime Minister, I feel terrible about the schedule which we are on together, but since you mentioned it, perhaps we can make sure that we both stay awake at the dinner tonight. Laughter Let me say, in all seriousness, too, I was deeply honored to be received by the Emperor and the Empress today, and very much appreciated the visit that we had and the good wishes they sent to my family. Since my last visit here in the spring of 1996, strong winds have blown across the world, disrupting economies in every region. There have also been threats to peace and stability, from acts of terrorism to weapons of mass destruction. Yet, the world has made progress in the face of adversity. It is more peaceful today than it was 2 years ago when I was here. Hope has come to Northern Ireland. Peru and Ecuador have resolved their longstanding dispute. Bosnia is building a self sustaining peace. A humanitarian disaster has been averted in Kosovo, and the people there have, now, hope for regaining their autonomy. The Middle East is back on the long road to peace. All of these areas of progress have one thing in common They represent the triumph of a wide circle of nations working together, not only the nations directly affected but a community of nations that brings adversaries to the table to settle their differences. Year in and year out, Japan's generous contributions to peacekeeping efforts and your eloquent defense of the idea of global harmony have gone far to make this a safer world. In Central America, you have provided disaster relief in the wake of Hurricane Mitch. I should say, Mr. Prime Minister, that I wish my wife were with me tonight, but she is there, where they had the worst hurricane disaster in 200 years. And I thank you for helping people so far from your home. In the Middle East, you have contributed substantial funds to aid the peace process. In recent months you have further advanced the cause of peace by taking your relations with Asian neighbors to a new and significantly higher level of cooperation. And despite economic difficulties at home, you have contributed to recovery efforts throughout Asia. That is true leadership. Now, Mr. Prime Minister, you have made difficult decisions to overcome your own economic challenges. The path back to growth and stability will require your continued leadership, but we hope to work with you every step of the way. In dealing with these difficulties, Japan can lead Asia into a remarkable new century, a century of global cooperation for greater peace and freedom, greater democracy and prosperity, greater protection of our environment, greater scientific discovery and space exploration. At the center of all our efforts is the strong bond between the people of the United States and the people of Japan. Our security alliance is the cornerstone of Asia's stability. Our friendship demonstrates to Asia and to the world that very different societies can work together in a harmony that benefits everyone. Two fine examples of our recent cooperation are the new Asia growth and recovery initiative that you and I recently announced, Prime Minister, and, as you mentioned, the space shuttle Discovery, which included your remarkable astronaut Chiaki Mukai. I understand that when Dr. Mukai spoke with you from space, Prime Minister, she offered the first three lines of a five line poem, a tanka poem, and she invited the people of Japan to provide the final two lines. I want to try my hand at this. As I understand it, her lines were Spinning somersaults Without gravity's limits In space flight with Glenn. I would add All is possible on Earth and in the heavens When our countries join hands. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to join me in a toast to the Prime Minister and Mrs. Obuchi and to the people of Japan. November 19, 1998 Opening Remarks Tetsuya Chikushi. We have our special guest today who has the biggest influence and responsibility to the future of humankind. We have this most important bilateral relations, and he's the most responsible person in all of the United States. We are very happy to have him, to greet him with a large number of audience. Mr. Bill Clinton, the President of the United States. Mr. President, welcome to our program, and I appreciate your choice to join us. It's really an honor. I will skip any more ceremonial remarks inaudible . To begin with, you have something to say to the people. The President. Yes. I will be very brief so that we can leave the most time possible for questions. But I would like to begin by thanking you and this station for making this program possible. I thank all of you for participating and also those in Osaka who are joining us. I would like to open by just emphasizing some things I think we all know. First, the relationship between the United States and Japan is very, very important to both countries and to the world. We have a very broad partnership in the security area, in the political area, in the economic area. Over the years, there is sometimes greater emphasis on one issue than another. Over the years, sometimes America is having particular problems sometimes Japan is. But the enduring nature of our democratic partnership across all the differences between our peoples is profoundly important. And on the edge of this new century and a new millennium, when there is so much change in the way people work and live and relate to each other, it will become more important. That's why I'm here and why I wanted to be a part of this townhall meeting. And I thank you very much. Mr. Chikushi. Thank you very much. There are about 100 people here and 30 people in Osaka, the second largest city, and everybody wants to discuss with you, to make some questions. And also, we gathered questions nationwide through Internet and facsimile. To start with, I would like to ask some casual questions, and I would like to expect a brief answer. From now on, I'd like to speak in Japanese. We have many questions from children, many of them with inaudible . I will pick one from the fifth grader of the primary school "Did you have good grades at school when you were a kid?" Laughter The President. Mostly. Laughter Mr. Chikushi. Next question. Chelsea Clinton Q. Inaudible when Chelsea, your daughter, was born, how much were you involved in baby raising, child raising? The President. I'm sorry, would you read Q. How much were you involved in raising her? The President. When my daughter was born, how involved was I with her? I was very involved with her from the time she was a very small baby, and always going to her events, working with her on her homework until it became too difficult for me laughter and trying to be a big part of her life. So, my wife and I both tried to be very involved in her life, and we still try to be, although she has reached an age where I don't think she thinks it's always such a good idea. Laughter Public Speaking Q. I am very bad in speaking in front of large number of people and also the same question from the junior high school student how can you speak so well in front of the large number of people? Could you give us some tip? The President. My only advice is to imagine, no matter how many people are in your audience, that you're speaking to a few of your friends because, look at the camera, the camera will take us to millions of people. I have been in crowds the largest crowd I've been in was in Ghana in West Africa. We had maybe 400,000 or 500,000 people. But on the television, there are millions. And if you're in a big crowd, well, the microphone is your friend. You can speak normally because the sound will carry. And I think many people have trouble speaking in public because they think they have to change. And you don't have to change. You just have to be yourself. Imagine you are at home, entertaining some friends, sharing something with your family, and speaking the way you would when your heart was engaged and your mind was engaged about something you cared about in your own life. That's my only advice. Mr. Chikushi. Well, thank you. So, that being said, let's go into our Q A session. So you spoke very well as President. Now talk about leadership and about your personality. I would like to welcome questions regarding leadership or his personality or the President as a person. Pressures of the Presidency Q. I'm involved in welfare. I am sure you feel a lot of pressure being President. Have you ever felt that you wanted to get away from these pressures? And also, how are you coping with these tremendous pressures as President? The President. Well, of course, sometimes you want to get away from it. But I think the important thing is not to be overwhelmed by the work, that only people have these jobs and you have to take some time for family and some time for recreation. I spend a lot of time reading. I probably read more than I did before I became President. I exercise every day. I play a lot of golf, not as much as I wish but some, and certainly not as well as I wish. Laughter And I try to stay in touch with my family members beyond our home and also my friends around the country. And all these things help to keep balance in my life. I try to make sure on the weekends I spend time with my family. I take time to attend my church services. I do the things that remind me that I'm a normal person and I need a balanced life. And I think that's important. President's Legacy Q. I work for Kirin Beer Company. Thank you very much for this great opportunity. I really appreciate it. And I would like to congratulate you on the result of the midterm elections back in the United States. Now, my question You're the 42d President of the United States. What would you like people in the future to remember you for? The President. I would like to be remembered for having restored American confidence and opportunity, prepared America for the 21st century, and deepened America's partnership with people around the world to create a world more full of opportunities for ordinary citizens, more committed to preserving the environment, and more committed to working together for peace and prosperity. I believe we're moving into a world where our interdependence with one another will be critical to maintaining our independence, as nations and as individuals. And I would like to be remembered as a President who prepared my country and the world for the 21st century. And I like your beer. Laughter Japan's Leadership Q. I'm inaudible from Sony Corporation inaudible in Japan the leadership is not as good as we would like it to be. What do you think inaudible ? The President. Well, first of all, I think that, to be fair to the present leadership, Prime Minister Obuchi and his team, they have not had enough time for people to make a firm judgment. They just recently took office. That's the first point I would make, because the difficulties, the challenges Japan has today will not be solved overnight. For example, when I became President in 1993, I had to make some very difficult decisions. And in the midterm elections in 1994, like the ones we just had, between the Presidential elections, my party suffered great losses. And people who voted for the tough decisions that I advocated, many of them were defeated because the people had not yet felt the benefits of the things which were done. So the first thing I would say is, do not judge too harshly too quickly. The second thing I would say is, I think that the big things that have been done here are essentially moving in the right direction, the banking reform, stimulating the economy. The third point I would make is that for leadership, you need first to know what is going on you have to have a clear analysis of the present situation. Then you have to have a vision of the future you're trying to create. Without a vision, the rest of this doesn't matter. Then you have to have an action plan to achieve the vision. And then finally, in the world we're living in, where we do things like this, you must be able to have all kinds of ordinary citizens be able to buy into it, to support it, to say, "Yes, this will be good for me, good for my family, good for my future I wish to be a part of this." And that, I think, is the great challenge of modern leadership how to mobilize large numbers of people, even if unpopular things have to be done. Monetary Rewards and Public Service A participant commented that while many business leaders had amassed great wealth over the past 6 years, the President could not do so, given his income as President. He asked what kept the President motivated since he could not seek a third term. The President. Well, first of all, you're right I can't run for a third term under our laws. It's a good thing, because if I could, I would, I think. Laughter I like the work very much. But I think, first of all, people who get into public service must have a decision that they are not going to make as much money as they could make if they were doing something else. However, it is important that we pay them enough money so they can at least support their families, raise their children, pay their bills. Beyond that, I think that most people who are in public service should just be content, if they can raise their children and pay their bills, to think that when they get out of public service, they can do a little better. And that's the way I've always looked at it. It never bothered me that I didn't make much money. That's not what was important to me in life. And I think that as long as there are rewards to public service in terms of being able to achieve what you wish to do that is, help other people, help your country move forward I think good people will wish to do it. I don't think that money will ever be able to attract quality people to public service. But if you expect people to starve, you can drive good people away. Mr. Chikushi. Then we'll switch to Osaka. I guess they are waiting inaudible which is known for the shrine of the merchants we have 30 people here they are very vigorous Osakans. And 15 involved in retail business and 15 ladies that are present here, waiting for the opportunity to ask questions. We will start from a man. First Family Q. I'm involved in the metal business. Mr. President, out of the dishes that your wife cooks, what do you like best, and how much do you eat with your family a month? How many times do you eat with your family a month? The President. Well, of course, our daughter has now gone to university, but my wife and I have dinner together every night when we're both home. That is, unless she has to go out to an engagement or I do, we always have dinner together. I would say probably 4 times a week we have dinner together, and maybe 3 times a week one of the two of us is out at night or out of town. Over the last 20 years, of course, it's fairly well known in America that I like all different kinds of food. A lot of people make fun of me because of that. But I suppose my favorite dish is a Mexican dish, chicken enchiladas. That's what I really like the best, although I like sushi, too. Laughter Q. Very nice to meet you. I have two children. I am a housewife. So nice to meet you, or talk to you. I have a question regarding Miss Monica Lewinsky. How did you apologize to Mrs. Clinton and Chelsea? And I'm sure I would never be able to forgive my husband for doing that, but did they really forgive you, Mr. President? The President. Well, I did it in a direct and straightforward manner, and I believe they did, yes. Laughter But that's really a question you could ask them better than me. Okinawa Mr. Chikushi. Thank you very much. We'll go back to you, our viewers in Osaka. Let's change the topic now. Now our bilateral relationship is the most important of all bilateral relationships. Let's talk about U.S. Japan relationship. We collected about 4,000 questions from all over Japan, and the most popular questions were regarding Okinawa, American base issue of Okinawa. There are two independent countries, allies, but one country has the military presence in another country for a long time in such a large scale. Is it good for our relationship? Isn't it going to be a thorn of one side, so to speak? How do you feel about that, Mr. President? The President. Well, first of all, I think there have been, obviously, some difficulties in the relationship in our military presence in Okinawa. Some of them, I think, are inevitable, and I'm very respectful of the challenges that our presence has caused the Government and the people on Okinawa. On the other hand, both the Government of Japan and the Government of the United States agree that our security partnership is a good one and that we cannot say with confidence that there are no circumstances under which American forces would ever be called upon to defend Japan or our common allies. And if we were to move our forces back to Guam or to Hawaii, it would take them much, much longer to come anywhere in the northeast Asia area if there were difficulties. So the question is, if we do need to be here for some period of years, how can we do it in the way that is least burdensome to the people of Okinawa? That has been my concern. I have worked now with Prime Minister Obuchi's government and with predecessor governments to try to be responsive to that. And I hope we can do that. I hope we can continue to ease the burden on the people of Okinawa but stay as long as both Japan and the United States agree that is wise for us to stay. Military Conflicts Q. Related to the previous question, the new guidelines have been developed, and Japan, of course, is not supposed to go into war. But once the United States gets into the war situation, I'm afraid that Japan might be sort of pulled into that, also, and I've been concerned. Can you comment on that? The President. Yes. Of course, our strategy is to maintain a presence in the world so that there will be no war, so that there is a strong disincentive for anyone to drag anyone back into a war. There have been so many wars in Asia in this century, but in the last two to three decades, there has been an increased emphasis in the Asian countries on working on the economy, working on the society, working on the education of children, working on trade and other relations with people instead of military relations. And my hope is that America's military strength will be used to deter any further military action so that we will have more peace, and in the decades ahead, war will become more and more unthinkable for everyone. That is what the whole defensive military strategy of our country is designed to do. Japan U.S. Trade Q. I will ask about trade. Now, we are asked by the U.S. Government to further open our market. Do you have any Japanese made product which you daily use, Mr. President? The President. Yes, we have some Japanese televisions we also have at least one European television, I think, in the White House complex. And I have, over time, owned a number of them. When I was a Governor of my home State, we had a Sanyo plant in my home State that put together televisions that were mostly manufactured in Japan and the component parts sent there. So I'm quite well familiar with that, and I think it's very important. Actually, we've worked hard on trying to keep our markets open during this period of economic difficulty, not only for Japan but for all of Asia. And you may know that our trade deficit has gone way up with Japan, with China, with others. Because of the Asian economic crisis, we're buying more exports, but no country can afford to keep buying imports from us if the economy is down. And on the whole, the American people have supported this. It's our contribution to trying to stabilize Asia and bring it back. I have to say in all candor, there are some problems. Japanese imports into America of hot rolled steel, for example, are up 500 percent in one year, and no one quite believes that that's just because of the economic problems. But by and large, there's a commitment in America to keeping open markets and purchasing Japanese products. Let me also say, I believe that in addition to the financial reforms, which I think are very important to carry out aggressively, and the economic stimulus, domestically, I think Japan could get a lot of economic benefit in terms of new jobs, from greater openness. I'll just give you two examples. In our country there was great controversy about deregulating and opening investment to international investors in airlines and in telecommunications. We did it. It was quite controversial. But we have created, as a result, far more jobs in both sectors because of the greater competition. Just since 1993, when we've been aggressive in telecommunications and a lot of international firms have been a part of this we have seen hundreds of thousands of jobs created in America because of the increased competition. So I think it would be good for the Japanese economy. Let me say, I never consciously asked Japan or any other country to do something that is good only for the United States. My belief is that our country is strengthened if Japan is very strong, because if Japan is very strong, that brings back Asia. If Asia is strong, that's good for the American economy. It also means it's good for stability, which means more prosperity and less likelihood of the military conflicts that I was asked about by the lady there. Japanese Economic Policy Q. This is relating to our economic relationship. In Japan, the certificate or consumption coupons will be issued to children and old people. Now, including this and there are other measures to boost our economy what do you think of what Japan is doing? The President. Well, I know of no history with these coupons. It's a new idea. And so, obviously, I can't have an informed opinion. But I do believe that anything that can be done to increase consumption is a good thing, because I know the Japanese people are great savers, and that is also a good thing. And I know you worry about the population getting older and having to save more for retirement. But you need a balance between saving for your own retirement and growing the economy today, because as the population gets older, one of the things that will lift up the elderly population is a very strong economy. And so I think that anything that can be done to boost confidence of consumers and to boost consumption is a good thing. Agricultural Trade A participant explained that farming in Japan was a family based operation which maintained cultural and social values, while farming in the United States was more efficient and enterprise oriented. He stated that U.S. demands for agricultural trade liberalization were therefore unfair and then requested the President's views. The President. Well, first of all, let me say, this is a subject about which I think I know something. Before I became President, I was the Governor of my home State, which produces 40 percent of all the rice grown in the United States. And in our State, most of the farms are still family farms. But we see all over the world today family farmers having more trouble. For example, to show you the other side of this, in the northern part of the United States, in North Dakota, there was a huge drop in the number of family farmers this year because the Asian countries not Japan other Asian countries which had been buying their wheat could no longer afford to buy it. And a lot of them were threatened with going out of business. In fairness, one of the reasons I believe we need this WTO process is so we can have a regular way of deciding how to open the markets that should be opened in agriculture and then give countries enough notice so they can figure how they're going to help the farmers if they have a policy of wanting family farmers to survive. I can tell you, in my country we have tried to push for more open markets and a policy to keep family farmers in business by and I can only say what the situation is in America. In America, the family farmers are as productive as the big enterprise farms, but the family farmers don't have a lot of money in the bank. And we all know that because of bad weather or bad prices or whatever, some years are good in farming some years are bad in farming. The fundamental problem in the U.S. is that the family farmers need a system to help them through the bad years. The big enterprises have so much money, they take the bad years and wait for the good years. So we have tried to design a system that would address the needs of both, and we seem to be having some success there. So I think there is a proper compromise here where you can open markets more gradually, open them to farming, particularly if there are different products. There are some products that Japan buys that can't be grown in Japan. And if you can open these markets, but do it in a way that preserves to the maximum extent possible the family farms, that I think is the best way to do it. And that is what we are trying to achieve in the U.S. I don't know if we'll succeed, but I think we're doing a pretty good job now. Mr. Chikushi. Osaka is very interested in economic issues, so let's switch over to Osaka. Questions? Financing for Small Business Q. I'm in housing equipment and material. Osaka has a lot of small to medium size businesses, and I boast ourselves for having supported the Japanese economy. But we are suffering right now. It's hard to get loans these days. And the first blow comes to us first. But in the United States, how are you helping these small to medium size companies? The President. We have, I think, three things that I would like to mention. First of all, for small businesses that are just getting started, we have a Small Business Administration in the Federal Government which can provide guarantees of the first loans. Now we have a pretty healthy banking system, quite healthy, that is pretty aggressive in making loans to businesses. In addition to that, we have something that many countries don't have We have a very active system of venture capital, high risk capital, higher risk capital, people who will invest money in new areas or in small and medium size businesses that are just trying to expand. And having looked at the Japanese situation, I think it would be very helpful if, in addition to this bank reform, where the banks can get public money to protect depositors, and then they have to declare the bad loans and work through them I think that will help because then the banks can start loaning money again, with the depositors protected. So it's very important to implement that. But I would like to see some effort made at providing more of this venture capital, this risk capital, in Japan. And it may be that there is something we can do to encourage Japanese business people to set up these kind of ventures, because they have created millions of jobs in America, the venture capitalists have. And even though they lose money on ventures, on balance they make money over a period of years. Japan China U.S. Relations Q. I am also a merchant, selling kitchen material. Looking at the recent American diplomacy, you tend to go over the head of Japanese. You're interested in strengthening diplomatic relations with China. What we are afraid of is that in 2008 we would like to invite the Olympic Games to Osaka, and a very strong rival is Beijing of China, for the Olympics in 2008. So I would like to have your personal, private opinion about this. If Beijing and Osaka compete to get the Olympics, I am sure that you will support Osaka. I'd like to make sure of that. Or would you rather support Beijing? I certainly appreciate your support. The President. Thank goodness I will no longer be President, and I don't have to make that decision. Let me make two points. First of all, I did not intentionally go over the heads of the Japanese people in establishing better relations with China. I think it is good for Japan if America has better relations with China. I think it is good for America if Japan has better relations with China. The Chinese President is coming here, I think, on a state visit in just the next couple of days. And it has now been quite a long time since the last World War, and I think whatever remaining misunderstandings there are should be resolved and that your two great countries should have a better relation. And I'm going to do my best to see a partnership involving all of us going into the future. I'm not going to take a position on the Olympics. But let me say, before I became President, I spent a lot of time in Osaka because we had two companies in my State who were headquartered in Osaka. I even remember the last restaurant I ate at in Osaka, Steakhouse Ron, R O N. So if it's still there, maybe I got them some business tonight. Laughter Balancing Work and Family in Japan Q. I teach social studies in junior high school. We've been talking about expanding consumption. The Japanese junior high students spend so little time with their fathers at home. They have to go to inaudible school and fathers don't get home until very late. Talking about consumption, I think if they get fathers back, I think we will get a more stable society. Because if they get more free time, then they have more leisure time they will spend more money that way. But in the male oriented society of Japan, there is very little discussion regarding more holidays. What do you think about that? The President. I think, first of all, the whole world admires both the excellent education system and the hard work ethic of the Japanese people, and admires the fact that you have been able to keep the family structure as strong as you have under the enormous pressures of work and education for the children, especially during this hard economic time. But I think that in all societies which are very busy and very competitive, the number one social question quickly becomes, how do you balance work and family? I personally believe that the most important work of any society is raising children well. And if you have to sacrifice that to have a strong economy, then sooner or later your economy and your society won't be very strong. On the other hand, you don't want to sacrifice your economy in the service of raising children. There has to be a balance. We are having that kind of debate in America. I don't have the answer for Japan it would be wrong for me to suggest it. But I think you have asked the right question, and I hope maybe your being on this program tonight will spark a sort of national debate about it. It's worth asking that question, whether you could actually help the economy by providing people more free time with their children and their families. I never thought of it in this term before until you said it tonight. Thank you. Disabled Americans A participant asked the President what he planned to do for disadvantaged people in the United States. The President. Thank you very much. First of all, you made a very important point. In 1992, we passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, which guarantees all Americans access to certain public facilities and other opportunities in our society. Previous to that we had tried to do the same thing with our schools, in educational facilities. And all of you know, I'm sure, about all the fights we have in America between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and you see all that in the press here. But you should know that one of the things that we've had almost complete agreement on in the last 6 years since I've been President, is every year putting more money into education for Americans with disabilities. In the last session of Congress, we came very close to passing a bill which would have dramatically expanded job opportunities to Americans with disabilities, over and above where we are now. So I think it's fair to say and our administration has been very involved in this our position is, every person should be looked at as a resource every person should have all the opportunities necessary to live up to the fullest of his or her capabilities. And our policy is to do whatever we can to advance that goal. We believe it makes us a stronger country. Q. Thank you, Mr. President. American Visitors to Japan Q. Every year many Japanese youth go to the United States for sightseeing or to study. But compared with that, not too many Americans visit Japan. That's how I feel. I think it's important that the young generation understand each other, the American youth and the Japanese youth. Why do you think it's fewer American youth visit Japan? The President. I think, first of all, it's because it's a long way away in the minds of most Americans. And secondly, because we have in America, as you know, people of every conceivable different racial and ethnic backgrounds, but relatively small number of Japanese Americans a significant number we have several Japanese Americans in our United States Congress, for example. But I think that the Americans, when they travel abroad, tend to go to places where either their own people came from or they know someone in the school who is from there, or something like that. But there is an enormous interest in Japan in the United States, an enormous interest among the young people, wanting to understand the society, know more about it. And I think what we have to do is to try to facilitate more travel among older people, who have the means to travel, but more study groups among the younger people. Most young Americans could not afford to come here to study on their own. They would have to come as part of some scholarship program. And in the years since I've been President, we tried to find ways to increase the number of young Americans who could come here to study. Our Ambassador here now, Tom Foley, who was formerly the Speaker of the House of Representatives, has been very active in this whole area of trying to build greater communications and travel for a long time. And I hope we can do a better job now, because I don't think we've done as much as we should have to bring Americans to Japan, to give them a chance to get to know the Japanese people, understand the Japanese system, and build long term friendships for the future. Mr. Chikushi. A very tough question to the President. Laughter Landmines Q. I work for a nongovernment organization. I'm a housewife. Mr. President, there is a book, "Give Us Not Land Mines, But Flowers." You autographed this. Do you remember it? Thank you. We have been engaged in the campaign to get rid of landmines, and we have signed the treaty to completely get rid of landmines. You have not signed that. Why is that? What is your policy on landmines? The President. First of all, my policy is to support getting rid of them. And there is a reason that we have not signed the treaty. I would like to explain why. Number one, the way the treaty is written, the mines that countries use to protect their soldiers against tanks, so called antitank mines, not antipersonnel mines, are protected, except ours, because of the way the wording of the treaty is. And we pleaded with the people in Oslo not to do this, but they did. They basically wrote out and they knew exactly what they were doing. Why they did it, I don't know. But they basically said that other countries, the way they designed their antitank mines was protected the way we do it isn't. The second issue is, the United States has, as all of you know very well, a United Nations responsibility in Korea. The border, the DMZ, is 18 miles from Seoul. So there is one place in the world where we have lots of landmines, because it's the only way to protect Seoul from all the North Korean Army, should they mass along the border. It is heavily marked. As far as we know, no civilian's ever been hurt there. All we asked for was the opportunity to find a substitute for the protection the landmines give the people of South Korea, and we would sign it. Let me assure you all, I was the first world leader to call for a ban on landmines. We have destroyed almost 2 million landmines. We spend over half of the money the world spends helping other countries dig up their mines. So I strongly support the goals of the treaty, and I will continue to do so. I hope if we can resolve these two problems, we can sign the treaty, because I have spent a lot of my personal time on this landmine issue, and it's very important. And I thank you for what you're doing. Thank you. Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Nuclear Weapons Mr. Chikushi. Time is running short, so we turn our attention to the future. Something that is difficult for the people in the audience to ask, so I will do it. You have the button to destroy mankind 5 times over with your nuclear weapons. How much do you know about what really happened in Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Have you had any personal experience of getting in touch with the victims? And on that basis, you still continue to own, possess nuclear weapons. The President. No, I have never had any personal contact with victims, but I have read a great deal about it. After I decided to run for President, I began to think about it much more than I ever had before. Since I have been President, I have worked hard to reduce the number of weapons in our nuclear arsenal, along with the Russians, to extend the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. We were the first country to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. We are hoping that our friends in Russia will ratify the START II convention so we can immediately start on the next round of nuclear weapons reductions. So I have done everything I could do to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war. I have implored the people of India and Pakistan not to start a nuclear buildup with each other, because I never want to see another weapon dropped. On the other hand, if you look at the last 50 years, nuclear weapons have not been used a second time, I think, because of the deterrent theory. And what I want to do is to reduce our weapons but always do it in a way that at least provides some disincentive from someone else using nuclear weapons, as well. Mr. Chikushi. Well, unfortunately, I think the time is up. Or? The President. I'll take a couple more. Mr. Chikushi. There's two more questions regarding our future. How about a young person, how about over here? Teenage Crime Q. I want to ask you I'm very sad these days that teenagers' crime is increasing inaudible what do you hope we can leave to our children? The President. Let me ask you something. I have something to say about that, but why do you think the teenage crime is going up? Q. Well, I think it is a little related to what the other guy asked you about, that no communication in the family, no father, and many times the mother does not work in the home. And this kind of no communication in the family and also the area we don't know other people, what they are doing. The President. Well, I can tell you that in our country, one of the things that happened is that so many of our children were being let out of school, but they couldn't go home to their parents because there was no parent in the home. And so a lot of this crime was happening between the time school was over and the time the parents got home from work. So what we have tried to do is to turn our schools into more community institutions. And so the children can stay there for longer hours, and they can do their homework, or they can get tutoring, or they can do other things. In some of our big cities, even, they're feeding the children there, if necessary. And what we're trying to do is to create, as much as we can, opportunities to overcome the fact that many of these children don't even have two parents in the homes in the U.S. But I think the most important thing is, children have to believe that they are the most important people in the world to someone. They have to be when you're young, you must know that you are the most important person in the world to someone. It gives you a root, an anchor in life. Of course, then all the work and the study and all that makes more sense. But in the beginning you have to be valued just because you're alive and because you're in a family and because you're in a community and you matter, no matter what. I think that is important. And I worry that in all of our societies we're working so hard, we're getting so busy, we're doing so many things that that sense of the innate, inherent worth of people can be lost. We can never afford to define ourselves solely in terms of how hard we work or how much money we have or what our grades are or anything else. Children have to believe that they matter just because they're alive. And I think that, all of our societies, if we're not careful, we lose that. Mr. Chikushi. The last question I can only accept one question. Would you like to point to somebody, Mr. President? The President. If I'm late, the Prime Minister will stop speaking to me, and this whole thing will be laughter go ahead. Situation in Iraq Q. I have a question about you decided not to attack Iraq estimate by the Pentagon that more than 10,000 people would die inaudible . The President. Well, first of all, the Pentagon estimate was not that high but it's obvious that if we had conducted a comprehensive attack directed at their weapons of mass destruction program, the production capacity, the laboratories, all the supporting sites and the military infrastructure that supports it, that unless everyone knew in advance and left the premises, large numbers of people would be killed. And I believe the United States has a special responsibility, because of the unique position of our military might at this moment in history, to be very careful in that. Now, that's why I always said if Saddam Hussein would comply with the United Nations resolutions, we would not attack. Shortly before the attack was about to begin, we received word that they were going to send a letter committing to compliance. Then we worked all day to try to clarify it, and I think it was a good thing to try to solve this peacefully. Peace is always better than war, if you can do it consistent with the long term security and freedom of the people. So I feel good about that. Secondly, I think that the inspection system offers us the best protection over the long run. But don't forget, you have suffered in Japan from the sarin gas attack. This is not an academic issue to you this is a real issue to you. And Iraq is a nation that has actually used chemical weapons on its own people, on the Iranians, on others, had a biological weapons program of some significance, was attempting to develop a nuclear weapons program. So this is a very important issue for the world, and I would hope that all the countries of the world would continue to support an aggressive stance. I hope it will not lead to military action, but we have to be prepared, I believe, to take military action because the issue is so great. I think that young people like you Japan lived in the shadow of the awful legacy of the atomic weapons, but the likelihood is that in your lifetime, your adult lifetime, and your children's lifetime, you will have to worry more about chemical and biological weapons put in the hands of terrorists as well as rogue states. You have seen this in Japan you know this. But I think if we can do something to stop it now, we should do it even if it requires military action. The gentleman behind you there. International Finance in the 21st Century Q. I'm a private banker for a European bank. In a few years, in many ways, we've come through a lot. We have increased investment in the United States. However, things are changing a little bit. Now you will be the first President of the 21st century, but what do you think you have to be most worried about as we go into the 21st century in terms of economics? The President. I think the biggest challenge, long term, is to adapt the international economic systems to the realities of the 21st century. The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, all these institutions set up at the end of the Second World War have facilitated great trade and investment. But they weren't prepared for the fact that once you had trade and investment, you had to have money crossing national lines, and then that money would become a commodity traded in itself, and then it would be traded at great margins through the derivatives and the other mechanisms. Sometimes the money is traded, and you only put up 10 percent of the money you have at risk. Today, 1.5 trillion crosses national borders every day in currency trading. And we don't have a system to avoid boom and bust, to keep recession from going to depression in the global financial markets. So, long term, I think that's our big challenge. We are all working on it, and I think we'll have over the course of the coming year some very important things to do. Meanwhile, we've come up with some shortterm solutions, Japan and the U.S., with the Asia growth fund we announced the Prime Minister and I announced a couple of days ago, a precautionary finance facility to keep the financial problems from reaching countries that are doing a good job, strengthening the IMF. But over the long run, every country after the Great Depression that preceded World War II devised ways to stop those depressions from happening in their own countries. That's what you're doing here. You're just a question of whether you're doing enough to restore growth, right? But you've been able to stop things that happened all over the world in the 1920's and '30's. Now what we have to do is to develop an international system that will achieve that goal, that will allow growth, free flow of money but won't have these radical swings of boom and bust that devastated the world in the 1930's. That, I think, is the biggest long term economic challenge that we face. Closing Remarks Mr. Chikushi. Finally, you must have something to say to Japanese people. The President. Well, first of all, I hope you have enjoyed this evening as much as I have. And I thank you again for your questions. I thank the people in Osaka for their questions. I thank you for your interest in your country and in our relationships with your country. I would just like to say in closing that the United States views Japan as our friend, our ally for the future. We regret that you have the present economic challenges you have, but we don't think you should be too pessimistic about the future. These things run in waves over time. Keep in mind, 10 years ago a lot of people said America's best days were behind it. And we looked to you, and we learned a lot of things from you. And we borrowed some things from you, and they helped us. And so now we're in a period of time where what we're doing is working pretty well for us and helping the rest of the world. But in the last 50 years, no country has demonstrated the capacity to change more than Japan and to lead and to emerge and to sort of redefine, continually redefine the mission of the nation. So I would first of all say, do not be discouraged by the present economic difficulties. They can be overcome. The second thing I would say is, we had a big financial crisis in America, and it cost us 5 times more than it would have to fix because we delayed dealing with it. So now you have the laws on the books. I would urge you to support your Government in aggressively dealing with the financial institutions, aggressively moving to support greater consumption, aggressively moving for structural changes that will create more jobs, because a strong Japan is good for you but also essential to the rest of Asia emerging from its present difficulties. So don't be discouraged, but do be determined. That would be the advice of a friend. I say that because we have been through our tough times we have learned so much from you. And the last point I want to make is, the best days of Japan and the best days of America lay before us in the 21st century if we determine to go there together. Thank you very much. November 13, 1998 Situation in Iraq Thank you very much, and good morning. Ladies and gentlemen, because this is the only time I'm going to be before the press today, at the outset of my remarks I'd like to say a few things about the situation in Iraq. For more than 3 months, the United States and the international community have very patiently sought a diplomatic solution to Iraq's decision to end all its cooperation with the U.N. weapons inspectors. Iraq's continued refusal to embrace a diplomatic, peaceful solution, its continued defiance of even more United Nations resolutions, makes it plainer than ever that its real goal is to end the sanctions without giving up its weapons of mass destruction program. The Security Council and the world have made it crystal clear now that this is unacceptable, that none of us can tolerate an Iraq free to develop weapons of mass destruction with impunity. Still, Saddam Hussein has it within his hands to end this crisis now by resuming full cooperation with UNSCOM. Just yesterday his own neighbors in the Arab world made it clear that this choice is his alone and the consequences, if he fails to comply, his alone in terms of responsibility. Law Enforcement Legislation Now, let me say to all of you, this is a very good day for the United States. I want to thank Officer Sandra Grace from New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Detective Gary McLhinney from Baltimore for their service, for sharing their stories, for representing their organizations so well, for reminding us why all of those here have worked so hard to pass the laws that in a few moments I will sign, laws to help us honor the memory of law enforcement officers by helping to prevent the kind of gun related crimes that took their lives and by supporting the families they leave behind. I'd also like to thank Secretary Rubin, Attorney General Reno, Director Magaw, the ATF, Assistant Secretary Johnson, and the others who are here from the Treasury and Justice Departments Attorney General Curran from Maryland, who joined us today. And a special word of thanks to my good friend Senator Biden, who had to leave and to Congressman Stupak Congressman King, who spoke so well and did so much. And thank you, Congressman Fox, for joining us here today in celebration of the work you did that I hope you'll be proud of all your life, sir. Thank you very much. This is a special day for me personally because I was attorney general of my own State. I was Governor for a dozen years. I have spent a lot of hours riding around in State police cars with officers. I have been to altogether too many funerals of law enforcement officials killed in the line of duty. And because I come from a small State, very often I knew these people well. I knew their families, their children, their circumstances. Just last weekend I went home to dedicate an airport, and the first people that came running up to me were the three State police officers who were assigned to work the event. And we stood there and relived a lot of old times. So this issue is very, very vivid. And I think, again, we should thank, especially, the Members of Congress who are here the police officers Gil Gallegos and the FOP Thomas Nee and the National Association of Police Officers Jerry Flynn, the International Brotherhood of Police Officers Rich Gallo, the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association Sam Cabral, the International Union of Police and Debbie Geary from the Concerns of Police Survivors. I'd like to ask you all just to give them all another hand. Applause Six years ago when I became President, one of my most urgent priorities was to put the Federal Government on the side of supporting our police officers and reducing the crime rate. At the time, the crime rate was on the rise gangs, guns, and drugs were sweeping through our neighborhoods, terrorizing our families, cutting off the future of too many of our children. The thing that bothered me most when I was out around the country seeking the Presidency was that there were so many people who were full of hope and optimism for our country, but when it came to crime, they seemed almost to have given up, to have simply accepted the fact that a rising crime rate was a part of the price of the modern world. We were able to galvanize, all of us together, the energies of the American people to fight back. I never met a law enforcement officer who believed that a rising crime rate was inevitable. Every law enforcement officer I met believed that if we did the right things if we were tough, yes, but tough was not enough we had to be smart, too that if we both punished people who should be punished and did the intelligent things to prevent crime from happening in the first place, that the crime rate could go down. And we passed in 1994 a historic crime bill, along with the Brady law, which among other things focused on community policing, aggressive prevention, and tougher penalties for violent repeat offenders. Now we're ahead of schedule and under budget in putting those 100,000 police on the street. We've gone after gangs and drugs with the full authority of Federal law. The Brady law has prevented about a quarter of a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from buying firearms in the first place. Crime rates have fallen to a 25 year low. All across America, robbery is down assault is down murder is down. Respect for the law is on the rise. You can see it in little ways fewer broken windows, less graffiti, cleaner streets in city after city after city. We must never forget that this victory was won, however, at a very high price for some of our law enforcement officials. We must never forget that police officers put on their uniforms, their badges, go to work every day knowing that that day could be their last, just by doing their jobs. Officer Bradley Arn served on the police force of St. Joseph, Missouri, for the last 7 years. He was a cop's cop. He patrolled the streets by day and worked his way through college by night. At 28, more than anything else, he wanted a better life for his wife and his 2 year old twin daughters. On Tuesday, just a couple of days ago, he answered a distress call. A career criminal with a semiautomatic gun was terrorizing pedestrians. He responded to the call and was brutally gunned down. According to the police, the murderer had a deadly goal, quote, "He wanted to hurt people in black and white cars wearing dark blue uniforms." Only the bravery of a fellow officer stopped the shooting spree. Every year there are too many police officers like Bradley Arn who make the ultimate sacrifice to keep us safe. Not very long ago, I went up to the Capitol to honor the two police officers who were killed there. But we have to do more than build monuments to honor these people. We have to take action to prevent more needless tragic deaths, to work for those who have given their lives, and we have to take action to help families they leave behind. Two years ago we acted to provide college scholarships to the families of slain Federal law enforcement officers. Last year I pledged to make those same scholarships available to the families of State and local law enforcement officers and all public safety personnel. Today the legislation I sign honors that pledge. From now on, children and spouses of public safety officials who lose their lives in the line of duty will be able to apply for nearly 5,000 a year to pay for college tuition. I should point out that because virtually 100 percent of these families will be people on very modest incomes, they will be eligible also for the 1,500 a year HOPE tax credit in the first 2 years of college, tax credits for the junior and senior year, expanded work study programs, student loan programs a student loan program which in most places allows them to pay the loan back as a percentage of the income that they earn and the IRA that can be withdrawn from without penalty if the money's used to educate children. Most of that was the product of the bipartisan Balanced Budget Act of 1997. So we believe that if you look at this scholarship amount with the other things that have been passed in the last couple of years, as Peter King said, with overwhelming bipartisan support, Democrats and Republicans working together on these issues, we will be able to protect the families and the children in their education and, in so doing, to honor the families and the law enforcement officers. It's the least we can do, and we have to do it. The bill I'm about to sign was enacted in memory of U.S. Deputy Marshal William Degan, the most decorated deputy marshal in our history, who lost his life in a brutal shootout. His son, Billy Degan, was the first young person to benefit from this program. He recently graduated from Boston College, and he's here with us today. I'd like to ask him to stand and be recognized. Applause Now, let me say just a brief word about the other legislation that I'm going to sign Mr. McLhinney talked about it. I'm very proud that we're announcing these scholarships, but I can't wait for the day when there is not a single person eligible for one. And I think that all of us should think about that. We know from painful experience that the most serious threat to the safety of police officers is a criminal armed with a weapon. Most police officers who lose their lives die from gunshot wounds. That's why we fought hard to keep guns off the streets, out of the hands of criminals. Brady background checks, as I said earlier, have prevented nearly a quarter of a million felons, fugitives, and stalkers from buying guns. Last week I announced a new step to close a loophole in the law that makes it easier for gun traffickers and criminals to avoid those checks at private gun shows. Make no mistake, the insidious practice of sidestepping our guns laws is not an idle threat. The city of Chicago recently concluded an undercover investigation of gun dealing. And as you saw, I hope, in the morning press, it has just filed suit alleging widespread practices by gun dealers in the Chicago area of selling guns illegally, counseling purchasers on how to evade firearms regulations, even selling guns to purchasers who say they intend to violate the law. We know legitimate gun dealers make every effort to comply with the law, but these charges in Chicago, if proven true, would demonstrate that at least some parts of the gun industry are helping to promote an illegal market in firearms. Such disrespect of our law endangers our people, and we will be watching the progress of this lawsuit closely. The ATF already vigorously investigates gun dealers and other gun traffickers who violate Federal laws. We will continue to work closely with State and local police to trace the crime guns back to their source and prevent illegal gun sales, especially to criminals and juveniles. But there is more we can do to protect our communities and police officers. You've heard a little bit of it from Detective McLhinney, but let me just say again, for several years now criminals who have used guns to commit their crimes have been subject to stiff mandatory penalties under Federal law and virtually every State law in the country. Today we go a step further. To protect our families and police officers, the bill I sign today will add 5 years of hard time to sentences of criminals who even possess firearms when they commit drug related or violent crimes. Brandishing the firearm will draw an extra 7 years firing it, another 10. A second conviction means a quarter century in jail. This is very important to try to reduce the threat of violent crime. Just a couple of days ago on Veterans Day, as I have every year since I've been President, I laid a wreath on the tomb of the unknown servicemen who gave their lives in service to our country. Today it is with great pride that I stand here with many of our law enforcement officers who every day are prepared to make the same sacrifice. Together, we are working to make America stronger in the 21st century. And again, let me thank you all. Now I'd like to ask the Members of Congress and Officers Grace and McLhinney and Mr. Degan, if you would come up here, I'd like for you to stand with us as we sign the bill, please. November 11, 1998 Thank you very much, Secretary West, for those extraordinary remarks and your equally extraordinary service to our Nation. Commander Tanguma, General Ivany, Superintendent Metzler, Chaplain Maddry, Lee Thornton, thank you for being with us again. To the distinguished leaders of our veteran organizations, General Ivany, Members of Congress, members of the Cabinet, Secretary Cohen and the Joint Chiefs, the clergy, the veterans, and their families, the members of the Armed Services here. We thank especially the Marine Band. My fellow Americans, if you will let me begin on a point of personal privilege, I was especially proud to listen to Commander Tanguma's speech today. It was about 10 months, almost to the day, from this day that he and I were together in Mission, Texas, his hometown. He brought with him a distinguished group of Catholic war veterans, including a number from Texas, including a member of his post, the former chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Congressman Kika de la Garza. We're glad to see you here, sir. What I want you to know, that is in spite of all the incredible valor of Hispanic soldiers in our country's war, he is the very first Hispanic veteran ever to host this event. It is a great honor for all Americans that this has finally come to pass, and we thank you, sir, for being here. Today, as a free nation, we come together to honor the men and women to whom we owe our freedom, to pay our own tribute here at this most sacred memorial to our Nation's past. Not only today but every day, some of us have the privilege to glance across the Potomac to see these silent white rows inscribed with their crosses and crescents and Stars of David to remind us that our achievements in peace are built on the sacrifices of our veterans in war and that we owe the most solemn debt to these brave Americans who knew their duty and did it so very well. We come together today to acknowledge that duty to them, a duty to provide for our veterans and their families, to give them every possible opportunity to improve their education, to find a job, to buy a home, to protect their health. Just this morning I was proud to sign, in the presence of some of the veterans leaders here, the Veterans Programs Enhancement Act, which will increase compensation payments to veterans with disabilities as well as benefits to the survivors of Americans who died serving our country. I have also directed the Secretaries of Defense, Veterans Administration, and Health and Human Services to establish a Military and Veterans Health Coordinating Board to improve health care for our Armed Forces, our veterans, and our families, and to make sure we know what the health risks are to our soldiers when we send them into harm's way. We have a duty as well to remember the history that our veterans lived and to appreciate and honor the history they made. We cannot expect future generations to understand fully what those who came before saw, experienced, and felt in battle. But we can make sure that our children know enough to say "thank you." Those two simple words that can mean as much or even more than a medal. We can preserve their diaries and documents, their letters home, their stories of sorrow and pride. Neither the passage of time nor the comforts of peace should drive the memory and meaning of their sacrifice from the consciousness of our Nation. We owe this to every American who fought in this century's wars. We owe it as well to the millions of Americans who served in our Armed Forces during the cold war. Because they stood ready, we live in a very different world. No longer is there a single overriding threat to our existence. Former adversaries are becoming our partners. Still, this remains a dangerous world, and peace can never be a time for rest, for maintaining it requires constant vigilance. We can be proud that the United States has been a force for peace in Northern Ireland, in the Middle East, in Haiti, in Bosnia, in Kosovo. We have been able to secure peace because we have been willing to back up our diplomacy, where necessary, with military strength. Nowhere is our vigilance more urgent than in the Persian Gulf, where Saddam Hussein's regime threatens the stability of one of the most vital regions of the world. Following the Gulf war, and as a condition for the cease fire, the United Nations demanded, and Iraq agreed, to disclose and destroy its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capabilities. This was no abstract concern. Saddam has fired Scuds at his neighbors, attacked Kuwait, and used chemical weapons in the war with Iran and even on his own people. To ensure that Iraq made good on its commitments, the United Nations kept in place tough economic sanctions while exempting food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies to alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people. The U.N. also established a group of highly professional weapons inspectors from dozens of countries, a group called UNSCOM, to oversee the destruction of Iraq's weapons capability and to monitor its ongoing compliance. For 7 years now, Iraq has had within its power the ability to put itself on the path to ending the sanctions and its isolation simply by complying with obligations it agreed to undertake. Instead, it has worked to shirk those obligations, withholding evidence about its weapons capability threatening, harassing, blocking the inspectors massing troops on the Kuwaiti border in the South attacking the Kurds in the North. Our steadfast determination in maintaining sanctions, supporting the inspections system, enforcing a no fly zone, and responding firmly to Iraqi provocations has stopped Iraq from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction arsenal or from threatening its neighbors seriously. Now, over the past year Iraq has intensified its efforts to end the weapons inspection system, last fall threatening to overthrow to throw American inspectors off the UNSCOM teams then, in January, denying UNSCOM unfettered access to all the suspect weapon sites. Both times we built diplomatic pressure on Iraq, backed by overwhelming force, and Baghdad reversed course. Indeed, in March, again it gave a solemn commitment this time to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that it would reopen all of Iraq to international weapons inspectors, without conditions or restrictions. In August, for the third time in only a year, again Iraq severely restricted the activities of the weapons inspectors. Again, we have gone the extra mile to obtain compliance by peaceful means, working through the U.N. Security Council and with our friends and allies to secure a unanimous Security Council resolution condemning Iraq's actions. We also supported, along with all the members of the Security Council, what Iraq says it wants, a comprehensive review of Iraq's compliance record, provided Saddam resumes full cooperation with the UNSCOM inspectors. Now, if Saddam Hussein is really serious about wanting sanctions lifted, there is an easy way to demonstrate that Let UNSCOM do its job without interference fully comply. The international community is united that Saddam must not have it both ways, by keeping his weapons of mass destruction capability and still getting rid of the sanctions. All of us agree that we prefer to resolve this crisis peacefully, for two reasons first, because accomplishing goals through diplomacy is always preferable to using force second, because reversing Iraq's decision and getting UNSCOM back on the job remains the most effective way to uncover, destroy, and prevent Iraq from reconstituting weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. But if the inspectors are not permitted to visit suspect sites or monitor compliance at known production facilities, they may as well be in Baltimore, not Baghdad. That would open a window of opportunity for Iraq to rebuild its arsenal of weapons and delivery systems in months I say again, in months not years. A failure to respond could embolden Saddam to act recklessly, signaling to him that he can, with impunity, develop these weapons of mass destruction or threaten his neighbors. And this is very important, in an age when we look forward to weapons of mass destruction being a significant threat to civilized people everywhere. And it would permanently damage the credibility of the United Nations Security Council to act as a force for promoting international peace and security. We continue to hope indeed, pray that Saddam will comply, but we must be prepared to act if he does not. Many American service men and women are serving in the Persian Gulf today, many others serving elsewhere around the world, keeping the peace in Bosnia, watching over the DMZ in Korea, working with our friends and allies to stop terror and drugs and deadly weapons. Too often we forget that even in peacetime their work is hard and often very dangerous. Just 3 days ago, four brave, dedicated American flyers, Lieutenant Commander Kirk Barich, Lieutenant Brendan Duffy, Lieutenant Meredith Carol Loughran, and Lieutenant Charles Woodard all four were lost in a crash aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. Today our prayers are with their families. When we give our Armed Forces a mission, there is a principle we must keep in mind. We should never ask them to do what they are not equipped to do, but always equip them to do what we ask them to do. The more we ask, the greater our responsibility to give our troops the support and training they require and the tools they need, from basic spare parts to the newest technology. As Commander in Chief, I have no higher duty than this to make certain our troops can do their job while maintaining their readiness to defend our country and defeat any adversary to ensure they can deploy far from home, knowing their loved ones have the quality of life they deserve. For, as one sergeant recently said, "We enlist soldiers, but we reenlist families." While our current state of readiness is sound, there are real concerns about the future. For that reason, I made a commitment to add resources to this year's budget to keep our readiness razor sharp and to improve recruitment. We asked the Congress to approve 1.1 billion in new funds for readiness, and it did. Today I am happy to announce that we are releasing those funds. We have also obtained almost 2 billion in emergency funds to cover unanticipated operations in Bosnia and shifted another 1 billion in our defense budget to meet readiness needs. We have approved pay raises that will significantly reduce the discrepancy between military and civilian pay. In addition, I have ordered my administration to conduct a thorough review of our long term readiness and have met with all of our service chiefs to discuss that. The process is now under way. I anticipate it will result in a set of budget and policy proposals for our year 2000 budget requests and for future years. My fellow Americans, this is a challenge we can and must meet. For while we certainly cannot solve all the world's problems, when our values and interests are at stake, we must be ready to act. Let us always remember that our most profound duty to our Nation's veterans is to keep standing for the ideals for which they fought and for which too many died to keep strengthening the alliances they forged, as we will next spring at NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington to keep taking risks for peace to keep faith with those who struggle for human rights, the rule of law, a better life. We have a duty to seize, not shirk, the responsibilities of leadership, and we have an opportunity to create a world more peaceful, more free, more prosperous than any people have ever known. Therefore, we should look on leadership not as a burden but as a chance, a responsibility to give our children a world that reflects the hopes and enthusiasm that have inspired generation after generation of Americans to serve our country in uniform, from World War I hero Alvin York to World War II hero Waverly Wray, from General George Marshall to General Colin Powell, from John Glenn to John Glenn. Laughter I think we ought to give Senator Glenn a hand today, don't you? Applause Think of it, he's given us a whole new field of endeavor to look forward to in our old age. Laughter We dedicate this day to all our veterans, to the retired schoolteacher who in his time helped liberate a death camp, to the hospital medic who learned to save lives in Vietnam, to the legionnaire who pins on his medals with pride, to the heroes buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns.To all of them and all they represent, we dedicate each and every day spent in service to our country and its ideals. May God bless them and their families. May God bless the United States of America. Thank you. November 06, 1998 Thank you very much. You know, when Ernie was up here introducing me, I remembered that he was the only senior among the Little Rock Nine. He graduated in the spring in 1958, and when they called him up to receive his diploma, the whole auditorium was quiet, not a single person clapped. But we're all clapping for you today, buddy. I would like to thank all the members of the Little Rock Nine who are here, including Elizabeth Eckford, Carlotta LaNier, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Trickey, Terrence Roberts. Melba Pattillo Beals is not here. Gloria Ray Karlmark is not here. Thelma Mothershed Wair is not here. I think we should give all of them another hand. Applause I would like to thank Congressman Elijah Cummings, Congressman Gregory Meeks for coming Mayor Woodrow Stanley of Flint, Michigan Commissioner Edna Bell, the president of the National Association of Black County Officials, from Wayne County, Michigan. I'd like to thank and welcome the mayor elect of Washington, DC, Anthony Williams. I told him I'd be for more Federal aid if he'd teach me how to tie a bow tie. I never learned how to do that. I would like to thank Secretary of Transportation Rodney Slater and the Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt for their presence and leadership. And I would like to say a special word of welcome, and profound appreciation for his historic role in Tuesday's historic turnout of voters, to Reverend Jesse Jackson. Welcome, sir, we're delighted to have you here. I thank the United States Marine Band, as always, for their great performance, on the occasion of John Philip Sousa's birth anniversary. And let me say a special word of welcome again to the White House to the magnificent young people of the Eastern High School Choir from Washington, DC. Thank you. Let me say, since we are here to talk about our reconciliation, I hope you will forgive me for taking just a moment and I know I speak for all Americans who are here to express my sympathy to the people of Israel, who this morning were once again the target of a vicious terrorist attack. No nation should live under the threat of violence and terror that they live under every day. When Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat signed the Wye River agreement, they knew they would face this moment. They knew when they went home both of them would be under more danger and the terrorists would target innocent civilians. They knew they would have to muster a lot of courage in their people to stick to the path of peace in the face of repeated acts of provocation. There are some people, you know, who have a big stake in the continuing misery and hatred in the Middle East, and indeed everywhere else in this whole world, just like some people had a big stake in continuing it in Little Rock over 40 years ago. I ask for your prayers and support today for the Israelis and the Palestinians who believe in this agreement and who are determined to carry out their responsibilities and who understand that the agreement is the best way to protect the safety of the Israeli people. It was tenaciously negotiated, hard fought, but it is the best way to safety for the Israelis, the best way to achieve the aspirations of the Palestinians, and in the end, the only answer to today's act of criminal terror. I hope you will all feel that in your heart. Let me say, this is a very, very happy day for the people who were part of the Little Rock Nine experience, for the people of Little Rock, all the Arkansans who are here, African Americans from throughout our country. There was an earlier reference made by Congressman Bennie Thompson and I thank him for his outstanding leadership in this endeavor and for his fine remarks today about the election. Now, most of the publicity about the election has been the enormous turnout of African American citizens in a midterm election that resulted in the victories that have been well publicized for non African American elected officials. And having been one of those on several occasions, I am immensely grateful. Laughter But what has received less publicity that I would like to point out, because this too was a part of the road that the Little Rock Nine began to walk for us, is that on Tuesday in the State of Georgia, an African American was elected the attorney general of the State, an African American was elected the labor commissioner of the State. And in the South on Tuesday, African American Congressmen were reelected in majority white districts, with large majority large majority. That is a part of the road we have walked together, a part of what we celebrate today. There are so many here who played a role in it. One more person I would be remiss if I did not recognize, that Hillary and I love so much and are so grateful to, is the wonderful Dr. Dorothy Height, chairman of the National Commission of Negro Women. Thank you for being here, Dorothy. Let's give her a big hand. Applause Thank you, and bless you. Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one bittersweet element in this magnificent moment for Hillary and for me, and that is that we are celebrating the last piece of legislation passed by our good friend Dale Bumpers. We have walked a lot of steps together since I first met Dale Bumpers about 25 years ago when he was Governor. And we've had a lot of laughs at each other's expense. After I became President, just to make sure that I didn't get the big head, he went around Washington introducing me to people as the second best Governor Arkansas ever had. Laughter Today I told him that I hadn't had much time to review my remarks and, therefore, hadn't had the opportunity to delete all the nice things that had been written for me to say about him. Laughter But I do want to tell you that this is a truly astonishing public servant. Hillary and I admire him, admire his wife Betty, admire the things that he's stood for and she's stood for, and we will miss them. Last month, in a final and, as always, brilliant speech on the Senate floor, Dale mentioned an inspiring teacher who once stopped him when he was reading out loud and said to the whole class, "Doesn't he have a nice voice? Wouldn't it be tragic if he didn't use that talent?" I think it's fair to say that Dale Bumpers has done his teacher proud, because he used that eloquent, impassioned voice to make sure that all the children of his State and our Nation could make use of their Godgiven talents. We owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his nearly five decades of caring, often courageous public service, and I cannot thank him enough. The bill that Senator Bumpers and Congressman Thompson have presented to me for signature today recognizes the courage of the Little Rock Nine and that of their parents, their leaders, their community leaders, especially our great friend Daisy Bates, who could not be here today. Because of all of them, Central High has become a hallowed place, a place every bit as sacred as Gettysburg and Independence Hall. Interestingly enough, back in the 1920's, it was voted the most beautiful school in America. It is still a functioning school, very much so. There are some years when its students comprise 25 percent of our State's entire roster of National Merit Scholars. It's a place where children can still go and study Greek and Latin, something that's rare in all school districts throughout America. It is, I believe, about to become the only open, fully operating school that is a National Historic Site. As Ernie said, Hillary and I welcomed the Little Rock Nine back to Little Rock on the 30th anniversary of the integration of Little Rock Central High School. Then I was profoundly honored to hold open the door of the school so they could walk through on the 40th anniversary. Today I was able to welcome them all to the White House to the Oval Office and now on the South Lawn. On the fateful day they slipped into Central High School and were removed by the police, President Eisenhower was on vacation in Newport. When he learned what had happened to them, and that Governor Faubus had turned over the streets to the mob, he realized that even as a conservative the Federal Government had to act. The next day he flew back to the White House. His helicopter landed just a few steps from here. He had just ordered General Maxwell Taylor to put the might of the 101st Airborne Division behind their righteous march through the doors of Central High. Now, thanks to Senators Bumpers and Congressman Thompson, and many others, as they said, our Nation has found two very fitting ways to honor that march to ensure that the memory of the Little Rock Nine and all they represent remains alive long after those of us with living memories are gone. As part of the budget I signed 2 weeks ago, I was authorized to confer Congressional Gold Medals, the highest civilian honor the Congress can bestow, on each and every member of the Little Rock Nine. It was only a few months ago that we presented President Nelson Mandela with that same award, and he spoke so movingly of his long struggle to tear down the walls of apartheid. The Little Rock Nine broke through the doors of apartheid. I can't wait until the artists finish creating your medals and we can bestow them upon you, an honor you richly deserve. And then, of course, the main reason we're here today is to make a living monument forever out of the setting of your struggle. Again, I thank Senator Bumpers and all the others. The bill will allow the National Park Service to work with the community to maintain and protect Central High's magnificent building. It will also allow the Park Service to start acquiring land in the surrounding neighborhood to create new facilities where people can learn about the origins and the aftermath of the 1957 crisis, topics that simply can't be fully explored in the existing visitor center's limited space. Children will never fully understand what you experienced in 1957. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. But they need to know. And now, for all time to come, children will have an opportunity to walk the stairs you walked, to see the angry faces you braved, to learn of your sacrifice, and about what, as a result of your sacrifice, you, your fellow Arkansans, and your Nation have become. Perhaps they will even see what it was about the Little Rock confrontation that made racial equality a driving obsession for so many of us who were young at the time and seared by it. Again, I want to thank you for staying together over these 40 plus years now, for being willing to show up and be counted and to remind us, for showing us the shining example of your lives so that we could never forget all those who went before you who never had the chance that you gave to all who came after. Monuments and medals are important reminders of how far we have come, but it is not enough. The doors of our schools are open, but some of them are falling off their rusty hinges. And many of them are failing the students inside. The economy has never been stronger, but there are still striking disparities in jobs, in investments in neighborhoods, in education, and criminal justice. Still too many break down along what W.E.B. Du Bois first called the color line. And while the Little Rock Nine have enjoyed great success in business, in the media, in education, they can tell you that in spite of what we celebrated on Tuesday, there is still discrimination and hatred in the hearts of some Americans. All of that we found in our Presidential initiative on race. And we must never forget that it is our continuing obligation to the Little Rock Nine and all others who brought us to this point to fight this battle. The last point I want to make to you is that the face of America is changing and changing fast. I went to an elementary school last Saturday to talk about the need to build and modernize our schools. There were children from 24 nations there. The principal said, "Mr. President, we're so glad to have you here, and we've got all the parents here. I only wish that we could have translated your talk into Spanish and Arabic." America is changing, and it is a good thing, if we remember to live by the ideals on which this country was founded, if we remember the sacrifices of the Little Rock Nine, if we listen to our teachers, like Dr. John Hope Franklin. We, in other words, have a whole new chapter in the Nation's march to equality to write. Remember what Senator Bumpers' teacher said, "Wouldn't it be tragic if he didn't use that talent?" That's exactly what the struggle for one America is all about, because that is a question that should be asked of every single child in our country. When we ask that question with the Little Rock Nine in mind, it helps us to keep our eyes on the prize, the prize of true equality and true freedom, that ever elusive, always worth seeking, more perfect Union. These people that we honor today, in the school we save today for all time, have given us all a great and treasured gift. May God bless them and the United States. Thank you very much. November 06, 1998 Thank you so much, Secretary Slater, for your support of this project and your terrific work. Thank you, Administrator Garvey, Senator Hutchinson, Congressman Hutchinson, Senatorelect Blanche Lambert Lincoln. Now, up here in northwest Arkansas, from my point of view, she's got the best of all worlds she's a Democrat with a Republican last name. Laughter I want you to get to know her you'll like her a lot. Congressman Dickey, Congressman Hammerschmidt, Mr. Green, thank you for your marvelous work here. Mr. Bowler, thank you for bringing American Eagle here. I want to thank the Springdale Band and the Fayetteville Choir. I thought they both did a superb job. You know I've got all these notes, but I don't really want to use them today. I was flying home today, and I have to begin by bringing you greetings from two people who were with me this morning who, for different reasons, wanted to come and couldn't. One is the First Lady, Hillary, who wanted me to tell her friends in northwest Arkansas hello and to say she wished she could be here. And the other is Senator Bumpers, who has a sinus condition and was told by his doctor not to get on the airplane, although I told him I thought it was a pretty nice plane I was trying to bring him down here in laughter and that we were trying to demonstrate that northwest Arkansas had a worldclass airport. But he asked to be remembered to you. I want to thank my good friend, former Chief of Staff, and our Envoy to Latin America, Mack McLarty, for being here. And all of you all out here I've been looking out in this crowd at so many people I've known for 25 years, many more I've been sort of reliving the last 25 years. I think I should begin by saying that in every project like this, there are always a lot of people who work on it. Rodney mentioned that many years ago, Senator Fulbright, who was my mentor, had the idea of there ought to be an airport here. I know how long Congressman Hammerschmidt has worked on this. This project started in the planning stage under the Bush administration, and we completed it. We had bipartisan support, and as Senator Hutchinson said, invoking our friend Senator McCain, we had bipartisan opposition to it as well. Laughter And I have found that there is in any project like this a certain squeaky wheel factor there are people that just bother you so much that even if you didn't want to do it, you'd go on and do it anyway. And I would like to pay a certain special tribute to the people who were particular squeaky wheels to me, starting with Alice Walton, who wore me out laughter Uvalde and Carol Lindsey, who guilt peddled me about every campaign they'd ever worked for me in and Dale Bumpers, who made me relive every favor he'd ever done for me for 20 years. Laughter Now, there were others as well, but I want to especially thank them. I want to say to all of you, I'm delighted to see Helen Walton here and members of the Walton family. I, too, wish Sam were here to see this day. I thank J.B. Hunt, who talked to me about this airport. George Billingsly once said, "You remember, I gave you the first contribution you ever got in Benton County now build that airport." Laughter I have a lot of stories about this airport. I want you to understand how high public policy is made in Washington. Laughter And we're all laughing about this, but the truth is, this is a good thing, and it needed to be done. You know, when I was a boy growing up in Arkansas Tim talked about how we were all raised to believe you could build a wall around Arkansas we thought in the beginning, for a long time, that roads would be our salvation. Forty two years ago President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act into law, a bill sponsored by the Vice President's father, Albert Gore, Sr., in the United States Senate. And it did a lot of good for America and a lot of good for Arkansas. And a lot of trucking companies in this State did a lot of good with it, and a lot of poultry companies, like Tyson's and others, made the most of those roads. And then we began to see that air traffic was important as well. And Secretary Slater talked a lot about that. And I got tickled when Senator Hutchinson was talking about transporting apples from Hiwassee by railroad in the twenties. I thought to myself, I wonder if I'm the first President who has ever known how to get to Hiwassee? Laughter But I got to thinking about that and how now we move from interstates to highways, and the people all these people I've mentioned today, Senator Hutchinson, Senator Bumpers, Senator Pryor, certainly Congressman Hammerschmidt, and Congressman Hutchinson now, and Secretary Slater, and before him, Secretary Pena, and all the people in Northwest Arkansas and their supporters understand today if you can't fly, you can't compete. But if you can fly, you can soar to new heights. Today in a sentence, at long last, northwest Arkansas can fly. And this means a lot to me. When I was landing here, I called all my Secret Service detail leaders together and I said, "I want you guys to look out the window. This is where I started my political career. I've been on every one of these roads." And we were sitting here, Congressman Hammerschmidt reached over and he said, "You know, your career, the career that led you to the Presidency, really started 24 years ago last Tuesday." What he didn't say was, comma, "when I beat you like a drum up here for Congress." Laughter But I learned a lot in that race. And ever since, driving into all the little towns and hamlets in this area, then as Governor, flying in and out of northwest Arkansas and all the airports that were up here, I have known for a long time that this could bring opportunity and empowerment, access to markets, a boom to tourism all of this will happen. And what I'd like to ask all of you to think about is to think of this airport and it's not just going from here to Chicago but from here to tomorrow. I am glad to tell you that the FAA will release today a 5 million letter of intent for continued development of this airport. I'm glad to say that we have not abandoned our bipartisan commitment, we Arkansans, to other kinds of transportation. When the Congress passed, with the vote of every Member of Congress here present, and I signed the Transportation Equity Act this year, it will mean 100 million more a year over the next 6 years to the State of Arkansas alone. And it, too, will do a lot of good to take us to the future. We are committed also to modernizing the air traffic system. Our air traffic control system, with the new investments we're making in aviation service and infrastructure, will now be able to better handle the listen to this the 50 percent increase in global air travel we expect in just the next 7 years. Our policy has helped our airlines and aerospace industries return to profitability. Now we're finalizing new means to promote more competition and lower fares at home. We've signed more than 60 agreements to expand air service with other nations, opening skies above as we open markets below. We're also trying to do more to make sure those skies are safe and secure. Under the Vice President's leadership, with the joint efforts of the FAA and NASA and the airline industry, we're working to convert our air traffic control system to satellite technology, to change the way we inspect older aircraft, and most important over the long run, to combat terrorism with new equipment, new agents, new methods. In the world of the future, we'll need great airports we'll need wonderful airplanes we'll need well trained well trained pilots and people to maintain those airplanes. Our prosperity, more and more, will depend upon keeping the world's skies safe, secure, and open. I've got to mention one other personal thing. I saw Lieutenant Governor Rockefeller here, and he probably has to hide it around election time, but when we were younger men we studied in Oxford, England, together when people typically took a boat. Now, people our age then look at me when I tell them I took 6 days to get from here to England and they think I need my head examined. We are moving around very fast now. And the last thing I'd like to ask you to think about is where we are going and how we're going to get there. We'll have better roads we'll have better airports we'll have safer air travel. But to me, as I have seen all the people before me speak, the people that really did the work all I had to do as President was to make sure my budget office didn't kill these requests and to make sure everybody I knew knew that I was personally supportive of this. But the Members of Congress and the others here present, the citizens, they did all the work. And all of you who worked on this I saw the leaders stand up when their names were called to me, this symbolizes America at its best people working on a common objective, across party lines, putting people first, thinking about the future. It's a symbol of what I have tried to do in the 6 years I have been in Washington. And I learned most of what I know driving around on these backroads. And I just want to tell all of you that I thank you for the role that you have played in helping to bring this country to the point where we not only have a surplus for the first time in 29 years but the lowest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years, the lowest unemployment in 28 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the highest homeownership in history, with the smallest Government in Washington since the last time John Glenn orbited the Earth. And I am proud of that. And what I ask you to think about is that we are all of us living in a smaller and smaller world, where our interdependence and our own power depends upon our constructive interdependence with our friends and neighbors beyond our borders, the borders of our region, our State, our Nation. If we're going to build a pathway to the future, we have to build it with air travel we have to build it with the Internet we have to build it with modern medical and scientific research and we have to build it by giving every child without regard to income, race, region, or background a worldclass education. We have to build it by recognizing that all the differences that exist in this increasingly diverse country I know there are churches here in northwest Arkansas that now have service in Spanish on Sunday, which would have been unthinkable 24 years ago when I first started traipsing around on these roads. All of that is a great blessing, if we decide, when we soar into the future, we're all going to take the flight together. You built this airport together. Take it into the future together. Thank you, and God bless you all. November 02, 1998 Mr. Joyner. We go to Washington, DC, and on the line right now is the President of the United States, President Bill Clinton. Good morning, sir. The President. Good morning, Tom. Mr. Joyner. How are you this morning? The President. I'm great. It's a beautiful day here, a little fall coolness in the air, but it's a beautiful day. Ms. Wilkes. It's a great day before getting out the vote. Myra J. Yes. The President. It is. I hope tomorrow will be as good as today is with the weather. African American Vote Mr. Joyner. Now, we've been talking all along about how important it is for African Americans to get out and vote. I want to go back, first of all, and let's talk about the times when black Americans didn't have the right to vote. Because I know that you came up in an era where you can remember the Little Rock Nine you can remember Medgar Evers you can remember the four little girls in Birmingham, where a lot of us only know about these events from recent movies. The President. Absolutely. Mr. Joyner. But you remember those times. The President. I lived through all that. I lived through the churches being bombed and people being driven away from the polls. And then I lived through the poll tax era, where people would buy the poll taxes by the roll, and black people had to agree to vote the way they wanted and they if they could get a certificate for the poll tax. I remembered all that Mr. Joyner. from Arkansas. And you probably heard a lot of hatred growing up in Arkansas, too. The President. I did. Of course, I did. To me, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the voting rights law, the open housing law, all those things, they were the pivotal events of my childhood as far as my citizenship goes I mean, just the whole civil rights movement. Now I see that we do at least on election day, we are all equal. As I said yesterday in Baltimore, tomorrow, whatever anybody thinks about all the challenges and problems we still have in America, every single person tomorrow is just as important as the President or the Speaker of the House or Mr. Gates at Microsoft or anybody else. Everybody shows up, and everybody's vote counts, unless you don't show up. You know what kinds of debates we've had here in Washington over the last couple of years you know what the big issues are. And the real challenge here is that if this were a Presidential year, then African American voters, Hispanic voters, working people generally single mothers who have to work for a living and figure out how to get their kids to child care or to school and work through how to get to the polling place all these folks would be voting. And it's clear, if that were the case, that we would win the congressional races handily, and we could change the direction of this country. We could end this last 8 months of partisanship we went through and really start building on the successes of the last 6 years. So what I've got to try to do is persuade enough people just to go out and vote, because this election is not an ordinary congressional election. This Congress will shape how the American people live in important ways for many years to come. Mr. Joyner. The African American vote is real important. The President. Very important. It's important because in these midterm elections, normally, African Americans do not vote in the same percentages as they do in Presidential elections. And normally the falloff is bigger than it is for hardcore Republican voters, who tend to be older, a little better off, have a little more free time, and more likely to vote. And of course, the so called Christian Coalition, the very conservative right wing of the Republican Party, they always vote. So if we want our voices heard and we want to continue the progress of the last 6 years, I need some support in Congress. We had a little more balance in Congress if we had a few more Democrats in Congress, we could pass the Patients' Bill of Rights to make sure that health care decisions are made by doctors and not insurance company accountants. We could pass Senator Carol Moseley Braun's school construction initiative to make sure that we have not only 100,000 teachers, but they're teaching our kids in modern schools and not classrooms that are all broken down buildings. We could pass an increase in the minimum wage. And we could stop this raid on the surplus until we save Social Security. Those are huge issues. And that's really what this election is all about. 2000 Census Ms. Wilkes. Mr. President, you were saying about African Americans and certainly there are a couple of things that are before the U.S. Government in the Congress, specifically, when you're looking at the U.S. census coming up and the importance of that, as well as representation in Congress, which the census obviously affecting that The President. Absolutely. Let me say to everyone here listening to us, the census is not just important because it's a way of telling us how many Americans there are and how we break down, what communities and States do we live in, what are our ages, what are our incomes, what are our racial backgrounds. The census also is used to draw the congressional maps and to determine the amount of assistance that comes in education aid and other things to various States and localities. Now, all I have tried to do in this census is to guarantee that we have an accurate count. In the last census, we know we missed several million Americans, disproportionately Americans of color and Americans who live in urban areas. We know they were not counted. So all we've said is, let's take the most reliable way of doing that. The Republicans are adamantly opposed to the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations. They're opposed to the recommendations even of President Bush's own census taker. And the reason is, I think they don't want all Americans counted because if that happens we'll have a different distribution of the congressional district maps, and it will make a big difference for the long term future of our country. Now, this will happen in the year I leave office, 2000, my last year as President. But I just believe I owe it to the future as we grow ever more diverse. And this is not just an issue for African Americans this is an issue for Asian Americans this is an issue for Hispanic Americans this is an issue for new immigrants from even some of the Central European countries, countries of the former Soviet Union. All these people, if they're here, deserve to be counted. If they're citizens, they deserve to be counted and taken into account when we draw the congressional district maps. If they're legal immigrants, they should be counted so that we can give the appropriate distribution of Federal education and health care assistance and other things. President's Motivation and Goals Mr. Joyner. You know, Mr. President, I hear you talking about things like that and the fact that you'll be out of office soon, and I just read in the paper the other day about the millions of dollars that you have allocated for African Americans and other minorities to fight AIDS. And I think that's a tribute to you and your dedication, and it makes me want to ask you what makes you keep pressing forward like this, knowing that you're going to be out of office soon? What makes you keep trying to do these kinds of things? The President. Well, what would be the point of being President if you didn't use the power of the Presidency to try to solve the problems of the country, to meet the challenges of the country, to seize the opportunities of the country? When I ran for this job, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do. I didn't know, obviously, every decision that would be presented to me or every challenge or crisis that would come up. But I knew that I wanted to turn the country. I wanted to change our economic policy. I wanted to change our education and our welfare policies. I wanted to give more young people the chance to serve their country in national service. But all of it together was designed to create a country that was ready for a new century and a new economy and a new world. And one of the critical things about getting ready is whether every person in this country believes that we're moving toward one America. You mentioned that AIDS initiative. We got 156 million to try to do special things to reduce the dramatic increase in HIV and AIDS in the African American community, in the Hispanic community, in other communities of color. That's where the growth is now. How can we be one America if a ravaging disease like this is being brought under control in part of our population but not in another? So I think this is very important to me. I have I can rest when I'm not President anymore. I need to work like crazy till the last minute of the last hour of the last day to try to make sure I have done everything I possibly could with this precious 8 years of time the American people gave me. Mr. Joyner. So what do you want historians to write about you when it's all over? The President. I want them to say that I helped to take America into a new era, that I really prepared America for a global economy, a global society, for increasing diversity at home, for responsibilities in a world where there was no cold war but we had a lot of challenges from terrorism, from racial and ethnic and religious wars. I want them to say that I did create an America of dramatically increased opportunity for all people, an America where we were coming together more in a spirit of unity, an America that was a leading force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world. That's what I want them to say. President's Advisory Board on Race Ms. Wilkes. You know, Mr. President, when you were talking about the Little Rock Nine and how you lived through that, and also people have said that as you have promised and you have carried through on that promise to give us a reflection in your Cabinet and those around you of America, and one of the leading things that you brought to mind is the race relations panel. And I was just wondering what the status is on that. The President. Well, we are preparing right now a final book on that. I got the report from Dr. John Hope Franklin and the other members of my panel on race, and we're going to do a book on it and get it out to the country. And then we're going to continue the work. We're going to take the recommendations of the panel and work with them on the next legislative program I present to the Congress, in the administrative policies of our Government, and in continuing to find things that are working at the local level and promoting them throughout the country. I think this is very important. They did a terrific job. We've got literally hundreds of thousands of Americans involved all across America, and we're going to continue to work. I've got the report now, and we're going to be about the business of implementing it. I think it's very important. Ms. Wilkes. And that's the importance of having the Congress that you can work with, that will get that out. The President. That's right. That's right. And let me say this. The real problem now is that the Congress is basically dominated by not only the Republicans, but the right wing of the party is in the driver's seat. And if we get a big turnout here and we change the Congress, the composition of the Congress, you wouldn't have to change it all that much to get enough balance in there for us to be able to take some affirmative action. If we had a few more Democrats we could do things positively instead of do what we had to do last year, which was to this year we fought a rear guard action for 9 months, and then at the very end they came in and had to deal with us on the budget. And because we all stuck together, we got 100,000 teachers we did save the surplus for Social Security we were able to get programs for children after school hundreds of thousands that was a good thing. But there is so much more we should do. And if the American people believe it's important to have modern schools and more teachers and to have the Patients' Bill of Rights, to have an increase in the minimum wage, to save Social Security, if they think these things are important and they want us to keep coming together, not be driven apart, then it's important to show up tomorrow. Voter Turnout Myra J. Do you think the Republicans are counting on African Americans not to come out tomorrow? The President. Well, I think they are hoping that there will be a lower turnout among people who will vote for the Democrats, yes. They are hoping that there will be. And they are hoping there will be a higher turnout among people that they have tried to inflame, as they always do, in the various ways that they do it. Republican Campaign Ads Ms. Wilkes. And the Republican ads, certainly, have been flooding the airwaves. The President. It's unbelievable. I think it's important that the people listening to us know that they raised over 100 million more than the Democrats did in their Senate and House committees and their national political committees over 100 million. And they, over and above that, they have a lot of these so called third party expenditures where just in the last 10 days they dropped another 750,000 against a congressional candidate in Michigan, a few hundred thousand dollars they dropped into a television ad campaign attacking one of our Democrats in rural Ohio. I've never seen this kind of money. But we have the message we have the issues. The country is in good shape, and we can do better. And the public agrees with us on our program, so it's basically their money and our issues and the question of who votes. And that's why this interview is so important to me. Mr. Joyner. Radio stations, I told you I would be running long. I'm running right through the break with the President of the United States. Please hold with us. Ms. Wilkes. Bigger name. 1998 Elections Mr. Joyner. Yes, bigger name. Laughter Mr. President, we've talked about what happens if African Americans turn out to vote tomorrow. What if we don't turn out? The President. Then they'll win a lot more seats than they otherwise would. Mr. Joyner. So we're going to be to blame if it doesn't work out? The President. Well, I wouldn't say that. I mean, who knows President Kennedy once said, "Victory has a thousand fathers, and defeat is an orphan." I don't think it's worth thinking about that, but I think it's worth thinking about the difference between what you know, Carol Moseley Braun in Illinois has been behind this whole race. She has been badly outspent. She has run against someone with millions and millions of dollars who attacked her and basically refused to appear and tried to disguise his philosophical positions, which were far to the right of the voters of Illinois. She's made a huge comeback in the last week. It's amazing. One survey even had her leading by 2 points after being down by as much as 16. But it won't amount to anything unless the voters in Illinois who would vote for her show up. Senator Hollings is in a tough fight in South Carolina. We have a chance to win a Senate seat in North Carolina. Chuck Schumer in New York, Barbara Boxer in California, these are huge, huge races, and there are many more. I just mention them. In Las Vegas, Nevada, where there's a substantial African American population, we've got a congressional seat and a very important Senate seat in play. So the extent of the turnout all across America and there are 30 or 35 congressional seats that could go one way or the other, and how they go will determine the shape of this next Congress and what their priorities will be. Ms. Wilkes. And into the year 2000 and beyond. The President. Yes. Mr. Joyner. And you, personally, have a lot riding on this Congress, with all of the troubles that you're having. The President. You know, I've just got 2 more years to be President, and I would like it I'll be happy to fight, just like I did this last year, if that's the Congress I have to deal with, and at the end of the year we'll get something done, just like we did this year. But it would be so much better here we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the first budget surplus in 29 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years, the highest homeownership in history. The policies we've followed have been good for America, and it would be so much better now if we could just go to work and get rid of some of this bitter partisanship. The level of intense, angry partisanship that the Republicans have injected into Washington is really not good for America. I want to work with all people here who have good ideas, to go forward. It is possible to do. But it's not possible to do as long as they think they can win with huge amounts of money and divisive attacks and negative campaigns. So if we can change the balance here a little bit, then we can get everybody to work together to move the country forward for the next 2 years. And yes, that's what I'd like to spend my time on. I think we ought to be working on people's problems out there in America and not just fighting with each other inside the beltway. Ms. Wilkes. Mr. President, you talked about how good things are in the country and some people have said that they're too good and people have become too complacent to get out there and vote for any difference. The President. Well, I have two things to say about that. First of all, they are good, but they can be a lot better. Yes, we have the lowest African American poverty rate ever recorded. But is it low enough? Of course not. They can be a lot better. And I have offered to Congress initiatives to dramatically improve the schools, to dramatically improve the economic prospects of inner city neighborhoods. I'd like to have a chance to pass them. Think of the need we have for this Patients' Bill of Rights. Think of how many people are out there in HMO's that are having health care decisions made by accountants, not doctors. Think of the need we have, with the biggest school population in history, to build 5,000 modern schools that can be hooked up to the Internet and smaller classes for 100,000 teachers to teach in. Think of the need we have for a minimum wage increase. You know, even with low unemployment, you can't raise a family on 5.15 an hour. And think of the need we have to reform Social Security in the right way and to preserve the Medicare program and to meet these other challenges. So my first answer is that we have a lot to do. The second thing I would say is that if everybody stays home and we have people in here who will be irresponsible and squander the surplus and risk our economic program and its stability as they did for the last 8 months here, if they tried to do that, then things could get worse in a hurry. So I believe that it would be a great mistake for anybody to stay home because times are good and to assume, "Well, the President is dealing with all these guys all right, and things are fine, and I don't really have to show up." That's a big risk that's not worth taking. We have too much to do. Mr. Joyner. Well, that seems to be the mood. The President. I don't know. I think a lot of people know this is a big election. I think they know what their priorities are, and you mentioned them. And I think they know what our priorities are. And I think they know that the Democrats are focused on the people out there in the country and not on some sort of a partisan power game here in Washington. That's what I want to get out there to the people, and if they understand that, I think they'll go. I certainly hope they will. The American people, given enough time, virtually always make the right decision. But we need people to go, because otherwise this huge, vast amount of money that's been spent in this campaign is going to beat a lot of very, very worthy people who would be very good in the Congress and the Senate. Mr. Joyner. All right. Thank you, sir, for coming on the air and talking to us. The President. Thank you. Mr. Joyner. And we look for results tomorrow and a better day on Wednesday. Ms. Wilkes. Are you going home to Little Rock to vote? The President. No, I'm not. I voted absentee already. I've already cast my ballot. Mr. Joyner. All right, Mr. President. The President. Thank you. Goodbye. October 31, 1998 Q. President Clinton, first of all, thank you very much for sitting down with us. The President. Delighted to do it. Thank you. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's Legacy Q. You know, it's exactly 3 years since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And Mrs. Rabin said she was rather disappointed that you failed to mention her husband during the East Room ceremony last Friday. How do you respond to that? The President. Well, you know, the agreement is actually supposed to enter into force on the third anniversary of his passing, of his killing. And I think that if, in fact, it does do so, it is a fitting thing, because none of us would be here if it hadn't been for him. He really started all this in a profound way. I know that the Madrid conference started before his election, but it was his conviction and his strength and security that he conveyed to the people of Israel, I think, that made this whole peace process possible. And I never do anything in the process that I don't think about him. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Q. Mr. President, from the tragic assassination to the current situation, Prime Minister Netanyahu might put himself at the same risk as Mr. Rabin. So perhaps it is unjustified to put pressure on him to follow the Oslo accord or the Oslo track. The President. Well, I don't think there's any question that the Prime Minister has put himself at some physical risk in pursuing the peace process. But I believe that it's important that the people of Israel know that, at least in my opinion, it's a good agreement that it strengthens Israel's security needs that the agreements made with the Palestinians are fully consistent with Oslo. And the Prime Minister worked very, very hard to advance Israel's security interests. Just for example, there was the whole issue of what should be done with the people whom Israel believes have committed acts of violence and terrorism against Israelis. And I am convinced that the Palestinians will now act against these people in a way that is consistent with the agreement and that will meet the Prime Minister's and Israel's needs. So that's an example of a whole array of security advances that were embedded in this agreement. And I think all Israelis who support the peace process should support the agreement because I think it furthers the cause of peace. Palestinian National Council Q. Mr. President, is it really the PNC, the Palestinian National Council, that is going to convene to revise the Palestinian covenant with your presence? Is it really the PNC? The President. Well, it's the PNC plus a number of other groups. And some of these groups are embedded within the PNC that is, they're dual membership for some of the people in the Government, in the executive council, in the other councils involved. And some are outside the PNC. But among other things at that meeting, we will seek a clear renunciation of the offending parts of the charter and a general endorsement of the agreement, this whole agreement, so that the process can be seen to be going forward with the support of those who represent grassroots Palestinian opinion. The Prime Minister wanted me to support this provision, this effort, and he fought very, very hard for this, as did a number of members of his Cabinet who were there, because they thought that there needed to be a debate in a Palestinian forum, even if it was controversial and heated, which would give to the Palestinian people some evidence not only of a commitment to follow an agreement but of a changing of the heart, an opening of the heart of the Palestinians toward the Israelis. And I thought that argument had a lot of appeal, even though it was not without its hazards for Mr. Arafat. Q. Because The President. Because it's been 18 months since anything big has happened, and because there's a lot of he has his problems, too, among them the fact that the standard of living for most Palestinians is lower today than it was when the peace process began, because the enemies of peace keep interrupting the flow of normal life. So I agreed that if it was that important to Israel and Chairman Arafat were willing to try to accommodate that condition by the Israelis, that I would go to Gaza and address this group and ask them to support the peace and to renounce forever the idea of animosity toward and opposition to the existence of the state of Israel, and instead embrace the path not only of peace but of cooperation. President's Upcoming Visit to Gaza Q. I want to ask you about your visit to Gaza. Don't you think, Mr. President, that this trip may be seen as a first step in recognizing an independent Palestinian state? The President. Well, if so it would be, I think, wrong, because I have tried strictly to adhere to the position of the United States that we would not take a position on any final status issue. One of the reasons that I worked so hard at Wye to try to bring the parties together is, I thought it imperative to take this next big step along the peace process so that we could launch the final status talks and get them underway in good faith, so that neither side would seek to prejudge a final status issue. That is not what I'm doing in going there. The Prime Minister wanted me to go there and wanted us all to make this pitch. I asked them if they would make some joint appearances and if they would both make the same speech to Palestinian and to Israeli audiences. And they said they would do that. I would like to see that happen I think that would help. It would help the Palestinians to see Yasser Arafat saying the same thing to the Israelis he says to the Palestinians. It would help the Israelis, I think, also. And it would be a good thing for the Prime Minister to be able to give the same speech whatever they decide to say, just say the same thing to both communities so that no one thinks that there's any evasion or shading or anything. I think, just little things like this to open up a little awareness of the other's position and build a little confidence, I think would be quite good. Jonathan Pollard Q. Mr. President, why won't you release Jonathan Pollard? The President. Well, I agreed to review his case and to take the initiative to review it. I have not released him in the past because since I've been President in the two previous normal reviews that is, the ones that were initiated by his request for clemency the recommendation of all my law enforcement and security agencies was unanimously opposed to it. But the Prime Minister felt so strongly about it and I might say, every Israeli Prime Minister I have dealt with on every occasion has asked me about Pollard. Yitzhak Rabin did, Shimon Peres did, and Prime Minister Netanyahu has. Q. But you argued pretty you had pretty harsh exchanges with Netanyahu, reportedly, about that? The President. No. I thought then, I believe now, and I think the public opinion in Israel bears this out, that it was in Israel's interest to do this agreement on its own merits because it would advance the cause of Israeli security and keep the peace process going. I think there's been a lot of reporting about this with which I don't necessarily agree. That's no criticism I just want to tell you my perception. Bibi Netanyahu argued strongly for Pollard's release. He made the arguments that anyone who knows a lot about the case and thinks he should be released would make. But I took no offense at that. He was representing what he believes to be the interest of the State of Israel. And he did it in you know, he doesn't make arguments halfway. You observe the Prime Minister, he's an aggressive person he fights hard for what he believes. I took no offense at it at all. And I would ask you all to remember, when evaluating reports that tempers were frayed or strong language was used now, remember, the three of us, Mr. Arafat and Mr. Netanyahu and I, we were there for over 8 days. Most nights I was there, I went home at 2 and 3 o'clock in the morning. The last time we were there on this last day, I was up for 39 hours and so were they. Now, I'm amazed that we didn't have more disruptive conduct and more harsh words, given how exhausted and frayed we were. But it shows you how hard the parties were trying, on the one hand, to make peace, but on the other hand, to protect their security interests. Particularly, I think, that was Mr. Netanyahu's concern. He was desperately trying to find a way to make peace or to advance the peace process that would enable him to go home and sell it to his Cabinet and his constituency. And this Pollard issue was very important to him. But I took no offense at that. Q. But still, Mr. President, there were many reports that you were very upset with Mr. Netanyahu and were quoted saying that his behavior was despicable. The President. That report is not true. That's just inaccurate. And this is the first opportunity I've had to say that. There was a moment in the negotiations when the two guys split apart, and there was an issue raised that I thought was wrong. And I said so in very graphic terms. But I never used the word "despicable" to describe the Prime Minister. I did not do that. There was a moment where I thought there were various moments in these negotiations when I thought at least from my perspective, trying to be an honest broker they were both wrong. You would expect this over 8 days. But at that moment, the issue at stake had nothing to do with Pollard. It was an issue, a dispute between the Palestinians and the Israelis it had nothing to do with Pollard. And it is true that there was a moment in which there was a heated exchange in which I said something rather graphic, but I did not adversely characterize the Prime Minister in the way that's reported. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin Q. I'd like to talk about the late Yitzhak Rabin. I think you know, Mr. President, that when you said the phrase, shalom chaver, "goodbye friend," I think you touched many many Israelis in a very, very special way. And we've been curious, how did you come up with this? I even noticed you have a pin that says shalom chaver on your desk right here in the Oval Office. The President. Yes. I have many Jewish Americans working for me here, and they all knew how close I felt to Prime Minister Rabin. And they all knew how heartbroken I was when he was shot. And we were everybody was sort of coming up with ideas. And Shimon Peres later told me that he had not seen those two words used together before because chaver, it's sort of a special word it goes beyond normal friendship. And one of my I wish I could say that I knew enough Hebrew that I came up with it, but one of my staff members suggested that I say it. And they explained it to me, what it meant, and it seemed to be perfect for what I was trying to say. I must say, for me, that was more than a political loss. I felt very close to the Prime Minister, to Mrs. Rabin. I got to know their children, grandchildren. And I think always when I'm pushing the peace process forward that I'm doing it not just for myself but maybe also a little for him. And I must say, in these last negotiations I was very pleased to see that Prime Minister Netanyahu I saw in his eyes, I could almost see in his eyes the moment when he really made the decision that, well, maybe the Palestinians were going to make sufficiently specific security commitments that would be on a sufficiently clear timetable that he could sell not just to the Israeli public at large but to a decisive portion of his own constituency, which is a very different thing, as all of you know better than I do. And he could see that, that he could personally believe that it would advance Israel's security. And I saw that look in his eyes. I felt from that point on that eventually we would get an agreement. And that's the look that you want to see in a leader's eyes in a situation like that, because I still believe that the right formula is peace and security, and that you really can't have one without the other. But I also believe I told Mr. Arafat once during these negotiations that we had to get to the point where Israel and the Palestinian Authority had the same enemies and that they felt that if they couldn't get to be friends, at least they could be comrades and that if we could fulfill a role there, in the way this agreement was written, to build confidence between them on a daily basis, then that would be a good thing for us to do. Q. Do you think, Mr. President, that things might have been different today if it wasn't for the assassination? The President. Yes, of course they might have been. But it's hard to know and pointless to speculate. The main thing I think that is important for me, at least from my perspective as an American President and a friend of Israel, it's important for me that the people of Israel know that I watched these peace talks at Wye unfold, and that I believe that the Prime Minister and the members of his Cabinet who were there and his staff were trying their best to advance the cause of Israel's security. I believe that they would never have agreed to this, no matter how much I asked them to do so, if they were not absolutely convinced that it was a real advance for security and that, therefore, if we can launch the final status talks, we can redeem the sacrifice of Rabin and all the other people who have died and given and given and given to secure Israel's place and future. October 28, 1998 President Clinton. Good afternoon. Let me say again how very pleased I am to have President Pastrana, his wife, his children, and so many members of his government here with us. This is truly a new beginning for Colombia and a new opportunity for our nations to renew our bonds. We made a very good start today. Our hemisphere is increasingly working together for democracy and opportunity, for justice and human rights, for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. For Colombia, the insurgency looms over all other challenges today. There is terror and assassination, kidnaping, including the kidnaping of United States citizens, and other affronts to human rights. The narcotics trade and the civil conflict have fed off each other as rebels and paramilitaries do business with violent drug traffickers. However, we know peace can come, even in the most difficult circumstances, if the will and the courage for peace is strong. President Pastrana has the will, the courage, and the support of his people to build peace. I welcome his efforts to open talks with insurgent groups. We stand ready to help. We hope the insurgents and paramilitaries will seize this opportunity the President has offered them by ending terrorism and hostage taking and involvement with drug traffickers. The President and I have just signed a new alliance against drugs to intensify our joint efforts in education, in prevention and law enforcement, and extradition, eradication, economic development, and again, in efforts to end civil conflict. All are essential to this fight. Also, we have reached an agreement on using the proceeds from assets forfeited by drug traffickers to bolster Colombia's counternarcotics enforcement efforts. As I said this morning, the fight against drugs is our joint responsibility. It must unite us, not divide us. In that spirit, I am pleased to announce that we will provide more than 280 million in assistance to Colombia in the current fiscal year, not just for the frontline battle against drugs today but for development, to build a better future. The strong package of aid recently approved by Congress shows that there is bipartisan support here in America for Colombia's new leadership. I appreciate the challenge Colombia faces in getting its fiscal house in order. I also appreciate the commitment President Pastrana has made to meeting that challenge. If our experience is any guide, Colombia's effort will be rewarded. Today we learned, after decades of deficits, that this past year we had a surplus of exactly 70 billion. I'm very pleased that attempts to spend that surplus, rather than preserve it until we reform the Social Security system to meet the needs of the 21st century, were not successful in the last Congress. It is important that we maintain this position until we have saved Social Security. Hopefully, that will occur next year. While we both work to improve our economies at home, we must do more together. The President and I have agreed to seek new ways to expand trade and to improve our financial stability. We will start consultations on a bilateral investment treaty and a trade and investment commission for the Andean region. We will work together toward the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. We agreed that developments must be carried out in ways that protect our natural environment and the public health. Toward that end, we have reached agreement for Colombia to become the 73d nation to join the GLOBE program for environmental education over the Internet. We also reaffirmed our joint commitment to strengthening democracy, human rights, the rule of law. Our Agency for International Development has concluded an agreement to help the Colombian Government strengthen its judicial system to improve its ability to prosecute human rights abuses. And our Defense Department has established a working group with Colombia's Defense Ministry to improve military justice. Finally, President Pastrana and I have asked Secretary of State Albright and Foreign Minister Fernandez to establish a joint consultative group to keep us in close contact and keep all this progress on track so that we can realize our common aspirations for greater democracy, prosperity, and peace in the new century. Again, Mr. President, we take your election and your early actions as a very hopeful and positive sign for the people of Colombia and the opening of a new and strong chapter in our joint history together. Thank you for coming. The floor is yours. President Pastrana. First of all, I'd like to express my thanks to President Clinton and to Mrs. Clinton for the splendid welcome that Nohra and I have been given. And I'd like to say to everyone that I've met in Washington, members of both political parties, both on this trip as well as on my earlier trip, that I am extremely impressed by your good wishes and by your will to work with us as we overcome past problems and enter a new era. On behalf of our people, I would like to express our thanks to the people of the United States, and personally, I'd like to state that although I've only been President for 3 months now, it would be very difficult I think for Nohra and I to be welcomed so warmly anywhere else. I came here with the hope of forging an alliance with President Clinton and the United States, and I will leave having established a true friendship with the President, and I hope with his Nation. We have made progress in all the areas placed before us the environment, education, aviation, and economic cooperation. During this state visit, President Clinton and I have signed a new and historic alliance against drug trafficking in order to combat the growth, trafficking, and demand for drugs, which is a major achievement which reaffirms this new era in relations between Colombia and the United States. I referred to all these areas earlier as items we have before us but not between us. These are matters of common interest. We are united on this, and united, there is much that we can achieve. Finally, before answering your questions, allow me to say that my country and my compatriots feel deep respect for President Clinton and for his role as world leader. And as a rarity in history, he is one who forges world peace. President Clinton is a friend of Colombia, and in this visit we have solidified our friendship. Thank you very much. President Clinton. Now, what we will do is take a few questions. We will alternate between American and Colombian journalists. And we'll begin with Mr. Hunt Terence Hunt, Associated Press . Wye River Agreement Q. Mr. President, less than a week after the Mideast agreement, Prime Minister Netanyahu has come under pressure from hardliners and says that he won't begin the pullback from the West Bank until he gets approval from his Cabinet, and he has delayed a Cabinet meeting indefinitely. Are you concerned about delays, the return of mistrust? And what can the United States do to prevent this agreement from unraveling? President Clinton. Well, first of all, let me say that I believe it's a good agreement. It required principled compromise by both parties and extraordinary efforts. Secondly, as you can see from the criticism both Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat have gotten, it took some courage for them to reach this agreement. I told everybody that I discussed this with before they came here that, if Prime Minister Netanyahu reached an agreement here, he would face a great deal of bitter criticism at home. I personally think he did a good job at the Wye negotiations, a remarkable job, being strong, aggressive in defense of Israel's interests. The way I read the present state of things is that at the present moment, he knows there's a lot of opposition in the government and in his political base to this agreement, and he wants to be absolutely assured that the early steps will be taken on the other side. I believe that if we complete the security arrangements that were agreed to at Wye, that the Israeli Government will approve this and honor their commitment, and we'll go forward. So I would urge all the onlookers here, including all of us in the press and in public life, not to over react to every little bump and turn in the road. There was a lot of mistrust built up in this relationship. It wasn't going to evaporate even in 9 days. And a lot of the people who weren't there at Wye are going to be heard from in both camps now. I think the important thing is they all make commitments to do certain things on a certain timetable and no one should slip off of that. And it was pretty well synchronized so that there will be continual reaffirmations on both sides of the commitments made. If we can just stay on that, I think we'll be fine. But all of this should only clarify to all the rest of us that they were both quite brave in doing what they did and that peace is a difficult business in the Middle East. Colombian Domestic Peace Process Q. President Clinton, how committed are you with bringing peace to Colombia? And will you personally take the lead in this effort? President Clinton. Well, I would like to do anything that I can, but I think the President has taken the lead in a way that is, I think, innovative and very heartening to the rest of us. Again, I hope that those who have been involved in the turmoil in Colombia will take his offer in good faith. From the point of view of the United States, I think we should be in a supporting role however we can be of help. One of the things that we would very much like is the United States citizens who have been kidnaped. If they are alive, we'd like them released. If they're not, we'd like them accounted for. That would help us a great deal. But I personally have been struck with admiration for the way that President Pastrana has handled this so far. I don't know what else anybody could do, and I think that the path he is pursuing is the one most likely to bring results. If there is anything we can do to support that, of course, I would be happy to do so. Helen Helen Thomas, United Press International . 1998 Elections Free Press in Colombia Q. Mr. President, what is your take on the internal elections? How do you think the Democrats will fare? And do you think the impeachment process will impact on the election itself? And for President Pastrana, do you have freedom of the press in your country? I understand that you have threatened to shut down a radio station. President Clinton. Do you want to go first? President Pastrana. Yes, please. President Clinton. Yes, you want to go first or, yes, you want me to go first? Laughter President Pastrana. You go first. Laughter President Clinton. Let me say, I think that these elections, first of all, are important. This is an important time for our country, and therefore, this is a very important election. And I hope there will be a big turnout. As to how they will come out, it's very difficult to say. There are an unusually large number of apparently quite close elections, which could be quite good for the Democrats in a year when, by 150 years of history, we're not supposed to do very well, especially since our side is being very badly outspent. But I think that the important thing is that the choices are clear. We believe that none of the surplus should be touched until we save the Social Security program. The leadership of the Republican Party apparently disagrees with that. Mr. Kasich talked about it again yesterday. We believe that it's important to pass a Patients' Bill of Rights that lets medical decisions be made by doctors, not accountants, that guarantees people can see a specialist, that their medical records are private, that they go to the nearest emergency room. They disagree with that. We believe that it is very important that, now that we're going to have 100,000 new teachers, that we build or modernize 5,000 schools so they'll have classrooms to teach in. They disagree with that. We think we ought to raise the minimum wage they disagree with that. We think there ought to be tobacco legislation to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco, that there ought to be campaign finance reform. Even though some Republicans have supported that, their leadership disagrees with that. So the choices in this election are very, very clear. And all of these issues, plus my continuing efforts to maintain financial stability, economic stability around the world, and keep the economy going, make this a very important time. And the only thing I can say is that every American should care about this and should go out and vote, and I hope that every American will. President Pastrana. Thank you very much for your question. First, I'd like to say that I am a colleague of yours. I'm a journalist. And for that very reason, I am one of the great defenders of freedom of the press. I think your question refers to a fine or a sanction that was imposed by the earlier administration. That's another one of the legacies left us by the Samper administration. Two days before the end of the administration, the President fined a radio network in Colombia precisely because they violated the Colombian legal statute. My administration now needs to wait for this radio network. According to Colombian law establishes the process necessary to appeal this decision, and we as the Government have approximately one month to respond to whatever appeal the network makes. I think, in Colombia, we need to recover the freedom of the press that was lost over the last 4 years in great measure. And I would just give you some examples. Families that were owners of newspapers for over 100 years in Colombia had to close them down. TV licenses that had complied with the law as stated here in the United States even our Nobel Prize winner, Garcia Marquez, has stated this these things were taken away since these people were not friends of that administration. I think we're now in a new era where we will recover freedom of the press in Colombia. That is my commitment. I insist, as your colleague as a journalist, as a lover of democracy, we will recover freedom of the press, which I think to a great extent was lost over the last few years in my country. Colombian Domestic Peace Process Q. President Clinton, does the U.S. believe in the guerrillas' will for peace? President Clinton. I can't say that because I've never had any direct contact with them. All I can say is, I've had quite a lot of experience now with this over the last 6 years. We have worked to end a war in Bosnia. We have worked to end three decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. We have labored in the vineyards, as you know, of the complex Middle East peace process. And we have worked in many other areas, I and my partners here in our administration. And I have read a great deal about the turmoil in Colombia and its roots. All the parties share the same country. It cannot be good for a nation over the long run to endure the kind of fighting that Colombia has endured and to have it all mixed in with the narcotraffickers. It can't be good for the children of the guerrillas. It can't be good for the areas where they operate. It can't be good for the quality of life. So now you have a President who is clearly independent of destructive forces, clearly committed to bringing people together, clearly committed to giving all the children of Colombia a better future. All I can do is hope and pray that the offer he has given he has reached his hand out to these people, and I can only hope that they will shake his hand and take his offer. Mr. McQuillan Larry McQuillan, Reuters . 1998 Elections Q. Mr. President, on the latest Republican campaign commercials, do you think it's fair for them to try to cast your personal life as a campaign issue? And do you think in broader terms, that it's fair that anyone should view next Tuesday's election as a referendum on you? President Clinton. Well, first of all, I think the Republicans are free in our country, they're free, and they should be free to make the election about whatever they want to make the election about. I hope the American people have seen in me over these last few weeks a real commitment to doing what I told them I would do from the beginning, to try to atone to them for what happened and to try to redouble my efforts to be a good President. And I hope they have sensed the inner changes that are going on and the manifestations and the efforts I've made to help the education of our children in the budget, to achieve peace in the Middle East talks. But I believe that it's always best if the elections are about the American people and their families and their future. And that's why I believe that, with the choice so clear we are for Social Security first don't squander the surplus we're for the Patients' Bill of Rights doctors, not accountants, make decisions we are for building those 5,000 schools so the teachers will have a place to teach and the kids will have a place to learn we're for raising the minimum wage and for campaign finance reform and for legislation to protect our kids from tobacco. And they're against those things. That's one of the reasons they have the enormous financial advantage they enjoy which is paying for a lot of those ads. And so to me, there's a clear choice. How can I object to them exercising their free speech rights in saying what they think the election is about? They also say, I might add, apparently I know what I've read I've not seen these ads they also say that the elections are about tax cuts and their plan on Social Security, which indicates to me that once again they are not committed to leaving this surplus alone until we reform Social Security. That, to me, is a very serious issue that will affect all the American people. So I would hope that the American people will hear the differences between the two parties, see how far we've come in the last 6 years, and make their judgments. But in any case, I hope we'll have a big turnout. This is not an ordinary election because of the challenges facing our country, and we don't need an ordinary midterm turnout. We need people to show up. And I trust the American people. That's why we're still around here after over 200 years. I think they'll get it right. Q. So, sir, does that mean President Clinton. I gave you my answer. The Republicans are free to say whatever they want to say. I told you what I believe the issues are that are most important facing the American people. I told you that I'm doing my best to be a good President and to evidence the commitment that I expressed to the American people over the last 2 months in what I do as President and how I do it. But they have to decide whether to vote and on what to vote. I believe if the election is carried out on the issues affecting our children and our future, whether it's our financial stability or saving Social Security or the Patients' Bill of Rights or education, that the members of my party will do quite well, notwithstanding the enormous burden of history and the enormous financial disadvantage under which they labor. And so we're just going to go out there and keep reaching out to the American people and see what happens. Colombia's Economic and Political Situation Q. I'd like to know why you have been going down in the polls, and do you believe in those polls? President Pastrana. I don't think life is about doing well in the polls or not. In our country we received a situation that all Colombians are very aware of, especially with regard to financial matters, where we have the highest fiscal deficit in Colombia's history. We were given a country with the highest rate of unemployment the country has had in the last few years. And clearly, I think that to a great extent this is due to the policies we've had to adopt and the policies we will continue to have to adopt to overcome the crisis. What I've always repeated is that, as a leader, as a politician, a person has to be judged at the end of his or her term. Clearly, at least in my personal case, in spite of believing in polls, I think that logically we have to look at the mechanism we have to see if we've talking about phone polls, personal polls, what kind of methodology has been used. But clearly, I think the important thing is that in 4 years we will know if these measures we've adopted were right or not. We are committed to a peace process which is difficult, but we are committed to it, and we will forge ahead. We know the country we've received is in a financial situation worse than any in Colombia's history. We know we have to take harsh measures, and we will take them. We will protect the poorest sectors. Clearly, there are instructions to be given to ministers for all the social areas, those that have to do with social investment, with poverty, with health and education, with building houses and matters of social interest are matters within the budget on which we are not going to try to reduce our expenses but try to keep them up and strengthen them. And we will have to make a major effort from the viewpoint of the administration, as we are doing, to cut our expenses, to cut a number of things. And logically, within 4 years we will know if these measures we are taking today with the assistance I've asked President Clinton for from the United States, through their support at the World Bank and at the Inter American Development Bank and at the International Monetary Fund, with the help that President Clinton's leadership can provide us in Europe, in Japan, so that we can overcome this crisis and obtain the resources necessary to again generate confidence in Colombia, and thus, as we see today, we will be able to overcome the kind of exchange pressure we're under. If we manage to generate that trust again you heard that yesterday from the Secretary of the Treasury today you've heard it from the President of the United States with their help, we will generate trust in the markets. We will take away the pressure on the exchange rate. We will lower our interest rates, and we will reactivate our economy. And thus we will increase our employment. And at the end of my 4 year term, we will be able to say, although we had to take some tough measures, we know now that those were the right measures to lead Colombia forward. President Clinton. I would like to make just a comment about that, because I am a totally disinterested observer in this sense. But the President has been in office 3 months, and I have now been here 6 years. For whatever it's worth, I think he's making the right decision. If you come into office and you face a difficult challenge and keep in mind, he now faces two difficult challenges he has a big economic challenge and he has the challenge of peace it's always better to be high in the polls than low. We all run for office everyone would rather be loved than hated. Everyone would rather be liked than disliked. But when you have a difficult economic situation, it's better to bite the bullet early and take the tough positions early so that people can get better. If you keep putting it off, the polls will slowly erode anyway, and in the end the people's lives won't change. When we adopted our budget here in 1993, a lot of members of my party actually lost their seats because of it, and I've regretted it ever since for them. But when we celebrated the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years, we invited all the ones who lost their seats to come back, and many did. And you'd be amazed how many told me that they did the right thing. They were proud of the fact that they got rid of the deficit of the country, and they gave us a new economy, a new lease on life. This is the nature of things in the world today. Not all problems are easy. We'd all like it in life if everything we had to do was easy. But not everything we have to do is easy. And I think the President is doing the right thing. As a disinterested observer, I'll be very surprised if Colombia is not richly rewarded by much stronger economic success, more jobs, higher incomes, more success as a result of the decisions he is making today. 1998 Elections Q. Mr. President, you said a moment ago that Republicans have a right to frame their ads in this election as they see fit. Two ways they've framed these latest ads number one, they argue, in essence, that you are not trustworthy, and therefore, you need a Republican Congress to balance against your Presidency. And number two, they ask the question, what do you tell your kids about your relationship with Ms. Lewinsky. I wonder how you would answer those two questions, sir. President Clinton. Well, first of all, I have answered the second question as far as I should. The decisions beyond that on the publicity were made by others, not me. I have answered that question. On whether I've been trustworthy, I think you can look at the record. Go back and look at what I said I would do in 1992, when I ran for President. Yesterday I signed a bill, for example, which completed the agenda that I said I would try to achieve for poor people in America to give them a chance to get more jobs and to allow them to save more of their own money when they're moving off welfare. It was a very important bill. It also contained our increase in Head Start funds, another commitment I made. And Gene Sperling came in, and he handed me this statement we put out in September of '93. And everything I said I would do on that list has now been done. A noted Presidential scholar said a couple of years ago before we had the success of the last 2 years that I had kept a higher percentage of my promises than the last five Presidents, in spite of the fact that I had made more detailed commitments to the American people when I ran. And the consequences are good. We have an economic boom. We have declining social problems. We are a force for peace in the world. So I think that it's fair for a person to be judged on his whole record. I've never I'm not trying to sugarcoat the fact that I made a mistake and that I didn't want anybody to know about it. I think I've talked about that. The American people have had quite a decent amount of exposure to that. I hope very much that they have seen that I'm doing my best to atone for it. I hope they can sense the rededication and the intensified efforts I'm making for the cause of peace around the world, for the cause of prosperity at home. But if you look at what I said I'd do when I presented myself to the American people in 1991 and 1992, at the long list of things we've done we said we'd do, and at the good results that the American people have enjoyed and it's a fact that the American people, I think, agree with us and not them. I think that's the real issue here. Are we right or are they right? Should we save the surplus until we save Social Security? Should we pass a Patients' Bill of Rights, or not? Should we build classrooms for these teachers to teach in and classes so the kids can have smaller classes? Should we raise the minimum wage? Should we pass campaign finance reform? Should we protect our kids from the dangers of tobacco, or not? It's a clear choice. That will be the impact on people's lives in this election. That's what I believe. But everyone else that's why you have a vibrant democracy everybody else gets to say whatever they want to say and debate it however they want to debate it. I can only tell you that I hope the American people will remember that, notwithstanding the best efforts of some to always take politics away from them and take decisions away from them and pretend that what happens to them and their lives is not important, it really is. And folks should show up and vote. And they should know that the decision not to vote is also a decision that will affect their lives. That's all I can say. And I hope that many will go, and I trust them to make whatever decision is best for them and for our country. Colombian Demilitarized Area Q. Mr. President, a question on the demilitarization and the reservations in the United States with regard to those measures. President Clinton said that it would be good to face these subjects at the beginning. Did you talk about demilitarization in your meeting? And I'd like to ask President Clinton what he thinks after his discussion with you this morning, what he thinks of that measure. President Pastrana. I think that it's very important to be able to establish a dialog, a direct dialog with President Clinton, with the Secretary of State, with General McCaffrey, with the National Security Council Adviser, especially with this whole demilitarized area which, according to Colombian law, can be established so that the representatives of the guerrilla movement can come to that area so we can guarantee their life, so that the representatives of Government can go to that area and their lives will also be guaranteed. We can have international observers present in this demilitarized area, as well as journalists who will also be attending. We had the opportunity today to explain to the President and to his Cabinet that this area will be established for 90 days. That was the commitment that was the agreement. What we seek are 90 days after next November 7th. During that time we want the FARC to sit down at the negotiating table. They've already appointed three representatives. The Colombian administration will be naming a representative. We'll establish an agenda for those meetings. But I think it's been very important to be able to share these ideas with President Clinton so that the U.S. Government can discuss it with us to allay their concerns. As I was saying to him this morning, sometimes there may be misinformation or lack of information with regard to this subject. But clearly we have had the opportunity to be able to share and discuss with him exactly what that demilitarized area is about, not just with the President but also with we've had our Minister of Defense, our High Commissioner for Peace, all the members of our delegation to be able to answer any concern, allay any fear, any question they may have with regard to this process. And I think it's been very well expressed. But I'd like to see if the President has any additional comment to make on it. President Clinton. I agree. Laughter Go ahead, Wolf Wolf Blitzer, CNN . 1998 Elections Q. Mr. President, the other theme that these new Republican ads say is this I hate to beat a dead horse, but I'll just give you an opportunity to respond to it they say the question of this election is this Reward Bill Clinton or vote Republican. Larry asked you earlier if you think these elections are going to be a referendum on your behavior. Do you think they will be? President Clinton. Well, I think they're running a great number of ads with a lot of issues. I'd like to go back I'm not sure I answered your question exactly right. I was talking about on the first question you asked, I think what people ought to say to their children is that when someone makes a mistake, they should admit it and try to rectify it and that this is an illustration of the fact that those rules should apply to everyone, but that when people do that, if they do it properly, they can be stronger in their personal lives and their family lives and in their work lives. And many of us in life can cite examples where if we went through a period of assessing, that we grew stronger from it, and we actually did better. With a humble spirit, with the grace of God, and with a lot of determination, I think that happens. And I think in that sense, the lesson is a good one, that it should apply to everyone, from the President on down. But I believe, to go back to your point, since there has been a lot of talk about misleading, they have a right to say whatever they want to say but in fairness, they're basically saying to the American people, "We want you to give up saving Social Security first. We want you to give up a Patients' Bill of Rights. We want you to give up modernizing or building 5,000 schools. We want you to give up a minimum wage increase. We want you to give up protecting your children from the dangers of tobacco, and we want you to give up campaign finance reform. We want you to give up all of that. We don't want you to think about yourself. We want you to, in effect, ratify the decisions we made for the tobacco companies, the health insurance companies, the special interests that didn't want campaign finance reform, all the people that gave us the money to put this ad on the air. We want you to give up everything that could help you. And if we can distract you and divert your attention, that will enable us to hold on to our jobs, even though we had 8 months of partisanship in the last Congress and didn't do much until we had to get a budget out. And then we agreed to go along with the President and the Democrats and let them do what they wanted to do for education." So I would say it wouldn't be a very persuasive argument to me if I were a citizen out there, because I would always be trying to think, as a citizen, what is best for my family, for my children, for my community, and for my country. And I think that is always always got to be uppermost in all of our minds. I think it would be a more compelling debate if they would put whatever it is they want to do and explain why they were opposed to what we wanted to do here, and have a debate so people could evaluate how it affects their lives. But again, it's not for me to tell them how to do it. All I can tell you is what we're for and what we think the issues are. Colombian Domestic Peace Process Immigration A question was asked in Spanish, and the interpreter was unable to hear the question. Near the end of the question, the following translation was given. Q. Just like you had Arafat in the United States, here in the White House, do you think at some point it would be possible to have one of our guerrilla leaders here? President Clinton. Sorry, the interpreter did not hear, so could he repeat his question? If he could repeat his question in English, then you could answer in Spanish and the interpreter could hear you. Laughter President Pastrana. Well, Colombia is not at war. Colombia has an internal conflict. I've been able to describe it to the President. For 36 years we've had an internal conflict in the country. And what we hope for is precisely to be able to achieve a peace process that will allow us to put an end to the violence that Colombia has lived through in the last few years. As I was able to explain to the President and to the press, for the first time as well, we have an historic opportunity. The guerrillas have agreed to eradicate illicit crops. For the first time the FARC has made a commitment in fact, they have set that forth in the document they've given to the government, which the public knows of. For the first time they're willing to work on eradicating illicit crops. So I think it's an historic opportunity for the country. If we're able to make peace in Colombia, this is the first major battle in which we will defeat the narcotraffickers. The major enemy in Colombia is drug trafficking, drug traffickers. Therefore, we understand, and we know that we will win that battle. And by winning that battle, we will begin to do away with the global problems the entire world is suffering from today. That's why I think it's a situation in which our country knows, we're already dealing with it. We've initiated our dialog with the ELN. And we hope after November 7th to begin the dialog with the FARC. And in this way we'll put an end to this process and, clearly, achieve the great wish of our people, which is to have a country at peace. President Clinton. On the question you asked me about the immigration, the Colombians who are here, I don't know enough about the facts to answer the question. We did make I tried to make good decisions regarding the Nicaraguans, the Salvadorans, and the Haitians. We have tried to be sensitive to the real facts of the individual's lives who are here what were the circumstances under which they came to our country and under which they stayed consistent with our other immigration laws, which are pretty open and broad, I think. But I would before I could give you an answer, I would have to know more than I do now. Thank you. President Pastrana. Thank you. President Clinton. Thank you very much. October 28, 1998 President Pastrana, Mrs. Pastrana, members of the Colombia delegation, I am proud to welcome you to the United States and to the White House. Two months ago when Andres Pastrana stood in historic Bol var Plaza, the people of Colombia inaugurated not just a new President but a new spirit of hope hope for change hope for reconciliation hope for the fulfillment of his citizens' most profound dreams. President Pastrana was inspired to public service by his father, who was Colombia's President a generation ago, and by the enduring spirit of the liberator, Bol var. He was already working for the public good while still a teenager, backpacking across the country to collect money for the poor and raising funds for young burn victims. Now, Mr. President, as Colombia's leader, you have made it your mission to renew your country for all your citizens to revive the economy to lead in the global fight against narcotics to bring relief and progress to people caught in the crossfire of violence among rebels, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers to bring peace. Colombia is the last site of major civil strife in our hemisphere. In recent years, the violence and suffering have grown the struggle has become intertwined with the deadly drug trade. The conflict has claimed the lives of many dedicated public servants. It has forced Colombians to flee their homes and made it difficult for others to run their businesses and farms. Mr. President, we admire your courage and determination to end the violence, to heal the wounds of the past, to build a better future. We call on the insurgents and paramilitaries to respond to your bold initiative for peace by ending terrorism, hostage taking, and support for drug traffickers. All around the world today, men and women who have suffered too long from the poison of hatred are choosing the path of peace in Ireland, in Bosnia, in Southern Africa, and Central America, now with renewed hope in the Middle East, and just this week with the agreement to end their longstanding conflict in Peru and Ecuador. With your leadership, Mr. President, peace can come to Colombia, too. As you embark on your mission to build an honorable and enduring peace, count on the United States as a friend and partner. Count on us, too, as you work to bring prosperity to all Colombians. We will work together to create jobs and improve opportunities for both our peoples. We already are your largest trading partner and foreign investor. But there is much more we can do together. And as part of the extraordinary process of integration now taking place all across our hemisphere, we will work together, and with our other friends throughout the Americas, to uphold human rights, root out corruption, fight crime, advance education and health care, overcome poverty, and protect our common environment. We will work together to combat illegal drugs. We have worked together, but we must do more, for both our peoples have suffered greatly from the drug trade and its brutality. The battle against drugs is a common battle. It must unite our people, not divide them. Colombians deserve normal lives. They deserve to live free in their homes with their families, to enjoy the phenomenal richness of their culture, the vallenato music, the paintings and sculptures of Botero, the fantastic writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Mr. President, we in the United States watched with pride as you took the oath of office in August, wearing the suit of clothes your father had worn when he was inaugurated President of Colombia 28 years ago. You said then, "This is not my day, but the day of all Colombians. Change begins today." This is a new beginning for Colombia. It is also a new opportunity to strengthen the bonds between our peoples. So let us begin today. Again, Mr. President, welcome, and welcome back to the White House. October 25, 1998 Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your wonderful welcome, I'm delighted to be here with so many great supporters of Barbara Boxer. I want to thank Mark and Susie and my longtime friend Dick Fredericks, all the others who are responsible for this event today. I am delighted to see Senator Cranston here, and thank you, sir. And I'm so glad that Gray Davis was able to come another way station on his way to victory in a few days. You know, I have had a great time at this event listening to other people speak, first of all because, believe it or not, I'm a little afraid to speak today because I still haven't had much sleep since the end of those peace talks. And I gave a couple speeches for Barbara yesterday in southern California, and I told everyone that before I got off the plane my staff gives me these typewritten things, see, like this, and I always ignore them I just stand up there and talk. So because I was up for 39 hours in a row at the end of the Middle East peace talks, and then had to come out here, and my system is a little you know, I mean, I'm 52 years old. Laughter And I didn't even do that in college. So my staff said, "Please read the cards today." Laughter And then Hillary called me to tell me to tell Barbara hello and to say how sorry she was she wasn't here. And she said, "Better read those cards today." Laughter So I've got these cards up here I'll do my best to do it. So the first thing is I'm tired. But secondly, you know the people who spoke before me, in image and in substance, to me represent the best of the party that I'm proud to belong to, the State that has been so good to me that I have seen come back from the doldrums once again to lead America and the world toward the future, and the country that we all love so much. I want to thank Art Torres for his leadership of this party. I want to thank Dianne Feinstein for her strong leadership, for standing up for the assault weapons ban and helping us to protect the Mojave and doing a dozen other things of great value to this country. I want to thank Nancy Pelosi for her steadfast support for education and health care, for women's rights, for human rights around the world, and for her wonderful friendship to me. And then Barbara gave this marvelous speech. I mean, weren't you proud of all of them? Didn't you feel better just listening to them all speak? I mean, it was great, wasn't it? Applause I sort of feel like that old saw that everything that needs to be said has already been said, but not everyone has said it yet. Laughter And so you have to endure one more speech. But I'd like to, if I might, put the stakes of this election into some larger perspective for you. That's one of my jobs as your President, to try to tell you where I think the big picture is. When I came to California first in 1991 as a candidate and I asked the people here to support me, I did it because I felt that our country was not doing what we should to prepare for the 21st century. And I said, I want you to vote for me, even though I come from one of those little places Dianne Feinstein was talking about. I spent 12 years as a Governor trying to keep money from going to California, you know? Laughter And I spent 6 years as President trying to make it up to you, and I think you're net ahead on the deal, I think. Laughter But anyway, I said, look, this is the America I dream of. I want us to go into this new era, where every person every person without regard to the circumstances of his or her birth, has a chance to live up to their God given abilities. I want to live in a country that is still the world's strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity, not just for ourselves but for others as well. I want America not just to become more diverse in the census statistics but in the daily lives of our people. I want us to relish the differences between us and still grow closer together as a genuine community. And for 6 years, I've worked for this. And I believe we're closer to those goals than we were 6 years ago. And one of the reasons is that I have had people who would help pursue these goals, people like the three Members of Congress who spoke here today. If any one of them any one of them had been replaced in Congress in 1993 by a member of the opposite party, if we'd had one less vote for our economic program, it would not have passed. That economic program reduced the deficit by 93 percent before the bipartisan balanced budget bill passed in 1997. It sparked a huge boom in investment, a big drop in interest rates. It also had more money for everything from education to the environment to research. And they were there. Barbara Boxer was there. She had a tough race in '92 she could have taken a dive. But if she had taken a dive, then California would not have been able to rise. She didn't take a dive, and California ought to stick with her on November 3d. We have worked to prove you can grow the economy and improve the environment. We've worked for cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food, fewer toxic waste dumps. Barbara worked especially for special safety standards for children. And it's worked. But every year it's a battle. We still, every year, have to fight people who believe that the only way to grow the economy is to, alas, damage the environment more, when all the evidence is that, with the new technologies available today, we can actually accelerate economic growth if we make an intelligent commitment to the preservation and improvement of the environment. That's a huge issue for California. This is not some casual thing. If you want 33 million, 35 million, 40 million people to be able to live here, all different kinds of people elbow to elbow, with all the diversity you have, you want the people who serve this meal to have their children grow up without asthma, just as well as those who paid the full ticket price to come today, then California has to lead the way on the environment. Barbara Boxer has stood up for the environment and for the health of California's children, and California should stand up for Barbara Boxer on election day. I could give you a lot of other examples, but let me just say, in this budget negotiation that we just went through, it is the time of maximum opportunity for the members of our party, because even though we're in the minority in the House and Senate now I hope only for a few more days and we have the White House, we don't have enough numbers to pass bills unless Republicans join with us. And in a funny way, that's as it should be. We ought to have, basically, people in both parties who are willing to work with each other in good faith. We had a few who would work with us to protect our children from the dangers of tobacco, but they had enough to beat us. We had a few who would work with us to raise the minimum wage, but they had enough to beat us. We had a few who would work with us to reform the campaign finance reform laws, but they had enough to beat us. We had a handful, even, who stood up to the health insurance lobby and wanted to help us with the Patients' Bill of Rights, but they had enough to beat us. But when we got to the budget, as long as they stood with me, then if they wanted a budget and they wanted the Government to go on and they wanted to be able go home and campaign and take advantage of the fact that they had defeated campaign finance reform, they defeated the effort to protect our kids from the dangers of tobacco and did what the health insurance companies wanted on the Patients' Bill of Rights, then they had to listen to us. And so for the first time in history, in a Congress where the majority really did not want to do it, we got 100,000 teachers in the early grades to lower class size to an average of 18. We got that after school money Barbara Boxer talked about, and she brought it to the Congress. She did it. And it will mean that 250,000 more kids who live on mean streets in tough neighborhoods with parents that don't get off work until 7 or 8 o'clock at night will be able to stay after school. I have seen what this can do with my own eyes. In Chicago, where I was the other day, there are now 40,000 children who get 3 square meals a day in the schools. And guess what? Learning levels have gone up, and juvenile crime has done down. This is not rocket science. These children need support they need something positive to do. And they can learn, and they can grow, and they can flourish. And because of Barbara Boxer, that's a part of our budget. She stood up for the poorest of California's children, so they could make the richest contribution to California's future, and you ought to stand up for her on election day because of that as well. We also had the best legislative session for the high tech industry in California, I believe, ever in history. They had six or seven bills up there we passed them all at the end. And she supported them, and they shouldn't forget it. I could go on and on and on. She's talking about going to the Central Valley. Farmers have been hurt worse than anybody else in America so far by the Asian economic crisis. So we declared an emergency and went in to provide some help for people who don't deserve to go out of business because the financial system's gone haywire half a world away. And she helped me do that. The Congress took 8 months to do it, but finally, when the budget time came, we finally got America's contribution to the International Monetary Fund, which is essential if you want me to help lead the world away from the financial crisis in Asia, if you don't want it to spread to Latin America, if you want America's economic growth to keep going. So for all those reasons, she deserves to be reelected. But more important is what we're going to do in the future. What is our message in this election? Our message is that Washington ought to be about the business of America and its future and its children. Our message is, okay, we've got 100,000 teachers now let's provide the tax incentives within our balanced budget to build or repair 5,000 schools so we'll have the classrooms for the teachers to teach in. Our message is, okay, we beat back the ill advised election year tax cut to squander the surplus this year and for all years to come but next year we have to actually save Social Security for the 21st century. And we have to do it in a way that protects the universal coverage of Social Security that has lifted half the seniors in this country out of poverty. But we have to do it in a way that does not overly burden our children and our grandchildren when the baby boomers retire. This is a huge decision. Voters should focus on this. Why were we trying to save the surplus to save Social Security? Because we know, if we make modest changes now, we can preserve Social Security in the 21st century. And we know that we can do it in a way that brings our country together. Now, if we don't do it and we wait until people like me retire and we know not everybody will have as good a pension as I do. Laughter You laugh about it it's a serious thing. We've done a lot, by the way and Barbara and Dianne and Nancy voted for every single initiative we have done a lot to make it easier for people of modest means to save for their own retirement. It's very important. But half the seniors in the country today would be in poverty were it not for Social Security. Now, when the baby boomers retire, there will be two people working for every one person drawing. We have basically three choices. We can deal with this now when we've got a projected surplus for many years to come, make some modest changes, not be afraid of the political heat, join together, and do what's right. Or we can wait until the wheel starts to run off, in which case we will have one of two choices, both bad. We can simply lower the standard of living of our seniors if they don't have good pensions and say, "I'm sorry." Or if that bothers our conscience too much, we can, by that time, have a whopping tax increase to maintain a system that is unsustainable in ways that lower the standard of living of our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. So Barbara Boxer stood up for me to save that surplus. And that's why we did it, because we waited 29 years to go from red ink to black, and we wanted to use the money first to take care of this enormous problem that defines who we are as a people. So she has voted to save Social Security first. She deserves a chance to be voting on how to save it. And we're going to do that next year, and that's another reason she should be elected. So building the classrooms for the kids to be in smaller classes in, saving Social Security, the Patients' Bill of Rights you've heard us talking about it, but let me remind you what it says. It says, if you're in an HMO, that's good. Care ought to be managed. But the doctor, not the accountant, ought to make the health care decision. You ought to be able to see a specialist if the doctor says you should. If you get hurt in an accident, you ought to go to the nearest emergency room, not one clear across town. If your employer changes health care providers while you're in the middle of a treatment, chemotherapy, or you're pregnant, or there is some other extended treatment, you should be able to finish the treatment before you have to be forced to change doctors. And your medical records ought to be kept private. This is a big deal. I am telling you, we have tried for one year to pass this. And I need a few more folks like Barbara Boxer in the United States Congress, not fewer, if you want the Patients' Bill of Rights, if you want the schoolrooms, and if you want Social Security saved. We also have got to figure out what to do to deal with the challenges of the global financial system now, and I intend to spend I've already been up working on that this morning. We need people, in short, who care about every individual citizen in every community, in every neighborhood in this State, but also understand we can only fulfill our responsibilities to them unless we do right in the larger world. No State has benefited as much as California from our growing involvement in the global economy. No State should understand more clearly, with the diversity of your own population, how essential it is on the one hand to give every child a hand up and to reward the labor of every person, but also to reach out to the rest of the world. And I'll leave you with this one final thought. I want you to ask yourself this question Why did you clap so much when the speakers said the nice things they did about the Middle East peace accord? And my role in it was really your role in it, because I'm just your hired hand, your elected representative. Why did you feel so good? You may think it's self evident. Ask yourself what is your answer? Why? Because you know how much trouble there has been there. You know how these people and their leaders have been at odds. You've read and seen the continuing tensions in the region. And after all the hope of peace in '93 and '94 and '95, the tragic killing of Prime Minister Rabin, the elections, the upheaval, then stalling, and there, in the middle of the place where the world's three great religions Islam, Judaism and Christianity believe in one God were born, all of a sudden people were able to lay down their mistrust and lay down their hatred and grit their teeth and come together and say, "We're going to try again to reaffirm our commitment to peace. We're going to try together to live on this little piece of land. We're going to try to find a way to live together so that we, together, fight terrorists, who are the enemies of all of us. We're going to try to find a way to live together so that we don't have to put you down to lift ourselves up." And when something like that happens, we just feel big. It gives us energy. It gives us hope. You know, I'm Irish. To have played a role in this Irish peace process is a great thing for me, to believe that the bedeviled land of my ancestors could finally be walking away from hundreds of years of absolute madness so that all the Irish writers and poets and musicians of the future will have to find some new subject to sing and write about laughter some new reason that justifies spending all night at the pub with a Guinness. Laughter You laugh, but it's a great joy. Why? Because in the end, we all know down deep inside that the things that make us happiest are those things which reaffirm our common humanity. Now, what's the most troubling event that's happened in America in the last 2 weeks? I would argue that it's the tragic murder of that young man, Mr. Shepard, in Wyoming. You know, I saw his picture on television, and I talked to his parents and his brother. And I thought, that boy could have been my son. And I listened to his friends talk about him, how he always tried to help people and he was always trying to do things for people. And it looks like, pure and simple, someone took him out because he was gay, so they thought, well, he really is not a part of our deal here. But I think he is part of our deal here. Now, what's all this got to do with this election? Because every fundamental decision in the end is about whether you have a unifying view of America and your own life and the future you want for your children whether you really believe that there is such a thing as our common humanity and there is a way for us to advance it as citizens. And that has been America's mission from the beginning, since our Founding Fathers declared, when they knew it was not true in fact, that we were all created equal and that, in order to further our objectives of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we were going to bind together and try to form a more perfect Union. Now, they said that, and they knew we weren't all equal in fact. And they knew we were a long way from the ideals we wanted. But they knew what we should be doing and the direction in which we should be going. Now, when you strip it all away, that's what's at stake in this election. And because these issues are so big this is like an election for President in some ways. We have the message, we have the candidates, we have the unifying vision. Don't let the fact that this is a midterm election let the voter turnout be so low that we wind up disappointing ourselves on the day after the election. So I tell you all, I'm grateful for the money that we have given to Senator Boxer, and she'll spend it well. But you are not off the hook laughter because there are still several days between now and this election. You look at this crowd here. How many people do you believe that all of you will see, who never come to a political event like this, between now and Tuesday, November 3d? Tens of thousands? A hundred thousand? All the people you work with, the people you socialize with, the people you worship with, the people you bump into at a coffee shop how many people will you see? I'm telling you, we are about the business of defining our country and what it will be like. If you were heartbroken when that young man was killed, if you were elated by the fact that these two people Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat were able to reach across this great divide and say, hey, we don't exactly know what's out there, but we're going to jump off this high diving board together and I might say, they deserve the credit, not me it was an honor for me, every minute of it but if you felt that, that means you know that we can't define our future by putting down people who are different from us, and we can't get ahead by pushing people behind. You know that. You may think this is easy enough for me to say because I have no more elections in me. But I promise you, I believe this the greatest victories we all win in life are not the victories we win over other people. It's the victories we win for our common humanity. A day after this election, the great joy of Barbara Boxer's life will not be that she defeated Mr. Fong. He has been a worthy opponent. They have had a good race. The great joy will be that she's been given 6 more years by you to reaffirm our common humanity. And we have ample evidence that that is what our country desperately needs. So don't you pass a person between now and November 3d don't pass a one and Barbara Boxer will go back to Washington. Thank you, and God bless you. October 24, 1998 Good morning. Yesterday, after 9 days of difficult negotiations on Maryland's Eastern Shore, Israeli and Palestinian leaders signed an agreement that restores hope for peace in the Middle East. It strengthens security, increases cooperation against terrorism, and brings both sides closer to the day when they can live together as free people. Keeping the peace process on track will require continued courage by Israelis and Palestinians in the months ahead. But this agreement shows what is possible when the will for peace is strong. And I'm proud that, together, we were able to make real progress. America will continue to work for a just and lasting peace in this land that is holy for so many people throughout the world. Now I'd like to talk with you about an historic opportunity we face here at home. Ten days from now, the American people will head to the polls for one of the most important elections in recent years. You will help select a Congress that will determine whether we seize this moment of prosperity to save Social Security for the 21st century. Earlier this month we celebrated America's first budget surplus in 29 years. But even before the black ink was dry, some in Congress were determined to squander our surplus on an unwise election year tax plan. But we turned back these efforts. The balanced budget I signed this week protects our hard won surplus until we save Social Security first. As a result, the new Congress will have the best chance ever to ensure that the baby boomers can retire in dignity, without imposing unfair burdens on our children. As we begin the process of reform, I have proposed five core principles to guide our way First, we have to reform Social Security in a way that strengthens and protects the system for the 21st century. We simply cannot abandon a program that represents one of our country's greatest successes. Second, we should maintain universality and fairness. Third, Social Security must provide a benefit people can count on, regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or the financial markets. Fourth, Social Security must continue to provide protection for disabled and low income Americans. And finally, any reforms we adopt must maintain our fiscal discipline. Today I'm proud to announce the next important step we'll take in putting these principles to work. On December 8th and 9th, we'll hold the first ever White House Conference on Social Security to help pave the way toward a bipartisan solution early next year. Unfortunately, some in Congress already may be backing away from this historic opportunity. Just last week the Senate majority leader said he may not be willing to join me in our efforts to save Social Security. That would be a grave mistake. As with so many other long term challenges, if we act now, it will be far, far easier to resolve the problem than if we wait until a crisis is close at hand. I believe we must save Social Security and do it next year. I pledge to work with anyone from any party who is serious about this task. We cannot let partisanship derail our best opportunity to strengthen Social Security for the 21st century. For more than 60 years now, Social Security has formed the sacred bond between the generations. In the words of one elderly woman three generations ago, "It is a precious shield against the terror of penniless, helpless, old age." If the Congress you elect in 10 days chooses progress, it can strengthen that shield for generations to come. But if it chooses partisanship, this historic opportunity will be lost. You have the power to shape a Congress that will keep our Social Security system as strong for our children as it was for our parents. You have the power to elect a Congress pledged to save Social Security first. Thanks for listening. October 23, 1998 The President. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. Vice President, Madam Secretary. Your Majesty, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Chairman Arafat. To the Israeli and Palestinian delegations, the Members of Congress and the Cabinet, members of the diplomatic corps, my fellow Americans who are here, it's a great honor for me to welcome you here. I only wish the First Lady were here as well. She is in Chicago. We talked a few moments ago, and she sends her great happiness and best wishes, especially to Queen Noor and Mrs. Netanyahu. After some very difficult negotiations very long, dare I say, quite sleepless the Israelis and Palestinians here have reached an agreement on issues over which they have been divided for more than 17 months. This agreement is designed to rebuild trust and renew hope for peace between the parties. Now both sides must build on that hope, carry out their commitments, begin the difficult, but urgent journey toward a permanent settlement. Over the last 9 days I have witnessed extraordinary efforts on behalf of peace. I thank our team, beginning with its head, the Secretary of State, who showed remarkable creativity, strength, and patience. I thank the Vice President for his interventions. I thank my good friend Sandy Berger our Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, who had an unusual, almost unprecedented role to play because of the security considerations our Special Middle East Coordinator, Dennis Ross, who was a young man with no gray hair when all this began. Laughter I thank all the other outstanding members of our delegation. I thank Prime Minister Netanyahu, who stood so firmly for the security of his citizens and of his country, and of the impressive members of his Cabinet and administration. I thank Chairman Arafat, who tenaciously defended the interests of his people, and the very impressive members of his team, as well. In the end, after all the twists and turns and ups and downs, all their late and ultimately sleepless nights, both reaffirmed their commitment to the path of peace. And for that, the world can be grateful. And finally, let me thank His Majesty King Hussein, whose courage, commitment, wisdom, and frankly, stern instruction at appropriate times were at the heart of this success. Your Majesty, we are all profoundly in your debt. This agreement is good for Israel's security. The commitments made by the Palestinians were very strong, as strong as any we have ever seen. They include continuous security cooperation with Israel and a comprehensive plan against terrorism and its support infrastructure. This agreement is good for the political and economic well being of Palestinians. It significantly expands areas under Palestinian authority to some 40 percent of the West Bank. It also offers the Palestinian people new economic opportunities, with an airport, an industrial zone, soon safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank, and in time, a seaport. The Palestinian people will be able to breathe a little easier and benefit from the fruits of peace. Most importantly, perhaps, this agreement is actually good for the peace process itself. For 18 months it has been paralyzed, a victim of mistrust, misunderstanding, and fear. Now ordinary Israelis and Palestinians once again can become partners for peace. To bolster this effort, Chairman Arafat will invite members of the Palestinian National Council and other important political entities to reaffirm his prior commitments and their support for the peace process. I have agreed to address that meeting, several weeks hence, and to underscore the values of reconciliation, tolerance, and respect, and my support for those commitments and this process. People around the world should be heartened by this achievement today. These leaders and those with whom they work have come a very long way. The Israeli and Palestinian peoples, whose bitter rivalry in this century has brought so much suffering to both sides, have moved yet another step closer toward fulfilling the promise of the Oslo accords, closer to the day when they can live peacefully as true neighbors, with security, prosperity, self governance, cooperation, and eventually, God willing, genuine friendship. No doubt, as peace gains momentum, forces of hate, no matter how isolated and disparate, will once again lash out. They know this, the leaders, and they are prepared to face it. Staying on the path of peace under these circumstances will demand even greater leadership and courage. The work at Wye River shows what can happen when the will for peace is strong. But let me say once again to all the rest of you, everyone who is tempted to handicap every little twist and turn over the last 9 days, you need to know one overwhelming thing The Prime Minister and the Chairman and the members of their delegation who supported this process, even when there were things about it they did not agree with, are quite well aware that the enemies of peace will seek to extract a price from both sides. They are quite well aware that in the short run, they themselves may have put themselves at greater risk. But by pledging themselves to the peaceful course for the future, to the same values and, ultimately, to the same enemies, they have given both Israelis and Palestinians a chance to have the future we all want for our children and our children's children. Every effort will have to be exerted to ensure the faithful implementation of this agreement, not because the parties do not want to do so but because the agreement covers many things, was developed over many days, involved many discussions and sleepless nights. It will test whether the Palestinian people are prepared to live in peace, recognizing Israel's permanence, legitimacy, and a common interest in security. It will tell us whether Israelis want to help build a strong Palestinian entity that can fulfill the aspirations of its people and provide both real security and real partnership for Palestinians and Israelis. The United States is determined to be of whatever help we can to both sides in their endeavors. I will consult with Congress to design a package of aid to help Israel meet the security costs of redeployment and help the Palestinian Authority meet the economic costs of development. I hope we will have support from Republicans and Democrats in that endeavor. With respect to Mr. Pollard, I have agreed to review this matter seriously, at the Prime Minister's request. I have made no commitment as to the outcome of the review. Ultimately, the parties will have to translate the gains of Wye River into renewed efforts to secure a just and lasting peace. For as big a step as today is and after 17 months, it is a very large step, indeed it is just another step along the way. Therefore, perhaps as important as any other statement to be made today, let me say how grateful I am that the Prime Minister and the Chairman have agreed to begin permanent status talks upon ratification of this agreement. I have agreed to convene the two leaders at an appropriate time to seek to complete these talks. We have all agreed to try to do it under circumstances which permit more sleep at night. Laughter Let me say that no agreement can wipe away decades of distrust. But I think these last several days have helped each side to get a better understanding of the other's hopes and fears, a better feel for all they have in common, including on occasion, thank the Lord, a good sense of humor. The future can be right for Israelis and Palestinians if they maintain the will for peace. If we continue to work together, the next generation will grow up without fear. Israel can have the genuine security and recognition it has sought for so long. The Palestinian people can, at long last, realize their aspirations to live free in safety, in charge of their own destiny. So, on behalf of all the people of the United States, let me say to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, salaam, shalom, peace be with you in the hard and hopeful days ahead. We value our friendship, and we thank you for your trust, for giving us the opportunity to walk this road with you. Now it is my privilege to introduce Prime Minister Netanyahu. Let me say, I was, once again, extraordinarily impressed by the energy, the drive, the determination, the will, the complete grasp of every detailed aspect of every issue that this Prime Minister brought to these talks. He showed himself willing to take political risks for peace, but not to risk the security of his people. And as a result, this agreement embodies an enormous increase in the security of the people of Israel. Mr. Prime Minister, the microphone is yours. At this point, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel made remarks. The President. Let me say, I wish that all of you who care about this could have seen at least a portion of what I saw in the last 9 days in the interchanges between Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat. It was very interesting. They were so different. I can't imagine Mr. Netanyahu in a kaffiyeh. Laughter But they were very much alike in their tenacity and their astonishing intelligence and knowledge. Just as I was able to say a thank you to Prime Minister Netanyahu, let me say to Chairman Arafat, I thank you. I thank you for turning away from violence toward peace. I thank you for embracing the idea that Palestinians and Israelis can actually share the land of our fathers together. I thank you for believing that the home of Islam and Judaism and Christianity can surely be the home of people who love one God and respect every life God has created. And I thank you for decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self sufficient, and at home. Mr. Chairman, the microphone is yours. Chairman Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority made remarks. The President. Ladies and gentlemen, many kind things have been said about the efforts of the American delegation and the hours that I spent at Wye Plantation, every one of which I treasured. Laughter Some more than others. But in truth, all that was required of us was a listening ear and a helpful suggestion now and then, and a kind of a determination to keep us all moving forward. It is a little too easy, I think, sometimes for people who are not directly, themselves, parties to a peace negotiation to believe they truly understand the judgments that the parties themselves must make, and how difficult they are, and what price they might carry. I think, as hard as we tried not to fall prey to that, from time to time we did. I know we did, because there are people on both sides smiling at me just now as I speak. So the lion's share of the credit belongs to Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat and their close aides. But His Majesty King Hussein provided an element quite different from what the United States brought to these negotiations, for he reminded us of what rises above the facts, the arguments, the legitimate interests, even the painful sacrifices involved. He was the living embodiment of the best of our past and the brightest of our hopes for the future. And every time he was in the room, he made us all become a little closer to the people we all would like to see ourselves as being. For that, we and the world are immeasurably in his debt. Your Majesty. King Hussein I of Jordan made remarks. The President. Let me say everyone sit down. We have to hurry because the hour is growing late, and it's almost Shabbat. I have to say one thing, very quickly. We have three men of peace here who have extraordinary military backgrounds. We have many others here I want to mention two who came with Prime Minister Netanyahu General Sharon and General Mordechai we're glad to have you here. And I say that because I want you to understand a piece of history. This table was brought to this house in 1869 by one of America's greatest military leaders, Ulysses Grant, who revolutionized infantry warfare in our Civil War. One hundred years ago this table was used to sign the peace treaty between the United States and Spain. And for 100 years, this table, brought here by one of our greatest warriors, has been the exclusive repository of our peace agreements, the one we signed with Your Majesty King Hussein on this table President Kennedy's test ban treaty, signed on this table. And so I think it is fitting that these three great leaders two signers, one, His Majesty, observing who know a great deal about war have come to make peace on this table, which, for our country, has come to embody it. And we thank them. Thank you very much. The memorandum was signed. October 23, 1998 Thank you very much, "Reverend" Green. Laughter You know, Ernie was doing so well up here, it reminded me about what my grandmother used to say to me. She said, "Bill, I think you could have been a preacher if you'd been just a little better boy." Laughter I want to thank Ernie Green for his lifetime of friendship. I thank my longtime friend Secretary Slater, who has done a magnificent job in our Cabinet. I am delighted to be here with Secretary Togo West and Mayor Barry, Congresswoman Norton, Johnnie Booker, Bishop Anderson, Reverend Harvey, Assistant HUD Secretary Cardell Cooper, many members of our White House staff. And I'm really glad to be here with Gwen Ifill. I told the Bishop on the way in and Reverend Harvey I said, you know, Gwen Ifill's daddy was an AME preacher. And we used to talk about the AME back in 1992 when I was back when I had a life, when I was a real citizen, and I was running for President and she was covering me. And you know, when you get in the press corps in Washington, you tend to drift away. And I'm glad to see her back, getting close to the faith again tonight here, working with all of you. Laughter It's very good. I wish you a happy 160th birthday. I thank you more than you will ever know for the prayers, the friendship to me and to my family over these last few months and, indeed, over these last many years. And I am honored to have been invited to be with you on this occasion. And believe you me, I am very happy that we wound up those Middle East peace talks today, so I could be here. It is now 8 30, and I have been awake for 36 hours and 30 minutes. Laughter I think I can finish tonight. Laughter But in these last 9 days, when I have come home at 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning almost every night and then last night, we had to work the whole night through then it looked as if we were going to lose everything we had worked for. And then it came back together again. I felt so blessed to have had the opportunity to engage in these labors, to do this for our country, for the cause of peace, for the land of our faiths, the home of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. I felt that it was a part of my job as President, my mission as a Christian, and my personal journey of atonement. And I am grateful that God gave me the chance to do this for the last 9 days. The agreement that the Israelis and the Palestinians signed is a big step. It gives Israel genuine security, the cooperation of their neighbors among the Palestinians in fighting terrorism, the recognition that Israel has a right to be there, now and forever. It gives the Palestinian people at long last a chance to realize their aspirations to live free, in safety, in charge of their own destiny. How tragic it is that two different groups of people, each who have known so much oppression in life, so much deprivation, so much downright abuse, because there is such a little bit of land there and so much accumulated insecurity, would be fighting with each other when they should be embracing one another. Now they have a chance to do that. There's no way in 9 short days to wipe away decades of distrust. But you can do an awful lot in 9 days if you just lock people in a room and laughter see how well they get along. I believe if we can maintain the will and the momentum for peace, the future is bright there. But I also believe that we have to be realistic. There are enemies of peace. And in some ways, the very advance these people have made together will make them both more appealing targets to those who believe their lives only have meaning when they are hurting someone else, that they can only lift themselves up when someone else is being put down. I say that to make a point about this church. I think the most moving thing to me about the last 9 days were the periodic visits to the peace talks of King Hussein of Jordan. Many of you know that he has been treated at the Mayo Clinic for several months for a serious illness. He's lost a lot of weight, and as he joked today, he's lost his hair, and what little he's got left, even in his mustache, has turned white. But even though he was the smallest person in the room, he was always the largest presence. Here was a man fighting for his own life, willing to take time to remind the people at the peace talks of what it was really all about. I thought about today, when we were signing, that Mr. Netanyahu was in the Israeli commandos. Some of you may remember that his brother was the commander of the famous raid by the Israeli soldiers on Entebbe and Uganda, where they liberated their people who had been kidnapped, but his brother was killed. Mr. Arafat has been in battle after battle for decades. King Hussein, himself, was a jet fighter pilot in the Israeli Cabinet now, two of the great generals in the history of Israel, Ariel Sharon and the Defense Minister, General Mordechai. And I think all these people have come to a common realization, that in life all of our victories over other people are ultimately hollow, and the only victories that really matter are those that we win for our common humanity. And when King Hussein would walk in the room, people would see that he was frail, but strong of heart and voice. And he would admonish them to think of their children and grandchildren and to let go of some of their resentments and suspend some of their distrust and make one more reach. You could see, almost like a balm washing over the parties, how their attitudes would shift, and their hearts would open, and they would resolve to try again and try again. That, after all, is the lesson of the church, isn't it? That is, children of God the real victories in life are not the victories we win over other people. They are the victories we win for our common humanity as children of God. So this was a victory for the peace. Exodus says that "If thou shalt do as God command thee, the people shall go to their place in peace." The Koran says, "They shall not hear therein any vain discourse, but only peace." A couple of years ago, I almost gave a sermon at one of my State of the Unions because I took the theme from the 12th verse of the 58th chapter of Isaiah "They that shall be of thee shall build up the old waste places. Thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations. Thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in." That is the work in which we have been involved. But every good work is that kind of work. I thank God we have people like Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Congress of the United States to do that kind of work. This church has received people, in these 160 years, from Frederick Douglass to Mary McCloud Bethune to Nelson Mandela to Jesse Jackson to Ernie Green. It's easy to forget when you see old Ernie and all of his prosperity laughter that he was just a scared, skinny kid 41 years ago at Little Rock Central High School, enduring the jeers, the waving fists, for the simple proposition that he ought to have the right to get the best education he could. Today, Central High School has become a place in our history as hallowed as Gettysburg. Earlier this week, Congress passed a bill to officially designate Little Rock Central High School as a national historic site. And thanks to our Senator from Arkansas and others, the budget bill I signed authorizes me to give Congressional Gold Medals to each and every member of the Little Rock Nine. The victory they won was not over the Governor who tried to keep them out, not over the angry racial epithets of those who hurled them. It was a victory for all of us, even those who opposed their entry into the school. How did people keep on going? Rodney reminded me when back when I was Governor, and Rodney worked for me, and we had he didn't have such a big, fancy office, and he wasn't so far away laughter we used to talk all the time about Bible verses and first one thing and another, and he knew that one of my favorite verses was the ninth verse of the sixth chapter of St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians. And he mentioned it to me tonight because of the Middle East peace talks "Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart." After about 30 hours, I was beginning to lose the admonition of the Scripture. Laughter But what is it that gives people the power not to grow weary? What is the message emanating from this church, not only from this great pastor, whom I have had the privilege of sharing worship with, but for 160 years that we walk by faith and not by sight? This is not a science course faith in a loving and protective God faith in the righteousness of worship faith in a citizen's ability to be guided by respect for others and justice and equality and freedom ultimately, faith not only in our God but in what our country is and what it can become. We walk by faith and not by sight, the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. What a dreary world it would be if we had only to live with what was before us. If we could not imagine how things could be different, if there were no faith in the room I have occupied these last 9 days, I promise you there would be no agreement today. So that is what I come to thank you for. When something really important happens like this agreement today, when we win a good struggle in Congress, as Eleanor and I and our colleagues did, and against all the odds we prevail in our battle to put 100,000 teachers out there to lower the class size in the early grades, we know it wouldn't have happened because it wasn't rational when we started or when we are defeated, but we do not quit, even more importantly, we walk by faith, not by sight. And so, I came here to thank you for 160 years of that gift of faith that, without regard to the color of our skin or the condition of our pocketbook or even the stain of our past sins, we are all children of God. One of my favorite verses is the first verse in Isaiah 43 because it is the promise of faith "Fear not, for I have redeemed thee. I have called thee by thy name. Thou art mine." When you believe that, there's nothing you can't do. And if you don't do what you want to do, then you know God may have another plan. But you can still live with vision and hope you can always be a repairer of the breach, and you are never stupid enough to think that beating somebody else out of something is what life is really all about. That is a gift, to this Capital City and to this country, that this church has given. I only want to say one other thing to you. For all the good things that have happened in our country and I thank Ernie for mentioning them for all the prosperity we enjoy, we still have many challenges. You know them well enough. You pick up the paper every day, and you know that there are still a lot of trouble spots in this old world. And as soon as we put out one fire, another one crops up. You know that for all of our prosperity, the world financial system is troubled, and you see it in other countries, the problems they're having. And we need to fix it, and I'm working on that. You know that when all us baby boomers, like me, retire, there will only be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. And that's why I didn't want to spend that surplus until we fix Social Security for the 21st century. And so I say to you that even though we don't have all the answers, we also have to have faith that we can be good citizens. And when we're citizens, we have to realize, number one, we have a moral responsibility to exercise our franchise on November 3d. But we should be voting not just to defeat the people we don't vote for but, in a far larger sense, to find ways to reaffirm our common humanity as children of God. And I want you to think about that. President Franklin Roosevelt was a deeply religious man. On the day he died, he was working on a speech. And he would get these typewritten speeches that speechwriters would do, and then he'd get his ink pen, and he'd scratch through the words and write the words over and write a line here and a line there. This is the last line of the last speech the longest serving President in United States history, and certainly one of the greatest ones, ever wrote "The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with a strong and active faith." So, your faith is strong. For 160 years, it has been active. You have taken me in and, on occasions, given me the chance to have my inaugural memorial service here in this church some of the best music I ever heard, some from your choir, and some I brought to you. Laughter And every time when I left, I felt like I was 10 feet tall. But you do, too, don't you? And when the choir was singing, you felt taller, didn't you? And you felt stronger, and your heart was lighter, and so was the load you carried when you came to this dinner tonight. So again I say to you, happy birthday. Thank you for 160 years of the gift of faith and the energy that flows from it. Be good citizens with your faith. Show up every chance you get. Don't grow weary in doing good. Don't be discouraged when it doesn't work out. And help me every day to convince America that the real victories we have to win are not our victories over one another, but the victories together we win for our common humanity as children of God. Thank you, and God bless you. October 19, 1998 Terrorist Attack in Beersheba, Israel The President. I want to begin by saying how much I deplore the grenade attack earlier today on a bus station in Beersheba, Israel. No cause, no grievance justifies terror. This is another attempt to murder, plain and simple. Now, I am convinced that reaching a secure, just, and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians is the best way to ensure that terrorism has no future in the Middle East. I'm now returning to the Middle East peace talks to encourage the Israelis and the Palestinians to make the hard decisions necessary to move this peace process forward. As I said when we launched the talks last week, the United States will do everything we can to help but ultimately, only the parties themselves can bridge their differences and put their people on a more hopeful course. The issues are difficult. The distrust is deep. The going has been tough. But the parties must consider the consequences of failure and also the benefits of progress. Flash Floods in Texas Finally, let me say just a few words about the flash flooding that has wreaked havoc in southeast Texas. Reportedly, 18 people have lost their lives, 5,000 evacuated from their homes, 1,200 in refuge in emergency shelters. The storms themselves have not yet abated. We offer our thoughts, our prayers, our resolve to help to those who have lost family members, those who have been uprooted. A short while ago, I spoke to our FEMA Director, James Lee Witt. He is already working with the Texas officials to assess the damage, and the budget I am about to sign contains nearly 1 billion in additional resources to FEMA so that this vital agency will be even stronger as it works to address this and future disasters. For now, the Nation stands ready to assist the people of Texas in their time of need. Wye River Middle East Peace Talks Q. Mr. President, will the Wye talks cancel your trip to California tomorrow in order to be available to continue the Middle East negotiations? Q. Can they still succeed at Wye? The President. I'm going back today to work on this. As you know, I got home at 3 o'clock last night. We're working hard through it. This incident in Israel is certainly a complicating factor. I have been briefed on the progress of events this morning, and we're going to work as hard as we can today and we'll have more to say about it as events unfold. Thank you. October 05, 1998 Good afternoon. From the beginning of our efforts to create the economic renaissance America now enjoys, Congressman Gephardt and Senator Daschle have been tireless in working for that change. Especially in these last few weeks as the congressional session has entered its crucial final stage and the political season has intensified, these two leaders have stood above the crowd in their constant efforts to elevate progress over partisanship. I realize that the calendar says the election is just a month away. The calendar also says it is now 8 months since I sent the Congress a budget, 5 months since the legal deadline for Congress to pass a budget resolution. And as all of you know, the fiscal year ended last week. Yet so far, Congress has sent me only 2 of 13 appropriations bills necessary to keep our Government running. On Friday the temporary spending measure I signed will run out. I want to work with Congress to get this important work done. There is still time for real achievement, still time for progress over partisanship. That is why today I stand with Representative Gephardt and Senator Daschle to call on the congressional majority. Time is running short. Congress has important work left to do. Pass the necessary spending bills to keep the Government running save Social Security for future generations ensure a quality education for all our children protect America from the global economic turmoil these are the priorities of the American people, and they must be the priorities of Congress in these last days before the election. First, we must save Social Security first. Last week I was privileged to announce the first budget surplus in a generation. Congress must not lose this spirit of fiscal discipline. I have proposed tax cuts, but they're fully paid for. If the Congress sends me a tax plan that drains billions from the surplus before saving Social Security, I will veto it. We've worked too hard for too long to abandon fiscal discipline and our economic strength and to weaken our commitment to Social Security just because it's election time. Second, we must act to protect our prosperity in this turbulent international economy by meeting our obligations to the International Monetary Fund. The world is waiting literally, the world is waiting for Congress to step up to America's responsibility, provide funds to the IMF, and give us the tools we need to pull teetering economies back from the brink and to keep America's economic prosperity going. It would be unacceptable for Congress to leave Washington before acting. Third, we must continue to invest in education. As the leaders here with me and about 50 other Members of Congress asked last week, we seek just one day for Congress to consider the education measures I have proposed, to pass a plan to provide our schools with the tools they need, with 100,000 teachers so we can have smaller classes in the early grades, with afterschool and summer school programs to help students raise higher achieve higher academic standards, with thousands of modernized schools for the 21st century. And fourth, in these last few days, Congress must act to protect, not gut, the environment. Republicans in Congress have sought to slip unacceptable provisions into unrelated bills that would cripple wildlife protection, force overcutting of our national forests, deny taxpayers a fair return on oil leasing, thwart commonsense efforts to address global warming. If they insist on sending these antienvironmental riders to my desk, again I will veto them. Fifth, Congress must act to address a range of pressing emergencies that simply cannot wait for a new congressional session, emergencies including supporting our troops in Bosnia, maintaining our military readiness worldwide, providing assistance to our farmers who are in real crisis out there, protecting American citizens from terrorism, and providing resources to address the year 2000 computer problem. For two administrations the budget rules under which both parties have operated have accommodated such emergencies. Troops in the field and citizens in crisis should never be subject to partisan wrangling. This is what we ought to do We ought to save Social Security first, pass the education program, protect our own economy, and do what we should do to lead the world away from world financial crisis, pass the Patients' Bill of Rights, avoid these environmentally destructive riders. There is still time for us to put the people of our country ahead of politics, and I hope we'll do it. Now I'd like to ask Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt to say a word. October 02, 1998 Thank you very much. I kind of hate to follow Rendell tonight. Laughter It's a true story, that story you heard about me asking if he modeled for these sculptures. Laughter You know, he did so well tonight, I think he sort of halfway talked himself into believing it. It was great. Laughter I tell you, I would just like to say one serious thing about the mayor. I remember when we walked the street here in 1992, when he took me into a neighborhood where the gangs and the drugs had been cleared out. I remember when we shot baskets together. He won. Laughter I think I've demonstrated to the whole world that I'm not always very smart, but I was smart enough to know I shouldn't win that basketball game in '92. Laughter I knew the only score I was trying to win was in November and that it would help if I took a well considered dive. Laughter No, he beat me fair and square, actually. But I want you to know that to me it's just literally thrilling to come here to this city to see what has been done, to see the whole sort of spirit of the place, to see the neighborhoods that have come back, to see the people that are working, to see the projects that are on line. And when I became President, I believed that we needed in Washington to find a way to reduce the deficit until we balanced the budget, to reduce the size of Government, to reduce the burden of regulation, to reduce the plethora of programs in a lot of these areas, but to be more active in creating the conditions and giving people the tools to solve their problems at the grassroots level. And every tool that we put out there, Ed Rendell used as well or better as anyone in America. And it is an awesome thing to see. And I just want to thank him for proving through this city that this great country can solve its problems, meet its challenges, and work in a stunning fashion. I am very grateful to him, not only for his friendship and support but for what he's done for you and for our country as mayor. I would like to thank Congressman Bob Borski and Congressman Bob Brady and Congressman Chaka Fattah for being with me tonight and for being with me in Washington, where it really counts and where they have counted for you. I would like to thank our State party chair, Tina Tartaglione, a member of the legislature, I know and Senator Fumo, thank you for coming, and all the other public officials who are here. I'd like to thank my good friend Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky for running for Lieutenant Governor and being my friend. Tonight Hillary is finishing a trip to Uruguay, where they had one of a series of conferences that she's done around the world. The last one was in Northern Ireland. They're called Vital Voices conferences, where she goes to places and gets together women who are working for peace and reconciliation and development, and dealing with health and family related problems. And Marjorie has helped her a lot on that, and I'm very, very grateful to her, and for so much else. Finally, let me say I want to thank Len Barrack for doing a fabulous job as the finance director of the DNC. The job has been good for him. He's even wearing three button suits now laughter taken years off his life, looks so much younger. Let me say very briefly, Ed talked about some of these issues tonight, but I would like to try to put this in some historical perspective. In 1992, when the citizens of this city gave Al Gore and me a great vote of endorsement and helped us to win the State of Pennsylvania, which was pivotal in our victory, we ran on a platform of change that said we didn't like very much what was going on in Washington and just the constant, endless, partisan bickering and rhetoric and setting up the American people against each other business against labor, the economy against the environment, dividing the races, dividing present citizens against immigrants all these things were going on as if there were no way out of these boxes that would build America, that would bring us together and move us forward. And we said, among other things, if you vote for us we'll give you a Government that's smaller but more active. We'll reduce the deficit and balance the budget, but we'll invest more money in education and medical research and the environment. We said we would try to deal with some of the challenges in the health care system and extend coverage to more people. We said that we thought we could improve the environment and grow the economy. We thought that we could be pro business and pro labor. We thought we could have a welfare system that required people who were able bodied to work, without hurting them in their more important job, which is raising their children by doing what many in the other party wanted to do, which was to cut off their guarantee of nutrition and health care benefits to their children. So we had a lot of ideas, and they were going to be tested. And after 6 years, most of those ideas have now been enacted into law and have been for some time part of the public policy of our country. I am very grateful for where America is tonight and grateful that you gave me the chance to do what I have done to contribute to that and grateful for your contributions. I'm grateful that we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and the lowest crime in 25 years and the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and now the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years. And we have record numbers of new businesses in each of the last 6 years, the fastest rising wages in over 20 years, the lowest poverty rate among African Americans ever recorded, the biggest drop among Hispanics in 30 years. I'm grateful for all that. The real question I want you to think about tonight when you leave here is why you came here besides the fact that Ed made you laughter why you came here and what you're going to do when you leave. Because for all the kind and generous and wonderful things that the people of Philadelphia said to me today and the messages they gave, through me, to Hillary today, I have to tell you that I think that the biggest challenge we face in this election season is not adversity but complacency. Painful though it is, I think adversity is our friend, not only for reasons of personal development and change but because when adversity affects any group of people, it forces you to dig down deep and ask yourself what you believe in, what you're doing, whatever you're doing it for, and what you intend to do tomorrow. And usually when times are good like this, people relax. And with these elections coming up, our friends in the Republican Party, they believe they're going to be successful for two reasons One, in spite of your presence here today, they always have tons more money than we do, which they spend very cleverly at the end. And secondly, they know that at midterm elections typically people who always vote in Presidential elections don't go vote. They don't go vote. And a lot of our folks Ed talked about the child care issue for a lot of the people that normally vote with our people, it's a lot more trouble for them to go vote. They have to balance children and work, and worry about child care. And election day is a work day, and it's a hassle. And so I ask you, we have to decide, what is it that we should as a people do with this moment of prosperity, with this moment of confidence? And I would argue to you that we ought to think about the big challenges facing this country over the long run and the specific things we ought to be doing right now. If you look at the big challenges over the long run facing America, what are they? Well, at home, when the baby boomers retire, we have got to modify Social Security and Medicare so it's there for the people that need it at a cost that doesn't bankrupt our children. It's a big challenge. We've got to make sure that to go along with the finest higher education system in the world, we can offer world class elementary and secondary education to every child without regard to race or income or neighborhood. We can't say that today, and we've got to be able to say that. We've got to modify the international financial systems and trading systems so that we don't have the kind of instability you see today in Asia and Russia, and so that they work for ordinary people, so that we put a human face on the global economy, so that all these people in other countries that we depend upon to buy our products and services really believe that this system will work for them. If you want freedom and free enterprise to work around the world, it has to work for real people, just like it does in this country. Otherwise, it's not sustainable. We have to prove all over the world that we can improve the environment and grow the economy, that there is not a connection between environmental destruction and economic growth anymore. And there isn't, by the way, on the evidence. Now, we have to prove that we can get more and more and more diverse racially, religiously, culturally, politically, and still find a way to come together as one America. Those are just some of the really big challenges out there facing us. What does that mean when you come down to the present day? Ed talked about a couple things. I think the biggest decisions facing us right now are one, a decision to do the right thing for our children and our parents and not spend this surplus until we have overhauled the Social Security system in the 21st century. Two, I think that we should make a clear commitment that we are going to continue to lead the world economically, that we recognize our own economy and our prosperity cannot be maintained if everybody else in the world gets in trouble, and there are too many people in trouble now in the world. And we have to lead the world. That means that Congress ought to give me the money not for me, to our country to contribute to the International Monetary Fund so we can keep this economy going. That's very important. Three, Ed talked about education. Let me just 8 months ago in the State of the Union, I gave the Congress an education plan designed to make concrete my belief that we had to make sure every 8 year old could read, every 12 yearold could log on to the Internet, every 18 yearold could go to college, and every adult could keep learning for a lifetime to try to make real my belief that we've got to be able to say that all the kids in this country have access to a world class elementary and secondary education. And the program I put before the Congress was not a partisan program. It was based on the best ideas I could find around the country and the 20 years of experience that Hillary and I have had going into classrooms, going into schools, and looking at the research. So we did. We said, "Look, we'll put 100,000 teachers out there. They will all be well trained. And we'll put them in the early grades so we can lower average class size to 18, because all the research shows that small classes in the early grades guarantee more individual attention, higher levels of learning, and permanent learning benefits." Then we will do what Ed talked about with the school facilities, because there are so many places where the school population is growing now, where there are these temporary classrooms. I was in one little town in Florida that had 12 of these behind one building, one school building. And then there are a lot of cities that have magnificent buildings, like Philadelphia, that simply can't be maintained and repaired given the present budget. So we put a program forward that will allow us to build or repair 5,000 school buildings be a good start on America's school challenge. We say our kids are the most important things in the world, but what kind of a message does it give a child to walk up the steps to a school building where the windows are broken out or a whole floor is closed down or all the windows have to be boarded up because nobody can afford the utility bills because they haven't been insulated properly? I see this kind of stuff all over America. The third thing we wanted to do was to give districts the encouragement to impose high standards on kids and to stop just promoting them whether they were learning anything or not, but not to brand the children failures because the system is a failure. So we wanted to give districts the opportunity to have mentoring programs, after school programs, summer school programs, so that kids could be held to higher standards, but would not be branded failures and instead would be helped, if they were prepared in school district after school district after school district to have those standards. We wanted to give 35,000 bright young people college scholarships and pay all their expenses and say, "Now you can go out and pay all your college debt off by going into educationally underserved areas in the inner cities and rural areas and teaching for a few years and paying your expenses off." We wanted to provide the funds to hook up every classroom in the country to the Internet by the year 2000. And all that is paid for in the balanced budget. And the fourth thing we wanted to do was to try to have some uniform rules for HMO's. And 43 43 HMO's have supported the Patients' Bill of Rights because they want to do this, and they don't think they can economically unless it's the same rules for everybody. And the rules are pretty simple If you're in an accident and you have to get in an ambulance, you ought to be taken to the nearest emergency room, not one clear across town because it's the one that's covered. If your doctor says you need to see a specialist, you can see one. If you're in the middle of treatment and your employer changes providers, they can't make you change doctors in the middle of a pregnancy or a chemotherapy treatment. And you get to have your records remain private. Now, those are four specific examples of the big problems, of the things we can do right now to address these big problems. Now, what's happened on the other side? Our friends in the other party with their majority this year, here's what they've done on those four things. Number one, on Social Security first, the House passed a tax cut because it's appealing 4 or 5 weeks before an election. And the Senate has it now, and I think they may have figured out that the people may be a little more broadminded and farsighted than they think, because I'm not sure they'll send it to me and let me veto it. Laughter Number two, on the International Monetary Fund, most of the people who immediately know about this are Republicans, international business people. The Senate passed it overwhelmingly. We're still waiting for the House to vote for it, and every single day that goes by, we run the risk of increased instability in the world and increased risk to America. Now, I've been waiting for this for 8 months, and I'm telling you, this is a big American issue still no action. On education, no action. On the health care bill of rights, the House passed a bill that guarantees none of these rights none that I mentioned and cuts 100 million Americans out what little it did guarantee. And so it went to the Senate. Now, in the Senate the rules are different, and our guys can bring up our bill. So when we tried to bring up our bill, the majority leader of the Senate I never thought I'd live to see this they shut the Senate down the other night. They closed the house for 4 hours to keep the Patients' Bill of Rights from being considered. They just turned the lights out. People got under their desk, or did whatever they did. Laughter It was death by the stealth to the Patients' Bill of Rights. Why? Because they did not want to be recorded being against what they fully intended to kill. Now, a few other things have happened this year. They killed the minimum wage increase. They killed campaign finance reform, which would have relieved you of some of the pain of being here tonight. Laughter They killed the tobacco reform legislation, which would have protected our children from what is still the number one public health problem in America today. Now, that is what is happening. This stuff matters. And, oh, by the way, in the way of tax cuts, we had a targeted tax cut program, and it covered child care, as Ed Rendell said. It helped small businesses take out pension plans for their employees. And it was all paid for. And on health care, we did have a provision so that 55 to 65 year old people could buy into health care plans, because a huge number of them are forced into early retirement or their spouses go on Medicare, but they can't, so they lose their employer based coverage, don't have any health insurance. And it doesn't cost much money. No action. So I say to you, what is really at stake here is about whether this election is about Washington or about you whether it's about power and politics or people whether it's about partisanship or progress. And when you leave here tonight, I want you to really think go home and just talk. If you've got couples here tonight, talk among yourselves. What do you think the really big challenges facing this country are going to be in the next 25 or 30 years? What do you think the things are that we could do right now that would address them most? And if you believe we ought to save Social Security before we squander the first surplus we've had in a generation, if you believe we should pass this health care bill of rights, if you believe that we should put education first among our investment priorities, if you think we ought to do what is necessary to keep America strong economically and in the leadership of the world economy and fighting for peace and freedom. Our strength, economically, enables us to be a force for peace in Northern Ireland enables us to continue to hold out hope of peace and work for it in the Middle East enables us to do what we're trying to do now to avert a horrible incidence of the death of innocents in Kosovo this winter enables us to try to work with other countries to bring down the threat of terrorism and nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons. It all rests on America's sense of strength and purpose. Now, if you believe that we ought to be for those things, and if you believe this election ought to be about you and your children and your grandchildren and the other people that live in Philadelphia, then I would challenge you not to leave your citizenship responsibilities with the signing of the check that you wrote to get here tonight, because the direction of these issues will be determined not only by how people vote but whether they vote. And so I say in closing, adversity is not our enemy complacency is. This is the greatest country in history. For 220 years, against all the odds, no matter what happens, we always somehow figure out how to do the right thing to get a little closer to our ideals of a more perfect Union, of freedom and opportunity for everybody. And we can do it this time. But we need your voice. We need your efforts. We need you to talk like I'm talking to you, to everybody you see between now and November. So when you go home tonight and you ask yourself, "Why did I go there?" I hope your answer will be, "Because I wanted to know exactly what I should do as a citizen in the next 5 weeks to do right by my country in the 21st century." Thank you, and God bless you. September 28, 1998 President Clinton. First of all, I would like to publicly welcome Prime Minister Netanyahu and Chairman Arafat. We have had a very, very good meeting today, following the one on one meeting that the Prime Minister and the Chairman had last night, their first face to face meeting in a year. I believe that we all agree that we have made progress on the path to peace. There has been a significant narrowing of the gaps between the two parties across a wide range of issues that were in the American initiative that we've been working on for months. I think also, to be candid, there's still a substantial amount of work to be done until a comprehensive agreement can be reached. And because I'm convinced that the two leaders and the people they represent want an agreement, I have asked them to come back to the United States in mid October with their teams to do the intensive work necessary to see if we can conclude this. Meanwhile, I've asked the Secretary of State and Ambassador Ross to go back to the region in early October to try to see how much preparatory work can be done to narrow the differences further and to agree on at least the modalities for what we will do here in mid October. So, all told, it was a good day. And again I want to thank both these men for the open, candid, respectful way in which they worked, and we worked, together. And we're going to work at this now to see if we can get it done. Q. What are the major sticking Q. Mr. President, there was President Clinton. Wait, wait. One, two, three. We'll do them all. Go ahead. Palestinian State Q. Mr. President, do you support the Palestinian state in principle, and do you think the Palestinians have the right to have a state made for or in principle, and self determination for them? President Clinton. In the Oslo accords, that question was left for the final status negotiations. Because of the heavy involvement of the United States in the peace process, I believe it would be in error for me to comment on that. I think the important thing is, that has to be resolved in the final status negotiations as provided for in the Oslo accords. As long as the peace process is going forward, whatever the United States says on that publicly will be unhelpful to the ultimate outcome. Q. Mr. President, the First Lady commented on this in public Q. Mr. President, is it your assumption President Clinton. She did, but she's not the President, and she's not trying to manage this peace process. That's a different thing. But I'm telling you the we gave our word, when we agreed to try to be an honest broker, to respect the Oslo process. And therefore I have to tell you, when I'm in Israel or when I'm with American Jewish groups, they also try to get me to say things that I said before I was the President and the broker of the process, that I can no longer say. So it's a different I gave my word that I would be faithful to the process that these two parties set out for the resolution of their agreement, and I have to try to do that. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, are you saying that the deadline is mid October when you expect both Chairman Arafat and Prime Minister Netanyahu to come back to the United States for a settlement? President Clinton. Well, let me say this. In the end, whether there will be this agreement depends upon how badly they want it, how much we can work together, how much trust can be built and sustained, what kind of process for ensuring the agreement can be agreed upon by the two parties. So I think what I'm telling you is that they have made a very unusual commitment they have committed several days, and not only their own time but the time of their appropriate administration and staff people, to try to resolve the remaining gaps. I can also tell you that I personally was very impressed by the way, the manner, and the substance of their conversation today with me. And so we all said we needed to continue to change the dynamics of the process to try to increase the likelihood of completion. We made significant progress on the path to peace, and I think we could finish it in mid October, and I certainly hope we do. Q. Mr. President Q. You promised me the question. Please. There was today Mr. President Q. Could we hear from Chairman Arafat and Mr. Netanyahu Q. Mr. President, today there was a terror attack in Hebron, a shooting, and an Israeli woman was injured. The Israelis are saying that Arafat, Mr. President, Arafat is not fighting terrorism. Did you get any answers from Mr. Arafat concerning the implementation of the reciprocity principle? Is Mr. Arafat willing to stick to his commitments according to the Hebron accords and Oslo accords to fight terrorism? President Clinton. Perhaps I should let him answer that. But he certainly affirmed that to us. And keep in mind, that's a part of the whole peace process, those kinds of agreements, and that's one of the things that the Prime Minister, representing the people of Israel, would raise, and something that has to be talked through. But if either one of these gentlemen want to say Q. Chairman Arafat, what's your assessment of the talks today? Chairman Arafat. What he has mentioned is covering everything and instead of saying the same thing Q. Palestinian state today in Q. Mr. President, where has there been progress in the peace process Q. Mr. President. Q. Chairman Arafat, are you convinced President Clinton. I believe there's been progress in all major areas. I think we're closer together on virtually on every major issue that either Chairman Arafat has mentioned to me or that Prime Minister Netanyahu has mentioned to me than there was before. But we have an operating agreement here that we will all say that nothing has been agreed to until everything has been agreed to. I think that is a good operating agreement. If they ever decide to change it, then I will honor their decision. Otherwise, our position is that you cannot conclude that anything has been agreed to until everything has been agreed to. Thank you. September 27, 1998 The President. Thank you very much. Audience member. Don't give up! The President. Well, ladies and gentlemen you don't have to worry about me giving up. Applause Thank you. Garry Mauro promised me that if I came to Texas in the wake of all this controversy, I would get a warm welcome. And he nearly overdid it today. Laughter It's great to be back here. I want to thank Frank Herrera and his whole family for making us feel so welcome at their humble little homestead here. We ought to give him a hand. Thank you. Applause I want to thank all the people who provided our music and catered our food and made this such an enjoyable occasion. I want to thank the candidates who are here who are running for office Jim Mattox, Charlie Gonzalez Richard Raymond is not here Joe Henderson. I want to thank Molly Beth Malcolm, your State chair, and all the members of the Texas House and Senate who are here. I want to say a special word of appreciation for the life and career of a man who has been my friend for more than 25 years, Henry B. Gonzalez. You can be really proud of what he has done. And I want to thank my friend Ann Richards for finding ways to say things no one else can say that make a point no one could misunderstand. Laughter She's unbelievable. I want to tell you why I wanted to come here today, for reasons other than the fact that Garry Mauro has been my friend since 1972. Audience member. Mango ice cream! The President. And the mango ice cream. Laughter First of all, many of you whom I've already met have said some wonderful personal things to me about my family, and I thank you for that. You know, it's easy to forget in Washington, but Presidents and their families are still people. And it meant more to me than you'll ever know, and I thank you for that. But I also want to tell you that I desperately want this election year, all across America and in Texas, not to be about what's going on in Washington, DC, but what's going on in San Antonio, in El Paso, in Lufkin, and towns like them all over America. You know, this is still a democracy you're still in the driver's seat, but you have to get behind it and drive if you want to be heard. Now, I ran for President I started almost 7 years ago in just about a week it will be the 7th anniversary of my declaration for President. When I started, nobody but my wife and my mother thought I could win. I had a lot of good friends in Texas and got two thirds of the vote in the Democratic primary here on Super Tuesday, and it catapulted me on. Now, I ran for President because I wanted to make this country work for ordinary citizens again because I wanted us to be a leader for peace and prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world, to which we're closer and closer tied and because I wanted to bring this country together in a spirit of harmony and unity across all the lines that divide us. And in the last 6 years Garry mentioned it, but I just want to reel it off to you we tested the ideas that we brought to Washington. They're no longer the subject of debate. If you believe elections are about ideas, ideals, and the impact they have on ordinary people, in every election in this country and in every election in Texas, you ought to tell people we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years. And Wednesday we'll have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years. But the real question is, what will we do with it? I want you to remember what Garry said today. Our enemy is not adversity. Look at this crowd. Feel your own enthusiasm. Remember what many of you said to me today. Adversity is our friend. It forces us to dig deep, to ask ourselves what we believe in, what kind of people we are, what kind of people we want to be, where we want to go, and what we want to do with our lives. Adversity is our friend. Our enemies are complacency and cynicism. Those are our enemies, and don't misunderstand it. The biggest problem Garry Mauro has got in this election is if people think, "Well, things are going well. Why do anything?" A lot of people think, "I had a tough time in the eighties, and things are going well now, and why don't we just relax and let things rock along?" And I can tell you that's appealing, but it's wrong. In Washington people think, "Things are going well why don't we fight with each other and see who we can hurt?" Laughter And it's tempting, but it's wrong. It's wrong because the world is changing very fast. I just got back from Silicon Valley, where all those computer companies are born, you know? Those people change for a living every day at blinding speed. But they understand something a lot of our fellow Americans don't, which is the world is changing for everyone. You pick up the papers you know that we've got economic problems in Japan and the rest of Asia. There's a real risk that it will spread to our friends in Mexico and throughout Latin America who are doing a pretty good job managing their economies. If that happens, it will hurt Texas very, very badly, and our economy. You see terrorism throughout the world you see people fighting with each other throughout the world because of their racial, their ethnic, religious differences. We have challenges, and we have challenges at home. And the real question in this election in America and in Texas is, what are we going to do with this moment of prosperity? This is Sunday, so I'll just make one Biblical reference. One of the most successful leaders in the Bible was Joseph. And what did he do? When Egypt was fat and sassy, he saved the grain. He made all those people go out and work and do things they'd just as soon not do. And they said, "This Joseph, why doesn't he let up on us?" But when the famine came, the people of Egypt were all right because a true leader did something in good times, understanding change. When people ask you about Garry Mauro, you tell them about Joseph, and tell them what a mistake it would be for Texas to say, "We're just going to stand pat because things are good who cares if anybody does anything? As long as I feel good, everything is all right." Let me tell you what's going on in Washington. I believe as strongly as I can say that we have to use these good times as a responsibility to look to the future and deal with our challenges. Let me just mention four of them. Number one and I'll compare the positions of the two parties. Number one, Wednesday we're going to have the first balanced budget and surplus for 29 years. I've worked hard for it for the last 6 years. In 1993 we had a vote, without a single member of the other party not a one that passed by one vote in both Houses, that brought the deficit down over 90 percent before we passed the bipartisan balanced budget amendment. And that started this recovery. Now, the guys that didn't vote to balance the budget say, "Well, we're going to have a surplus for the first time in 29 years let's give everybody an election year tax cut 6 weeks before the election." Now, it's very popular. It's very popular, but it's dead wrong. And I'll tell you why. Number one, it's wrong because the rest of the world is in economic trouble, and we have to set a standard of being strong economically and responsible. If we want to keep growing, we've got to help them get back on their feet, not make the same mistakes others are making. Number two, the Social Security system is solid now, but it is not sustainable when the baby boomers retire. I ought to know I'm the oldest of the baby boomers. Laughter And when we retire you look at all the young people here today when the baby boomers retire, there will only be two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. If we start now, well ahead of time, we can make modest changes that save Social Security that will not require us to make the horrible choice of either putting seniors back into poverty or taxing our children so that we undermine their ability to raise our grandchildren. Now, people say no one thinks that far ahead. But you know that I'm telling the truth, don't you? Applause So I say, I want you to support us when the Republicans say, "Here's the goody it's election time," and I say no. I'm not against tax cuts. We've got tax cuts for education, for child care, and for the environment in our balanced budget bill. But I'm against using that surplus for tax cuts or for spending programs until we save Social Security for our parents and our children. Number two, I never thought this would be an election year issue, but you know now that 30 percent of our growth comes from our trading with other countries. Texas knows how important it is that we sell our goods and our products and our services to Latin America, to Asia, all over the world. We have got to lead the world back from the financial trouble they're in, or we will eventually get hurt. And it will be sooner rather than later. In order for us to lead the world, we have to make our fair contribution to something called the International Monetary Fund. That's the fund we use to help the countries that are trying to help themselves and to keep the problems from spreading so we can keep selling our stuff. For 8 months I've been begging the Congress to do it, and they still haven't done it. So I say to you, if you like this economy and you want to keep it going, vote for us and our side because we will pay our fair share and lead the world back to prosperity. Number three, in the balanced budget this year, I have given the Congress an education agenda. There has been no action for 8 months. Here's what it does It puts 100,000 teachers in our classrooms to lower class size to 18 in the early grades it repairs or builds 5,000 schools it provides funds to hook up every classroom in the poorest schools in America to the Internet by the year 2000 it helps schools where the kids are poor and the neighborhoods are poor to adopt high standards, but to have afterschool programs and summer school programs so the kids aren't deemed failures just because the system is failing them. It gives 35,000 young people college scholarships that they can pay off if they'll go out and teach in hard pressed school districts for a few years after they get out of college. It is a good education program. It deserves to be passed. And our party is for it, and they're not. Number four, Garry talked about the Patients' Bill of Rights. I want a national bill that says the following things Number one, if you get hurt in an accident, they've got to take you to the nearest emergency room, not one halfway across town because it's covered by your plan. Number two, if your doctor tells you you need to see a specialist, you can. Number three, if you're in the middle of treatment and your company changes health insurance providers, they can't make you change doctors. Now, let me tell you what's happening in America today. Pregnant women, 6, 7 months into their pregnancy their employer changes coverage, they say, "Get another obstetrician." Have you ever had anybody in your family on chemotherapy? A lot of us have. I have, and it's pretty tough. And if somebody in your family I bet you had the same experience we did when my mother had to do that. You sit around and you try to put on a brave face you make a few jokes. You say, "Well, what are we going to do when you're running around bald?" And then you say, "Well, I'll finally get to wear that wig I've always wanted." You try to make fun of it to keep from the agony. And then you sit there and worry down deep inside, what's going to happen if you're so sick you can't eat anymore? Now, how would you feel in the middle of the chemotherapy treatment, if somebody said, "I'm sorry, your employer changed providers you've got to get another doctor"? That happens. And our bill would protect the privacy of your medical records, which is something people ought to care a lot more about today than ever before. Now, in Congress, the Republicans passed a bill that didn't do any of that, and left 100 million Americans out of what little they did do. It is the symbol of the difference in the two parties in Washington and throughout the country today. So I say to you, here's what we're for We're for saving Social Security first we're for keeping the economy going we're for putting education first among all our investment priorities and we're for a Patients' Bill of Rights. That's what we're for, and they're opposite us on all those issues. That is the choice nationally. You want to know Ann Richards asked if you could think of anything that Congress has done. Let me tell you what they've done this year, what our friends in the Republican Party have done with their majority. They killed campaign finance reform. They killed tobacco reform legislation to help us save our kids' health. They killed an increase in the minimum wage, with unemployment and inflation low, that would have helped 12 million hard working Americans. They have gone backwards on saving Social Security first. They have gone backwards in protecting the environment. And they have done nothing on helping us to lead the international economy and nothing on the education agenda. That's what they have done less than a week before the end of this budget year. And that's the difference. Well, what's that got to do with the Governor of Texas? I'll tell you what. For years and years and years, I heard the Republicans talk about how there ought to be more power given to the States, how the Federal Government did too much. They talked about it we did something about it. We have the smallest Federal Government in 35 years. But what that means is it matters a lot more who the Governor is. We have given Governors more responsibility in education, more responsibility in health care, more responsibility in managing the environment, and more responsibility in growing the economy. It matters. If Garry Mauro were not my friend, I would be here saying he has a plan for Texas, and just because you're doing well doesn't mean you can stand pat. You need to bear down and think about your children and the future and stand up for what's right. Now, our friends in the other party think they're going to do real well this year because of complacency and cynicism and what I call the M M syndrome money and midterms. They always have more money than we do. And at midterm elections our folks who work hard, have a lot of hassles, and it's more trouble for them to vote don't vote in the same numbers their folks do. But we can surprise them if the American people know what's really at stake. If they understand this is a question about progress over partisanship, people over politics, unity over division. And I'm telling you, you go out there and they ask you what it's about, tell them it's about the economy. Tell them it's about saving Social Security. Tell them it's about the integrity of your health care. Tell them it's about the education of your children. That's what we're for. And they know every voter knows what they're for. Make a decision for your future and our country's future. Thank you, and God bless you all. September 22, 1998 President Clinton. Let me say that I'm very sorry that the weather didn't permit us to go up to Tarrytown today, but I'm pleased to welcome Prime Minister Obuchi and his entire team here. I have also invited the Prime Minister to come back for an official visit early next year so that we can work very closely together on the challenges we face. The United States has no more important relationship in the world than our relationship with Japan, for common security concerns, to advance democracy and peace, and in our common economic endeavors. So we just had a good hour long meeting, and we're going to have a couple of other sessions today, and then early next year we'll have another meeting. Prime Minister Obuchi. I am very pleased to have this opportunity of having a discussion with President Clinton extensively on my first visit to the United States since I became the Prime Minister of Japan. This meeting of mine with the President I had earlier today brought home to me the importance of Japan and the United States working closely together. And although I am only 2 months in office and the President has experience a wealth of experience of over 5 1 2 years as President of the United States, we spoke in a very candid manner as if we knew from before. I think although this was the first time that we met in this kind of setting, we had a very substantive and important meeting. Let me take this opportunity to thank President Clinton for, as he mentioned earlier, extending to me the invitation to visit the United States early next year. I think that visit of mine will provide a good opportunity to continue our discussion further. And I do hope to make it realized. Details, I will instruct our officials to work out with U.S. counterparts. As we moved from the prior room to this room, we talked about the Third Way, but the path that we had in between two rooms were not enough to complete the subject. Laughter So I do hope to elaborate on that subject later on. Response to Independent Counsel's Referral Q. Mr. President, would you consider an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee in person, as some in Congress have suggested? President Clinton. Mr. Plante Bill Plante, CBS News , I don't have anything to add to whatever the White House is saying about all this today. I'm here working on a very important thing for the American people and for the Japanese people. We have to work together to restore growth to the world and to help our friends. Yesterday I was here working on terrorism and how to make the global economy work for ordinary citizens. That's what I'm doing, and I don't have any contribution to make to that discussion beyond whatever the White House has said. Q. Do you pay any attention to what's going on other than this? Do you pay any attention to what happened yesterday, to what the lawyers are doing, to any aspect of this? President Clinton. Not much. Believe it or not, I haven't read the report or my lawyers' replies. I think it's important that I focus on what I'm doing for the American people, and that's what I intend to do. Japanese Financial Reform Q. Mr. President, are you encouraged from what you heard today that Japan will be able to deal with its fiscal problems in a swift way and adequately? President Clinton. Well, I think, first of all, let's look at the facts here. Japan is a very great country with a strong, sophisticated economy and immensely talented people and, as in America now, an increasingly complicated political situation. That is, we have a Democratic President and a Republican majority in the Congress. They have their government, and in one house of their Diet an opposition with more members. So they have to work out what is politically possible. I think there is virtually unanimous support in the world for the kind of financial reforms that would restore economic growth in Japan. The rest of us want to be encouraging. We want to do what we can to be supportive to help do whatever we can to create the climate which would permit a quick restoration of economic growth in Japan and therefore in Asia. That's what our objective is, is to understand that they have unique challenges but enormous strengths and to help find a way to get this done. Q. Mr. Prime Minister, how optimistic or pessimistic are you about the prospects of getting reforms passed through your parliament? Prime Minister Obuchi. I'm neither optimistic or pessimistic on this, but I think, as much as I do realize, many in Japan would realize, that this is not only an issue for Japan but something that has major implications on economies of Asia as well as the whole world. I think steps we take in Japan to address the issue of financial system has very large implications worldwide. So I think with this understanding, I intend to make my very best effort at addressing this issue. I am convinced that we will be able to do something. September 21, 1998 Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mr. Secretary General, the delegates of this 53d session of the General Assembly, let me begin by thanking you for your very kind and generous welcome and by noting that at the opening of this General Assembly the world has much to celebrate. Peace has come to Northern Ireland after 29 long years. Bosnia has just held its freest elections ever. The United Nations is actively mediating crises before they explode into war all around the world. And today, more people determine their own destiny than at any previous moment in history. We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with those rights more widely embraced than ever before. On every continent, people are leading lives of integrity and self respect, and a great deal of credit for that belongs to the United Nations. Still, as every person in this room knows, the promise of our time is attended by perils. Global economic turmoil today threatens to undermine confidence in free markets and democracy. Those of us who benefit particularly from this economy have a special responsibility to do more to minimize the turmoil and extend the benefits of global markets to all citizens. And the United States is determined to do that. We still are bedeviled by ethnic, racial, religious, and tribal hatreds by the spread of weapons of mass destruction by the almost frantic effort of too many states to acquire such weapons. And despite all efforts to contain it, terrorism is not fading away with the end of the 20th century. It is a continuing defiance of Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says, and I quote, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person." Here at the U.N., at international summits around the world, and on many occasions in the United States, I have had the opportunity to address this subject in detail, to describe what we have done, what we are doing, and what we must yet do to combat terror. Today I would like to talk to you about why all nations must put the fight against terrorism at the top of our agenda. Obviously, this is a matter of profound concern to us. In the last 15 years, our citizens have been targeted over and over again in Beirut over Lockerbie in Saudi Arabia at home in Oklahoma City, by one of our own citizens, and even here in New York, in one of our most public buildings and most recently on August 7th in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, where Americans who devoted their lives to building bridges between nations, people very much like all of you, died in a campaign of hatred against the United States. Because we are blessed to be a wealthy nation with a powerful military and worldwide presence active in promoting peace and security, we are often a target. We love our country for its dedication to political and religious freedom, to economic opportunity, to respect for the rights of the individual. But we know many people see us as a symbol of a system and values they reject, and often they find it expedient to blame us for problems with deep roots elsewhere. But we are no threat to any peaceful nation, and we believe the best way to disprove these claims is to continue our work for peace and prosperity around the world. For us to pull back from the world's trouble spots, to turn our backs on those taking risks for peace, to weaken our own opposition to terrorism, would hand the enemies of peace a victory they must never have. Still, it is a grave misconception to see terrorism as only, or even mostly, an American problem. Indeed, it is a clear and present danger to tolerant and open societies and innocent people everywhere. No one in this room, nor the people you represent, are immune. Certainly not the people of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam for every American killed there, roughly 20 Africans were murdered and 500 more injured, innocent people going about their business on a busy morning. Not the people of Omagh, in Northern Ireland, where the wounded and killed were Catholics and Protestants alike, mostly children and women and two of them pregnant people out shopping together, when their future was snuffed out by a fringe group clinging to the past. Not the people of Japan who were poisoned by sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. Not the people of Argentina who died when a car bomb decimated a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Not the people of Kashmir and Sri Lanka killed by ancient animosities that cry out for resolution. Not the Palestinians and Israelis who still die year after year, for all the progress toward peace. Not the people of Algeria, enduring the nightmare of unfathomable terror with still no end in sight. Not the people of Egypt, who nearly lost a second President to assassination. Not the people of Turkey, Colombia, Albania, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, and countless other nations where innocent people have been victimized by terror. Now, none of these victims are American, but every one was a son or a daughter, a husband or wife, a father or mother, a human life extinguished by someone else's hatred, leaving a circle of people whose lives will never be the same. Terror has become the world's problem. Some argue, of course, that the problem is overblown, saying that the number of deaths from terrorism is comparatively small, sometimes less than the number of people killed by lightning in a single year. I believe that misses the point in several ways. First, terrorism has a new face in the 1990's. Today, terrorists take advantage of greater openness and the explosion of information and weapons technology. The new technologies of terror and their increasing availability, along with the increasing mobility of terrorists, raise chilling prospects of vulnerability to chemical, biological, and other kinds of attacks, bringing each of us into the category of possible victim. This is a threat to all humankind. Beyond the physical damage of each attack, there is an even greater residue of psychological damage, hard to measure but slow to heal. Every bomb, every bomb threat has an insidious effect on free and open institutions, the kinds of institutions all of you in this body are working so hard to build. Each time an innocent man or woman or child is killed, it makes the future more hazardous for the rest of us, for each violent act saps the confidence that is so crucial to peace and prosperity. In every corner of the world, with the active support of U.N. agencies, people are struggling to build better futures, based on bonds of trust connecting them to their fellow citizens and with partners and investors from around the world. The glimpse of growing prosperity in Northern Ireland was a crucial factor in the Good Friday Agreement. But that took confidence confidence that cannot be bought in times of violence. We can measure each attack and the grisly statistics of dead and wounded, but what are the wounds we cannot measure? In the Middle East, in Asia, in South America, how many agreements have been thwarted after bombs blew up? How many businesses will never be created in places crying out for investments of time and money? How many talented young people in countries represented here have turned their backs on public service? The question is not only how many lives have been lost in each attack but how many futures were lost in their aftermath. There is no justification for killing innocents. Ideology, religion, and politics, even deprivation and righteous grievance, do not justify it. We must seek to understand the roiled waters in which terror occurs of course, we must. Often, in my own experience, I have seen where peace is making progress, terror is a desperate act to turn back the tide of history. The Omagh bombing came as peace was succeeding in Northern Ireland. In the Middle East, whenever we get close to another step toward peace, its enemies respond with terror. We must not let this stall our momentum. The bridging of ancient hatreds is, after all, a leap of faith, a break with the past, and thus a frightening threat to those who cannot let go of their own hatred. Because they fear the future, in these cases, terrorists seek to blow the peacemakers back into the past. We must also acknowledge that there are economic sources of this rage as well. Poverty, inequality, masses of disenfranchised young people are fertile fields for the siren call of the terrorists and their claims of advancing social justice. But deprivation cannot justify destruction, nor can inequity ever atone for murder. The killing of innocents is not a social program. Nevertheless, our resolute opposition to terrorism does not mean we can ever be indifferent to the conditions that foster it. The most recent U.N. human development report suggests the gulf is widening between the world's haves and have nots. We must work harder to treat the sources of despair before they turn into the poison of hatred. Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote that the only revolutionary is a man who has nothing to lose. We must show people they have everything to gain by embracing cooperation and renouncing violence. This is not simply an American or a Western responsibility it is the world's responsibility. Developing nations have an obligation to spread new wealth fairly, to create new opportunities, to build new open economies. Developed nations have an obligation to help developing nations stay on the path of prosperity and and to spur global economic growth. A week ago I outlined ways we can build a stronger international economy to benefit not only all nations but all citizens within them. Some people believe that terrorism's principal fault line centers on what they see as an inevitable clash of civilizations. It is an issue that deserves a lot of debate in this great hall. Specifically, many believe there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political objectives they have, even cold blooded murder. Some may have the world believe that Almighty God himself, the Merciful, grants a license to kill. But that is not our understanding of Islam. A quarter of the world's population is Muslim, from Africa to Middle East to Asia and to the United States, where Islam is one of our fastest growing faiths. There are over 1,200 mosques and Islamic centers in the United States, and the number is rapidly increasing. The 6 million Americans who worship there will tell you there is no inherent clash between Islam and America. Americans respect and honor Islam. As I talk to Muslim leaders in my country and around the world, I see again that we share the same hopes and aspirations to live in peace and security, to provide for our children, to follow the faith of our choosing, to build a better life than our parents knew, and pass on brighter possibilities to our own children. Of course, we are not identical. There are important differences that cross race and culture and religion which demand understanding and deserve respect. But every river has a crossing place. Even as we struggle here in America, like the United Nations, to reconcile all Americans to each other and to find greater unity in our increasing diversity, we will remain on a course of friendship and respect for the Muslim world. We will continue to look for common values, common interests, and common endeavors. I agree very much with the spirit expressed by these words of Mohammed "Rewards for prayers by people assembled together are twice those said at home." When it comes to terrorism, there should be no dividing line between Muslims and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Serbs and Albanians, developed societies and emerging countries. The only dividing line is between those who practice, support, or tolerate terror, and those who understand that it is murder, plain and simple. If terrorism is at the top of the American agenda and should be at the top of the world's agenda what, then, are the concrete steps we can take together to protect our common destiny? What are our common obligations? At least, I believe, they are these to give terrorists no support, no sanctuary, no financial assistance to bring pressure on states that do to act together to step up extradition and prosecution to sign the global anti terror conventions to strengthen the biological weapons and chemical conventions to enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention to promote stronger domestic laws and control the manufacture and export of explosives to raise international standards for airport security to combat the conditions that spread violence and despair. We are working to do our part. Our intelligence and law enforcement communities are tracking terrorist networks in cooperation with other governments. Some of those we believe responsible for the recent bombing of our Embassies have been brought to justice. Early this week I will ask our Congress to provide emergency funding to repair our Embassies, to improve security, to expand the worldwide fight against terrorism, to help our friends in Kenya and Tanzania with the wounds they have suffered. But no matter how much each of us does alone, our progress will be limited without our common efforts. We also will do our part to address the sources of despair and alienation through the Agency for International Development in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, in Haiti, and elsewhere. We will continue our strong support for the U.N. Development Program, the U.N. High Commissioners for Human Rights and Refugees, UNICEF, the World Bank, the World Food Program. We also recognize the critical role these agencies play and the importance of all countries, including the United States, in paying their fair share. In closing, let me urge all of us to think in new terms on terrorism, to see it not as a clash of cultures or political action by other means or a divine calling but a clash between the forces of the past and the forces of the future, between those who tear down and those who build up, between hope and fear, chaos and community. The fight will not be easy. But every nation will be strengthened in joining it, in working to give real meaning to the words of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights we signed 50 years ago. It is very, very important that we do this together. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the authors of the Universal Declaration. She said in one of her many speeches in support of the United Nations, when it was just beginning, "All agreements and all peace are built on confidence. You cannot have peace and you cannot get on with other people in the world unless you have confidence in them." It is not necessary that we solve all the world's problems to have confidence in one another. It is not necessary that we agree on all the world's issues to have confidence in one another. It is not even necessary that we understand every single difference among us to have confidence in one another. But it is necessary that we affirm our belief in the primacy of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and therefore, that together we say terror is not a way to tomorrow it is only a throwback to yesterday. And together together we can meet it and overcome its threats, its injuries, and its fears with confidence. Thank you very much. September 21, 1998 President Clinton. Thank you very much, John. I would like to thank you and the NYU School of Law, the Progressive Policy Institute, the World Policy Institute, and the New School University all of you for your support of this endeavor. And especially, we want to thank NYU Law School for hosting this. I'd like to thank Hillary and the people on her staff and others who worked with you to conceive and execute this remarkable meeting. I want to thank all the participants here on the previous panels. I have gotten a report about what you've said, and I will try not to be repetitive. I would also like to thank Prime Minister Blair, Prime Minister Prodi, President Stoyanov for being here and sharing this couple of hours with me. I want you to have the maximum amount of time to hear from them. If you listened to the people in the earlier panels today, you know kind of how this socalled Third Way movement evolved, beginning in the 1980's here, in Great Britain, and in other places. If you look around the world, there is an astonishing emergence in so many countries, and obviously in different contexts, of people who are trying to be modern and progressive. That is, they're trying to embrace change they're trying to embrace free markets they're trying to embrace engagement in the rest of the world. But they do not reject the notion that we have mutual responsibilities to each other, both within and beyond our national borders. Most of us have very strong views about the role of government. We believe that the government should support a pro growth policy but one that is consistent with advancing the environment. And that's the other thing I know you've heard before, but there are hard choices to be made in life and in politics. But not all choices posed are real. One of the things that paralyzes a country is when the rhetoric governing the national civic and political debate is composed of false choices designed to divide people and win elections but not to advance the common good once the elections were over. I think that, more than anything else, that feeling that I had many years ago back in the eighties got me into trying to rethink this whole notion of what our national political principles ought to be, what our driving platform ought to be. I think that we have found that, yes, there are some very hard choices to be made, but some of the mega choices that people tell us we have to make really are false that you can't have a growing economy by pitting working people against business people, you have to get them to work together you can't have a successful economic policy over the long run unless you improve the environment, not destroy it. It is impossible to, anymore, have a clear division between domestic and foreign policy, whether it is economic policy or security policy, and I would like to argue, also, social policy. That is, I believe we have a vested interest in the United States in advancing the welfare of ordinary citizens around the world as we pursue our economic and security interests. And of course, that brings us to the subject we came to discuss today, which is how to make the global economy work for ordinary citizens. I would just say, I'd like to make two big points. Number one is, the rest of us, no matter how good our conscience or how big out pocketbooks, cannot make the global economy work for ordinary citizens in any country if the country itself is not doing the right things. And I think it's very important to point that out. Second, all the countries in the world trying to do the right things won't make sense unless we recognize that we have responsibilities, collective responsibilities that go beyond our borders, and I would just like to mention a couple of them. First of all, we have to create a trading system for the 21st century that actually works to benefit ordinary people in countries throughout the globe. That's what all this labor and environmental conditions and letting all the interest groups be a part of the trade negotiations all of that's just sort of shorthand for saying, "Look, we've got to figure out some way that if wealth increases everywhere, real people get the benefit of it, and it's fairly spread, and people that work hard are rewarded for it." Second, I think we simply have to realize that while the IMF and the World Bank and these international institutions have proved remarkably flexible and expandable, if you will, over the last 50 years, we are living in a world that is really quite different now, with these global financial markets and the increasing integration of the economy. And while, again I say, in the absence of good domestic policies, there is nothing a global system can do to protect people from themselves and their own mismanagement, the world financial system today does not guard against that boom bust cycle that all of our national economic policies guard against, that it does not reflect the lessons that we learned in the aftermath of the Great Depression of 1929 nationally it does not reflect those lessons on an international scale. And I believe that the most urgent thing we can do is to find a way to keep capital flowing freely so that the market system works around the world, but do it in a way that prevents these catastrophic developments we've seen in some countries and also may prevent an overindulgence of giddiness in some places, where too much money flows in in the beginning without any sort of proper risk premium at all on it. We have to recognize that there's going to be a global financial system, and we have to think about how we can deal with it in the way each of us deal nationally to avoid depression and to moderate boom bust cycles. Now, in the short run, I think there are a lot of other things we have to do Europe, the United States, Japan adopting aggressive growth strategies working through some of the bad debts in Asian countries dealing with Russia, especially preventing the contagion from going to Latin America, especially to Brazil. There are lots of other things we can do. Just one point, finally, I do believe that it is unavoidable that trauma will come to some of the countries in the world through the workout they have to go through. And therefore, I believe that the developed countries, either directly through the G 8 or indirectly through the World Bank, should do much, much, much more to build social safety nets in countries that we want to be free market democracies, so that people who through no fault of their own find themselves destitute have a chance to reconstruct their lives and live in dignity in the meantime. I think that is quite important that Jim Wolfensohn has committed to do that, and I think the rest of us should, as well. So in summary, I'm grateful that the Third Way seems to be taking hold around the world. I think if you look at the record of the people on either side of me, the evidence is that the policies work for ordinary citizens and our countries. I think the challenges ahead of us are very, very profound. But I think if we meet them we will find that this whole approach will work in a global sense in the same way it's worked nationally in the nations here represented and in many others around the world. Thank you very much. At this point, Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Romano Prodi of Italy, and President Petar Stoyanov of Bulgaria made brief remarks. Philosophy of Government President Clinton. I would like to start the conversation by asking you to think about your jobs, first from a domestic point of view, just totally within your country, and then we'll move to our global responsibilities. Let's go back to what Prime Minister Blair said. Basically, the whole idea of this Third Way is that we believe in activist government, but highly disciplined. On the economic front, we want to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives, the empowerment notion. On the social front, we want to provide rights to people, but they must assume certain duties. Philosophically, we support a concept of community in which everyone plays a role. Now, arguably, that philosophy has led, in every one of the countries here present, to some very impressive gains in economic policy, in crime policy, in welfare policy, and all of that. But I would like to ask you instead to talk about what the what is the hardest domestic problem you face? What do you have to deal with that the this so called Third Way philosophy we've developed either doesn't give you the answer to, or at least you haven't worked through it yet? And how would you analyze what still needs to be done? I think it's very important that we understand that we not stand up here and pretend that we have found a sort of magic wand to make all the world's problems go away, but instead we've found a working plan that sensible and compassionate people can ally themselves with and be a part of. But I think it's important that we, frankly, acknowledge what out there still needs to be done, what seems to be beyond the reach of at least what we're doing now. Tony, want to go first? At this point, the discussion proceeded. President Clinton. Former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo used to say, people campaign in poetry, but they must govern in prose. Laughter Prime Minister Blair. Yes, we're on the prose part. Laughter President Clinton. That's one part of what you said. It's also true, as I used to say, that I never met anyone who did not support change in general everybody's for it in general hardly anyone is for it in particular. And I think that's another problem we face. But I agree with that. I'd like to follow up, but I'd like to go Romano, what's your biggest domestic challenge? Prime Minister Prodi. My prose, my prose. Laughter My problem is that President Clinton. Italians never have to speak in prose. Laughter The discussion continued. President Clinton. I might say one of the interesting things to me as an American about this consultative process in European governments is the extent to which it really does seem to work very well when practiced in good faith. I was just in Ireland, and Ireland has had the fastest growing growth rate in Europe, I think, for the last several years. Of course, it was starting from a lower base. But they have an intensive system like the one you describe. And I have been particularly interested in the practice in The Netherlands, and they have sort of a Third Way government. I wish that Prime Minister Wim Kok were here, but he couldn't come. But they actually have an unemployment rate more or less comparable to what to Great Britain and the United States, and a more certainly a more generous social safety net than we do, with a very, very high percentage of part time workers showing a higher level of flexibility in the work force than virtually any country with which I'm familiar. So I think there is something to be said for this. One of the things that I think will be interesting is to see whether or not this whole model can produce both a good macroeconomic policy, which gives you growth, and lower unemployment in a way that still saves enough of a safety net for people to believe they're in a just society. I mean, it's a very tough thing. In France France has had significant growth in several years and still not lowered the unemployment rate. So this, I think, is a big challenge. But I think the point you made is very good. What's your biggest domestic problem? The discussion continued. Problem Solving in Advance President Clinton. I would like to make a brief comment and then go into the second question, and then after we all do that, then maybe Dean Sexton will come up, and we'll go through the questions. I think one big problem that prosperous countries have is, even if you have the right sort of theory of government, even if you have a strong majority support, is dealing with the huge problems that won't have their major impact until a good time down the road. For example, almost all developed economies are going to have a serious intergenerational problem when all the so called baby boomers retire. And we are hoping that sometime early next year, that we'll be able to get our big national consensus in America to reform Social Security system, the retirement system, and our Medicare system, our medical program for elderly people, in a way that will meet the social objectives the program has met, in Social Security's case, for the last 60 years, and in the case of Medicare, for the last 30 plus years. And we know if we start now, we can make minor changes that will have huge impacts. If we wait until it's a major crisis, then we'll either have to raise taxes and lower the standard of living of working people and their children to take care of the elderly, or we'll have to lower the standard of living of the elderly to protect the working people and their children. So clearly this is something that it's really worth beginning now on, because by doing modest amounts now, you can avoid those dire consequences. And to be fair, I think the whole success of our kind of politics consists in our being able to hold people together, to give people a sense that there really is a genuine sense of community out there. Ironically, in Japan, they have just the reverse problem everybody is so panicked about it because their society is even older than Great Britain and the United States and Italy that they're almost oversaving, and it's hard to get growth going there. But for us, the other problem is the bigger one. Now, having said that, I'd like to segue into the international arena. It seems to me that all of us who are internationalists are pretty good at solving problems when they're hitting us in the face, but not very good in convincing our parliaments to give us the investment to build progress over a long period of time that will avoid those problems in the first place. For example, we all got together and stopped the war in Bosnia after too many people have died and had been on television for too long, and there was too much blood in the streets. And it was quite expensive, but we're all glad we did it. Now, for a pittance of what that cost, we could all send him a check, and we'd never have a problem like that in his country. I mean, that's just one example. Laughter I don't mean just give the money, I mean investment. You know, I don't mean you know what I mean. But this is a big problem. Hillary and I were in Africa a few months ago in a little village in Uganda, looking at all these microcredit loans that have gone to women in this small African village and watching them put together the infrastructure of a civil society. Now, the United States funded, with our aid programs, 2 million such loans last year. In a world with 6 billion people, with whom several billion are quite poor, we could fund for a modest amount of money 100 million such loans a year and create the core of a civil society in many places where we would never have to worry about terrorism, where we would never have to worry about huge public health outbreaks, where we'd never have to worry about these massive environmental problems. So I put that out because I do believe that somehow, the investment systems of the global economy, through the World Bank, the IMF, and other things, are not nor are the aid systems of various countries or in the aggregate, the EU adequate to deal with what I think is the plain self interest of the developed world in helping prove this global system will work for ordinary people, not because it's the morally right thing to do it is the morally right thing to do but because it would be good for ordinary Americans 10 years from now not to have to worry about other Bosnias, not to have to worry about the Ebola virus going crazy, not have to worry about the horrible problems of global warming and malaria reaching higher and higher climates. All these things, these are things that require disciplined commitments over a lifetime. Maybe I've had it on my mind because I've been at the U.N. today, but if you think about what we spend on that as compared to what we happily spend to solve a problem I mean, for example, if God forbid things really went bad in Albania and Kosovo at the same time, and you called me on the phone and rang the bell, you know, we would all show up. Whatever you tell me to do there, I'm going to try to help you, no matter how much it costs, right? But for a pittance, over a period of years, we could maybe move so many more people toward the future we seek. And that goes back to the point Tony made. How do you have a genuinely internationalist outlook that resonates with the people that we have to represent, the kind of people that are out there on the street waving to us when we came in today, people who have worked for very modest salaries, and the kind of people that keep NYU Law School going how do we make the argument that some of the money they give us in taxes every year should be invested in the common future of humankind? The discussion continued. Human Rights Issues President Clinton. Well, I think it does limit it, but I think that the answer to that is to keep pushing for more democracy and for more gender equality and more concern for all children, especially young girls. A lot of the most perverse manifestation of gender inequality that I have learned from Hillary's experiences has to do with the treatment of young girls and whether they get schooling and other kinds of things that are regularly offered to young boys in some developing societies. So I think that's very important. But if you go back to your question, we're just celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, something I talked about over at the U.N. today. Well, those human rights are not universal, but they're more widely embraced than ever before. I think we should push all these things simultaneously. I don't think you can possibly say, "Well, we won't do this until we've got these other nine things done." If we took that approach toward any endeavor in life, no business would ever be started, no marriage would ever be undertaken, no human endeavor would ever be undertaken. I do think the accurate part of Professor Dworkin's implication is that if there is no prospect of achieving any advances on these fronts, then it's going to be hard to have a truly democratic market society. I do believe that. But I think that we just have to face the fact that some cultures are going to be different from others, and if they have democratic governments, we should keep pushing them on these other fronts. That's my view, anyway. The discussion continued. President Clinton. At the risk of getting myself in trouble, let me give a very specific example of Professor Dworkin asked about women's rights. I think there is a very great difference in the question of what our policy should be, let's say, toward the Taliban if they take Muslim women who are doctors and say, "You can't practice medicine anymore," in ways that really put the health system of the country at risk, because it violates their religious convictions and how should we approach them, and how should we approach a country, let's say, in Africa or Latin America, which historically has had gross disparities in the education rates of young girls and young boys. I would argue that if you go into those countries and you start putting money into education, you start putting money into education technology, and you start putting money into these villages and microenterprise loans for village women, giving them power, independent power to the economy, that you will get the objective you want by making sure women get treated more equally with men, and their children are much more likely to be treated more equally. So I think you have to look at it on the facts. Whereas, with another kind of society you might say, "Well, we need to approach a different strategy," But to go back to what Mr. Prodi said, 9 times out of 10 or more, it doesn't make any sense to isolate them. It's still better to try to find some way to engage these countries and work with them if they're willing to deal with us on peaceful and honorable terms. Education Referring to the First Lady's description of the government, the economy, and society as three legs of a stool, moderator John Sexton, dean, New York University School of Law, read a question concerning the role and goals of education, and the discussion continued. President Clinton. I think the issue in education I think the first question was, should it primarily teach good citizenship. I agree with Tony you can't be a good citizen if you can't function. I think what you want is an education system that teaches knowledge, citizenship, and learning skills. You basically have to teach people how to keep learning for a lifetime. And I think that every country is different, but you have to disaggregate what the challenges are. For example, if the system itself is of good quality but insufficiently accessed, or if there is no system, then what you have to do is just fix something that people can access. If the system is all there, but encrusted to some extent and not performing, then you have to go after the system, and that's much harder. That's what Tony was saying. In our country, we have now dramatically increased access to higher education. Really, if you look at all the tax benefits, the scholarships, and the work study programs and all this, there's almost no reason that anybody in America who can otherwise qualify shouldn't go to college now. We need to do the same sort of thing, I think, with preschool programs, starting with very young children. We need to build that infrastructure out there. Now, in the schools, we need to do better, and part of it is influence. We need more good physical facilities. We need more teachers in the early grades. We need more teachers in the underserved areas. But a lot of it is are quality things. We need more competition. That's why I'm for the charter school movements and public school choice. We need more standards and accountability. That's why I'm for the master teacher movement and for we need an end to social promotion. But if you do that in the inner city schools and you have the kind of standards, as Tony is talking about, and you actually hold people, schools, teachers, and students, accountable for student performance, then I would argue, ethically as well as educationally, we are obliged to do what has been done in Chicago and give every child who is not performing well the chance to go to summer school and the chance to be in an after school program. Chicago now has the summer school in Chicago is now the sixth biggest school district in America the summer school and it's a great thing. And guess what happened to juvenile crime? So I just would point that out. I think that each society needs an analysis of what it takes to take this three legged school up some of it is going to be more, some of it is going to be better. And it's very important not to confuse more with better in either direction, because better won't make more, but neither will more make better. By and large, most of us need to be doing some mix of both. Mr. Sexton. Mr. President, I would be wrong to leave the topic of education without noting something narrowly self interested, but important to many of the students, many of the students in this room. President Clinton. It's the American way do it. Laughter Mr. Sexton thanked President Clinton for his efforts to eliminate the taxability of loan repayment assistance for law school tuition for former students who choose to forgo higher pay to enter public service. President Clinton. I think that's very important. If that were the definition of narrow selfinterest that most citizens embraced, this would be a better country today. That's great. Laughter The discussion continued. Environmental Issues President Clinton. First of all, let me go back to the basic question as I remember the basic question was Will environmental security be like a military security issue in the 21st century? The answer is, I think it's very likely that it will be. And the more irresponsible we are for a longer period of time, the more likely that is to happen. I think it's useful in looking at environmental problems to break them down into two categories, although there's always some overlap. One is, there is one truly global environmental problem, and that's climate change, because the climate of the Earth is changing in ways that already is disrupting life throughout the Earth. I mentioned one example earlier. You have mosquitoes at higher and higher levels now giving people malaria who never got it before. And there's no resistance to it so they're getting sicker, and they're getting on airplanes and flying. And now they're bumping into people at airports, and there's now a phenomenon called airport malaria in the world, where technology and global warming are bumping into each other. That's a global problem. You can see it in weather, in disease, and a little bit in air pollution. Then there are national problems which have global impacts because they're so big, and they prevent countries from becoming what they ought to air pollution, water pollution, soil erosion, food supply pollution, those kinds of things. Then there's a huge problem we've got that's sort of in the middle. It's partly the result of global warming and partly the results of national pollution, and that is the degradation of the oceans, which is a breathtaking environmental problem that, if unaddressed, we will pay a huge price for. Now, from my point of view, there are two big issues here. One is and I agree with Tony I think Kyoto is a big step forward. So I go to my Congress that's supposed to be Republican, free market oriented, and I say, "Okay, guys, no regulations and no taxes, tax cuts and increases for research and development." And they say, "It's a Communist plot," and they hold hearings laughter about how, you know, this is just some deep, dark conspiracy to undermine the strength of the United States. Now, wait a minute. You're laughing about this, but actually behind this, as opposed to some other things, there is the core of an idea they have. Laughter This idea, widely shared in the developing world and held onto in America more than any other developed country, is it goes right against what Tony said is this is a very serious comment. We're having fun, but this is a serious conversation. Their idea is that there is an inevitable iron connection between the production of greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuel and economic growth, and if you reduce greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere, there is no way on Earth that you will not reduce economic growth. There's all this business about technology and conservation and it's all a big plot designed to bring down the growth machine of America. Now, you laugh we've had hearings on it. We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars complying with subpoena requests and document requests and sending witnesses up to the Hill to basically say, "This is not a conspiracy to destroy the future of America." But the serious idea here is, if you want something done about climate change, you must prevail in every developing country with evidence evidence that there is no longer an iron connection between the burning of fossil fuels and economic growth. The second point I want to make goes to the second question they asked, about how come we spend so little on foreign aid on the poor now? Because they don't have any votes in our country and because we don't think enough about it. I mean, every year my foreign aid budget is cut back. But one thing we can do is to participate jointly with other countries in environmental projects in developing countries in ways that help reduce climate global warming and create lots of jobs in areas where there are lots of poor people. I believe if there is a serious global effort to deal with these environmental challenges, we would be investing all over the world the way the United States did, for example, in a massive reforestation project in Haiti. And when you do that kind of work a lot of this work is very basic work that needs to be done you can create huge numbers of jobs for poor people who would otherwise not have them. So I would say to all of you, I think this is a big opportunity I tried to say some provocative things to make you laugh so you'd listen, because it's late in the day and you're all tired. But I'm telling you, the biggest environmental the obstacle to our having responsible environmental policy in the whole world, including in the United States, is the belief of too many policymakers in 1998 that there is still an iron law between how much junk you put in the atmosphere and how much your economy grows. And until we break that in the minds of decisionmakers, we will not do what we should do on the climate change challenge. And until we do it, we are playing Russian roulette with our children's future and running an increased risk that this will be the national security issue of the 21st century. The discussion continued. Closing Remarks President Clinton. John, I would like to thank you, the law school, and NYU and the other sponsors of the event. Again, let me thank all of you who participated. And I want to thank Hillary and Sid Blumenthal and the others who conceived of this, and Mr. Blair's folks in Great Britain who worked so closely with us on this. I would like to close with ask for just a brief reprise of two things we talked about. One is, can this whole Third Way approach be applied successfully to long term problems that have big consequences before they have them, i.e., in American terms, Social Security, Medicare, climate change. Two is, can we not only develop a global consciousness and global policies within our respective country but actually band together to deal with this present global financial challenge in a way that gives us a trading system, a labor rights system, an environmental system, and a financial system that, in effect, recreates what works on the national level globally, that in effect takes these great 50 yearold institutions and does whatever has to be done to make sure that they see us through for the next 50 years. Will the ideas that we've developed and the approach that we have developed work in those two great areas of challenge? Because if they do work in those two great areas of challenge, then I think that the 21st century is in very good hands. Thank you very much. September 19, 1998 Thank you very much. Thank you. You know, Maxine Waters would be so much more effective as the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus if she weren't so shy and retiring laughter so reluctant to express her opinion. Laughter Thank you, my friends, for years of friendship. Thank you for the work we began back in 1991. To the chair of the dinner, Congressman Clyburn, and the chair of the Foundation, Congresswoman Clayton and congratulations on your recent outstanding primary victory to the dean of this caucus and a great fighter for the American way, John Conyers, thank you. To two great lions of the century we are about to end, Rosa Parks and Dr. Dorothy Height to three great friends of mine who have left or are now leaving the Congress, Ron Dellums, Floyd Flake, and Louis Stokes, I echo everything the Vice President said about you. And to the family of Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr., I thank you for giving the awards to Secretary Herman and Secretary Slater, to Frank Raines and Congressman Rush and the other winners who have given so much to our country. I thank the members of our administration who are here tonight Attorney General Reno, Secretary Cuomo, SBA Administrator Alvarez. To the marvelous White House staff members who are here Minyon Moore, Goody Marshall, Maria Echaveste, Bob Nash, Janis Kearney, Ben Johnson, Al Maldon, Tracey Thornton, Cheryl Mills, Judith Winston, Betty Currie, Janet Murguia, and goodness knows who else is here they hate to miss this dinner. To all the members of the administration who are here, along with all the members of the caucus, I thank you. After the speeches which have been given, the outstanding remarks of the Vice President and let me say one thing about him. I sometimes regret that one of the burdens of being Vice President is having to brag on the President and never getting to brag on himself. Many things will be said, good and perhaps some not so good, about this administration. One thing that will never be in question is that in the history of our Republic no person has ever held the office of Vice President who had more influence on more decisions and did more good in more areas for more people in this country than Vice President Al Gore. I have a speech I want to give, but first I'd like to say something from the heart. I want to thank you for standing up for America with me. I want to thank you for standing up for me and understanding the true meaning of repentance and atonement. I want to thank you for standing up consistently for people over politics, for progress over partisanship, for principle over power, for unity over division. I want to thank you for standing up, beyond race, for the very best in America. I am very, very grateful. I am grateful for what the Congressional Black Caucus has done for the past 28 years to expand and enhance the promise of America and to lead our country toward a single shining ideal, perhaps captured best in that wonderful phrase from John Lewis' autobiography, "the beloved community," one that dwells not on difference but instead gains strength from expanding diversity, one rooted in humane laws and generous spirits, in which all children's talents are matched by their opportunities, in which all Americans join hands and, in John's words, "courageously walk with the wind." God knows your journey has not been easy. The winds have often blown bitter and cold. But always this caucus has walked with the wind. Today, because of the long road you have walked, the house we call America is safer and stronger than ever. As I think back on what we have done together in the last 5 1 2 years, I think of these things. We cut taxes for 15 million hard working families through the earned income tax credit, and when the Republicans tried to slash it, we said no. We increased the minimum wage to give 10 million Americans a well deserved raise. And now we're trying to increase it again in a way that would affect 12 million of our fellow citizens, to ensure that people who work full time can raise their children out of poverty and that all people share in the bounty of our present prosperity. Together we fought for and won the biggest increase in children's health care in more than three decades. It can add insurance health insurance to 5 million children in working families across this country. We expanded the Head Start program to help our children get off on the right foot, and we're going to expand it some more. We made it possible for nearly 2 million more women and infants to get the nutritional care they need. With the Family and Medical Leave Act, we gave millions of people the chance to take time off from work to care for an ailing parent or bond with a newborn child. We have opened the doors of higher education with the HOPE scholarship, with more Pell grants, with tax credits for all higher education, with the deductibility of student loans. We have done that for every single qualified American who's willing to work for it. Money can no longer be considered an insurmountable obstacle. And you did that. You should be very, very proud. Together with the Vice President's leadership, we created more than 100 empowerment zones and enterprise communities, established community development banks, doubled small business loans to minorities and tripled them to women. When people wanted to scrap affirmative action we said, "Mend it. Don't end it," because we believe the best investment in America makes us all stronger. Together we shaped and passed the historic crime bill, overcoming immense pressure, with the Brady bill, the assault weapons ban, more police on our streets and, yes, more prevention for our children to keep them out of trouble in the first place. Now, look what you have done nearly 17 million jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest African American and Hispanic unemployment rates in a generation, the lowest African American poverty rate since statistics have been kept, the fastest real wage growth in 20 years, a record number of new small businesses every year, violent crime down 6 years in a row, and the lowest crime rate in 25 years. None of this could have happened without the leadership, the friendship, the ideas of the Congressional Black Caucus. And I thank the Vice President for his litany of our African American appointments and for pointing out in a phrase I will steal the first chance I get that we are not successful in spite of our diversity we are successful because of it. We can never say that enough. That is the truth, and America is better because all Americans can feel a part of this administration. Now, here's the real question What are we to do with this treasured moment of prosperity and progress? What are we do to with our resources? What are we to do with the self confidence it has generated in America? Some people think that now is the time to kick back and relax. Others seem to think they can play games with our future with some of the proposals now before the Congress. I say we can look back a long way to the book of Genesis to see what we should do. Remember Joseph? What did he do in a time of plenty? He did not rest. When people thought he was too farsighted and too burdensome, he instructed them to stockpile rich bounties of grain like sand to the sea. He knew the times of plenty had to be the busiest, the most productive, the most determined times of all. Wisdom and history teaches us that in times of prosperity we need to be more visionary, more vigorous, more determined to deal with the long term challenges before us, and that we will only pay a price if we indulge ourselves in idleness or distractions. I say we cannot rest until we save Social Security for the 21st century. Remember what we are facing today. In 1993 it was projected that the deficit would be about 300 billion and rising. In just a few days, a little more than a week, we'll have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years. Ninety two percent ninetytwo percent of the gap was closed by the votes of members of this caucus and our party without any help. Then we did have a bipartisan balanced budget bill that had, thanks to your efforts, the health care and education initiatives I mentioned. So now we are going to have a surplus because of the hard work and productivity of the American people. Some say, "It's just a few weeks before the election we ought to have a tax cut." I'm not against tax cuts. This year, in the balanced budget bill, the American people will get, most of them, a 500 tax credit for every child at home the HOPE scholarship and other credits for college education the right to withdraw from an IRA without penalty for education, for health care, for buying a firsttime home. That's a good thing. But they're paid for in the balanced budget. And in my budget there are more tax cuts. There are tax cuts for education, to build and repair old schools tax cuts to help families with the cost of child care tax cuts to help small businesses take out pensions for their employees who don't have them today. But every one of them is paid for in the balanced budget. By the time the baby boomers like me and I'm the oldest of them that's hard to say. Laughter By the time we retire, all of us in the baby boom generation, 18 years of us, there will only be about two people working for every one person drawing Social Security if the predictions are right. Now, we have three choices. Number one, we can do nothing and wait until the crash comes, because the present system is not sustainable, and then we can simply cut the living standards of our seniors. For people like me it will be fine I'll have a good pension. But don't forget, half the people in this country over 65 today are out of poverty because of Social Security. Or we can wait until that day comes, and we can say, "We can't do that to our parents and grandparents, so we can just simply raise the taxes a lot on the working families of this country to maintain the system just exactly as it is." And in so doing, people like me will have to face the prospect that we've lowered the standard of living of our children and our children's ability to raise our grandchildren. Or we can say, "If we start now with a sensible, modest proposal, we can save Social Security and save the future for our children and grandchildren." I don't think it's even close, and I don't think you do either. But that means we can't rest. We have to work. We can't rest until all the children in all the communities have a world class education. We have a budget before the Congress to hire 100,000 more teachers to take those class sizes in the early grades down to 18 to rebuild or modernize 5,000 schools to hook all the classrooms in the poorest schools, too, up to the Internet by the year 2000 to reward the school districts that are trying to reform and help kids, like Chicago, where there are so many kids in summer school it's the sixth biggest school district in America and over 40,000 kids get three square meals a day there to hire 35,000 more teachers by paying their way through college and saying you can pay your student loan off if you'll go into the inner city or into another underserved area and teach our kids who need it by passing Congressman Fattah's High Hopes proposal so that we can have the ability to mentor kids in junior high school and tell them, "If you'll stay out of trouble, stay in school, learn your lessons, we will tell you right now you will be able to go on to college, and here's how much money you will get to make sure it gets done." That's what we have to do. We cannot rest. We have work to do. We can't rest until we pass the Patients' Bill of Rights. Now, that sounds like a high flown term. Here's what it means. It means that with 160 million Americans in managed care systems, we still don't think an accountant ought to be making a decision a doctor should make. We believe if somebody walks out of this dinner tonight and God forbid is in a car accident, they ought to be able to go to the nearest emergency room, not one 5 or 6 miles away because it happens to be covered by the plan. We believe if somebody needs a specialist and their doctor says they need a specialist, they ought to be able to get a specialist and not be told no. We believe if a woman is 6 months pregnant and her insurance plan changes carriers, her employer, they ought not to be able to tell her to get a different obstetrician until after the baby is born. That's what we believe. And we believe the other party's bill is wrong for America, because it doesn't guarantee any of these rights. It enables people to invade the privacy of your records even more, and it leaves 100 million Americans out. We cannot rest. We have work to do. We cannot rest while HIV and AIDS is escalating in the African American community. Secretary Shalala just announced the first installment of a comprehensive prevention, education, and care plan in the African American community. Working with Maxine Waters, Lou Stokes, and others in the CBC, we can and we must do more. But we're only 2 weeks away from this budget year, and Congress has still not passed the health budget. We cannot rest. We have work to do. We cannot rest until we eliminate the unacceptable disparities in health that racial and ethnic minorities experience in America today. We are not one nation when it comes to infant mortality, heart disease, and prostate cancer for African Americans. It is nearly double the rate for white Americans. There are other problems that Hispanics and Asians and other minorities have. That is why I challenged the Nation to eliminate these disparities by 2010, and asked Congress to pass 400 million to achieve this goal. Almost time for the new budget year, it still hasn't passed yet. We cannot rest. We have work to do. Let me say this. The unemployment rate, the poverty rates, all those rates you hear about the African American population, they're true. But they disguise a fact that is unacceptable There are still disparities. We cannot rest until every community, every neighborhood, every block, every family has the chance to reap the benefits of our economic growth. That is why we have to fund the empowerment initiatives that the Vice President and Secretary Cuomo have worked so hard for, to provide housing assistance for those leaving welfare and entering work, to expand funding for the community development banks, to step up enforcement of fair housing laws, to revitalize more urban brownfield areas, and to restore summer jobs for our young people. We're less than 2 weeks away from a new budget year, and that has not been passed yet. We cannot rest. We have work to do. We cannot rest while any communities are thoroughly segregated by income or by race. The Federal Government should lead the way in word and deed. I have directed Secretary Cuomo to seek a major legislative overhaul in the admission policy for public housing, to deconcentrate poverty, mix incomes, and thereby mix racial balances for Americans. Tonight I ask all of you to send a clear message to Congress with me Don't send me a public housing bill that doesn't include our admission reforms, reforms that will make public housing a model of one America in the 21st century. And I might add, we're less than 2 weeks away from a new budget year, and I still don't have the increase I asked for in the budget of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We cannot rest. We have work to do. And let me say one or two more words about this census. We can't rest until we have a fair one. Listen to this In 1990 about 4 1 2 percent of African Americans were not counted. In Los Angeles County alone, nearly 40,000 African American children were left out. This has enormous consequences for how we distribute the bounty of America, for how we draw our political distinctions, for the policies that we follow. This is a fundamental issue. This is a civil rights issue. Why? Why would the Republican leadership in Congress refuse methods of counting that even listen to this that even Republican experts say is the best way to count all Americans. We must count every American for one simple reason Every American counts. We cannot rest. We have work to do on this census issue. We cannot rest until we act as leaders to contain the global financial and economic crisis that grips Russia and Asia. Why? Because a third of our own economic growth in these last years has come from our trade with other nations. We have to try to build an adequate trade and financial system for a new century that takes into legitimate account the interests of working people, the interest of the environment, the interest all countries have in avoiding depressions and unusual boom and bust cycles. Why? Because it is in our interest in a world growing ever smaller to keep people free and give them a chance to work their way to prosperity, and because we can't be an island of prosperity in a sea of failure, as Alan Greenspan said so eloquently the other day. That means we've got to help the International Monetary Fund put out these economic fires across the world by paying our fair dues. It's in our interest to help emerging countries in Africa, in Latin America, in Asia. Hillary and I saw the African renaissance with many of you this past spring, a trip that changed me forever. Across the continent, I saw hope rising, business growing, democracy gaining strength. Yes, I saw profound, continuing problems and enormous challenges, but I saw in the bright eyes of children and the stern resolve of their parents the potential of a wonderful future. We have to work together to see that Africa's children, like America's, have a democratic, peaceful, prosperous future to expand trade and partnership by passing our Africa trade bill to deal effectively with the violent conflicts that continue to plague Africa today and threaten its future to ensure that Africa's hospitality is not used to perpetuate acts of terrorism, as it was so terribly in the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. I have asked Dr. David Satcher, our Surgeon General, to go to east Africa this month with a team of medical experts to do what they can to help people who are still ailing there. There is still no action in Congress, after all these months, on the Africa trade bill or on the International Monetary Fund. But world events are not waiting for Congress. My friends, if you believe we have responsibilities in the world and you believe ultimately those responsibilities affect the welfare of your families, your children, and the future of this country, I say we cannot rest. We have work to do. We cannot rest until we solve the oldest, most stubborn, most painful challenge of our Nation, the continuing challenge of race. Yesterday, for the final time, I met with my Advisory Board on Race and received their report. I am proud of their work, the guidance they have given us for policy, for dialog, for specific practices in every community in this country. But we know we've only just begun a work that will take a lifetime, only just begun to find ways finally to lift the burden of race and redeem the full promise of America. You know, our Founders knew we weren't perfect, but they always strived for perfect ideals. They built us a country based on a Constitution that was literally made for reconciliation, for the honorable and principled resolution of differences, rooted in the simple proposition that God created us all equal. Therefore, the implicit mandate of the Constitution is that each of us should respect and treat our neighbors as we, ourselves, would like to be treated. It is still our most sure guidepost today. We can build an America where discrimination is something you have to look in the history books to find. But we've still got work to do. If it takes until my last day on this Earth, I owe it to you, to the American people who have been so good to me for so long, to keep working on guiding our people across all the great divides into that one beloved community. My friends, this is not a time to rest. It's a time to work. Just as God is not finished with any of us yet, we must not be finished with God's work. We must not be finished with seeking peace or justice or freedom, equality, human dignity, and reconciliation. "Foxes have holes birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has no place to rest his head." There is never going to be an end to this work. And the present moment of promise imposes upon all of us a special responsibility. So let there be no end to your faith, your energy, your courage, and your commitment. And let me say one other thing. You and I need some help. And this November we'll be given a chance to get it. We have worked hard to make America a better place, and it is. We have worked hard to empower our people, and we have. But now they must use that power to be heard, to say what we shall do and where we shall go. This is a moment of decision for us. Will it be progress or partisanship, people or politics, principle or power? The Scripture says that we should mount up with wings as eagles we should run and not grow tired we should walk and not faint. We should not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart. For all the many things I am grateful to the Black Caucus for, the most important thing is that I know you have never lost heart and that in your heart there is a longing for the best, not just for African Americans but for all Americans. We can help them get there, and they can lead us home. Thank you, and God bless you all. Thank you. September 17, 1998 Thank you very much. Maybe I ought to read Stan's talking points again. Laughter The only thing I didn't like about what he said was all that bragging he did on Bruce Lindsey. I'll have to live with that for the next year or two. Laughter Let me say, first of all, I'm delighted to be back here in this magnificent home with a person who has been a true friend of mine and Hillary's. I want to thank Mayor Qualls and Chris Gorman for being here and for running for Congress at a time when public service is not the easiest it's ever been. And I want to thank Lieutenant Governor Steve Henry he's been a great friend of mine for coming over from Kentucky. And David Leland, thank you Tim Burke, thank you. And I want to thank Stan and Dick Lawrence for cochairing this dinner this lunch. I don't know if I'm going to be able to give a speech. It's not that I'm so emotionally choked up, but I never eat this much for lunch, and I'm actually sort of sleepy. Laughter Let me say, I was deeply moved by what you said, but what I would like for you to think about, all of you, in terms of what Stan said, is not me. Hillary and I, we're doing fine. We're working on what we need to be working on, and we're doing fine. What I'm concerned about is the rest of the people that live in this country, and one more time having Washington obsessed with itself instead of America. Harry Truman once made that famous statement "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." So I think about that every morning, and go to the kitchen. Laughter But all over the country there is a country out there. This is a democracy. We're all hired hands. We showed up because we pledged to help the rest of the country and to do things the rest of the country needs. And I'm here today to help these people running for Congress, because the choice really is between partisanship and progress, between people and old fashioned politics or maybe even newfangled politics. I think that's what I would like for you to focus on. By coming here today, you have helped these two candidates, and others that we're trying to advance, get their message out. And if America understands we're 2 weeks away. When I gave the State of the Union Address, I said and I'd like to say again, because it's an important lesson I try to remind myself of every day when things are going well for a country, for a business, for a family, for a career, the temptation is to relax and say, "Gosh, I've been working hard. I've worked through all these tough times, and I think I'll just sort of sit in the sun for a while." For politicians, it's tempting to say, "I think I'll do nothing, because I'll get reelected because things are going well." Do you know what we talked about around our table today? We talked about the financial crisis in Asia. We talked about what was going on in Russia. We talked about whether it could spread to Latin America. We talked about the challenges of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. We talked about how Americans are going to go on in an international environment that has a lot of big challenges out there. What's that got to do with these races for Congress? The American people, whether they know it or not, are going to be making a decision about whether they really want to ratify here we are 2 weeks before a new budget year. There is no budget resolution in the Congress that is, that says what our budget is going to be. One of the 13 appropriations bills has passed. They've killed the tobacco legislation and campaign finance reform. And last night the Senate Republican leader literally shut the Senate down for 4 hours to keep them from casting a vote on the Patients' Bill of Rights, because they knew if they voted for the bill that the House passed, which does nothing, it would be harmful and if they voted against our bill, it would really be harmful. So they started they just decided to kill it by stealth. They just literally had to shut the Senate down to keep from doing the people's business. So the choice before us is whether the American people will embrace a strategy of politics or a strategy of people, a strategy of partisanship or a strategy of progress whether they will reward a strategy of not doing anything or embrace our agenda. You know, I know it's popular to talk about a tax cut in an election year. We've got no business cutting taxes. We had a deficit for 29 years. We have no business cutting taxes until we save the Social Security system, because otherwise the baby boomers are going to applause . I'm not against tax cuts mine are paid for. We have tax cuts for child care, for education, and for the environment in this budget, but they're all paid for. But to spend this surplus that won't even materialize for 2 weeks, after 29 years without one you know, I'd just kind of like to watch the ink turn from red to black and see it dry laughter before we start shoveling it out the door again. And I think that's very important. It's important to our present economic health in a world of uncertainty. And it's important to our responsibilities long term. I've been waiting since January for the Congress to fund America's portion of the International Monetary Fund. That's the fund that enables us to stabilize our trading partners and friends around the world so they can keep buying our products. Cincinnati, I think, is doing pretty well, from the look of things. But in the high plains of America, the farmers are having the worst year they've had in decades. And one big reason is, nobody in Asia can buy our farm products because they don't have any money. So that's two big issues Are we going to save Social Security first or play politics? Are we going to meet our international responsibilities that help us to grow economically, or are we just going to make speeches about it? If you look at the issues here at home the Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky rode in with Roxanne and Chris and me, and he's a doctor. A lot of you know that. We got to talking about this health care bill of rights. This is a very specific bill. This basically says there's 160 million Americans in managed care plans and other Americans in other kinds of plans, and without regard to their health care plan, if they get in a car accident, they ought to be able to go the closest emergency room, not one that's 10 miles down the road that happens to be covered in the plan. If they need a specialist, they ought to be able to get one they shouldn't be able to be told by a business organization that a general surgeon will do as well or a general practitioner should do as well, particularly if the doctor is begging them to go to a specialist in the first place. If their employer changes health plans at some point during the year and the employee or someone in their family is pregnant, they ought not to have to change their obstetrician until the baby is born. If somebody in the family has got cancer, is getting chemotherapy, they ought not to have to stop in the middle of the treatment and go get another doctor. We believe medical records ought to be private. They want to make them more subject to invasion by other people. So this is a big deal. This affects you know, their bill leaves 100 million people out and doesn't do much for the people it covers. We're talking about a majority of the people in the United States of America who will be personally affected by how this election comes out. And this is not a partisan issue. When somebody hauls you in on a stretcher to an emergency room and they start filling out those forms, as maddening as it can be, at least they don't ask you what your party affiliation is. Laughter This is an American issue. It's a huge issue. We're for the Patients' Bill of Rights, and they're not. And the choice the American people make in the election will determine whether they get one. If you look at the education issue, I'm gratified that we've been able to open the doors of college wider than ever before. But our public schools are not the best in the world for all our students yet, and until they are, we can't stop. In the balanced budget bill, paid for in the budget I sent them, there are funds to hire 100,000 teachers to take average class size down to 18 in the early grades. All the research shows that it has a dramatic, permanent effect on the ability of children to learn, especially kids that come from poor backgrounds and limited circumstances, where they may not be read to at home and get all the help they need there paid for in the balanced budget. We have a proposal that will help to build or remodel 5,000 schools. I cannot tell you how many schools I've visited that are surrounded by housetrailers because there are so many kids that have outstripped the ability of school districts to build a school. I was in Philadelphia the other day, where the average age of the schools is 65 years. We tell these kids, "Oh, you're the most important thing in the world to us." Tell that to a kid that has to walk up the steps every day to a school where the windows are broken, where there's a whole floor closed down, where they don't function. These old buildings are priceless. We could never afford to build them today. But we can afford to repair them and make them what they ought to be, and it's in the plan. In our plan there's enough money to hook up all the classrooms and libraries in the country to the Internet by the year 2000, especially important to kids that don't have a computer in their home. It's an education agenda worth fighting for. If you just take those four issues keeping our economy going by doing our part for the global economy saving Social Security first, before we squander this surplus we're about to build up doing something to really advance the cause of education passing the Patients' Bill of Rights if you don't remember anything but those four issues and look, they've had 8 months we've got one appropriation bill they killed campaign finance reform, and they killed the tobacco legislation. Near as I can tell, that's the record of the last 8 months. Now, that is what this is about. It is not about me it is about the people of this country. It is about their children, their future, and our common efforts. I am going to do everything I can to fight for these things and to fight to help people who believe in them get elected. That's what you're doing here. And what I want to say to you is, when you leave here, I don't want you to let a day go by that you don't talk to somebody about what our common responsibilities as citizens are and what is really at stake here, in very specific terms. We're not particularly cynical, we Democrats. We believe we can always do better we believe we have a responsibility to do better and I think that it would be a very good thing if a few more of us were in the United States Congress now. The voters who used to worry about us who said that we couldn't be trusted with the budget, now they know that we can, and they can't. The voters that used to worry and say we couldn't be trusted to manage the economy know that that's not true that we were weak on crime, know that's not true all those things they used to say about us. So now we're free to look to the future, and you have to tell voters our enemy is not adversity here our enemy is complacence. We have to say to people, "Look at what's going on down there in Washington. This is about us and our future. Washington always thinks everything's about Washington. It's not about Washington it's about America. And it's about these issues." It's about our ability to lead the world toward peace and freedom and prosperity. And it's about our ability to do what needs to be done to strengthen this country at home for a new century. If you just remember those 4 issues there's 40 more but those 4 will carry us a long way. Go out and hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer and tell people to show up. Basically, the strategy of the other side is, it's a midterm election and our group doesn't vote as often as their group does. And so if everybody is sort of generally happy and there's a lot of static in the atmosphere and our base of voters don't go vote, then they win and if they have more money. They always have more money. So what you're saying is, you don't want them to have so much more money that we can't get our message out. And I thank you for that. But you must also be messengers. You must really talk to people about it. You've got to look your friends and neighbors dead in the eye and tell them this is a big election for this country. This is a huge choice about the direction of America in what is the last election of the 20th century. And if you will give them the specific examples of the Patients' Bill of Rights, the education issue, the saving Social Security, and exercising our leadership in the world economy to protect the American economy's growth at home, I think you'll be quite pleased with the results. And it will have been worth all of this to all of us. Thank you very much. September 16, 1998 President Clinton. Thank you very much. Please be seated. Ladies and gentlemen, last June in Washington, I had the opportunity to speak of a remarkable trio of leaders, each a champion of freedom, each imprisoned by authoritarian rulers, each now, after decades of struggle, the President of his nation. Last June, I was hosting President Kim Dae jung of Korea. Next week, President Nelson Mandela of South Africa will be here. And of course, today, I am very proud to stand with President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic. In the Prague Spring of 1968, a celebrated young playwright boldly called for an end to one party rule before Soviet tanks crushed the people's hopes. Vaclav Havel's plays were banned. He lost his job, but he carried on. In 1977, he spearheaded the Charter 77 human rights movement and for his activism then, he faced more than a decade of harassment, interrogation, and incarceration. Still, he carried on. And in 1989, he was at the forefront of the Velvet Revolution that at last brought freedom to the Czech and to the Slovak peoples. There was exhilaration all around the world when he spoke as President on the first day of January 1990 and declared, "People, your Government has returned to you." I was proud to visit President Havel in Prague in 1994, to see the great energy, creativity, joy of the Czech people unleashed. When we celebrate freedom today, we know that many challenges still lie ahead. President Havel recently put it very well. "Something is being born," he said. "One age is succeeding another. We live in a world where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain." Today our meetings focused on seizing those possibilities and minimizing those uncertainties. I'm delighted that Foreign Minister Kavan and Defense Minister Vetchy, representatives of the new government headed by Prime Minister Zeman, as well as Mr. Tosovsky, the governor of the Czech National Bank, were able to participate in our discussions. We talked about the true partnership for security our nations have forged, our desire to build a world with greater tolerance, greater respect for human rights, to build a united, democratic, peaceful Europe. We talked about next year's NATO Summit here and the Czech Republic's preparations for integration into the NATO alliance. I thanked President Havel for beginning to talk with me a long time ago, even before I became President, about the importance of the expansion of NATO and the Czech Republic's role in it. Already, Czech troops are working side by side with us in Bosnia, where we've just seen further evidence that the Bosnian people are on the path to lasting peace a free election with a strong turnout. Czech soldiers served as peacekeepers and military observers in Macedonia, in Georgia, in Angola, in Mozambique and Liberia. Today we spoke about the urgent need to bring stability to Kosovo to prevent suffering there, and the current tensions in Albania. We discussed ways to strengthen our cooperation against the terrible scourge of terrorism, and I had the chance to thank the President for the support we got from the Czech Republic for our actions against terrorism in the wake of the bombings of the American Embassies in Africa. We talked about the situation in Russia, the economic crisis there, the new government. I underscored America's continuing support for Czech reforms, greater openness in economic institutions, and greater investment in their increasingly competitive economy. And I expressed our strong support for the Czech Republic's accession to the European Union and for the fair treatment of American businesses that would be affected. We are making progress as friends and partners. That is possible only because of the courage President Havel and the Czech people have shown and continue to show today. We will continue to do the hard work together so that our children can reap the full benefits of it in the new century. Thank you for coming, Mr. President. The floor is yours. President Havel. Mr. President, I thank you for the floor and for these nice words. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. With your permission, I'll try to speak in your nice language. The situation of the contemporary world is very complicated. We feel it especially in Europe, especially in Central Europe, especially in Czech Republic. And I think that in this situation, it's extremely important, the responsibility of the United States, as the biggest, most powerful country all around the world. And I'm extremely grateful or thankful to Mr. President and his leadership, because it was in his time when we received the chance to build a new Europe. And to build a new Europe it means to build the new world, peaceful world, because in modern time, as you know, Europe was the main exporter of world wars, and now it has a completely different chance. And it was during his leadership when these chances were open, with support of your big country. I would like to thank for all this to your President and to thank to all your Nation. Thank you. Kosovo President's Moral Authority Q. Mr. President, what can the U.S. and NATO do to stop the killing in Kosovo? And what do you say to people who have said that you have lost all the moral authority to lead this Nation or to conduct foreign affairs? President Clinton. Let me answer the second question first, and then I will talk about Kosovo, because it's very important. I have never stopped leading this country in foreign affairs in this entire year, and I never will. The issues are too important and they affect the way Americans live at home. Just in the last several days, of course, we have taken action against those who killed our people and killed the Kenyans and Tanzanians. We have I and my administration have been working for peace in Northern Ireland, for stability in Russia. I have been personally involved in the peace process in the Middle East again, as it reaches another critical phase. I gave a speech Monday which I think is about the most important subject now facing the world community, how to limit this financial crisis, keep it from spreading, how to develop long term institutions that will help to promote growth and opportunity for ordinary people around the world in a way that permits America's economic recovery to go on. After that, my objectives were embraced by the leaders, the financial leaders of the largest industrial countries in the world. Yesterday, as it happens, I got calls from the Presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and the Prime Minister of Canada, all thanking me for what I said on Monday and saying they wanted to be a part of it. So I feel very good about where I am in relations to the rest of the world. I had a good talk with President Chirac of France, who called me a couple of days ago to talk about some of our common concerns and the U.N. inspection system in Iraq and other things. So I feel good about that. Now, on Kosovo, the American people should know that we have looming there, right next door to Bosnia, a significant humanitarian problem. There are many, many tens of thousands of people who have been dislocated from their homes. But somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 it's hard for us to know for sure are above not, I want to say, above the tree line at least at very high levels in the mountains, which means it will get colder there much more quickly than in the rest of the country. Winter is coming on you could have a major humanitarian disaster. What are we doing about it? We're doing three things. First of all, we're doing everything we can to avert the humanitarian disaster. Secondly, we're pursuing negotiated settlement options through Ambassador Chris Hill. Thirdly, we're doing NATO planning and consulting with our allies, because I still believe the big problem here is Mr. Milosevic is determined to get a military solution if he can, instead of pursuing a diplomatic solution which would give the Kosovars the autonomy they're supposed to have under the Serbian system that they once had. Now, I discussed this with President Havel he may want to comment on it since it's in his neighborhood. But while the political and legal situation is not identical to what we had in Bosnia, the humanitarian issue is similar. And we don't want a repeat of Bosnia. We don't want another round of instability there. And I think it is imperative that we move forthrightly, with our allies, as firmly as possible, to avert the humanitarian tragedy and then to get a political solution. Q. So you think you do have the moral authority to lead this Nation? President Clinton. Well, you might in my view, that is something that you have to demonstrate every day. My opinion is not as important as the opinion of others. What is important is that I do my job. I said last Friday, and I'd like to say again, I am seized on two things I'm trying to do the still quite painful work that I need to do with my family in our own life, and I'm determined to lead this country and to focus on the issues that are before us. It is not an option. There is no option we have got to deal with these things. And I'm very, very heartened by what world leaders have said to me in the last 2 weeks about what they want us to do. And there was an enormous positive reaction here in America and around the world to the steps that I outlined on Monday. It was very, very heartening to me. Czech U.S. Shared Values Q. I'm sorry, I will ask the question in Czech because I need a Czech answer. A question was asked in Czech, and a translation was not provided. President Havel. I have never said that we believe in different values. We believe in the same values like the United States. And the United States and especially the American Nation is fantastic, big body with many very different faces. I love most of these faces. There are some which I don't understand. I don't like to speak about things which I don't understand. Laughter President's Regrets and Goals Q. Mr. President, from your understanding of events, is Monica Lewinsky's account of your relationship accurate and truthful? And do you still maintain that you did not lie under oath in your testimony? President Clinton. Mr. Hunt Terence Hunt, Associated Press , I have said for a month now that I did something that was wrong. On last Friday at the prayer breakfast, I laid out as carefully and as brutally honestly as I could what I believe the essential truth to be. I also said then, and I will say again, that I think that the right thing for our country and the right thing for all people concerned is not to get mired in all the details here but to focus for me to focus on what I did, to acknowledge it, to atone for it and then to work on my family, where I still have a lot of work to do, difficult work and to lead this country, to deal with the agenda before us, these huge issues that I was just talking about internationally, plus, with only 2 weeks left to go in this budget year, a very, very large range of items before the American people here at home doing our part to deal with this financial crisis, with funding the International Monetary Fund, saving the Social Security system before we spend the surplus, doing the important work that we can do to help educate our children, dealing with the Patients' Bill of Rights for these people, 160 million of them, in HMO's. These are the things, to me, that I should be talking about as President, without in any way ever trying to obscure my own personal acknowledgment and chagrin about what I did wrong and my determination to put it right. Friendship With President Clinton Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa Q. Mr. President Havel, you said today that President Clinton is your great friend. I wonder if the discovered misdeeds of President Clinton have anyhow influenced your approach to him, your relations with him. President Havel. I didn't recognize any change. I was speaking some minutes ago about these faces of America which I don't understand. There are some faces which we understand very well. In this connection, permit me to congratulate Mr. Mark McGwire and to wish the success to Mr. Sammy Sosa. Laughter Press Secretary Mike McCurry. Larry McQuillan from Reuters. Russia Testimony Before Grand Jury Q. Mr. President, as the Lewinsky matter continues to unfold, can you foresee any circumstance where you might consider resignation, either because of the personal toll on you or the toll on the country? And do you think it's fair if the House should release these videotapes? And sir, if I could ask President Havel a question. With the current developments going on in Russia, are you concerned that there's a return to some degree of some former Soviet officials who are running the country? And do you have a fear that perhaps an old threat may return? President Havel. I don't think that contemporary or current development in Russia is such a danger like old Soviet Union. It is a country in a very complicated situation, and it will be a country in complicated situation I think 50 or 100 years. But we understand this complication because we have the same. But for us, it is question of years for them, it is question of decades. I don't see anything very dangerous in it. It's a natural process, and I think it is much more better to have ill Russia than healthy Soviet Union. Laughter President Clinton. Let me, first of all, say that the personal toll on me is of no concern except insofar as it affects my personal life. I think the and I feel the pain better now because I'm working on what I should be working on. I believe the right thing for the country and what I believe the people of the country want is, now that they know what happened, they want to put it behind them, and they want to go on. And they want me to go on and do my job, and that's what I intend to do. That is the right thing to do. In terms of the question you asked about the House, they have to decide that. That's not for me to decide. They have to do their job, and I have to do mine. There are some things, though, we need to do together. And again I would say, it's been quite a long time during this session, and there's still only one appropriation bill passed and a lot of other things still out there. So I hope we can work together to do some things for the American people. I think that the time has come to think about the American people and their interests and their future. And that's what I'm going to focus on, and that's what I would hope the Congress would focus on. Q. When you gave the deposition, sir, were you fully aware that it might be released, the videotape? President Clinton. Mr. McQuillan, I'm trying to remember. I think that I knew that the rules were against it, but I thought it would happen. I think that's where I was on that. But it's not of so much concern to me. I mean, you know that I acknowledged an improper relationship and that I declined to discuss the details, and that's what happened. So I'll leave it for others to judge and evaluate that's not for me to say. I want to work on my family and lead this country, and others will have to make all those judgments. They're not within my range of authority anyway, so it's pointless for me to comment on it. Friendship With President Clinton Q. Mr. President, you have mentioned in your speech that you appreciate the personal contribution of President Clinton to the NATO enlargement, and you see him also as a personal friend. I'd like to know, how do you think that an eventual resignation or impeachment of President Clinton would influence the American foreign policy and the Czech American relations? President Havel. Excuse me, I am a little bit tired. I prefer to speak in my language. I believe that this is a matter for the United States and for the American people, who will be their President. When I have made a friendship with someone, I remain that person's friend, no matter which office he or she holds or doesn't hold. Mr. McCurry. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. President Clinton. Do you want to take one more? April April Ryan, American Urban Radio Networks , go ahead. President's Initiative on Race Q. Mr. President, your initiative on race finishes this month, and your Press Secretary yesterday agreed that the race initiative isn't flying because of your current problems and it was bogged down in the muck and mire. Do you regret that your personal problems affected your potential legacy on race and that it may just, at best, be a Band Aid approach to racism in America? President Clinton. First of all Mr. McCurry. That's not exactly what I said. President Clinton. I don't know if he said that, but if he did, I strongly disagree with him. I don't think it's affected it at all. As a matter of fact, I think in the response you've seen from some sectors of the American community have reinforced and acknowledged the centrality of this issue to the work of the last 6 years, not just the work of the last year. And let me also say that what is coming to an end here is this phase of it. And there will be a report the board will give me a set of recommendations. Then we expect to produce a document. But the main thing is we have to keep making progress for the American people. I would remind you that we have before the Congress right now just two things that I'd like to emphasize number one, legislation, fully funded, within the balanced budget bill, to get rid of the backlog in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and otherwise enforce the antidiscrimination laws of the country I think that is very important. Number two, we have an empowerment agenda put together by the Vice President and Secretary Cuomo and an education component put together by Secretary Riley to create affirmative economic and educational opportunities in distressed inner city and isolated rural areas that are predominantly minority. Both those are not particularly costly. Both those could be passed by this Congress in the next 2 weeks. Both those would actually do something for the American people that live beyond the borders of the Federal establishment here, and I very much hope they will pass. But I expect this to be a central part of the work I do in the next 2 years. I expect this to be a central part of the work I do for the rest of my life. I think in the 21st century when you go back to World War II, and you think about the part of the Nazi experience that was directed against the Jews, and you look all the way through the ensuing years, all the way to the end of this century, down to what we've seen in Rwanda, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo you name it it will be incumbent upon the United States to be a force for tolerance and racial reconciliation for the foreseeable future. So this is just simply a phase of this work that is coming to an end, and I think you should see it as a springboard, both in the recommendations the advisory commission will make and in the document that I will put out after that. Q. So could there be a council on race? President Clinton. I understand they may recommend that, and if they do, of course, I will take it very seriously. President Havel. One of my whole life personal ideals is ideal of a civic society. I must tell you that America and America especially in time of President Clinton, because this is the America I know the best is for my work, for my support of civic society, a big inspiration. Thank you. President Clinton. Thank you very much. September 14, 1998 Thank you very much, Pete. Hillary and I are delighted to be here with you and Joan, and I'm glad to be joined by Secretary Rubin and Jim Harmon, Gene Sperling, other members of our team. I'm glad to see Dick Holbrooke over here I hope, if we can overcome the inertia of Congress, he will soon be a member of the team again. And I thank David Rockefeller and Les Gelb and others who welcomed us here today. The subject that I want to discuss let me just say one thing in advance I'm going to give you my best thoughts. We have been working on this for 3 years at some level of intensity or another, going back to the Naples G 7 meeting in the aftermath of the Mexican financial crisis. I have done everything I could do personally to reach out across the country, and indeed across the world, for any new ideas from any source. I'm going to give you my best thinking today about what we can do, but I want you to know that I'm here, and if I had my druthers, this would be about a 3 hour session where I'd give this talk and then I would listen for the rest of the time. So I want to encourage you, if you think we're right, to support us. But if you have any ideas, for goodness sake, share them, because I agree with what Pete said. This is the biggest financial challenge facing the world in a half century. And the United States has an absolutely inescapable obligation to lead, and to lead in a way that's consistent with our values and our obligation to see that what we're doing helps lift the lives of ordinary people here at home and all around the world. The Council on Foreign Relations has always stood for political and economic freedom, since right after World War I. And I think one of the things that has impacted all of us, and it was implicit in what Pete said, is that for the last decade the growth of freedom around the world with more than half the people in the world living under governments of their own choosing more than half the villages, the one million villages, in China now even electing their own governments and this sweeping replacement of command and control economies by market economies I think it seems to have happened so easily, so effortlessly, so inexorably that I think we think the trend is inevitable and irreversible. But if you consider today's economic difficulties, disruptions, and the plain old deep, personal disappointments of now tens of millions of people around the world, it is clear to me that there is now a stark challenge not only to economic freedom, but, if unaddressed, a challenge that could stem the rising tide of political liberty as well. Obviously, we have profound interests here. It is a great irony that we are at a moment of unsurpassed economic strength at a time of such turmoil in the world economy. We, I think, all of us in this room, know that our future prosperity depends upon whether we can work with others to restore confidence, manage change, stabilize the financial system, and spur robust global growth. For most of the last 30 years, the United States and the rest of the world has been preoccupied by inflation, for reasons that all of you here know all too well. And it was a good thing to be preoccupied with. Today, the low and stable inflation we enjoy has been critical to our economic health, and low inflation has also contributed to that of many other nations as well. But clearly, the balance of risks has now shifted, with a full quarter of the world's population living in countries with declining economic growth or negative economic growth. Therefore, I believe the industrial world's chief priority today, plainly, is to spur growth. It seems to me there are six immediate steps we should take to help contain the current financial turmoil around the world, and then two longer term projects in which we must be involved. To take the immediate first, we must work with Japan, Europe, and other nations to spur growth. Second, we will expand our efforts to enable viable businesses in Asia to emerge from crippling debt burdens so they can once again contribute to growth and job creation. Third, we've asked the World Bank to double its support for the social safety net in Asia to help people who are innocent victims of financial turmoil. Fourth, we'll urge the major industrial economies to stand ready to use the 15 billion in IMF emergency funds to help stop the financial contagion from spreading to Latin America and elsewhere. Fifth, our Ex Im Bank, under the leadership of Jim Harmon, will intensify its efforts to generate economic activity in the developing world immediately, in the next 3 months. And sixth, Congress must live up to its responsibility for continued prosperity by meeting our obligations to the International Monetary Fund. Secretary Rubin has been working with his counterparts in the G 7 to get cooperative support for several of these measures. I understand Chairman Greenspan is also consulting with his counterparts on these items as well. As we take these immediate steps, we also must intensify our efforts to reform our trade and financial institutions so that they can respond better to the challenges we now face and those we are likely to face in the future. We must build a stronger and more accountable global trading system, pressing forward with market opening initiatives, but also advancing the protection of labor and environmental interests and doing more to ensure that trade helps the lives of ordinary citizens across the globe. Above all, we must accelerate our efforts to reform the international financial system. Today I have asked Secretary Rubin and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Greenspan to convene a major meeting of their counterparts within the next 30 days to recommend ways to adapt the international financial architecture to the 21st century. Over the past 6 years, our strategy at home of fiscal discipline, investment in the skills of our people, and open trade has worked for all Americans unemployment at a 28 year low, inflation a 32 year low, wages rising at twice the rate of inflation after decades of stagnation. And on October 1st we'll have the first balanced budget in 29 years. But the global economy brought a lot of that prosperity to us, and now fast moving currents have brought or aggravated problems in Russia and Asia. They threaten emerging economies from Latin America to South Africa. With a quarter of the world's population in declining growth, we must recognize what Chairman Greenspan said the other day We cannot forever be an oasis of prosperity. Growth at home depends upon growth abroad. A full 30 percent of our growth, just since I became President, has been due to our expanding positive involvement in the global economy. That's why ordinary Americans should care if Asia or Russia or South America is on solid economic footing. These people are our customers. With one third of the growth of our economy coming from exports, much of it from emerging markets, we know that those markets will falter as their economies flatten. When the problem is widespread and perceived to be moving in the wrong direction, we have seen that our stock market can react, having a direct and immediate impact on the wealth of the American people. These nations are also our competitors. And under conditions of decent equilibrium, that is a very good thing, indeed. But when their currencies drop precipitously, the prices of their goods fall they could undercut the sales of our own goods here at home that are otherwise profitable, dramatically increasing our trade deficit under circumstances that could cause the American people to turn away from open trade toward protectionism in a way that has terrific negative consequences long term for our global growth objectives. Finally, these nations are our friends, our allies, and our security partners. Where economic turmoil plunges millions into sudden poverty and disrupts and disorients the lives of ordinary people, the risks of political and social instability and of a turn from democracy clearly rise. Just look at Russia. Russia is facing an economic crisis that threatens the extraordinary progress the Russian people have made in just 7 years, building a new society from the ground up. The ruble and the stock market have plummeted banks are weak tax collections have slowed the government has trouble paying its debts and its salaries. Some Russians have become wealthy, but many, many more are struggling to provide for their families. I talked to some of them when I was in Russia just a few days ago. Amid such political uncertainty and economic difficulty, some now talk of abandoning the path of reform and returning to policies of the past, even policies that have already failed. At worst, adversity in Russia could affect not only the Russian economy and prospects for our economic cooperation at worst, it could have an impact on our cooperation with Russia on nuclear disarmament, on fighting terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, on standing together for peace, from the Balkans to the Middle East. Now Russia has a new Prime Minister, Mr. Primakov, who's been in office a grand total of 4 days. He and President Yeltsin face one of the great challenges of their time. Never has there been a more important moment to set a clear direction for the future, to affirm the commitment of Russia to democracy and to free markets, and to take decisive steps to stabilize the economy and restore investor confidence. But if Russia is willing to take these steps, we must do everything we can to provide support to them. Because again I say, as long as ordinary people don't feel any benefits from this, in the end it's going to be difficult to sustain the direction we think the world should take. On the other hand, we need to be honest with Russia and everyone else. No nation, rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian, can escape the fundamental economic imperatives of the global market. No nation can escape its discipline. No nation can avoid its responsibility to do its part. But since all economies are increasingly interdependent, fear and uncertainty about the economy of one country can prompt investors to pull money out of other countries thousands of miles away. Markets work best when they are driven neither by excessive inflows or outflows of capital based on indiscriminate optimism or pessimism. Regardless of what changes in policies or institutions may be warranted, we have to say we'll only be able to help those countries who are willing to help themselves. If a nation chooses to print money indiscriminately, to wink at cronyism or corruption, to hide bad loans and protect corrupt or inefficient banks, then investors, foreign and domestic, sooner or later will withdraw their investments, with consequences both swift and severe. That is why we support the fundamental approach of the International Monetary Fund to extend assistance only when nations have taken responsibility, strengthening their banking systems, introducing honest accounting and open markets, awarding credit on merit instead of connections. Still, what has been done is clearly not enough to reverse the decline in particular countries, to douse the flames of the international financial crisis, to support steady and sustainable growth in the future. In the face of this new challenge, America can and must continue to act and to lead to take the urgent steps needed today to calm the financial crisis, restart the engine of growth in Asia, and minimize the impact of financial turmoil on other nations, and to make certain that for tomorrow the institutions and rules of international finance and international trade are prepared to support steady and sustainable growth over the long term. First and foremost, the leading economic nations must act together to spur global growth. Our strong and growing economy here has made a major contribution to global growth, just as our weak economy was holding the world back 6 years ago when I attended my first G 7 meeting in Tokyo and every other country said the first thing they needed was for America to put its economic house in order. We did that. Now, I believe strongly we must maintain our fiscal discipline. It has led to lower interest rates and a huge investment and job growth. Maintaining economic growth is the best thing we can do right now, not only for the United States but for the global economy. I would also remember that back in 1993 we had a general agreement that what was needed was America should get rid of its deficit, Europe should lower its interest rates, and Japan should open its markets. There was this general agreement that if we did all those things, we would have a remarkable resumption of growth. Europe did moderate its interest rates. And the then Prime Minister, now the Finance Minister, Mr. Miyazawa, oversaw a significant market opening trade agreement between the United States and Japan, which also benefited others, not just us. And of course, we got rid of our deficit. The results were quite satisfactory for several years for us. Now Europe has to continue to pursue policies that will spur growth and keep their markets open because they, too, must be able to provide markets for Asian goods as those nations seek to find their footing. But the key here is Japan, for the second largest economy in the world, by far the biggest economy in Asia, has now gone several years without any economic growth. Thank goodness, a lot of their ordinary citizens have been able to maintain a decent life because of the wealth of their country and probably because of the enormous personal savings rate they have enjoyed for many, many years now. But it is difficult to see how any actions of the world community can be successful in restoring growth in Asia in the absence of the restoration of growth in Japan, which would enable Japan to lead the region out of its present condition. Therefore, we must support Japan and do everything we can to help create the conditions in which together we can all lead again, just as we did in 1993. Their challenges are quite formidable. They have to spur domestic demand, revive a banking system, restore confidence, deregulate the economy, and open markets. And we all know all the forces that seem to be working against these developments in Japan. But I would remind you that this is a very strong, sophisticated nation full of people of knowledge and enormous achievement. It is fully capable of playing its world leadership role. I believe its business leaders right now know what needs to be done and would support it. Next week I'm going to meet with Prime Minister Obuchi here in New York to discuss how America can support Japan's efforts to restore economic growth and investor confidence. And I will do everything I can to try to make sure that, as we go forward, we have America, Europe, and Japan all doing our part to get beyond this present moment, just as we did back in 1993. The second step we should take is to intensify our efforts to speed economic recovery in Asia. When countries like South Korea and Thailand have taken strong and responsible steps, the freefall has ended progress is being made. But the human cost of Asia's collapse is only now being fully felt. Recent press reports have described an entire generation working its way into the middle class over 25 years, then being plummeted into poverty within a matter of months. The stories are heartbreaking doctors and nurses forced to live in the lobby of a closed hospital middle class families who owned their own homes, sent their children to college, traveled abroad, now living by selling their possessions. It is in our interest to help these nations and these people recover. They will become once again our great markets and our great partners. It is also the right thing to do. We've worked with international lenders, like the IMF, to help these nations to adopt pro growth budget, tax, and monetary policies, but clearly we're going to have to do more to restore Asian growth. We must work to lift the weight of private sector debt that has frozen the Asian economies. Today I'm asking Secretary Rubin to work with other financial authorities and international economic institutions to enhance efforts to explore comprehensive plans to help Asian corporations emerge from massive debt where individual firms have been swept under by systemic national economic problems, rather than their own errors. We need to get credit flowing again. We need to get business back to making products, producing services, creating jobs. Third, Asian businesses need assistance, but so do millions of Asian families. We must do more to establish an adequate social safety net in recovering nations. Wrenching economic transition without an adequate social safety net can sacrifice lives in the name of economic theory and, I might add, can generate thereby so much resistance that reform grinds to a halt. If we want these countries to do tough things, we have to protect the most defenseless people in the society, and we have to protect people who get hurt when they didn't do anything wrong. I think that is terribly important. With our support, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have started to deal with these challenges, but they have to expand their efforts. There is simply not enough being done. I asked them to double their aid through an expanded social compact initiative focusing on job assistance, basic needs, and economic transition on children and the elderly on groups most vulnerable to economic change. And I want to commend Jim Wolfensohn for his efforts and his willingness to lead this expanded initiative. Fourth, we have to be ready to respond immediately, and with financial force if necessary, to the currency crisis, if it spreads, especially if it threatens the economies of Latin America, where nations have struggled to make progress to do the right thing only to find themselves buffeted by economic storms outside their control. Therefore, the major economies should stand ready to activate the 15 billion now in the emergency funds of the IMF, the general agreement to borrow, to ensure that the IMF continues to support reform and fight economic contagion. Fifth, our Export Import Bank will increase its commitments to specific economic development projects over the next 3 years 3 months projects which will have concrete benefits for ordinary citizens in other countries, projects which will increase our own exports and thereby help our economy, and ones which can help to restore confidence in countries that they are not alone and that actual, specific, positive developments can occur. Sixth, for the effort of the international community to succeed, America simply must meet its own obligations to the International Monetary Fund. After a year of financial firefighting, the IMF's resources are badly strained. Every day we don't act, we undermine the confidence the world badly needs that we are trying to restore. Congress simply must assume its responsibility for our leadership in the economy. In my State of the Union Address, I said it was better to prepare for a storm when the skies were clear than when the clouds were overhead. Well, 8 months later, the clouds are closer, and you can nearly hear the thunder. Now, the Senate, by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, has, thankfully, approved our obligation to fund our part of the International Monetary Fund. But with only 5 weeks left in this congressional session, there is still no action from the House of Representatives. Let me put this as plainly as I can. Failure by this Congress to pay our dues to the IMF will put our own prosperity at risk. Failure to act will send a sharp signal that at a time of economic challenge, our lawmakers were unwilling to protect our workers, our businesses, our farmers from the risk of global economic change and unwilling to maintain our leadership in building a global economic system that has benefited us more than any other nation. Concerted action to spur growth, helping Asia through private sector debt restructuring, and a strengthened social safety net, helping to protect the rest of the world through the use of the IMF's emergency fund, increasing the activity of the Ex Im Bank, and meeting our own obligations to the IMF these are the six immediate steps we want to take. But we must also be willing to take action for the long run to modify the financial and trading institutions of the world to match the realities of the new economy they serve. By creating the WTO, the World Trade Organization, in 1994, we began to build a modern trading system. We must redouble our efforts to tear down barriers around the world. But as I said in Geneva last May, we must do more to ensure that spirited economic competition among nations never becomes a race to the bottom in environmental protection, consumer protection, or labor standards. We are working to open the procedures of the WTO to participation by the public and the full range of affected interests so that people will know and see and be able to do for themselves things which will ensure that the trading system makes the world better for all the people in all the countries. We've already completed 260 trade agreements, opening markets in areas from autos to telecommunications. Next year we will host the meeting of the world's trade ministers to set the agenda for expanded trade in the first decade in the new century. History teaches us that at a time of worldwide difficulty, it would be folly to retreat into a protectionist shell. We must keep trade flowing among nations. But I will say again, if we want to do that, we have got to give ordinary citizens and the groups that represent them in countries all over the world the sense that it is going to be done in a fair way, consistent with nations' obligations to advance the interests of their working people and protect not only their national but the global environment. This November, when I meet with the leaders of the Asian economies at the APEC meeting, we will move forward to further open markets in Asia. And when Congress returns next year, I will work to pass legislation to open markets further, from trade negotiating powers to the African trade initiative. I will do so in a way that I believe will win broad support from a majority of both parties. From the G 7 meeting in Halifax in 1995, in the wake of the Mexican financial crisis, to the Birmingham meeting this year, we have been working, also, with our major economic partners to plan for new financial architecture for the 21st century. For the first time, this year we included key emerging markets in the process in a new Group of 22, recognizing their important stake in the global economy. This group has been working together for nearly a year now to improve the global financial assistance with a special focus on improving financial sectors, on transparency, and on private sector burden sharing. I just want to emphasize again that even as we respond to the urgent alarms of the moment, we must speed the pace of this systemic work as well. That is why I have asked Secretary Rubin and Chairman Greenspan to convene the finance ministers and central bankers of the G 7 and key emerging economies in Washington within 30 days to develop a preliminary report to the heads of state by the beginning of next year on strengthening the world financial system. We must develop policies so that countries can reap the benefits of free flowing capital in a way that is safe and sustainable. We must adapt the IMF so that it can more effectively confront the new types of financial crises, minimizing their frequency, severity, and human cost. We need to consider ways to extend emergency financing when countries are battling crises of confidence due to world financial distress as distinct from their own errors in policy. We must find ways to tap the energy of global markets without sentencing the world to a cycle of continued extreme crises. For half a century now in our national economy, we have learned not to eliminate but to tame and limit the swings of boom and bust. In the 21st century, we have to find a way to do that in the global economy as well. I've discussed this in recent days with Prime Minister Blair of Great Britain, who is now the Chair of the G 7. He shares my belief that this is an urgent task. It is critical to the mission that he and I and Prime Minister Prodi of Italy will be discussing next week at the New York University Law School in a very interesting meeting that the First Lady and others in our administration helped to organize on how to extend the benefits of the world economy to all and how to strengthen democracy in a time of such sweeping economic change. Now, let me just say it all again very briefly. In short, we must improve our ability to address the current financial emergency, and we must build a system to prevent such future emergencies, whenever possible, and to blunt their impact when they do occur. There is no mission more critical to our own strength and security. And let me say this again, what is at stake is more than the spread of free markets and their integration into the global economy. The forces behind the global economy are also those that deepen democratic liberties the free flow of ideas and information, open borders and easy travel, the rule of law, fair and evenhanded enforcement, protection for consumers, a skilled and educated work force. Each of these things matters not only to the wealth of nations but to the health of freedom. If citizens tire of waiting for democracy and free markets to deliver a better life for them, there is a real risk that democracy and free markets, instead of continuing to thrive together, will begin to shrivel together. This would pose great risks not only for our economic interests but for our security. We see around the world the international aggressors, the harborers of terrorists, the druglords. Who are these countries? They're authoritarian nations without democracy and without open markets. Nations that give their people freedom are good neighbors. When nations turn away from freedom, they turn inward toward tension, hatred, and hostility. We now have a chance to create opportunity on a worldwide scale. The difficulties of the moment should not obscure us to the advances of the last several years. We clearly have it within our means, if we do the right things, to lift billions and billions of people around the world into a global middle class and into participation in global democracy and genuine efforts toward peace and reconciliation. That is a possibility, but recent events show it is not a certainty. At this moment, therefore, the United States is called upon once again to lead, to organize the forces of a committed world, to channel the unruly energies of the global economy into positive avenues, to advance our interests, reinforce our values, enhance our security. In this room, I think it is not too simple to say we know what to do. The World War II generation did it for us 50 years ago. Now it is time for us to rise to our responsibility, as America has been called upon to do so often so many times in the past. We can, if we do that, redeem the promise of the global economy and strengthen our own Nation for a new century. Thank you very much. September 12, 1998 Good morning. It's been an exhausting and difficult week in the Capital, not only for me but for many others. But as I told my Cabinet on Thursday, we cannot lose sight of our primary mission, which is to work for the American people and especially for the future of our children. The most important thing to do now is to stay focused on the issues the American people sent us here to deal with, from health care to the economy to terrorism. Today that's exactly what we're doing. I want to tell you about the latest steps we're taking to combat a truly alarming trend, the growing use of drugs among our young people. The good news is that overall drug use has dropped by half since 1979. But among our children, the problem is getting worse. In fact, if present trends continue, half of all high school seniors will have smoked marijuana by the time they graduate. That's a frightening development. When we know that drugs lead to crime, to failure in school, to the fraying of families and neighborhoods, we know we must do better. We can reverse this terrible trend if we attack it in the way we did the crime problem, by working together at the community level, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, person by person. Crime overall has dropped to a 25 year low now, because whole communities are taking responsibility for their own streets and neighborhoods, and because here in Washington we're giving them the tools they need, such as support for community policing programs. When we assumed responsibility for bringing down crime, something remarkable happens crime does go down. We can have a similarly dramatic effect in curbing the use of drugs among our young people. But all of us have a responsibility to send our young people the same simple message Drugs are wrong drugs are illegal and drugs can kill you. This summer my administration launched an unprecedented media campaign to ensure that the message comes across when young people watch television, listen to radio, or read the newspaper. But media is not enough. We also must enlist the efforts of parents, teachers, ministers and clergy, coaches, principals from the community of adults around them. That's why, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and under the direction of General Barry McCaffrey, we're extending new help to community based groups all over our Nation. Representatives of some of those groups are here with me in the Oval Office today. Already they are working to curb drug use by reclaiming drug houses, reaching out to at risk foster kids, teaching parents to deliver the antidrug message. Today I'm delighted to announce the first round of high impact, low redtape grants to 93 communities. Their dollar amounts are not large, but if these grants empower communities to do more of what works to keep young people away from the scourge of drugs, their effect will be enormous. Now, we also need the support of Congress on other serious issues facing our country. We are committed, in a bipartisan way, to fight against drug use among our young people. We must similarly be committed in a bipartisan way to continue our economic growth by staying with our economic strategy that has made our country the envy of the world, by maintaining our fiscal discipline, setting aside the surplus every penny of it until we save Social Security first. We have to restore strength and growth to the world economy by investing our proportionate share in the International Monetary Fund. All of you know that the world economy has been going up and down and changing quite a bit lately. Treasury Secretary Rubin and I will go to New York on Monday, where I will discuss the current challenges of the global economy and the risks to our prosperity unless we act on the IMF request and take some other steps designed to make sure that America does not become a sea of prosperity in an ocean of distress. We also have to continue to invest in the education of our people. We have to have smaller classes, more teachers, modernized schools, all the classrooms hooked up to the Internet, and higher standards. We need a real Patients' Bill of Rights. We need to protect the environment. We need to protect our democracy by passing bipartisan campaign finance reform. All these items, also, are before Congress now. It is truly encouraging to me how we have put aside partisan differences to save our children and their future from drugs. We have to do that on other issues critical to our future now and even in the weeks before the election in November. We must stay focused on your business. Thanks for listening. September 11, 1998 Bishop Haines, Dean Baxter, Reverend Jackson, clergy Vice President and Mrs. Gore, Secretary Albright, Secretary Cohen, Janet, Secretary Shalala to the Members of Congress our military service distinguished members of the diplomatic corps, especially those from Kenya and Tanzania. Most of all, to the members of the families, friends, and colleagues of the deceased the survivors of the attacks Ambassador Bushnell and Charge Lange my fellow Americans. Today we are gathered in a truly sacred and historic place to honor and to celebrate the lives of 12 Americans who perished in service to our Nation their goodness, their warmth, their humanity, and their sacrifice. The two sides of their lives who they were in their labors and who they were as husbands and wives, sons and daughters, friends and colleagues came together. For as they showed every day in their devotion to family and friends, their work was about bringing better lives to all. They worked to create opportunity and hope, to fight poverty and disease, to bridge divides between peoples and nations, to promote tolerance and peace. They expressed both their patriotism and their humanity, as Adlai Stevenson so well put it, "in the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime." In the book of Isaiah it is written that the Lord called out, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And Isaiah, the prophet, answered, "Here am I, Lord send me." These Americans, generous, adventurous, brave souls, said, "Send me. Send me in service. Send me to build a better tomorrow." And on their journey they perished, together with proud sons and daughters of Kenya and Tanzania. Some of the Kenyans and Tanzanians worked alongside our Americans at our Embassies, making vital contributions. Others were simply, unfortunately, nearby, working or studying, providing for their loved ones, doing what they do and did every day. For those people, too, we mourn, we honor, we thank God for their lives. All of them were taken too soon, leaving behind families, many including young children, and devoted friends and colleagues. No tribute from us can rouse them from a long night of mourning. That takes time and the mysterious workings of the heart. But surely some comfort comes with the memory of the happiness they brought, the difference they made, the goodness they left inside those whom they loved and touched. Last month at Andrews Air Force Base, Hillary and I walked out into the hangar that day to meet the families and share with them the homecoming of their loved ones for the last time. There we saw a larger family, many standing and pressed together, people from the State and Defense Departments, from our military, from AID and the CDC. They, too, lost brothers and sisters. They, too, must be immensely proud of their friends, the traditions, the accomplishments, the life they shared. All of us must stand together with our friends from Kenya and Tanzania and other peaceloving nations yes, in grief, but also in common commitment to carry on the cause of peace and freedom, to find those responsible and bring them to justice, not to rest as long as terrorists plot to take more innocent lives, and in the end, to convince people the world over that there is a better way of living than killing others for what you cannot have today. For our larger struggle, for hope over hatred and unity over division, is a just one. And with God's help, it will prevail. We owe to those who have given their lives in the service of America and its ideal to continue that struggle most of all. In their honor, let us commit to open our hearts with generosity and understanding to treat others who are different with respect and kindness to hold fast to our loved ones and always to work for justice, tolerance, freedom, and peace. May God be with their souls. September 10, 1998 Thank you. It's rare for me to feel that I am at a loss for words. I can only hope you know what I'm feeling, for you and for my wife and for my country. I think you do, and I thank you more than you can possibly know. Hillary has mentioned all the people who are responsible for this evening. I would just echo my strong note of gratitude to all of you. Congressman Markey was here there he is. Thank you very much for being here and for your support. There are many distinguished citizens here, but I would like to acknowledge one because he embodies to me everything that is best about America. I think he is one of the bravest human beings I've ever known, and without him, Americans with disabilities would not be where they are today a man I had the great honor to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Justin Dart. Thank you for being here, and God bless you, sir. In addition to Roy and Len and Carol and all the DNC officers who are here, and Tom and Mike and John and Chris, who did this weekend you know, Steve Grossman is not here tonight, but I just want to acknowledge how hard he has worked for all of us, to make our party strong. There is one other person I want to mention. I'm glad Steve Grossman is not here tonight, because he went home to Massachusetts to Kirk O'Donnell's funeral. And a lot of you in this room knew Kirk O'Donnell. He was a magnificent human being, a great Democrat, a proud Irish American, a passionate citizen and patriot. And this town is much the poorer for his passing. When I called his wife the other night, I said, "You know, I'm not really a Washington insider. I think we've established that beyond any doubt." Laughter I said, "But Washington has a lot of great qualities, and maybe some that aren't so great. More than anybody I ever knew around here, I think Kirk O'Donnell had all the good and none of the bad." I'm proud he was a member of my party, and I just want to say to his wife and his two wonderful children, on behalf of a grateful nation, I thank them for his life, and I thank God for his life, and I thank Steve Grossman for representing all of us at his funeral today in Massachusetts. Thank you. Yesterday I was in Florida, and I went to this school in Orlando. And I wish all of you had been with me. It was an elementary school that was basically a multilingual international school, where all the kids that were there had to take at least two languages, English and something else. And there were a lot of Hispanic kids there there were a lot of Asian kids there there were kids from South Asia there were African American kids there there was every conceivable ethnic group in this little grade school in Florida. And there was a wonderful Hispanic principal American whose mother, the principal's mother, spoke to me in Spanish and had to have it translated because I'm not as fluent as I should be and hardly in English. Laughter But anyway, these kids, they had a school uniform policy, which I love. They had a PTA president who was more charismatic than 90 percent of the politicians I've met in my life. They had a sense of community that required them to go out to every mother of a newborn in the jurisdiction of the elementary school and give the mothers classical music and other support for the newborns as a part of the elementary school's mission. And they had the genuine commitment that everybody that was within their embrace mattered, that every child could learn, that every child mattered, and that they were creating not just a school but a community in which they were prepared to accept responsibility for all these children's well being. And I'm telling you, it was an overwhelming experience being there. I say that because that school is a metaphor for what I have tried to do with America. And tonight all of you in this Business Council, you're pretty sophisticated about what's going on in this economy, and you understand that for all of our great good fortune today, this is an uncertain world, a lot of changes in it. The stock market goes up and down in no small measure because of perceived risk in America as a result of events far from our shores in economies much smaller than ours, reminding us that if we want the benefits of this global society, we must be able and willing to assume its responsibilities of leadership. And so I want to just say two things that aren't particularly sophisticated. First of all, I am profoundly grateful for every single day, even the worst day, I have had to serve as your President because of where we are today. Secondly, when I was a young man I don't believe I've ever said this in public except at my daughter's high school graduation but when I was a young man I was complaining about something once, some perceived unfairness. And a much older man who sort of mentored me looked at me, and he said, "Let me tell you something, Bill." He said, "What you're saying is probably right, but just remember this Most of us get out of this world ahead of where we would be if we only got what we deserved." Laughter He said, "No matter what happens, most of us get out of this world ahead." And we need to develop what Hillary later taught me is the discipline of gratitude. So that's the first thing I want you to know. I am grateful that we have had this chance to do these things. The second thing I want to say is, usually when I come to a group like this, I say, isn't it wonderful that we have the lowest unemployment in 27 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, and the first balanced budget in 29 years, and the lowest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years, and you know the whole rest of it. And it is great. But you understand a simple truth This is a dynamic world. What really matters is not so much what we've had but what we intend to do with what we have. And a lot of times when things are going well, people think that they can indulge themselves in either idleness or things that are irrelevant to the mission at hand. I believe that in a dynamic world, our blessings confer special responsibilities to deal with the long term challenges of the country. We've got to really think about what we have learned about this global economy in the last 2 years. We learned a lot, you know. We learned a lot with NAFTA, with GATT, with our trade rules, with all the things we benefited 30 percent of our growth coming from trade. We learned a lot. What have we learned from the problems of the countries of Asia? What have we learned from the difficulties of the Russians? What have we learned from the difficulties of a great, vast, powerful country like Japan going 5 years without any real economic growth? And what should we as Americans do to inject stability and growth into this system? Because if we don't as Chairman Greenspan said last week we can't be an island of prosperity in a sea of distress. Big issue. We've got to start by paying our way to the International Monetary Fund. But there is more, and it's big. We know that we have to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers. Therefore, I say, let's don't spend this surplus until we save Social Security. Let's don't do that. Maybe the Democrats feel more strongly about it because there were only Democrats voting for that economic plan in '93 we lost seats in the Congress on account of it. People bled over that plan. But when we passed the Balanced Budget Act, 92 percent of the deficit was already gone because of what our party did. Now, we've been waiting 29 years 29 years. You know, I like tax cuts and spending programs as well as the next person. We've got both in our balanced budget, both targeted tax cuts for child care and education and the environment, and new investments in education and health care and other things. But I would like to see that ink change from red to black and just sort of savor it for a minute or two before we throw it all away again. Laughter And I think you would, too. Now, everybody in this room who is between the ages of 34 and 52 in the baby boom generation, you've got to face the fact that if we do not meet our responsibilities to reform Social Security in a way that preserves its essential characteristics to give stability in old age to people who need it without imposing undue financial burdens if we don't do it and do it now when it's least painful, then one of two things is going to happen Either we'll all get to retirement, and we'll have to take a much lower standard of living or we'll try to maintain the same system, which will cost our kids and grandkids so much money that they will have a lower standard of living. And that is a very foolish thing to do. We don't need to do it. So let's fix Social Security and then see how much money is left, and we can decide what to do with it then. That's what I think we ought to do. We have just a few weeks left in this legislative session. I think it's important to make the right decisions. Look at the education bills we've got up there 100,000 teachers in the early grades to lower average class size to 18 a program that will enable us to build or rehabilitate 5,000 schools to deal with school overcrowding and substandard condition programs for safe schools programs to hook all our classrooms and libraries up to the Internet by the year 2000 programs to create education opportunity zones, summer school, and after school programs and mentoring programs and guaranteed scholarship programs for schools that aren't doing well that will agree to end social promotion but only if they help the kid, not stigmatize him. All of that's there. The America Reads program We had 1,000 colleges last year sending young people into schools to make sure that every 8 year old could read by the end of the third grade. It's all out there riding on what Congress does. You won't read anything about it, but it may be the most important set of decisions still to be made in this Congress. Will they embrace an education agenda that we never asked to be a partisan agenda? We never asked for it to be a partisan agenda. It is an agenda for America's children. Or the health care bill of rights 43 HMO's have now endorsed our health care bill of rights that says, in an accident you ought not have to drive across town to get to an emergency room, you ought to go to the nearest one if you need a specialist, you ought to be able to get one if you're getting care and your employer changes HMO's during the time of your pregnancy or your chemotherapy, they ought not to be able to change your doctor in the middle of the stream and if you have privacy concerns, you ought to know your records will be kept private. Those are just some of the things in our bill. I think that's a big deal. There are 160 million Americans in managed care, and I have never been an opponent of it, because I don't think we could be where we are today with the economy where it is unless we had broken the inflation in health care costs. But quality comes first. Now 43 HMO's have supported our bill. Why? Because they're doing the right thing anyway, and they're at an unconscionable disadvantage by treating their people right unless everybody else follows the same rules. This is a big deal for America. It's going to be decided between now and the next 3 weeks. The same thing is true on the environment 40 percent of our lakes and streams still not fit to swim in even though the air and the water are cleaner and the food is safer, and we've cleaned up more toxic waste dumps, and we've also set aside more land than any administration except the two Roosevelts, we've still got 40 percent of the rivers and lakes in this country not fit to swim in. We've got a lot of challenges to face. And man, I'm telling you, you ought to be attuned to this there is a device in Washington I had to learn about this we didn't have these where I used to be involved in lawmaking called a rider. That is not a person in a cowboy hat with spurs on. Laughter A rider is something you put on a bill that doesn't have much to do with the bill. And normally you put it on the bill because it couldn't stand on its own two feet so it's got to ride along on something that's got feet and legs and independence. And if you stick the rider on it, you know that the rider wouldn't be standing, so it's got to ride to get across the finish line of the law. And my job is to stop as many of those riders as I can. It's a big deal. So I say to you, all of you, if you go back to the beginning, we are blessed. I am grateful. It imposes responsibilities. And the first and foremost of those is to say, what are the big challenges facing us on the brink of a new century and a new millennium? How are we going to be one America across all the lines that divide us? How are we going to keep growing? How are we going to fight the security threats like terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and seize the opportunities of this new world? I'll tell you, if we do what we're trying to do, we'll be doing our job. So I say to you, we need more business support. We've got a lot more business Democrats than we had 6 years ago because we believe you can grow the economy and let people make good profits and still do right by the ordinary citizens of this country and lift the people up who deserve a fair chance. That's what we believe that's what we believe. So again I say, thank you for tonight, but remember those two things We should be grateful, but we should be determined not to let America, her children, and her future down. Thank you, and God bless you. September 04, 1998 Senator Joseph I. Lieberman's Remarks Q. Mr. President, do you have any comments on Senator Lieberman's remarks? The President. I've been briefed on them, and basically I agree with what he said. I've already said that I made a bad mistake, it was indefensible, and I'm sorry about it. So I have nothing else to say except that I can't disagree with anyone else who wants to be critical of what I have already acknowledged was indefensible. Q. Do you think the Senate is the right format for The President. That's not for me to say. That's not for me to say. I don't I've known Senator Lieberman a long time. We've worked together on a lot of things. And I'm not going to get into commenting on that, one way or the other. That's not it wouldn't be an appropriate thing for me to do. Q. But do you think it's helpful for him to make that kind of The President. It's not for me to say. But there's nothing that he or anyone else could say in a personally critical way that I that I don't imagine that I would disagree with, since I have already said it myself, to myself. And I'm very sorry about it. There's nothing else I could say. Q. Mr. President, do you think an official censure by the Senate would be inappropriate? The President. I just don't want to comment on that. I shouldn't be commenting on that while I'm on this trip, and I don't think that my understanding is that was not a decision that was made or advocated clearly yesterday. So I don't want to get into that. If that's not an issue, I don't want to make it, one way or the other. I don't think that's appropriate right now. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. Mr. President, it usually seems to take a visit from you to give the peace process a boost. Will we need to see you again? The President. Well, for the sake of the peace process, I hope not. For my own sake, I hope so. But I hope the next time I come it won't be in aid of the peace process, because I hope it will be institutionalized and off and going. I do think that a lot of progress has been made. I give the Taoiseach a lot of credit, Prime Minister Blair, and the party leaders. I think the statements in the last few days by Gerry Adams and Mr. Trimble's response make me quite hopeful about next week. And then, after that, we'll just have to see where we go from there. Q. Mr. President, do you believe that from what you've heard from political leaders yesterday that David Trimble is now ready to sit down with Gerry Adams in government in Northern Ireland? The President. Well, first of all, they talked about meeting, and I think they need I expect that at some point there will be a meeting, and I think that's a good thing. And then, we'll have to take the next steps. I think that what you want is what we all want is for the agreement to be fully implemented so that all parts of it the decommissioning, the participation in government by everyone who qualifies by vote of the people all parts of it will be fully implemented. And I think that eventually it will get there, and I hope it's sooner rather than later. Q. Mr. President, what were your views of Omagh yesterday? It was a very emotional day. You seemed to work the crowd so well you spent a lot of time meeting those people there yesterday. What were your feelings? The President. Well, first of all, like everyone in the world that knew about it, I was just overwhelmed by the dimension of the tragedy and the random, cruel nature of the violence. And my experience has been, dealing with the families who have suffered a similar fate, is that they know there's nothing you can do to bring their loved ones back or bring their limbs back or give them sight or whatever else the problem may be. But sometimes just listening to people's story and letting them say what they hope will happen next, in many cases yesterday letting them reaffirm their belief in the peace, sometimes that helps. And what I was hoping to do yesterday was to bring the support of the people of the United States as well as my own and Hillary's to the families there and just give them a chance to continue the healing process. I must say I was very, very impressed with the people of the community, who turned out, on the street where the bomb had exploded, in large numbers to say hello to us and to encourage us. And I'm grateful for that. But it was an amazing experience talking to those families in the building there and just listening to them. Q. You were clearly moved by it. The President. Anyone would have been. Q. Mr. President, where do you rank the Northern Ireland peace process among the policy initiatives you've pursued in office? The President. Oh, I don't know about ranking. It was important to me. Once I realized that there was something the United States could do, which probably happened somewhere in late 1991, long before I was elected, I decided I would try. And I just hope it succeeds. I believe that at the end of the cold war, I think the United States has a particular responsibility, that goes beyond my personal passion for the Irish question, to do two things. One is to do whatever we can, wherever we can, to try to minimize the impact of ethnic and religious and tribal and racial conflicts. And we're in this position of responsibility there because of where we find ourselves at the end of the cold war. In addition to that, I think we have a particular responsibility to try to organize the world against the new security threats of the 21st century, the terrorism and narcotraffickers, the potential for the spread of weapons of mass destruction. And I have tried to do that. I don't suspect that either of those jobs will be completely done in 2001 when I leave office, but at least the world will be on the way to having a framework to deal with both the opportunities for peace and the challenges to security. And I think you have to see the Irish question in that context, apart from my personal feelings about it. Because if you, all of you the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the Taoiseach and the Irish party leaders if you're able to make this peace go, as I said in Armagh yesterday, then we can say to the places to the Middle East, we can say in the Aegean, we can say in the Indian subcontinent, we can say in the tribal strife of Africa, "Look at this thing that happened in Northern Ireland. There's the Troubles for 30 years, but there were conflicts for hundreds of years. This can be done." And so the potential impact of resolving this could wash over many more people than just those that live on this island. Military Action Against Terrorist Sites Q. Mr. President, how do you reconcile the peaceful strides you've made in the Northern process with your foreign policy and your reaction to the threat of Islamic militants and the airstrikes on Afghanistan and Sudan? The President. Well, I think you have to, first of all, look at what happened in the Middle East and here. In the Middle East and here, I have worked hard to get people to turn away from terror toward a peace process, not just the Irish parties that had once participated in violence, but in the Middle East it's the same. The PLO has moved away from violence towards the peace process. The problem with the bombings in our Embassies in Africa is that they were carried out by an operation which does not belong to a nation and does not have a claim or a grievance against the particular nation that it wants to resolve so that it can be part of a normal civic life. It is an organization without that kind of political agenda. Its agenda is basically to strike out against the United States, against the West, against the people in the Middle East it doesn't like. And it is funded entirely from private funds under the control of Usama bin Ladin, without the kind of objectives that we see that, even on the darkest days, the Irish parties that were violent had, the PLO had. So it's an entirely different thing. And I think it's quite important that people see it as different, because one of the things that we have to fight against is having the world's narcotraffickers tie up with these multinational or non national global terrorist groups in a way that will provide a threat to every country in the world. It's just an entirely different situation. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. Taoiseach, how important was the President to the developments that took place earlier this week which seemed to have injected a new momentum into the peace process? Prime Minister Ahern. They were immensely important, because even if Omagh never happened and the terrible tragedy that it was, in early September we had to focus back, preparing for the next meeting of the Assembly, for heading on to preparations for the executive North South Council and all of the other aspects of the agreement. And we needed to focus very clearly on those. And what the President's visit has done is, it has got the parties to, I think, move what might have taken weeks and months over a very short period, because they looked at the agenda that was set before us, and they've made the moves. Now, there are clearly more moves to be made. And I think what the President said in Armagh last night, we would totally agree with in the Irish Government, because I think he's laying down for us and for all of us that there is a path to follow. If we are sensible, if we're brave, and then we follow that path, the reward is peace and stability and confidence. If we don't, well, then the future is as gloomy as the past. And I just believe that this visit at this time, it has been immensely important. It's given confidence to us all, I think, to move on. It's given confidence, I think, to the Unionist Party and Sinn Fein to make moves that are brave and efficient to the process. And we're very grateful not only for this visit, not only for the last visit, but the fact that this President of the United States has given us an enormous amount of time, a huge amount of support, and an enormous amount of encouragement to move forward. And we're very grateful for that. Q. How will history judge his role, President Clinton's role in the Northern Ireland peace process? Prime Minister Ahern. Well, I always say, President Carter and U.S. Presidents and successive Presidents and administrations have taken an interest in affairs, and a supportive interest. But the facts are, never before have we had such intense and sustained contact from the United States President, and that in a period when we desperately need it to be able to move forward. I said, I think, in Washington last March that maybe it was the luck of the Irish, but we don't take it for granted, and we're very grateful for it. September 03, 1998 Thank you. Lord Mayor Alderdice, First Minister Trimble, Deputy First Minister Mallon, Mr. Prime Minister to the members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the citizens of Belfast and Northern Ireland, it is an honor for me to be back here with the First Lady, our delegation, including two members of our Cabinet, distinguished Members of Congress, our Ambassador, and Consul General, and of course, the best investment we ever made in Northern Ireland, Senator Mitchell. I want to begin very briefly by thanking Prime Minister Blair and echoing his comments about the thoughts and prayers we have with the passengers and families of the Swissair flight that crashed this morning near Nova Scotia, Canada. The flight was en route to Geneva from New York, and as I speak, Canadians are conducting an extensive search operation. We hope for the best, and we are deeply grieved that this has occurred. I would like to also begin just by simply saying thank you to the leaders who have spoken before me, to David Trimble and Seamus Mallon to the party leaders and the other members of the Assembly whom I met earlier today to Tony Blair and, in his absence, to Prime Minister Ahern and to their predecessors with whom I have worked, Prime Ministers Bruton and Reynolds and Major. This has been a magic thing to see unfold, this developing will for peace among the people of Northern Ireland. Three years ago, when Hillary and I were here, I could see it in the eyes of the people in Belfast and Derry. We saw, as Seamus Mallon said, the morning light begin to dawn after Ireland's long darkness on Good Friday with the leaders' commitment to solve your problems with words, not weapons. It lit the whole sky a month later when you voted so overwhelmingly for the peace agreement. Now this Assembly is the living embodiment of the promise of that covenant. Together, people and leaders are moving Northern Ireland from the deep freeze of despair to the warm sunlight of peace. For 30 long years the Troubles took a terrible toll Too many died too many families grieved. Every family was denied the quiet blessings of a normal life, in the constant fear that a simple trip to the store could be devastated by bombs and bullets, in the daily disruptions of roadblocks and searches, in the ominous presence of armed soldiers always on patrol, in neighborhoods demarcated by barbed wire, guarded gates, and 20 foot fences. No wonder this question was painted on a Belfast wall Is there life before death? Now, at last, your answer is yes. From here on, the destiny of Northern Ireland is in the hands of its people and its representatives. From farming to finance, education to health care, this new Assembly has the opportunity and the obligation to forge the future. The new structures of cooperation you have approved can strengthen the quality of your ties to both London and Dublin, based on the benefits of interdependence, not the burdens of division or dominance. In peace you can find new prosperity, and I heard your leaders seeking it. Since the 1994 cease fire, the number of passengers coming to and from your international airport and ferryport has increased more than 15 percent. The number of hotel rooms under construction has doubled. And in the wake of the Good Friday agreement, you are projected to receive record levels of investment, foreign and domestic, bringing new jobs, opportunity, and hope. The United States has supported our quest for peace, starting with Irish Americans, whose commitment to this cause is passionate, profound, and enduring. It has been one of the great privileges of my Presidency to work with the peacemakers, Protestant and Catholic leaders here in the North, Prime Minister Blair, and Prime Minister Ahern. Our Congress, as you can see if you had visited with our delegation, has reached across its own partisan divide for the sake of peace in Northern Ireland. I hope some of it will infect their consciousness as they go back home. Laughter They have voted extraordinary support for the International Fund for Ireland, the 100 million over the past 5 years. I am delighted that there are both Republican and Democratic Members with me today, as well as Jim Lyons, my Special Adviser for Economic Initiatives in Northern Ireland, and Senator Mitchell, whom you welcomed so warmly and justly a few moments ago. In the months and years ahead, America will continue to walk the road of renewal with you. We will help to train your Assembly members, support NGO's that are building civil societies from the grassroots, invest in our common future through education, promote cross border and cross community understanding, create with you microcredit facilities to help small businesses get off the ground, support the trade and investment that will benefit both our people. I thank the Secretary of Education for being with us today, and the Secretary of Commerce who led a trade mission here in June, already showing results. Chancellor Brown takes the next important step with his mission to 10 American cities next month. As you work to change the face and future of Northern Ireland, you can count on America. Of course, for all we can and will do, the future still is up to you. You have agreed to bury the violence of the past now you have to build a peaceful and prosperous future. To the members of the Assembly, you owe it to your country to nurture the best in your people by showing them the best in yourselves. Difficult, sometimes wrenching decisions lie ahead, but they must be made. And because you have agreed to share responsibilities, whenever possible you must try to act in concert, not conflict to overcome obstacles, not create them to rise above petty disputes, not fuel them. The Latin word for assembly, "concilium," is the root of the word "reconciliation." The spirit of reconciliation must be rooted in all you do. There is another quality you will need, too. Our only Irish Catholic President, John Kennedy, loved to quote a certain British Protestant Prime Minister. "Courage," Winston Churchill said, "is rightly esteemed as the first of all human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others." Courage and reconciliation were the heart of your commitment to peace. Now, as you go forward, courage and reconciliation must drive this Assembly in very specific ways to decommission the weapons of war that are obsolete in Northern Ireland at peace to move forward with the formation of an executive council to adapt your police force so that it earns the confidence, respect, and support of all the people to end street justice, because defining crime, applying punishment, and enforcing the law must be left to the people's elected representatives, the courts, and the police to pursue early release for prisoners whose organizations have truly abandoned violence and to help them find a productive, constructive place in society to build a more just society where human rights are birthrights and where every citizen receives equal protection and equal treatment under the law. These must be the benchmarks of the new Northern Ireland. I must say, the words and the actions of your leaders, this week, and their willingness to meet are hopeful reflections of the spirit of courage and reconciliation that must embrace all the citizens. Also hopeful are the activities of the community leaders here today, the nongovernmental organizations, those in business, law, and academia. And especially I salute the women who have been such a powerful force for peace. Hillary had a wonderful day yesterday at your Vital Voices conference. And as she said, we are pledged to follow up on the partnerships established there. All your voices are vital. The example you set among your neighbors, the work you do in your communities, the standards you demand from your elected officials All these will have a very, very large impact on your future. And to the people of Northern Ireland I say it is your will for peace, after all, that has brought your country to this moment of hope. Do not let it slip away. It will not come again in our lifetime. Give your leaders the support they need to make the hard, but necessary decisions. With apologies to Mr. Yeats, help them to prove that things can come together, that the center can hold. You voted for a future different from the past. Now you must prove that the passion for reason and moderation can trump the power of extremes. There will be hard roads ahead. The terror in Omagh was not the last bomb of the Troubles it was the opening shot of a vicious attack on the peace. The question is not whether there will be more bombs and more attempts to undo with violence the verdict of the ballot box. There well may be. The question is not whether tempers will flare and debates will be divisive. They certainly will be. The question is How will you react to it all, to the violence? How will you deal with your differences? Can the bad habits and brute forces of yesterday break your will for tomorrow's peace? That is the question. In our so called modern world, from Bosnia to the Middle East, from Rwanda to Kosovo, from the Indian subcontinent to the Aegean, people still hate each other over their differences of race, tribe, and religion, in a fruitless struggle to find meaning in life in who we are not, rather than asking God to help us become what we ought to be. From here on, in Northern Ireland, you have said only one dividing line matters, the line between those who embrace peace and those who would destroy it, between those energized by hope and those paralyzed by hatred, between those who choose to build up and those who want to keep on tearing down. So much more unites you than divides you the values of faith and family, work and community, the same land and heritage, the same love of laughter and language. You aspire to the same things to live in peace and security, to provide for your loved ones, to build a better life and pass on brighter possibilities to your children. These are not Catholic or Protestant dreams, these are human dreams, to be realized best together. The American people, as the Lord Mayor noted, know from our own experience about bigotry and violence rooted in race and religion. Still today, we struggle with the challenge of building one nation out of our increasing diversity. But it is worth the effort. We know we are wiser, stronger, and happier when we stand on common ground. And we know you will be, too. And so, members of the Assembly, citizens of Belfast, people of Northern Ireland, remember that in the early days of the American Republic, the Gaelic term for America was Inis Fa'il, Island of Destiny. Today, Americans see you as Inis Fa'il, and your destiny is peace. America is with you. The entire world is with you. May God be with you and give you strength for the good work ahead. Thank you very much. September 03, 1998 Thank you very much. Mr. Prime Minister, Mrs. Blair, Secretary Mowlam, Ambassador Lader, Senator Mitchell to the people of Omagh. Hillary and I are honored to be in your presence. We come to tell you that, a long way away, the American people have mourned the loss of 28 innocents and all those who were injured. For those victims and family members who have come here today to say a word to us, we thank you for your presence. To all of you, we thank you for standing up in the face of such a soul searing loss and restating your determination to walk the road of peace. We came here, knowing, as the Prime Minister said, that words are not very good at a time like this, simply to express our sympathy with the good people of this community, especially with the victims and their families, and again to support your determined refusal to let a cowardly crime rob you of the future you have chosen. What happened here on August 15th was so incredibly unreasonable, so shocking to the conscience of every decent person in this land, that it has perversely had exactly the reverse impact that the people who perpetrated this act intended. By killing Catholics and Protestants, young and old, men, women, and children, even those about to be born, people from Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, and abroad by doing all that in an aftermath of what the people have voted for in Northern Ireland, it galvanized, strengthened, and humanized the impulse to peace. Even more than when we were here 3 years ago, people are saying to me "It's high time that the few stop ruining the lives of the many high time that those who hate stop bullying those who hope high time to stop the lilt of laughter and language being drowned out by bombs and guns and sirens high time to stop yesterday's nightmares from killing tomorrow's dreams." All I wanted to say today is that nothing any of us can say will erase the pain that those of you who have experienced loss know now. Just a few days ago, we had to Hillary and I did go to the airport to meet the plane bringing home the bodies of the Americans who were killed in the Embassy bombing in Africa, and to go from table to table to meet their families. There is no word to explain a mindless act of terror that grabs the life of an innocent. But I think the only way to truly redeem such a terrible loss is to make the memories of the innocents monuments to peace. We cannot brook a descent into terror. Northern Ireland is walking away from it. Life will never be the same here, but it will go on. Since the bombings, one of the victims, Nicola Emory, has given birth to a healthy baby. I pray that baby will never know an act of terror and will live a long, full life in the 21st century, proud of a hometown that learned, through tragedy, the meaning of community. I'd like to close my remarks by reading to you from a letter that our Ambassador in Dublin received from a young man named Michael Gallagher from County Mayo after this happened. He wrote to the American Ambassador "You don't know me. You may not even get this letter. But after yesterday's tragedy, I just wanted to do something. I am 29 years old, an Irishman to the very core of my being. But throughout my life, there has never been peace on this island. I never realized how precious peace could be until my wife, Martina, gave birth to our daughter, Ashleen, 20 months ago. We don't want her to grow up in a society that is constantly waiting for the next atrocity, the next bunch of young lives snuffed out in a sea of hatred and fear. Ashleen's name means vision' or dream,' and we have a dream of what Ireland might be like when she grows up. It could be a place where dreams come true, where people would achieve things never imagined before, where people would not be afraid of their neighbors. Hopefully, this can happen. But after yesterday, one has to wonder. We know America has done much for Ireland. All we ask is that you keep trying, even when times are hard. Please keep Ireland in mind because Ashleen and all Irish children need to be able to dream." So we came here today to say we grieve for your loss, but to pledge to that little Ashleen in Mayo and Nicola's newborn here in Omagh that we will work to build this peace, to make it a place where children can dream, to redeem the loss of innocence from the madness of people who must fail so that your life can go on. Thank you for letting us come here, and God bless you. September 02, 1998 President Yeltsin. Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, the official visit of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, to Russia is coming to an end. We have had intensive, productive negotiations. We have managed to discuss a wide range of topical issues. I would like to emphasize the exchanges were sincere and keen. The dialog was marked by the spirit of mutual understanding. Responsibility of our two countries for maintaining and strengthening peace and stability is obvious. That is why we have paid special attention to the discussion of the entire spectrum of security issues in the world. The discussion has included the implementation of international and bilateral treaties and agreements concerning the weapons of mass destruction, as well as the elaboration of common approaches to dealing with the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation and their delivery means. Unfortunately, this is not the only major task the humanity struggles to resolve. That is why President Clinton and I have discussed global threats and challenges. Our positions on this issue have coincided, and this closeness of approaches is reflected in the joint statement on common security changes on the threshold of the 21st century. I consider this document to be a significant step towards strengthening strategic partnership between Russia and the United States. We have also had substantial talks on the most topical international issues. And there are quite a few such issues. I'll put it frankly Here our approaches have not always completely coincided. Russia rejects the use of power methods as a matter of principle. Conflicts of today have no military solutions, be it in Kosovo or around Iraq or Afghanistan or others. Also we do not accept the NATO centrism idea for the new European security architecture. Nevertheless, our talks have been conducive to greater mutual understanding on these issues. Of course, we could not do without discussing economy problems. Current dimensions of our economic relations should be brought up to a qualitatively new level. We shall have to suffer through much blood, sweat, and tears before new forms of business cooperation, worthy of our two great powers, are found, the forms that would be able to withstand volatile circumstances. There exist quite a few opportunities for this. These are mentioned in our joint statement on economic issues. In conclusion, I would like to say and I hope Bill will agree with me the summit was a success. This meeting, the 15th in a row, confirmed once again, when Presidents of Russia and the United States join their efforts, no issue is too big for them. Thank you for your kind attention. President Clinton. Thank you very much, Mr. President, for your hospitality and for giving Hillary and me and our team the chance to come to Moscow again. Over the past 5 years, I have been in this great, historic city in times of bright hope and times of uncertainty. But throughout, I have witnessed the remarkable transformation of this nation to democracy and to a more open economy. We all know that this meeting comes at a challenging time for the Russian people. But I don't believe anyone could ever have doubted that there would be obstacles on Russia's road to a vibrant economy and a strong democracy. I don't also believe that anyone can seriously doubt the determination of the Russian people to build a brighter, better, stronger future. Russia is important to America. Our economies are connected. We share values, interests, and friendship. We share security interests and heavy security responsibilities. In our discussions, President Yeltsin and I spoke about Russia's options for stabilizing its economy and restoring confidence. I reaffirmed America's strong view that Russia can move beyond today's crisis and create growth and good jobs but only if it carries forward with its transformation, with a strong and fair tax system, greater rule of law, dealing forthrightly with financial institutions, having regulation that protects against abuses, and yes, developing an appropriate safety net for people who are hurt during times of change. President Yeltsin reaffirmed his commitment to reform, and I believe that is the right commitment. The answer to the present difficulties is to finish the job that has been begun, not to stop it in midstream or to reverse course. This is a view I will reaffirm when I meet today with leaders of the Duma and the Federation Council. America and the international community are, I am convinced, ready to offer further assistance if Russia stays with the path of reform. We discussed also at length common security concerns. We've reached an important agreement to increase the safety of all our people, an arrangement under which our countries will give each other continuous information on worldwide launches of ballistic missiles or spacelaunch vehicles detected by our respective early warning systems. This will reduce the possibility of nuclear war by mistake or accident and give us information about missile activity by other countries. We've also agreed to remove from each of our nuclear weapons programs approximately 50 tons of plutonium, enough to make literally thousands of nuclear devices. Once converted, this plutonium can never again be used to make weapons that become lethal in the wrong hands. Our experts will begin meeting right away to finalize an implementation plan by the end of this year. I'd like to say in passing, I'm very grateful for the support this initiative received in our Congress. We have four Members of Congress here with us today, and I especially thank Senator Domenici for his interest in this issue. Next let me say I look forward to and hope very much that the Russian Duma will approve START II, so that we can negotiate a START III agreement that would cut our levels of arsenals down to one fifth of cold war levels. I think that would be good for our mutual security and good for the Russian economy. In recent months Russia has taken important steps to tighten its export controls on weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them, and to penalize offenders. This week Russia barred three companies from transactions with Iran. Today we agreed to intensify our cooperation by creating seven working groups on export controls to further strengthen Russia's ability to halt the spread of dangerous weapons. Also, we renewed our commitment to persuade India and Pakistan to reverse their arms race. And we pledged to accelerate international negotiations to establish a tough inspection regime for the Biological Weapons Convention. I don't believe it's possible to overstate the importance of this initiative for the next 20 years. Russia and the United States share a commitment to combat terrorism. We agree that there is no possible justification for terrorism. It is murder, plain and simple. Today we instructed our Foreign Ministers to develop a plan to deepen our cooperation against this danger to our own people and to innocent people around the world. We agree on the importance of further strengthening the partnership between NATO and Russia through practical cooperation. We plan to accelerate talks on adapting the treaty that limits conventional military forces in Europe, the CFE, to reflect changes in Europe since the treaty was signed in 1990, with an aim to complete an adapted treaty by the 1999 summit of the OSCE. Finally, we discussed our common foreign policy agenda, including, first and foremost, the need to continue to strengthen the peace in Bosnia and to look for a peaceful solution in Kosovo, where the humanitarian situation is now quite grave. We agreed that the Serbian Government must stop all repressive actions against civilian populations, allow relief organizations immediate and full access to those in need, and pursue an interim settlement. President Yeltsin and I also agree that Iraq must comply fully with all relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions imposed after the gulf war and, in particular, must agree to allow the international weapons inspectors to again pursue their mission without obstruction or delay. Far from advancing the day sanctions are lifted, Iraq's most recent efforts to undermine the inspectors will perpetuate sanctions, prevent Iraq from acquiring the resources it needs to rebuild its military, and keep Iraq's economy under tight international control. On energy and the environment, we reiterated our commitment to the emissions reductions targets and the market based mechanisms established at Kyoto to slow the dangerous process of global warming. We agreed that multiple pipeline routes were essential to bring energy from the Caspian to international markets and to advance our common security and commercial interests. This has been a full agenda, a productive summit. Again, let me say that I have great confidence that the people of this great nation can move through this present difficult moment to continue and complete the astonishing process of democratization and modernization that I have been privileged to witness at close hand over the last 5 1 2 years. Again, Mr. President, thank you for your hospitality. And I suppose we should answer a few questions. Russian official. Now we will have a Q and A session, so the work will proceed in the way that the U.S. and Russian press corps could ask questions in turn. Using the privilege of the host, I will give the floor to the representatives of ORT television. Summit Goals Russia U.S. Relations Q. A question to both Presidents. Prior to meeting, many experts, politicians, and public at large believed that your meeting is futile, nobody needs it, no results will be produced due to the known difficulties both in Russia and America. I understand now you're trying to make the case it's the other way around, the situation is different. So what was the psychological atmosphere to your talks, bearing in mind this disbelief in the success, this skeptical approach? And second, are we, Russia and U.S., partners right now or still contenders? And today, bidding farewell, Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton, are they still friends? Thank you. President Yeltsin. I will start with your last question. Yes, we stay friends and the atmosphere, since the beginning of the talks until the end, was a friendly one. I would say it was very considerate, and there were no discontents during the talks that we had. And this brings my conclusion that since we did not have any differences, in my opinion, there will be no differences also in our activities, in what we do bilaterally. Of course, that goes without saying. This is very logical. Now, in response to those skeptical observers who alleged, and continue to do so, that they don't believe, I've been always saying no, on the contrary, we need to repeat it we do believe we do that in order to remove the tension. And each time, having those meetings, we've been able to do something to alleviate the tension. This is what really matters. We've been doing that, removing that tension. And this time, again, we have removed part of the tension one more time. President Clinton. Well, first of all, I think it's important to answer your question of what happened from the point of view of the Russian people and then from the point of view of the American people. You ask if we're still friends. The answer to that is yes. You ask if Russia and the United States have a partnership. I think the plain answer to that is yes, even though we don't always agree on every issue. I can tell you from my point of view this was a successful meeting on the national security issues, because I think establishing this early warning information sharing is important, and I know that the destruction of this huge volume of plutonium is important. And it also might be important to the Russian economy. It can be an economic plus as well as a national security plus. Now, on the domestic economic issues, from the point of view of America, it was important to me to come here just to say to the President and to his team and to the Duma leaders I will see later and the Federation Council leaders that I know this is a difficult time, but there is no shortcut to developing a system that will have the confidence of investors around the world. These are not American rules or anybody else's rules. These are in a global economy, you have to be able to get money in from outside your country and keep the money in your country invested in your country. And if the reform process can be completed, then I for one would be strongly supportive of greater assistance to Russia from the United States and the other big economic powers, because I think we have a very strong vested interest in seeing an economically successful Russia that is a full partner across the whole range of issues in the world. I also think it's good for preserving Russia's democracy and freedom. So, from my point of view, saying that we support reform and saying we will support those who continue it was in itself a reason to come. From Russia's point of view, I think knowing that the United States and others want to back this process and will do so and at least having someone else say, "There is a light at the end of this tunnel there is an end to this process and it could come quickly if these laws are passed in the Duma and the things that the President has asked for already are done and the decisions are made well," I think that is worth something apart from the specific agreements that we have made. But my answer to you is that, in foreign policy and security, this meeting produced something. Whether it produces real economic benefits for the people of Russia depends upon what happens now in Russia. But at least everyone knows that we're prepared to do our part and to support this process. President Yeltsin. I would like to add just for one second, please, just two words here. We have put it on paper. We have decided to set up, on the territory of Russia, a joint center of control over the missile launches. For the first time, this has been done. This is exceptionally important. President Clinton. I agree with that. Press Secretary Mike McCurry. Our tradition questions from our wire services. Terence Hunt of the Associated Press. Russian and American Economies Q. President Yeltsin, yesterday President Clinton spoke of the painful steps that Russia will have to take and the need to play by the rules of international economics. What difficult steps are you prepared to take? And are you committed to play by these rules of international economics? And to President Clinton, the world stock market seems very fragile right now. How can the United States withstand all these outside pressures? President Clinton. Do you want me to go first? I think the answer to your question about what we can do that's best for our economy is really twofold. The first thing we have to do is to do our very best to make the right decisions at home. You know, we have to stay with the path of discipline that has brought us this far in the last 5 1 2 years, and we have to make the investments and decisions that we know will produce growth, over the long run, for the American economy. Whether it's in education or science and technology, we have to do the things that send the signal that we understand how the world economy works and we intend to do well in it. But the most important thing is sticking with sound economic policy. Now, in addition to that, it is important that more and more Americans, without regard to party, understand that we are in a global economy, and it's been very good to the United States over the last 5 1 2 years about 30 percent of our growth has come from exports but that we, at this particular moment in history, because of our relative economic strength, have an extra obligation to try to build a system for the 21st century where every person in every country who is willing to work hard has a chance to get a just reward for it. And that means that we have to in my opinion, that means that we have to continue to contribute our fair share to the International Monetary Fund. It means that we have to do everything we can to support our friends in Russia who believe that we should continue to reform. It means that Secretary Rubin's upcoming meeting with the Finance Minister of Japan, former Prime Minister Miyazawa, is profoundly important. Unless Japan begins to grow again, it's going to be difficult for Russia and other countries to do what they need to do. It means, in short, that America must maintain a leadership role of active involvement in trying to build an economic system that rewards people who do the right thing. And that's in our best interest. So I think this is a terribly important thing. The volatility in the world markets, including in our stock market, I think is to be expected under these circumstances. The right thing to do is to try to restore growth in the economies of the world where there isn't enough growth now and to continually examine whether the institutions we have for dealing with problems are adequate to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. And we are aggressively involved in both those activities. President Yeltsin. Naturally, we face problems basically of our own. We have not been able to do many things over the past time when we started our reforms. And still we need to conclude our reforms, to bring them to completion, and consequently to get results. We are not saying that we count solely on the support from outside. No. One more time, I will reiterate this No. So let your mass media not spread the word to the effect that allegedly we would count solely on the support from the West, and to this end we have gathered together here by no means. What we need from the United States is political support to the effect that the United States is in favor of reforms in Russia. This is what we really need, and then all the investors who would like to come to the Russian reformed market will do so, will come with their investments. And this is what we really need now. This is what is lacking, investments. This is first and foremost. Certainly, we ought to fight our expenditures pattern and mismanagement. This is the second issue which, to us, is one of the most important issues. And we have been adopting, accordingly, the measures which need to be taken, like we have adopted the program of stabilization measures in other words, those measures which will result in stabilization of our reforms. Stabilization I believe that such measures and such a program will work, promptly over the coming 2 years, it will produce results. Russia U.S. Relations Q. I'd like to pose a question to the President of the United States, Mr. Clinton. One gets the impression that some politicians in the United States right now like to somehow frighten the people with Russia. On the other hand, we are aware of the fact that you are never afraid of Russia, yourself, and you did everything possible so that people in the U.S. would not be afraid of Russia. Now, on the results of these talks, tell us please your belief what is the basis of your belief that our country will get back to its feet and that Russian U.S. relations have promising prospects? Thank you. President Clinton. Well, my belief that Russian U.S. relations have promising prospects has been supported by the agreements we have made in the security and foreign policy areas. My belief that Russia will get back on its feet is based on my observation that, in Russian history, every time outsiders counted the Russian people out, they turned out to be wrong. And this is a very big challenge, but, I mean, a country that rebuffed Napoleon and Hitler can surely adjust to the realities of the global marketplace. Now, what has to be done? The reason I wanted to come here and, to be fair, let me back up and say, I don't think there are many people in America who are afraid of Russia anymore. I think there are some people in America who question whether I should come at this moment of great economic and political tension for the country, but I don't think it's because they want something bad to happen to Russia. I think, by and large, the American people wish Russia well and want things to go well for Russia and like the fact that we are partners in Bosnia and that we've reduced our nuclear arsenals so much and that we've reduced our defense establishment and that we've found other ways to cooperate, in space for example. I think most Americans like this very, very much. So let me go back to the economic question. I believe whether you succeed and how long it takes you to succeed in restoring real growth to the Russian economy depends upon President Yeltsin's ability to persuade the Duma to support his formation of a Government which will pursue a path of reform with a genuine sensitivity to the personal dislocation of the people who have been hurt. And here's where I think the World Bank and other institutions can come in and perhaps help deal with some of the fallout, if you will, of the reform process. But I think, if other political forces in Russia try to force the President to abandon reform in midstream or even reverse it, what I think will happen is even less money will come into Russia and even more economic hardship will result. I believe that because that is, it seems to me, the unwavering experience of every other country. That does not mean you should not have a social safety net. It does not mean you have to make the same domestic decisions that the United States or Great Britain or France or Sweden or any other country has made. You have to form your own relationship with this new economic reality. But I still believe that unless there is a manifest commitment to reform, the economy will not get better. So I support President Yeltsin's commitment in that regard. And I think my conviction that it will get better is based on my reading of your history. How long it will take to get better depends a lot more on you and what happens here than anything else we outsiders can do, although if there is a clear movement toward reform, I'll do everything I can to accelerate outside support of all kinds. Press Secretary McCurry. Lori Santos, United Press International. President's Effectiveness Q. Sir, you were just speaking of the challenges that we face as a nation. And what has the reaction since your admission of a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky caused you any given you any cause for concern that you may not be as effective as you should be in leading the country? President Clinton. No, I've actually been quite heartened by the reaction of the American people and leaders throughout the world about it. I have acknowledged that I made a mistake, said that I regretted it, asked to be forgiven, spent a lot of very valuable time with my family in the last couple of weeks, and said I was going back to work. I believe that's what the American people want me to do. And based on my conversations with leaders around the world, I think that's what they want me to do, and that is what I intend to do. As you can see from what we're discussing here, there are very large issues that will affect the future of the American people in the short run and over the long run. There are large issues that have to be dealt with now in the world and at home. And so I have been quite encouraged by what I think the message from the American people has been and what I know the message from leaders around the world has been. And I'm going to do my best to continue to go through this personal process in an appropriate way but to do my job, to do the job I was hired to do. And I think it very much needs to be done right now. Russia and NATO Expansion Q. Boris Nikolayevich, this question has to do with the relationship between Russia and NATO. I understand you had time to discuss this issue with the U.S. President. It's known that the next NATO summit will take place in Washington, where important decisions will be taken regarding the European security architecture. How do you think this relation should evolve in the future? President Yeltsin. Yes, we have discussed with President Clinton the question concerning the relationship between Russia and NATO. We're not running away from the position which has been that we are against NATO expanding eastward. We believe this is a blunder, a big mistake, and one day, this will be a historic error. Therefore, at this point in time, what we necessarily would like to do is to improve relations so that there be no confrontation. Therefore, we have signed an agreement between Russia and NATO. And in accordance with that agreement we want to do our job. However, no way shall we allow anybody to transgress that agreement, bypass that agreement, or generally speaking, put it aside. No, this will not happen. And naturally, we shall participate in the Warsaw meeting, and there we shall very closely follow the vector of NATO and what they intend to do in regards to, so to say, deploying their forces and their power. We still are in favor of being cautious with regards to NATO. We don't have any intentions to move towards the west, ourselves. We don't intend to create additional forces. We're not doing that, and we're not planning to do that. This is what really matters. President Clinton. I would like to say one word about that. We obviously, President Yeltsin and I, have a disagreement about whether it was appropriate for NATO to take on new members or not. But I think there is a larger reality here where we are in agreement, and I would like to emphasize it. Russia has made historic commitments in the last few years to essentially redefine its greatness, not in terms of the territorial dominance of its neighbors but, instead, of constructive leadership in the region and in the world. The expansion of NATO, therefore, should be seen primarily as nations interested in working together to deal with common security problems, not to be ready to repel expected invasions. And if you look at what the NATO members will be discussing next year, they're talking about how they can deal with regional security challenges, like in Bosnia and Kosovo, both of which one of which we would never we would not have solved the Bosnia war, or ended it, had it not been for the leadership of Russia and the partnership between NATO and Russia. It simply would not have happened in the way it did, in a way that reinforced harmony in the region. Similarly, we have got to work together in Kosovo to prevent another Bosnia from occurring. If we have problems with terrorism or with the spread of chemical or biological weapons, they will be problems we all have in common. That's why you have two dozen nations, that are not NATO members, a part of our Partnership For Peace, because they know that nationstates in the future are going to have common security problems and they will be stronger if they work together. And that's why I was especially proud of the charter that Russia and NATO signed. I intend to honor it. I intend to build on it. And I hope that within a few years we'll see that this partnership is a good thing and continues to be a good thing and brings us closer together rather than driving us apart. Press Secretary McCurry. Larry McQuillan, Reuters. Russia's Political Situation President's August 17 Address Q. President Yeltsin, do you see any circumstance in which you could accept someone other than Mr. Chernomyrdin to be your Prime Minister? And if you can't accept that, does that mean you're prepared to dissolve the Duma if they refuse to confirm him? And Mr. President, another Lewinsky question. You know, there have been some who have expressed disappointment that you didn't offer a formal apology the other night when you spoke to the American people. Are you do you feel you need to offer an apology? And in retrospect now, with some distance, do you have any feeling that perhaps the tone of your speech was something that didn't quite convey the feelings that you had, particularly your comments in regard to Mr. Starr? President Yeltsin. Well, I must say, we will witness quite a few events for us to be able to achieve all those results. That's all. Laughter President Clinton. That ought to be my answer, too. That was pretty good. Laughter Well, to your second question, I think I can almost reiterate what I said in response to the first question. I think the question of the tone of the speech and people's reaction to it is really a function of I can't comment on that. I read it the other day again, and I thought it was clear that I was expressing my profound regret to all who were hurt and to all who were involved, and my desire not to see any more people hurt by this process and caught up in it. And I was commenting that it seemed to be something that most reasonable people would think had consumed a disproportionate amount of America's time, money, and resources and attention, and was now continued to involve more and more people. And that's what I tried to say. And all I wanted to say was I believe it's time for us to now go back to the work of the country and give the people their Government back and talk about and think about and work on things that will affect the American people today and in the future. That's all I meant to say, and that's what I believe, and that's what I intend to do. September 01, 1998 Thank you very much. First I'd like to thank Maxim Safonov for that fine introduction and for his very encouraging remarks. Rector Torkunov, Minister Primakov, to all the members of the American delegation. We have Secretary of State Albright Secretary of Commerce Daley Secretary of Energy Richardson National Security Adviser Berger our Ambassador, Jim Collins and five distinguished Members of the United States Congress here, Senator Domenici, Senator Bingaman, Representatives Hoyer, King, and Deutsch. I think their presence here should speak louder than any words I could say that America considers our relationship with Russia to be important. It is a relationship of friendship, of mutual responsibility, and of commitment to the future. We are all honored to be here today, and we thank you for your welcome. On this first day of school across both our countries, students are resuming their studies, including their study of history. At this critical, surely historic, moment, let me start with a few words about what I believe the past can teach us as we and, especially, as the Russian people face the challenges of the present and the future. Two hundred and twenty two years ago, we Americans declared our freedom from the tyranny of King George of England. We set out to govern ourselves. The road has not often or certainly not always been easy. First, we fought a very long war for independence. Then it took more than 10 years to devise a Constitution that worked. Then in 1814, we went to war with England again. They invaded our Capital City and burned the President's house, the White House. Then in 1861, we began our bloodiest war ever, a civil war, fought over the conflicts of slavery. It almost divided our country forever, but instead we were reunited, and we abolished slavery. In the 1930's, before World War II, our country sank into an enormous depression with 25 percent of our people unemployed and more than one third of our people living in poverty. Well, you know the rest. We were allies in World War II, and after World War II we were adversaries. But it was a time of great prosperity for the American people, even though there were tense and difficult moments in the last 50 years. The larger point I want to make, as Russia goes through this time of extreme difficulty, is that over the life of our democracy we have had many intense, even bitter debates about what are the proper relations between people of different races or religions or backgrounds, over the gap between rich and poor, over crime and punishment, even over war and peace. We Americans have fought and argued with each other, as we do even today, but we have preserved our freedom by remembering the fundamental values enshrined in our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence, by continuing to respect the dignity of every man, woman, and child, to tolerate those with different ideas and beliefs than our own, to demand equality of opportunity, to give everyone a chance to make the most of his or her life. Russia's great ally in World War II, our President, Franklin Roosevelt, said that democracy is a never ending seeking for better things. For Americans, that means, in good times and bad, we seek to widen the circle of opportunity, to deepen the meaning of our freedom, to build a stronger national community. Now, what does all that got to do with Russia in 1998? Your history is much longer than ours and so rich with accomplishment, from military victories over Napoleon and Hitler to the literary achievements of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pasternak, and so many others to great achievements in art, music, dance, medicine, science, space flight. Yet for all your rich, long history, it was just 7 years ago that Russia embarked on its own quest for democracy, liberty, and free markets just 7 years ago a journey that is uniquely your own and must be guided by your own vision of Russia's democratic destiny. Now you are at a critical point on your journey. There are severe economic pressures and serious hardships which I discussed in my meetings with your leaders this morning. The stakes are enormous. Every choice Russia makes today may have consequences for years and years to come. Given the facts before you, I have to tell you that I do not believe there are any painless solutions, and indeed, an attempt to avoid difficult solutions may only prolong and worsen the present challenges. First, let me make a couple of points. The experience of our country over the last several years, and especially in the last 6 years, proves that the challenges of the global economy are very great, but so are its rewards. The Russian people have met tremendous challenges in the past. You can do it here. You can build a prosperous future. You can build opportunity and jobs for all the people of this land who are willing to work for them if you stand strong and complete, not run from but complete the transformation you began 7 years ago. The second point I want to make is the rest of the world has a very large stake in your success. Today, about a quarter of the world's people are struggling with economic challenges that are profound, the people of your country, the people in Japan, who have had no economic growth for 5 years it's still a very wealthy country, but when they don't have any growth, it's harder for all other countries that trade with them who aren't so wealthy, to grow other countries in Asia. And now we see, when there are problems in Russia or in Japan or questions about the economy of China, you see all across the world, the stock market in Latin America drops, you see the last 2 days, we've had big drops in the American stock market. What does that say? Well, among other things, it says, whether we like it or not, we must build the future together, because, whether we like it or not, we are going to be affected by what we do. We will be affected by what you do you will be affected by what we do. We might as well do it together and make the most of it. Now, in terms of what has happened in America, obviously it's always more enjoyable when our stock market goes up than when it goes down. But I have talked to our Secretary of the Treasury about this several times since yesterday. I want to reiterate the point that I think is important for Russia, for America, for every country We believe our fundamental economic policy is sound we believe our people are working at record rates and we are determined to stay on a path of fiscal discipline that brought us to where we are. I think that, wherever there are markets, there will always be changes in those markets. But we must attempt to move in the right direction. And that's what I want to talk to you about today How can we move in the right direction? When I look at all the young people here today and I have read about you and your background young people from all over Russia, seizing the possibilities of freedom to chart new courses for yourselves and your nation, making a difference by building businesses from modest loans and innovative ideas, by taking technologies created for weapons and applying them to human needs, by finding creative government solutions to complex problems, by improving medical care and fighting disease, by publishing courageous journalism, exposing abuses of power, producing literature and art and scholarship, changing the way people see their own lives, organizing citizens to fight for justice and human rights and a cleaner environment, reaching out to the world in this room today, there are young people doing all those things. That should give you great reason to hope. You are at the forefront of building a modern Russia. You are a new generation. You do represent the future of your dreams. Your efforts today will not only ensure better lives for yourselves but for your children and generations that follow. I think it is important to point out, too, that when Russia chose freedom, it was not supposed to benefit only the young and well educated, the rich and well connected it was also supposed to benefit the men and women who worked in factories and farms and fought the wars of the Soviet era, those who survive today on pensions and Government assistance. It was also supposed to benefit the laborers and teachers and soldiers who work every day but wait now for a paycheck. The challenge is to create a new Russia that benefits all responsible citizens of this country. How do you get there? I do not believe it is by reverting to the failed policies of the past. I do not believe it is by stopping the reform process in midstream, with a few Russians doing very well but far more struggling to provide for their families. I believe you will create the conditions of growth if, but only if, you continue to move decisively along the path of democratic, market oriented, constructive revolution. The Russian people have made extraordinary progress in the last 7 years. You have gone to the polls to elect your leaders. Some 65 to 70 percent of you freely turn out in every election. People across Russia are rebuilding diverse religious traditions, launching a wide range of private organizations. Seventy percent of the economy now is in private hands. Not bureaucrats but consumers determine what goods get to stores and where people live. You have reached out to the world with trade and investment, exchanges of every kind, and leadership in meeting security challenges around the globe. Now you face a critical moment. Today's financial crisis does not require you to abandon your march toward freedom and free markets. Russians will define Russia's future, but there are clear lessons, I would argue, from international experience. Here's what I think they are. First, in tough times governments need stable revenues to pay their bills, support salaries, pensions, and health care. That requires decisive action to ensure that everyone pays their fair share of taxes. Otherwise, a few pay too much, many pay too little, the government is in the hole and can never get out, and you will never be able to have a stable economic policy. It is tempting for everyone to avoid wanting to pay any taxes. But if everyone will pay their fair share, the share will be modest and their incomes will be larger over the long run because of the stability and growth it will bring to this Russian economic system. Second, printing money to pay the bills and bail out the banks does not help. It causes inflation and ultimately will make the pain worse. Third, special bailouts for a privileged few come at the expense of the whole nation. Fourth, fair, equitable treatment of creditors today will determine their involvement in a nation tomorrow. The people who loan money into this nation must be treated fairly if you want them to be loaning money into this nation 4 years, 5 years, 10 years hence. These are not radical theories, they are simply facts proven by experience. How Russia reacts to them will fundamentally affect your future. Surviving today's crisis, however difficult that may be, is just the beginning. To create jobs, growth, and higher income, a nation must convince its own citizens and foreigners that they can safely invest. Again, experience teaches what works fair tax laws and fair enforcement easier transferability of land strong intellectual property rights to encourage innovation independent courts enforcing the law consistently and upholding contract rights strong banks that safeguard savings securities markets that protect investors social spending that promotes hope and opportunity and a safety net for those who, in any given time in an open market economy, will be dislocated and vigilance against hidden ties between government and business interests that are inappropriate. Now, this is not an American agenda. I will say it again This is not an American agenda. These are the imperatives of the global marketplace, and you can see them repeated over and over and over again. You can also see the cost of ignoring them in nation after nation after nation. Increasingly, no nation, rich or poor, democratic or authoritarian, can escape the fundamental economic imperatives of the global market. Investors and entrepreneurs have a very wide and growing range of choices about where they put their money. They move in the direction of openness, fairness, and freedom. Here, Russia has an opportunity. At the dawn of a new century, there is a remarkable convergence. Increasingly, the very policies that are needed to thrive in the new economy are also those which deepen democratic liberty for individual citizens. This is a wealthy country. It is rich in resources. It is richer still in people. It has done a remarkable job of providing quality education to large numbers of people. You have proven over and over and over again, in ways large and small, that the people of this country have a sense of courage and spirit, an unwillingness to be beat down and to give up. The future can be very, very bright. But we can't ignore the rules of the game, because if there is a system of freedom, you cannot take away, and no country, not even the United States with the size of our economy, no country is strong enough to control what millions and millions and millions of people decide freely to do with their money. But every country will keep a large share of its own citizens' money and get a lot of money from worldwide investors if it can put in place systems that abide by the rules of international commerce. And all Russia needs is its fair share of this investment. You have the natural wealth. You have the people power. You have the education. All you need is just to get your fair share of the investment. Now, 21st century economic power will rest on creativity and innovation. I believe the young people in this room think they can be as creative or innovative as anyone in the world. It will rest on the free flow of information. It will rest on ideas. Consider this, those of you who are beginning your careers America's three largest computer and software companies are now worth more than all the American companies in our steel, automotive, aerospace, chemical, and plastics industries combined combined our three biggest computer companies. The future is a future of ideas. No nation will ever have a monopoly on ideas. No people will ever control all the creative juices that flow in the human spirit more or less evenly across the world. You will do very well if you just get your fair share of investment. To get your fair share of investment, you have to play by the rules that everyone else has to play by. That's what this whole crisis is about. No one could ever have expected your country to be able to make this transition without pain. You've only been at this 7 years. Look at any European country that has had an open market society for decades and decades and decades. They have hundreds, indeed thousands of little organizations they have major national institutions that all tend to reinforce these rules that I talked about earlier. Don't be discouraged, but don't be deterred. Just keep working until you get it in place. Once you get it in place, Russia will take off like a rocket, because you have both natural resources and people resources. Now, I think it's important to point out, however, that economic strength let's go back to the rules it depends on the rule of law. If somebody from outside a country intends to put money into a foreign country, they want to know what the rules are. What are the terms on which my money is being invested? How will my investment be protected? If I lose money, I want to know it's because I made a bad decision, not because the law didn't protect my money. It is very important. Investors, therefore, seek honest government, fair systems, fair for corporations and consumers, where there are strong checks on corruption and abuse of authority, and openness in what the rules are on how investment capital is handled. Economic strength depends on equality of opportunity. There must be strong schools and good health care and everyone must have a chance to share in the nation's bounty. And economic power must lie with people who vote their consciences, use new technologies to spread ideas, start organizations to work for change, and build enterprises of all kinds. Now, some seek to exploit this power shift that's going on in the world to take advantage of their fellow citizens. When this nation went from the old Communist command and control system to an open free system, without all the intermediate institutions and private organizations that it takes years to build up, vacuums were created. And into those vacuums, some moved with an intent to exploit their fellow citizens, to enrich themselves without regard to fairness or safety or the future. The challenges for any citizen this is not Russia specific this would have happened and has happened in every single country that has had to make this transition. There's nothing inherently negative about this development. It is as predictable as the Sun coming up in the morning. Every country has had to face this. But you must overcome it. You must have a state that is strong enough to control abuses violence, theft, fraud, bribery, monopolism. But it must not be so strong that it can limit the legitimate rights and dreams and creativity of the people. That is the tension of creating the right kind of democratic market society. The bottom line is that the American people very much want Russia to succeed. We value your friendship. We honor your struggle. We want to offer support as long as you take the steps needed for stability and progress. We will benefit greatly if you strengthen your democracy and increase your prosperity. Look what our partnership has already produced. We reversed the dangerous buildup of nuclear weapons. We're 2 years ahead of schedule in cutting nuclear arsenals under START I. START II, which still awaits ratification in the Duma, will reduce our nuclear forces by two thirds from cold war levels. President Yeltsin and I already have agreed on a framework for START III to cut our nuclear arsenals even further. For you young people, at a time when India and Pakistan have started testing nuclear weapons, America and Russia must resume the direction the world should take, away from nuclear weapons, not toward them. This is a very important thing. We are working to halt the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with 147 other countries. We're working to contain the arms race between India and Pakistan, to strengthen controls on transfers of weapons technologies, to combat terrorism everywhere. Our bonds are growing stronger, and as they do we will move closer to our goal of a Europe undivided, democratic, and at peace. We reached agreement for greater cooperation between NATO and Russia. And our soldiers serve side by side, making peace possible in Bosnia. We don't always agree, and our interests aren't always identical. But we work together more often than not, and the world is a better place as a result. Building peace is our paramount responsibility, but there is more we must do together. One thing we need to do more together is prove that you can grow the economy without destroying the environment. A great man, looking at the condition of the environment, charged that humanity was a destroyer. He wrote, "Forests keep disappearing. Rivers dry up. Wildlife has become extinct. The climate is ruined. The land grows poorer and uglier every day." Chekhov wrote those words 100 years ago. Just imagine his reaction to the present environmental conditions, with toxic pollution ruining our air and water, and global warming threatening to aggravate flooding and drought and disease. Together, we can create cleaner technologies to grow our economies without destroying the world's environment and imperiling future generations. Together, we can harness the genius of our citizens not for making weapons but for building better communications, curing disease, combating hunger, exploring the heavens. Together, we can reconcile societies of different people with different religions and races and viewpoints, and stand against the wars of ethnic, religious, and racial hatred that have dominated recent history. If we stand together and if we do the right things, we can build that kind of world. If the people of Russia stand for economic reform that benefits all the people of this country, America will stand with you. As the people of Russia work for education and scientific discovery, as they stand against corruption and for honest government, against the criminals and terrorists and for the safety of ordinary citizens, against aggression and for peace, America will proudly stand with you. It is the right thing to do, but it is also very much in the interest of the American people to do so. I was amazed there were some doubters back in America who said perhaps I shouldn't come here because these are uncertain times politically and economically. And there are questions being raised in the American press about the commitment of Russia to the course of reform and democracy. It seems to me that anybody can get on an airplane and take a trip in good times and that friends come to visit each other in challenging and difficult times. I come here as a friend, because I believe in the future of Russia. I come here also because I believe someone has to tell the truth to the people, so that you're not skeptical when your political leaders tell you things that are hard to hear. There is no way out of playing by the rules of the international economy if you wish to be a part of it. We cannot abandon the rules of the international economy. No one can. There is a way to preserve the social safety net and the social contract and to help the people who are too weak to succeed. There is a way to do that. And there are people who will help to do that. But it has to be done. So I come here as a friend. I come here because I know that the future of our children and the future of Russia's young people are going to be entwined, and I want it to be a good future. And I believe it can be. Recently, a woman from Petrozavodsk I hope I pronounced that right, Petrozavodsk wrote these words about your people who won World War II and rebuilt from the rubble. Listen to this. She said, "We survived the ruins, the devastation, the hunger, and the cold. It is not possible that our people can do this again? If people raise themselves, they can move mountains. Toward what end? Pushkin once said that so long as we burn with freedom, we can fulfill the noble urges of our souls." In all this dry and sometimes dour talk about economics and finance, never forget that, whatever your human endeavor, the ultimate purpose of it is to fulfill the noble urges of your soul. That is the ultimate victory the Russian people will reap if you will see this process through to the end. I hope you will do that, and I hope we will be able to be your partners every step of the way. Thank you very much. August 31, 1998 Thank you. First of all, let me thank all of you for that warm welcome, and Michele Freeman, thank you for welcoming me to Herndon Elementary School. All of you know, better than I, that this is the beginning of a new school year where parents and children are meeting their teachers for the first time, and there is excitement and anticipation of what everyone hopes will be a very successful year for the children, and insofar as it is, it's a good year for America. I have done everything I knew to do, for the last 6 years, to try to focus the attention of the American people on the whole question of education, because I think it is one of the big questions which will determine the shape of our children's future and the world in the 21st century. If you think about the other major challenges we face as Americans reforming Social Security and Medicare so that we baby boomers don't bankrupt the country when we retire laughter providing quality affordable health care for all of our people proving we can preserve and improve the environment and grow the economy building one America across all the racial and religious and other lines that separate us, something I've been very involved in, in the last several weeks, as all of you know trying to construct a world free of terrorism and more full of peace and prosperity and security and freedom every single one of those challenges depends upon our ability to have educated citizens, not just educated Presidents, not just educated Secretaries of Education, but citizens who can absorb complicated information and all these things that are flying at them all the time and evaluate it and measure it, who can develop reasoned principles, passionate responses, to keep the idea of America going into this new century. That's why I wanted to come here today. Many of you know that I am leaving. When I go back from you, I go back to Washington and then the First Lady and I are going to Russia and then to Ireland with a team of people to deal with the issues there, and I'd like to just say one word about it, because it's my only real opportunity to talk with you and through you, thanks to our friends in the press here, to the American people. Because this trip is an example of one of the most important lessons every child needs to learn in America from a very early age. And that is, we are living in a smaller and smaller world. This global economy, the global society, it is real. Information, ideas, technology, money, people can travel around the world at speeds unheard of not very long ago. Our economies are increasingly interconnected. Our securities are increasingly interconnected. I'm sure all of you have followed the events in the aftermath of the tragic bombing at our Embassies in Africa, and you know that there were far more Africans killed than Americans, even though America was the target. And you know that the person responsible did not belong to any government but had an independent terrorist network capable of hitting people and countries all around the world. So there's been a lot of good. We've benefited a lot from this global society of ours. We have over 16 million new jobs in the last 6 years, and we're about to have our first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years. We have benefited from the world of the 21st century. But we have a lot of responsibilities. And the reason I'm going to Russia is because we have learned the hard way that problems that develop beyond our borders sooner or later find their way to our doorstep unless we help our friends and our neighbors to deal with them as quickly and promptly as possible. Now, the Russian people are to be commended for embracing democracy and getting rid of the old Communist system. But they're having some troubles today making the transition from communism to a free market economy and from communism to a democratic society that has supports for people who are in trouble. What I want to do is to go there and tell them that the easy thing to do is not the right thing to do. The easy thing to do would be to try to go back to the way they did it before, and it's not possible, but that if they will stay on the path of reform, to stabilize their society and to strengthen their economy and to get growth back, then I believe America and the rest of the Western nations with strong economies should help them and, indeed, have an obligation to help them and that it's in our interest to help them. If you say "Why?" let me just give you a couple of reasons. First of all, Russia and the United States still have the biggest nuclear arsenals in the world. And at a time when India and Pakistan have tested nuclear weapons, we need to be moving the world away from nuclear war, not toward it. We have to have the cooperation and the partnership with the Russians to do that. We don't want terrorists to get a hold of weapons of mass destruction. A weakened Russia, a weakened Russian economy would put enormous pressure on people, who have those technologies and understandings, to sell them. We don't want that to happen. We know we need Russia's partnership to solve problems in that part of the world. If it hadn't been for Russia's partnership, we could not have ended the war in Bosnia, which all of you remember, a couple of years ago, was threatening the entire stability of Europe. Next door, in Kosovo, there is a similar problem today we've got to have Russia's partnership to solve that. So if Russia will stay on the path of reform, I believe America and the rest of the West must help them. I'm also going to Ireland, which is the homeland of over 40 million Americans. We trace our ancestry there. And they've been working a long time on a peace process in which we've been intimately involved, and I'm going to do my best to advance that. I think we have a good chance to do so. But I want you to understand that I do these things because I think they are in America's interest. They're not just the right things to do, they're not just nice things to have happen. But every child you look around this room and see how many children are here who come from different cultures themselves, whose ancestors come from different countries themselves. There is no nation in the world better positioned than the United States to do well in the 21st century, because we're a people from everywhere. If our values and our ideals can spread around the world, then we can create a peaceful, secure world. So that's what I'm trying to do. But to get back to the main point, the ultimate national security of any country rests in the strength of its own citizens. And for us, that means we have got to prove that no matter how diverse we are, we can still offer a worldclass education to every single American child. I'm sure all of you know this, but virtually everyone in the world believes that America has the finest system of higher education anywhere. We are flooded every year with students and graduate students coming from every other country in the world to our colleges and universities because they think they're the best in the world, and they have made us very strong. But we now know that, in the world we're living in, it's not enough just to educate half the people very well through university you must educate 100 percent of the people very well in elementary and secondary school. We know we've got a lot of challenges. Our kids come from different places. A lot of them have different cultures. They have different learning patterns. They speak different languages as their native language. A lot of them are poor. A lot of them live in neighborhoods that are difficult. And so this is a great challenge for us. But it is a worthy challenge. It's a worthy challenge for a great country to prove that we can take all this diversity, not just racial and ethnic and religious diversity but diversity of life circumstance, and still give every single child a shot at living his or her dream. That is what this is all about, and that's why I'm here today. This is just as much a part of our national security as that trip I'm taking to Russia, and I want you to understand that I believe that. So when we finish the roundtable, I want to say a little about what we can do to help and what's going on in Congress and what will happen in Congress over the next month, because it's very important. But the most important thing, as the Secretary said, is what's happening here. So I'd like to stop talking and start listening now, and we'll do the roundtable. And I think we should start with Michele Freeman and let her talk about this school and her experiences and her challenges and what she's doing about it. August 28, 1998 Thank you very much. First of all, hasn't this day made you proud to be an American? Applause I want to thank Dr. Ogletree and the entire committee, Skip Gates, Anita Hill, Judge Higginbotham. I want to thank Sebastian for doing a superb job of reminding us of the important facts of Martin Luther King's life. Marianne, thank you for your work and your words today. I thank Sabrina and Elza for leading us in the singing, and Giles, Olivia, and Mia for reading from the "I Have A Dream" speech. Rebecca, thank you for the books. Mr. Bryan, thank you for making us welcome in your congregation. And should I say, Reverend Lewis? John, I would not be a bit surprised if, when we walk out these doors today, every chicken on this island will be standing out there laughter in the street waiting for their leader. Laughter John Lewis has been my friend for a long time a long time a long time before he could have ever known that I would be here. And he stood with me in 1991 when only my mother and my wife thought I had any chance of being elected. So you have to make allowances and discount some of what he says. Laughter But I treasure the years of friendship we have shared. I have boundless admiration for him. He and Lillian have been an incredible source of strength and support for Hillary and me, and our country is a much, much better place because of the road John Lewis has walked. The summer of 1963 was a very eventful one for me, the summer I turned 17. What most people know about it now is the famous picture of me shaking hands with President Kennedy in July. It was a great moment. But I think the moment we commemorate today a moment I experienced all alone had a more profound impact on my life. Most of us who are old enough remember exactly where we were on August 28, 1963. I was in my living room in Hot Springs, Arkansas. I remember the chair I was sitting in. I remember exactly where it was in the room. I remember exactly the position of the chair when I sat and watched on national television the great March on Washington unfold. I remember weeping uncontrollably during Martin Luther King's speech, and I remember thinking, when it was over, my country would never be the same, and neither would I. There are people all across this country who made a more intense commitment to the idea of racial equality and justice that day than they had ever made before. And so, in very personal ways, all of us became better and bigger because of the work of those who brought that great day about. There are millions of people, who John Lewis will never meet, who are better and bigger because of what that day meant. And the words continue to echo down to the present day, spoken to us today by children who were not even alive then. And God willing, their grandchildren will also be inspired and moved and become better and bigger because of what happened on that increasingly distant summer day. What I'd like to ask you to think about a little today and to share with you and I'll try to do it without taking my spectacles out, but I don't write very well, and I don't read too well as I get older is what I think this means for us today. I was trying to think about what John and Dr. King and others did, and how they did it, and how it informs what I do and how I think about other things today. And I would ask you only to think about three things the hour is late and it's warm in here, and I can't bring the chickens home to roost. Laughter But I think of these three things. Number one, Dr. King used to speak about how we were all bound together in a web of mutuality, which was an elegant way of saying, whether we like it or not, we're all in this life together. We are interdependent. Well, what does that mean? Well, let me give you a specific example. We had some good news today Incomes in America went up 5 percent last year. That's a big bump in a year. We've got the best economy in a generation. That's the good news. But we are mutually interdependent with people far beyond our borders. Yesterday there was some more news that was troubling out of Russia some rumor, some fact about the decline in the economy. Our stock market dropped over 350 points. And in Latin America, our most fast growing market for American exports, all the markets went down, even though, as far as we know, most of those countries are doing everything right. Why? Because we're in a tighter and tighter and tighter web of mutuality. Asia has these economic troubles. So even though we've got the best economy in a generation, our farm exports to Asia are down 30 percent from last year, and we have States in this country where farmers, the hardest working people in this country, can't make their mortgage payments because of things that happened half a world away they didn't have any direct influence on at all. This world is being bound together more closely. So what is the lesson from that? Well, I should go to Russia, because, as John said, anybody can come see you when you're doing well. I should go there and we should tell them that, if they'll be strong and do the disciplined, hard things they have to do to reform their country, their economy, and get through this dark night, that we'll stick with them. And we ought to meet our responsibilities to the International Monetary Fund and these other international groups, because we can't solve the world's problems alone. We can't even solve our problems alone, because we're in this web of mutuality. But I learned that from the civil rights movement, not from an economics textbook. The second thing, even if you're not a pacifist, whenever possible, peace and nonviolence is always the right thing to do. I remember so vividly in 1994 John writes about this in the book I was trying to pass this crime bill, and all the opposition to the crime bill that was in the newspapers, all the intense opposition was coming from the NRA and the others that did not want us to ban assault weapons, didn't believe that we ought to have more community policemen walking the streets, and conservatives who thought we should just punish people more and not spend more money trying to keep kids out of trouble in the first place. And it was a huge fight. And so they came to see me, and they said, "Well, John Lewis is not going to vote for this bill." And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Because it increases the number of crimes subject to the Federal death penalty, and he's not for it. And he's not in bed with all those other people, he thinks they're wrong, but he can't vote for it." And I said, "Well, let him alone. There's no point in calling him, because he's lived a lifetime dedicated to an idea." And while I may not be a pacifist, whenever possible it's always the right thing to do, to try to be peaceable and nonviolent. What does that mean for today? Well, there's a lot of good news. It's like the economy. The crime rate is at a 25 year low juvenile crime is finally coming down. Yesterday we put out a handbook to send to every school in the country to try to increase the ability of teachers and others to identify kids in trouble, to try to stop these horrible, although isolated, examples when young people wreak violence on others. We've got, all over the country now, these exciting community based programs that are dramatically reducing violence among young people the school uniforms and curfew programs, and summer school in Chicago now is the sixth biggest school district in America the summer school. Over 40,000 kids are now getting three square meals a day in the schools of that city. There's a lot of great things going on. But it is still a pretty violent world. A black man was murdered recently in Texas in the most horrible way, because people not representative of that community but people living in that community were driven crazy through their demonic images of a man of a different race. We have more diversity than ever before. It's wonderful, but there are still we now see different minority groups at each other's throat from time to time, not understanding their racial or their cultural or their religious differences. And again, there is this web of mutuality. Half a world away, terrorists trying to hurt Americans blow up two Embassies in Africa, and they kill some of our people, some of our best people, of, I might add, very many different racial and ethnic backgrounds, American citizens, including a distinguished career African American diplomat and his son. But they also killed almost 300 Africans and wounded 5,000 others. We see their pictures in the morning paper two of them who did that, we're bringing them home. And they look like active, confident young people. What happened inside them that made them feel so much hatred toward us that they could justify not only an act of violence against innocent diplomats and other public servants but the collateral consequences to Africans whom they would never know? They had children, too. So it is always best to remember that we have to try to work for peace in the Middle East, for peace in Northern Ireland, for an end to terrorism, for protections against biological and chemical weapons being used in the first place. The night before we took action against the terrorist operations in Afghanistan and Sudan, I was here on this island, up until 2 30 in the morning, trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift. I believed I had to take the action I did, but I didn't want some person, who was a nobody to me but who may have a family to feed and a life to live and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there, to die needlessly. It's another reason we ought to pay our debt to the United Nations, because if we can work together, together we can find more peaceful solutions. Now, I didn't learn that when I became President. I learned it from John Lewis and the civil rights movement a long time ago. And the last thing I learned from them on which all these other things depend, without which we cannot build a world of peace or one America in an increasingly peaceful world bound together in this web of mutuality, is that you can't get there unless you're willing to forgive your enemies. I never will forget one of the most I don't think I've ever spoken about this in public before, but I one of the most meaningful, personal moments I've had as President was a conversation I had with Nelson Mandela. And I said to him, I said, "You know, I've read your book, and I've heard you speak, and you spent time with my wife and daughter, and you've talked about inviting your jailers to your Inauguration." And I said, "It's very moving." And I said, "You're a shrewd as well as a great man. But come on, now, how did you really do that? You can't make me believe you didn't hate those people who did that to you for 27 years." He said, "I did hate them for quite a long time. After all, they abused me physically and emotionally. They separated me from my wife, and it eventually broke my family up. They kept me from seeing my children grow up." He said, "For quite a long time I hated them." And then he said, "I realized one day, breaking rocks, that they could take everything away from me everything but my mind and my heart. Now, those things I would have to give away. And I simply decided I would not give them away." So, as you look around the world you see, how do you explain these three children who were killed in Ireland, or all the people who were killed in the square when the people were told to leave the city hall, there was a bomb there, and then they walked out toward the bomb? What about all those families in Africa? I don't know I can't pick up the telephone and call them and say, "I'm so sorry this happened." How do we find that spirit? All of you know, I'm having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness. It gets a little easier the more you do it. And if you have a family, an administration, a Congress, and a whole country to ask, you're going to get a lot of practice. Laughter But I have to tell you that, in these last days, it has come home to me, again, something I first learned as President, but it wasn't burned in my bones, and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing to give it. And all of us the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you, they harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self inflicted wounds. And so it is important that we are able to forgive those we believe have wronged us, even as we ask for forgiveness from people we have wronged. And I heard that first first in the civil rights movement "Love thy neighbor as thyself." What does it all mean and where do we take it from here? I'm so glad John told you the story of the little kids, of whom he was one, holding the house down. I want to close with what else he said about it, because it's where I think we have to go in order for the civil rights movement to have a lasting legacy. In the prolog of John's book, he tells the story about the kids holding the house down. And then he says the following "More than half a century has passed since that day. And it has struck me more than once over those many years that our society is not unlike the children in that house, rocked again and again by the winds of one storm or another, the walls around us seeming at times as if they might fly apart. It seemed that way in the 1960's when America felt itself bursting at the seams so many storms. "But the people of conscience never left the house. They never ran away. They stayed. They came together. They did the best they could, clasping hands and moving toward the corner of the house that was weakest. And then another corner would lift, and we would go there. And eventually, inevitably, the storm would settle, and the house would still stand. But we knew another storm would come, and we would have to do it all over again. And we did. And we still do, all of us, you and I. Children holding hands, walking with the wind. That is America to me. Not just the movement for civil rights, but the endless struggle to respond with decency, dignity, and a sense of brotherhood to all the challenges that face us as a nation as a whole." And then he says this "That is a story, in essence, of my life, of the path to which I've been committed since I turned from a boy to a man and to which I remain committed today, a path that extends beyond the issue of race alone, beyond class as well, and gender and age and every other distinction that tends to separate us as human beings rather than bring us together. The path involves nothing less than the pursuit of the most precious and pure concept I have ever known, an ideal I discovered as a young man that has guided me like a beacon ever since, a concept called the beloved community."' That is the America we are trying to create. That is the America John Lewis and his comrades, on this day 35 years ago, gave us the chance to build for our children. Thank you, and God bless you. August 27, 1998 Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, first let me thank you for your remarkable and warm welcome. I'm glad to be here in Worcester, the heartbeat of Massachusetts for 150 years now, and in this grand hall where so many great Americans have spoken, from Frederick Douglas to Susan B. Anthony to Henry David Thoreau. I'm honored to share this stage with Kathleen Bisson, and I thank her for her commitment to teaching our children and for keeping them safe, and with Officer Michael Jones, who moved us all with how he responded to his personal tragedy. Mr. Mayor, I thought you gave a great talk. When he was up here kind of moving around, doing his shtick, I said I was amazed. Kathleen said, "You know, he ought to be in Hollywood. You should see the rap act he does for the school kids." Laughter So I thank you. Chief Gardella, I cannot thank you enough for what you said, and I appreciate more than you will ever know the impact that we have had the opportunity to have through the community policing and the other law enforcement programs. I thank Scott Harshbarger, who has been a friend of mine for a long time and who has, I can tell you from my personal experience not only as President but even before when I was Governor, always been on the forefront of law enforcement reforms that would give our children a safer future. I thank Congressman McGovern who has worked in both the areas we celebrate today and in so many other ways. It's interesting to see a man who both knows what he's doing down to the tiniest detail about how Congress works and how the committees work and how the procedures work. And I think Congressman Moakley's tutelage had something to do with that before he showed up. But it's interesting to see someone who has that feel for the mechanics and also is plainly so connected at an emotional, human level to the people in his district and so passionately cares about it and was able to convey that to all of us today through the wonderful metaphor of his wife and young child and if you want to cry, go right ahead. Laughter Let me also thank Congressman Markey, who is here, and Congressman Neal for coming out to the airport to meet me. I thank Senator Kerry, who has long been one of the leaders in law enforcement issues in the Congress, for his involvement in both these issues. And I thank Senator Kennedy for making sure that even though this is the end of a long program, none of us could possibly go to sleep. Laughter I always marvel at his continuing energy and commitment and dedication. And some days, when I get tired and weary, I think, he's been doing this longer than I have, and he never gets tired or weary. And that's a good thing. Let me say I have a few brief things to add to what has been said about the two issues we came here to discuss today. But because this is my only opportunity to speak with you and, through you, to the American people, I want to say a couple of things about Hurricane Bonnie and the havoc it's wreaked in North Carolina over the last day, and the flooding caused in Texas by Tropical Storm Charley. I know that all of our hearts go out to the families affected by these storms. Yesterday I declared a disaster in Texas because of the flooding, and today there's a disaster declaration that has just been issued for North Carolina. That makes Federal funds available immediately to people who have been harmed in both places. Thankfully, the winds are dying down in North Carolina. Hopefully, the floods soon will recede in Texas. In both cases, FEMA, our Federal Emergency Management Agency, is working with State and local agencies to assess the damage and to stay there for as long as it takes to help the people rebuild. While we're here today, Vice President and Mrs. Gore and Secretary of Education Dick Riley are in California talking about the same things, our common commitment to make our streets and our schools safe for families and children. This is, as Senator Kennedy noted, a time of great prosperity for our people. We have the lowest unemployment in 28 years, the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years, about to realize the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years, and we learned not very long ago that homeownership is at its highest rate in American history. And this has occurred at a time when we have reduced the Government to the smallest size it is at since John Kennedy was the President of the United States. I come here, as I have gone across this country, to say to my fellow Americans, this is not a time to celebrate but to be grateful. It is not a time to rest on our laurels but to use the confidence, the resources, and the understanding we have acquired for the last 6 years to face the long term challenges of this country, for the world is changing very quickly, full of new challenges. Senator Kennedy mentioned one of them, the problem of terrorism, which has become a bigger problem for us as we become more open and as information and money and technology can move around the world so quickly, as people themselves can move across borders so quickly. These multinational problems like terrorism or even the global spread of disease or shared environmental problems are things that visionaries must think about and take steps now to prepare for. The world will never be free of problems. And we know that the world is changing fast, which means that if we wish to maintain our present level of success, we must keep up. We cannot afford to relax. We must become more rigorous. And we must I say again use the newfound confidence of America to think more boldly, not less boldly, and to act more boldly, not less boldly, for our children's future. There is critical business ahead of us, business that we will take up as soon as Congress comes back to work. One of the Members who spoke before me mentioned it, but we want to make sure I think Congressman McGovern did we want to make sure that we have saved the Social Security system for the 21st century before a penny of that surplus is touched. We think it is important. We want to help the teachers like Kate Bisson, not only with school violence but with the tools necessary to move our children forward. I have an education agenda before the Congress that would provide funds in the balanced budget for school construction, to help repair and rebuild and build new buildings so that children aren't in substandard conditions. We have children going to school, in some cities in America today, in buildings that are 65, 70, 80 years old, where the windows are broken, where they go in where whole floors are closed down. What kind of signal does that send to children about their importance? In other parts of our country we have children going to school in housetrailers because the school districts are growing so fast and there's no way the people can afford to keep up with it. I was in a small school district in Florida recently where there were 17 trailers outside the main school building. This is important. We have a program to help our school districts hire 100,000 teachers in the early grades so we can get down to an average class size of 18. It is the single most significant thing that the research shows, over more than a decade now, that will guarantee that children will get off to a good start in school. We're trying to hook up all our classrooms to the Internet. We're trying to support the establishment of voluntary national standards. We are trying, in short, to make sure we can say to our children No matter where you grow up or what your racial or ethnic or income background is, you have access to the finest system of elementary and secondary education in the world. That's a big part of our agenda. We have a huge health care agenda, and it begins with the Patients' Bill of Rights. With 160 million people in managed care operations, people ought to have a right, whatever their health care plan, to see a specialist if their doctor recommends it, to have emergency room care where it's needed if they have an accident, to have their medical records kept private, to be able to appeal adverse decisions. These things are important. And so I say to you, we need your help. There's going to be a big debate on campaign finance reform when we get back, and the Shays Meehan inaudible bill, that is cosponsored by Congressman Meehan from Massachusetts, is going to be in a version before the United States Senate. And our people are going to work hard to pass it. There will be major environmental debates when we get back. And these things are important. So I say to you, the energy that brought you here today, the concern you have for these issues, you need to bring it back to every single major challenge this country faces. If I had told you 6 years ago that in 6 years we would have 16 million new jobs and all these other things, you would have said, "There's another politician running for office." It happened not by accident but because of the hard work and the vision and the citizen spirit of the American people and the disciplined efforts that we have all made. And we must not forget that now that times are good. We also can't forget that, unless we make our communities, our schools, and our children safe, prosperity doesn't mean very much. That is why this is at the core of what we have tried to do. I told this story many times, but I want you to let me share it one more time. Right before the New Hampshire primary in 1992, a period when I was dropping like a rock in the polls I have some experience with that I was going through a kitchen in New York City. And I was walking to one of these banquets, one of these fundraising banquets. I didn't have any idea whether it would be three people or 300 or 700 when I got out the door. I was just walking through the kitchen to get there. And a waiter came up to me, in this nice hotel in New York. And I wasn't very wellknown then. I was the Governor of Arkansas. I just started running in New Hampshire. And this man came up to me and stopped me, and he said, "Mr. Governor, I want to talk to you." He said, "My 10 year old boy here in New York," he said, "he studies these elections, and he reads up on the candidates, and he says I should vote for you." He said, "Now, if I vote for you, I want you to do something for me." I said, "Well, what is it?" I couldn't imagine what this man who was a waiter in a hotel in New York wanted me to do for him. He said, "Well, the place where we came from in the old country, we were much poorer, but at least we were free." He said, "Here I make more money, but we're not free. When my boy goes across our apartment house, across the street to play in the city park, I have to go with him because I'm afraid for his safety. Our school is only a couple of blocks from our apartment, but I have to walk him because I'm afraid for his safety. So if I do what my boy wants and I vote for you, would you make my boy free?" I will never forget that as long as I live. The comprehensive approach we followed on crime is basically what, as Senator Kerry said, and he certainly supported it very strongly, is just what the local law enforcement people and the local community leaders taught us to do Be smart about prevention be smart about giving kids something to say yes to be smart about law enforcement patterns be smart about punishment. Crime rates are now at a 25 year low, juvenile crime is finally coming down. People do think, I think, that they are more free. We have worked hard especially in the schools with the Safe and Drug Free Schools program. We've supported communities in schools that offer antitruancy, curfew, school uniforms, and dress code policies. We have strictly enforced zero tolerance for guns. Last year alone, over 6,000 students with guns were disarmed and sent home. This year, recently, a new report showed that the overwhelming majority of our schools are, in fact, safe. But it's not enough, as we know from the recent rash of killings in our schools all over the country. When children in inner city schools have to walk through metal detectors, when high schools in small towns like Jonesboro, Arkansas, in my home State, or Springfield, Oregon, are torn apart by disturbed children with deadly weapons, when gang violence still ravages communities large and small, we have to do more. This fall, we are going to hold the first ever White House Conference on School Safety, and today we're taking two steps that I think will make our schools safer and our communities stronger. First, offering a guide to help prevent school violence before it starts and, second, expanding the remarkable Police Corps program to Massachusetts and elsewhere. Let me show you what this early warning guide is all about. Earlier this year, in the aftermath of the tragedy of Springfield, Oregon, I actually went there to Springfield, and I spent an extended period of time in the school library, going from table to table to table, meeting with the families of the victims, children who had been killed, and a much larger number of children who had been wounded. I talked to the school officials. I asked them what they knew about the young man who was apparently involved in this incident. I asked them how they dealt with kids who were in trouble how did they know when children were in trouble. And we began to ask other people, and we concluded that not everybody knew everything they needed to know in clear, practical terms about how to spot the danger signals early and then what to do about them. So I asked Secretary Riley and Attorney General Reno to develop the safe school guides for educators, for parents, for fellow students to help them recognize and then respond to early warning signs. This is the guide. It says, "Early Warning Timely Response A Guide to Safe Schools." Now, over the next few weeks, every single school in America will get a copy of this in time for the start of the new school year. It will help schools to recognize a troubled or potentially violent young person. It outlines steps to intervene early before it's too late. As Secretary Riley and General Reno say in their introduction, the guide should never be used to stigmatize or label young people in distress. Instead, it should be used as a vital part of overall school violence prevention efforts that have to include, as others have said before and as your mayor said about Worcester, every teacher, every parent, and every young person. This guide can make a difference in the lives of our children. The Police Corps can also make a difference. It embodies the same commitment to every person and the commitment to public service that was embodied in the life service of John and Robert Kennedy. I first heard about the Police Corps from Adam Wolinsky, who has previously been eulogized by Senators Kerry and Kennedy, when I was the Governor of Arkansas. I was so impressed by this program and by Adam's commitment to it, that I became a charter member of the National Committee for the Police Corps on the spot. Adam and his wife, Jane, are here, and I know they've already been introduced, but I want you to know that we would not be here talking about this today were it not for this one American citizen and his harboring a dream for years and years and years until it became real in the lives of people. And I thank him for it. When I was Governor, I signed a bill to create a Police Corps scholarship program in our home State. And when I became President, thanks to the efforts of Senator Kennedy, Senator Kerry, and others, especially of Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend of Maryland and Adam, we put the Police Corps in the 1994 crime bill. We've already heard that, much in the way that ROTC functions, this remarkable program gives talented young people college scholarships in return for their commitment to serve as police officers in their communities. I should mention, as was pointed out to me here today before I came here, that a preference is given to one group only, the children of police officers killed in the line of duty. And I understand that the State police here has already identified several young people who are the children of police officers who have died in the line of service in Massachusetts who, themselves, want to go into law enforcement and would be eligible to get these scholarships. In 17 States around the country, that's what the Police Corps is already doing, creating a new generation of police officers trained to stand on the front lines and listen on the front porches, to work in distressed communities and be role models for young people. Now, the young members of the Police Corps who are here with us today and I think there are some, aren't there? Are there any Police Corps members here today? What? Stand up. We have invested in their honor, their courage, their commitment to community and country. We need more like them. That is why the announcement we make today expanding the Police Corps to 6 more States, including Massachusetts, awarding scholarships to more than 300 dedicated young people, is a good thing for the United States. This Police Corps is an incredible example of what we can do when we put progress ahead of partisanship, people ahead of politics, the future of our children ahead of all else. As the mayor said, in referring to the First Lady, it does take a village. But both of us note, as we travel around the country and Hillary mentioned to me just about a week ago when she came back from another stop it is astonishing it is astonishing how many places we go will there be somebody in the receiving line who will thank us for the community police officers in their community, large and small. Robert Kennedy once said, "The fight against crime is, in the last analysis, a fight to preserve that quality of community which is at the root of our greatness, a fight to preserve confidence in ourselves and in our fellow citizens, a battle for the quality of our lives." With these actions, we move a step closer to winning that battle for all our people and to building that bridge toward a strong America in the 21st century. Thank you, and God bless you all. August 22, 1998 Good morning. I want to talk to you about our strike against terrorism last Thursday. Two weeks ago, a savage attack was carried out against our Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Almost 300 innocent people were killed thousands were injured. The bombs were aimed at us, but they claimed anyone who happened to be near the Embassies that morning. They killed both Africans and Americans indiscriminately, cruelty beyond comprehension. From the moment we learned of the bombings, our mission was clear Identify those responsible bring them to justice protect our citizens from future attacks. The information now in our possession is convincing. Behind these attacks were the same hands that killed American and Pakistani peacekeepers in Somalia, the same hands that targeted U.S. airlines, and the same hands that plotted the assassinations of the Pope and President Mubarak of Egypt. I'm referring to the bin Ladin network of radical groups, probably the most dangerous non state terrorist actor in the world today. We also had compelling evidence that the bin Ladin network was poised to strike at us again, and soon. We know he has said all Americans not just those in uniform all Americans are targets. And we know he wants to acquire chemical weapons. With that information and evidence, we simply could not stand idly by. That is why I ordered our military strikes last Thursday. Our goals were to disrupt bin Ladin's terrorist network and destroy elements of its infrastructure in Afghanistan and Sudan. And our goal was to destroy, in Sudan, the factory with which bin Ladin's network is associated, which was producing an ingredient essential for nerve gas. I am proud of the men and women of our Armed Forces who carried out this mission and proud of the superb work of our intelligence and law enforcement communities. I thank the congressional leadership for their bipartisan support. And I'm grateful to America's friends around the world who have expressed their solidarity. For this is not just America's fight it's a universal one, between those who want to build a world of peace and partnership and prosperity and those who would tear everything down through death and destruction a fight that joins people from Northern Ireland and Africa and the Middle East a fight not directed at any particular nation or any particular faith but at a callous criminal organization whose policies of violence violate the teachings of every religion. In particular, it is very important that Americans understand that the threat we face is not part of the Islamic faith. Hundreds of millions of Muslims all over the world, including millions right here in the United States, oppose terrorism and deplore the twisting of their religious teachings into justification of inhumane, indeed ungodly acts. Our efforts against terrorism cannot and will not end with this strike. We should have realistic expectations about what a single action can achieve, and we must be prepared for a long battle. But it's high time that those who traffic in terror learn they, too, are vulnerable. I'm determined to use all the tools at our disposal. That is why I have just signed an Executive order directing the Treasury to block all financial transactions between the bin Ladin terrorist group and American persons and companies. We'll urge other governments to do the same. We must not allow sanctuary for terrorism, not for terrorists or for their money. It takes money, lots of it, to build the network bin Ladin has. We'll do our best to see that he has less of it. Finally, as we close ranks against international threats, we must remember this America will never give up the openness, the freedom, and the tolerance that define us. For the ultimate target of these terrorist attacks is our ideals, and they must be defended at any cost. Thanks for listening. August 20, 1998 Good afternoon. Today I ordered our Armed Forces to strike at terrorist related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security. I want to speak with you about the objective of this action and why it was necessary. Our target was terror our mission was clear to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Usama bin Ladin, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today. The groups associated with him come from diverse places but share a hatred for democracy, a fanatical glorification of violence, and a horrible distortion of their religion to justify the murder of innocents. They have made the United States their adversary precisely because of what we stand for and what we stand against. A few months ago, and again this week, bin Ladin publicly vowed to wage a terrorist war against America, saying, and I quote, "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They're all targets." Their mission is murder and their history is bloody. In recent years, they killed American, Belgian, and Pakistani peacekeepers in Somalia. They plotted to assassinate the President of Egypt and the Pope. They planned to bomb six United States 747's over the Pacific. They bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan. They gunned down German tourists in Egypt. The most recent terrorist events are fresh in our memory. Two weeks ago, 12 Americans and nearly 300 Kenyans and Tanzanians lost their lives, and another 5,000 were wounded, when our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. There is convincing information from our intelligence community that the bin Ladin terrorist network was responsible for these bombings. Based on this information, we have high confidence that these bombings were planned, financed, and carried out by the organization bin Ladin leads. America has battled terrorism for many years. Where possible, we've used law enforcement and diplomatic tools to wage the fight. The long arm of American law has reached out around the world and brought to trial those guilty of attacks in New York and Virginia and in the Pacific. We have quietly disrupted terrorist groups and foiled their plots. We have isolated countries that practice terrorism. We've worked to build an international coalition against terror. But there have been and will be times when law enforcement and diplomatic tools are simply not enough, when our very national security is challenged, and when we must take extraordinary steps to protect the safety of our citizens. With compelling evidence that the bin Ladin network of terrorist groups was planning to mount further attacks against Americans and other freedom loving people, I decided America must act. And so this morning, based on the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, I ordered our Armed Forces to take action to counter an immediate threat from the bin Ladin network. Earlier today the United States carried out simultaneous strikes against terrorist facilities and infrastructure in Afghanistan. Our forces targeted one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It contained key elements of the bin Ladin network's infrastructure and has served as a training camp for literally thousands of terrorists from around the globe. We have reason to believe that a gathering of key terrorist leaders was to take place there today, thus underscoring the urgency of our actions. Our forces also attacked a factory in Sudan associated with the bin Ladin network. The factory was involved in the production of materials for chemical weapons. The United States does not take this action lightly. Afghanistan and Sudan have been warned for years to stop harboring and supporting these terrorist groups. But countries that persistently host terrorists have no right to be safe havens. Let me express my gratitude to our intelligence and law enforcement agencies for their hard, good work. And let me express my pride in our Armed Forces who carried out this mission while making every possible effort to minimize the loss of innocent life. I want you to understand, I want the world to understand that our actions today were not aimed against Islam, the faith of hundreds of millions of good, peace loving people all around the world, including the United States. No religion condones the murder of innocent men, women, and children. But our actions were aimed at fanatics and killers who wrap murder in the cloak of righteousness and in so doing profane the great religion in whose name they claim to act. My fellow Americans, our battle against terrorism did not begin with the bombing of our Embassies in Africa, nor will it end with today's strike. It will require strength, courage, and endurance. We will not yield to this threat we will meet it, no matter how long it may take. This will be a long, ongoing struggle between freedom and fanaticism, between the rule of law and terrorism. We must be prepared to do all that we can for as long as we must. America is and will remain a target of terrorists precisely because we are leaders because we act to advance peace, democracy, and basic human values because we're the most open society on Earth and because, as we have shown yet again, we take an uncompromising stand against terrorism. But of this I am also sure The risks from inaction, to America and the world, would be far greater than action, for that would embolden our enemies, leaving their ability and their willingness to strike us intact. In this case, we knew before our attack that these groups already had planned further actions against us and others. I want to reiterate The United States wants peace, not conflict. We want to lift lives around the world, not take them. We have worked for peace in Bosnia, in Northern Ireland, in Haiti, in the Middle East, and elsewhere. But in this day, no campaign for peace can succeed without a determination to fight terrorism. Let our actions today send this message loud and clear There are no expendable American targets there will be no sanctuary for terrorists we will defend our people, our interests, and our values we will help people of all faiths, in all parts of the world, who want to live free of fear and violence. We will persist, and we will prevail. Thank you. God bless you, and may God bless our country. August 20, 1998 Good afternoon. Today I ordered our Armed Forces to strike at terrorist related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the threat they present to our national security. I have said many times that terrorism is one of the greatest dangers we face in this new global era. We saw its twisted mentality at work last week in the Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which took the lives of innocent Americans and Africans and injured thousands more. Today we have struck back. The United States launched an attack this morning on one of the most active terrorist bases in the world. It is located in Afghanistan and operated by groups affiliated with Usama bin Ladin, a network not sponsored by any state but as dangerous as any we face. We also struck a chemical weapons related facility in Sudan. Our target was the terrorists' base of operation and infrastructure. Our objective was to damage their capacity to strike at Americans and other innocent people. I ordered this action for four reasons first, because we have convincing evidence these groups played the key role in the Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania second, because these groups have executed terrorist attacks against Americans in the past third, because we have compelling information that they were planning additional terrorist attacks against our citizens and others with the inevitable collateral casualties we saw so tragically in Africa and fourth, because they are seeking to acquire chemical weapons and other dangerous weapons. Terrorists must have no doubt that, in the face of their threats, America will protect its citizens and will continue to lead the world's fight for peace, freedom, and security. Now I am returning to Washington to be briefed by my national security team on the latest information. I will provide you with a more detailed statement later this afternoon from the White House. Thank you very much. August 15, 1998 Good morning. Two days ago, at Andrews Air Force Base, we welcomed them home America's brave sons and daughters, carried under Stars and Stripes, flanked by the silent sentries of the honor guard. They had perished in Nairobi, cruelly and without warning, in an act of terror at the American Embassy. It was not the sort of homecoming any of us would have wished. But it was a tribute that befit their service to our Nation. Hillary and I had the honor to meet with their families on the morning of the ceremony. They shared stories with us, stories and memories, showing us photographs. Their shoulders were heavy with sadness their voices sometimes shook. But anyone could tell that their hearts were full of pride for the brave service of their loved ones and pride in the Nation they so ably and faithfully represented around the world. Collectively, over the course of their careers, these 12 men and women represented the United States in more than 20 countries across the globe, from Brazil to Botswana, from France to the Philippines, from South Korea to their final post, Kenya. They represented America not simply by their deeds but by their character by the quiet labors of a medical doctor, the careful diplomacy of a Foreign Service officer, the iron discipline of men and women in uniform. Their dedication to America was matched by their dedication to their families. In all these ways, they represented the best of our country. They showed the world our very best face and shared with its people our most cherished values. As a nation, we have lost much. These families have lost even more. Words cannot describe and tributes cannot begin to fill the cruel vacancy left by evil acts of terror. But in the example of the proud and grieving families I met on Thursday, we find an embodiment of American resolve. They made it clear to me they did not want us to give in to terror or to turn inward or retreat, for the world is full of promise, and they do not want us to try to stop resolving the misunderstandings that can deteriorate into the rot of hatred. Instead, they urged us to stand strong, as ever, for freedom and democracy in all countries and for all people. And our administration will remain committed to the fight against terror. Over the last few years, working with Congress, we have passed tough new criminal penalties, tightened security at airports, strengthened protection of our troops overseas. We have created an international coalition to help us combat terrorism and have apprehended or helped to capture more than 40 terrorists abroad, including those involved in attacks on Pan Am Flight 830 and the World Trade Center and in the murder of two CIA employees in Virginia. We must continue to lead the world toward peace, freedom, and prosperity. That is why our diplomats are on the job today around the world, working to ensure our national security, working to strengthen the global economy, working to bring peace to troubled regions, working often at risk to themselves. And that is why we now must work to rebuild our Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, to secure our Embassies and outposts around the world, to support our friends in Tanzania and Kenya as they rebuild. This week I have spoken with leaders in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike. In the finest American tradition, they have pledged to join me in protecting America's presence throughout the world. Today we think especially of those serving in our diplomatic posts. I ask all our citizens to say a prayer for them and to express gratitude for their service. The spirit of the patriots who have dedicated or lost their lives to service is the spirit of America. They help to keep our Nation strong and free, peaceful and proud, a powerful beacon of hope for the world. Thank you for listening. August 14, 1998 I am honored to address you, the people of Kenya and Tanzania. On behalf of all the American people, I extend our deepest condolences to the families and the friends of those Kenyans and Tanzanians who perished in the tragic attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Some of them worked alongside Americans at our Embassies, making vital contributions to our common efforts, and we are very grateful for their service. Others were nearby, working hard, as they did every day. All of these men and women were important to America, because we cherish our friendship with your peoples. We have long admired the achievements of your citizens and the beauty of your lands. All three of our nations have lost beloved sons and daughters, and so many, many more were injured. We pray, too, for their speedy recovery. Let me express America's profound gratitude for your extraordinary efforts, with Americans and others, to respond to this shared tragedy, pulling people from the wreckage, aiding the wounded, searching for evidence as to who committed these terrible acts. Violent extremists try to use bullets and bombs to derail our united efforts to bring peace to every part of this Earth. We grieve together, but I am proud that our nations have also renewed our commitment to stand together, to bring the offenders swiftly to justice, to combat terrorism in all its forms and to create a more tolerant and more peaceful world for our children. August 13, 1998 To the members of the families here, Secretary Albright, Secretary Cohen, members of the Cabinet, Members of Congress, leaders of the Armed Forces, members of the diplomatic corps, friends, and we say a special appreciation to the representatives here from Kenya and Tanzania. Every person here today would pray not to be here. But we could not be anywhere else, for we come to honor 12 proud sons and daughters who perished half a world away but never left America behind, who carried with them the love of their families, the respect of their countrymen, and above all, the ideals for which America stands. They perished in the service of the country for which they gave so much in life. To their families and friends, the rest of your fellow Americans have learned a little bit about your loved ones in the past few days. Of course, we will never know them as you did or remember them as you will, as a new baby, a proud graduate, a beaming bride or groom, a reassuring voice on the phone from across the ocean, a tired but happy traveler at an airport, bags stuffed with gifts, arms outstretched. Nothing can bring them back, but nothing can erase the lives they led, the difference they made, the joy they brought. We can only hope that even in grief you can take pride and solace in the gratitude all the rest of us have for the service they gave. The men and women who serve in our Embassies all around this world do hard work that is not always fully appreciated and not even understood by many of their fellow Americans. They protect our interests and promote our values abroad. They are diplomats and doctors and drivers, bookkeepers and technicians and military guards. Far from home, they endure hardships, often at great risk. These 12 Americans came from diverse backgrounds. If you see their pictures, you know they are a portrait of America today and of America's tomorrow. But as different as they were, each of them had an adventurous spirit, a generous soul. Each relished the chance to see the world and to make it better. They were a senior diplomat I had the honor to meet twice, and his son, who proudly worked alongside him this summer a budget officer, a wife and mother who had just spent her vacation caring for her aged parents a State Department worker who looked forward to being back home with her new grandson a Foreign Service officer born in India who became an American citizen and traveled the world with her family for her new country a Marine sergeant, the son of very proud parents an Air Force sergeant who followed in her own father's footsteps an epidemiologist who loved her own children and worked to save Africa's children from disease and death an Embassy administrator who married a Kenyan and stayed in close touch with her children back in America a Foreign Service officer and mother of three children, including a baby girl a Foreign Service member who was an extraordinarily accomplished jazz musician and devoted husband an Army sergeant, a veteran of the Gulf war, a husband, a father, who told his own father that if anything ever happened to him, he wanted his ashes scattered in the Pacific off Big Sur because that was where he had met his beloved wife. What one classmate said to me of his friend today we can say of all of them They were what America is all about. We also remember today the Kenyans and Tanzanians who have suffered great loss. We are grateful for your loved ones who worked alongside us in our Embassies. And we are grateful for your extraordinary efforts in great pain in the wake of this tragedy. We pray for the speedy recovery of all the injured, Americans and Africans alike. No matter what it takes, we must find those responsible for these evil acts and see that justice is done. There may be more hard road ahead, for terrorists target America because we act and stand for peace and democracy, because the spirit of our country is the very spirit of freedom. It is the burden of our history and the bright hope of the world's future. We must honor the memory of those we mourn today by pressing the cause of freedom and justice for which they lived. We must continue to stand strong for freedom on every continent. America will not retreat from the world and all its promise, nor shrink from our responsibility to stand against terror and with the friends of freedom everywhere. We owe it to those we honor today. As it is written "Their righteous deeds have not been forgotten. Their glory will not be blotted out. Their bodies were buried in peace, but their names shall live forever." Sergeant Jesse Nathan Aliganga. Julian Bartley, Sr. Julian Bartley, Jr. Jean Dalizu. Molly Huckaby Hardy. Sergeant Kenneth Hobson. Prabhi Guptara Kavaler. Arlene Kirk. Dr. Mary Louise Martin. Ann Michelle O'Connor. Senior Master Sergeant Sherry Lynn Olds. Uttamlal "Tom" Shah. May they find peace in the warm embrace of God. And may God give peace to those who loved them, and bless their beloved country. August 11, 1998 Thank you. First of all, thank you for coming tonight. Thank you for making me feel so welcome. Many of you said especially kind things to me when I was going around and visiting with you, and I thank you for that. I thank Jeffrey and Marilyn for now now I have visited in all their residences. Laughter I'm three for three I get to start on my second round now. And I thank them for having all of us in here in this beautiful and, for this sort of political event, rather cozy setting. I've enjoyed it very much. We've been working all day, as Gray said, and you've probably heard about all the speeches you want to hear. I would just like to tell you a couple of things that are very much on my mind. First, I want to thank you and the people of California for giving me and Hillary and Al and Tipper Gore the chance to serve these last 5 1 2 years and to play our role in this country's renaissance. I'm grateful for that. Second, I thank you for helping Gray Davis. I think he is a good man. I think he will be elected Governor if the people of California show up at the polls in November. Thirdly, I want to ask you to just think about one thing briefly and seriously, and that is, okay, California is back, America is moving forward Gray reeled off the statistics, you heard them we're in the best shape we've been in a generation. Our economy is growing our social problems are declining. What are we to do with this moment? And what does the race for Governor have to do with it? What does Senator Boxer's race have to do with it? Is it really a good thing that a guy like Rob Reiner has put his neck on the line to put a proposition on the ballot to try to provide a better early beginning for our children? What does all this matter? And it may seem self evident, but it's not really. I mean, if you think about your own life, just go back over periods of your life, and you go through a really tough time and just about all of us in this crowd have lived long enough to have had a few tough times and then things get really good what is the temptation? You want to say, "I had all these tough times and now things are going well for me, and I want to enjoy it. I want to kick back, relax, enjoy it, smell the roses." That's what people want to do, families want to do, businesses are inclined to do. And the point I would like to make, that I think is so urgent when it comes to the decisions the voters will make here in California this November, is that we can't afford to do that now. We have to resist the temptation of saying these good times can let us be a little bit lazy, and say instead The world is changing too fast the challenges are still too profound and we have an obligation to use these good times and the confidence they've given us to meet the long term challenges of the future. For me, it means we have to solve the problems of Social Security and Medicare before the baby boomers retire, so we can do it in a way that will provide dignity to my old age and our generation in a way that does not bankrupt our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. So even though it's election year, I'm against the Republican House proposal for a tax cut. We've had a deficit for 29 years now we're going to have a surplus I'd like to look at the black ink for a few months and take care of our kids' future before we squander it for political purposes. A good reason to vote to reelect Barbara Boxer a good reason. We have got to resolve this ambivalent feeling that or these messages that America has sent out because of the votes, or lack of them, in Congress about whether we're prepared to continue to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity. We've got to pay our dues to the U.N., our debt to the International Monetary Fund we've got to say we're proud of what we've done for peace in Northern Ireland, in Bosnia, in Haiti, what we're working on in the Middle East, the humanitarian disaster we want to avoid in Kosovo. We've got to say we're not going to let the terrorists back us down or get away with it in the wake of these horrible Embassy bombings in Africa. We have got to stand up for our leadership role in the world. We have got to face big challenges here at home. Let me just reel some of them off Gray talked about some of them. We've got the best system of college in the world. One of the major achievements of our administration is we've opened the door to college wider than ever before with tax credits and more scholarships and more work study positions and the national service program, AmeriCorps, to let people earn college scholarship money. But nobody thinks we've got the best elementary and secondary system in the world. And it's too late to have a debate about what to do about it. But I'll tell you this Every problem in American education has been solved by somebody somewhere, and there is no excuse for us not doing it everywhere. Now, that has to be done partly by the National Government, but largely at the State and local level. Which candidate for Governor do you really believe is more likely to make a contribution to that? We've got to continue the fight to provide health care to all of our people. At the national level we need to pass a Patients' Bill of Rights to balance managed care with patient care and get the balance right. But when we passed the balanced budget bill, we made it possible for 5 million American kids to get health care, but we said the States had to figure out how to do it, here's the money. Which candidate for Governor is more likely to see that more of California's children get decent health care? We have to figure out a way to grow the economy while we preserve the environment. I hope all of you in this crowd believe that the phenomenon of global warming is real. It is. When I was out on the Monterey Peninsula a few weeks ago, I went out with some young marine biologists from Stanford, and we stood in the bay there and we looked at marine life there that just 20 years ago was no further north than 50 miles south of there. That's a phenomenal change in marine life because of the warming of the planet. But a lot of the environmental challenges of this State have to be met here in California. What candidate for Governor is more likely to help you meet the environmental challenges of the future and grow California's economy? I could go on and on and on. The last thing I'd like to say is that one of the things that's made me proudest to be a Democrat in the last few years is that we have continued to stand for the proposition that this has to be one America that all the lines that divide us, the lines of race and religion and income, all the other things that divide people in this society that have been used by people in political campaigns to drive wedges between us, that we have to overcome those things because what we have in common is more important than what divides us. And I believe that California sends a signal to America because this State is so diverse. And the decision you make in the Governor's race here will have a lot to say about whether State politics continues to be a source of constant social division or whether you've got a Governor up there leading people to aspire to their better selves. And I don't think there's any question in your mind about which candidate is more likely to do that. And let me say one last thing on an issue. When I come to California, it makes my heart leap with joy to see so much prosperity where once there was so many problems. And I'm very proud of the role that we have played in it. But I just want to remind you that politics is more than speeches at events like this. After the poetry of the campaign, as Governor Cuomo used to say, there is the prose of making decisions and a lot of them hard and controversial, with tough choices and trade offs. Five years ago this month I presented to the Congress the economic plan that began the recovery of this country by driving the deficit down, driving interest rates down, driving investment up. The Republicans attacked it, characterized it unfairly as a tax increase on the whole American people, said it would be a disaster. And not a single, solitary Republican after they have quadrupled the debt in 4 years would step forward to vote for that plan. It passed by one vote in the House, one vote in the Senate. If one person had failed to be there, then the thing that set this whole recovery in motion would not have occurred. Barbara Boxer won by about 47 percent of the vote in 1992. She could have taken a powder because she didn't have a majority going in. And she stood 7 feet tall and walked down the aisle and voted for the economic plan that we are now celebrating the consequences of in California and all over America. For that vote alone, I believe she deserves to be reelected in November, and I hope you will help her. So let me ask you to go out here and talk about these things, talk about the issues that are on the ballot, talk about these candidates. You've given a much bigger bullhorn to Gray Davis by your contributions tonight, and that's very important. But it's important that the people you come in contact with, many of whom influence a lot of other people, understand that this is not a time for sitting around, because the world is changing too fast. Let me just ask you this. If somebody told you 5 years ago when I became President 5 1 2 years ago that over the next 5 1 2 years America will become the strongest economy in the world with the strongest economy in a generation here, and meanwhile the Japanese stock market will lose one half of its value and Japan will not grow for 5 years, you would not have believed that, I bet. But that happened. I say that not to criticize the Japanese they're a very great people they're brilliant they're rich they're strong they're smart and they'll be back but to show you that you can never afford just to relax and stay with the established order of things. We have to keep doing what got us here. When Hillary agreed to take over this celebration of the Millennium Project, she came up with this theme, "Honoring the past, and imagining the future." In a dynamic time, that's what we all have to do. Gray talked about honoring the past by doing the right things for the future. And that's what we represent. If you look at the whole history of the country Gray talked about "Saving Private Ryan." I told him one of my favorite parts of that movie was George Marshall reading Abraham Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby, which I used to read every Memorial Day, because it captures what America is all about. But I believe that the party I'm a part of and the candidates I'm supporting and the work we're trying to do embody the best of our past and the best hope for the future. Because what are we trying to do? We're trying to widen the circle of opportunity, deepen the reach of our freedom, strengthen the bonds of our community. You've helped us to do that tonight. I hope tomorrow when you wake up you'll be proud you were here tonight. And I hope you'll want to talk to others about why we should not relax, we should thank God for the blessings we enjoy and do our best to preserve and spread them. Thank you, and God bless you. August 11, 1998 Thank you very much. First of all, I think we should tell Gray Davis that he's going to have to stop getting so many laughs and having so many good lines in his speeches. He's going to completely destroy his reputation. Laughter I want to thank Bruce and Janet for having us in their magnificent home, and especially out here in this beautiful open air area. I want to thank them for putting those trees up so I can't look down on Riviera and be distracted while I speak tonight. Laughter I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to Janet for being involved in the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. That corps and a remarkable project that began in Boston called City Year were the two inspirations for me for the proposal I made in the 1992 campaign to have a national community service program, AmeriCorps. And when it was created, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. We've now given about 100,000 young people a chance to work in communities in all kinds of work all across America, some of them with the L.A. Conservation Corps and, in so doing, to earn some money for college as well. And it's very, very important. I think that the more we can get people when they're young to do community service and to do it with people who are different than them different in terms of race, in income, in background the more likely we are to succeed in building one America. I also promised myself a long time ago that I'd never come to California again without saying a profound word of thanks to the people of this State for giving Hillary and me and Al and Tipper Gore and our administration a chance to serve, a chance to do the work we have done this last 5 1 2 years. And no matter what you read, every day has been a joy for me, and I have loved it. I have tried to be a good President for California, and I could mention 10 or 11 things. But a lot of you thanked me for spending all day with Gray Davis. But I can tell you, I can't think of a better gift I could give the people of California than playing some role in the election of this good man to the governorship. It will be great for your future. I was just sitting up there listening to Gray talk, and I he mentioned the education issues and the difference between himself and his opponent the crime issues. Last week I had Jim and Sarah Brady with me in the White House you may have seen it. We celebrated the fifth anniversary of the Brady bill, another piece of legislation that most of the leaders in the other party opposed. Since the Brady bill became law, about a quarter of a million people with criminal and mental health histories that were destructive have not been able to buy handguns. Let me break it down just on the felons. Since I signed that bill into law and it took effect, 118 felons an hour every hour of the day have been denied the ability to buy a handgun. Now, I feel very strongly about the assault weapons ban that Gray has tried as he talked about the enforcement of the California law. As most of you know, Senator Feinstein was the leading sponsor of the bill in the Senate that we incorporated into the crime bill to ban assault weapons there. I have tried to strengthen that. I've tried to stop foreign manufacturers from getting around it. These kinds of issues tell you a lot not just about the issues but about the general attitude of people who would be in public service and, therefore, are a pretty good predictor of the kind of decisions they might make on hundreds of other issues. And the request I want to make of you tonight is that you do more than you've done here, because, keep in mind, the truth is that most of you will do all right whether Gray wins or not. But the people that are serving our food here tonight, the people that are parking cars, the people that work in every place of business that I pass on the way up here tonight, it makes a whole lot of difference to them and their children. And in the end, how your children and your grandchildren do will be determined more than anything else by how everybody else does. And it is profoundly important. So I just want you to think about that. I also have to put in a good word here tonight for someone who is not here. I thank Congresswoman Jane Harman and Sidney for being here and Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher. They do a wonderful job for the State of California in the Congress. And I did get to go to Jane and Sidney's, to their event for Gray, and having lost two elections myself, I can say two things. Number one, it's not fatal and number two, you know what the right thing to do is, but it's not always easy. And she has done the right thing and then some, and I respect her for it immensely. And I thank her. Thank you very much. I'd also like to say a word for Barbara Boxer, who isn't here. That young man at the water treatment facility today, he did say to me, "Mr. President, my life is better since you've been in. The California economy has come back things are better here." I want you to just remember one thing. I want to give a speech for Gray, so I don't want to get off on Barbara too much, and besides, most of you know that I'm related to her by marriage, so you have to discount some of what I say. Laughter But in 1993, 5 years ago this month, when the whole future of the economic ideas that I wanted to bring the American people was on the line in the economic plan I presented to Congress, when I said it would reduce the deficit by at least 500 billion and probably more, that it would bring interest rates down, get investments up, that it would also provide tax cuts to lower income working families and provide real incentives to invest in our cities, which had been neglected, and put more money into education, not a single Republican voted for that bill not one not one. The bill passed by one vote in the House, by one vote in the Senate. If Barbara Boxer had not voted for it and keep in mind, she was elected in 1992 with only 47 percent of the vote, and she could not possibly have known for sure what the outcome would be. And all the Republicans were saying, "This will be a disaster it will bring on a recession. We will attack the Democrats." And she didn't blink. She went right down the aisle and cast her vote, "Aye." So when you look at the fact that we have the lowest unemployment in 28 years, the smallest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years, the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years, with the lowest inflation in 32 years and the smallest Federal Government in 35 years, that vote alone, in my judgment, plus the fact that she has worn me out, just like Gray has, on offshore oil drilling and every other California issue I can possibly think of laughter no family dinner with my extended family and all my wife's family is ever free from an interruption of lobbying on your behalf that deserves your support for reelection, and I hope you'll give it to her. Now, I'll be brief. Gray gave you his campaign speech, and I won't give it to you again. I want to make a point that only I understand. Before I became President, I was a Governor for 12 years. Unlike Gray, I did get to live in public housing, and I rather enjoyed it. Laughter I don't even know what it costs to rent a place what am I going to do when I get out in a couple years? Laughter Anyway and I think by experience more understanding than anyone here could possibly have about the relationship of the National Government to the State government, how it's changed in the last 8 years, and why I have tried to make the Governor's job more important. But let me take one step back. One crusade I've been on all across America everywhere I go I make this point. I say I am grateful for the good times we now enjoy. I think the lion's share of the credit goes to the American people for their hard work and ingenuity and good citizenship. But I think the policies of this administration have made a lot of it possible by creating the conditions and giving people the tools to make the most of their own lives. Now, after all California went through in the late eighties and early nineties, it is tempting for a State or for a nation to do what every individual or family or business is tempted to do after you've been through tough times and all of the sudden you're in the pink and things are going well. You want to just take a deep breath, relax, put your feet up on the couch, and forget about it for a while. Speaker Gingrich said the other day the only thing they had to do to hold the Congress was pass the continuing resolution, not shut the Government down, and just go home don't do anything, because times are good, people are happy, and they'll just vote for the status quo. My argument is that that would be the exact wrong thing to do for America at this time. And I'll just give you an example that I think makes the point. If I had come here in 1992 and said to you, "Vote for me because I have a crystal ball, and I can see the future, and in 5, 6 years, not only will we have the strongest economy in the world, but the value of the Japanese stock market will be one half of what it is today, and they will have no growth for 5 years," you would think I had a screw loose, wouldn't you? There's not a soul in this place that would have believed me if I'd said that 5 years ago maybe a few of you who understood the real estate issues and all of that, but most people would have said no. Now, I say that not to be critical of the Japanese. They are a very great people with enormous intelligence, enormous wealth, enormous potential, and they will be back. I say it to make this point The world is changing more rapidly and more profoundly than almost any of us can understand the way we work, the way we live, the way we relate to each other and the rest of the world, the nature of the foreign policy challenges we face. So when you have good times like this, but you know times are changing, if you want them to continue, the only responsible thing to do is to say, okay, we've got money we've got confidence we've got breathing space we don't have to worry about where our next nickel or meal is coming from let's look at the big long term challenges and face them. Now, I believe this country has seven big long term challenges, and I'll just mention them to you, and you'll see what relevance it has to the Governor's race, because the last four depend on what is done at the State level as well as what's done at the national level. Number one, we have got to stop playing with whether we're an isolationist power or whether we're going to lead the world for peace and freedom and prosperity. We have got to stop it. We've got to pay our debts to the U.N. We've got to pay our debts to the International Monetary Fund. We've got to be proud and aggressive of what we did in Bosnia, what we did in Haiti, what we've done in Northern Ireland, what we're trying to do in the Middle East, what I hope we can do by stopping another horrible ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. We've got to be tough in standing up against terrorism from whatever source and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We've got to be willing to invest the money to do it, and we've got to realize that if we're going to trade all around the world, we have to have a world where commerce is possible because freedom is possible. We have got to do that. Now, number two, we've got to understand if we want to do good abroad in a world totally awash in racial and ethnic and religious hatred, we have to be good at home. We have got to build one America across the lines that divide us. Number three, we have got to look out for the next generation and the implications of the retirement of the baby boomers. I can say that I'm the oldest baby boomer. I don't know how you call anyone who is almost 52 baby anything. Laughter But when we all retire, all of us baby boomers, people who are this year turning between 34 and 52 years of age, at present rates of work force participation, retirement, birth rates, and immigration rates, there will only be about two people working for every person drawing Social Security. That will put untenable strains on both the Social Security and the Medicare program as they presently operate. That is why I am so diametrically opposed to these suggestions that some in the other party have made that we're going to have a huge surplus, therefore we ought to spend hundreds of billions of dollars right now on a permanent tax cut. If the surplus doesn't materialize, do you think we'd repeal the tax cut? Look, it's election year I'd like to give you a tax cut as much as anybody else. Even though I'm not running, I want everybody else to win that I'm for, that is. Laughter But that would not be responsible. We don't know how much it's going to cost to preserve what is essential about Social Security as we reform it to make it sustainable. And the same is true of the Medicare program. So I say, we've been waiting for 29 years to get out of the red wouldn't you like to spend just a few months looking at the black ink before we squander it all again? Isn't that the right thing to do? Applause You see all these young people around here. The baby boomers I know, we are plagued with the thought that we will lower the standard of living of our children and undermine their ability to raise our grandchildren because it will cost so much to take care of us when we're old, and we don't want it to happen. And we'll find a right balance, but we can't do it overnight. Now, those are three big challenges that the State doesn't have anything to do with. We have to do that nationally. But what are the others? And Gray talked about a couple of them. Number one, we have the best system of higher education in the world. No serious person believes we have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world for all our kids. Until we can say we do, we will never be what we ought to be. And we can help. I've got a good program for smaller classes, higher standards, better training of teachers, hooking up all the classrooms to the Internet. But in the end, it's fundamentally a State responsibility, carried out by local people ultimately in the schools, the principals, the teachers, the parents, and the students. It matters who the Governor is. Next, we've got to prove that we can grow the economy and improve the environment. A lot of it has to be done at the national level. The challenge of climate change primarily has to be done, I'm convinced, by a sensible program at the national level. The challenge of cleaning up our oceans has to be done primarily at the national level. But so much can and must be done here. I'm telling you, I was driving across Los Angeles today thinking, thank God the people of California stood up for clean air and cleaned up the air here. How many children are free of bronchial diseases in this State because you believed in the environment and because you understood you could do it and still have a strong economy? You don't need someone in the Governor's chair who does not believe that passionately. It is very important very important. Just two other issues, very quickly. Economic policy We've got a great economic recovery, but there are places cities, rural areas, Indian reservations where there is no free enterprise economic recovery. We can do something nationally some of it has to be done at the State level. And finally, health care. You know, when Hillary and I tried to reform the health care system and the Republicans and the insurance companies beat us and said we were trying to have the Government take over health care, they said, "Oh, they're going to have the Government take over health care." Of course, that wasn't true, but that's what they said. And they spent a lot of money, and they convinced a lot of people it was right. Let me give you an interesting statistic. When they beat our health care program, 40 percent of all health care dollars came from public sources. What do you think it is today? Fortyseven percent. Why? Because private employers don't insure as many of their employees any more, and even lower income working people are now more eligible for Medicaid. Now, what I've tried to do is to find a way step by step to deal with that, to have the benefits of managed care without the burdens. That's what the Patients' Bill of Rights is all about. And I think it's very important. But let me give you one example. We passed in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 a bill part of that to provide 24 billion to give health insurance to 5 million children who don't have it, most of them in low income working families. Thirteen percent of the country lives in California, but a lot more than 13 percent of the eligible kids live in California working people who can get their kids insured now because we put that money into the balanced budget. But the whole program has to be developed by the States. They have to come up with a system to do it. That's one of the biggest responsibilities of a Governor today figure out how his State or her State can get their fair share of money to get these children in working families so they can see a doctor on a regular basis and get preventive care so they don't get sick, so their parents aren't torn up with worry. Now, you tell me you know who the two candidates for Governor are if you thought that was one of the most important responsibilities, and also you wanted less drain on your State tax dollars from people getting real sick and showing up at public hospitals and public health centers, which one do you think is more likely to spend more time designing an aggressive, appropriate plan to protect the working families of this State and their health care? The answer is Gray Davis. It's clear. You can see I don't feel very strongly about this. Laughter If you think about it, there are seven big challenges this country is facing for the 21st century. Four of them, no matter what I do as President or whether I can prevail in Congress, depend upon having the right kind of visionary leadership at the State level. This is a big deal. And I want you to go out and talk to your friends and neighbors between now and November and tell them the only way this guy can lose this race is if a lot of people who care and know better don't vote because they really don't think it matters, because they can relax because things are going so well. Things are going so well because of all the hard work we have all done together. And they will continue to go well as long as but only as long as we continue to face the challenges of today and tomorrow. That is the major case for Gray Davis. You've given him a chance tonight to have a bigger bullhorn, to get his message out. Tomorrow you can give him a chance to have a lot more apostles, one on one, and in the end, that can be even more important. Thank you, and God bless you. August 11, 1998 Thank you very much. Good morning. I asked Lorraine if any of her children were here, and she said they were all here. I would like to ask the members of your family to stand. Everybody in Lorraine's family, stand. Applause Good for you. There are your children, your husband. Thank you all. I'd say they were worth fighting for. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for braving this beautiful but rather warm California sunshine to participate in this event. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Ann Caen, for your service and the reference to Herb. Thank you, Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis, for your support for the environment. Thank you to Superintendent Paul Mazza and the members of the facility here, all of the people who work here. I'd like to thank them for what they do to help improve the lives of the people in this area. Thank you very much. I know we have members of the San Mateo board of supervisors and other perhaps other officials here. And I'd like to say a special word of appreciation to Congressman Tom Lantos and especially for the reference he made to the terrible events a few days ago in Kenya and Tanzania. We now have as the Congressman mentioned, the American citizens who were killed there are coming home, and Hillary and I will go to Andrews Air Force Base to meet that sad homecoming plane on Thursday. In addition to that, you should know now, over 200 well over 200 African citizens have been killed and almost 5,000 injured. There are over 500 people still in the hospital in Nairobi in Kenya. I think it's important for me to tell you that we have worked very closely with the Governments of Kenya and Tanzania in, first of all, determining and finding those who were killed and those who were injured and now in their treatment. And also they are working very closely with us in our attempts to find those who are responsible. And I know this is terribly frightening to people when something like this happens, but in an ever more open world where people are traveling more and where more information and technology and, unfortunately, weaponry are available across national lines, and more and more information through the Internet, I think it is important that we all, as Americans, send a clear signal to the world that we are not going to back away from our involvement with other people, and we are not going to back away from our opposition to terrorism. It makes us more vulnerable as targets because we have taken the toughest stand around the world against terrorism. Now is the time to bear down, not back up, on that. And that is my determination. And I believe that's what the American people support, and I hope all of you will. Let me say that today is a happy day because it marks another step forward in our attempt to bring the American people the kind of life I believe that all hard working citizens deserve. It is tempting because our own country has enjoyed so much prosperity and a declining crime rate, declining welfare rolls, and declining other social problems, rising wages. Particularly in a place like California, where you had such a tough time for so many years, it's tempting at a good time like this for everybody to say, "Okay, we went through all those tough times. Now we've got good times. Mr. President, leave us alone. We want to relax. We want to enjoy this. We want to chill out." I think that's what some people say. I think that would be a mistake. Why? Because all you have to do is pick up the newspaper any day or watch the news any night, and we see how fast the world continues to change always changing the ay we work, the way we live, the challenges we face, the way we relate to each other and the rest of the world. At a time like this we should take our prosperity and the self confidence it has given us as a country and say, "What are the challenges of the future? And how can we use this moment of opportunity, because we're doing well, to take care of the long term challenges to our children's future and to make America what it ought to be?" We have to, for example, save Social Security for the 21st century, before all the baby boomers retire and impose unbearable strains on the system as it's now constituted. We have to make our elementary and secondary schools the best in the world, just as our higher education system is now. We have to prove that we can provide affordable and quality health care to all people, which is why I've fought so hard for this Patients' Bill of Rights. We have to expand opportunity into innercity areas and rural areas and Native American reservations where there has been no recovery yet. We have to prove we can live together as one America as we get more diverse. We have to, as Tom Lantos said, fulfill our responsibilities in the world, because we cannot grow and prosper at home unless we are also strong abroad in pursuit of peace and freedom and prosperity. But one thing we clearly have to do is to prove that we can grow our economy while we improve the environment and public health. The two things must never be seen in conflict. When they are, we pay a price that is terrible, first in the environment, second in public health, and eventually in the health of our economy. And one example of that is what we're here to talk about today, the importance of our drinking water. It may have been gold that brought people to California 150 years ago, but water has enabled them to stay here and enabled this State to grow and expand to the point where now California comprises 13 percent of our entire Nation's population. It may be that the clear water that flows down the Sierra slopes and was miraculously, a long time ago, through pipes and channels, taken into a reservoir here to provide water for this area was an even greater discovery than the gold. I think clearly it was. Few States are blessed with such a supply of fresh water, and none have done more to put it to productive use than California. Still, although there are problems, and I understand there are still disputes over water, I have seen in my own administration how, by working patiently together with different groups, cooperation can win out to protect this vital resource so there's enough for the farms, for the wildlife, and for the people. Now, we also have to work to assure the quality as well as the supply. That's what we're here to talk about today. Mrs. Ross told you about what happened to her family and others in the Silicon Valley. Five years ago, the citizens of Milwaukee found themselves with 400,000 people sick, dozens of people dead because a microbe called cryptosporidium had contaminated their water supply. The Vice President and I have worked hard to deal with this issue, to strengthen the Safe Drinking Water Act, to help communities upgrade treatment plants, and to zero in on contaminants posing the greatest threat. We required more industries to publicly disclose the chemicals they release into the air and water. The results of that have been quite remarkable. The factories required to provide this information listen to this, just the community rightto know the factories required to provide the information about the chemicals they release into the air and water have reduced their toxic releases by almost half. That's what right toknow can do. Now, today we take another important step to empower communities with information. Beginning next year, under a new EPA community right to know rule I'm announcing today, water systems across our country must give their customers regular reports on the water flowing from their taps, to tell consumers where the water comes from, whether it meets Federal standards, as well as the likely source of any contaminants and their potential health effects. Thanks to these reports, contamination in the water will no longer be invisible to the eye. Families will see at a glance whether their drinking water is safe. When it is not, utilities will have a crystal clear incentive to clean it up, and citizens like Lorraine Ross will not have to fly blind. They will be able to come up all over America, and they will know what they have to work with and what they must work toward. Safe water for our children is something all Americans agree on. This should not be a partisan issue. We've improved the quality of drinking water so much over the years, in fact, because of a bipartisan effort. And yet, there is in Congress today a disturbing trend to break up what has historically, at least for the last 30 years, been a bipartisan consensus on the environment. If there is ever an area where we need progress, not partisanship, it is to ensure the purity and safety of our environment. But there is a question about that. So far, Congress has refused to fund my clean water action plan that would help to restore the listen to this the 40 percent of our waters that are still too polluted for fishing and swimming. In February, I proposed to add 100 national and historic sites across our country to our endowment of protected areas. One of the things I'm proudest of that our administration has done is that we have protected more land in perpetuity than any administration in history except those of the two Roosevelts. And now we have 100 more sites, places like Bair Island, a haven for endangered wildlife in San Francisco Bay, and the gravesite of John Muir, perhaps the greatest preservationist of all time. Believe it or not, the money has been appropriated for all these sites, but under the law, once they're selected, the congressional leaders must approve its release. So far, that approval has not been forthcoming for months and months. Today, for the sites in California and throughout the country, again I ask Congress to release the funds already approved so we can preserve these precious places. We need progress and not partisanship in our efforts to avoid the degradation of our ocean waters. We had a big ocean conference out here on the Monterey Peninsula not very long ago. And we need it in our efforts to combat climate change and to do America's part. Just yesterday the Vice President announced new data showing that the month of July was the hottest month ever recorded since climate records have been kept on Earth. This is not some fly by night phenomenon. The 9 hottest years ever recorded have occurred in the last 11 years '97 was the hottest year ever measured every month in '98 has been hotter than the preceding month in '97. And we need to work together. Yet many in Congress want to cut the common sense technology, market oriented initiatives I have proposed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and to do America's part. We can grow this economy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve the environment. If we do not do so at some point in the not too distant future, our children will be living in an economy that is much reduced, because we didn't do right by the environment. And we should never forget that. Let me finally say that one of the things that I have found most frustrating in trying to create a bipartisan consensus on the environment is that I keep finding in all these bills that are sent to me legislative gimmicks called riders, which have nothing to do with the bills that pass, where the little rider is designed to weaken some environmental protection the United States has. Lawmakers have attached language to unrelated bills to cripple wildlife protection and cut through an Alaskan wildlife refuge with a 30 million road. These back door assaults must also stop. We shouldn't squander our bounty for short term gain. Now, the people of California know this. From Monterey Bay to Lake Tahoe, people who haven't always seen eye to eye on any political issue are working together to preserve their water and land. We are rebuilding at the grassroots level a consensus for preserving our environment, advancing the public health as we grow our economy. That message needs to get back to Washington, because every American has to come to grips with this fundamental challenge. We can never create the 21st century America we want for our children until we do not think of economic growth as divorced from the preservation of the environment and the public health. They must be seen as absolutely part of one indivisible effort to create the good life for the American people. If we do that and if we fulfill our responsibilities, then I'm convinced that for the children here in this audience, America's best days are still ahead. Thank you, and God bless you. August 10, 1998 Thank you very much. First of all, I want to thank all the previous speakers for saying everything that needs to be said I am free to say whatever I like. I am deeply indebted, as all of you know, to this city and this State for many things, the most important of which is clearly the First Lady, who asked me to be remembered to all of you tonight. I have a picture on my wall in my office of Hillary and me on St. Patrick's Day in 1992 in Chicago that was the night of the primaries in Illinois and Michigan, the night we knew that unless the wheel completely ran off, I would probably become the nominee of our party. And from that day and before to this, no place has been better to us and to the Vice President and to our whole team than the city of Chicago and the State of Illinois. And I am profoundly grateful to all of you, and I thank you for it. I also want to say a word of appreciation to Steve Grossman, who has done a magnificent job. I thank Congressman Rangel, who has to put on his uniform every day. He's now in the most severe combat he's been in since the Korean war, I think, with the Republicans in the House, but he holds up his end right well. And I thank you, Charles. I'm proud of you in every way. I want to thank Secretary Daley, who will soon get over being 50. Laughter Oh, to be 50 again. Laughter It's all a matter of perspective, you know. I want to thank Mayor Daley for his leadership here and his support and friendship. I thank Senator Durbin for many things and for being so courageous in his leadership to protect our children against the dangers of tobacco, to keep our streets and our communities safe, and many other things. I want to say a little more about Carol Moseley Braun in a moment. I want to thank Reverend Jesse Jackson for being a good friend of my family in personal as well as political ways, and for doing a superb job for our country as our Special Envoy to Africa, a very important part of America's future. Thank you, Reverend Jackson, for doing that. Now, you heard all the politics. I would like to talk a little bit about specifically about Illinois and how if fits into the larger picture of America and our future. I ran for President because I honestly believed our country was not doing what was necessary to prepare for a new century, a new millennium, a completely new way of living and working and relating to each other and the rest of the world. And I think that what we have sought to do is best captured in the theme the First Lady picked for our Millennium Project, the things we are doing over the next 2 1 2 years to celebrate the coming of a new century and a new millennium. The theme is "Honoring the past imagining the future." And that is what we have tried to do to offer new ideas based on our oldest values to deepen the meaning of our freedom to widen the circle of opportunity to build the bonds of our Union stronger to help America be the strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world to give our children all our children the best chance to live out their dreams any generation of children has ever known. That is what we have worked on doing. Now, all those words sound good, and it is an important thing, words. They spark ideas. They spark the human spirit. They motivate people to act. But in the end, you have to turn the words into action. And I would like to just give you one example. The lion's share of credit for the economic statistics the Vice President reeled off belongs to the American people, to their hard work, their ingenuity, their good citizenship. But the policies of this administration have plainly played a role in giving people the tools to do what has been done and creating the conditions for success. If it hadn't been for Carol Moseley Braun or Glenn Poshard or Charlie Rangel or Al Gore, the economic plan in 1993 which drove interest rates down, drove the deficit down, got investment up, expanded our commitment to promote economic opportunity in the inner cities, including in Chicago would not have passed, because it passed by one vote in both Houses, because every single member of the other party voted against it. And I want to tell you that I am proud to be a member of my party and proud to be an ardent supporter of the reelection of Senator Carol Moseley Braun and the election of Glenn Poshard. There is I was told today when I came into Chicago that Congressman Poshard's opponent has an ad on attacking him for voting for our 1993 economic plan, claiming it was a big tax increase, neglecting to point out that income taxes were raised on about two tenths of a percent of the American people, that 5 times as many people in Illinois got a tax cut as got a tax increase working families who need it the most and that that bill lowered the deficit 92 percent before the bipartisan balanced budget agreement passed and, therefore, was the single most important vote to the economic recovery America enjoys today. I think Glenn Poshard should thank his opponent for advertising for him. It's a good difference between Republicans and Democrats. They're still trying to mischaracterize the bill that brought America back. And I hope you will send a message on election day, by reelecting Carol Moseley Braun and electing Glenn Poshard, that Illinois likes this economy and will support people who brought it about. We have the lowest crime rate in 25 years. The crime bill of 1994 played a major role in that, with 100,000 police on the street and grants to communities like Chicago not just to punish people but to give our young people something to say yes to, so that more communities could have more programs like your afterschool programs here and your summer school programs here. And most of the members, not all but most of the members of the other party voted against it. Carol Moseley Braun and Glenn Poshard voted for it. And so, if you like the fact that Chicago has all these new police officers under the crime bill and you like what has been done here to make the streets safer, I think you should show that you like it when words are turned into action by voting to reelect Carol Moseley Braun and to elect Glenn Poshard. I think these are the kinds of things that you have to say to people. Now, as the Vice President said, we have to decide what we're going to do with the good times we have. We are sobered and humbled when our friends in Asia, who once we thought would never have any economic problems again, have their own struggles. But we should be humbled because, when things change fast, the ground can move, and the world is changing very fast. We are heartbroken at what has happened in Africa to our Embassies, the tragic loss of life of American public servants and the more than 200 Africans who have died now and thousands wounded because some terrorist criminal wanted to hurt America. But this reminds us that freedom is a precious thing, prosperity is a wonderful thing, but in a dynamic world they bring responsibilities. And this election year should not be about negative 30 second ads, or all the mean things they've said about me or the rest of you, or any mean thing we can say back to them. It really ought to be about what do we do now. We have been given the gift of this moment of prosperity, which gives us confidence and energy. What do we do with it? What have you done in the times in your life when you thought everything was hunkydory? After things have been tough and they were tough for America for a long time the natural thing to do is to sort of say, "Man, I have been working like crazy. This is great. Leave me alone. Give me a break." That was really, in fairness, the import behind the quote by the Speaker that the Vice President read, "We don't really have to do anything. We just have to avoid another shutdown and get out of town. And things are so good, and we've got more money than the Democrats do. We'll be fine in the election. We'll worry about all of this tomorrow." And that is playing into what is often the dominant feeling in human nature. I suggest to you it would be a mistake for us to have that attitude today as a nation and that instead we ought to say, "Hey, we may not get a time this good again for a while. Let's take this time to think about the big, long term challenges this country faced, and let's go on and face them and deal with them now. If not now, when? If we can't do it now, when will we ever have a better time?" And that's what we ought to be thinking about now. So I'll tell you what I think they are, in no particular order you may have different rank order. They've been alluded to already, but let me just tell you because this is why it's important to have people in the positions of Congressmen and Senators who will make good decisions about this. One of the biggest challenges this country is going to face every advanced country is going to face it is when all the baby boomers retire. I know I'm the oldest of the baby boomers. I'm the oldest man my age in America now. Laughter Think about that. Because we are the biggest group of Americans ever to live, until this group of kids that just started school last year, when we retire, at present rates of retirement, birth rates, and immigration rates, for the first time since Social Security came in there will only be about two people working for every one person eligible for Social Security. The system we have, that has literally on its own lifted half of our elderly people out of poverty, is unsustainable as it is. But it has done a lot of good for the elderly, for the disabled, for children whose parents die when they're still children. So one of the things that we have to do and we ought to do it early next year we ought to stop fooling around with it. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. We are prosperous now. We are confident now. We should reform Social Security to preserve its best characteristics and make sure it will survive into the 21st century. You have to decide, who do you think you want to do that? And don't you want somebody that will come in there and keep the very best of the system but have the courage to tell you what changes have to be made now? The same thing is true of Medicare. We have to do that. It's a big challenge. That's why I have said, "Let's don't spend any of this surplus on a spending program or a tax cut that I like, even something I would dearly love to do. Let's don't do that until we know we have done what is necessary to save Social Security for the 21st century." Now, it's election year. It's popular to say, "I want to give you a tax cut," or "I'm going to give you a new program, and we're going to have a surplus, and it's projected to be such and such." Well, let me tell you, we won't even have the surplus until October 1st. And we've been waiting for 29 years to get out of the red. I'd just kind of like to look at the black ink for just a few months laughter before we go squander this money that we don't even have yet. And I think down deep inside you and every other responsible person in Illinois, Republican, Democrat, or independent, knows that's the right thing to do. So go out and say, we ought to save Social Security first, and you're for that. I think everybody in America knows we've got the best system of higher education in the world. And one of my proudest achievements as President is that, working with the Congress, we've opened the doors wider than ever before with the HOPE scholarships, the Pell grants, the work study grants, letting people deduct the interest on their student loans, all of the things that we've done. No one believes we've got the best elementary and secondary education in the world for all our children yet. No one believes that, because it's not true. But we need it. And I have given this Congress an agenda for smaller classes in the early grades and more teachers and modernized schools, whether we're repairing old schools or building new ones, and connecting all the classrooms to the Internet and providing for better trained teachers and raising standards and trying to support things like the mayor's reforms here in Chicago, including more afterschool programs and more summer school programs. And that school construction and repair initiative would not be a part of my program if it weren't for Carol Moseley Braun. And it ought to pass, and if you reelect her, you'll send a loud message to Washington that you believe it ought to. It's an important issue. We just glanced over the Patients' Bill of Rights today. You know, there are 160 million Americans in managed care. And when Hillary and I told the American people we had to find a way, because managed care was growing, to allow people to be in managed care to control costs, but we ought to make health care affordable and available and quality for all Americans, we were attacked by our adversaries, saying we wanted to have the Government take over health care. I'll tell you something interesting. When they attacked me for that, 40 cents on the dollar of health care dollars came from public sources. Do you know what it is today? Forty seven cents, not 40. Do you know why? Because employers cannot afford to buy health insurance, so they don't cover their employees, and more and more people even in the work force are eligible for Government funded programs today. But 160 million Americans in Medicare our Patients' Bill of Rights is the next big item on the health care agenda. Why? Because we think that it's a good thing to manage health care costs and control them, but you ought to be able to go to an emergency room if you get hurt, without having to lay there on the gurney. How would you feel if somebody in your family were in a car wreck, lying in an emergency room on a gurney, and you're trying to call the insurance company to get authorization? We believe if somebody needs a specialist, they ought to be able to get a specialist. And if the doctor believes that, he ought to be free to say so. That's what we believe. We believe if a woman is 6 months pregnant and her employer changes insurance carriers, she ought not to have to give up her obstetrician before the baby's born. Or if somebody is taking chemotherapy and they are 80 percent of the way through and the same thing happens, they ought to be able to stay with their oncologist until the treatment is over. But it doesn't always happen today. That's what this Patients' Bill of Rights is about. It's about common sense, balancing of the need to control costs on the one hand with the need never to forget that the health care of the American people comes first. We are for that. We have a few a very few Republicans who are helping, and God bless them, including the physician representing the State of Iowa in the House of Representatives, a brave man, Congressman Ganske. But the leadership of the other party is against this, and what they would do would make it weaker. We believe, with all this stuff being computerized, you ought to have more privacy in your medical records, not less. And I think most of you think that. That's what the Patients' Bill of Rights is about. Carol Moseley Braun is for it the leadership of the other party is against it. On that ground alone you should make sure she gets reelected. This is a big battle for how you and your families and your children will live in the 21st century. I could go right down the list with the environment with the need for us to build one America working together with the need to provide more economic opportunity in inner cities, isolated rural areas where there has been no opportunity and with the need for America to fulfill its responsibilities. The Vice President made the remarks about the International Monetary Fund and the U.N. You know, Reverend Jackson and I and the First Lady and a big delegation, we just went to Africa not very long ago. Believe it or not, several of those African economies are growing at 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 percent a year. They want to buy our products. They want to be our partners. An investment there today will pay our children many times over in return tomorrow. All over the world, people still look to us to take the lead to stand against the kind of terrorism that we experienced just a few days ago to stand against the kind of racial and ethnic and religious hatreds that we see in places like Bosnia, that are the part of the process of peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland. And if we want to be a source of peace and freedom and prosperity all around the world, then we have to have people who will say in Congress, "I realize it's not free. I'm prepared to invest in it and go home to my hometown in the heartland of America and say it's important." You know why it's important in Illinois? How many people do you believe, if you went down to the central part of this State and said, "Do you know what the IMF is?" could give you an answer? Or, "It's the International Monetary Fund do you know what it does?" They might not know, but here's why it matters. The International Monetary Fund provides funds to countries in economic trouble in return for their willingness to undertake disciplined steps to improve reform and grow their economies. Why does that matter to you? We export half of our wheat and our corn half of it. Forty percent of all of that goes to Asia. Today, the exports to Asia are down 30 percent. It's costing the farmers of Illinois a pretty penny because there is a deep, profound economic crisis in Asia. And that will cost the people who do business with the farmers in Illinois a pretty penny. But the United States is strong, and we should be leading. We shouldn't be looking for excuses not to assume our responsibility. We should be leading. Now, those are the big things. So I ask you to think big, be big. But remember, with every high flown idea, with every passionate phrase, in the end, as Governor Cuomo used to say, you have to turn the poetry of a campaign into the prose of daily work. We must turn these passionate ideas into action. That's what this administration has been about. That's what Carol Moseley Braun has helped us to do. That's what Charles Rangel has helped us to do. That's why I hope you are here. And I would implore you to go out of here with a great deal of pride and energy and determination. And when somebody asks you, "Why did you go to that Democratic fundraiser?" you can say, "Because I'm for saving Social Security and Medicare for the 21st century because I'm going to keep working until our schools are the best in the world because I want American health care to be affordable and available and quality for all of our citizens because I want to grow the economy and preserve the environment because I want us to be one America, across all the lines that divide us and because I still believe our best days are ahead as long as we're willing to stand up against the terrorists and stand up for freedom." Thank you, and God bless you. August 10, 1998 The President. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Peeno. Thank you, Dr. Peters. I must say, after they have spoken there hardly needs to be much else said. I was profoundly moved, as I know all of you were, by what both these fine doctors said, and I thank them for giving their time and their lives to the work that they have discussed with us today. Yes, let's give them another hand. I thought they were great. Applause Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for your warm welcome and your leadership. Thank you, my good friend, Senator Ford, for all the years of wise counsel and advice, for your work for Kentucky, for its communities, its farmers, its people. Thank you, Governor Patton, for your friendship and for working for the education and health of your children. Thank you, Congressman Baesler, for voting with us and supporting the Patients' Bill of Rights, along with Senator Ford, for both of them. I'd like to thank your Lieutenant Governor, and doctor, Stephen Henry, for being here today and State Auditor Edward Hatchett Secretary of State John Brown my good friend Judge Dave Armstrong from the same little patch of ground that I'm from in Arkansas. I'd like to thank our Director of Personnel Management, Janice Lachance, for coming down with me here today. And I'd like to thank all of the health care professionals who are here. Embassy Bombings in Kenya and Tanzania Ladies and gentlemen, before we begin, I would like to just ask you to permit me to say a few words about the terrible tragedy that occurred at our Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Our hearts are heavy with the news that now 12 Americans, brave people who were working to build a better world and represent all of us abroad, have lost their lives. Somewhere around 200 Africans have died in those bombs now. We mourn their loss. We extend our sympathies to their loved ones. To the nations of Kenya and Tanzania, we thank them for their friendship to us. We grieve for the loss of their citizens. I would just like to ask all of you to take just a few seconds of silence in their honor. A moment of silence was observed. Amen. We go forward now. You should all know that our teams are on the ground in Africa. They're tending to the wounded. They're providing security. They are searching and finding evidence. We will do whatever we can to bring the murderers to justice. I must have said this 100 times or more since I've been President, but I want to say it again because it bears special meaning today. The world we are living in and the world we are moving toward will allow us to move around the world more rapidly and more freely than ever before and to move information, ideas, and money around the world more rapidly, more freely than ever before. It will be a global society that I am convinced will bring all Americans our Nation's best years. But there has never been a time in human history when we have been free of the organized forces of destruction. And the more open the world becomes, the more vulnerable people become to those who are organized and have weapons, information, technology, and the ability to move. We must be strong in dealing with this. We must not be deterred by the threat of other actions. There is no way out if we start running away from this kind of conduct. We have to build a civilized, open world for the 21st century. Now, back to the important business at hand. For 5 1 2 years now, I have had the great honor of serving you and working with others to strengthen America for a new century, a global information age. We have tried to look ahead with new ideas relevant to the times, but based on our oldest values of opportunity for all citizens, responsibility from all citizens, and a community of all our citizens. Thanks to the hard work, ingenuity, and civic spirit of the American people and to this new direction in policy, this is a time of great prosperity and profound national strength for America. We have a lowest unemployment in 28 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the smallest percentage of our people on welfare in 29 years, the smallest Federal Government in 35 years, the highest homeownership rate in history. Wages are rising at twice the rate of inflation. We have, as the Governor said, provided for the opportunity for health insurance for 5 million uninsured children. We have provided HOPE scholarships, worth about 1,500 in tax credits a year for the first 2 years of college, tax credits for other years of college, interest deduction on tax deductions on the interest on student loans, more Pell grants, more work study positions to open the doors of college to everyone. Compared to 5 1 2 years ago, our air and water are clearer our food is safer there are fewer toxic waste dumps. And soon soon we will have the first balanced budget since Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon in 1969. Now, here's the problem with that. Usually, in our personal lives, our family lives, our work lives, and a nation's life, after a series of difficult years, when times get good you want to say, "Thank goodness. I'm tired. I need a rest. I want to sit back and enjoy this. I've been working like crazy for years, and now things are good. Give me a break. Let me have a break." Applause And you agree, see? That is the natural human tendency that would be a mistake. Why? The world is changing very rapidly, as we see every day in the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world. If someone had told you 5 or 6 years ago that today Japan would be having the problems it's having, would you have believed that? I say that not critically it is a great country full of brilliant people, and they will come back. But it is a reminder that things change in a hurry and we must always be ready. I think you can overdo sports analogies, but I can't resist one since I'm in Kentucky. Laughter The way the world works today is like the last 10 minutes of a basketball game between two really talented teams. Now, you think about last season and what the Kentucky Wildcats did to people who sat on the lead. Now, think about it. How many games were you behind in that you won? You can't afford to do it. The world is changing, so we should take the confidence, the resources, the good fortune that we gratefully have now and use it to meet the big challenges still facing the country. That is very important. We've got to continue to work on economic growth, to stay with the strategy of fiscal discipline and open trade and investment in our people that has brought us this far. And we have to prove we can extend the benefits of this recovery to people who haven't felt it yet, from the inner cities to Appalachia. We have to continue to lead the world toward peace and freedom. We can't withdraw from the world. Witness the events of the last few days. We have to stand against the spread of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. We have to stand against the reach of international organizations of crime and terror and narcotrafficking. We have to stand against the destruction of racial and ethnic and religious hatred, against the threat of global environmental and health challenges. Here at home we have to honor our obligations to future generations. And the most important thing we should do is to set aside every penny of the surplus we're going to have on October 1st until we have saved the Social Security system for the 21st century when the baby boomers require it. We have to make sure all of our people have a chance in tomorrow's world by making our elementary and secondary schools the best in the world. We need smaller classes, more highly trained teachers. We need modernized schools connected to the Internet. We need schools where there is discipline and good behavior and no gangs, guns, and drugs. We need high standards and accountability and great flexibility in meeting them. We need to prove we can protect our environment and still grow our economy. We have to continue to prove we can reach across the lines that divide us in this increasingly diverse country and be one America. A good way to view this moment in history, I believe, is through the lens of the First Lady's theme that she came up with for our Millennium Project as we look toward how we will mark the changing of the centuries and the changing of 1,000 years "Honor the past imagine the future." That's what we should be doing. We have come here today to talk about a very important part of one other big challenge we face how we can put progress over partisanship, people over politics, to expand access to quality health care to every American. Nothing is more critical to the securities of our families, the strength of our communities. Health is something we take for granted until we or our loved ones don't have it anymore. But people like the two fine doctors who talked to us deal with folks like that every day. It isn't a partisan issue, and I appreciated the fact that they made that clear. You know, when someone gets sick and comes in to see one of these two doctors and fills out a form, there is no box that says, "Republican, Democrat, or independent." Health care is being revolutionized in America. Most of the changes are good. Stunning biomedical breakthroughs pose the possibilities of vaccines or cures for our deadliest enemies, from diabetes to AIDS to Alzheimer's. Before you know it, this genome project will be finished, and we'll be able to decode the genetic structure of every person. Mothers will know when they bring their babies home from the hospital what the potential problems are that those babies have, and some of it will be troubling to know, but most of it will be good because they'll be able to avoid all kinds of problems that might otherwise have come to their children. It will be unbelievable what's going to happen to health care in the 21st century. There have already been examples of nerve transplantations in laboratory animals where their spines have been severed and now their lower limbs are moving again. It will be an amazing time. The trick is how to extend affordable coverage of all these miracles and basic preventive health care to all Americans. That's really how the managed care revolution began. You know, when I became President, for the last 10 years health care costs had been going up at 3 times the rate of inflation. We were spending approximately 4 percent more of our national income and at the time, that was about 240 billion a year than any other country on Earth on health care, even though we were one of the few industrialized countries that still have a significant percentage of our people without any health insurance. That was an unsustainable trend. Since 1990 the number of people in managed care has nearly doubled. Today most Americans, 160 million of us, are in managed care plans. And as has already been said, I think, on balance, there have been a lot of good things to come out of managed care to make it more affordable, more accessible, to make the resources go further. But you've heard these doctors say that some very, very costly errors have been made by putting the dollar over the person. I'll never forget the people that I have met and the stories they've told me. I met a woman named Mary Kuhl, from Kansas City, whose husband died. He needed specialized, urgent heart surgery. By the time he got the clearance to get it, it was too late. I met Mick Fleming, whose sister died of breast and lung cancer after she was denied treatment that she was later determined to have been entitled to. I met a billings manager that the doctor referred to, who herself bears the scars of having to turn away patients. I think in some ways, of all the people that have talked to me, she was the most moving of all, because she had to deliver the "no" face to face. Now, when the bottom line is more important than patients' lives, when families have nowhere to turn, when their loved ones are harmed by bad decisions, when specialist care is denied, when emergency care is not covered, we have to act. That's why you heard, at the grassroots level in America, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, even people who think normally the Government should not do anything that can fairly be done by the private sector, have developed this overwhelming grassroots consensus that we need a Patients' Bill of Rights in America. I've done what I could administratively, and some of you are probably covered by decisions that I and my administration have made. I acted to extend the protections of the Patients' Bill of Rights to 85 million Americans who get health care through Federal plans. In June we extended it to 40 million people who receive Medicare. Last month we put in place new rapid appeals for the 3 million veterans who receive health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Last week the Department of Defense issued a directive to all military bases throughout the world, extending protections to 8 million service men and women and their families at nearly 600 hospitals and clinics all around the globe. We are already extending many patient protections, such as the right to a specialist and continuity of care, to Federal workers. And that's why Janice Lachance is here with me today, because we are announcing that we are now requiring that 350 health plans that serve Federal employees to repeal the gag rules that keep doctors from telling patients all their health care options, not just the cheapest ones. Now, a lot of States are acting in this area, too. Kentucky has a patients' bill of rights. But I can tell you because of the way the laws work, there is no substitute for a national law. We cannot provide protection for all Americans. We will leave many, many tens of millions behind unless we have strong, bipartisan legislation that covers every American. Now, for 9 months, I've worked in good faith with lawmakers of both parties to pass a strong, enforceable, bipartisan bill of rights. We are fighting for a bill supported by both Democrats and Republicans, and again, I thank Wendell Ford and Scotty Baesler for their support. Now, for 9 months, the leadership of the majority party in Congress has resisted taking any action at all. They have listened to those with an interest in preserving the status quo, rather than the clear call of the public interest we have heard echoing across this hall today. Now public demand is rising, and the Republican leadership has discovered the need to act. So the House passed a plan last month, and the Senate Republicans have offered a similar bill. But these bills would give patients and their families a false sense of security. You've already heard some of the comments. But this is very important, that when everybody is calling for a Patients' Bill of Rights and both parties pushing proposals, how can the American people know what a real one is? Well, that's what this chart is about over here. And maybe Jerry, would you hand me the chart? You don't have to bring the stand just bring that chart up here. I'll hold it. He said he's the Vanna White of Louisville here. Laughter I'm not going to discuss that. Laughter I want you to look at this, because that's what this is all about. A real Patients' Bill of Rights at least continues and should strengthen the medical privacy provisions in place today. In the age of computer databases and the Internet, we should strengthen the privacy of medical records. Don't you want yours private? Don't you? Applause I have a proposal that would do this. The House Republican bill would dramatically increase the number of people who can see your medical records without your knowledge or consent. It overturns privacy protections already on the books in 20 States, including Kentucky. The bill would just wipe them from the books, and that is wrong. So here's the first test, protecting medical privacy laws the Republican plan, no our bipartisan proposal and I should say we do have Republican support, including a fine doctor from Iowa, Dr. Ganske, in the Congress, for the bipartisan bill. Second, a real Patients' Bill of Rights will guarantee the right to see specialists that you need. To reap the full rewards of modern medicine, you must have the ability to see, for example, a neurologist or a cardiologist if that is what is medically indicated. The congressional bills don't give you that right. Ours does. That's the second no yes. The third issue, a real Patients' Bill of Rights guarantees you won't lose your doctor in the middle of a medical treatment even if your employer switches health plans. This is a big deal! This is a big deal! Now, the GOP leadership bills don't do that. An insurance company could switch obstetricians in the 6th month of pregnancy or drop your oncologist in the middle of chemotherapy just because your employer switches plans. A real Patients' Bill of Rights makes sure that health plans don't secretly give incentives to doctors to limit medical care. Now, the Republican leadership plan would permit that. Ours would not. A real Patients' Bill of Rights guarantees you the right to emergency room care when and where you need it. When you are wheeled into an emergency room, you shouldn't have to start negotiating with your health plan. This is the financial incentive this is keeping your doctor through critical treatments no, yes no, yes. Emergency room theirs, no ours, yes. A real Patients' Bill of Rights holds health care plans accountable for the harm patients face if they are denied critical care. Now, that's important. If a doctor denies you the health care you need, you can get help to pay for lost wages or medical costs today. If an HMO denies you the care you need, under the congressional leadership bill, you won't get any help at all. Now, if you have rights with no remedies, are they rights? How would you feel what would you say to me? What they're saying is, "Oh, this bipartisan bill, they have all these remedies, and it's just going to be a mess with a bunch of lawyers. Isn't that awful?" And a lot of people say, "Well, I don't like lawyers. I don't like lawsuits. Who wants to be in court?" Sounds pretty good. Let me ask you this How would you react if I gave a speech tomorrow that said, "My fellow Americans, I love the Bill of Rights. I love the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the freedom of religion, the right to travel. I love all those Bill of Rights. But I don't like all these lawsuits. We got too many of them in America. Therefore, I have proposed to amend the Constitution so that no one can ever sue to enforce the right to free speech, free assembly, free practice of religion, or any other of the rights that have kept our country strong for 220 years." You would say Audience members. No way! Laughter The President. So when you talk about remedies, do you have rights without remedies? I think we've seen enough there. That's a big issue. A real Patients' Bill of Rights should apply to every plan, every single one. The Republican plan leaves out listen to this as many as 100 million people, many of them working for small businesses 100 million people would still be under the present system, 100 million people who need our help. It is wrong. If we're going to do this, I don't want to leave 100 million Americans behind, and I don't think you do either, even if you would be covered. That's not right. So you need to remember here, it isn't the title, "Patients' Bill of Rights" it is the specifics. What are the specifics? Medical privacy yes on our bill, no on theirs. Access to specialists yes on our bill, no on theirs. Assuring that accountants don't make arbitrary medical decisions yes on our bill, no on theirs a big deal to doctors, because they know what happens to patients. Providing real emergency room protections yes on our bill, no on theirs. Holding health plans accountable if patients are harmed yes on our bill, no on theirs. Protecting patients from secret financial incentives yes on our bill, no on theirs. Keeping your doctor through critical treatments huge issue I saw a lot of you nodding your heads when I said that you'd lose your doctor in the middle of your treatment yes on our bill, no on theirs. And then covering all health plans, that is, all Americans yes on our bill, no on theirs. That's what's at issue. This is not about politics. This is not about party. This is about a crying need for the American people, and it's time we did the right thing. We ought to do it now, in September, when Congress comes back. I want to thank the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the American College of Emergency Room Physicians, and so many others. I have to tell you, we need a bill of rights, not a bill of goods. We need a law, not another loophole. If I get that other bill of rights, I will be forced to veto it, and I will. Now, I will say again, this is not a partisan issue any place in the country but Washington, DC. I believe Republicans and independents are just as much for this bill out here in the real world as Democrats are. Nothing should be less partisan than the quality of health care our people receive. We're a little more than 500 days from that new millennium, but there's only a handful of days left in this session of Congress. We cannot let this moment of opportunity be remembered as a time of missed opportunity. Think of what I said about the basketball game. Think about how fast things are changing. Think about how fast things can change in your life, in your family's life, in your business' life, and in the life of our Nation. Now is the time to say, we thank God for the good fortune we have, but we are using it to look forward to the future, to make a better future, to meet the big challenges of this country. And we ought to begin next month, when Congress returns, with the Patients' Bill of Rights. Thank you, and God bless you all. August 08, 1998 Good morning. I want to talk to you about the terrorist bombings yesterday that took the lives of Americans and Africans at our Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to tell you what we're doing and how we are combating the larger problem of terrorism that targets Americans. Most of you have seen the horrible pictures of destruction on television. The bomb attack in Nairobi killed at least 11 Americans. In Dar es Salaam, no Americans lost their lives, but at least one was gravely wounded. In both places, many Africans were killed or wounded, and devastating damage was done to our Embassies and surrounding buildings. To the families and friends of those who were killed, I know nothing I can say will make sense of your loss. I hope you will take some comfort in the knowledge that your loved ones gave their lives to the highest calling, serving our country, protecting our freedom, and seeking its blessings for others. May God bless their souls. Late yesterday, emergency response teams, led by our Departments of State and Defense, arrived in Africa. The teams include doctors to tend to the injured, disaster relief experts to get our Embassies up and running again, a military unit to protect our personnel, and counterterrorism specialists to determine what happened and who was responsible. Americans are targets of terrorism, in part, because we have unique leadership responsibilities in the world, because we act to advance peace and democracy, and because we stand united against terrorism. To change any of that to pull back our diplomats and troops from the world's trouble spots, to turn our backs on those taking risks for peace, to weaken our opposition to terrorism that would give terrorism a victory it must not and will not have. Instead, we will continue to take the fight to terrorists. Over the past several years, I have intensified our effort on all fronts in this battle apprehending terrorists wherever they are and bringing them to justice disrupting terrorist operations deepening counterterrorism cooperation with our allies and isolating nations that support terrorism protecting our computer networks improving transportation security combating the threat of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons giving law enforcement the best counterterrorism tools available. This year I appointed a national coordinator to bring the full force of our resources to bear swiftly and effectively. The most powerful weapon in our counterterrorism arsenal is our determination to never give up. In recent years, we have captured major terrorists in the far corners of the world and brought them to America to answer for their crimes, sometimes years after they were committed. They include the man who murdered two CIA employees outside its headquarters. Four years later we apprehended him halfway around the world, and a Virginia jury sentenced him to death. The mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, who fled far from America, 2 years later we brought him back for trial in New York. And the terrorist responsible for bombing a Pan Am jet bound for Hawaii from Japan in 1982, we pursued him for 16 years. This June we caught him. Some serious acts of terror remain unresolved, including the attack on our military personnel at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland and now, these horrible bombings in Africa. No matter how long it takes or where it takes us, we will pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and justice is done. The bombs that kill innocent Americans are aimed not only at them but at the very spirit of our country and the spirit of freedom. For terrorists are the enemies of everything we believe in and fight for peace and democracy, tolerance and security. As long as we continue to believe in those values and continue to fight for them, their enemies will not prevail. And our responsibility is great, but the opportunities it brings are even greater. Let us never fear to embrace them. Thank you for listening. August 07, 1998 Thank you very much, and good morning. Thank you very much, Mr. Antosy, to Benny Hernandez, examples of what we come here to celebrate and enhance today. Thank you, Secretary Herman, for your leadership on this bill which was so essential to its passage. Chairman Goodling, Senator DeWine, Congressman Clay, Congressman McKeon, Congressman Kildee, many other Members of the House Representatives who are here. To Senator Jeffords and others who are not here, who, along with Senator DeWine, worked on the passage in the Senate. I'd also like to thank the representatives of the National Association of Counties and other local groups who are here. And I will say more about all of you in a moment. I hope you will understand why I feel the need to comment on the fact that early this morning bombs exploded outside two of our American Embassies in Africa. An explosion in Nairobi, Kenya, killed and wounded scores of people. We have reports that several Americans are among the dead. Another explosion in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, also caused many casualties. At this time, there are no reports that any Americans were killed in that attack, although our Embassy appears to have been the target. Both explosions caused large scale damage to our Embassies and to surrounding buildings, as you may have already seen from the pictures coming in. Though the attacks appear to have been coordinated, no one has yet claimed responsibility for them. As I speak, we have dispatched Defense Department and State Department led emergency response teams to the region. The teams include medical personnel, disaster relief experts, criminal investigators, counter terrorism specialists. We have taken appropriate security measures at our Embassies and military facilities throughout the region and around the world. These acts of terrorist violence are abhorrent they are inhuman. We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes. Let me say to the thousands and thousands of hard working men and women from the State Department and from our other Government agencies who serve us abroad in these Embassies, the work you do every day is vital to our security and prosperity. Your well being is, therefore, vital to us, and we will do everything we can to assure that you can serve in safety. To the families and loved ones of the American and African victims of these cowardly attacks, you are in our thoughts and prayers. Out of respect for those who lost their lives, I have ordered that the American flag be flown at halfstaff at all Government buildings here at home and around the world. We are determined to get answers and justice. Now, we are here to do something very important for America's long term future today. I mentioned the Congressmen and Senators who played a leading role who are here. I'd like to also acknowledge those who are out there whose names I have, and if I make a mistake, stand up and be recognized. Laughter If I say you're here, and you're not, just let it go. Laughter In addition to Senator DeWine and Chairman Goodling and Mr. Clay and Mr. McKeon, Mr. Kildee, we have here Congressman Barrett, Congressman Chaka Fattah, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Representative Dennis Kucinich, Representative Carrie Meek, Representative Dan Miller, Representative Patsy Mink, Representative Louis Stokes, Representative Steve LaTourette, Representative George Brown, Representative Paul Kanjorski, Congressman Bruce Vento, Congressman Donald Payne, and Congressman Tim Roemer with his own version of America's future in his lap. Laughter I'd also like to thank, again, Alexis Herman and Erskine Bowles and all the people on my staff for their role in this. But one person above all who has been with me since 1991 and who shared my dream of consolidating this blizzard of Government programs into one grant that we could give a person who was unemployed or underemployed so that they could decide, as Mr. Antosy did, what to do with the help we were giving them on the theory that they would know their own best interest and be able to pursue it, and that is Gene Sperling, who has worked on this for years and years. This is his heart is in this bill. And I want to thank him as well as all the staff people in Congress. As Secretary Herman said, this bill fulfills principles for reform of our work force training program that I outlined in my first campaign for President over 6 years ago and that the Vice President set out in our National Performance Review. It is a model of what we should be doing, and also the way we did it is a model of how our Government ought to work. It was a truly bipartisan, American effort. This morning we received some more good news about our economy. Even though the latest economic report shows the effects of the now settled GM strike, we still see that, over the past year, wages have risen at more than twice the rate of inflation, the fastest real wage growth for ordinary Americans in 20 years. This past month our unemployment rate held firm, in spite of the GM strike, at 4 1 2 percent. For nearly a quarter century, not once had our Nation's unemployment rate gone below 5 percent. It's now been below 5 percent for 13 months in a row. We have low unemployment, low inflation, strong growth, and higher wages. But to maintain this momentum, we must continue to change and move forward. Over the long run, in the face of daily new challenges in the global marketplace, we simply must press forward with the economic strategy outlined 5 1 2 years ago fiscal discipline, expanded trade, investment in our people and communities. To maintain fiscal discipline, we must save every penny of our surplus until we save the Social Security system. To maintain exports, we must immediately support the international efforts to stabilize our customers in Asia to reform and lift their economies. In recent weeks we have clearly seen that the crisis in Asia is having an impact on our economy. You can talk to any American grain farmer who will tell you that. For our economy to remain strong, therefore, we must pay our dues to the International Monetary Fund. To invest in our people we have to give all our people access to worldclass education and training, beginning with our children before their school years and ending with people who have access to education throughout a lifetime. The story Mr. Antosy told is a moving and heartening story. There are a lot of people in his position. In a dynamic global economy, more and more people, even if they stay with the same employer, will have to change the nature of their work several times over the course of a lifetime. It is, therefore, very important that every person who is willing to work hard to make the most of his or her own life should be able to become the success stories we celebrate with Benny Hernandez and James Antosy. Therefore, we have to do more than we have been doing, even though we have been making progress. The vast majority of corporate managers say the number one prerequisite for continued prosperity is finding a way to fill all our high skill jobs. I'm telling you today, there are even with the unemployment rate as low as it is, there are hundreds of thousands of jobs which are going begging that are high wage, high skill jobs, undermining the ability of our free enterprise economy to maximize its benefits to all our people to reach into all the urban neighborhoods and the rural communities and the places that it has not yet reached. Therefore, giving all Americans the tools they need to learn for a lifetime is critical to our ability to continue to grow. We are making progress in building an America where every 8 year old can read, every 12year old can log on to the Internet, every 18year old can go on to college. And today we celebrate a big step forward in making sure that every adult can keep on learning for a lifetime, where no disadvantaged child, no displaced worker, no welfare parent, no one willing to learn and work is left behind. This is the crowning jewel of a lifetime learning agenda the Work Force Investment Act to give all our workers opportunities for growth and advancement. It, as Mr. Goodling said and Mr. Clay said in specifying what was in the bill, has many things that will help millions of workers enhance our Nation's competitive age. Let me just mention some of the things that are most important to me. It empowers workers, not Government programs, by offering training grants directly to them, so they can choose for themselves what kind of training they want and where they want to get it. There was a time, decades ago, when Congress actually needed to pass specified training programs with specific purposes and mechanisms to implement them. But that time has long since passed. Almost every American is within driving distance of a community college or some other mechanism of advanced training. And almost every American has more than enough sense to decide what is in his or her best interest, given a little good helpful advice on the available alternatives. The law streamlines and consolidates a tangle of training programs, therefore, into a single, commonsense system. And it also expands our successful model of one stop career centers so people don't have to trot around to one different agency after another when they find themselves in the position that Mr. Antosy found himself in. It enhances accountability for tough performance standards for States and communities and training providers, even as it gives more flexibility to the States to develop innovative ways to serve our working people better. It helps to create opportunities for disadvantaged youth. And I think that is terribly important. Everybody is concerned about the juvenile crime rate. We need to be concerned, therefore, about the number of juveniles that are out here on the street, out of school, not doing what could be done to give them a more constructive future. And finally, it does two more things that I think are quite important. It has a real emphasis on helping people with disabilities prepare for employment, and it gives adults who need it literacy support to move ahead. You cannot train for a lot of these programs if you cannot read at an adequate level. And I think that is terribly important. What all this amounts to is that we get to celebrate Labor Day a month early this year. At long last, we're giving our workers the tools they need to move quickly to 21st century jobs, higher incomes, and brighter futures. I thank all those on this stage, all those in this audience, and those who could not be here who have worked and waited for this day. Let me also say that just a couple of minutes ago I had the chance to sign another bill that helps all Americans share in our prosperity, the Credit Union Membership Access Act. Credit unions serve a vital and unique purpose they make sure financial services and credit are available to people of modest means. The law I signed strengthens them, helps them to withstand hard economic times, clarifies who can join, and ensures that those who are in credit unions now won't ever get locked out. It will help extend greater credit to those who need it most. It is also good for our economy. Both these bills are bipartisan bills. They passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. They show what can happen when we can put our differences aside and put progress ahead of partisanship and people ahead of politics. That's a good thing because our plate is still full. In the few days remaining in this legislative session, we must still work together to save Social Security first secure funding for the International Monetary Fund to stabilize our own economic growth to pass a strong Patients' Bill of Rights, a very crowded education agenda built on excellence and opportunity, and an important element of our environmental agenda to preserve our environment and grow the economy. We can do all these things. And as we see today on this very happy occasion, when we do it, we strengthen our country and the future of the children over there with Congressman Roemer and all the others like them throughout America. Thank you very much. July 31, 1998 First of all, I thank Bruce and Claude for their wonderful hospitality in this magnificent home and the terrific dinner. Our compliments to all the the chef and the people in the kitchen. I thank Alan and Susan for dreaming up this weekend and all of you who have come to be a part of it. We've had a great time tonight. Since Bruce asked me if I would go in there, when we're having coffee in the other room, and answer questions, I will spare you any extended remarks. I want to ask you to think about something. I am we're here for the Democratic Committee, and I'm very grateful to Steve Grossman and to Len Barrack and to Fran Katz and all the other people. But I was born a Democrat because I was a Depression era my parents were and my grandparents. My grandfather, who raised me until I was 4, thought he was going to Franklin Roosevelt when he died. But I was determined in 1991 and 1992 to be faithful to the traditional values of our country and our party, but to modernize our party and to bring a new set of ideas to the debate in Washington, which I thought, frankly, was stale and divisive and dominated by the people in the other party who thought they had an entitlement to the White House. Some days, I think they still do. Laughter And I thought the White House belonged to all the rest of you and everybody else in the country and was the instrument of ideas consistent with our democracy to keep our country moving forward. Now, Hillary is leading this Millennium Project, which was referred to earlier. And you probably saw that they started Hillary and Ralph Lauren started by saving the Star Spangled Banner the other day. And then she went to Fort McHenry, and then to Thomas Edison's home, and then to Harriet Tubman's home, and then to George Washington's Revolutionary War headquarters in New York. But the theme of the Millennium Project is honoring the past and imagining the future. So I think about that all the time. Tom said that McKinley was the last President to come here, for example it must be true. Laughter Now, McKinley was an interesting fellow, but I'll tell you the interesting McKinley was elected President in 1896 and reelected in 1900. Now, between 1868, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley were elected President. You know what they had in common? They were all generals in the Union Army from Ohio. If you got to be a general in the Union Army, and you were from Ohio, you had about a 50 percent chance of being President in that period of time. Laughter That's a rather interesting bit of our history. Laughter So tell that tomorrow when they tell you McKinley was the last President. I care a lot about this country's history. I've spent a lot of time reading it, studying it, trying to feel it in the White House, in every room, in the life of every predecessor I have had and their families. And I think it's very important when you imagine the future that we do it in a way that is consistent with the history of this country. So I will say that I think the most important things about American history can be found in the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which and manifest in every changing time, this country has always been about at least three things widening the circle of opportunity for responsible citizens, deepening the meaning of freedom in each succeeding generation, and strengthening the bonds of our Union. The reason I'm a Democrat in 1998, apart from the fact that I was born and raised one and believed in the civil rights movement and the things that were dominant in my childhood, is that I think we more clearly represent the last of those ideas. I think we believe that Union is very important. I think we believe that part of the Declaration of Independence, that we are dedicated to the permanent mission of forming a more perfect Union, because there are some things that we want to achieve for ourselves, our families, and our future that we cannot achieve alone or in isolated groups. And I say that because I think that we've, for the last couple of decades, seen a real assault on government and on the idea that we do have sort of mutual ties and bonds and responsibilities to one another that enhance our own lives. And I believe that very strongly. So as we look ahead, I think I will just tell you what I think some of the great challenges of tomorrow are. I think, first of all, it will be the period of greatest possibility in all human history, and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves if we mess it up. It will be an age of breathtaking biological advances. It will be an age of breathtaking technological advances. It will be an age where we will be able to relate to people around the world through the device of the Internet the fastest growing social organism in history, I might add in ways that our parents could never imagine, probably in ways that most of us could never imagine. But we have some big challenges at home and abroad. And I will just mention them and stop, and you ask yourself If you're trying to imagine the future, what do you think the big challenges are? Now, let me just mention what I think they are. At home, I think, first of all, the baby boomers have got to retire in a way that preserves the dignity of American society for the elderly without bankrupting our kids and undermining their ability to raise our grandchildren, which means we have to reform Social Security and Medicare in a way that keeps them there functioning for people who need them to the extent that they're needed and brings our country together, but does it in a way that does not dramatically undermine the standard of living of our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. Secondly, we have to recognize that in an information society we have to do a much better job of elementary and secondary education and preschool education, and not just for some or most but for all of our children. And we have to maximize everything we know about child psychology, about support for kids who come from troubled families and live in troubled neighborhoods, about the access to technology. But no one in the world who really knows anything about it would seriously question the proposition that American has the finest system of higher education in the world. No one believes that America has the finest system of elementary and secondary education in the world for all its children. And I think that's a big challenge. Number three, I think we have a whole new attitude about the environment. We have basically, for 30 years, done great things as a country on the environment since the passage of the Clean Air Act and setting up the EPA, and we concluded that, if we take these things one at a time, we can afford to clean up the environment and keep our economy still growing. I think now we have to understand that we cannot maintain or sustain our economy unless we make the preservation and even the improvement of the environment an integral part of our economic policy. In other words, I believe global warming is real. I do not think it is an accident that 9 hottest years on record have all occurred in the last 11 years. I don't think that's an accident. I don't think it's an accident that '97 was the hottest year on record, and every month in '98 has been hotter than every month in '97. And I think there are at hand the means to continue to grow the economy and improve the environment in ways that will make sure it's all here a hundred years from now for our great grandchildren. Let me just mention a couple of other things. I believe that, with regard to the economy I think it's obvious and around our table I had a fascinating conversation talking about the global economy, in particular, as you might imagine, Japan and Asia, China, and we talked about Russia. We have a lot of challenges in the global economy we have a lot of challenges in the area of world peace, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, dealing with terrorism, and trying to stop people from killing each other because of their ethnic, racial, and religious differences. There will be plenty to do in the post coldwar world to create a trade centered, peoplecentered, peaceful network of national cooperation and institutions to help deal with those who won't be part of that framework. We also have to recognize, I think, that we have an incredible opportunity and an obligation here and those of you from New York, I'd say, should feel it especially to prove that we can bring free enterprise to the areas of America which haven't received it yet. There are still neighborhoods in New York City that have double digit unemployment rates, largely because of underinvestment and low skill levels, not because most people aren't responsible most people in most neighborhoods get up and go to work every day, pay taxes, and try to be good citizens. So we're never going to have a better time than the next couple of years to try to help. And the last thing I'd like to say is I think that this theme, that Hillary and I have worked on, of one America means something to me. It means one America across all the lines that divide us. It means an America in which citizens commit themselves to serve their fellow human beings, which is why I'm so proud of our AmeriCorps program, our national service program. It also means that we understand that the unity we have is a precious gift, and we should manage our differences with dignity and decency and always strive for unity over division always put people over politics always put progress over partisanship. That's what I believe. And if we do those things, I think we're going to do just great in the 21st century. And I'm going to do everything I can for the next 2 1 2 years to make sure that that is exactly what we do. Thank you very much. July 27, 1998 Shootings at the Capitol Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, before you sit down, if I might, I want to do something quite serious but, I think, important here at the beginning. I would like to ask Senator Domenici and Senator Bingaman and Congressmen Kolbe and Becerra to come up and stand with me, and I'd like to ask all of us to offer a moment of silent prayer for the memory and the families of the two police officers who were slain at our Nation's Capitol. At this point, a moment of silence was observed. Amen. Thank you very much. Social Security Let me, now on a somewhat lighter note, say that Mayor Baca was reeling off all of his relatives on Social Security I'm glad to see one person here who I believe is now eligible for Social Security, former Governor Bruce King, and his wife, Alice, over there. I point them out for a special purpose. One of the demographic realities we have to confront is that women are living longer than men. Governor King is in a wheelchair because of a fright he received from a rattlesnake, which his wife killed. Laughter So we congratulate both of them. Let me also say, I'm glad to see this great and diverse group of Americans here in Albuquerque. You can always depend upon getting an audience that genuinely does look like America if you come to Albuquerque. I thank all the Native Americans here who are in the audience. Thank you very much for coming. I see our friends from the Sikh community over there. I know there are a lot of Hispanic Americans here. I know there are African Americans, Asian Americans, and others. We thank you for coming here. And I also thank all the young people that are in the audience, because this is an issue for all ages of Americans to deal with together. I would like to acknowledge our Social Security Commissioner, Ken Apfel thank Bill Gordon, the provost of the University of New Mexico, and all the university family for making us welcome here today. I thank Horace Deets of the AARP for being here, and Harvey Meyerhoff of the Concord Coalition, and Carolyn Lukensmeyer of Americans Discuss Social Security. I want to say a special word of thanks to the AARP and the Concord Coalition for hosting this forum. And of course, I thank the Members of Congress who are here and the leaders of the Congress for nominating the Members who are on this program. We are very blessed at this moment to have a strong economy in America. The question for us is whether we will do what societies often do when times are good and sit back and enjoy it, or whether we will face the larger challenges that our present prosperity and confidence permit us to face. They are significant and formidable. If you think about the next 50 years, how are we going to build the world's best elementary and secondary education system? How are we going to bring economic opportunity to the people who don't enjoy this prosperity, whether they're in inner city neighborhoods or rural communities where agriculture is in trouble or Native American communities? How are we going to deal with the challenge of growing the economy and preserving our natural environment? Big, significant challenges. One of those challenges, clearly, that we must face together is saving Social Security and I might add, with it, Medicare for the 21st century. One of our biggest challenges is what I call a high class problem We are an aging society. We are living longer and better and healthier, and that imposes costs. The older I get, the more I like that problem that's a highclass problem. It wouldn't have been too many years ago that it would have been rather unusual to find a mayor who could stand up and cite 3 of his family members who are over 75 years of age. That's not so unusual anymore. But we know now that because of the demographic challenges facing us, we have to make some adjustments in the Social Security system to strengthen and preserve it in a new century. As all of you know, I have said since my State of the Union Address that we should set aside every penny of any surplus until we save Social Security first. At the very moment when we have switched from deficits as far as the eye can see to surpluses as far as the eye can see, it's tempting to offer a large tax cut or perhaps a new spending program paid for by the projected surplus. Some have advocated this course, but we must not squander the hardwon legacy of fiscal responsibility that has brought us our present moment of prosperity. Instead, we should use it to tackle the longterm challenges of the United States. Any new tax cut or spending program done before we save the Social Security system would commit funds that may be needed to honor our commitment to our parents and our commitment to our children. I think those of us who are part of the so called baby boom generation feel that most acutely because it is in the years when all of us, that is and I'm the oldest of the baby boomers those who are between the ages of roughly 52 and 34, when we all get into the retirement system. It is then when the greatest stresses will be placed upon it at present levels of retirement, projected birth rates, and projected immigration rates. So I am very grateful for the bipartisan spirit in which we have been pursuing this. I'm grateful for the people who are here. I appreciate Senator Domenici's strong leadership and his strong support for taking the responsible course. In an election year, asking politicians to hold off on a tax cut is almost defying human nature, but Senator Domenici and many Republicans have joined our Democrats in saying together, "Let's deal with this problem. The American people waited 29 years to get out of the red ink and look at the black we can take a year to enjoy the black and deal with the long term problems of the country before we decide everything we have to do with the surplus. Let's deal with first things first." Also I want to thank, as I said, Senator Bingaman, Congressman Kolbe, and Congressman Becerra. We have to reach across the lines of party, philosophy, and generation. This will require open minds and generous spirits. We all have to be willing to listen and learn. In preparation for this forum today, I had three different sessions with my staff members briefing me on all the various reforms that have been advocated by the extraordinarily distinguished panel of experts from whom you will hear in a few moments. And I've been doing my best to be open to new ideas and to listen and to learn. I have asked every Member of Congress not only to support the forums we're having here today but to hold town meetings in every district in America. And we will have a White House Conference on Social Security at the end of this year. Next year I will convene the bipartisan leadership of Congress to craft a solution. The stakes are very high. Those of you who are older or who have had family members dependent on Social Security know that for 60 years Social Security has been far more than an ID number on a tax form, even more than a monthly check in the mail. It reflects the duties we owe to our parents and to each other, and this kind of society we are trying to build. Today, 44 million Americans depend on Social Security, and for two thirds of seniors it's the main source of income. Today, nearly one in three of the beneficiaries, however, is not a retiree. Social Security is also a life insurance policy and a disability policy. Since its enactment over 60 years ago, it has changed the face of America. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law, most seniors were poor. A typical elderly person sent a letter to FDR begging him to terminate the "stark terror of penniless old age." Now, in 1996, the elderly poverty rate was below 11 percent. Without Social Security, today nearly half of all seniors would still live in poverty. Today, the system is sound, but we all know a demographic crisis is looming. There are 76 million of us baby boomers now looking ahead to retirement age and longer life expectancies. By 2030, there will be twice as many elderly as there are today, with only two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. After 2032, contributions from payroll taxes to the Social Security Trust Fund will be only enough to cover about 75 cents on the dollar of current benefits. We know the problem. We know that if we act now, it will be easier and less painful than if we wait until later. I don't think any of you want to see America in a situation where we have to cut benefits 25 percent or raise inherently regressive payroll taxes 25 percent to deal with the challenge of the future and our obligations to our seniors. I can tell you, I've spent a lot of time talking to the people I grew up with. Most of them are middle class people with very modest incomes, and they are appalled at the thought that their retirement might lower the standard of living of their children or undermine their children's ability to raise their grandchildren. So let's do something now in a prudent, disciplined way that will avoid our having to make much more dramatic and distasteful decisions down the road. Now, today we're going to discuss one of the most interesting and important issues that will affect how much it will cost to stabilize the Social Security Trust Fund and what the nature of it will be, and that is, whether and how there should be Social Security investments not just in low risk government bonds, as the investments are made today, but also in the stock market. I think we have to be openminded about these proposals, and we also have to ask the hard questions. One I'll start with is, in the 6 years I've been President, the value of the stock market has nearly tripled. I'm grateful for that. Can we look forward to having that happen every 6 years from now on? If not, what are the risks? What will it cost to administer such a program? If you don't have individual accounts where administration costs may be higher, what would be the dangers of having the Government, either itself or through some third party independent agency, make such investments? I think that we just have to look at this and listen, and I hope all of you today will leave with a better understanding of both the appeal as well as the questions in each and every proposal that has been raised. As I said, I have spent a lot of time studying them. I have tried to set out the five principles by which I think we should judge any proposed reforms. And let me just briefly state them again. First of all, I think we should reform Social Security in a way that protects the guarantee for the 21st century. We shouldn't abandon a program that has lifted our seniors out of poverty and that is reliable. Second, I think whatever we do, we should maintain universality and fairness in the program. For a half century, this has been a progressive guarantee for citizens. Third, Social Security must provide a benefit that people can count on so they can plan for their future. Regardless of the gyrations of the markets, there must be at least a dependable foundation of retirement security. Third, Social Security must continue to provide financial security for disabled and low income beneficiaries. Remember, one in three Social Security recipients is not a retiree, something that is often lost on people when they comment on the relatively low rate of return of the retirement program. Now, finally, we must maintain our hard won fiscal discipline in anything that we do. That means, from my point of view, that any change we adopt must not lead to greater long term projected deficits. We worked awful hard for a generation to get our country out of the deficit mode. It's resulted in a lot of prosperity for our country. I can tell you, as I deal with other nations around the world with the Asian financial crisis, with all the challenges other countries face money moves around the world today in the flash of an eye. Investment is important. America will continue to be successful because of our great free enterprise system as long as we have a responsible economic policy in this country. So we should not abandon that. Now, those are the principles that I will use when I try to evaluate all these proposals. But they don't answer the questions. These are hard questions. And every person who's on this panel of experts has worked hard to answer them. You'll see they have very different answers, but they all deserve a respectful listen from you. And you need to start, as I always try to start, by saying, "What's good about this idea? What are the positives about it? What are the inherent questions that are raised?" Try to work them through for yourself and go back and discuss them with your friends and neighbors. And most of all, let's try to keep an open, positive, oldfashioned American attitude toward this. We dare not let this disintegrate into a partisan rhetorical battle. Senior citizens are going to be Republicans and Democrats and independents. They're going to come from all walks of life, from all income backgrounds, from every region of this country, and therefore, so will their children and their grandchildren. This is an American challenge, and we have to meet it together. Thank you very much. July 25, 1998 The President. Thank you. That was better than I can do, Michael. Thank you very much. Thank you and thank you, Ana, for welcoming all of us into your home. And I want to thank my long, longtime friend Roy Romer for being willing to keep his day job and take on another job as well for our party. Since you mentioned the Brady bill, I think what I'd like to do is maybe just talk just for a few minutes and then, probably to the chagrin of all the people who came here with me, take a few minutes, if any of you have any questions or comments or you want to give a speech to me, I'll listen to that. But if you think about it, if you've got any questions you want to ask. But you heard the example Michael gave you of the Brady bill, and if you ask me about what I have tried to do through and with our Democratic Party and as President that makes it worthy of the support of thoughtful Americans, many of whom might have even been Republicans before, I would say two things. First of all, I've tried to move our party and to move our country and, hardest of all, to move Washington, DC, away from sort of yesterday's categorical, partisan name calling toward a genuine debate over new ideas, because we are living in a new and different time that, coincidentally, is at the turn of the century and the turn of the millennium, but is indisputably different. It is different because the way we work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world is different. It is different because the nature of the challenges we face, among other things, in relating to the natural environment are profoundly different than any previous generation. So that's the first thing it is different. The second thing I would say is that I have tried to redefine what it means for Americans to be engaged in what our Founding Fathers said would be our permanent mission, forming a more perfect Union. And the Brady bill is about as good an example as any I can think of for what the difference is today, in Washington at least not so much out in the country maybe but certainly in Washington between the two parties. If you go back to the beginning of the Republic, the people who got us started were very smart people they understood that they weren't perfect. Thomas Jefferson said when he thought of slavery, he trembled to think that God was just and might judge him justly. So they knew they weren't perfect even then. And then they knew there would be new and uncharted challenges in the future. But they essentially if you go back and read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it all comes down to the fact that they believe that God gave everybody the inherent right to life, liberty, and the pursuit not the guarantee but the pursuit of happiness, and that in those shared rights we were created equal, not with equal abilities, not with equal tastes, not all the same, but equal in a fundamental human sense. And then the second thing that distinguishes the Democrats from the Republicans even today, I think even more today than in the last 50 years the Founding Fathers said, "Look, we can't pursue these objectives completely by ourselves. We can't protect or enhance the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness unless we band together and form a government. But governments ought to be limited. They ought to be limited in scope, limited in power, limited in reach, but they should do those things that we cannot do alone." And sometimes, in order to advance our collective life, liberty, and happiness, individually we have to make a few sacrifices. That's really what the Brady bill is all about. You know, in a country with 200 million guns, where last year, with our zero tolerance for guns, we sent home 6,100 kids got sent home from school because they brought guns to school, and you've seen in the series of murders in the schools the consequences of failure when that policy either doesn't work or isn't enough, the Brady bill, by requiring a background check and making people wait 5 days between the time they order and get a handgun, has kept a quarter of a million people with criminal records, stalking records, or records of mental health instability from getting handguns. That's one of the reasons that crime is at a 25 year low, and murder has dropped even more. Now, did it inconvenience some people to wait 5 days? Doubtless so maybe some people that were mad at other people who cooled down after they waited 5 days. Is it an unconstitutional abridgement of the right to keep and bear arms? Not on your life. In 1996 one of the most moving encounters I had in the campaign was when I went back to New Hampshire, the State that basically allowed me to go on when the first, we now know, Republican inspired assault was waged against me in 1991 and '92 in New Hampshire. And they gave me a good vote, and I got to go on, so I went back there. Then they voted for me in 1992 for President. And in 1996 they voted for me again, which is unheard of because it's an overwhelmingly Republican State in elections. But I went into an area of people who are big sportsmen, and they had defeated a Congressman who supported our crime bill with the ban on assault weapons and the Brady bill. And I had all these hunters there, and I'd been going to see them a long time. And I said, "I'll tell you what, remember back in '94 when you beat that Congressman because the NRA told you that the President was trying to take your guns away with the assault weapons ban, and the NRA?" I said, "Well, you beat him last time." I said, "Now, every one of you who lost your hunting rifle, I expect you to vote against me this time. But," I said, "if you didn't, they lied to you, and you ought to get even." Laughter And you could have heard a pin drop there, because they realized all of a sudden that this sort of radical individualism, meaning you have no responsibilities to collective citizenship, was wrong. And they could perfectly well pursue their heritage that's deeply a part of New Hampshire, where people could hunt and fish and do whatever they want, and still have sufficient restraints to try to keep our children alive. And that's just one example. And I could give you countless others. But as you look ahead in a world where we have done our best to promote global markets, to promote efficient enterprise, we still have to recognize that there are some obligations we have to each other we have to fulfill together. And as you look ahead, let me just mention two or three and I won't mention them all, but two or three. One is, as presently structured, both the Social Security system and the Medicare system are unsustainable once all the baby boomers retire. And I look at all these young people who are working here and young enough, most of them, to be, for most of us, to be our children. Not very long ago I went home to Arkansas because we had a terrible tornado. And after I toured the damaged area, I got a bunch of people I went to high school with to come out and have dinner with me. We ate barbecue from a place we've been eating at 40 years and sat around and talked. Now, most of my high school classmates had never been to Aspen. Most of my high school classmates are just middle class people with modest incomes, doing the best they can to raise their kids. But every one of them said to me, "You've got to do something to modify the Social Security system. Make it as strong for us as you can do the best you can but we are obsessed with not bankrupting our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren because the baby boom generation is so big that by the time we're all in it, there will be only two people working for every one person drawing." Now, I personally believe, since the Democratic Party created Social Security and Medicare and since they, I believe, they've been great for America, that we should take the responsibility of constructively reforming them rather than going into denial and pretending that it doesn't have to be done. That's one example. Example number two We've got the best system of college education in the world, but nobody thinks we have the best elementary and secondary education system in the world. Ninety percent of the kids in this country are in public schools. We have got to modernize these schools, raise the standards, and do a thousand things that are necessary that Governor Romer and I have been working on for 20 years now if we expect America to grow together in the 21st century. Example number three and then I'll quit after this, although there are more, but I think it's important here in Colorado, especially in Aspen we've got to prove that we can grow the economy and improve the environment, not just preserve it the way it is but actually make it better. We have to make energy use like electricity and other things in the next 50 years the way electronics has been in the last 50, where everything gets smaller and smaller and smaller, with more and more power. I mentioned this at the previous dinner, but I'll say it again The main reason we have a year 2000 problem with all these computers, you know, where everybody is afraid that we'll flip into at the stroke of midnight, December 31st, January 1st, 1999, 2000, we'll all go back to 1900 and everything will stop, is because we computerized early in America. And when we computerized, these chips that hold memory were rudimentary by today's standards. And so they had all the numbers they did on dates, they just had the last 2 years they didn't have 4 years. So they're not capable of making this transition. Today, it's a no brainer. If you were building something today, the power of these chips is so great, nobody would even think about making it possible to have four digits on there and you could go right on until the year 9999. So we've got to deal with this education challenge, and we've got to prove that we can do it. And then the second thing we have to do on this is to prove that we can do with energy what we have done with electronics and the computer chip. The best example of that, that all of you will be able to access within 3 or 4 years, is a fuelinjection engine. Where today about 70 percent of the heat value of gasoline is lost as it works its way through a regular engine, when the fuel can be directly injected into the process of turning the engine over you will cut greenhouse gas emissions by 75 to 80 percent and triple mileage. And that's just one example. I was in a low income housing development in California a couple weeks ago where the windows let in twice as much light and kept out twice as much heat and cold. All of this is designed to do in energy what we have already done in electronics and so many other things. This is a huge challenge. I was pleased to wake up just the other morning and look at CNN the first story was on climate change because of all the scorching heat in the South and the fires in Florida, pointing out that the 9 hottest years ever recorded have occurred in the last 11 years the 5 hottest years ever recorded have all occurred in the 1990's 1997 was the hottest year ever recorded and each and every month of 1998 has broken that month's record for 1997. This is not a game. We cannot afford to go into denial about this. We have to find a way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and still keep growing the economy, not just for America but for China, for India, for all the people that are looking for their future. These are just three examples. Last point 50 years ago tomorrow I had this on my mind because I dedicated the aircraft carrier, the Harry Truman, today some of you may have seen it on TV tonight 50 years ago tomorrow Harry Truman signed the Executive order ending segregation in the United States military. And 50 years later there are a lot of people who whined and squalled about it and said it was the end of the world and how awful it would be 50 years later we have the finest military in the world, in no small measure because it is the most racially diverse military in the world, where everybody meets uniform standards of excellence. Today we have one school district in Washington across the river from Washington, DC, with children from 180 different national and ethnic groups, speaking over 100 different native languages one school district. So that's the last point I will make. It is particularly important that we figure out how to live together and work together, to relish our differences but understand that what binds us together is more important. When you look at Kosovo and Bosnia, when you look at Northern Ireland and the Middle East, when you look at the tribal warfare in Rwanda and elsewhere, you look at the way the whole world is bedeviled by not being able to get along because of their racial, ethnic, and religious differences, if you want America to do a good job in the rest of the world, we have to be good at home. Those are some of the things I think we should be thinking about. And I believe politics should be about this. So if when you turn on the television at night and you hear reports about what's being discussed in Washington, the tone in which it's being discussed, and the alternatives that are being presented, you hardly ever hear this, do you? You ought to ask yourself why. I can tell you this You help more of our guys get in what you're doing by your presence here you'll have more of this kind of discussion, and I think America will be better in the 21st century. Thank you very much. National Economy Q. As you know, I'm a Houstonian, but I have a house down the street from my friends the Goldbergs. I want to say that in your last trimester of your stewardship, I remember sitting on a bus with Senator John Breaux, my boyhood friend, and you talked about your plans for America. And I haven't seen this in the paper lately, but I guess I want to tell you that we recognize low unemployment we recognize low interest rates we recognize low inflation and, I think, a booming economy. And I think with that track record, that I should be reading that in the paper more. But I want to tell you that I thank you, and I think all these people here thank you. The President. Thank you. If I could just say one thing about it as you well know, because you work all over the world, the economy is a constantly moving target. And I am very grateful we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and the lowest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years and the lowest inflation in 32 years and the highest homeownership ever. That's the good news. About a third of our economic growth has come from exports. About a third to 40 percent of our export growth 40 percent has gone in Asia. If Asia goes down, our export growth goes down our economic growth goes down. That is already happening. So one of the things that I think is very important to do is that we impress upon the Members of Congress, both Republican and Democratic, that we have to do those things which are designed to keep the rest of the world growing. Otherwise, we can't grow. We are 4 percent of the world's population we have 20 percent of the world's income. It does not require much mathematical computation to realize that if we want to sustain our income, we have to sell more to the other 96 percent of the people in the world. And that's why I've been in such a big fight in Washington to fund America's dues to the International Monetary Fund to modernize and strengthen and restore growth in these economies, why I want to see us continue to be engaged with Japan, why I went to China because a strong economy will cure a lot of social problems. And very few social problems can be cured in a democracy in the absence of a strong economy because the middle class becomes preoccupied with its own problems. But in this day and age, we can't sustain a strong economy without a strong foreign policy that commits us to be constructively involved with the rest of the world. And one of the things that I worry most about in Washington is, in various ways, there are elements that are still some in our party but more in the other party still pulling away from our constructive engagement in the rest of the world. We cannot become what we ought to become unless we continue to get more deeply involved, not less involved, with the rest of the world. But I thank you for what you said. Go ahead. Republican Congress Q. You mentioned Harry Truman, and I still remember those headlines, "Dewey Wins," right? And in fact it was Harry that won. And my question is, I believe I am not smart enough to know exactly why, but I believe that one of the reasons he won is he said, "That do nothing 80th Congress" is that the right number, 80, I hope? "and we're going to really show them." When are we going to when do your advisers say it's time to start talking in the parts of matter, instead of more that sort of global thing where we are all going to be together and be all a happy family? The President. Well, I have been hitting them pretty hard over the way they killed the tobacco bill, the way they are so far killing the Patients' Bill of Rights, the way they killed campaign finance reform, the way they are endangering our future economic prosperity by walking away from our dues to the International Monetary Fund. You know I haven't attacked them personally in the way they have attacked me, but I've tried to make it clear that I think there are serious risks being played with America's future there. But I frankly believe that we have to wait until see what happens in the first 2 weeks after the August recess. They're about to go out. Then they'll come back, and they'll have to make a final decision whether they are going to work with us to get something done for America or whether they're just going to play politics. And I believe the American people will have an extremely negative reaction if they walk away as a do nothing Congress. So far one of the major papers called them a "done nothing" Congress. They said, so far, they're a "done nothing" Congress. They're not yet a do nothing Congress because they still have a few days left. But they're not meeting very much this year and so far I just think that they believe that conventional wisdom is that when times are good, incumbents all win, so what they really have to do is to keep their base happy. And in this case, the base is the most ideologically conservative people in the country. And I think they think they can keep them happy just by banging on me and doing a few other things. And I basically disagree with that because I do not think, as good as times are, I don't think this is an inherently stable time I mean, stable is wrong I think it's stable but not status quo. I think all you have to look 5 years ago, Japan thought they had a permanent formula for prosperity. Now they've had 5 years of no growth, and their stock market has lost half its value. But one of the reasons that our country is working so well is that the private sector, the entrepreneurs in this country, can stay in constant motion. There are opportunities out there. They can see things that are changing, and they can move and everything. And we've got to equip more people to do that. But I guess I'm having a vigorous agreement with you, but I think the Republican political analysis is that they can get by this election by doing nothing because times are so good that all incumbents will benefit, even if the President is more benefited than others. My belief is that the good times impose on us a special responsibility to bear down and take on these long term challenges because good times never last forever and because things inherently change more rapidly now than they ever have before. So I think they're making probably a political miscalculation and certainly a miscalculation in terms of what's best for our country. And I think you'll hear more of it in the last 6 weeks before the election. Yes? 1998 Elections Q. The Republican Party has clearly been captured by the conservative ideologues. The Christian right, the religious right, knows what they're doing they know what they believe they're well organized and I think they are probably the most inaudible that we have. On the other hand, Democrats, we have a all of us have a tradition of understanding and of tolerance for the discrepancies and the differences in opinions across the party we're not so well organized. How do we face this The President. Well, first of all Q. election against people who are as determined, as well organized, and as well funded as the conservative right is? The President. Well, we are working hard to get better organized. And I think we are going to be better organized than we ever have been. We were quite well organized in '96, and we did well. We would have won the House in '96, but for the fact that in the last 10 days of the election, in the 20 closest races they outspent us 4 1 2 to one in the last 10 days. Over and above that, you had all these third party groups like the Christian Coalition groups doing mass mailings into these districts, basically talking about what heathens our candidates were. And I think the Democrats are just going to have to decide whether they're going to be tough enough to handle that. I mean, we don't but I think we will be better organized. I think we will be better funded this time. They did their best to bankrupt us the last 2 years, and it didn't work. So I think if we're better organized and better funded and we train our candidates better, then what we have to do is be ready for that last 10 day onslaught where the Christian Coalition and the other far right groups do these heavy, heavy mailings basically trying to convince the people they're mailing to that we're cultural aliens and that we don't have good values and we don't support families and the country will come apart at the seams if we become the majority again. And if we're tough enough to handle that, I think we've got a chance to do pretty well. We were doing fine in '96 we just didn't have enough ammunition at the end. We were so far down in '95 that we had to spend a lot of our party money to get back up, and then the last 10 days they just blew us away. But you've helped a lot by being here, and I think we know now that you don't have to descend to the level of personal meanness that your attackers do, but you do have to show a similar level of vigor, with a strategy that will work. My own view is that we've got a strategy that will work we've got a message that will play. And you asked about the partisanship thing the most effective partisan attack, and a truthful one, is to say that they are being partisan in preventing us from making progress. It's not just to say Democrats are better than Republicans. It's to say they're being partisan they're preventing us from making progress. Here are our ideas. Now, what are their ideas measure them up. Two thirds of the American people will pick ours. So if they don't stampede us with fear and money, we'll do fine. And that's the ultimate answer to the question you asked. Go ahead. International Environmental Issues Q. Mr. President, first of all, I think it's really wonderful you've had a long day, and you're answering our questions. That's really the American way. Thank you. The President. It's 1 15 a.m. our time. Q. Inaudible you're doing incredible things worldwide. I read the newspapers where you even got those two suspected terrorists, and they may end up getting tried in The Hague. And that's wonderful. And NAFTA was the greatest thing. I know you have to give and take, Mr. President, but during NAFTA I know one of the things you had to kind of give on a bit was to let the Mexican fishermen take up to 10,000 dolphins and kill them. Is there any way in the last year and a half we could take a couple of these ecological issues and maybe readdress them again to help make the world a better place to live? The President. Well, we've got a lot of one of the reasons we did that is that we finally got the Mexicans to agree to at least end some of the unsanitary conditions under which people were living along the border. And we tried to build up a border commission that would allow us to invest in the environment and elevate the public health of the people in the Maquilladora areas along the border. I think that you will see, I predict, a number of areas where there will be advances in wildlife protection and the environment in the last 2 years. We're doing our best to get a much broader agreement, for example, on all kinds of efforts to restore the oceans generally. There's been a significant and alarming deterioration in the oceans, not unrelated to climate change and global warming but caused by forces in addition to that. There is a dead spot the size of the State of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico outside the mouth of the Mississippi, for example. And we're trying to address all those. I believe the American people I think within a decade you'll see an overwhelming majority of the American people for operational environmentalism. Today we have 70 percent of our people are environmentalists. And almost all little children are it's something they have to be taught to abandon their instincts are to preserve the planet. But I think that people still believe something I don't anymore, which is that you have to give up all this if you want to grow the economy. I just don't believe that. And I think that you will see a steady movement toward more aggressive environmental policies which will come to dominate both parties, I believe, in the next 10 years. And I hope before I leave office I can do more. I even had somebody from Utah come up to me tonight and thank me for saving the Red Rocks, the Grand Staircase Escalante, you know, who said they didn't think it was right when I did it before. Moderator. Mr. President, I know your schedule. Would you mind taking just a couple more? The President. Go ahead. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia Q. Mr. President, I've got a question about foreign policy. Do you have any concern about India and Pakistan, South Asia, what's happening over there and what kind of leadership role you can take to bring peace over there or even float the idea of creating an independent country of Kashmir, because that's the biggest problem there? What can you do about it? The President. Well, one of the problems we've had I thought I actually feel bad about this because I had a trip set up for the fall to India and Pakistan. And in 1993, when I took office, I got all of our people actually, before I took office and I said, "Let's look at the major foreign policy challenges this country faces and figure out how we're going to deal with them and in what order." And as you might imagine, we went through the Middle East and Bosnia, and then we had Haiti on the list. We went through the idea that we had to build a trade alliance with Latin America, that we needed a systematic outreach to Africa, that the big issues were how were Russia and China going to define their future greatness and could we avoid a destructive future. And we worked hard on that. But I told everybody at the time, I said, one of the things that never gets in the newspapers in America is the relationship between India and Pakistan and what happens on the Indian subcontinent, where they already India already has a population of over 900 million in 30 years it will be more populous than China it already has the world's biggest middle class. And Pakistan has well over 100 million people, and so does Bangladesh. So it's an amazing place. So I had planned to go there with plans to try to help resolve the conflicts between the two countries. One big problem is India steadfastly resists having any third party, whether it's the United States or the United Nations or anybody else, try to mediate on Kashmir. It's not surprising. India is bigger than Pakistan, but there are more Muslims than Hindus in Kashmir. I mean, it's not the same reason that Pakistan, on the flipside, is dying to have international mediation because of the way the numbers work. What I think we have to do is go back to find a series of confidence building measure which will enable these two nations to work together and trust each other more and to move back from the brink of military confrontation and from nuclear confrontation. And we have to find a way to involve the Russians and the Chinese, because the Indians always say they're building nuclear power because of China being a nuclear power and the border disputes they've had with China and oh, by the way, we happen to have this Pakistani problem. So I have spent a lot of time on that, even though it hasn't achieved a lot of notoriety in the press. And I'm still hopeful that before the year is over, we'll be able to put them back on the right path toward more constructive relations. I mean, India, interestingly enough, is a democracy just as diverse, if not more diverse, than America. Almost no one knows this. But most most, but not all the various minority groups in India live along the borders of India in the north. And it's just it would be, I think, a terrible tragedy if Hindu nationalism led to both estrangement with the Muslim countries on the border and the minorities Muslim and otherwise within the borders of India, when Gandhi basically set the country up as a model of what we would all like to be, and when India's democracy has survived for 50 years under the most adverse circumstances conceivable and is now, I believe, in a position to really build a level of prosperity that has not been possible before. I feel the same thing with the Pakistanis. I think if they could somehow they're much more vulnerable to these economic sanctions than the Indians are. If they could somehow ease their concerns which are leading to such enormous military expenditures and put it into people expenditures, we could build a different future there. I don't know if I can do any good with it, but I certainly intend to try because I think, whether we like it or not, I think that the one good thing that the nuclear tests have done is that they have awakened the West, and Americans in particular, to the idea that a lot of our children's future will depend on what happens in the Indian subcontinent. Q. How about if you called their Prime Ministers here? The President. Well, I can't force a settlement on them, but I can that's why I say because of their relationships with India and China, we need their help as well. And so far excuse me with Russia and China. And so far, the Russians and the Chinese have been very helpful to me in trying to work out a policy that we can pursue. But I'm working on it. Believe me, if I thought it would work, I would do it tomorrow, and I will continue to explore every conceivable option. Q. That's great. Thank you very much. The President. Thanks. One last question. Go ahead. Intellectual Property Rights Q. I'm an intellectual property owner. I represent a lot of entrepreneurial and independent inaudible interests against a lot of the large multinational companies. I know what it's like to be on the nose cone of a missile pretty much. And these interests can tell us that basically that black is white in Congress and try to weaken the patent system and protection of intellectual property. But Governor Romer's son is one of the most vocal spokesmen for the thing that differentiates us from the rest of the world is intellectual property, and I'd be interested in your views on this. The President. Well, it's interesting that you'd say that. First of all, I don't think we should weaken the system. And secondly, I think we should continue to aggressively pursue those protections in our trade relations. I have spent an enormous amount of time with the Chinese, for example, trying to protect against pirated CD's of all kinds and other technology. And the consequences are far greater than they used to be. And we always had a lot of this in Asia. We had Gucci handbags and the Rolex watches and then when I first went to Taiwan 20 years ago, you could buy all the latest hardcover books for 1.50 that was something that was done. But the volume and level of trade and the interconnections and the sophistication of what was being copied were nowhere near what they are today, where you're talking about billions and billions and billions of dollars that can literally undermine the creative enterprise of whole sectors of our economy. So I think it's important, first, to keep the legal protections there, but secondly, it's important that the United States make this a big part of our foreign policy and all of our trade policy. And we try to do it. I spent a huge amount of time on it myself. Education Q. Mr. President, recently Massachusetts had some ugly test scores from its teachers they couldn't pass 10th grade equivalency. And there's a problem, I guess, in other States, as well. Is there any way that the education of the kids won't take another generation to upgrade the teaching in the public schools? The President. Well, first of all, yes, I think I advocate I think what Massachusetts did was a good thing, not a bad thing. Most people, every time they read bad news think this is a bad thing. Sometimes when you read bad news, it's a good thing, because otherwise how are you going to make it better if you don't know what the facts are? So the first thing I'd like to say is we ought to give Massachusetts a pat on the back for having the guts to have the teacher testing, get the facts out, and deal with them. Now, what I think should happen is, I think every State should do this for first time teachers just the way they do it for lawyers and doctors. Then I believe there should be a much more vigorous system for trying to support and improve teaching as we go along, trying to bring like retired people with degrees in science and mathematics and other things into the teacher corps, which is very uneven across the country. And there's also something called the National Board for Professional Teacher Standards, which certifies master teachers every year, people who have great academic knowledge, could knock the socks off that test, and people who have proven ability in the classroom. And one of the things that I've got in my budget is enough money to fund 100,000 of those master teachers, which would be enough to put one master teacher in every school building in the country. And if you look at I don't want to embarrass him, but Tony Robbins standing here, if you ever listen to his tapes or look at him on television, you know he's a teacher. He's teaching people to change how they behave. Well, it just stands to reason that if you could get one really great teacher in every class, in every school building in America, you would change the culture of that school building if they had mentoring as part of their responsibility. So I think this is a huge deal. But let me say, there's a lot more to do. You have to recognize, too, that we have to do more to get young people into teaching, even if they only stay a few years really bright young people. One of the proposals I've got before the Congress today would fund several thousand young people going into inner city schools and other underserved areas to teach just for a couple of years and they would, in turn, get a lot of their college costs knocked off for doing it. Congress hasn't adopted it yet, but I think that's another important avenue to consider. You've got to the quality of teaching matters. Now, I won't go through my whole education agenda with you, but the other thing that you have to remember, whether you're in Colorado or anyplace else, is that when most of us who are my age at least were children, the smartest women were teaching because they couldn't do anything else for a living. And they weren't making much for doing it, but it was all they could do. And now, a smart woman can run a big company, can create a company and then take it public and be worth several hundred million dollars, can be elected to the United States Senate and, before you know it, will be President of the United States. So that means if you want good young people to be teachers, we're going to have to pay them more. And that's everybody nods their head and then nobody wants to come up with the bread to do it, but you've got to do it. I mean, there's no question about it. If you really want to maintain quality over a long period of time, you have to do you have to pay people you have to improve the pay scales. The best short run fix is to get really smart people who did other things and now have good retirement income to come in because they don't need the salary as much, or to get really smart young people to do it for a few years as soon as they get out of college by helping them cover their college costs. Moderator. Mr. President, Michael Goldberg promised me he would show me some reruns of his brother, the wrestler, on winning his championship after you were done speaking. The President. I'm really impressed by that. Moderator. You're running me out of my time on watching that wrestling. Laughter The President. Thank you very much. July 25, 1998 Thank you very much. Thank you, Beth. Thank you, Steve. Like others, I want to thank Christy and Sheldon for having us in this magnificent home tonight with the wonderful natural surroundings. I haven't been to Aspen for a long time, and for the last 3 or 4 hours I've been kicking myself for how many years it's been since I was here last. But in the eighties, Hillary and I had some wonderful trips up here, and just looking around has been very it's a wonderful opportunity. And again I say that this has been a particularly unique opportunity for me to see many of you and to see you in these magnificent settings. So, thank you, Sheldon thank you, Christy. We're very grateful. I'd like to thank many people here. I thank Secretary Riley and Secretary Slater for coming out here and being a part of this. Once I had a meeting of Presidential scholars at a time when things were not so rosy for our administration as they are now after the '94 elections, I don't know, it was early '95, and my obituary once again had been written several times by several people. Laughter And this fellow who is a professor at Harvard in Presidential studies, he said, " I think you're probably going to be reelected." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, for one thing, you have the most loyal Cabinet since Thomas Jefferson's second administration," which was very touching to me because they're also very good. Rodney Slater has worked with me for more than 15 years now, and I'm very proud of the work he has done. And Secretary Riley and I have been friends for more than 20 years now, and colleagues. We are so creaky we were actually Governors in the 1970's. Laughter So I thank them for being here and for their ardent support of our political objectives. I thank Senator Feinstein and Congresswoman DeGette. I'd also like to thank my wonderful friend Governor Roy Romer. He and Bea are here tonight, and he has done a great job being a spokesperson from our party, going around the country trying to do his job as Governor of Colorado and give us as much time as he can. I thank Steve Grossman and Barbara, and Lynn and Len Barrack, who are here, and all the weekend hosts. I thought I would tell you, I was asking myself although some of you are actually new to this, most people have heard me give too many speeches, and I was feeling very badly for all of you tonight. Laughter So I was thinking what I could tell you, and I thought maybe I ought to start with where I started this day. Hillary and Chelsea and I had a wonderful weekend. Last night or yesterday afternoon we all went out to Camp David, and we managed to fool my brother into believing that we had to have this high powered family conference. And I think he honestly thought I was going to tell him that I had a life threatening illness or something. Laughter And we had gathered his 20 best friends from all around America, and we threw a surprise birthday party for him last night, and he never did figure out what it was about until we hit him with it. So I didn't think I was capable of such sleight of hand, and I felt very good about myself afterwards. Laughter And then, this morning I got up and I flew to Newport News, Virginia, to commission our newest aircraft carrier, the United States Ship Harry Truman. Margaret Truman, Harry Truman's daughter, is a good friend of Hillary's and mine, and she was, unfortunately, unable to be there. But all President Truman's grandchildren and great grandchildren were there, and it was quite an extraordinary day. I say that because if you think about what Harry Truman did 50 years ago, entering as he was, and as America was, into a new and very different time after World War II, it gives you some guidance in terms of what we ought to be doing today. And let me just mention three things. Number one, at the end of World War II, he understood that America could not be isolated from the rest of the world, as we had been after World War I and historically, throughout our country's history before. So he was the first world leader to recognize the state of Israel, 50 years ago this year, against the advice of most of his advisers. Number two, he understood that America was fundamentally at that time still quite a hypocritical society in that there was such a huge gap between what was written on paper in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, and how we were living. Fifty years ago tomorrow, Harry Truman issued the Executive order to integrate the Armed Forces. Fifty years later, we have the most diverse and the most successful military anywhere in the world. Number three, Harry Truman understood that you could not go into a new and different time with just the right ideas there also had to be some institutional mechanisms through which people could work to achieve their common objectives, just as the same way that if you have an idea to make money in the free enterprise system, you still have to organize a business to do it. And that's what the United Nations was all about that's what the International Monetary Fund was all about that's what NATO was all about. So Harry Truman committed us to the world, committed us to being one America, and committed America to building and supporting the institutions necessary to make it possible for the American people to make the most of their own lives and to advance the cause of peace and freedom and prosperity around the world. Now, if you fast forward to the present moment, on the edge of a new century and a new millennium, we have some of the same challenges and some very different ones. But the thing I want to say to you is, the world is moving quickly and changing profoundly, and we need that level of vision as a people to decide where we want to go. And I believe that our party best embodies that in America today. And I'd like to just give you just a few examples. First of all, when I came to office in 1993 I was determined to reflect at least as best I could what I thought the real experience of Americans was out in the country and not just to get into this Washington sort of hyperpolitical rhetoric and shouting that is the staple of everyday life in Washington, DC. I had the privilege to serve as a Governor with two of the Coloradans here present, Roy Romer and Dick Lamm. And when we argued about things, we almost always were arguing about what would work or not, based on what kind of country we wanted to build, what kind of future we wanted to have for our children, what kind of legacy we wanted to leave them. So we started with a different economic policy, a different welfare policy, a different education policy, a different crime policy, and very often what I tried to do was misunderstood at least by the political writers who were quite angry that they could no longer put it into a little neat box of whether it was old fashioned liberal or old fashioned conservative. I concede that I caused them the discomfort of having to think about it, but I thought that's what we should be doing. We had gone on too long on automatic in American politics, and the time had come to lower the rhetoric and open our ears and our eyes and think about it. I often used to quote Benjamin Franklin's famous saying that our critics are our friends, for they show us our faults. And then I found so many friends in Washington, I stopped saying it. Laughter But nonetheless, there's some truth to it. So if you look at where are we today, today we have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest percentage of people on welfare in 29 years, the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years, with the lowest inflation in 32 years, the highest homeownership in history, the smallest Federal Government in 35 years with scholarships and loans that have opened the doors of college to all Americans with cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food, fewer toxic waste dumps, more land set aside in national trust than any administration except the two Roosevelts 5 million children with health insurance and a real ethic of national service among citizens out there, with things like AmeriCorps, which is now at 100,000 young people serving in communities across America, and 1,000 different colleges which have had their students working in our grade schools, teaching our kids to read. So this is a better country, stronger, more well prepared for the future. But I would say to you we still have a lot of huge, big institutional challenges. I believe that where we are now, compared to where we were 6 years ago, is that America is working again. And we should come to the point where we expect that not that there won't always be ups and downs in the economy, but we should expect ourselves to have a functioning society. And we should take this moment of prosperity and instead of doing what our friends in the Republican Party hope will happen which is that the status quo will prevail and they will hold on to power by doing the things they've done to kill campaign finance reform and to kill the tobacco reform legislation and so far to kill the Patients' Bill of Rights and a lot of other things that I think should be passed we ought to be saying, no, no, no, no. When things are changing and the challenges are big, we should use the prosperity and the confidence it gives us to ask ourselves, what are the big long term challenges this country faces, and how are we going to meet them? And that's what I want the Democrats to do. Because as long as our party is seen as the party of constructive change and inclusive change, where we're embracing new ideas but we're rooted in traditional values, we're going to do better and better and better, because we have broken out of the paralysis of the past. And I think it's obvious to anyone just following the news that the members of the other party can't really say that today. So let me just give you a few examples of what I think we ought to be doing. First of all, if we're looking to the future, we have to look at how we can build one America generationally, which means that we cannot permit the baby boom generation to retire with the present systems of Social Security and Medicare unaltered, because when you have two people working for every one person retired which is what's going to happen when all the baby boomers retire, at present rates of birth, retirement, and immigration the present systems, as they're constructed, are unsustainable. Now, Monday I'm going down to New Mexico to hold the second of our national forums on Social Security. But there's got to be Social Security has done a lot of good 48 percent of the seniors in this country who are above the poverty line would be below it if there were no Social Security. It's done a lot of good. But the people that I know in my generation are obsessed with the thought and I'm not just talking about well off people I mean the middle class working people I grew up with in Arkansas are obsessed with the thought that when we retire we will impose unfair burdens on our children and their ability to raise our grandchildren. We are determined not to see it happen. Therefore, our party, which created Social Security and created Medicare, has the responsibility to take the lead in a constructive reform of them if we want to honor the compact in America between the generations. That's a first big issue. I hope it will be done in early 1999. Second, we have an obligation to prove that we can grow the economy and finally make it reach people in places that it hasn't reached in inner city neighborhoods in rural areas you know, if you've been following the farm crisis, you know there's been a 90 percent drop in farm income in North Dakota in one year in Native American communities, where the ones that don't have casino gambling have hardly had any advance in their economic well being at all in the last 6 years. If we can't improve the economic circumstances, not by giving money but by creating enterprise, in these communities when we're doing well, we'll never be able to do it. The third thing we have to do and I cannot say how important I think is a lot of you were kind enough to mention the China trip. And let me just make a little timeout here. Jiang Zemin once asked me if I was trying to contain China, if I were scared of China and I thought America had to keep it in. And I said, "No, I'm not worried about that. Historically, your country has not been particularly aggressive towards its neighbors, and you suffered from more invasion than you've done invading." I said, "But you do present a threat to our security." And he looked at me and he said, "What is it?" I said, "I'm afraid you're going to insist on getting rich the same way we did." Laughter "And I want you to get rich, but if you get rich the same way we did, nobody on the planet will be able to breathe." And we have to prove that we do not have to maintain industrial age energy use patterns to have a successful, sustainable economy in which our children have unparalleled opportunities. And if you look at the technology now available, I predict to you that in the 21st century, energy will go the way of electronics in the last 50 years, you know, everything getting smaller and smaller and smaller. The only reason we got this year 2000 computer problem is that those of us like Americans who computerized early did it when the chips wouldn't hold much memory. And so all the dates were just put in with two numbers instead of four because memory was a precious commodity. That will never be a problem again because smaller chips hold unbelievable memory. The average home computer now has more power than the average supercomputer did when my daughter was born, for example. So we have to do this. This is a huge deal. Nine of the hottest years in history, since temperatures have been measured, have been in the last 11 years. Florida had the wettest winter, the driest spring in history, and June was the hottest month in the history of Florida, hotter than any July or August in Florida history. Ninety seven was the hottest year in the history of the world '98, every single month has set a new record. So unless something happens, in spite of the wonderful cool evening we're enjoying in Aspen, this will be the hottest year on record. Now, I am not advocating a policy of no growth or low growth. I am advocating a policy of putting our brains and our market enterprise to the task of growing the economy while reducing the per unit energy use required to do it and changing the nature of energy. The Sterns from Chicago are here their son, Todd, runs this program for me, my climate change program. And he's a brilliant young man, and he's doing a wonderful job. But we have got to somehow convince the American people and the Chinese people that we can grow the economy and improve the environment. And if we don't unfortunately, while I was joking with Jiang Zemin, I told him the truth. If you go to China today, what's the number one health problem they've got? Bronchial problems, breathing problems, children with asthma terrible problems. And we can do better. But it's our solemn obligation to do it. Let me just mention one or two other things. First of all, I want to talk about education just briefly. This is area where there's the biggest difference between the Republicans and the Democrats in Congress in this session. Everybody knows America has the best system of higher education in the world. That's why people from all over the world come here to go to college and to graduate school. And we welcome them. I love it. It's like our major exchange program. It saves the Government a lot of money that people want to come here anyway to go to college and graduate school. And it helps us to become even more tied into the rest of the world. No serious person who knows a lot about education believes that we have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world. And yet, in a world where the economy is based on ideas, where even those of you in agriculture who are here are benefiting from and have to embrace newer and newer technologies every year, we need more universal education than ever before. So I have put before the American people and before the Congress an agenda that would support higher standards and greater accountability and better teaching and smaller classes in the early grades and hooking all the classes up to the Internet and more choice within the public schools. And the main thing I want to say to you is that this is not a time for what I take to be the Republican response, which is, make possible for more people to go to private school and everything will be fine. When 90 percent of our kids are in public school, that's just not accurate. What we need is universal excellence of opportunity. And so that's something the Democrats have to be on the forefront of. The last thing I'd like to say is that we've got to be interested in creating one America in a time that's far more complicated than Harry Truman's time, and in having that America lead the world in a time when the issues are more complicated than they were in his time. The cold war may be over, but believe you me, in the lifetime of people in this room, we will be confronting serious challenges of terrorists, drug runners, organized criminals, having access to chemical and biological weapons, other hightech weapons I hope not but they would try to get small scale nuclear weapons. In the lifetime of the people in this room, in this modern age, the ancient racial and religious and ethnic hatreds, which have killed hundreds of thousands of people in Rwanda, bedeviled Northern Ireland, continue to paralyze the Middle East, caused the Bosnian war, now have all the problems in Kosovo the possibility that those things might be mixed with weapons of mass destruction is enormous. And all of you that are involved in finance know what this problem in Asia these Asian financial problems and the challenges of Russia have done to the international markets there and the prospect of supporting peace and prosperity and freedom in those countries in that region. Our own economy has slowed considerably because of the Asian financial crisis. So that the last thing I want to tell you. We have got to reaffirm we've got to tell people, who cares that the cold war is over? It's more important than ever before that America be in there leading the way to create an international economy that works, that works for people abroad, and works for the American people as well. Now, I think if the Democratic Party stands for that kind of constructive future for America and comes forward with those kinds of ideas and is uncompromising, and if we get enough help to get our message out and Steve Grossman didn't say this, but we picked up some seats in 1996. In the last 10 days, our candidates in the 20 closest House races were outspent 4 1 2 to one. We're not talking about peanuts here. We're talking about and the stakes could hardly be larger. Now, you pick up the paper every day you watch the news every day. Do you hear debates at the level that I've just been talking to you about on these issues? Is this what you think they're talking about in Washington? You put us in, and that's what we'll be talking about, and your children will enjoy the fruits of it. That's why you're here, and we're very grateful. Thank you, and God bless you. July 24, 1998 Thank you very much. Good morning, and thank you, "Sheriff" Riley, for that introduction and for your wonderful work for the education of our young people. I'd like to welcome your Boys Nation director, Ron Engel your legislative director, George Blume your director of activities, Jack Mercier, celebrating 35 years with Boys Nation he was here when I was here, back in the "dark ages" your national chairman for the American Legion, Joseph Caouette President Sladek Vice President Rogers. We've got a good representation for former Boys Nation people here. I know Fred DuVal, my Deputy Assistant, who was in Boys Nation class of 1972, has already spoken to you. I'd also like to recognize Sean Stephenson, class of 1996, now an intern in Cabinet Affairs thank you for what you're doing here. And I'd like to acknowledge someone who has worked with Boys Nation, year after year as long as I've been here, in facilitating this event, a long, longtime friend of mine, Dan Wexler, who is leaving the White House. This is his very last event. And thank you, Mr. Wexler, for a wonderful job for the United States. As some of you may know, a few days ago we had a reunion here at the White House for our 35th anniversary of our Boys Nation summer, and "Nightline" ran 2 nights on our reunion. I asked your president if he'd seen either one of them he said he saw the first one, the second one he was here on duty. But I had an opportunity to meet with about half the men who were with me 35 years ago, and we were reminiscing. It was exactly 35 years ago on this day, July 24, 1963, that President Kennedy spoke to us right here in the Rose Garden about our future. He made us believe that together we could change the world. I still believe that, and I think it is no less true for your generation. Indeed, I believe you will live in the time of greatest possibility in all human history. Today I want to talk with you a little bit about what we have to do as a country to make the most of those possibilities, specifically about what we have to do to strengthen our education system. When I was here, President Kennedy complimented us for supporting civil rights legislation which the Nation's Governors had declined to do. I was very proud of that because two delegates from Louisiana and I and one from Mississippi were four Southerners who broke from the pack and ensured that the legislation would pass. But I have to say that, looking back over the years, we knew then that our school systems were separate and unequal and that we never could make them what we ought to until we integrated our schools so that we could integrate our country. What we did not see then and what we know now is that equal access to public schools does not guarantee the educational excellence that should be the birthright of every American on the edge of the 21st century. Today we enjoy a remarkable amount of peace and prosperity and security. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, lowest percentage of our people on welfare in 29 years, lowest crime rate in 25 years. On October 1st we will realize the first balanced budget and surplus we have had in 29 years. We have the highest homeownership in history, and the Government has played an active role in this, but it is the smallest Government we have had in 35 years, since I was here where you are today. Still, the world is changing fast, and it is full of challenges that we have to meet. We must build an alliance of nations, committed to freedom and human rights and to fighting against terrorism and organized crime and drug trafficking, against weapons of mass destruction, and racial, ethnic, and religious violence that bedevils so much of the world. We must build a global alliance against the global environmental and health challenges we face, including the degradation of our oceans and especially the problem of climate change. Those of you who come from Texas and Arkansas and Oklahoma and the other places in the South that have been experiencing record heat know a little about this, but it's worth pointing out that the 9 hottest years on record have occurred in the last 11 years 1997 was the hottest year ever recorded each and every month of 1998 has broken a record. So unless something happens, notwithstanding this cool morning we're enjoying now, 1998 will be the hottest year on record. Unless we act now, by the time you're my age, you will have a much, much more severe problem to confront. We have a lot of challenges here at home. We have to save Social Security and Medicare for the 21st century in a way that protects the retirement age of the baby boomers without bankrupting our children and our grandchildren. Until your generation that is, you and all the people younger than you, starting the year before last entered school, my generation and I'm the oldest of the baby boomers were the largest group of Americans ever. When our fathers came home to meet our mothers after World War II, there was a sense of enthusiasm and exuberance which manifested itself in unusually large families. Laughter And we all enjoyed being part of the baby boom generation, at least I think most of us did. But all of us now, I think without regard to our station in life, are quite concerned about the potential burdens we might impose on our children. Not so long ago, I had to go home to Arkansas because we had some serious tornadoes. After I toured the damage sites, I had dinner at the airport in Little Rock with about 20 people I grew up with. And I try to stay in touch with them, and we just went around the table, and most of them are just middle class working people. Every one of them was absolutely determined that we had to make the changes now to prepare ourselves to retire in ways that didn't impose undue burdens on our children. Because when we begin to retire, when all the baby boomers get into their retirement age that is over 65 at present birth rates and immigration rates and retirement rates, there will only be about two people working for every person retired. Now, this is a significant challenge. But it can be met. It is, in this way, like the problem of climate change. If we act now and take modest but disciplined steps now, well ahead of the time when we have to face the crisis, then we won't have to take big, dramatic, and maybe draconian steps later. So, especially saving Social Security is important. And I'd like to say just a couple more words about it, because I want all of you to think about it it's important. The idea behind Social Security is, number one, even though your retirement may be a long way off, you can know that it's going to be there for you. Number two, even though most Americans have something other than Social Security to retire on and you should begin as soon as you get into the work force to save and plan for your own retirement, because if you save a little bit when you're young, you'll have a whole lot when you're older Social Security actually is responsible for keeping about half of our senior citizens out of poverty. And beginning about 10 or 15 years ago, we achieved a remarkable thing for a society. We had a poverty rate among seniors that was lower than the poverty rate for the society as a whole. We want to continue that, and we can. Thanks to our fiscal discipline, we're going to have the first budget surplus we've had, as I said, in 29 years. And this gives us some money to help to pay for the transition. I believe it is very important to set aside every penny of this surplus until we save Social Security. Now, that's a big challenge here in Washington, because after all, it's an election year, and it's more popular to give tax cuts or even to have big new spending programs than to say to people, "Okay, we've got this money, but we don't want to spend it right now. We may well be able to afford new spending programs we may well be able to afford a tax cut, but we need to know how much it's going to cost to fix Social Security and how we can make it as small a burden as possible today and tomorrow." That's why I have said save Social Security first. If it doesn't take all the money of the projected surplus, then we can figure out what else to do with it. I believe that is important. Some people here disagree with me some want a tax cut before we fix Social Security. I am determined not to let that happen, because I think we should invest in your future, not squander it. I do not believe that those of us who are adults should enjoy a limited small tax cut now and sacrifice your future tomorrow. And I'm going to do what I can to stop that. I think there is broad support for this position among both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, and I hope very much that, by the time you're out in the work force and having children of your own, that this will be yesterday's problem, and you will not have to confront it. And we're going to do our best to see that that happens. Let me talk a little about, very briefly, some other challenges we face. We have to provide access to affordable quality health care to all Americans. More and more Americans, probably a lot of you here, are in managed care plans. Managed care has done a lot of good. It's cut a lot of inflation out of health care costs. But health care decisions ought to be made by doctors and patients, not by accountants and insurance company executives who are determined to save money whether or not it's the right thing to do for the patients. That's the idea behind the Patients' Bill of Rights we're trying to pass up here in this session of Congress. I think it is very important that we recognize that, in spite of all this economic growth, there are still areas of our country which have not reaped the benefits of American enterprise. There are inner city neighborhoods, there are Native American communities, and as a lot of our farmers have been telling America lately, there are a lot of rural American communities that still have not felt the benefits of the economic recovery. If we can't find a way to expand opportunity to these areas now, when we're doing so well, we will not be able to do it the next time a recession comes along. So that, I think, is a very important challenge. I think it is very important that we build an America, as Secretary Riley says, that crosses the boundaries of race and religion and culture that respects, revels in our diversity that enjoys our heated arguments but that recognizes that underneath it all we are bound together by those things that the framers laid out so long ago. We all believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We all believe that we have constituted a free Government of willing citizens because there are things we have to do together that we can't do alone. We all believe that America will always be on a permanent mission to form a more perfect Union. So I say to all of you, even though I think it's a great thing to have vigorous debates I love them. I think it's a good thing that we have different opinions. I think it is a terrific thing that we have people in America who come from every other country on Earth. Just across the Potomac River here, in Fairfax County, there are students from 180 different national, racial, and ethnic groups in one school district, and they come from 100 different language groups. That is great for America in a global society. But we still have to find a way to be one America, to recognize that what we have in common as human beings, as children of God, is more important than what divides us. And finally let me say, we have to build a world class system of elementary and secondary education. You heard Secretary Riley say that we have done a lot of work to open the doors of college to everyone who is willing to work for it. And just about everyone in the world believes that America has the finest system of higher education in the world. Now we have the HOPE scholarship, a 1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college tax credits for the junior and senior year, for graduate school, for adults who have to go back for continuing education a direct student loan program that allows you to borrow money and then pay it back as a percentage of your income so you don't ever have to worry about borrowing money, making you go broke later, just to get an education more work study positions, more Pell grants. We have the AmeriCorps program for young people who want to do national service for a year or two and then earn credit for college. And this has been a very, very good thing. But almost no one believes that every American has access to world class elementary and secondary education. And if you think about all the other challenges I have mentioned, they all rely on a well educated, responsible citizenry. You have to be well educated, and you have to be a good citizen to say take the Social Security challenge "Don't give me a little bit of money now. Save me a huge headache later. Save my children save my grandchildren. I'll give it up right now so we can do something good for tomorrow." You have to be well educated to imagine what the world would be like if this climate change continues and the polar ice caps melt and the water levels rise and the Everglades are buried or the Louisiana sugar plantations are underwater or Pacific island nations are buried, to understand what it means when the climate changes and mosquitoes bearing malaria go to higher and higher climates and infect more and more people, and then they get on airplanes and meet you in the airport, and now people in Norway come home with airport malaria. It sounds funny, but it's happening. You have to have an education to understand these things. It helps to be well educated to understand the importance of diversity and respect for diversity and still what we have in common. So every other challenge we face requires us to meet the challenge of educating all our citizens. We've come a long way since 1963, when most of the schools in the South were segregated, and when I was here listen to this one quarter of our high school students dropped out of school before they graduated less than half went on to college. Today, almost 90 percent of high school students do graduate, and nearly 70 percent will get some further education. Many of you are here, as I was 35 years ago, in part because of a special teacher who's had a positive influence on your life. Our schools have always been the cornerstone of our democracy. At a time of increasing diversity through immigration, they are more important than ever. Ninety percent of our children are in our public schools, and in an age of information and ideas, a strong education system is now even more important to you than it was to me when I was your age. Now is the time to strengthen public education, not to drain precious resources from it. That is America's first priority, and it is our administration's first priority. If our schools are to succeed in the next century, however, it will require more than money. We have to raise standards for students and teachers. We have to heighten accountability. We should widen choices for parents and students. We have to expect more of everyone, of our students who must master the basics and more and behave responsibly of our teachers who must inspire students to learn and to be good citizens and of our schools which must be safe and state of the art. We've worked hard to strengthen our public schools, to promote higher standards and to measure student progress, to do what we can to improve teaching and to certify more master teachers throughout the country, to give schools the means to meet our national education goals and to help students not going to 4 year colleges make the transition from school to work, to get more aid to students in schools with special challenges and to hook all the classrooms and libraries in our country up to the Internet by the year 2000, and to have more public school choice. But we clearly have to do more. I have called for smaller classes in our early grades and 100,000 new teachers to fill them, teachers that pass rigorous competency tests before they set foot in the classroom. I've called for an end to social promotion so that no child is passed from grade to grade, year after year, without mastering the materials and for extra help for those who don't pass, like the summer school program in Chicago. Chicago now has mandatory mandatory summer school for children who don't make the social promotion hurdle. And the summer school there is now the sixth biggest school district in the entire United States of America. I don't think I have to tell you that more children are learning and the juvenile crime rate is way down. We need more of that in America. These are important investments. We have to also do more. We need to build more schools and modernize more schools. I was in Philadelphia the other day where the average school building is 65 years old. They are magnificent old buildings. They're very well built, but they need to be modernized. A child that goes to school every day in a school where a whole floor is closed off or the roof leaks or the rooms are dark or the windows are cracked gets a signal, a clear signal that he or she is not as important as we all say they are day in and day out. I have been to school districts in Florida where there were more than a dozen trailers outside the main school building because the schools are so overcrowded and the districts don't have the funds to keep building schools to deal with the new students. We have to do that. We have to finish our effort to connect all our classrooms to the Internet. We have got to, in other words, make these investments that will make our country strong. President Kennedy said our progress as a Nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. That is more true now than ever before, and I hope in the remaining few days of this congressional session, our Congress will put progress above partisanship, leave politics at the schoolhouse door, and make the education of our children America's top priority. We know our schools are strengthened also by innovation and competition brought about increasingly in our country by more choice in the public schools children attend. Public school choice gets parents and communities more involved in education, not just in helping with homework or attending parent teacher conferences but actually in shaping the schools. Some of you, having gone to public schools of choice, may know this from experience. David Haller, for example, from Arkansas, attends a school that's very close to my heart, in the town I grew up in, the Arkansas School of Math and Science in Hot Springs, which I help to found as Governor. Across our Nation, public school choice and, in particular, charter schools are renewing public education with new energy and new ideas. Charter schools are creative schools, innovative schools, public with open enrollment, strengthened by the commitment of parents and educators in the communities they serve. They can be models of accountability for all public schools, because they are chartered only when they meet rigorous standards of quality, and they should remain open only as long as they meet those standards. According to new data from Secretary Riley's Department of Education, parents are choosing charter schools more and more often because they're small, safe, supportive, and committed to academic excellence. We can do more of this. I am pleased to report some interesting progress. When I was elected President, campaigning on the idea that we should have more of these charter schools, there was only one such school in the country. It was in the State of Minnesota. I am pleased to tell you that this fall there will be 1,000 of them, serving more than 200,000 children. We're well on our way to meeting my goal of creating 3,000 such schools by the beginning of the next century, and again, I ask Congress to help us meet the goal and finish its work on the bipartisan charter school legislation that is now making its way through Congress. The Department of Education has released a guidebook to help communities learn from each other's successes. I commend it to you. Charter schools do very well in general, but they face a lot of challenges, including finding the funding to get started and keep going. Lack of access to startup funding, as the report I release today shows, is the biggest obstacle facing more rapid development of these schools. To make it easier for parents and educators to innovate, I have proposed to increase the 80 million for startup funds this year to 100 million next year. That's up from 6 million when we started in 1994. Now, let me just say one other thing. A lot of you are going back for your senior years. You'll be leaving your hometown school. Some of you will be going a long way away to college. I urge you to go wherever your dreams take you. But in the years to come, I hope you won't forget about your schools. I am very impressed by all the resolutions and the legislation that you have passed, and I have been given a review of it this morning before I came out here. But I'm also impressed by the commitment that so many of you have expressed to citizen service. I hope you will always take part of your time to be servants to young people who are younger than you are. Some of you may become teachers or professors, but most of you won't. Wherever your life's travels take you, every one of you can find some enduring connection to education. I hope some of you will consider, some time during your next few years, joining our national service program, AmeriCorps, and serving young people in your community and building up some more scholarship money. But whatever you do when you get out of school, I hope you will maintain a connection to young people and to their schools. You can volunteer your time, you can mentor someone who needs guidance. You can remember that only a very few young people ever have the experience you're having now, but hundreds and thousands more can hear about it from you and be inspired by it, to believe in our country and to believe in themselves and their capacity to learn and live out their dreams. As I get older and older, I think more and more, as is natural I suppose, about people who are coming along behind me. It's hard to get used to most of us will tell you that we consider anyone who is a year younger than we are to be young, however old we are. I never will forget, once I was talking to Senator Mike Mansfield, who was our Ambassador to Japan, and Senator Mansfield must be about 96 now. He still walks about 5 miles a day. And he was having lunch with another former Senator, J. William Fulbright who was a mentor of mine and for whom I worked when I was in college when Senator Mansfield was 91, and Senator Fulbright was 87. He looked at him, and he said, "Bill, how old are you now?" And he said, "I'm 87." And Mansfield said, "Oh, to be 87 again." Laughter So we all get our perspective from our own age. And for you, your future is all ahead of you. But just think about how many Americans there already are who are younger than you are, and think about how many there are who would never have a chance like the one you've had this past week. And just remember, never, never, never underestimate your ability to teach, to inspire, to guide, to help them to love this country the way you do, to embrace concepts of good citizenship the way you have, and frankly, to live a good, constructive, ambitious life the way you will. All of us all of us sometimes underestimate the enormous power that we have to influence other people one on one. Alexis de Tocqueville said a long time ago that America is great because America is good. America cannot be good except through her people. To say America is good is to say the American people are good. We have all these big challenges. I'm convinced we will meet them, as we have all our other challenges for over 200 years, because America is good. I ask your support in meeting those challenges, and I ask for your commitment never to forget all those young people who are coming along behind. Good luck, and God bless you. Thank you very much. July 23, 1998 The President. After the clicking stops, here's what I want to do. Laughter As you can all see, I'm here with Senator Daschle, Senator Harkin, Senator Conrad, Senator Dorgan, and Secretary Glickman, Deputy Secretary Rominger and these young people here are national officers of the FFA. In a few moments, I'm going to do a national radio press conference with agricultural reporters from agricultural radio networks around the country. I've got a brief statement here that I would like to read, and then I'd like to give the Senators a chance to make whatever comments they would like to make, and then I will do what I said I'd do in the pressroom a while ago I'll let you all ask some questions, if you have questions on other subjects, and then we'll go do the ag press conference. We're here because all of us are profoundly concerned about the communities that are suffering from both low prices and all kinds of natural disasters around the country. In Texas, about three quarters of the cotton crop has been lost. Senator Dorgan said the other day that North Dakota retired auctioneers are being pressed into duty to handle all the families that are being forced to sell their farms. For 5 1 2 years, we've worked hard to help America's farm families with disaster assistance to ranchers who've lost livestock, surplus commodity purchases for school lunches, diversifying the sources of enterprise and income in rural America. We've increased our use of export credits by a third in the last year alone. This year's farm crisis demands that we do more. On Saturday I directed Secretary Glickman to buy more than 80 million bushels of wheat to help lift prices for American farmers and ease hunger in the developing world. Today I'm announcing that we are providing disaster assistance for farmers in Texas the entire State has been declared a disaster area to help those whose crops and livestock have been ravaged by the drought. I believe today is the 18th day in a row that it's above 100 degrees in Dallas, Texas. Next week I will send Secretary Glickman to Texas and Oklahoma to assess what other help is needed. As we head into the conference, I ask all of you young people who are here to go back home and help us to do whatever we can to pass the 500 million in emergency farmer and rancher assistance contained in the amendment sponsored by Senators Conrad and Dorgan and strongly supported by our ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Harkin, and our leader, Senator Daschle. We also have to help to revive the rural economy with exports. We have to give the International Monetary Fund the resources it needs to strengthen the Asian economies. Let me tell you how big a deal this is. About 40 to 50 percent of all American grain production is exported 40 percent of all the exports go to Asia. We have a 30 percent decline in farm exports to Asian countries, excluding China and Japan they're down about 13 percent in Japan they're down about 6 percent in China 30 percent in the other countries this year because of the Asian financial crisis. The International Monetary Fund is designed to reform those economies and boost them. They need money in order to buy our food. It is not a very complicated thing. But I have asked for this since January now. I was very disturbed to see in the morning press there's been another decision to delay a vote on this in the House of Representatives. I think it is a big mistake. I am doing what I can to continue to boost food exports. I don't believe that they should be subject to sanctions and our policies except under the most extreme circumstances. And I believe we have to do more. Finally, I want to do whatever I can to strengthen the farm safety net. We should expand eligibility for direct and guaranteed loans improve the crop insurance program, which simply is not working for too many farmers and extend marketing loans when the prices are low. We have to give farmers more flexibility in planning when to receive Federal income support. They ought to be able to get these payments early. I proposed that last spring. I saw that there was some support for that in the House leadership last week, and I'm grateful for that, but I'd like to pass that and get it out and do it soon. All these things I think will help. But we have to understand we've got a price crisis in America today because of high worldwide crop production, the decline of the Asian economies, and the decline in the currencies of so many countries relative to the dollar, which means they can't buy as much food. That's why the IMF is important. We also have a disaster problem because of the drought and other significant natural problems. And no farmer should go broke because of an act of God. So that's our policy, and we're going to try to implement it. And I'd like to give the Senators a chance to make a few remarks, and then I'll answer your other questions. Senator Daschle. Senator Thomas A. Daschle made brief remarks. The President. Senator Harkin. Senator Tom Harkin made brief remarks. The President. The North Dakota Senators I think North Dakota, I should say for the benefit of the national press, I believe has had the largest drop in farm income in any State of the country by a good stretch. Senators Kent Conrad and Byron L. Dorgan made brief remarks. The President. Well, let me just make one more comment about this, and then I'll answer your questions. When the freedom to farm bill was passed, those of us who came from farming areas knew that it had a lot of very good provisions. It got the Government out of micromanaging farming it gave farmers more freedom to make their own planting decision it had terrific conservation provisions it had good rural development provisions. But it did not have an adequate safety net. We all knew it at the time, and there were those, and there still are some, who believe that we really don't need one. But I just think that's wrong. To go back to what Senator Harkin said, I believe if you look at the trends in world population growth and agricultural production elsewhere, in most normal years, for the next 30 years, American farmers should do better and better and better. This would be a very good time for a whole generation of our farmers. But the average farmer is about 59 years old in America today. So what I'm worried about is that, you know, you get a bad year or two like this coming along without an adequate safety net in this bill, then you wind up changing the whole structure of agriculture in ways that I don't think are good for America. So we're going to work on this. We're going to try to get it done. But I do say to the young people here, I agree with Senator Harkin. I think the future trends around the world look quite good for America's farmers if we can get through this rough spot. Thank you. Q. Why can't you lawmakers convince your fellows on the Hill? I mean, what is the holdup? The President. Well, don't you think your bill will pass? I think it'll pass. Senator Dorgan. It passed the Senate. We've got to get it through conference, and I think we'll get it The President. And the Senate passed the International Monetary Fund. Senator Harkin. Yes. And we've got the indemnity fund in there. Senator Conrad. We're about to The President. You're about to but you're going to pass it. Q. What's the problem? The President. The problem is in the House, and we just have to hope that they will follow the lead of the Senate here. Iran U.S. Relations Q. Mr. President, what impact do you see the missile test having on your efforts to try and warm relations with Iran? The President. Well, we've been following this for some time. And we knew that Iran was attempting to develop this capability. It's just a test. But if they obviously, if they were to develop an intermediate range missile, it could change the regional stability dynamics in the Middle East. And that's why we've worked so hard with North Korea and with others to try to get them not to transfer missiles and missile technology to Iran. If we do continue to have an opening of relations, because the new President seems more open to it, obviously this is one of the things I would raise with him. We've been very concerned about this. And we believe that the future of the Middle East would be better if they'd invest more money, all those countries, in something other than military technology. So we're very, very concerned about it, but not surprised by it. Q. Inaudible The President. One at a time. Obviously, it is an obstacle. But I don't think it's an argument for closing off all avenues of opportunity. The country is in a dynamic state now. There's some dynamism there, and there's some reason to believe that, it seems to me, that at least making it clear what our position is on that on the Middle East peace process, on terrorism, support of terrorism, on all these issues with which we've had problems with Iran in the past and still being glad that there's some movement toward greater popular government, more openness in the country argues for what we're doing a cautious, deliberate approach. Fast Track Trade Legislation Q. Mr. President, besides the IMF bill, high on the farm agenda is fast track legislation. Why not go along with Speaker Gingrich and schedule a vote a September vote on this? The President. First of all, I strongly support fast track, as you know. I was bitterly disappointed that we couldn't pass it earlier, and he and I both worked very hard to pass it. There is no evidence that one single vote has changed. If anything, there's some evidence that we'd have more trouble passing it. So if we bring it up in a bill that also has the International Monetary Fund or the Africa trade bill or the Caribbean Basin initiative all of which I think are good for America the impact would be, in all probability, to kill them all and to make it even harder to pass fast track early next year. I still believe we'll pass fast track next year when we get beyond this election year. I think it is so evidently in the best interest of the country. That's the first answer. The second point is, the International Monetary Fund funding will do much more good in the short run because it puts money into the countries that want to buy our food today. Fast track gives the United States the power to open new markets in the future, to enter negotiations to open new markets in the future. So it's not terribly significant whether we get the fast track legislation in August, let's say, or September or January or February next year or March, because we still have to start the negotiations and open new markets. We're already going to negotiate in opening agricultural markets, for example within the World Trade Organization to try to deal with the European subsidy issue that was mentioned earlier. So I'm strongly for fast track. I think we will pass it next year. I have no evidence that a single vote has changed since it was not passed earlier, and I don't want to kill all the rest of that. We ought to pass the Africa trade bill now, the modified Caribbean Basin bill now. But most important of all, dwarfing everything else, in the near term, for these farmers with their prices low, is the International Monetary Fund funding, because that will float cash into these countries as a condition for reform, and it will give the money to buy our food. That's more important. Middle East Peace Process Q. Why have you thrown in the towel on the Middle East? The President. Well, we haven't. I saw that story. That's just not so. Let me say first of all, if I thought the process were over, I would say it was over. We have continued intense negotiations to this day with both sides, based on the ideas we advanced earlier, which, as you know, were accepted in principle by Mr. Arafat and not by Mr. Netanyahu, but a negotiation ensued. Secretary Albright has worked very, very hard on this. We have made a not inconsiderable amount of progress, but differences remain. We haven't thrown in the towel because I think it's a lot better to get an agreement, to get them into final status talks than it is to give up and let this thing drift dangerously toward conflict and dissolution. So if we come to a time when I think it's hopeless, I'll say it's hopeless and that ideas weren't accepted. But right now, I'm not prepared to say that. I think there's still a chance we can get an agreement, and we're going to keep working for it. July 13, 1998 Thank you very much. Well, Joe, I agree with Hadassah this is pretty impressive. I would like to thank all the members who are here, all the candidates who are here, the sponsors of this event, and those of you who have contributed, because this group is going to give the American people a chance to finally and fully ratify the ideas that we have been pursuing the last 6 years. I want to thank Simon. I did tell Senator Lieberman I thought Simon had given a good talk. One of the things that I always think that all of us should be doing is trying to recruit good young people and lift them up. Simon self selected we didn't have to recruit him at all. Laughter After surviving the War Room in '92, he understands that all you have to do is just sort of stand there and keep going, and it will be all right. I'm delighted to see so many of you here, so many old friends and some people who are getting involved in this. And I will be a little brief tonight. I rewrote my talk here it is. Even I can't read it, so it will be less. Well, I'd like to just kind of recap how this all began. I'll never forget the first time or two I talked to Al From and the first encounter I had with many of you through the DLC, and how strongly we felt that our party, which we had no intention of leaving, was being rendered irrelevant in national elections, partly by being caricatured successfully by the very adroit tactics of our friends in the Republican Party and partly because we seemed unable to break out of the conventional wisdom which had worked for us in the past but which seemed inadequate to the dynamic present. And that had been the case for some years. If you look around the world today and I don't want to make any untoward foreign policy comments but if you look around the world today, you see that there is always quite a high price to pay if you stay with a strategy that once worked for you, or with ideas and policies that once worked for you, when circumstances change and they no longer fit. We find that in business we find that in our personal lives, in virtually every form of human endeavor. And so more than a decade ago, those of us that loved and believed in the Democratic Party as the instrument of progressive government, lifting people up, giving them a chance, building the American community, and expecting responsibility from every citizen, started, through the Democratic Leadership Council, to try to come up with the ideas that would carry America forward. It is true that we built it on the old bedrock values of our party and, I think, of our country of opportunity, responsibility, and community. It's also true that we said some things which made everybody angry and often confused our friends in the press. And they sometimes said, "Well, if you don't fit into these old categories, you must not have any principles." I mean, whoever it's obviously stupid to believe you could reduce the deficit and balance the budget and still keep investing more in education and science and technology, for example hard to believe that, on crime, the only thing that would ever work would be to be tough on people who should be properly punished, but to do smart things to prevent crime in the first place on welfare, to say that if you're ablebodied you ought to go to work, but we don't expect you to give up your most important job, which is raising your child or on the environment, to say that it's crazy to believe that we can ever have long term economic growth without preserving the environment, but we think we can do it and still grow the economy. And when we said these things, for years people said, "Well, those people, they don't have any principles, because, after all, we know what a principle is a principle is an old liberal idea or a new conservative idea. That's what a principle is. And that way we don't have to think anymore. We were relieved of all the burden of thinking about the complexities of the modern world if we just put you in some box. And if you guys don't fit, it must mean that there is no core there." But we sort of pressed ahead. And when I started running in '92, a lot of you helped me, even though you honestly didn't believe I had a chance to win. Laughter Only my mother thought I could win. That's not true Hillary did. And the American people gave us a chance. And we set about the business of doing this. And along the way, we found that, as all people do, it wasn't always easy to take your general principles and turn them into specific bills and specific policies. From time to time, we had disagreements, but it's clear the path we have followed. And it was clear to us very often even when it wasn't clear to people who were commenting on it. I remember when we had the debate on welfare reform, for example, and I vetoed the first two bills and I signed the third one, so people said, "Well, obviously, the President just didn't want the Democrats to be exposed to another veto in an election year." I never read a single article which analyzed the difference in the bill I signed and the two I vetoed. The two I vetoed said, "We're going to make you go to work if you're able bodied, and if you have to give up being a good parent, that's fine with us. We're not going to give your kids Medicaid. We're not going to give your kids food stamps. We're not going to provide adequate child care for you. The most important thing is work, and if you can't be a good parent, that's tough." I still believe that's the most important job in America. So when they fixed the bill, I signed it. So fast forward to the present. If you look back on the last 6 years, if somebody told you on the day of Inauguration in 1993 that after 6 years we'd have the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years and 16 million new jobs, the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years, the first balanced budget in 29 years, the lowest inflation in 32 years, the smallest Federal Government in 35 years, the highest rate of homeownership in history, a quarter of a million people who couldn't buy guns because they had mental health histories or criminal records, cleaner air, cleaner water, safer food, fewer toxic waste dumps, 90 percent of our kids immunized, and a foreign policy that's helped to advance the cause of freedom from Bosnia to the Middle East to Northern Ireland to Haiti, that's expanded trade and stood up for human rights in places like China and other places around the world you would have said, "Never happen in 5 1 2 years." The American people did it. We had something to do with it because we gave them the ability to do it, because we said the role of Government should be to give people the power, the tools to make the most of their own lives and then to provide the conditions within which they can accomplish that, but always to remind people that one of the big differences between ourselves and the other party historically, and still, is that we believe that we are fundamentally interdependent and that our personal independence can only really be manifested when we're working together for the greater good. And those who say that's a flaky idea and inappropriate to the moment need only go back and read our founding documents. Our Founders pledged their lives and fortunes and sacred honor to the proposition that we should all be able to pursue life, liberty, and happiness within the context of a free government of limited power but unlimited potential and that our eternal mission as a country was to form a more perfect Union, not to form a more perfect collection of swarming individuals but to form a more perfect Union. And I'm very grateful that I was given the chance to serve. And it's a good thing we got that constitutional amendment, or I'd try to get another chance. Laughter But I want to tell you, I am absolutely convinced that we have not finished the job of convincing the American people that the prospects for the future depend upon the continued embrace and development of the ideas which have produced the results of the last 6 years. That's what this election is all about. They say, "Oh well, you know," I hear a lot of my Republican friends say, "Well, you know, you go all the way back to the Civil War, and the party of the President always loses seats in the midterm election, especially in the second term of the President." And I said, "Well, that's because they think they're sort of retiring." I'm not sitting in the sun here we've got an agenda. We don't believe America should be sitting on its laurels. We believe, first of all, that we hadn't had a balanced budget and a surplus for 29 years, and we don't want the majority in Congress to spend it before we save Social Security. We want to reform Medicare in a way that is relevant to the 21st century, that protects the health care of seniors. And we don't want Social Security and Medicare to bankrupt the children and grandchildren of the baby boomers. And we believe we can do both things. And we think, as Democrats, we're better suited to that path. We want to continue to reform education, even as they try to eviscerate our agenda, as I speak, in the House of Representatives. We want to continue to advance the environmental agenda with market technology and research to prove that we can improve the environment while we grow the economy. We want to continue to prove that we can be one America, across all the lines that divide us, because what we have in common is more important. We have a lot of big things to do. We want to prove that we can go into inner city neighborhoods and isolated rural areas and Native American reservations and bring the principles of market economy and the right kind of support and prove that even in the poorest parts of America we can create a system of opportunity that will work for people and that they ought to have a chance to be a part of. We have a lot to do. This country still has responsibilities in the world that we are not fully meeting. If we're going to create the kind of world trading system we want, if we're going to continue to be a force for human rights and democracy, if we're going to organize ourselves against the security threats of the 21st century including biological and chemical warfare, smallscale nuclear warfare, terrorism, narcotrafficking we have other things to do. And if we keep these ideas up front, I think that the people we have seen here tonight, the Members of Congress and the candidates, have an excellent chance of winning. And I think we have an excellent chance to genuinely build a majority party not based on the success of one person from, as one of my adversaries once said, a small Southern State. I am very grateful for the chance I had to serve and run. I'm grateful for the chance that I've had to win elections. I've loved every day, every month, every year of my life in politics. But the success America enjoys today is fundamentally due, first, to the character and effort and ingenuity of the American people and, secondly, to the fact that we have done the right thing. Ideas matter there are consequences that flow from actions taken or forgone. And you know and I know and I can tell you agree with me because you're quiet and you're listening that two Presidential elections in good times the second one in good times do not necessarily ratify what we're doing. We have worked like crazy to hammer these ideas into policies. And we've had honest debates and arguments, and sometimes we still disagree, but we know we're moving the country in a certain direction and we know it works. And we've got to go out there in this election season and tell the American people that, "Hey, you know, I like the President, too, but this is not a personality contest this is the struggle for the ideas that should properly dominate the public policy of this country, that should guide this country where we're going, and should lift us up and give us a chance to do even better in the 21st century." What you're doing is very, very important. And if you're undertaking one of these congressional races out there in an open seat maybe it's held by a Republican maybe it was held by a Republican and it gets tough and you get discouraged, just remember, you know in the very marrow of your being that two thirds of the American people, if they could get rid of all the cardboard, cut out, superficial, negative images that our friends in the Republican Party have laid on us for 20 years relentlessly, cleverly, and often effectively, and strip all that away and just look at what they stand for and what we stand for, and have an honest choice of the ideas before them, they would say, "I think I like that New Democrat way I think that's right." So don't get discouraged when you're still shedding the shackles of history. Don't get discouraged when you're still scrubbing the barnacles off the tarnished image that we had for too long. Don't get discouraged when you're still moving against the preconceptions that people have embedded over 20 years. The hardest thing in the world to change is a mind. But ideas move people they drive countries they change destinies in people's individual lives and family lives and work lives and in the course of a country's life. And this country has had a good 6 years because of the ideas that all of you worked hard on for years and years and years, before I had the extreme good fortune to serve as President in 1993. So don't give up on that, and don't get discouraged. And don't think that just because every election since the Civil War in an off year has turned out a certain way, that this one will, because there's something different about now. The country is doing well. We've got the ideas, and we've got youth. And if you keep your spirits up and you understand the historic mission you're on and you think about what your country ought to look like when your children are your age, I think you'll be very pleased by how it turns out. Thank you very much, and God bless you. July 03, 1998 Thank you very much. To Jeff Muir and Victor Fong, thank you both for your fine remarks and for hosting me. I thank all the members of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council and the American Chamber of Commerce for making this forum available, and so many of you for coming out on this morning for what will be my last public speech, except for my press conference, which the members of the press won't permit to become a speech, before I go home. It has been a remarkable trip for my wife and family and for the Senate delegation and members of our Cabinet and White House. And we are pleased to be ending it here. I want to say a special word of appreciation to Secretary Albright and Secretary Daley, to Senator Rockefeller, Senator Baucus, Senator Akaka, Congressman Dingell, Congressman Hamilton, Congressman Markey, and the other members of the administration and citizens who have accompanied me on this very long and sometimes exhausting but ultimately, I believe, very productive trip for the people of the United States and the people of China. I'm glad to be back in Hong Kong. As I told Chief Executive Tung and the members of the dinner party last night, I actually I may be the first sitting President to come to Hong Kong, but this is my fourth trip here. I was able to come three times before, once with Hillary, in the period which we now refer to as back when we had a life laughter before I became President. And I look forward to coming again in the future. I think it's quite appropriate for our trip to end in Hong Kong, because, for us Americans, Hong Kong is China's window on the world. I have seen remarkable changes taking place in China and sense the possibilities of its future, much of which clearly is and for some time has been visible here in Hong Kong, with its free and open markets and its vibrant entrepreneurial atmosphere. Devoid of natural resources, Hong Kong always has had to fall back on the most important resource of all, its people. The entrepreneurs, the artists, the visionaries, the hardworking everyday people have accomplished things that have made the whole world marvel. Hong Kong people have dreamed, designed, and built some of the world's tallest buildings and longest bridges. When Hong Kong ran out of land, the people simply went to the sea and got more. To the average person from a landlocked place, that seems quite stunning. I thank you for giving me a chance to come here today to talk about the relationship between the United States and all of Asia. I have had a great deal of time to emphasize the importance of our future ties with China, and I would like to reiterate them today and mention some of the points that the two previous speakers made. But I would like to put it in the context of the entire region. And after all, it is the entire region that has been critical to the success of Hong Kong. We have a fundamental interest in promoting stability and prosperity in Asia. Our future is tied to Asia's. A large and growing percentage of our exports, our imports, and our investments involve Asian nations. As President, besides this trip to China, I have been to Japan, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, and Thailand, with more to come. I have worked with the region's leaders on economic, political, and security issues. The recent events in South Asia, in Indonesia, in financial markets all across the region remind the American people just how very closely our future is tied to Asia's. Over the course of two centuries, the United States and Asian nations have built a vast, rich, complex, dynamic relationship, forged in the beginning by trade, strained on occasion by misunderstanding, tempered by three wars in living memory, enriched by the free flow of ideas, ideals, and culture. Now, clearly, at the dawn of the 21st century, our futures are inextricably bound together, bound by a mutual interest in seeking to free future generations from the specter of war. As I said, Americans can remember three wars we have fought in Asia. We must make it our mission to avoid another. The cornerstone of our security in Asia remains our relationship of longstanding with five key democratic allies Japan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines. Our military presence in Asia is essential to that stability, in no small measure because everyone knows we have no territorial ambitions of any kind. Nowhere is this more evident than on the Korean Peninsula, where still every day, after 40 years, 40,000 American troops patrol a border that has known war and could know war again. We clearly have an interest in trying to get a peace on the Korean Peninsula. We will continue to work with China to advance our efforts in the four party talks, to encourage direct and open dialog between North and South Korea, to faithfully implement the agreement with North Korea to end their nuclear weapons program, and to insist that North Korea do the same. I am encouraged by the openness and the energy of South Korea's new leader, Kim Daejung. Last month, in an address to our Congress, he said, "It is easier to get a passerby to take off his coat with sunshine than with a strong wind." Of course, our security is also enormously enhanced by a positive partnership with a prosperous, stable, increasingly open China, working with us, as we are, on the challenges of South Asian nuclear issues, the financial crisis in the region, the Korean peace effort, and others. Our oldest ties to Asia are those of trade and commerce, and now they've evolved into some of our strongest. The fur pelts and cottons our first traders bought here more than 200 years ago have given way to software and medical instruments. Hong Kong is now America's top consumer for cell phones. Today, roughly a third of our exports and 4 million jobs depend on our trade to Asia. As was earlier said, over 1,000 American companies have operations in Hong Kong alone. And as we've seen in recent months, when markets tremble in Tokyo or Hong Kong, they cause tremors around the world. That is why I have not only sought to ease the Asian economic difficulties but to institutionalize a regional economic partnership through the Asian Pacific Economic Council leaders meetings that we started in Seattle, Washington, in 1993, and which, in every year since, has advanced the cause of economic integration and growth in the region. That is why I'm also working to broaden and deepen our economic partnership with China and China's integration into the world economic framework. It clearly is evident to anyone who knows about our relationship that the United States supports China's economic growth through trade. We, after all, purchase 30 percent of the exports of China, far more than any other country in the world, far more than our percentage of the world's GDP. We very much want China to be a member of the World Trade Organization. We understand the enormous challenges that the Chinese Government faces in privatizing the state industries and doing so at a rate and in a way which will permit people who lose their jobs in the state industries to be reintegrated into a changing economy and have jobs and be able to educate their children, find a place to live, and succeed in a stable society. So the real question with this WTO accession is not whether the United States wants China in the WTO. Of course, we do. And the real question, in fairness to China, is not whether China is willing to be a responsible international partner in the international financial system. I believe they are. The question is, how do you resolve the tension between the openness requirements for investment and for trade through market access of the WTO with the strains that are going to be imposed on China anyway as it undertakes to speed up the economic transition and the change of employment base within its own country? We are trying to work these things out. We believe that there must be an end agreement that contains strong terms that are commercially reasonable. We understand that China has to have some transitional consideration because of the challenges at home. I think we'll work this out. But I want you to understand that we in the United States very much want China to be a member of the WTO. We would like it to happen sooner, rather than later, but we understand that we have not only American but global interests to consider in making sure that when the whole process is over that the terms are fair and open and further the objectives of more open trade and investment across the world. I also would say in that connection, I am strongly supporting the extension of normal trading status, or MFN, to China. I was encouraged by the vote in the House Ways and Means Committee shortly before we left. I hope we will be successful there. I think anything any of you can do to support the integrity of the existing obligations that all of us have, including and especially in the area of intellectual property, will be very helpful in that regard in helping us to move forward. In addition to trade and security ties, the United States and Asia are bound by family ties, perhaps our most vital ones. Seven million Americans today trace their roots to Asia, and the percentage of our citizens who are Asian Americans is growing quite rapidly. These roots are roots they are eager to renew or rebuild or to keep. Just last year 3.4 million Americans traveled to Asia 7.8 million Asians traveled to the United States. Thousands of young people are crossing the Pacific to study, and in so doing, building friendships that will form the foundations of cooperation and peace for the 21st century. All across the region, we see evidence that the values of freedom and democracy are also burning in the hearts of the people in the East as well as the West. From Japan to the Philippines, South Korea to Mongolia, democracy has found a permanent home in Asia. As the world becomes smaller, the ties between Asia and the United States the political ties, the family ties, the trade ties, the security ties they will only become stronger. Consider this one little statistic In 1975 there were 33 million minutes of telephone traffic between the U.S. and Asia in 1996 there were 4.2 billion minutes of such traffic, a 127 fold increase. That doesn't count the Internet growth that is about to occur that will be truly staggering. Now, the result of all this is that you and I in our time have been given a remarkable opportunity to expand and share the storehouse of human knowledge, to share the building of wealth, to share the fights against disease and poverty, to share efforts to protect the environment and bridge age old gaps of history and culture that have caused too much friction and misunderstanding. This may be the greatest moment of actual possibility in human history. At the same time, the greater openness, the pace of change, the nature of the global economy, all these things have brought with them disruption. They create the risk of greater gaps between rich and poor, between those equipped for the information age and those who aren't. It means that problems, whether they are economic problems or environmental problems, that begin in one country can quickly spread beyond that country's borders. It means that we're all more vulnerable, in a more open atmosphere, to security threats that cross national borders, to terrorism, to drug smuggling, to organized crime, to people who would use weapons of mass destruction. Now, how are we going to deepen this relationship between the U.S. and Asia, since all of us recognize that it is in our interest and it will further our values? I believe there are three basic lessons that we can learn from the immediate past that should guide our path to the future. First, building economies and people, not weapons of mass destruction, is every nation's best path to greatness. The vast majority of nations are moving away from not toward nuclear weapons, and away from the notion that their influence in the future will be defined by the size of their military rather than the size of their GDP and the percentage of their citizens who know a great deal about the world. India and Pakistan's recent nuclear test, therefore, buck the tide of history. This is all the more regrettable because of the enormous potential of both countries. The United States has been deeply enriched by citizens from both India and Pakistan who have done so very well in America. They and their relatives could be doing very well at home, and therefore, could be advancing their nations' cause around the world. Both these countries could achieve real, different, fundamental greatness in the 21st century, but it will never happen if they divert precious resources from their people to develop nuclear and huge military arsenals. We have worked hard with China and other leading nations to forge an international consensus to prevent an intensifying arms race on the Indian subcontinent. We don't seek to isolate India and Pakistan, but we do seek to divert them from a self defeating, dangerous, and costly course. We encourage both nations to stop testing, to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to settle their differences through peaceful dialog. The second lesson that we should take into the future is that nations will only enjoy true and lasting prosperity when governments are open, honest, and fair in their practices, and when they regulate and supervise financial markets rather than direct them. Too many booming economies, too many new skyscrapers now vacant and in default were built on shaky foundations of cronyism, corruption, and overextended credit, undermining the confidence of investors with sudden, swift, and severe consequences. The financial crisis, as all of you know far better than I, has touched nearly all the nations and households of Asia. Restoring economic stability and growth will not be easy. The steps required will be politically unpopular and will take courage. But the United States will do all we can to help any Asian government willing to work itself back to financial health. We have a big interest in the restoration of growth, starting the flows of investment back into Asia. There is a very limited time period in which we can absorb all the exports to try to do our part to keep the Asian economy going. And while we may enjoy a brief period of surging extra investment, over the long run, stable growth everywhere in the world is the best prescription for stable growth in America. We are seeing some positive steps. Yesterday Japan announced the details of its new and potentially quite significant banking reform proposals. We welcome them. Thailand and Korea are taking decisive action to implement the IMF supported economic reform programs of their countries. Indonesia has a fresh opportunity to deepen democratic roots and to address the economic challenges before it. Thanks to the leadership of President Jiang and Premier Zhu, China has followed a disciplined, wise policy of resisting competitive devaluations that could threaten the Chinese economy, the region's, and the world's. Even as your own economy, so closely tied to those of Asia, inevitably feels the impact of these times, Hong Kong continues to serve as a force for stability. With strong policies to address the crisis, a healthy respect for the rule of law, a strong system of financial regulation and supervision, a commitment to working with all nations, Hong Kong can help to lead Asia out of turbulent times as it contributes to China's astonishing transformation by providing investment capital and expertise in privatizing state enterprises and sharing legal and regulatory experience. The final lesson I believe is this Political freedom, respect for human rights, and support for representative governments are both morally right and ultimately the best guarantors of stability in the world of the 21st century. This spring the whole world looked on with deep interest as courageous citizens in Indonesia raised their voices in protest against corruption and government practices that have brought their nation's economy to its knees. They demonstrated for change, for the right to elect leaders fully accountable to them. And in just 2 weeks the universal longing for democratic, responsive, accountable government succeeded in altering their political future. America will stand by the people of Indonesia and others as they strive to become part of the rising tide of freedom around the world. Some worry that widespread political participation and loud voices of dissent can pull a nation apart. Some nations have a right to worry about instability because of the pain of their own past. But nonetheless, I fundamentally disagree, especially given the dynamics of the 21st century global society. Why? Democracy is rooted in the propositions that all people are entitled to equal treatment and an equal voice in choosing their leaders and that no individual or group is so wise or so all knowing to make all the decisions that involve unfettered power over other people. The information age has brought us yet another argument for democracy. It has given us a global economy that is based on, more than anything else, ideas. A torrent of new ideas are generating untold growth and opportunity, not only for individuals and firms, but for nations. As I saw again in Shanghai when I met with a dozen incredibly impressive Chinese entrepreneurs, ideas are creating wealth in this economy. Now, it seems to me, therefore, inevitable that societies with the freest flow of ideas are most likely to be both successful and stable in the new century. When difficulties come, as they do to every country and in all ages there is never a time that is free of difficulties it seems to me that open debate and unconventional views are most likely to help countries most quickly overcome the difficulties of unforeseen developments. Let me ask you this A year ago, when you celebrated the turnover from Great Britain to China of Hong Kong, what was everybody buzzing about after the speeches were over? "Will this really work? Will this two system thing work? Will we be able to keep elections? Will this work?" How many people were off in a corner saying, "You know, this is a pretty tough time to be doing this, because a year from now the whole Asian economy is going to be in collapse, and how in the world will we deal with this?" When you cannot foresee the future and when problems coming on you have to bring forth totally new thinking, the more open the environment, the quicker countries will respond. I believe this is profoundly important. I also believe that, by providing a constructive outlet for the discontent that will always exist in every society because there is no perfect place, and because people have different views and experience reality differently and by finding a way to give everybody some sense of empowerment and role in a society, that freedom breeds the responsibility without which the open, highly changing societies of the 21st century simply cannot succeed. For all these reasons, I think the forces of history will move all visionary people, including Asians, with their legendary assets of hard work, intelligence, and education, toward freer, more democratic societies and ways of ordering their affairs. For me, these lessons we must carry forward into the new century. And in this time of transition and change, as we deepen America's partnership with Asia, success will come to those who invest in the positive potential of their people, not weapons to destroy others. Open governments and the rule of law are essential to lasting prosperity. Freedom and democracy are the birthrights of all people and the best guarantors of national stability and progress. Now, as I said, a little over a year ago, no one could have predicted what you would have to endure today in the form of this crisis. But I am confident Hong Kong will get through this and will help to lead the region out of it, because of the lessons that I have just mentioned, and because they have been a part of the fabric of your life here for a very long time. For years, Hong Kong people have enjoyed the right to organize public demonstrations, due process under law, 43 newspapers and 700 periodicals, giving life to the principle of government accountability, debate, free and open. All this must continue. The world was impressed by the record turnout for your May elections. The results were a mandate for more democracy, not less, and faster, not slower strides toward political freedom. I look forward to the day when all of the people of Hong Kong realize the rights and responsibilities of full democracy. I think we should all pledge, each in our own way, to build that kind of future, a future where we build people up, not tear our neighbors down a future where we order our affairs in a legal, predictable, open way a future where we try to tap the potential and recognize the authority of each individual. I'm told that this magnificent convention center was built in the shape of a soaring bird on a patch of land reclaimed from the sea. It's an inspiring symbol of the possibilities of Hong Kong, of all of Asia, and of our relationship with Asia. Just a couple of days ago, Hong Kong celebrated its first anniversary of reversion to China. I am going home for America's 222d anniversary tomorrow. May the future of this special place, of China, of the relationship between the United States and China and Asia, soar like the bird that gave life to this building. Thank you very much. June 27, 1998 President Jiang. Ladies and gentlemen, just now I've held official talks with President Clinton. The two sides have held an extensive and indepth exchange of views on China U.S. relations and the major international and regional issues. The talks were positive, constructive, and productive. The successful exchange of visits between the two heads of state of China and the United States marks a new stage of growth for China U.S. relations. This not only serves the common interests of China and the United States, but also will be of important significance to promoting peace, stability, and the prosperity in Asia Pacific and the world at large. Peace and the development are the main themes of contemporary times. In the new historical conditions, the common interests between China and the United States are increasing, not decreasing. The foundation for cooperation between the two countries is reinforcing, not weakening. Both sides believe that China and the United States, as the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, should continue to work together to promote peace and security in the world and Asia Pacific in particular, to ease and eliminate all kinds of tensions and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to strengthen the efforts in protecting environment, combating international crime, drug trafficking, and international terrorism. Our two sides have agreed to further step up cooperation and the dialog between the two countries on major international issues. China U.S. relations are improving and growing. The cooperation between the two sides in many areas has made important progress. President Clinton and I have decided that China and the United States will not target the strategic nuclear weapons under their respective control at each other. This demonstrates to the entire world that China and the United States are partners, not adversaries. I hereby wish to reiterate that since the very first day when China came into possession of nuclear weapons, China has undertaken not to be the first to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances. President Clinton and I have reached a broad range of agreements and consensus on further increasing exchanges in cooperation between China and the United States in all areas in our bilateral relations. We have agreed to take positive steps to promote the growth of the mutually beneficial economic cooperation and trade between China and the United States and to expand the exchanges and the cooperation between the two countries in the energy, environment, scientific, educational, cultural, health, legal, and the military fields, and also to enhance the people to people exchanges and friendship. We have also agreed to enhance the consultations and the cooperation between China and the United States on the issues of disarmament, arms control, and nonproliferation. And we have issued joint statements on the BWC protocol, on the question of the antipersonnel landmines, and on the question of South Asia. The Taiwan question is the most important and the most sensitive issue at the core of China U.S. relations. We hope that the U.S. side will adhere to the principles set forth in three China U.S. joint communiques and the joint China U.S. statement, as well as the relevant commitments it has made in the interest of a smooth growth of China U.S. relations. The improvement and the growth of China U.S. relations have not come by easily. It is the result of the concerted efforts of the Governments and people of our two countries. So we should all the more treasure this good result. As China and the United States have different social systems, ideologies, values, and culture traditions, we have some difference of views on certain issues. However, they should not become the obstacles in the way of the growth of China U.S. relations. The world is a colorful one. The development parts of the countries in the world should be chosen by the people of the countries concerned. China and the United States should view and handle the bilateral relations from a long term and strategic perspective. We should promote the growth of China U.S. relations in the spirit of mutual respect, equality, mutual benefit, seeking common ground while putting aside differences and developing cooperation. I believe that through the concerted efforts of both sides, we will make constant progress in the direction of building a constructive, strategic partnership between China and the United States oriented towards the 21st century. President Clinton. Thank you, Mr. President. And I also thank the Chinese people for their warm welcome to me, to my family, and to our delegation. Over the past 5 years, President Jiang and I have met seven times. Mr. President, your leadership is helping us to transform our nations' relationship for the future. Clearly, a stable, open, prosperous China, shouldering its responsibilities for a safer world, is good for America. Nothing makes that point better than today's agreement not to target our nuclear missiles at each other. We also agreed to do more to shore up stability in Asia, on the Korean Peninsula, and the Indian subcontinent. I reaffirmed our longstanding "one China" policy to President Jiang and urged the pursuit of cross strait discussions recently resumed as the best path to a peaceful resolution. In a similar vein, I urged President Jiang to assume a dialog with the Dalai Lama in return for the recognition that Tibet is a part of China and in recognition of the unique cultural and religious heritage of that region. I welcome the progress we made today in nonproliferation, including China's decision to actively study joining the Missile Technology Control Regime, our joint commitment not to provide assistance to ballistic missile programs in South Asia, and President Jiang's statement last week that China will not sell missiles to Iran. We also welcome the steps China recently has taken to tighten nuclear export controls, to strengthen controls on the export of chemicals that can be turned into weapons, and to work jointly with us to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. As the President said, we are also working together against international crime, drug trafficking, alien smuggling, stepping up our scientific cooperation, which already has produced remarkable breakthroughs in areas including the fight against birth defects like spina bifida. We're helping to eradicate polio and working to predict and to mitigate national disasters. And perhaps most important over the long run, we are committed to working together on clean energy to preserve our natural environment, a matter of urgent concern to both our nations. I am also very pleased by our cooperation on rule of law programs, from training lawyers and judges to providing legal assistance to the poor. President Jiang and I agree on the importance of China's entry into the World Trade Organization. I regret we did not make more progress on this front, and we must recommit ourselves to achieving that goal on strong terms. We agree that we need to work together to avoid another round of destabilizing currency devaluations in the region and to restore economic growth. As you can see, we are working together in many areas of cooperation. We have developed a relationship of openness and candor. When we differ, as we do from time to time, we speak openly and honestly in an effort to understand our differences and, if possible, to work toward a common approach to resolving them. It is well known that the principal area of our difference in recent years has been over human rights questions. America recognizes and applauds China's economic and social transformation which has expanded the rights of its citizens by lifting hundreds of millions from poverty, providing them greater access to information, giving them village elections, greater freedom to travel and to choose their own jobs, and better education for their children. As I said again to President Jiang, we Americans also firmly believe that individual rights, including the freedom of speech, association, and religion, are very important, not only to those who exercise them but also to nations whose success in the 21st century depends upon widespread individual knowledge, creativity, free exchange, and enterprise. Therefore, we welcome China's decision to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the recent release of several prominent political dissidents, the recent visit China graciously accorded American religious leaders, and the resumption of a human rights dialog between China and the United States. Earlier this morning, during my official welcome, I could hear and see the many echoes of China's past and the call of its promising future, for Tiananmen Square is an historical place. There, 100 years ago, China's quest for constitutional government was born. There, in 1919, young people rallied against foreign occupation and launched a powerful movement for China's political and cultural renewal. There, in 1976, public mourning for Zhou Enlai led to the Cultural Revolution's end and the beginning of your remarkable transformation. And there, 9 years ago, Chinese citizens of all ages raised their voices for democracy. For all of our agreements, we still disagree about the meaning of what happened then. I believe and the American people believe that the use of force and the tragic loss of life was wrong. I believe and the American people believe that freedom of speech, association, and religion are, as recognized by U.N. Charter, the right of people everywhere and should be protected by their governments. It was to advance these rights that our Founding Fathers in our Declaration of Independence pledged our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor. Fifty years ago, the U.N. recognized these rights as the basic freedoms of people everywhere. The question for us now is, how shall we deal with such disagreements and still succeed in the important work of deepening our friendship and our sense of mutual respect? First, we Americans must acknowledge the painful moments in our own history when fundamental human rights were denied. We must say that we know, still, we have to continue our work to advance the dignity and freedom and equality of our own people. And second, we must understand and respect the enormous challenges China has faced in trying to move forward against great odds, with a clear memory of the setbacks suffered in past periods of instability. Finally, it is important that whatever our disagreements over past action, China and the United States must go forward on the right side of history for the future sake of the world. The forces of history have brought us to a new age of human possibility, but our dreams can only be recognized by nations whose citizens are both responsible and free. Mr. President, that is the future America seeks to build with China, in partnership and honest friendship. Tomorrow, Hillary and I will visit the Great Wall. The wall's builders knew they were building a permanent monument, even if they were unable to see it finished in their lifetimes. Likewise, we know we are building a friendship that will serve our descendants well, even if we, ourselves, will not see its full development across the next century and into the new millennium. Our friendship may never be perfect no friendship is. But I hope it will last forever. President Jiang. Now President Clinton and I are prepared to answer your questions, and now I'd like to give the first question to President Clinton. President Clinton. Which Chinese journalists, one of you? In the back there, yes? Yes, ma'am, go ahead. Asian Financial Situation Q. Thank you. I'm a correspondent with Phoenix TV of Hong Kong. In the recent Asian financial crisis, the Chinese Government has pledged to maintain the value of RMB Asian currency and, thus, making positive contribution to stabilizing the situation in Asia. And this has attracted positive reaction from the international community and from the U.S. Government. However, yesterday, the exchange rate between Japanese yen and the U.S. dollar dropped again to a low of 143 yen against one dollar, and which was closed at 141 yen against one dollar. So, what specific common measures are the Chinese and the U.S. Government prepared to take to stabilize the financial situation in Asia and the world? The President. Well, first of all, let me agree with you. I think that China has shown great statesmanship and strength in making a strong contribution to the stability not only of the Chinese people and their economy but the entire region, by maintaining the value of its currency. The United States, as you know, has worked hard to try to support the stability of the Japanese yen and to help growth resume in Japan. I think that what we have agreed to do is to continue to do whatever we can to promote stability and to support policies within Japan that will restore confidence in the economy, get investment going again, and get growth going. The key here, I believe, is for the plans to reform the financial institutions in Japan and take other steps that will get growth going and get investments going in Japan to be made. I think that, ultimately, President Jiang and I would give anything to be able to just wave a wand and have all of this go away. We are not the only actors in this drama, and a lot of this must be done by the Japanese Government and the Japanese people. We can be supportive, but they have to make the right decisions. Human Rights Q. My question to President Jiang and also to President Clinton is, we know that there were four dissidents in Xi'an who were arrested earlier, and three were released, and one of them is still under detainment. And I would like to know if you talked about the issue. And what about the rest 2,000 dissidents who are being reported still under imprisonment right now in China? Can both of you elaborate on that? Thank you. President Jiang. In our talks just now, President Clinton raised this issue. We adopt an attitude of extending very warm welcome to the visit to China by President Clinton. As for the matter you raised, I think you're referring to the incident in Xi'an, and I think in China there is no question that there is no restriction whatsoever on the coverage and interview by the reporters and the correspondents within the scope of law. But as for some activities that have been detrimental or have prejudiced the security, then the local authorities should take measures to deal with them, and it is also understandable. As for the question you raised, actually, I do not have very detailed information in this regard. But as for the latter part of your question concerning 2,000 dissidents, I think in China we have our laws. And in China's constitution, it is clearly stipulated that the Chinese citizens have the freedom of speech, but any law breaking activities must be dealt with according to law. I think this is true in any country of rule of law. And I think China's judicial departments will deal with the matter according to law. I want to add that I believe that the vast majority of the correspondents and the reporters are willing to promote the friendship between China and the United States through President Clinton's visit to China this time. However, before President Clinton's visit, I read some reports from some media and newspapers saying alleging China had been involved in so called political contributions in the United States. I really think it very absurd and ridiculous, and I think they are sheer fabrications. China can never do such a thing, and China never interferes in other countries' internal affairs. Actually, at the talks this morning, President Clinton also asked me of this question. And I told him that after hearing of such an allegation, we conducted very earnest investigation into the matter. And the results of the investigation shows that there was never such a thing. Recently, in my meetings with many foreign visitors and visiting leaders of other countries, I often said to them that as countries in the world have different social systems and values, it is something that should be allowed that they may have different understandings about one fact. And this actually, itself, is a representation and the manifestation of democracy. However, what is important is that the fact itself should not be distorted. I'm sorry I've taken up too much of the time, and I now invite President Clinton to say a few words. President Clinton. Well, we did discuss the questions you raised. And of course, I made my views known about the recent detentions yesterday. On the larger question you raised, I actually made a couple of specific and practical suggestions about how we might take our dialog farther there. There are some people who are incarcerated now for offenses no longer on the books in China, reflecting real progress in present Chinese practice, and the Chinese, in my view we should acknowledge that. But the question then arises, is there some way that these people might be released? Is there some procedure through which we could move? There are some people imprisoned for nonviolent activities in June of '89 is there something that could be done there? There are some other practical things we discussed, which I think it would be premature to ask the Chinese Government to make a statement on now because we just have had these discussions. But I want to say to all of you that the atmosphere whatever your position on these issues is, and particularly if you agree with me, I think you should at least appreciate the fact that we now have an atmosphere in which it is possible for us to be open and honest and in great detail about this and that there are legitimate and honest differences in the way we look at this. But I believe that we are making progress, and I believe that we will make more. I remember the things that I specified in my statement about that. You can see that neither one of us are shy about being strong about how we believe about this. And I think that we have them in the public debate now, we have them in the private discussions, and we just have to keep pushing forward in trying to work through it. Nuclear Detargeting Agreement Q. President Jiang spoke of China's position against the first use of nuclear weapons, and the policy of the United States does not agree with. Was this discussed in the context of negotiations on the detargeting agreement? And where are any U.S. concessions in order to obtain the detargeting agreement? President Clinton. Well, the short answer to your question, and the accurate one, is no, but I don't want it to be a misleading answer. That is, you well understand that our position on that issue is a product of decades of experience in a former time. We have not changed our position, nor are we prepared to do so, on that. But this was a mutual decision we made because we both felt that, number one, if we detargeted, we would completely eliminate the prospect ever of any kind of accidental launch, and number two, we would take one more step in showing mutual confidence and trust in one another, and number three, it would be a helpful signal as a counterweight to the recent nuclear tests in India and Pakistan. And so we agreed that it was in both our interests to do this on its own terms. President Jiang. I would like to make a brief explanation. As I stated just now, President Clinton and I decided that China and the United States would not target the strategic nuclear weapons under their respective control at each other. Full stop that's a full stop. And then this demonstrates to the entire world that China and the United States are partners, not adversaries. Full stop again. Laughter And then I said, I hereby reiterate that since the very first day that China came into possession of nuclear weapons, China has undertaken not to be the first to use nuclear weapons under any circumstances. Full stop. That's my view. That's our view. Human Rights Q. I'm a correspondent with Xinhua news agency. My question is to President Jiang. At his opening statement, President Clinton expressed appreciation of the achievements made by the Chinese Government in respecting human rights. At the same time, he also said that China and the United States also had difference of views over this matter. So my question is, what is the position of the Chinese Government on the human rights issue? President Jiang. China and the United States have differences of views and also have common ground on the human rights issue. More than 2,000 years ago, a great thinker of China's Han Dynasty, Dong Zhongshu, once said, "Of all the living things nurtured between heaven and the Earth, the most valuable is human beings." So the Chinese nation always respects and maintains the dignity and rights of the people. Today the Chinese Government solemnly commits itself to the promotion and the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. The United States is the most developed country in the world, with a per capita GDP approaching 30,000 U.S. dollars, while China is a developing country with a population of 1.2 billion, with a per capita GDP of less than 700 U.S. dollars. As the two countries differ in social system, ideology, historical tradition, and cultural background, the two countries have different means and ways in realizing human rights and fundamental freedoms. So it's nothing strange that we may have some difference of views over some issues. China stresses that the top priority should be given to the right to subsistence and the right to development. Meanwhile, efforts should be made to strengthen democracy and the legal system building, and to protect the economic, social, cultural, civil, and the political rights of the people. I listened very carefully to what President Clinton said just now, and I noticed that he made mention of the political disturbances happened in Tiananmen in 1989, and he also told the history of Tiananmen and told of the things that happened in Tiananmen. With regard to the political disturbances in 1989, the Chinese people have long drawn a historical conclusion. During my visit to the United States last year and also on many international occasions, I have stated our position that with regard to the political disturbances in 1989, had the Chinese Government not taken the resolute measures, then we could not have enjoyed the stability that we are enjoying today. China is a socialist country in which its people are masters of the nation. The Chinese people can elect their own representatives to the people's congresses through direct or indirect means, and they can fully express their views and exercise their political rights. In the two decades since the reform and opening up program was started, the National People's Congress of China has adopted more than 320 laws and acts, thus, constantly strengthening the legal protection of the democracy, fundamental freedoms, and the various rights enjoyed by the Chinese people. Over the past two decades, another 200 million people in China were lifted out of poverty. No country's human rights situation is perfect. Since the founding of new China, the fundamental changes and the tremendous achievements that have been achieved, that have been scored in the human rights conditions in China are for all to see. I'd like to know whether President Clinton will have anything more to add. President Clinton. I would like to add a comment. First of all, I think this debate and discussion today has been a healthy thing and a good thing. Secondly, I think to understand the priority that each country attaches to its own interpretation of this issue of human rights, you have to understand something of our history. The Chinese who are here understand better than I the price paid over time at various moments in history for disruption and upheaval in China, so there is an understandable desire to have stability in the country. Every country wants stability. Our country was founded by people who felt they were abused by royal powers, by people in power, and they wanted to protect their personal liberties by putting limits on government. And they understood they understood clearly, that any system because human beings are imperfect, any system can be abused. So the question for all societies going forward into the 21st century is, which is the better gamble? If you have a lot of personal freedom, some people may abuse it. But if you are so afraid of personal freedom because of the abuse that you limit people's freedom too much, then you pay, I believe, an even greater price in a world where the whole economy is based on ideas and information and exchange and debate and children everywhere dreaming dreams and feeling they can live their dreams out. So I am trying to have a dialog here that will enable both of us to move forward so that the Chinese people will get the best possible result. I believe stability in the 21st century will require high levels of freedom. President Jiang. I'm sorry, I have to take up an additional 5 minutes. Laughter So I'd like to say a few words on Dalai Lama. President Clinton is also interested in this question, in Dalai Lama. Actually, since the Dalai Lama left in 1959, earth shaking changes have taken place in Tibet. First, the system of theocracy has forever become bygones, though it is unfortunate that the disappearance of this theocracy was much later than the demise of theocracy in Europe, that's before the Renaissance. And the more than 1 million serfs under the rule of the Dalai Lama were liberated. In 1990 when I was in Tibet, I went to visit the liberated serfs. And now the system of national autonomy is in practice in Tibet, and the people there, they have their Tibetan autonomous region government. Since I came to work in the central government, I have urged the rest 29 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions to assist Tibet in its development, even including those provinces that are not very developed, such as Qinghai Province. So all together, nearly 8 billion RMB yuan financial resources were raised, and already 62 projects have been completed in Tibet. As for the freedom of religious belief, there is fierce stipulations in our constitution for the protection of religious belief, and this also includes in Tibet. And we have also spent a lot of money in renovating the lamaseries and temples in Tibet. And we have spent 100 million RMB yuan and one ton of gold in renovating the Potala Palace. Just now President Clinton also mentioned the Tibetan issue and the dialog with the Dalai Lama. Actually, as long as the Dalai Lama can publicly make a statement and a commitment that Tibet is an inalienable part of China and he must also recognize Taiwan as a province of China, then the door to dialog and negotiation is open. Actually, we are having several channels of communications with the Dalai Lama. So I hope the Dalai Lama will make positive response in this regard. Finally, I want to emphasize that according to China's constitution, the freedom of religious belief in Tibet and also throughout China is protected. But as the President of the People's Republic of China and as a Communist member, a member of the Communist Party, I myself am an atheist. But this will by no means affect my respect for the religious freedom in Tibet. But still, I have a question. That is, during my visit to the United States last year and also during my previous visits to other European countries, I found that although the education in science and technology have developed to a very high level and people are now enjoying modern civilization, but still quite a number of them have a belief in Lamaism. So this is a question that I'm still studying and still looking into. I want to find out the reason why. I think President Clinton is a strong defender of the American interests, and I am a strong defender of the Chinese interests. But despite that, we still can have very friendly exchanges of views and discussions. And I think that is democracy. And I want to stress that, actually, there are a lot of areas in which we can learn from each other. If you agree, we will finish this. Laughter President Clinton. I agree, but I have you have to let me say one thing about the Dalai Lama, since you brought it up. Laughter First, I agree that Tibet is a part of China, an autonomous region of China. And I can understand why the acknowledgement of that would be a precondition of dialog with the Dalai Lama. But I also believe that there are many, many Tibetans who still revere the Dalai Lama and view him as their spiritual leader. President Jiang pointed out that he has a few followers of Tibetan Buddhism even in the United States and Europe. But most of his followers have not given up their own religious faith. He has followers who are Christians supporters, excuse me, not followers, supporters who are Christians, who are Jews, who are Muslims, who believe in the unity of God, and who believe he is a holy man. But for us, the question is not fundamentally religious it is political. That is, we believe that other people should have the right to fully practice their religious beliefs and that if he, in good faith, presents himself on those terms, it is a legitimate thing for China to engage him in dialog. And let me say something that will perhaps be unpopular with everyone. I have spent time with the Dalai Lama. I believe him to be an honest man, and I believe if he had a conversation with President Jiang, they would like each other very much. Laughter June 18, 1998 The President. Senator Bingaman and Congressman Becerra, ladies and gentlemen, I welcome you all here today as I announce my intent to nominate Ambassador Bill Richardson to become our Secretary of Energy, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke to assume the portfolio of America's Representative to the United Nations. I'm especially pleased that their families could join me and the Vice President and, as you can see, our entire national security team. Over the last 2 years, Bill Richardson's experience, energy, and tenacity have made a real difference in advancing our interests in the United Nations and around the world. With diplomatic skills honed in one of the most diverse congressional districts in our country, negotiating ability tested in some of the toughest hot spots on our planet, and a personal touch evidenced from his first day on the job, Bill Richardson has brought creativity and drive to our leadership at the U.N. He has served the Secretary of State and me by tackling some of the toughest negotiating challenges from the Congo to Zaire to Afghanistan. He helped to rally the international community to speak and act as one in the crisis in Iraq. Today, the international inspectors are back on the job, working to end Iraq's nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons threat, thanks in no small measure to his efforts. He has been a vigorous and articulate proponent of our engagement around the world and the importance of leveraging that engagement by living up to our United Nations obligations. In short, if there's one word that comes to mind when I think of Bill Richardson, it really is "energy." But that is hardly the only reason I am appointing him to this job. Laughter For 14 years representing New Mexico, an energyrich State that is home to two of our national Department of Energy labs, and his long service as an active member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, he has gotten extensive, firsthand experience in issues ranging from deregulating the oil and gas industries, to promoting alternative sources of energy, to ensuring that energy development meets tough standards of environmental safety. I thank him for his willingness to serve. Let me also say that Secretary Pena has left a very impressive legacy upon which to build. I appreciate his 5 years of service to our Nation as both Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Energy, where he surprised, I might say, even his greatest admirers with the speed with which he mastered the incredible complex issues of the Department and the leadership he demonstrated in supporting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, in coming out with an electricity deregulation plan that will save consumers 20 billion a year, in helping to open all kinds of opportunities for energy conservation and a clean energy future for America. Let me also thank him as Secretary of Transportation for his service there in advancing mass transit more than at any point in recent history and for opening up our air commerce with 40 other nations. With Congress' support, Bill Richardson will do his part now to secure our energy future, at a time when that is inextricably bound up with our obligation as Americans to do our part to deal with the problem of climate change and our obligations as Americans to build a secure future for our country that allows economic growth and protection of the planet. I believe that this challenge will require the greatest energy from our labs, from our scientists and technology, from an Energy Department that can work clearly with the private sector on what plainly will be one of America's most important priorities for years and years to come. Ambassador Holbrooke, my new United Nations designate, is already a familiar face all around the globe. His remarkable diplomacy in Bosnia helped to stop the bloodshed, and at the talks in Dayton, the force of his determination was a key to securing peace, restoring hope, and saving lives. His ongoing service in the Balkan region has helped to keep Bosnia's peace on track through some difficult moments. He has helped to advance our efforts to break the stalemate in Cyprus, and he's worked to defuse the alarming tensions and violence still brewing in Kosovo. His expertise rests on an outstanding career of diplomatic service, from his early days as one of the youngest ever Assistant Secretaries of State for Asia, an area where he has continued to be actively involved and which is very important today. Then he worked as my Ambassador to Germany and as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe. His long experience in the private sector has given him a keen eye for the bottom line, economically and politically. He will help us to shape a U.N. that is leaner, more efficient, better equipped, that fulfills the best ideals of its founders and meets the challenges of the 21st century. Ambassador Holbrooke understands, as do all the members of our national security team, the important role the United Nations can play in supporting our goals around the world, pursuing peace and security, promoting human rights, fighting drugs and crime, helping people lift themselves from poverty to dignity and prosperity. Our Nation will always be prepared to act alone if necessary, but joining our strength with our U.N. partners, we maximize our reach and magnify our effectiveness while sharing costs and risks. In a world where developments beyond our borders have dramatic implications within them, from rogue states seeking nuclear weapons and chemical and biological weapons to pollution corroding the atmosphere, international cooperation is clearly more important than ever. I urge Congress to send me legislation, therefore, without unrelated issues, to live up to our legacy of leadership and pay our debt to the United Nations. In closing, let me say that the Vice President and I feel very fortunate every day to have such a strong national security team, men and women of vision, of judgment, of commitment. We have worked closely together to make sure that our Nation remains the world's leading force for peace and freedom, for prosperity and security. The line up I announce today maintains that exceptional standard. I thank all of them for their willingness to serve. I especially thank Ambassador Holbrooke and Ambassador Richardson for their willingness to take on these important new tasks. And now, I'd like to turn the floor over to them. At this point, Secretary designate Richardson and Ambassador Holbrooke thanked the President and made brief remarks. Rapprochement With Iran Q. Mr. President, are you softening your policy toward Iran? Are you softening your policy toward Iran? Did you find a new rapprochement? The President. I agree with the remarks made yesterday by Secretary Albright. We talked about them extensively before she made her speech. What we want is a genuine reconciliation with Iran based on mutuality and reciprocity and a sense that the Iranians are prepared to move away from support of terrorism and distribution of dangerous weapons, opposition to the peace process. We appreciate the comments that were made by the President several months ago, and we are exploring what the future might hold. We have not changed our principles, our ideas, or our objectives. We believe Iran is changing in a positive way, and we want to support that. Q. Are you contemplating a gesture, sir? The President. I think Secretary Albright's words should stand for themselves right now. I thought it was a fine speech and an important one. Tobacco Legislation Q. Mr. President, do you have any plans to resurrect tobacco, perhaps in the House? And how? The President. Well, yesterday many of the Republicans Senators whom I called and I talked to 10 of them yesterday said that they had been approached by Senator Lott about the prospect of putting some sort of special group together of 4 Republicans and 4 Democrats and maybe having them try just in a matter of a few days to come up with a bill they thought would actually not only pass the Senate but could be written into law. And if that's a goodfaith effort they're willing to make, that's certainly one option that I would consider. But I don't intend to continue to stop fighting for this. I think it's obvious to everybody in the world what happened. This bill was voted out of the committee 19 to 1. Some of the people who voted for it in the Republican caucus then did not vote for it on the floor, even though every major amendment which was adopted to the bill was sponsored by a Republican Senator. And I think it's pretty clear what happened. They may believe that the 40 million in advertising by the tobacco companies changed public opinion irrevocably and permanently and therefore it's safe to walk away from the biggest public health obligation that this country has today. I don't believe that. But even if the politics have changed, the merits haven't. One more day will pass today when 3,000 more children will start to smoke even though it's illegal to sell them cigarettes, and 1,000 of them will have their lives shortened because of it. And for us to sit here and do nothing in the face of evidence which has been mounting during this debate, even in the Minnesota case, during this debate, gave the freshest and in some cases the most vivid documentary evidence of all from the tobacco companies themselves that they've known about the addictive qualities of nicotine for years and that they have deliberately marketed cigarettes to children for years, even though they knew it was against the law to do it, because they needed what they call "replacement smokers." Now, the bill is simple in its outline and clear in its objectives. And in terms of the complications of it, many of those were added by the people who now are criticizing it. So, on balance, I think the case is still so overwhelming that we ought to keep working on it, and I'm prepared you know, I've been working on this for years. When we started, most people didn't think we'd get as far as we have, and I don't think that we intend to stop until we prevail. And sooner or later we will, because it's the right thing to do. Q. Sir, how will you finance this child care initiative and other things that were contained in that bill without ruining the budget? The President. We can only finance we can finance that part of it which is within our own budget, and that part of it which was dedicated to which would had to have been financed by the States and which was within a menu of things that we supported that the States could spend it on won't be financed unless the States get the money some other way. And I think that's unfortunate, because I think that would be a good expenditure of some of the money. Keep in mind, most of the Federal money was designed to be spent on directly on health care on medical research, on smoking cessation programs, on programs designed to deal with the consequences of the health problems that are directly related to smoking in this country. And that was, of course, a part of the Senate's decision in killing it. I think it's important to point out also that there were that this bill is temporarily dead because of the unusual rule of the Senate that requires 60 percent, not 51 percent, of the Senate to pass on any bill other than the budget if somebody objects to it. So for all the 40 million in spending and as reported in the paper today, all the commitment to run the same ads all over again in November to protect the Republican Members who voted with them they still could only muster 43 votes. And two of those votes were people who wanted a better provision for the tobacco farmers and essentially supported the bill. So, essentially, what you've got is 41 people denying the American people and denying the huge majority of the United States Senate, including a number of Republicans, the right to pass a tobacco bill and ask the House to do the same to protect our children. That's not a long way from success. And that means that each and every one of the members of the Republican caucus who voted for that was in a way personally responsible for the death of the bill. It's not all it's dead today. It may not be dead tomorrow. And it's not dead over the long run because the public health need is great. I've never quit on anything this important in my life, and I don't intend to stop now. There are too many futures riding on it, and I think in the end we will prevail. Thank you. June 13, 1998 Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the wonderful warm welcome. President Bernstine, Provost Reardon, Senator Wyden, Representatives Blumenauer and Hooley, Treasurer Hill, General Myers, Superintendent Paulus my good friend, your great former Senator, Mark Hatfield I'm delighted to see you here today, sir thank you. To the faculty, especially the faculty honorees today State Board of Higher Education the alumni to the speakers, Theo Hall and Jane Rongerude I thought they did a marvelous job on behalf of the students. Congratulations, Mr. Miller, and thank you for your contributions to Portland State. And let me say to all the members of the class of 1998, I thank you for allowing me to come here today. I congratulate you on your tremendous achievement. I know the roads that you have traveled here have not all been easy. Some of you have worked full time and cared for your families even while you carried a full course load, and I congratulate you on what you've done. What I want to say to you in the beginning is that you will see that it was worth it. In the world in which we live, there is a higher premium on education than ever before, not only because of what you know but because of what you will be able to learn for the rest of your life. The education and the skills you take away from this campus will open doors for you forever. And I congratulate you on having the foresight as well as the determination to see this through. Portland State is a very interesting institution to me. First of all, we're the same age. Laughter Portland State was born in 1946, out of the demand generated by the GI bill at the end of World War II, one of the most farsighted things that was ever done to explode opportunity across America. The GI bill helped to create the modern American middle class and the prosperity we enjoyed. It also helped to create a number of community based institutions of higher education, which more and more now are beginning to look in their student bodies the way they did over 50 years ago. More than half the students here are over 25. More than a few of you are considerably over 25. Laughter Still, you all look quite young to me. Laughter As was said earlier, I have worked hard, and our administration has, to open the doors of college to everyone who would work for it, with the HOPE scholarship and permanent tax credits for all higher education and more Pell grants and better student loans and the AmeriCorps program and workstudy programs. We have to create a country in which everyone at any age believes that they have access to continue their education for a lifetime. I want to focus on this institution again as an institution of the future. You know, a couple of years ago I came out here, and we had a conference on the Pacific Rim and our relationship to the Asia Pacific region that Portland State hosted. And I have to say that one of your most distinguished alumni was a particular friend of mine, the late Congressman Walter Capps from California, one of the finest people I ever knew went to this school. And he was a person of the future in the Congress. His wife succeeded him, and we were talking just last evening, before I came here, about how grateful Congressman Capps always was to Portland State for giving him the ability to go out into the world and make a difference. What I want to talk to all of you about, particularly the graduates, is the America of your future. We all know that at the edge of a new century and a new millennium, America is changing at breathtaking speed. We know that most of these changes have been good. We're grateful as a nation to have the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 29 years, the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years, the highest homeownership in history. We feel gratitude. We know that none of us alone is responsible for these things, but all of us together have come to terms with the challenges of the modern world and its opportunities and we're moving America in a good direction. But this spring I have attempted to go out across the country and address graduates about the challenges this new era poses, not only because even when there is a lot of good news out there, we should never forget that there are challenges but, perhaps even more importantly, because when times are good, it imposes upon Americans a special responsibility to take our confidence and our prosperity and look to the long term challenges of the country, to address them in a forthright, constructive way so that our country will continue to grow and prosper. This spring I have talked about three things. At the Naval Academy, I talked about defending our Nation against the new security threats of the 21st century, including terrorism, biological and chemical weapons, and global environmental degradation. At MIT, not very long ago, I talked about the challenges of the information age and the importance of bringing those opportunities to all Americans, bringing the Internet into every classroom, ensuring that every young student is computer literate. Maybe I should have given that speech here. Laughter Today I want to talk to you about what may be the most important subject of all, how we can strengthen the bonds of our national community as we grow more racially and ethnically diverse. It was just a year ago tomorrow that I launched a national initiative on race, asking Americans to address the persistent problems and the limitless possibilities of our diversity. This effort is especially important right now because, as we grow more diverse, our ability to deal with the challenges will determine whether we can really bind ourselves together as one America. And even more importantly in the near term, and over the next few years perhaps as well, our ability to exercise world leadership for peace, for freedom, for prosperity in a world that is both smaller and more closely connected and yet increasingly gripped with tense, often bloody conflicts rooted in racial, ethnic, and religious divisions, our ability to lead that kind of world to a better place rests in no small measure on our ability to be a better place here in the United States that can be a model for the world. The driving force behind our increasing diversity is a new, large wave of immigration. It is changing the face of America. And while most of the changes are good, they do present challenges which demand more, both from new immigrants and from our citizens. Citizens share a responsibility to welcome new immigrants, to ensure that they strengthen our Nation, to give them their chance at the brass ring. In turn, new immigrants have a responsibility to learn, to work, to contribute to America. If both citizens and immigrants do their part, we will grow ever stronger in the new global information economy. More than any other nation on Earth, America has constantly drawn strength and spirit from wave after wave of immigrants. In each generation, they have proved to be the most restless, the most adventurous, the most innovative, the most industrious of people. Bearing different memories, honoring different heritages, they have strengthened our economy, enriched our culture, renewed our promise of freedom and opportunity for all. Of course, the path has not always run smooth. Some Americans have met each group of newcomers with suspicion and violence and discrimination. So great was the hatred of Irish immigrants 150 years ago that they were greeted with signs that read, "No Dogs or Irish." So profound was the fear of Chinese in the 1880's that they were barred from entering the country. So deep was the distrust of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe at the beginning of this century that they were forced to take literacy tests specifically designed to keep them out of America. Eventually, the guarantees of our Constitution and the better angels of our nature prevailed over ignorance and insecurity, over prejudice and fear. But now we are being tested again by a new wave of immigration larger than any in a century, far more diverse than any in our history. Each year, nearly a million people come legally to America. Today, nearly one in 10 people in America was born in another country one in 5 schoolchildren are from immigrant families. Today, largely because of immigration, there is no majority race in Hawaii or Houston or New York City. Within 5 years, there will be no majority race in our largest State, California. In a little more than 50 years, there will be no majority race in the United States. No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time. What do the changes mean? They can either strengthen and unite us, or they can weaken and divide us. We must decide. Let me state my view unequivocally. I believe new immigrants are good for America. They are revitalizing our cities. They are building our new economy. They are strengthening our ties to the global economy, just as earlier waves of immigrants settled the new frontier and powered the Industrial Revolution. They are energizing our culture and broadening our vision of the world. They are renewing our most basic values and reminding us all of what it truly means to be an American. It means working hard, like a teenager from Vietnam who does his homework as he watches the cash register at his family's grocery store. It means making a better life for your children, like a father from Russia who works two jobs and still finds time to take his daughter to the public library to practice her reading. It means dreaming big dreams, passing them on to your children. You have a lot of stories like that here at Portland State. Just this morning I met one of your graduates or two, to be specific Mago Gilson, an immigrant from Mexico who came here without a high school education 12 years later she is receiving her master's degree in education, on her way to realizing her dream of becoming a teacher. She is joined in this graduating class by her son Eddy, who had dreams of his own and worked full time for 7 years to put himself through school. Today he receives a bachelor's degree in business administration. And soon there's more soon her son, Oscar, whom I also met, will receive his own master's degree in education. I'd like to ask the Gilsons and their family members who are here to rise and be recognized. There she is. Give them a hand. Applause In the Gilson family and countless like them, we see the spirit that built America, the drive to succeed, the commitment to family, to education, to work, the hope for a better life. In their stories we see a reflection of our parents' and grandparents' journey, a powerful reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise, not a guarantee but a chance, not a particular race but an embrace of our common humanity. Now, some Americans don't see it that way. When they hear new accents or see new faces, they feel unsettled. They worry that new immigrants come not to work hard but to live off our largesse. They're afraid the America they know and love is becoming a foreign land. This reaction may be understandable, but it's wrong. It's especially wrong when anxiety and fear give rise to policies and ballot propositions to exclude immigrants from our civic life. I believe it's wrong to deny law abiding immigrants benefits available to everyone else wrong to ignore them as people not worthy of being counted in the census. It's not only wrong, it's un American. Let me be clear I also think it's wrong to condone illegal immigration that flouts our laws, strains our tolerance, taxes our resources. Even a nation of immigrants must have rules and conditions and limits, and when they are disregarded, public support for immigration erodes in ways that are destructive to those who are newly arrived and those who are still waiting patiently to come. We must remember, however, that the vast majority of immigrants are here legally. In every measurable way, they give more to our society than they take. Consider this On average, immigrants pay 1,800 more in taxes every year than they cost our system in benefits. Immigrants are paying into Social Security at record rates. Most of them are young, and they will help to balance the budget when we baby boomers retire and put strains on it. New immigrants also benefit the Nation in ways not so easily measured but very important. We should be honored that America, whether it's called the City on a Hill, or the Old Gold Mountain, or El Norte, is still seen around the world as the land of new beginnings. We should all be proud that people living in isolated villages in far corners of the world actually recognize the Statue of Liberty. We should rejoice that children the world over study our Declaration of Independence and embrace its creed. My fellow Americans, we descendants of those who passed through the portals of Ellis Island must not lock the door behind us. Americans whose parents were denied the rights of citizenship simply because of the color of their skin must not deny those rights to others because of the country of their birth or the nature of their faith. We should treat new immigrants as we would have wanted our own grandparents to be treated. We should share our country with them, not shun them or shut them out. But mark my words, unless we handle this well, immigration of this sweep and scope could threaten the bonds of our Union. Around the world, we see what can happen when people who live on the same land put race and ethnicity before country and humanity. If America is to remain the world's most diverse democracy, if immigration is to strengthen America as it has throughout our history, then we must say to one another Whether your ancestors came here in slave ships or on the Mayflower, whether they landed on Ellis Island or at Los Angeles International Airport, or have been here for thousands of years, if you believe in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, if you accept the responsibilities as well as the rights embedded in them, then you are an American. Only that belief can keep us one America in the 21st century. So I say, as President, to all our immigrants, you are welcome here. But you must honor our laws, embrace our culture, learn our language, know our history, and when the time comes, you should become citizens. And I say to all Americans, we have responsibilities as well to welcome our newest immigrants, to vigorously enforce laws against discrimination. And I'm very proud that our Nation's top civil rights enforcer is Bill Lann Lee, the son of Chinese immigrants who grew up in Harlem. We must protect immigrants' rights and ensure their access to education, health care, and housing and help them to become successful, productive citizens. When immigrants take responsibility to become citizens and have met all the requirements to do so, they should be promptly evaluated and accepted. The present delays in the citizenship process are unacceptable and indefensible. And together, immigrants and citizens alike, let me say we must recommit ourselves to the general duties of citizenship. Not just immigrants but every American should know what's in our Constitution and understand our shared history. Not just immigrants but every American should participate in our democracy by voting, by volunteering, and by running for office. Not just immigrants but every American, on our campuses and in our communities, should serve community service breeds good citizenship. And not just immigrants but every American should reject identity politics that seeks to separate us, not bring us together. Ethnic pride is a very good thing. America is one of the places which most reveres the distinctive ethnic, racial, religious heritage of our various peoples. The days when immigrants felt compelled to Anglicize their last name or deny their heritage are, thankfully, gone. But pride in one's ethnic and racial heritage must never become an excuse to withdraw from the larger American community. That does not honor diversity it breeds divisiveness. And that could weaken America. Not just immigrants but every American should recognize that our public schools must be more than places where our children learn to read they must also learn to be good citizens. They must all be able to make America's heroes, from Washington to Lincoln to Eleanor Roosevelt and Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez, their own. Today too many Americans and far too many immigrant children attended crowded, often crumbling inner city schools. Too many drop out of school altogether. And with more children from immigrant families entering our country and our schools than at any time since the turn of the century, we must renew our efforts to rebuild our schools and make them the best in the world. They must have better facilities they must have smaller classes they must have properly trained teachers they must have access to technology they must be the best in the world. All of us, immigrants and citizens alike, must ensure that our new group of children learn our language, and we should find a way to do this together instead of launching another round of divisive political fights. In the schools within the White House excuse me, in the schools within just a few miles of the White House, across the Potomac River, we have the most diverse school district in America, where there are children from 180 different racial and ethnic groups, speaking as native tongues about 100 languages. Now, it's all very well for someone to say, every one of them should learn English immediately. But we don't at this time necessarily have people who are trained to teach them English in all those languages. So I say to you, it is important for children to retain their native language. But unless they also learn English, they will never reach their full potential in the United States. Of course, children learn at different rates, and, of course, children have individual needs. But that cannot be an excuse for making sure that when children come into our school system, we do whatever it takes with whatever resources are at hand to make sure they learn as quickly as they can the language that will be dominant language of this country's commerce and citizenship in the future. We owe it to these children to do that. And we should not either delay behind excuses or look for ways to turn what is essentially a human issue of basic decency and citizenship and opportunity into a divisive political debate. We have a stake together in getting together and moving forward on this. Let me say, I applaud the students here at Portland State who are tutoring immigrant children to speak and read English. You are setting the kind of example I want our country to follow. One hundred and forty years ago, in the First Lady's hometown of Chicago, immigrants outnumbered native Americans. Addressing a crowd there in 1858, Abraham Lincoln asked what connection those immigrants could possibly feel to people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who founded our Nation. Here was his answer "If they, the immigrants, look back through this history to trace their connection to those days by blood, they will find they have none. But our Founders proclaimed that we are all created equal in the eyes of God. And that," Lincoln said, "is the electric cord in that declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty loving people everywhere." Well, that electric cord, the conviction that we are all created equal in the eyes of God, still links every graduate here with every new immigrant coming to our shores and every American who ever came before us. If you carry it with conscience and courage into the new century, it will light our way to America's greatest days your days. So, members of the class of 1998, go out and build the future of your dreams. Do it together, for your children, for your grandchildren, for your country. Good luck, and God bless you. June 12, 1998 Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Stand up here, Darlene. You know, on my body clock it is 1 35 laughter and Alexis and Darlene are hard acts to follow. Laughter I must say, I'm sorry that Alexis had to miss the Shania Twain concert, but if Shania Twain had heard her sing, she might have thought it was the other way around. She was great. You have a great gift, young lady, and I wish you well with it. I thank the Rose City Brass Quartet for playing "Hail To The Chief." It sounded great thought the Marine Band had come across the country to be here. Thank you. I want to thank Governor Kitzhaber and Senator Wyden and Congressman Blumenauer for being here and my old friend and classmate John Platt and the candidates for the House, David Wu and Kevin Campbell. I admire your public officials here. They are visionary and practical, principled and pragmatic. They get things done, and they're a joy to work with. And I especially am proud to be here with Darlene Hooley. My only regret is that as President, I do not have her courage in footwear. Laughter I got to thinking the other day that if Speaker Gingrich wore shoes like that, he might be in a better humor. Laughter We might change the whole psychology of the Republican caucus in the Congress laughter if they just had comfortable shoes every day. Maybe that's what the matter is. Maybe their shoes hurt them all the time. Laughter I also want to say how profoundly indebted I feel to the people of Oregon who have been so good to me and to my wife and to the Vice President and Mrs. Gore, to our whole administration. You've given me your electoral votes twice and have unfailingly supported policies to move this country forward. And I just thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm very grateful, more than you know. I wanted to come out here for Darlene tonight for a number of reasons, not the least of which is on occasion she has stood up with me and for our country when it was not easy to do so. And she's the sort of independentthinking person who also has a heart I believe we need more of in politics. She does a great credit to all of you. Because we have a number of important races in Oregon this year, I'd just like to say a few things briefly. I know the hour is late. But every day I get up, and no matter what the challenges of the day are and we've had a number lately, the financial challenges in Asia, the difficulties of the nuclear testing between India and Pakistan, the new trouble in the Balkan region in Kosovo, a number of things but I just I give thanks for the fact that compared to the day I was inaugurated, and Darlene said something about this, but I just want to read this off to you because you can take a lot of credit for this, but your country now has the lowest crime rate in 25 years. It has 16 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years. It has the lowest percentage of its people on welfare in 29 years. We are about to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years. We have the lowest inflation in 32 years, with the smallest Federal Government in 35 years and the highest rate of homeownership in the history of the United States. That's pretty good for America. And when I ran for President in 1992, and came and asked the people of Oregon to support me, I was deeply disturbed because our country was not moving forward and because our political leadership seemed trapped in a debate that had very little relevance to ordinary people in places like Oregon or in my home State of Arkansas. And I thought to myself, if we would think more about the future, if we would imagine what we wanted America to look like for our children in the 21st century and work back from that, we'd make more sense in what we said and what we do would be better. And I know that sounds sort of simplistic, but that's actually what I tried to do. And before I ever ran for President, I sat down and asked myself, what do you want your country to look like when we cross that bridge to the 21st century? What do you want your country to look like when your daughter is your age? And my answers are fairly straightforward I want the American dream to be alive and well for every person who is willing to work for it. I want America to still be the leading force in a smaller and smaller world for peace and freedom and prosperity and for meeting the challenges that we face together, whether it's from terrorists or weapons of mass destruction or from global environmental destruction. And I want America to be able to enjoy this dramatically increasing racial and ethnic and other diversity in our country and still be able to live together as one community with shared values, where we respect our differences but we have some core things in common that are most important of all. That's what I want. And that's what I've worked for. That's what I've asked people to join me in doing. And the first point I'd like to make is that I certainly can't claim full credit for all those statistics I just read off, but I do believe that our administration and those in Congress who have helped us have contributed to those good results, the lion's share of which belong to the American people. Ideas matter. And actions based on ideas have consequences. That's why it's important to keep people like Darlene Hooley in the Congress. That's why it's important to give us a few more people who are more interested in progress than politics, more interested in unity and moving forward than being divided for short term political power advantage. That's why it's important, because ideas and policies matter they make a difference. And it is very important that in this election season the American people say, "We want an honest debate about where we are, where we've come from, and where we're going, because ideas and actions matter. We are not going to be diverted. We are not going to be divided, and we are not going to be little. We are going to be large, and we are going to look to tomorrow, to our children's future." If we do, we'll have more people like Darlene in Congress. We have big issues still to deal with. That's the other thing I want to say. The temptation is to say, "Well, I ought to just vote for a bunch of people who tell me what I want to hear and hope they won't do anything, because things are going well and I don't want to mess it up." Laughter And we have often done that. Societies everywhere often do that. That would be a mistake. It would be a mistake for two reasons. Number one, we have big long term challenges ahead of us big long term challenges ahead of us. That's why I say, don't spend any of that surplus that we're going to accumulate this year until we know that we have fixed Social Security for the 21st century. We have to reform Medicare for the 21st century. We've opened the doors to colleges to virtually all Americans now, with our tax credits, our scholarships, our student loan program improvements, our work study increases, our national service scholarships. But nobody thinks that we have the best system of public education uniformly in the world yet. And we've got things to do. We've got an agenda there, of smaller classes, better trained teachers, more charter schools, technology in every single classroom, no matter how remotely rural or how poorly urban, in America. And I want to see that implemented. We still have too many kids in trouble Darlene talked about that. The after school program we have offered to the Congress a program to hugely increase after school programs and summer school programs to give not only not only say, well, we're going to find these kids that do bad things and punish them but to keep more kids out of trouble in the first place. Let me just tell you one story. A lot of you know that Hillary comes from Chicago, and we spent a lot of time there. When I was a Governor, the Governor of Illinois the then Governor of Illinois was a friend of mine, and he and I both have one daughter. And I knew that there was one picture I could see in the newspaper once a year, when his daughter was with him in the Governor's office on the day that the teachers went on strike in Chicago. Every year it happened, whether they needed to or not. Laughter And there was this great estrangement, and everybody thought the schools were dysfunctional. Today, in Chicago, there has been unbelievable harmony between the teachers and the administration. Every school has a parent council. No child can be promoted that doesn't perform to a certain level. They have mandatory summer school and a massive after school program. There are literally tens of thousands of children now in the inner city neighborhoods of Chicago who get three hot meals a day at school because their parents work. And their summer school, the Chicago summer school, is now the sixth largest school district in America. Now, what is the consequence? The juvenile crime rate has plummeted. Even better, more kids are learning more more kids are having the opportunity to work more children are going to have the chance to live the American dream. That's what we have to be mindful of. You know, we will never reach a time when we can solve every problem for every child, when there will never be any tragedy, when there will never be any kind of thing that goes wrong in any family in this State or this country. But there's not a soul here that doesn't know we can do a lot better. We can do better with our schools, and we can do better with our children. We have huge environmental challenges. I just flew up here from Monterey, California, where we had the first ever national conference on the state of the oceans today, and particularly ours, the oceans that embrace our coasts all over America. And I announced a number of steps to try to improve our capacity to protect and recover the environmental quality of our oceans, the fishing stocks, and to preserve them into the future. This is a huge deal that most people don't ever even think about. You know, one of the most common phrases in our vernacular is, "Oh, what I did was nothing. It's just a drop in the ocean." Nearly all of you have used it if you've lived any number of years. Laughter And that's another way of saying I'm getting older. Laughter And it may have been true at one time, but once there are millions and billions of drops in the ocean, we run the risk of changing the entire ecostructure of the planet, even in Monterey, which is a pretty pristine place. I met with young graduate students at Stanford today, and we walked out into the ocean. We looked at the sea otters and the harbor seals and the pelicans and a lot of the small ocean life there. And these young people told me that they were studying it, and they concluded two things number one, that even there was a demonstrable warming of the ocean and number two, that a lot of the small examples of life in the sea there were things that had moved from the south and that all the life was moving north. Anybody that is involved with salmon in Oregon or Washington or Canada knows that they're moving north. This is a huge issue. We must come to grips with it. It is also closely related to the issue of greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, which is, in the near term, an even bigger issue. But they feed on each other, because the more greenhouse gases we emit into the atmosphere, the more the polluted particles drift over the ocean, find their way into the ocean, and compromise the ocean's ecostructure. Now, this may not be a burning issue in the election, but it's really important that you vote for somebody who will make some mental and emotional space to think about what your grandchildren are going to be facing if we don't deal with climate change, what your children and grandchildren are going to be facing if we don't deal with the deterioration of the oceans. So I just give you those things as an example. Ideas matter. In the other party, they just passed a budget in the House which has, as nearly as I can tell, not very much money at all for our climate change policy would eliminate our policy of putting 100,000 community police on the street before it's finished, when it has been the most successful anticrime strategy in modern American history and would cut back on our investments generally in education and the environment at a time when we ought to do more. Ideas matter. There are consequences to this. And there are big issues out there lot of others I could talk about. But the second point I want to make is this We feel good about our country now. You all clapped when I gave you all those numbers. Laughter The question is, what do you do when you feel good? You can go sit in the sun and wait for something to go wrong and enjoy it while it's good, or you can say, "Boy, when we have all this confidence now, when we finally have got some resources, when we finally have got the literally, the space to breathe, to think about the long term, that is the time to act." You don't wait to repair the roof until there's a rainstorm. We have a chance to build the right kind of house for America. And yes, it's important who's President, and because of the 22d amendment, you'll get a chance to make another decision next time about that. Laughter But it really matters who's in the Congress, who the Governor is, what kind of decisions are made, what values they reflect, and whether you honestly believe that we ought to be doing everything we can to create opportunity for everybody responsible enough to work for it, to maintain our leadership in the world, and to live together as one people. I'm going to talk at Portland State tomorrow about immigration and this new wave of immigrants and how they're changing America. And I'm going to say that they all now are more likely to be different colors and different races, but they're not much different than when the Irish came over, when my people came over here. I got a letter the other day I mean, a book the other day, from a friend of mine who's got a terrific sense of humor, that talked about how unfortunate it was that a lot of my forebears turned reactionary, because when we first came here, we were treated just like the recently freed slaves. And the title of this book is "How the Irish Became White" laughter tongue in cheek. You may have seen it. It's in the bookstores. But the point I want to make is, this is important. You look at the whole rest of the world. Look at what I'm worrying about the struggles between India and Pakistan, between the Hindus and the Muslims in Kosovo, the struggle between the Albanians and the Serbs. What was the Bosnian war about? People that were biologically indistinguishable, who were Serbs and Orthodox Christians, Croats and Roman Catholics, Bosnians and Muslims. Eight hundred thousand people killed in Rwanda in a matter of weeks because they were two different tribes and they had lived for 500 years on the same land. They weren't part of some artificial construct of colonialists. That was a distinct country. And if you want your kids to live in a world that is moving beyond that, America has got to set an example. If you want me to be able to say you know, it wasn't the only reason, perhaps not even the principal reason, but I can tell you it was a significant factor, when the Irish people voted for peace recently, that so many Irish Americans were involved and committed, and they were Protestant, and they were Catholic, and after a time of going over there and working year in and year out and trying to get people together, it became indistinguishable what the faith of the Irish Americans were committed to Ireland. We have to build one America for these children if we expect America to be able to lead to a safer, more peaceful, more prosperous, more responsible, sustainable planet. That is very important. So I say to you, I'm honored to be here with Darlene. I'm honored to be here with your other leaders. I respect them more than I can say. I respect Senator Wyden and Congressman Blumenauer. I respect Governor Kitzhaber. I respect Congresswoman Furse, and I regret that she's leaving. And I hope you'll replace her with a good Democrat who will help us keep going forward. But not because of party but because our party has embraced these ideas our party has embraced the future our party has resisted the politics of division and getting in office for the sake of holding power, and we're more interested in what we're going to do with it if we get it. And we want to build that kind of future for our country. So I'm glad you're here. I'm glad so many young people are here. But you remember what I'm telling you. There's a long time between now and November. And I want you to go out of here committed to talking to your friends and neighbors about the nature of American citizenship at the close of the 20th century and about this incredible opportunity we have. Yes, we've done a lot of good things, and yes, the country is in good shape, but I want you to be grateful for that, pocket it, and ask yourself, now what am I supposed to do for my country and my children's future? Thank you, and God bless you. June 05, 1998 Thank you, Dr. Vest. I think you're the real thing. Laughter Chairman d'Arbeloff, Dr. Gray, members of the corporation, the faculty, especially to the members of the Class of 1998 and your families, the Classes of 1948 and 1973, Mayor Duehay, members of the City Council. I thank the Brass Ensemble for the wonderful music before. Let me say I am profoundly honored to be here on the same platform with Dr. David Ho and grateful for the work he has done for humanity. When we met a few moments ago in President Vest's office with a number of the students and other officials of the university, I said you had a good representation of speakers today, the scientists and the scientifically challenged. Laughter But my administration has been able to carry on in no small measure because of contributions from MIT. Sixteen MIT alumni and faculty members have served in important positions in this administration, including at least two who are here today, the former Secretary of the Air Force, Sheila Widnall, and the Deputy Secretary of Energy, Ernie Moniz. Four of your faculty members and your president have done important work for us. I thank them all. And I come here today with good news and bad news for the graduates. The good news is that this morning we had our latest economic report unemployment is 4.3 percent there have been 16 million new jobs in the last 5 years there are numerous job openings that pay well. The bad news is that you now have no excuse to your parents if you don't go to work. Laughter MIT is admired around the world as a crucible of creative thought, a force for progress, a place where dreams of generations become reality. The remarkable discoveries and inventions of the MIT community have transformed America. Early in your history, MIT was known for advances in geology and mining. By midcentury, MIT pioneered x rays and radar. Today, it's atomic lasers, artificial intelligence, biotechnology. MIT has done much to make this the American Century. And MIT will do more to make America and the world a better place in the 21st century, as we continue our astonishing journey through the information revolution, a revolution that began not as our own did, here in Massachusetts, with a single shot heard around the world, but instead was sparked by many catalysts, in labs and libraries, startups and blue chips, homes and even dorm rooms across America and around the world. I come today not to talk about the new marvels of science and engineering you know far more about them than I do. Instead I come to MIT, an epicenter of the seismic shifts in our economy and society, to talk about how we can and must apply enduring American values to this revolutionary time, about the responsibilities we all have as citizens to include every American in the promise of this new age. From the start, our Nation's greatest mission has been the fulfillment of our Founders' vision opportunity for all, best secured by free people working together toward better tomorrows and what they called "a more perfect Union." Americans believe the spark of possibility burns deep within every child, that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Our history can be understood as a constant striving, on foreign fields and factory floors, in townhalls and the corridors of Congress, to widen that circle of opportunity, to deepen the meaning of our freedom, to perfect our Union, to make real the promise of America. Every previous generation has been called upon to meet this challenge. And as we approach a new century and a new millennium, your generation must answer the call. You enter the world of your tomorrows at a remarkable moment for America. Our country has the lowest crime rates in 25 years, the smallest welfare rolls in 27 years, the lowest unemployment in 28 years, the lowest inflation in 32 years, the smallest National Government in 35 years, and the highest rate of homeownership in our history. Such a remarkable time, a period of renewal, comes along all too rarely in life, as you will see. It gives us both the opportunity and the profound responsibility to address the larger, longer term challenges to your future. This spring I am speaking to graduates around the country about three of those challenges. Last month, I went to the Naval Academy to talk about the new security challenges of the 21 century, terrorism, organized crime and drug trafficking, global climate change, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Next week at Portland State in Oregon, I will discuss how our Nation's third great wave of immigration can either strengthen and unite America or weaken and divide it. And I thank Dr. Ho for what he said about immigration and our immigrants. Today I ask you to focus on the challenges of the information age. The dimensions of the information revolution and its limitless possibilities are widely accepted and generally understood, even by lay people. But to make the most of it we must also acknowledge that there are challenges, and we must make important choices. We can extend opportunity to all Americans or leave many behind. We can erase lines of inequity or etch them indelibly. We can accelerate the most powerful engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known, or allow the engine to stall. History has taught us that choices cannot be deferred they are made by action or inaction. There is no such thing as virtual opportunity. We cannot point and click our way to a better future. If we are to fulfill the complete promise of this new age, we must do more. Already the information age is transforming the way we work. The high tech industry employs more people today than the auto industry did at its height in the 1950's. Auto and steel industries in turn have been revived by new technologies. Among those making the most use of technology R D are traditional American enterprises such as construction, transportation, and retail stores. It's transforming the way we live. The typical American home now has much more as much computing power as all of MIT did in the year most of the seniors here were born. It is transforming the way we communicate. On any business day, more than 30 times as many messages are delivered by E mail as by the Postal Service. And today, this ceremony is being carried live on the Internet so that people all over the world can join in. It is transforming the way we learn. With the DVD technology available today, we can store more reference material in a 3 inch stack of disks than in all the stacks of Hayden Library. It is transforming the way our society works, giving millions of Americans the opportunity to join in the enterprise of building our nation as they fulfill their dreams. The tools we develop today are bringing down barriers of race and gender, of income and age. The disabled are opening long closed doors of school, work, and human possibility. Small businesses are competing in worldwide markets once reserved only for powerful corporations. Before too long, our children will be able to stretch a hand across a keyboard and reach every book ever written, every painting every painted, every symphony ever controlled. For the very first time in our history, it is now possible for a child in the most isolated inner city neighborhood or rural community to have access to the same world of knowledge at the same instant as the child in the most affluent suburb. Imagine the revolutionary democratizing potential this can bring. Imagine the enormous benefits to our economy, our society if not just a fraction but all young people can master this set of 21st century skills. Just a few miles from here is the working class community of East Somerville. It has sometimes struggled to meet the needs of population that is growing more diverse by the day. But at East Somerville Community School, welltrained technology teachers with equipment and support from Time Warner Cable have begun to give first to eighth graders an early and enormous boost in life. First graders are producing small books on computers. Sixth graders are producing documentaries. The technology has so motivated them that almost all the sixth graders showed up at school to work on their computer projects over winter break. That small miracle can be replicated in every school, rich and poor, across America. Yet today, affluent schools are almost 3 times as likely to have Internet access in the classroom white students more than twice as likely as black students to have computers in their homes. We know from hard experience that unequal education hardens into unequal prospects. We know the information age will accelerate this trend. The three fastest growing careers in America are all in computer related fields, offering far more than average pay. Happily, the digital divide has begun to narrow, but it will not disappear of its own accord. History teaches us that even as new technologies create growth and new opportunity, they can heighten economic inequalities and sharpen social divisions. That is, after all, exactly what happened with the mechanization of agriculture and in the industrial revolution. As we move into the information age, we have it within our power to avoid these developments. We can reap the growth that comes from revolutionary technologies and use them to eliminate, not to widen, the disparities that exist. But until every child has a computer in the classroom and a teacher well trained to help, until every student has the skills to tap the enormous resources of the Internet, until every hightech company can find skilled workers to fill its high wage jobs, America will miss the full promise of the information age. We cannot allow this age of opportunity to be remembered also for the opportunities that were missed. Every day, we wake up and know that we have a challenge now we must decide how to meet it. Let me suggest three things. First, we must help you to ensure that America continues to lead the revolution in science and technology. Growth is a prerequisite for opportunity, and scientific research is a basic prerequisite for growth. Just yesterday in Japan, physicists announced a discovery that tiny neutrinos have mass. Now, that may not mean much to most Americans, but it may change our most fundamental theories, from the nature of the smallest subatomic particles to how the universe itself works and, indeed, how it expands. This discovery was made in Japan, yes, but it had the support of the investment of the U.S. Department of Energy. This discovery calls into question the decision made in Washington a couple of years ago to disband the super conducting supercollider, and it reaffirms the importance of the work now being done at the Fermi National Acceleration Facility in Illinois. The larger issue is that these kinds of findings have implications that are not limited to the laboratory. They affect the whole of society, not only our economy but our very view of life, our understanding of our relations with others and our place in time. In just the past 4 years, information technology has been responsible for more than a third of our economic expansion. Without Government funded research, computers, the Internet, communications satellites wouldn't have gotten started. When I became President, the Internet was the province of physicists, funded by a Government research project. There were only 50 sites in the world. Now, as all of you know, we are adding pages to the World Wide Web at the rate of over 100,000 an hour, and 100 million new users will come on this year. It all started with research, and we must do more. In the budget I submit to Congress for the year 2000, I will call for significant increases in computing and communications research. I have directed Dr. Neal Lane, my new Adviser for Science and Technology, to work with our Nation's research community to prepare a detailed plan for my review. Over the past 50 years, our commitment to science has strengthened this country in countless ways. Scientific research has created vast new industries, millions of jobs, allowed America to produce the world's most bountiful food supplies and remarkable tools for fighting disease. Think of what today's investments will yield. Dr. Ho will unravel the agonizing riddles of AIDS. There will be a cure for cancer a flourishing economy that will produce much less pollution and move back from the brink of potentially devastating global warming high speed wireless networks that bring distance learning, tele medicine, and economic opportunity to every rural community in America. That is why, even as we balanced our budget for the first time in 29 years, we have increased our investments in science. This year I asked Congress for the largest increase in research funding in history, not just for a year but sustained over 5 years. It is a core commitment that must be part of how every American, regardless of political party or personal endeavor, thinks about our Nation and its mission. Applause Thank you those are the people who received the research grants over there. Laughter I want you to know that we are also working to address the threat to our prosperity posed by the year 2000 bug. I tried and tried to find out what the class hack project was for the Class of '98, and I failed. But I did learn that in the year 2000, the graduating class is proposing to roll all of our computers back by 100 years. And I am determined to thwart you. I will do my best. Laughter The second thing we have to do is to make sure that the opportunities of the information age belong to all our children. Every young American must have access to these technologies. Two years ago in my State of the Union Address, I challenged our Nation to connect every classroom to the Internet by the year 2000. Thanks to unprecedented cooperation at national, State, and local levels, an outpouring of support from active citizens, and the decreasing costs of computers, we're on track to meet this goal. Four years ago when you came to MIT, barely 3 percent of America's classrooms were connected. By this time next year, we will have connected well over half our classrooms, including 100 percent of the classrooms in the Nation's 50 largest urban school districts. But it is not enough to connect the classrooms. The services have to be accessed. You may have heard recently about something called the e rate. It's the most crucial initiative we've launched to help connect our schools, our libraries, and our rural health centers to the Internet. Now some businesses have called on Congress to repeal the initiative. They say our Nation cannot afford to provide discounts to these institutions of learning and health by raising a billion dollars or so a year from service charges on telecommunications companies, something that was agreed to in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that passed with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in both Houses. I say we cannot afford not to have an erate. Thousands of poor schools and libraries and rural health centers are in desperate need of discounts. If we really believe that we all belong in the information age, then, at this sunlit moment of prosperity, we can't leave anyone behind in the dark. Every one of you who understands this I urge to support the e rate. Every one of you here who came from a poor inner city neighborhood, who came from a small rural school district, who came perhaps from another country where this was just a distant dream, you know that there are poor children now who may never have a chance to go to MIT unless someone reaches out and gives them this kind of opportunity. Every child in America deserves the chance to participate in the information revolution. The third thing we have to do is to make sure that all the computers and the connections in the world don't go to waste because our children actually have 21st century skills. For 5 years now I've done my best to make education our number one domestic priority, creating HOPE scholarships, expanding Pell grants, to make the 13th and 14th years of education as universal as the first 12 are today. We've passed tax credits, reformed the student loan program, expanded work study, created AmeriCorps to open the doors of college to every young person who is willing to work for it. We're working to make our public schools the best in the world, with smaller classes, better facilities, more master teachers and charter schools, higher standards, an end to social promotion. But the new economy also demands that our Nation commit to technology literacy for every child. We shouldn't let a child graduate from middle school anymore without knowing how to use new technologies to learn. Already, 10 States with an eye to the future have made technology literacy a requirement of graduation from high school. I believe we should meet this goal in the middle school years. I believe every child in every State should leave middle school able to use the most current tools for learning, research, communication, and collaboration. And we will help every State to meet this goal. If a State commits to adopt a technology literacy requirement, then we will help to provide the training that the teachers need. I propose to create a team of trained technology experts for every American middle school in every one of these States and to create competitions over the next 3 years to encourage the development of high quality educational software and educational websites by students and professors and commercial software companies. All students should feel as comfortable with a keyboard as a chalkboard, as comfortable with a laptop as a textbook. It is critical to ensuring that they all have opportunity in the world of the 21st century. Today I pledge the resources and unrelenting efforts of our Nation to renew our enduring values in the information age. But the challenges that we face cannot be met by Government alone. We can only fulfill the promise of this revolution if we work together in the same way it was launched together, with creativity, resolve, a restless spirit of innovation. While this mission requires the efforts of every citizen, those who fuel and enjoy the unparalleled prosperity of this moment have special responsibilities. The thriving new companies that line Route 128 in Silicon Valley I challenge them to use their power to empower others, to invest in a school, embrace a community in need, endow an eager young mind with opportunity, not to rest until every one of our children is technology literate. Many of you are doing such work already, and many of them are but America needs all such companies to participate. And finally, to the graduates of the class of 1998, I, too, offer my congratulations and, as your President, my gratitude for your commitment, for challenges conquered, for projects completed, for goals reached and even surpassed. You, your parents, and your friends should be very proud today and very hopeful, for all the possibilities of this new age are open to you. You are at the peak of your powers, and the world will rightly reward you for the work you do. But to make the very most of your life and the opportunities you have been given, you, too, must rise to your responsibility to give something back to America of what you have been given. As the years pass, your generation will be judged and you will begin to judge yourselves not only on what you do for yourself and your family but on the contributions you make to others, to your country, your communities, your generation of children. When you turn your good fortune into a chance for others, you then will not only be leaders in science and industry, you will become the leaders of America. Twenty first century America belongs to you. Take good care of it. Thank you, and God bless you. May 22, 1998 Thank you. Thank you very much. Secretary Dalton, thank you for your generous introduction and your dedicated service. Admiral Larson, thank you. Admiral Johnson, General Krulak, Admiral Ryan, Board of Visitors Chair Byron to the faculty and staff of the Academy distinguished guests to proud parents and family members, and especially to the brigade of midshipmen I am honored to be here today. And pursuant to longstanding tradition, I bring with me a small gift. I hereby free all midshipmen who are on restriction for minor conduct offenses. Applause There was so much enthusiasm, I wonder if you heard the word "minor" offenses. Laughter You know, the President has the signal honor of addressing all of our service academies serially, one after the other in appropriate order. This is the second time I have had the great honor of being here at the Naval Academy. But I began to worry about my sense of timing. I mean, what can you say to graduating midshipmen in a year when the most famous ship on Earth is again the Titanic? Laughter But then I learned this is a totally, almost blindly confident bunch. After all, over in King Hall you eat cannonballs. Laughter Now, for those of you who don't know what they are, they're not the ones Francis Scott Key saw flying over Fort McHenry they're just huge apple dumplings. Nonetheless, they require a lot of confidence. Laughter I will try to be relatively brief today. I was given only one instruction I should not take as long as your class took to scale Herndon Monument. Now, at 4 hours and 5 minutes, the slowest time in recorded history, I have a lot of leeway. Laughter But you have more than made up for it. You have done great things, succeeding in a rigorous academic environment, trained to be superb officers. You have done extraordinary volunteer work, for which I am personally very grateful. In basketball, you made it to the NCAA's for the second time in a row. You defeated Army in football last year. In fact, you were 26 and 6 against teams from Army this year. And while I must remain neutral in these things laughter I salute your accomplishments. Laughter Let me also join the remarks that Secretary Dalton made in congratulating your Superintendent. Admiral Larson has performed remarkable service as an aviator, submarine commander, Commander in Chief in the Pacific, twice at the helm of the Academy. I got to know him well when he was our Commander in Chief in the Pacific. I came to appreciate more than I otherwise ever could have his unique blend of intelligence and insight and character and passionate devotion to duty. In view of the incident on the Indian subcontinent in the last few days, I think it's important for the historical record to note that the first senior official of the United States who told me that there was a serious potential problem there and we had better get ready for it was Admiral Chuck Larson, several years ago. When I asked him to return to the Academy, I thought it was almost too much, and then I realized it might have been too little, for he loves this Academy so much this is hardly tough duty. He met all its challenges. He taught you midshipmen to strive for excellence without arrogance, to maintain the highest ethical standards. Admiral, on behalf of the American people, I thank you for your service here, your 40 years in the Navy, your devotion to the United States. We are all very grateful to you. I also have every confidence that Admiral Ryan is a worthy successor, and I wish him well. As I speak to you and other graduates this spring, I want to ask you to think about the challenges we face as a nation in the century that is just upon us and how our mission must be to adapt to the changes of changing times while holding fast to our enduring ideals. In the coming weeks, I will talk about how the information revolution can widen the circle of opportunity or deepen inequality, about how immigration and our Nation's growing diversity can strengthen and unite America or weaken and divide it. But nothing I will have the chance to talk about this spring is more important than the mission I charge you with today, the timeless mission of our men and women in uniform protecting our Nation and upholding our values in the face of the changing threats that are as new as the new century. Members of the Class of 1998, you leave the Yard at the dawn of a new millennium, in a time of great hope. Around the world, people are embracing peace, freedom, free markets. More and more nations are committed to educating all their children and stopping the destruction of our environment. The information revolution is sparking economic growth and spreading the ideas of freedom around the world. Technology is moving so fast today that the top of the line, high speed computers you received as plebes today are virtually museum pieces. Laughter In this world, our country is blessed with peace, prosperity, declining social ills. But today's possibilities are not tomorrow's guarantees. Just last week, India conducted a series of nuclear explosive tests, reminding us that technology is not always a force for good. India's action threatens the stability of Asia and challenges the firm international consensus to stop all nuclear testing. So again I ask India to halt its nuclear weapons program and join the 149 other nations that have already signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. And I ask Pakistan to exercise restraint, to avoid a perilous nuclear arms race. This specter of a dangerous rivalry in South Asia is but one of the many signs that we must remain strong and vigilant against the kinds of threats we have seen already throughout the 20th century, regional aggression and competition, bloody civil wars, efforts to overthrow democracies. But also, our security is challenged increasingly by nontraditional threats, from adversaries both old and new, not only hostile regimes but also terrorists and international criminals, who cannot defeat us in traditional theaters of battle but search instead for new ways to attack, by exploiting new technologies and the world's increasing openness. As we approach the 21st century, our foes have extended the fields of battle, from physical space to cyberspace from the world's vast bodies of water to the complex workings of our own human bodies. Rather than invading our beaches or launching bombers, these adversaries may attempt cyberattacks against our critical military systems and our economic base. Or they may deploy compact and relatively cheap weapons of mass destruction, not just nuclear but also chemical or biological, to use disease as a weapon of war. Sometimes the terrorists and criminals act alone. But increasingly, they are interconnected and sometimes supported by hostile countries. If our children are to grow up safe and free, we must approach these new 21st century threats with the same rigor and determination we applied to the toughest security challenges of this century. We are taking strong steps against these threats today. We've improved antiterrorism cooperation with other countries tightened security for our troops, our diplomats, our air travelers strengthened sanctions on nations that support terrorists given our law enforcement agencies new tools. We broke up terrorist rings before they could attack New York's Holland Tunnel, the United Nations, and our airlines. We have captured and brought to justice many of the offenders. But we must do more. Last week, I announced America's first comprehensive strategy to control international crime and bring criminals, terrorists, and money launderers to justice. Today I come before you to announce three new initiatives the first broadly directed at combating terrorism the other two addressing two potential threats from terrorists and hostile nations, attacks on our computer networks and other critical systems upon which our society depends and attacks using biological weapons. On all of these efforts, we will need the help of the Navy and the Marines. Your service will be critical in combating these new challenges. To make these three initiatives work, we must have the concerted efforts of a whole range of Federal agencies, from the Armed Forces to law enforcement to intelligence to public health. I am appointing a National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism, to bring the full force of all our resources to bear swiftly and effectively. First, we will use our new integrated approach to intensify the fight against all forms of terrorism to capture terrorists, no matter where they hide to work with other nations to eliminate terrorist sanctuaries overseas to respond rapidly and effectively to protect Americans from terrorism at home and abroad. Second, we will launch a comprehensive plan to detect, deter, and defend against attacks on our critical infrastructures, our power systems, water supplies, police, fire, and medical services, air traffic control, financial services, telephone systems, and computer networks. Just 15 years ago, these infrastructures some within government, some in the private sector were separate and distinct. Now, they are linked together over vast computer electronic networks, greatly increasing our productivity but also making us much more vulnerable to disruption. Three days ago, we saw the enormous impact of a single failed electronic link when a satellite malfunction disabled pagers, ATM's, credit card systems, and TV and radio networks all around the world. Beyond such accidents, intentional attacks against our critical systems already are underway. Hackers break into government and business computers. They can raid banks, run up credit card charges, extort money by threats to unleash computer viruses. If we fail to take strong action, then terrorists, criminals, and hostile regimes could invade and paralyze these vital systems, disrupting commerce, threatening health, weakening our capacity to function in a crisis. In response to these concerns, I established a commission chaired by retired General Tom Marsh, to assess the vulnerability of our critical infrastructures. They returned with a pointed conclusion Our vulnerability, particularly to cyberattacks, is real and growing. And they made important recommendations, that we will now implement, to put us ahead of the danger curve. We have the best trained, best equipped, best prepared Armed Forces in history. But as ever, we must be ready to fight the next war, not the last one. And our military, as strong as it is, cannot meet these challenges alone. Because so many key components of our society are operated by the private sector, we must create a genuine public private partnership to protect America in the 21st century. Together, we can find and reduce the vulnerabilities to attack in all critical sectors, develop warning systems including a national center to alert us to attacks, increase our cooperation with friendly nations, and create the means to minimize damage and rapidly recover in the event attacks occur. We can and we must make these critical systems more secure, so that we can be more secure. Third, we will undertake a concerted effort to prevent the spread and use of biological weapons and to protect our people in the event these terrible weapons are ever unleashed by a rogue state, a terrorist group, or an international criminal organization. Conventional military force will continue to be crucial to curbing weapons of mass destruction. In the confrontation against Iraq, deployment of our Navy and Marine forces has played a key role in helping to convince Saddam Hussein to accept United Nations inspections of his weapons facilities. But we must pursue the fight against biological weapons on many fronts. We must strengthen the international Biological Weapons Convention with a strong system of inspections to detect and prevent cheating. This is a major priority. It was part of my State of the Union Address earlier this year, and we are working with other nations and our industries to make it happen. Because our troops serve on the front line of freedom, we must take special care to protect them. So we have been working on vaccinating them against biological threats, and now we will inoculate all our Armed Forces, active duty and reserves, against deadly anthrax bacteria. Finally, we must do more to protect our civilian population from biological weapons. The Defense Department has been teaching State and local officials to respond if the weapons are brandished or used. Today it is announcing plans to train National Guard and reserve elements in every region to address this challenge. But again, we must do more to protect our people. We must be able to recognize a biological attack quickly in order to stop its spread. We will work to upgrade our public health systems for detection and warning, to aid our preparedness against terrorism, and to help us cope with infectious diseases that arise in nature. We will train and equip local authorities throughout the Nation to deal with an emergency involving weapons of mass destruction, creating stockpiles of medicines and vaccines to protect our civilian population against the kind of biological agents our adversaries are most likely to obtain or develop. And we will pursue research and development to create the next generation of vaccines, medicines, and diagnostic tools. The human genome project will be very, very important in this regard. And again, it will aid us also in fighting infectious diseases. We must not cede the cutting edge of biotechnology to those who would do us harm. Working with the Congress, America must maintain its leadership in research and development. It is critical to our national security. In our efforts to battle terrorism and cyberattacks and biological weapons, all of us must be extremely aggressive. But we must also be careful to uphold privacy rights and other constitutional protections. We do not ever undermine freedom in the name of freedom. To the men and women of this Class of 1998, over 4 years you have become part of an institution, the Navy, that has repeatedly risen to the challenges of battle and of changing technology. In the Spanish American War, 100 years ago, our Navy won the key confrontations at Manila Bay and off Cuba. In the years between the World Wars, the Navy made tremendous innovations with respect to aircraft carriers and amphibious operations. In the decisive battle in the Pacific in World War II at Midway, our communications experts and code breakers obtained and Admiral Nimitz seized on crucial information about the enemy fleet that secured victory against overwhelming odds. In the cold war, nuclear propulsion revolutionized our carrier and submarine operations. And today, our Navy and Marine Corps are fundamental to our strategy of global engagement, aiding our friends and warning foes that they cannot undermine our efforts to build a just, peaceful, free future. President Theodore Roosevelt put it succinctly a long time ago. "A good Navy," he said, "is the surest guaranty of peace." We will have that good Navy, because of you, your readiness, strength, your knowledge of science and technology, your ability to promptly find and use essential information, and above all, your strength of spirit and your core values, honor, courage, and commitment. I ask you to remember, though, that with these new challenges especially, we must all, as Americans, be united in purpose and spirit. Our defense has always drawn on the best of our entire Nation. The Armed Forces have defended our freedom, and in turn, freedom has allowed our people to thrive. Our security innovations have often been sparked and supported over and over by the brilliance and drive of people in non military sectors, our businesses and universities, our scientists and technologists. Now, more than ever, we need the broad support and participation of our citizens as your partners in meeting the security challenges of the 21st century. Members of the Class of 1998, you are just moments away from becoming ensigns and second lieutenants, and I have not taken as much time as you did to climb the Monument. Laughter I thank you for giving me a few moments of your attention to talk to you and our Nation about the work you will be doing for them for the rest of your careers. You will be our guardians and champions of freedom. Let me say just one thing in closing on a more personal note. We must protect our people from danger and keep America safe and free. But I hope you will never lose sight of why we are doing it. We are doing it so that all of your country men and women can live meaningful lives, according to their own rights. So work hard, but don't forget to pursue also what fulfills you as people, the beauty of the natural world, literature, the arts, sports, volunteer service. Most of all, don't forget to take time for your personal lives, to show your love to your friends and, most of all, to your families, the parents and grandparents who made the sacrifices to get you here, in the future, your wives, your husbands, and your children. In a free society, the purpose of public service, in or out of uniform, is to provide all citizens with the freedom and opportunity to live their own dreams. So when you return from an exhausting deployment or just a terrible day, never forget to cherish your loved ones, and always be grateful that you have been given the opportunity to serve, to protect for yourselves and for your loved ones and for your fellow Americans the precious things that make life worth living and freedom worth defending. I know your families are very proud of you today. Now go, and make America proud. Good luck, and God bless you. May 18, 1998 Prime Minister Tony Blair. Thanks very much, ladies and gentlemen. Do sit down. I'm sorry there isn't a text yet, but you'll be provided with one shortly. Can I, first of all, set out what I believe that we have achieved at this summit, and then ask the President of the European Commission and, finally, the President of the United States to speak to you? As you know, there have been, for some years, serious differences over the U.S.'s sanctions policy and the EU's extraterritoriality. And what we established today is at least a basis for a lasting solution to these problems. We've avoided a showdown over sanctions with which we don't agree, and we've done it in a way that at least provides the chance of a solution to the problem in the future. And the President of the United States will set out the U.S. position in a moment. So there's still more work to do, but it is a real step forward. In addition, today we have launched a major new transatlantic trade initiative, the Transatlantic Economic Partnership, which will further add momentum to the process of developing what is already the most important bilateral trade relationship in the world. We've also agreed to work ever more closely together to promote multilateral trade liberalization. Finally, we have welcomed the very substantial report presented to us by our senior officials on the progress achieved since our last summit towards further implementation of the 1995 new transatlantic trade agreement. Some examples of this are cooperation to prevent drug smuggling through the Caribbean a joint decision to give awards to those in Central and Eastern Europe who have helped in recent years to entrench democracy and civil rights in those countries and a joint EU U.S. program in the Ukraine and Poland to warn women of the dangers of being lured into the sex trade in Western Europe. So there are a series of measures that we have put together and agreed, and we have made very substantial progress on both the issues of sanctions and extraterritoriality, and of course, in taking forward our trade partnership through a major new trade initiative. And I'm delighted to be able to make those announcements to you today. Jacques, do you want to add some words? President Jacques Santer. Ladies and gentlemen, our summit today is the sixth between the European Union and the United States since the adoption of the new transatlantic agenda. These summits are becoming more and more important to the development of the transatlantic relationship. The breadth of issues we covered today and the substantial agreements we came to prove how worthwhile these meetings now are. The 1995 new transatlantic agenda has led to much more intense cooperation across the Atlantic. It is not just a question of warm words but complete agreements. For example, today's signature of the mutual recognition agreement offers real benefits to business and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic. Today's summit is particularly important because we and the United States have struck a deal on the U.S. sanctions laws. This agreement, after weeks of intense negotiations with the U.S. administration, finally brings peace in this longstanding dispute. The European Union has opposed the United States sanctions laws on investments in Iran, Libya, and Cuba not only because we believe they are illegal but also because they are counterproductive. We in Europe have always taken very seriously the fight to curb terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But the U.S. sanctions laws make our cooperation on these issues more, rather than less difficult. The deal today means that European companies and businessmen can conduct their business without the threat of U.S. sanctions hanging over their heads. It's a deal that is good for European companies who now have protection from the sanctions. It's a deal that is good for the European Union which has shown that it can act together, united in important foreign policy issues. And it is good for the transatlantic relationship which can now develop further, free of this longstanding dispute. There are obviously still some further steps that need to be taken before the deal can be completely implemented, but I am hopeful that these will be concluded as soon as possible. By getting rid of the biggest problem in our relationship with the United States, the door is now open to further deepen and enhance our cooperation across the Atlantic. Today at the summit we agreed to a substantial new initiative to deepen the trade relationship called the Transatlantic Economic Partnership. In this initiative, first we address the further removal of barriers in our bilateral trade. It also says that the United States and the European Union will work together to achieve a substantial, further trade liberalization on a multilateral basis. Today's agreement will add to the prosperity of both the United States and the European Union and, more generally, in the world. It will, thus, create better prospects for future jobs. President Clinton, Prime Minister Tony Blair, and I will be in Geneva to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the GATT, an organization which has contributed so much to the stability and prosperity of the postwar world. Our agreements this morning sends a powerful message of transatlantic support to that meeting and to the further development of multilateral liberalization. But of course, today's summit, as is usual on these occasions, was also an opportunity to discuss many key foreign policy issues including Turkey, Cyprus, Kosovo, and Ukraine. On Ukraine, we agreed to call on the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to play its part in the implementation of the memorandum of understanding on nuclear safety concluded between the G 7 and the Ukraine. In conclusion, this summit has placed the transatlantic relationship on an even stronger footing. We can now look forward to an even deeper partnership in the future. Thank you. President Clinton. Thank you very much. I'd like to begin by thanking Prime Minister Blair for the creative and strong leadership that he has provided to the European Union and to the U.S. EU partnership. And I thank President Santer for his years of work for European unity. America welcomes a strong partnership with a strong and united Europe to improve the lives, the security, the well being of our own people and others around the world. The EU, as I'm sure all of you know, is America's largest trade and investment partner. Two way trade supports more than 6 million jobs on both sides of the Atlantic. Today I am very pleased that we have agreed to new steps to strengthen that economic partnership. First, we will work to dismantle trade barriers, both bilateral and multilateral trade barriers, in areas such as manufacturing, services, and agriculture, about a dozen in all, while maintaining the highest standards of labor and environment. Now, let me also say that we have agreed in this effort that we will make an effort to give all the stakeholders in our economic lives environmental stakeholders, labor stakeholders, other elements of civil society a chance to be heard in these negotiations, in these discussions. And I believe that is a new paradigm which ought to be mirrored in trade negotiations throughout the world. Indeed, as President Santer said, when we conclude here, I am going to Geneva, where I will speak about how we can work together to strengthen the world trading system on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. And I will argue that the WTO ought to embrace the kinds of things that we and the EU have agreed to do here, to give all the stakeholders a role and to do a better job of respecting the importance of preserving the environment and of making sure trade works for the benefit of all the people in all the countries involved. I am also pleased that we have reached agreement today, as the Prime Minister and President Santer said, on an issue of vital importance to our own security and well being. We share an interest in combating terrorism and limiting the spread of weapons of mass destruction. We understand, always, the problems with weapons of mass destruction, but we are, I hope, all more sensitive to them in light of the recent events in South Asia. Here in London, the EU countries have committed to enhance their cooperation with us with regard to Iran. They will step up efforts to prevent the transfer of technology that could be used to develop weapons of mass destruction. They have agreed to work toward the ratification of all 11 counterterrorism conventions. We've agreed to cooperate in the development of Caspian energy resources. I'd also like to emphasize that Russia, too, has taken important steps to strengthen controls over the export of sensitive technology, notably but not exclusively to Iran, in effect establishing Russia's first comprehensive catchall export control system. We'll be watching and working closely with the Russians to help make sure this system works. The actions taken by the EU and Russia advance Congress' objective in enacting the Iran Libya Sanctions Act. It is not primarily a sanctions act. It is an act that is designed to give the incentives for all of us to work together to retard the spread of weapons of mass destruction and to support more aggressive efforts to fight terrorism. Therefore, the waivers we have granted today are part of our overall strategy to deter Iran from acquiring weapons of mass destruction and promoting terrorism. And it is an important new stage in our partnership. We have also forged a pathbreaking common approach to deter investment in illegally expropriated property around the world, including but not limited to Cuba. Our governments will deny all forms of commercial assistance for these transactions, including loans, grants, subsidies, fiscal advantages, guarantees, political risk insurance. This understanding furthers the goals of protecting property rights in Cuba and worldwide, advances the interests of U.S. claimants, and protects U.S. investors, and does so far more effectively than the United States could have done alone. It also furthers, as the Prime Minister said and as President Santer did, the objectives of the European Union in getting away from the unilateral sanctions regime. We have finally agreed to work together with Russia to strengthen nuclear safety. This is also very important, especially with regard to nuclear waste removal and storage in northwest Russia. We will act together to encourage Ukraine to embark on bold economic reform and to speed the closure of the Chernobyl reactors that threaten safety and health. Let me finally add that today we will honor 50 exceptional individuals from Europe's new democracies for their work in helping freedom take strong root across the continent. I believe about half a dozen of them are here today. From protecting human rights in Belarus to preserving the environment in Slovakia, these dedicated men and women, like so many others, are helping to make Europe free, peaceful, prosperous, and united. I thank them, and again, I thank the Prime Minister for his truly outstanding leadership. Thank you very much. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. All three of you have spoken of the economic benefits which could flow to Northern Ireland, and in some cases, you've announced specific packages in view of the polls which clearly show that the majority of the Unionist community has yet to be convinced. How conditional are those benefits on convincing the "yes" vote in the referendum on Friday? Prime Minister Blair. Well, I don't think anyone is trying to say that investment is conditional on how people vote. But what people are saying is It's a matter of common sense if there's peace and stability in Northern Ireland, there is a far greater chance of attracting investment that people from Europe, from the United States, from right around the world see Northern Ireland as an immensely exciting investment opportunity. But obviously, it's far easier from them to come and invest if they're investing in the context of peace and stability. And I know that there are still people in Northern Ireland yet to make up their minds. And in the end the decision has got to be for people in Northern Ireland. But I have answered very clearly and specifically some of the questions that people have put to me. I have tried to tell people why it is so important that they recognize that the choice is not between the future that we've outlined in this agreement, which is the only chance I've seen of a peaceful, successful future for Northern Ireland, and the status quos that exist now. The danger that we foresee is that the real choice is between the agreement and everything slipping back. And we want to do as much as we possibly can to avoid that, because we recognize, as your question implies, that if we can get real peace and stability there, well, the chances for people in Northern Ireland are just amazing. And we would like them to take advantage of that. Mr. President. President Clinton. Well, I agree with that. There's no sort of quid pro quo here. It's just a fact that, for example, the Irish community in America, both Protestant and Catholic, which desperately wants to see an end to the Troubles, will be more interested in trying to make sure that a courageous effort on behalf of peace by the people of Northern Ireland has a better chance to succeed by greater investment. I don't think there's any question about that. I also would just say that I think that if the majority community in any vote to change, you might argue that the majority will always be willing to change because they're in the majority they say, "Well, we have what we like now." But they don't have peace now. They don't have maximum prosperity now. And if you think about the next 10 to 20 years, if I were an Irish Protestant, which I am, living in Northern Ireland instead of the United States, I would be thinking about my daughter's future and her children's future. And I'd say, "If you look at the framework, this protects us, no matter what happens to population patterns, no matter what happens to immigration patterns, no matter what happens. We're all going to be able to be protected and have a role in the democracy of our country, and I like that." So I'm hoping that everyone will be thinking that way, thinking about the future, thinking about their children. And I think the risk of doing this is so much smaller than the risk of letting it blow apart, that I believe in the end a lot of the undecided voters will go in and vote their hopes instead of their fears. President Santer. I only would add that the European Commission launched several years ago, as you remember, the peace program and also for the reconciliation for Northern Ireland and the surrounding counties. And I was very impressed, on my last trip in Northern Ireland several weeks ago, how many people are working across community levels in these schools, these programs. There are more, at this moment, more than 11,000 applications of this program, more than 200,000 people across the community working in these programs, and they are supporting, from grassroot levels, these peace and reconciliation programs. Therefore, I think we have to support, also from an economic side, this peace process. It is a longstanding process, but nevertheless, I think that through our structures and programs that people are coming closer together and the cross border community complying also to a lasting peace. And I wanted also that it would happen on Friday, and we ask that you would also have the possibility to support it for the next time. Middle East Peace Process Q. Mr. President, Secretary Albright and Dennis Ross are here in London after the talks in Washington with Prime Minister Netanyahu. Has the Prime Minister softened his resistance to the American proposal for Israeli troop withdrawals, pull backs from the West Bank? What will Secretary Albright take to the meeting today when she sees Yasser Arafat? Could you give us some kind of update on these talks? President Clinton. On a few occasions in the past I have given you an answer like this, and I hope you will abide my having to do so again. The posture of the talks now is such that anything I say publicly to characterize the position taken by Mr. Netanyahu or anybody else in the back and forth would almost certainly reduce the chances of our being able to get an agreement which would move the parties to final status and reduce dramatically tensions in the region. So I think I should reaffirm what I said earlier today. The parties are working. They have been working hard. In my judgment, they have been working in honest, earnest good faith. And we have our hopes, but I think it is important not to raise false hopes or to characterize the talks at this time. They are just in a period when anything we say publicly will increase the chances that we will fail. And if we get something we can say, believe me, I'd be the first one to the microphone. I'd be very happy. But I think it's important not to do more than that now. Chequers Golf Outing Q. Mr. President, we gather it's not been all work today and that you are reported to have introduced our Prime Minister to the mysteries of golf. How did he do? President Clinton. You know, there's a golf course across the street from Chequers, and the first nine holes were a part of the Chequers estate until 1906. So it's at least 100 years old, the first nine holes. So this morning I got up early, and the Prime Minister went with me, and we walked about four and a half holes of the golf course. And he says, mind you, that he has never hit a golf ball before in his life. And he asked me to drive two balls off of every tee of these four holes we played, and that he would play the rest of the way in. So I told him how to hold the club, how to stand, how to swing. And it was embarrassing how good he was. And the guy that was going around with us was a four handicap. For those of you who play, that's nearly scratch it's very good. And he thought, he just couldn't believe the Prime Minister was telling the truth, that he never hit the ball before. It was amazing. All I had to do was get him off the tee, and he did very well. He three putted no greens he two putted every green, all four greens. And he only just missed two shots. The rest of it, it was unbelievable. Either he is an unbelievable athlete, or I have a career as a golf instructor after I leave the White House. Laughter One of the two things must be true. Prime Minister Blair. It's true. I'm ashamed to say I haven't played golf. But I had the best teacher I could possibly have. It's not everyone who says he's been given golfing lessons by the President of the United States of America. But we will put it down to beginner's luck, a bit like politics. Laughter Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia Q. Mr. President, have you or will you contact the Indian or Pakistani Prime Ministers concerning the nuclear programs they're developing? What factors are you weighing in deciding whether to go ahead with your trip planned for later this year to those two countries? And did the agreement that you announced today, or understanding on sanctions that you announced today, provide any way through to resolving the dispute, that you had up at the G 8, on how to properly respond to India and Pakistan's programs? President Clinton. The answer to the latter question is, no. The answer to the first two questions you asked is, I would like to talk to the Pakistani Prime Minister just to reassure him of my support for a decision not to test and my understanding of the difficulty of his position and what I think is the way out of this. I think Prime Minister Blair feels the same way. I have made no decision about my travel plans. But keep in mind, what we need here is a way to break out of this box. What we need here is a way for both the national aspirations for security and for standing on the part of the Indians and the national aspirations for security and for standing on the part of the Pakistanis to be resolved in a way that is positive. I mean, this is, indeed, a very sad thing because it has the prospect of spreading not just to Pakistan, but to others in a way that could reverse decades of movement away from the nuclear precipice, in ways that clearly will not increase the security of countries, no matter how many times they say over and over and over again they only want these weapons for defensive purposes. And so that's what we have to do. And it's too soon for quick, easy answers on that. But I can tell you that my view is, we need instead of saying, "We're not going to talk. We're not going to go here. We're not going to go there," what we really need to think of is Pakistan has been a good ally of ours, India has been, arguably, the most successful democracy in history in the last 50 years because they preserved the democracy in the face of absolutely overwhelming diversity and difficulty, and pressures internal and external, and they can't get along over Kashmir, and they have some other tensions. And then their neighbors sometimes turn up the tensions a little bit. We've got to find a way out of this. We can't have a situation where every country in the world that thinks it has a problem, either in terms of its standing or its security, believes that the way to resolve that is to put a couple of scientists in a laboratory and figure out how to conduct a nuclear explosion. We just that is not the right thing to do. But we have to find the right way, offer it, and work it through with these folks. And I think maybe we can. But the answer to your question is, I'd like to talk to the Pakistani Prime Minister, not because I think I can pressure him into doing that I don't think for a moment I can do that but just because I would like to express my personal conviction about this in a way that I hope would allow them to think about it. Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus Q. Mr. President, did you have a chance to talk about Turkey's European case and, related with that, the Cyprus question with Mr. Blair and other world leaders? President Clinton. Yes, I did. And if I had any sense, I'd just stop there. That's the answer to your question. You know what I think, what the United States believes. The United States believes that there ought to be a path for Turkey to keep moving toward closer union with Europe. The United States supports the fact that Turkey and Greece are in NATO. The United States believes that there should be an honorable settlement to the Cyprus impasse because it is keeping Turkey and Greece, and the other Aegean issues keeping Turkey and Greece from being genuine allies and being genuinely available to spend their time, their energy, and their resources promoting peace and development for their own people, and being enormous, stabilizing forces in their respective regions of Europe. So, for me, this is a very important thing. To get there, I think we'll have to proceed on many fronts at once, and I think both the Turks and Greeks will have to make difficult decisions, which I believe the European Union and I know the United States will strongly support. But I don't think we can solve one problem in isolation from the other. I think we have to move forward on all these problems, the Cyprus, the Aegean jurisdictional disputes, the role of Turkey in Europe's future all of that we have to move forward on. But I think that both the Greeks and the Turks have a bigger interest in a comprehensive resolution of that, and I know the rest of us do, than it appears just from following daily events. We have got to resolve this. Prime Minister Blair. Can I just add to that, on behalf of the European Union, that I agree entirely with what the President has just said. And I think it's important to emphasize yet again that Europe wants a good and close relationship with Turkey. We want Turkey to feel included in the family of European nations. We have a deep concern over what has happened and is happening in Cyprus. And we believe it is essential that we make progress in this area. Now, we know the difficulties that Turkey felt that it had following the Luxembourg conclusions last year, but I think we should and will redouble our efforts to give a very clear signal to Turkey about our proper and true intentions and also to do what we can to bring hope in the conflict in Cyprus. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia Q. Thank you very much, Mr. President. If I could ask the Prime Minister and President Santer, Pakistan is complaining about the lack of response to India's nuclear explosions. Specifically, at the G 8, there was no call for sanctions. Britain and the European Union are not following the lead of the United States, Canada, and Japan and calling for sanctions. Will Britain and the European Union impose sanctions on India for its nuclear explosions? And to you, Mr. President, beyond words to Pakistan and beyond the possible delivery of those F 16's that Pakistan has already paid for, what specific concrete steps will you take to reassure the Pakistanis that might convince them not to go ahead with their own nuclear test? Prime Minister Blair. Well, in respect to the first point, I mean, as the G 8 statement made clear, obviously, individual countries have their own individual positions vis a vis sanctions. But do not underestimate two very clear points of agreement that were established in our G 8 discussions. The first is our condemnation of the Indian nuclear tests. The second is our desire to see India integrate itself unconditionally into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty process. And I believe, if we need to look at the way forward from here, it is not merely a question of expressing our dismay and concern, which I did personally to the Indian Prime Minister last Friday it is also finding the best way forward from now. And we expressed that very clearly at the G 8. I'm sure that is the position of all of the European Union countries, as well. And I think the most persuasive argument with Pakistan is to say very clearly to them that if India believes that it enhances its standing in the world by this action, it does not. And all of us are deeply conscious of the threat and danger to the security of the world that nuclear testing poses. So that is why I think it is important to see where we go from here. And the statement of the G 8 particularly in relation to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was most important and significant. President Santer. I only want to add, first, that the European Union would, at the next European Ministerial Council on the 25th of May so next Monday discuss the relations about the European Union with India on the basis of the statements we made at the G 8 meeting last weekend. Second, speaking from the European Commission, I must say that the main program we have about 80 to 90 percent of our programs are humanitarian programs to India. We are focusing to the poorest people of this country. So I don't think that sanctions for these programs, the humanitarian programs, would not produce any deeper concern. But we have to reflect on our attitude and the concerted attitude to India on the next occasion on Monday. President Clinton. First of all, let me say, I think that it's important to point out that in addition to Japan, Canada, and the United States, the Dutch, the Swedes have announced that they intend to have economic take economic actions, and I believe there will be other European countries as well. And everybody who was at the G 8 said that there would be some impact on their relations with India as a result of this. So I thought it was quite a strong statement. And given the well known positions of all the countries involved, I thought it was stronger than could have been predicted when we went in. Now, what I would hope we could work with the Pakistanis on are specific things that would allay their security concerns and also make it clear that there will be political and economic benefits over the long run to showing restraint here. But the Prime Minister mentioned one of the things that I think could really help us out of this conundrum, which would be if India would say, "Okay, now we're ready to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty." Pakistan has said in the past that, if India signed, they would sign. But again, I say somehow we've got to put this back on track. Remember, it wasn't very long ago that Argentina and Brazil had nuclear programs. And they just said, "We're not going to do this. We are not going to run the slightest risk that some future rift between ourselves would lead to some kind of explosion. We're not going to sink vast amounts of our national treasury into this when we have so many poor people in our country and we need this money freed up to other things. We are going to find other ways, number one, to take care of our security and, number two, to consider ourselves and have others consider us great nations." And I think it would be fair to say that both of them have succeeded very well. I think it would be fair to say that at least all of us who live in the Americas believe they're enormously important countries and think more of them, not less of them, because they gave up their nuclear weapons. They have vigorous militaries, and they certainly feel themselves secure. So we have to try to create that kind of condition under admittedly more difficult circumstances on the Indian subcontinent that is, the previous tensions between India and China, the previous tensions between India and Pakistan. I understand they're different, but the fundamental fact is the same. So that's what I'm going to try to sell, and whatever happens, I'm going to work every day I'm President, until I leave office in 2001, I'm going to work for this because I do not want to see us slip back away. We're on the right track here as a world. We don't want to turn back. Northern Ireland Peace Process Q. Mr. President, why is it that, if you feel it's so important to secure a yes vote in Northern Ireland, you decided it would be counterproductive to visit Northern Ireland before the vote? And Prime Minister, are you concerned at opinion polls which suggest a slippage in the yes vote amongst the Unionist community? There is one in two Northern Ireland newspapers today, which you may be aware of, which suggests that only 25 percent of young Protestants, who've never known anything but violence, are prepared to vote yes. President Clinton. Let me answer your question first, because I think your question to the Prime Minister is the far more important one. I decided that I shouldn't go, first of all, because I felt that I'd have just as good a chance to have my message heard if I did something like the interview the Prime Minister and I did with David Frost, that would be widely heard, under circumstances that would not allow me to become the issue in the election for those that are opposed to this measure. I believe you have to understand what I believe. I believe that the voters who actually weigh the merits and the substance and think rationally about what the alternatives are, if this fails and if it succeeds, will overwhelmingly vote yes. I believe the voters who will vote no will be those who, frankly, don't trust the other side and don't feel that they can trust the other side and who, therefore, can get distracted. And I do not want to be a distraction. The second reason I didn't want to do it is a lot of the leaders in Northern Ireland didn't think it would help. And my own experience is, I was the Governor of a State with not many more people than Northern Ireland had before I became President. And there were several times when the President of another party came into my State. At one time, I remember in 1984, President Reagan, who was immensely popular in my State, campaigning for my opponent. President Reagan got 62 percent of the vote, and I got 63 percent of the vote. So it had no impact. I did not want to become the issue. But I did want my commitment to the welfare of the people of Northern Ireland in both communities to be heard. So I hope I made the right decision, and I hope I was heard. Prime Minister Blair. To answer your question, I think there's obviously still a tremendous amount of debate going on. The fear that people have on specific issues I've addressed those fears, each one of them and those fears really revolve around this question Is it clear that if people want to take their seats in the Government of Northern Ireland or to benefits of any of the programs or an accelerated prison release or any of the rest of it, is it clear that they will have to have given up violence for good? The answer to that question is unequivocally yes. It's what the agreement states. And I've made it clear, we will clarify that and make it clear in the legislation. But beyond that, it is a decision that people are going to have to weigh in their own minds. And the easiest thing in politics is simply to say no. The easiest thing in politics is to sit there and say, "Change is something I'm afraid of, and I'm therefore just going to refuse it." But I ask everyone who takes that attitude to reflect upon what the future holds if there is a "no" vote for this agreement. And all the way through this campaign I've tried to ask people and to say to them, in order to understand their fears, say to them, "Well, what is the alternative to this agreement? Because, after all, what unionism has fought for for 60, 70 years has been the principle of consent, and that principle is enshrined in terms in the agreement in return, fairness and equal treatment for people from whatever side of the community they come from." Now, those are principles everyone can accept. That's the agreement. That's the alternative I take to the table. I still don't know what the alternative is on the other side. And I just hope people reflect on that and really think about it, because every generation gets its chances this is the chance for this generation in Northern Ireland. And we've all done our best to provide it for people, but in the end it's their decision. I can't make that decision for people. I can only tell them honestly what I believe and feel. Microsoft Antitrust Case Q. Mr. President, Microsoft has said that preventing it from distributing its Windows '98 software would cripple the computer industry and slow U.S. growth. Given the breakdown of talks over the weekend, do you now see a collision between Microsoft and the Justice Department as inevitable, and do you concur with their assessment of the economic consequences? President Clinton. Well, let me say, as you know, as a general principle, I have taken the view that I should not comment on matters within the jurisdiction of the Justice Department that could be the subject of legal action. At this time, I do not think I should depart from that policy on this case, even though it obviously will have a big impact on an important sector of our economy. But I would have to say, based on what I know to date, I have confidence in the way the antitrust division in the Justice Department has handled the matter. I say this, what I said I want to reserve the right at sometime in the future, if I think it's appropriate, to make a comment, because this is not just an open and shut case of one party sues somebody else. This is something that would have a significant impact on our economy. But I think that, based on what I know, I have confidence in the way the antitrust division has handled this, and while it's pending at this time, I think I should stick to my policy and not comment. European Union United States Trade Q. It seems like every 2 or 3 years there's another statement by European and American leaders that there's been another major breakthrough in trade relations. Do you now, all three of you, think it's time to set a clear and firm objective of a full scale free trade agreement in goods, services, and capital across the Atlantic? And, secondly, for Mr. President I think we're struck by your repeated use of the word "stakeholders" in your comments upon the agreement that you have reached today. Does this have something to do with your discussions about the third way that you've been holding with Mr. Blair, and is this now a keyword in the process? President Clinton. Well, let me answer, first of all. The question of whether there should be a U.S. EU comprehensive trade negotiation is one more properly directed to the EU because there is the United States has supported European Union and any devices, including the EMU, chosen by the leaders to achieve that union. We have also supported the broadest possible trade relationship with Europe and, as you know and have commented on elsewhere, a similar relationship in Latin America and in the Asia Pacific region. Now, as you know, to make full disclosure, I would have to have fast track authority from the Congress to do some, but not all, of the things that we have contemplated in this agreement. I would be for an even more sweeping one, but I think, to be fair, it's more difficult, with all the other tensions and debates of unification going on in Europe, to get much further than we've gotten today, and what we have agreed to do is very considerable, indeed. Now, the question you asked about the stakeholders, I have always believed that our country that the United States could not succeed, in the end, economically and socially at home, in providing opportunity for everyone who is responsible enough to work for it, and in having a community that's coming together instead of being torn apart, unless we maintained our level of engagement and involvement in the rest of the world. I have always believed we could not sustain our involvement in the rest of the world in trade and other areas unless the American people thought we were doing it in a way that was consistent with their values when it comes to basic working standards, basic living standards, and preserving the global environment. So what we have tried to do, without prescribing the end, is to set up a process here for our negotiation which will let all those folks into the trade debate. And what I am going to argue for at the WTO is an even more sweeping example of that. But Sir Leon Brittan I think he's here today commented earlier this year that, in the preamble to the WTO, it says that sustainable development should be the goal of increasing global trade, and that part of the trade agenda should be providing the means to preserve the environment and increasing the number of tools to do so. That's just one example. Is it part of the socalled third way? I think you could say that, but it's not something that came out of our dinner conservation last night. This is something Prime Minister Blair and I have long believed ought to be done. But you can't we don't exist as economic animals alone, and in fact, if we don't find a way to prove that increasing trade will lead to prosperity more broadly shared in all the countries in which we deal and will give us the tools to improve the environment, in the end, our trade policies will prove self defeating. President Santer. For our trade relations, I can only say that since we adopted the new transatlantic agenda in December 1995, we made a huge progress, a long way together. And Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, this morning, made a list of all we have delivered since '95. It is a very impressive list. Now, it's coming the way how we can deepen these transatlantic partnership relations further. And that we did this morning. And I think that this is really a major result for the future. We are the biggest world partner, the United States and Europe, and we have a balanced trade relations. And we have also a balanced foreign direct investments on both sides of the Atlantic, and, therefore, it seems to me that's very important that we strengthen and that we deepen these relations step by step for the future and that we make it in a very comprehensive way. That's not to say that we would not have sometime some difficulties the partners always have some difficulties. I remember that also with the member states in the European Union that's my daily life I have to deal with difficulties. And even with our friends here, in the Presidency, we are discussing the same problems inaudible cultural fields as we are discussing sometimes also with the United States. So, the thing is only in what spirit we are dealing with these problems. And therefore, I think we have to be in a partnership like spirit, and that's the real sense and the deepness, the depths of our partnership relation. And therefore, I think this summit, the sixth summit since 1995, is a very important one, and gives a new signal for a new direction. Situation in Indonesia Q. With regard to Indonesia, sir, do you anticipate using U.S. forces to safeguard the lives of Americans in that country, and would the United States be prepared to give Soeharto asylum if it would help ease him from power? President Clinton. Well, with regard to the first question, I have been given no indication that it is necessary at this time. And with regard to the second, the prospect has not been presented. As you probably know, just as we were fixing to come in here, there are all kinds of new stories which may or may not be accurate about very rapidly unfolding developments in Indonesia. And I expect that all of you may want to come back to me in 2 or 3 hours or 4 hours for comments on things that may be clearer then than they are now. Let me just say again what I think the real issue is here. We want this country to come back together, not come apart. We want the military to continue to exercise maximum restraint so there will be minimum loss of life and injury. We want civil society to flourish there. We believe that Indonesia was headed for some tough times because there has to be some tough economic decisions taken no matter what government has been in. But the absence of a sense of political dialog and ownership and involvement obviously has contributed to the difficulties there. And then there has been a heartbreaking loss of life of all the people who burned to death, for example. So what we're looking for now and what we're going to be working for is the restoration of order without violence and the genuine opening of a political dialog that gives all parties in this country a feeling that they are a part of it. They should decide, the Indonesian people, who the leader of Indonesia is. And then we're going to do our best, when things settle down and human needs are taken care of and there's order, to try to get them back on the road to economic recovery. Because all of us have a big interest in the future success of a country that has done some fabulous things in the last 30 years, but it had a very bad few moments here. Thank you. Prime Minister Blair. Thank you very much, indeed. President Santer. Thank you. May 16, 1998 Northern Ireland Peace Process Mr. King. Let me start by thanking both of you for sharing some time on what is obviously a very busy day. We're in the closing days of the campaign for the peace initiative in Northern Ireland, and suddenly there seems to be apprehension, a lot of opposition. You see some slippage in the public opinion polls, the critics saying that you see these people, terrorists, criminals, at rallies being hailed as heroes. Each of you, if you could share your thoughts on what you think of the tone of the campaign, and do you share that apprehension? And how do you counter the message of those who say, vote no? Prime Minister Blair. I think before we get a vote as important as this, there is bound to be a lot of apprehension, consideration by people, and it's right that they treat this seriously, because it affects their future. And one of the fascinating things is there has been very little debate in this referendum campaign about the institutional structure, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the relationship with the Republic of Ireland, because the thing has wrecked every attempt to have a peace agreement in Northern Ireland for the past 50, 60 years. Instead, people are worried, as you say, about things like prisoners. But as I say to people, when you look at the facts, these guys who were out on the platform the other day under day release schemes, they were done years ago. The vast majority of prisoners will be out within a few years anyway. And in the end, people have got to look at the package as a whole and say, "What is the best for the future to have stability and prosperity and the chance to bring up your children with some prospect of staying in Northern Ireland and doing well, or to slip back into the ways that Northern Ireland knew for decade upon decade of division and bitterness and hatred?" President Clinton. I think some of the reservation has come from people who wonder Well, is there some sort of trick here can somebody have it both ways can they be part of the political life of the country and can they sort of condone violence? And I can tell you, at least from America's point of view, the answer to that is no. Anybody who resorts to violence will have no friends in the United States. I don't care what side they're on or what their heritage is or what their previous ties are. And I think I can speak for the overwhelming majority of Irish Americans in both the Catholic and Protestant communities, that all we have ever wanted was a just peace. This peace embodies the principle of consent. It gives the Irish people of both traditions the right to chart their future in Northern Ireland and to make of it what they will. I think, if it is embraced, you'll see a big increase in involvement of Irish Americans and other Americans eager to invest in Northern Ireland, eager to lift prosperity and to show people the benefits of peace. And so I very much hope that they will take that leap of faith and ask themselves a simple question What is the downside risk of going forward? It is so much lower than the downside risk of blowing this opportunity. Mr. King. You, at one point, considered visiting at the end of this trip, going to Northern Ireland, to the Republic of Ireland, decided not, perhaps that it would be viewed as meddling. Now in the last 24 to 48 hours, you've decided to speak out again forcefully, publicly. Why did you feel that necessary? And in your view, what role can you play in that process? And sir, what role do you think the people of Ireland will consider as they listen to the American President? President Clinton. Well, I decided to speak out because I think that the people of Northern Ireland know that I care a lot about the peace process, that the United States has been involved in it, that we've tried to not only I think it's important to point out not only has Mr. Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, been to the United States a lot, but I have spent far more time with Mr. Trimble and other leaders, Unionist leaders, than any American President ever has. I've tried to listen to both sides, to learn, to just encourage them to make their own peace and chart their own future. And so I think it's appropriate for me to speak out. I just was afraid if I went there I can remember when people from outside used to come to my home State and try to influence elections. It never worked, because in the end voters instinctively know they have to live with the consequences of their decision. So that's different. But if a journalist like you asks me a question about what I think the arguments are, I think that it's important for me to answer. And I hope that people on all sides of the issue will listen to what I have to say, because at least I have some experience here I know something about this. I know something about what happened in Bosnia I know something about what happened in the Middle East I know something about people who are divided and the difference in peace and war, or peace and sort of purgatory with violence. And peace has unfailingly been better, in the toughest of circumstances. Mr. King. As to people who actually get a vote listen to him, your friend, why should they listen to him? Prime Minister Blair. I think people do listen because people know the President is sincere, deeply committed, and actually knowledgeable about what has happened in Northern Ireland. And I can say, right from the time I became Prime Minister, but actually before that when the President visited Northern Ireland in 1995 I think it was, that his visit made a huge impact. People felt that he was someone that understood. Perhaps more than any other American President, people really feel that President Clinton both understands, knows, and people, they can also feel his willing them to do well. And I think people certainly will listen to that very much. Mr. King. As you look forward to this vote, take us back if you will. You have described this process as agonizingly difficult. In the last few hours, you had a series of transatlantic conversations yourselves. Mr. President, you were on the phone with Mr. Adams I believe twice, Mr. Trimble at least once, John Hume. Can you take us inside those conversations, pacing, raising your voice? You had people on each side that, "Nevermind, I can't do this. I'm going to back out." How did you keep it together, and how did you interrelate personally as you went through this process? Prime Minister Blair. Well, I don't think it was so much a question of raising our voice or obviously, these are conversations that you have with people at a particularly difficult moment, and you don't go right back over them the whole time. But I think in many ways what I found was tremendously useful in respect to the President's intervention was that people did and do respect his views on it, because, obviously in part, he's the President of the United States, but actually it's more to do with him personally, having shown commitment all the way through, having listened to all sides in the conflict, and therefore having some standing because of this own personal commitment, some credibility, if you like, to say to people, "Look, the eyes of the world are upon us. Let's see if we can go for this thing and make it happen." Mr. King. And as Thursday night turned to Good Friday, at any point did you think This isn't going to happen it's going to collapse? Prime Minister Blair. I'm afraid I thought that pretty regularly, at about hourly intervals. But in the end I mean, what always comes back home to me is we're 2 years off the year 2000 there is so much happening in the world, so many changes that I've seen in the last 10 or 15 years of my lifetime. I can't believe 2 years off the millennium that a place like Northern Ireland, which has got this extraordinary potential, where the people are tremendous people, as you know if you've been there, I cannot believe we can't find a way to live with each other 2 years off the new millennium with all the changes in the world, with all the possibilities there are. So even though a lot of the time I was sitting there thinking, "Can we really make this happen," I have a sort of inner optimism about it. Mr. King. And what was your message in those phone calls? You were probably half asleep as you started some of them. President Clinton. Well, first of all, I just when I talked to Prime Minister Blair or Prime Minister Ahern or George Mitchell, I was mostly listening. But when I talked to the parties, what I heard from them actually was very like what you're hearing from the general public now. It was sort of the darkness before the dawn. It was like, "Okay, we made this deal, and oh, there's a few things down the road that we'd like to improve," but what they really needed was not me to talk about the specifics what they really needed was for me to remind them of the big picture, that it was time to join hands and jump off the diving board together and get in the pool and swim to shore. And I say that not in a disrespectful way but in a respectful way. It's very hard, once you've been estranged from people for a long time, to overcome your fears and distrust. And as I have said repeatedly, I'll never forget Prime Minister Rabin telling me before Israel signed the agreement with the PLO, that everybody was reluctant to do it, but you don't make peace with your friends. You have to make peace with those and then make them your friends, because of the estrangement of the past. That's what I want people to think about. If every voter in Northern Ireland says, "What are we going to look like in 2000, and what's it going to look like in 2010," Britain here Mr. Blair is the President of the EU in this cycle. Britain leading the united Europe Ireland a part of the united Europe with one of the best reforming economies, the Republic of Ireland Northern Ireland, where Britain and Ireland join in some sort of fashion no matter what decision they make. Now, they're going to be at the vortex of something very, very big, if they can just liberate themselves it could change the past. They don't have to give up their traditions they can value them. They've agreed to the principle of consent. They have set up a mechanism by which they can chart their own future. What remains is really just to take the leap of faith and realize that the risk of going forward is infinitesimal, tiny, compared to the risk of letting this opportunity slip away. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia Mr. King. We're short on time, so if I could ask each of you in closing, tensions in another part of the world have been a major theme of discussion here at your meeting, the Pakistani Prime Minister today saying he was disappointed in the communique relating to condemning India for the nuclear test. If I could ask each of you your reaction to that and how you see that process going forward in the days ahead. Prime Minister Blair. It's a very strong statement in the communique, condemning the Indian nuclear tests and, what's more, putting strong pressure on India to sign up unconditionally for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Non Proliferation Treaty. And I urge Pakistan now, as we all do in our communique, not to follow them down that route because the world is a dangerous enough place as it is, and we fear for the future if these nuclear tests carry on. President Clinton. Well, first, it's the strongest possible statement we could have gotten. Some of our members are philosophically opposed to the imposition of sanctions under virtually any circumstances. And as you know, the United States, Japan, Canada, perhaps others will follow, did impose economic sanctions. But it's a strong statement. What we have now to do is to build on it. We have to tell the Pakistanis, "If you're willing to not go down this road, which we believe is a loser, let's work together to try to define a way to protect your security without becoming a nuclear power." And we have to go back to the Indians and say, "Let's find a way to protect your security and honor the greatness of your democracy without becoming a nuclear power. This is a bad thing, but let's minimize this. This is not a good thing for the world. The Russians and the Americans, we're trying to lower our nuclear arsenals. We're trying to make this problem go away for the world. And we do not need to just have a whole lot of other people with smaller nuclear arsenals on the assumption that they'll never be used. You can't do that." Mr. King. Thank you both. President Clinton. Thank you. May 16, 1998 Good morning. This week I want to speak to you about a matter of grave concern to the United States and the international community India's nuclear test explosions. These tests were unjustified and threaten to spark a dangerous nuclear arms race in Asia. As a result, and in accordance with our laws, I have imposed serious sanctions against India, including an end to our economic assistance, military financing, and credit or loan guarantees. I'm at the G 8 summit of the major industrial powers in Birmingham, England, where the major nations here, along with friends and allies around the world, have joined us in condemning India's actions This is especially disappointing to me because I have long supported stronger ties between the United States and India. After all, India will soon be the world's most populous country. Already it has the world's largest middle class and 50 years of vibrant democracy to its credit. And America has been immeasurably enriched by the contributions of Indian Americans who work hard, believe in education, and have really been good citizens. For all these reasons, the United States and India should be close friends and partners for the 21st century. And they make it all the more unfortunate that India has pursued this course at a time when most nations are working hard to leave the terror of the nuclear age behind. So in this instance, India is on the wrong side of history. Over the past few years, we've made remarkable progress in reducing nuclear arsenals around the world and combating the spread of nuclear weapons. Building on the work of the Reagan and Bush administrations, we entered that START I treaty into force, lowering both Russian and American nuclear arsenals. And we ratified START II to go further. Now, when Russia's Parliament approves START II, we'll be on course to cut American and Russian nuclear arsenals by two thirds from their cold war height. We also worked with Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to return to Russia the nuclear weapons left on their land when the Soviet Union broke apart. We extended indefinitely and unconditionally the Non Proliferation Treaty, which makes it harder for states that do not now possess nuclear weapons to acquire them. And just last month, working with the United Kingdom and the Republic of Georgia, we helped to secure a small amount of bombgrade uranium in the Republic of Georgia that could have posed a serious danger if it had fallen into the wrong hands. Two years ago I was proud to be the first national leader to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, first proposed by President Eisenhower, advanced by President Kennedy, and brought to conclusion by my administration working with almost 60 other nations. This treaty, called the CTBT, bans all nuclear explosions, thus making it more difficult for the nuclear states to produce more advanced and dangerous weapons and much harder for nonnuclear states to develop them in the first place. Already, 149 other nations have signed on. The CTBT also strengthens our ability to detect and deter nuclear testing by other countries. That's a mission we must pursue, with or without this treaty, as India's actions so clearly remind us. The CTBT's global network of sensors and the short notice on site inspections it allows will improve our ability to monitor and discourage countries from cheating. I submitted the treaty to the Senate last fall. Now it's all the more important that the Senate act quickly, this year, so that we can increase the pressure on and isolation of other nations that may be considering their own nuclear test explosions. The Indian Government has put itself at odds with the international community over these nuclear tests. I hope India will reverse course from the dangerous path it has chosen by signing the CTBT immediately and without conditions. And India's neighbors can set a strong example of responsibility for the world by not yielding to the pressure to follow India's example and conduct their own nuclear tests. I hope they won't do that. We have an opportunity to leave behind the darkest moments of the 20th century and embrace the most brilliant possibilities of the 21st. To do it, we must walk away from nuclear weapons, not toward them. Let us renew our determination to end the era of nuclear testing once and for all. Thanks for listening. May 14, 1998 The discussion is joined in progress. U.S. Investment in Germany Q. Mr. President, do you regard Germany as an attractive country for American investors, and if so, for what main products and services? The President. Well, the short answer to your question is yes. One of the reasons that I was so excited about coming here is that I felt that if the Chancellor and I were to come here together and there would be widespread news coverage of our trip, then back in America, and indeed, in other places, there would be people who say, "Well, maybe we should look at investing there." Investors are like all other people you assume they know everything, but no one knows everything. No one has every possible option for activity in his or her head all the time. And so I think that one of the great challenges that Germany faces, obviously, is to bring the eastern Lander up to the employment levels and the income levels, generally, of the western part of the country. One of the great challenges Europe faces is to bring all the countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact up to the level of employment and income of the rest of Europe. And the only way this can be done is by people who believe in your counterparts, who believe in you and your potential, investing their money and putting people to work. Because of your geographical location, I would imagine that any kind of manufacturing operation would be a good operation here, because there are good transportation networks in and out of here to the rest of Europe and because, frankly, the Continent is not that large. I don't think there is any kind of thing you can't do. I think that Chancellor Kohl has already said that you would have a greater advantage probably in the areas where you already have a proven track record. But most manufacturers in America are prepared to go anywhere there is a work force that can be trained, where people will work hard and work in the kind of teamwork spirit that you have demonstrated here at this plant. So I hope that our coming here will help more of your fellow citizens to get good jobs. And that's one of the reasons we wanted to come. At this point, the discussion continued. Administration Accomplishments and Goals Q. Mr. President, which domestic or foreign policy problem would you wish to be solved most urgently, and which achievement would you regard as the highlight in your term of office? The President. Well, first let me say, I suppose our most important achievement is turning the American economy around in ways that benefit ordinary Americans so that we not only have high growth and low unemployment, but it's working in a way that most people feel more secure, and they have the freedom to make more good decisions for themselves. There are many other things that I have done, specific things that I am very proud of, but I think, generally, doing that has made a big difference. And in the world, I hope that putting America in the center of the future after the cold war will be a lasting achievement future trading relationships with Europe and Latin America and Asia our future efforts to combat the problems of terrorism and the weapons spread our future efforts to save the environment of the world our future efforts to work with countries to help solve problems, like the problems in Bosnia. And Helmut reminded me, the work we're doing now on nuclear weapons, because we're a little concerned that India had a test about that in the last couple of days. So, at home, making the economy work for all our people abroad, involving the United States in the challenges of the 21st century and not letting America withdraw from the world. Now, what would I still like to do, what problems are we still trying to solve? There are many things I could mention at home, but I would just say two things. First of all, after World War II, in almost every country there was a huge increase in the birth rate. People came home from the war, and they wanted to have babies, and they did, in record numbers in the United States. When these so called baby boomers and I'm the oldest one I was born in 1946 when all of them retire in all the advanced countries of the world, they will put enormous pressure on the retirement and health care systems. And if we don't make some changes in them in our country, we will put unfair burdens on our children and on our children's ability to raise our grandchildren. On the other hand, if we throw them out the door, then our people will be divided. We won't be preserving our obligations and our social contract. So I would still like to reform those things in a way that protects our people but allows our children to go forward and build a good life. The other thing I would say is that in our country, where we have so many people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, not everyone particularly a lot of people in our inner cities has participated in this economic recovery yet. We still have some neighborhoods in our cities where the unemployment rate is too high, the education level is too low, the crime rate is too high. And I would like to find a way before I leave office to bring the spirit of enterprise to all those people, the opportunities. Around the world, I hope before I leave office that we will have secured a peace agreement in the Middle East that will last for a long time. May 13, 1998 Thank you very much, Mr. President, Chancellor Kohl, to the leaders and members of the Bundestag and Bundesrat, members of the Cabinet, members of the diplomatic corps, Professor Schneider, and all the people who have made us feel so welcome here at the beautiful Schauspielhaus. Let me begin by thanking the German Symphony Orchestra for playing one of my favorite pieces, the "Eroica." You were wonderful. Thank you very much. Mr. Mayor, thank you for your remarks. And Chancellor, thank you for all that you said. I am delighted to join all of you in the historic heart of free and unified Berlin. Fifty years ago the United States and its allies made a commitment to the people of Berlin. It began with the heroic airlift of 1948, continued through the showdown with Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie in 1961, and includes nearly 100,000 American soldiers who defended this city over the course of 40 years and grew to love its people. It lasted until East Germans bravely reached out across the wall and tore it down, thus freeing all of us to make real a Europe we had only dreamed of, an undivided continent of thriving democracies where states deal with each other not through domination but dialog where societies are governed not by repression but by the rule of law where the only barriers people face are the limits of their own dreams. Today, Berlin is a symbol of what all Europe is striving to become. Former Chancellor Willy Brandt, who was mayor of West Berlin on the day the wall went up, declared on that magical November night as the wall was coming down, "Es wachst zusammen was zusammen gehort" "what belongs together is growing together." You have shown, citizens of Berlin, that he was correct. From the construction on the Spree turning Berlin into Germany's capital for the future to the renewal of Potsdammer Platz as a dynamic center of business, Berlin's rebirth embodies all our hopes for the future. And from Munich to Potsdam, from Hamburg to Dresden, people throughout Germany's old and new states have struggled and sacrificed to make the larger dream of German unity come true. Now, barely 600 days before the beginning of a new century and a new millennium, we must make unity our mission for the Continent as a whole and for a new transatlantic community. For more than 1,000 years, from the time of Charlemagne to the founding of the European Community, a unified Europe has captured this continent's imagination. Now, for the first time, the dream is within reach, and not through conquest but through the decision of free people. In 1994 I came to Europe to support your unity and to set forth a vision of partnership between America and a new Europe, rooted in security cooperation, free markets, and vibrant democracies. I asked all our countries to adapt our institutions for the new time, to help the new market economies of Europe's eastern half to thrive, to support the growth of freedom and the spread of peace, to bring the peoples of the Euro Atlantic community more closely together. On all fronts, we have made remarkable progress. NATO is taking on new missions and new members, building practical ties with Russia and Ukraine, deepening cooperation among the 44 nations of the Partnership Council. The European Union is growing, and America and the EU are working together to tear down more trade barriers and strengthen new democracies. The OSCE, Europe's standard bearer for human rights and freedoms, is now helping to make those standards real, from supervising elections in Albania to monitoring arms reduction in Bosnia. With support from America and the European Union and especially with Chancellor Kohl and Germany's farsighted leadership, new market economies are taking root all across this continent. Russia has privatized more property than any nation in this century. Poland and Estonia are among Europe's fastest growing economies. Since 1991, U.S. and EU investment in Central and Eastern Europe has quadrupled and trade has doubled. We've encouraged Europe's newly freed nations from helping citizens groups in the New Independent States to monitor their elections to strengthening the independence of their judicial systems. In Russia alone, thousands of civic groups are beginning to take a role in shaping the destiny of this century. President Yeltsin has a new government of young reformers, fully capable of leading Russia decisively into the future. We have helped to make the peace take hold from Bosnia to Northern Ireland. Every day our ordinary citizens work to link our nations together, from sister cities such as Leipzig and Houston, to American students flocking to all European countries, to young Romanians and Bulgarians now enrolled in our military academies. With all of this progress, as the Chancellor noted, many challenges still remain to our common vision the ongoing struggles of newly free nations to consolidate their reforms the unfinished work of bringing Europe's eastern half fully into our transatlantic community the fear of those who lack the skills to succeed in the fast changing global economy the voices of hatred, intolerance, and division on both sides of the Atlantic, whether masked in patriotism, cloaked in religious fervor, or posing as ethnic pride Bosnia's fragile peace Kosovo's volatility Cyprus' stalemate the dangers that all our nations face and cannot defeat alone the spread of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, environmental degradation. And so my friends, 1998, no less than 1989, demands our boldness, our will, and our unity. Today I call on our nations to summon the energy and the will to finish the work we have started, to keep at it until every nation on the Continent enjoys the security and democracy we do and all men and women, from Seattle to Paris to Istanbul to St. Petersburg, are able to pursue their dreams in peace and build an even better life for their children. This is the opportunity of generations. Together, we must seize it. We must build a Europe like Germany itself, whole and free, prosperous and peaceful, increasingly integrated, and always globally engaged. If you will forgive me a personal observation based on my service in the last 5 1 2 years, I must note that this magic moment in history did not simply arrive. It was made, and made largely by the vision and determined leadership of Germany and its Chancellor for 9 years. Consider the historic changes you have wrought. You committed Germany again to lead in a united Europe this time through cooperation, not conquest. You took the risk of pushing for the European Monetary Union, knowing there would be bumps along the way, especially with the strength of the deutsche mark and the power of your own economy. You shouldered the enormous cost of your own reunification to make sure the East is not left behind and to ease as much as possible the unavoidable dislocation and pain that goes along with this process. And you have done this while also taking on the challenge that West Germany must face in making a difficult transition to a global economy, in which preserving opportunity for all and preserving the social contract is a challenge even for the wealthiest nations, as we see in America every day. All this you have attempted to do, and largely achieved, in 9 short years. Though many German citizens may be uncertain of the outcome and may not yet feel the benefits of your farsighted, courageous course, you are clearly on the right side of history. America honors your vision and your achievements, and we are proud to march with you, shoulder to shoulder, into the new millennium. We thank you. We begin our common journey with one basic premise America stands with Europe. Today, no less than 50 years ago, our destinies are joined. If Europe is at peace, America is more secure. If Europe prospers, America does as well. We share a common destiny because we move to a logic of mutually beneficial interdependence, where each nation can grow stronger and more prosperous because of the success of its neighbors and friends. Therefore, we welcome Europe's march toward greater unity. We seek a transatlantic partnership that is broad and open in scope, where the benefits and burdens are shared, where we seek a stable and peaceful future not only for ourselves but for all the world. We begin with our common security of which NATO is the bedrock. Next year the leaders of countries across Europe will gather in Washington to celebrate NATO's 50 years of success, to welcome the first new democracies from Eastern Europe as members, to keep NATO's door open to others as they are ready to assume the responsibilities of membership, to chart a course for the century ahead with threats more diffuse but no less dangerous than those our founders faced. Yesterday's NATO guarded our borders against direct military invasion. Tomorrow's alliance must continue to defend enlarged borders and defend against threats to our security from beyond them the spread of weapons of mass destruction, ethnic violence, regional conflict. NATO must have the means to perform these tasks. And we must maintain and strengthen our partnership with Russia, with Ukraine, with other nations across the Continent who share our interests, our values, and our dreams. Advancing security also requires us to work for peace, whether in Northern Ireland, Nagorno Karabakh, Kosovo, Bosnia, or Cyprus, to stand against intolerance and injustice as much as military aggression. For racism and inequality have no place in the future we are building together. We must fight them at home and abroad. Second, we must do more to promote prosperity throughout our community. Transatlantic commerce, as the Chancellor said, is already the largest economic relationship in the world, encompassing more than half a trillion U.S. dollars each year, supporting millions of jobs in both America and Europe. Consider this America's investment in Europe roughly equals that in all the rest of the world put together. And Europe's investment in America has now created so many jobs that one of 12 U.S. factory workers is employed by a European owned firm. Still, we must face the stark fact that prosperity is not yet everyone's partner. Europe's new democracies confront the daunting challenge of transition to market economies in an age of globalization, which, as I have already said, makes it more difficult to preserve equality of opportunity, a strong social safety net, and a general sense of fairness. We must continue to help these struggling countries, even as those of us in wealthier nations confront our own challenges on these fronts. America will continue to support Europe's march toward integration. We admire the determination that has made your economic and monetary union possible, and we will work with you to make it a success. We will continue to encourage your steps to enlarge the EU as well, eventually to embrace all central Europe and Turkey. Our third task is to strengthen the hand and extend the reach of democracy. One important tool is the OSCE. Its broad membership projects a unity and moral authority unparalleled on the Continent. Today, the OSCE is taking action on the ground from advancing human rights in the Balkans to supporting democratic institutions in Belarus. At next year's OSCE summit, we should encourage even greater engagement in the areas where democracy's roots are still fragile, in the Balkans and central Asia and the Caucasus, and we must develop practical new tools for the OSCE, such as training police to support peacekeeping missions and dispatching democracy teams to build more open societies. Only in this way can we deter and defuse crises that threaten our values and our securities before they get out of hand. Now, the secure, the free, the prosperous Atlantic community we envision must include a successful, democratic Russia. For most of this century fear, tyranny, and isolation kept Russia from the European mainstream. But look at the future Russians are now building, and we have an enormous stake in their success. Russia is literally recreating itself, using the tools of openness and reform to strengthen new freedom and restrain those who abuse them, to ensure more competition, to collect taxes, fight crime, restructure the military, prevent the spread of sensitive technologies. We must support this Russian revolution. We will redouble our efforts with Russia to reduce our nuclear arsenals, to lower the limits on conventional forces in Europe, to fight the spread of materials and technology for weapons of mass destruction, to build a partnership with NATO in practical ways that benefit all of us, to develop the ties between our people that are the best antidote to mistrust. And we must not forget Ukraine, for it, too, has the opportunity to reach both east and west and be a great force for Europe's peace, prosperity, and stability. We should encourage reform and support it. The moment in Ukraine is historic, and it is not a moment to lose. Our fourth and final task is strengthening our global cooperation. Let us make common cause of our common concerns, standing together against threats to our security from states that flout international norms to the conflict brewing in Kosovo, from deterring terrorists and organized criminals to helping Asia restore financial stability, from helping Africa to join the global economy to combating global warming. In a world grown smaller, what happens beyond our borders touches our daily lives at home. America and Europe must work together to shape this world. Now, as we pursue this agenda, there will be times when we disagree. But occasional lack of consensus must never result in lasting cracks in our cohesion. Nor should the quest for consensus lure us into the easiest, lowest common denominator solution to difficult, high urgency problems. When the world needs principled, effective, strong leadership, we must rise to the responsibility. These are our challenges. They are ambitious, but attainable. They demand of nations constant unity of purpose and commitment, and they require the support and the courage of our citizens. For without the courage of ordinary people, the wall would not have come down, and the new Europe would not be unfolding. Now it falls to each of us to write the next chapter of this story, to build up from what has been taken down, to cement together what is no longer walled apart, to repair the breaches that still exist among our peoples, to build a Europe that belongs together and grows together in freedom. Our success in this endeavor will make the new century the greatest that Germany, America, Europe, and the world have ever known. This is an effort worthy of the rich legacy of Berlin, the visionary leadership of modern Germany, and the enormous obligation we share for our children's future. Let us embrace it with gratitude, joy, and determination. Thank you very much. May 12, 1998 Thank you very much, Mary, for your remarks and your work. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, members of the Cabinet and Congress, Mayor Barry, members of the city council, and to all the law enforcement officials who are here. We are here to talk about building a safer world for the 21st century. Nuclear Proliferation in South Asia So before I begin my remarks about the subject of the day, I want to make it very, very clear that I am deeply disturbed by the nuclear tests which India has conducted, and I do not believe it contributes to building a safer 21st century. The United States strongly opposes any new nuclear testing. This action by India not only threatens the stability of the region, it directly challenges the firm international consensus to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. I call on India to announce that it will conduct no further tests and that it will sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty now and without conditions. I also urge India's neighbors not to follow suit, not to follow down the path of a dangerous arms race. As most of you know, our laws have very stringent provisions, signed into law by me in 1994, in response to nuclear tests by nonnuclear weapons states, and I intend to implement them fully. International Crime Control Strategy Now, in a few hours I will be leaving to travel to Europe, to meet with the leaders of other industrial democracies in a time of great hope. Because of what is happening in Bosnia and Ireland, it is clear that if we work together, the 21st century can be a time of unprecedented democracy, prosperity, and peace. But it is equally clear that there are threats to our common future that cross national lines. Today I want to announce new plans to address the growing problem of international crime. We all know the globe is shrinking every day with global TV networks, instantaneous communications over the Internet, increasing world travel. European nations have adopted completely opened borders, and many of them have already voted to create a common currency. The American people in general benefit greatly from the process of globalization, with more economic opportunities and more opportunities to become enriched through contact with different cultures. Our values democracy, human rights, the rule of law will ultimately prevail when there is free trade in ideas. But more porous borders, more affordable travel, more powerful communications increasingly also give criminals the opportunity to reach across borders, physically and electronically, to commit crimes and then retreat before they can be caught and punished. Many Americans really don't realize the extent to which international crime affects their daily lives, which is why we were so pleased to have Agent Riley with us today. Con artists, operating overseas, mail phony financial offers and then disappear with investor dollars hundreds of millions of dollars' worth. Sometimes they lure citizens abroad and use violence to get what they want. Car theft rings move stolen vehicles across the border 200,000 a year, worth about a billion dollars resulting in higher insurance costs for all Americans. As Agent Riley's remarks suggest, cybercriminals can use computers to raid our banks, run up charges on our credit cards, extort money by threats to unleash computer viruses. Smugglers engage in port running speeding vehicles past our border points putting people in danger and aiding the thriving trade in gangs, drugs, and guns. Others smuggle people across our border for prostitution and jobs in illegal sweatshops. Two thirds of counterfeit U.S. money twothirds is printed overseas. Illegal copying of our products costs us jobs and tens of billions in revenue. Spies seek important industrial secrets, and worse, materials to make nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Up to 500 billion in criminal proceeds every single year, more than the GNP of most nations, is laundered, disguised as legitimate revenue, and much of it moves across our borders. International crime rings intimidate weak governments and threaten democracy. They murder judges, journalists, witnesses, and kidnappers and terrorists have attacked Americans abroad and even at home with brutal acts like the World Trade Center bombing. Wrongdoing flows two ways. U.S. criminals also operate across borders, victimizing people in other nations. All these activities threaten our common safety and prosperity. To combat them, we must act broadly, decisively, consistent with our constitutional values to leave criminals no place to run, no place to hide. The job of law enforcement officials behind me, from 12 different agencies, is to protect the American people from crime. But the job of our Congress, and my job, is to give these officers the tools they need to do the job. Therefore, today I announce for the first time a comprehensive international crime control strategy for America. At its core is a simple but compelling truth International crime requires an international response. America is prepared to act alone when it must, but no nation can control crime by itself anymore. We must create a global community of crimefighters, dedicated to protecting the innocent and to bringing to justice the offenders. This week, nations at the G 8 summit will announce significant new joint anticrime activities. But let me tell you what I plan to do already by taking better advantage of existing laws and asking Congress for new legislation. First, we will work with other nations to create a worldwide dragnet capability to promptly arrest and extradite fugitives from justice. Our bill asks for wider authority so America can extradite more suspected criminals. We'll also press for international cooperations so criminals will forfeit their ill gotten gains. Second, because none of us is safe if criminals find safe havens abroad, we'll work to ensure other nations are also ready to fight international crime with global standards and goals, training and technical aid, and programs to modernize criminal laws elsewhere. Third, we will work with our allies to share information on growing crime syndicates, to better derail their schemes. And we will work with industries to protect against computer crime. Fourth, we will put more law enforcement personnel abroad, to aid our Embassies in identifying criminals before they attack Americans. And I'm seeking new authority to prosecute more violent offenses against Americans overseas. Fifth, we will strengthen border security, with 1,000 new Border Patrol Agents, new technologies, and stiffer penalties, to put more smuggling rings out of business. I also want tough new sentences for port runners and for smugglers who refuse to stop for our Coast Guard. Sixth, I will ask Congress to enact strict provisions to bar drug and arms traffickers and fugitives from justice from entering our country and to expel them if they do come here. Finally, I will seek new authority to fight money laundering and freeze the U.S. assets of people arrested abroad. And we'll improve enforcement of existing laws against counterfeiting and industrial espionage. To focus our efforts, we will complete within 6 months a comprehensive analysis of the threat Americans face from international crime. I've asked Vice President Gore to organize a global meeting to set a common agenda for fighting corruption and strengthening the rule of law. Some of the criminals have sophisticated tools, so ours must be also. They can form temporary cross border alliances, based on greed and selfinterest, so we must strengthen the community of nations based on a community of values. They care about no one but themselves, while we care so deeply about our children and their future. It is our most profound strength, the strength that will allow us to prevail. For we cannot, we must not, we will not accept a world in which American children and children abroad grow up paralyzed by crime, fear, and violence. Together, America and our allies can attack this scourge and build a secure and prosperous future for all our people. Again, let me say to all of you, especially to the law enforcement officers here, I thank you very, very much. Thank you. May 09, 1998 Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the warm welcome. I thank Elaine and Gerry more than I can say. This has not been the easiest couple of weeks in their lives, and the fact that they continue to work and to have this event means an especially great deal to me tonight, and I thank you so much. I'd like to thank all the people who are here tonight. Senator Kerry, thank you for coming, and thank you for your leadership, especially on behalf of our Nation's children in the Capital. I thank Mayor Tom Menino and Angela for being here. When you said that Tom Menino's approval ratings, Steve, were in the eighties, my reaction was what the other 20 percent could possibly be thinking about. Laughter I don't know how anybody could do a better job as mayor than Tom Menino's doing I don't think it's possible. Everywhere I go in America now, when I talk to serious people who care about dealing with our challenges, people want to know how Boston went over 2 years with no child under 18 being killed. And I said it did not happen by accident. And I guess that's part of what I want to say tonight. Of course, this evening didn't happen by accident either. So I want to thank not only Elaine and Gerry but all the other cochairs Jim and Kathy Daley Sherry and Alan Leventhal Alan and Fred have been through the fires for me for a long time, and I thank them for that Lyle Howland and Jack Manning. And I'd like to say a special word of thanks to Alan and Susie Solomont Alan did do a fabulous job for us at the DNC. And Steve and Barbara Grossman, thank you. And you can see from Steve's speech tonight that he is not beaten down from the rigors of his job and he's doing a wonderful job. Massachusetts should be very, very proud of him. I also appreciate Lester Thurow coming tonight. I wish he could give the speech, and I could learn about how to improve the economy some more. Laughter And my good friend James Taylor, thank you for being here. You know, when I was standing in front and we were taking pictures, one of you came through the line and said, "You know, Mr. President, Boston has become your ATM machine." Laughter But she said, "That's okay. We like it we like it." Laughter I am profoundly grateful to the people of this city and this State for being so good to me and to Hillary and to the Vice President, to our administration. You all know we've got the highest percentage of the vote we received in any State in Massachusetts in 1996. We had an all Democratic sweep in our congressional elections. And some of them were quite tough, indeed. And I am profoundly grateful to all of you. And that didn't happen by accident. You heard all the things that Elaine said. I feel an enormous amount of gratitude for the strength of our economy, for the lowest unemployment rate since 1970 and the lowest inflation rate in 30 years and the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years and the lowest crime rates in 24 years. I'm grateful for that. I think the question is, what do we intend to do with that? And that really is the great question sort of looming over Washington. In that sense, I rather like the fact that the El Nino gods were not too nice to us tonight. It keeps us humble. If you like this, you'll love it if we don't do anything about climate change. And that makes the point I want to make. When times are really good in political life when times are good you can have, it seems to me, three responses. You can sort of play more golf and relax, which is appealing to me. Laughter Or you can think you can afford to be petty and mean and self serving and groping and divisive politically, which is appealing to some. Or if the times are dynamic and things are still changing very profoundly and rapidly, you understand that complacence and smallness are not really viable options. And I've been going around the country trying to convince the American people that these good times give us an enormous opportunity and impose upon us a significant responsibility. The American people have confidence again. They believe this country can work again. They believe we can make things happen again. But things are changing very profoundly in the way we work, the way we live, the way we relate to each other, the way we relate to the rest of the world. And I believe that this is a time that we should be big, think big, and act big. And I am doing my best, with the help of our Democrats in Washington, to push the country in that direction, because I think the only way you can continue to enjoy good success in a dynamic time is to bear down, not let up. If you go out to Silicon Valley, for example, where Lord knows how many people have been made millionaires and more people than I can count on my two hands have been made billionaires, you won't find people going to work at noon and leaving at 3 o'clock, because they understand that in an economy of ideas you have to keep working to stay ahead of the curve. Not only that, it's interesting it's fun it's more fulfilling. That's the way our country should behave. And in that sense, I would say to you, for me, we should have a short term agenda and a long term agenda. We should be committed to working like crazy this year in this session of Congress, even before this election, to earn our keep for the American people. And as we look to the next 2 years, in the barely 600 days we have until the start of a new century, a new millennium, we ought to promise ourselves that we are not going to start that new era without having seriously addressed what we know right now are the biggest challenges facing us. So even though we've had a good time, I'd like to be just a little serious for a moment and just briefly tell you what I think we should be doing both now and over the long term. This year the first thing we need to do is to say we're glad we balanced the budget for the first time in 30 years, but it hasn't actually happened yet. We're glad we're apparently going to have a big surplus for the first time in 30 years, but we don't actually have it yet. And we know we have real, serious, significant challenges awaiting us out there as the baby boomers retire and as everyone begins to live longer in reforming Social Security and Medicare, so we should not we should not squander this surplus we've waited 30 years to materialize until we've saved Social Security and prepared financially for the 21st century for the entire country. We should resist the easy temptation to either spend the money or give it back in a tax cut until, first, it materializes and, second, we know how we're going to deal with Social Security and Medicare. The second thing we ought to do is realize we have a historic public health opportunity and pass comprehensive tobacco legislation to protect our kids from the dangers of tobacco. Now, let me just say again, this is not a small thing. We have more people die from tobacco related illnesses than all other health problems put together. Three thousand kids start smoking every day, even though it's not legal, and we know 1,000 of them are going to die sooner because of it. What else can you do to save 1,000 lives a day? And we ought to do it this year in this congressional session. And if it's up to me and up to our caucus, that's exactly what we're going to do, and I hope you'll support us. We have an ambitious education agenda national standards, national exams to measure them help the school districts to build more buildings and to hire more teachers so we can have smaller classes in the early grades we can repair older buildings we can build new ones where the classes are bursting at the seams. Finally, we have a group of students in our school years who are bigger than the baby boom generation, for the first time since the baby boom generation. There are cities in this country where the average school building is 65 years of age or older. There are communities I was down in Florida the other day to do a makeup date for the little school district I was supposed to visit when I tore my leg up over a year ago. In this lovely little school district, there's a beautiful old school building, and outside there are not one, not 5 but 17 trailers housing the children in the school. Now, you ask yourself you say, we're Democrats we want every kid in this country to have a chance. And we know they can't have a chance unless they get good educations. What does it say to a child from a poor inner city school if they go to a school building where one of the floors is completely closed because the building is not maintained? How would you feel if you went to work every day and you walked up steps and you looked up at the floor and the first thing you saw as you looked at the building were three or four broken windows that never got fixed? You wouldn't tolerate it. You wouldn't permit your employees to do it. You wouldn't want your children to do it. We say education is our most important mission. I'm telling you we need to pass an education agenda this year, based on standards, based on choice, based on technology. We're trying to hook up every classroom in the country to the Internet. The mayor says he'll have all the schools fixed here in a matter of a few months. You know that there are huge numbers of school buildings in this country where kids are going to school right now that literally cannot be hooked up to the Internet because they're too deficient in their basic infrastructure. So we have an education agenda. We have got a families agenda that includes letting elderly people who are not old enough to be on Medicare, or near elderly people about my age people who aren't old enough to be on Medicare but are early retired, buy into the Medicare program at cost. Even the Republican congressional analysis says that it won't do anything to hurt the Medicare program. We're trying to pass a Patients' Bill of Rights. With over half the American people in HMO's today, I think it's important. There are lots of other things in the family area we're trying to do. We have international responsibilities we are not fulfilling. I am trying my best to get the Congress to pay our debt to the United Nations. We get a lot out of being in the U.N. People share our burdens they work with us. We can't say, "We'd like to be the leading country in the world but, oh, by the way, we're having a domestic political spat so we don't think we'll pay our dues." We say we wanted Kofi Annan to be the Secretary General. We said we wanted all these reforms in the U.N. They went about enacting our reforms, and now I can't get the Congress to pay our dues. We say we're worried about the financial crisis in Asia, but I can't get the Congress to pay what we owe to the International Monetary Fund, without which we cannot be an active participant in the long term rebuilding of a lot of those Asian economies. So we have a shortterm agenda. But over the long term and just think about it, how you think we ought to spend the next 600 and some odd days. I got yesterday I can keep up with it I finally got one of these little millennium clocks in the mail. And my wonderful secretary has it up on her desk now "602 days to the 21st century," you know, how many hours and minutes and seconds and all. And it's exciting right now. It may get boring before the time passes, but it's exciting. Laughter But it's very helpful to me because it also is, minus about 20 days, all the time I've got left to work for you no, no, 385 days, since we're measuring at 2000 instead of 2001. And I think you ought to think about it. What would you do if you were marking off the days every day? What are the big challenges still out there for us? I'll tell you what I think they are. First of all, if you want to hold this country together in a responsible way, we have to reform Social Security and Medicare. When all the baby boomers get into the Social Security system, if we continue to work and retire at the same rates we are now, there will be about two people working for every one person drawing Social Security. If we keep seeing the life expectancy of the American people go up and the wonders of technology come on, the Medicare system as presently structured will not be sustainable after another several years. So what we've got to do is to change that. I think that all of you would like it if Democrats were making those decisions, but you should insist that the Democrats who are elected be willing to make those decisions. We have proved now that we are the party of constructive change, and that's a big issue for America. What's the second big issue? We can't stop working on education until our elementary and secondary schools are the best in the world. No person doubts that our system of higher education is the best in the world. No person doubts that our system of elementary and secondary education is not the best in the world. And we could stay here until dawn talking about that, but I can tell you, for 20 years I believe that I have spent more time on education than any other public issue. I believe in it passionately. But I can tell you, we will never, ever, ever be able to say America is a place in which everyone has an opportunity unless we can do something about it. What's the third big challenge? We have to do something to bring the spark of enterprise and opportunity to the inner city poor. It is stunning to think that in an economy with a 4.3 percent unemployment rate, there are still neighborhoods in America where the unemployment rate is 15 percent or 20 percent. And it is not necessary. We have a huge program before the Congress right now that will do a lot to bring the spark of enterprise to the inner cities. If it isn't passed in this session, we have to keep working until we've done more. The third thing we've got to do is to prove we can grow the economy while we improve the environment. I believe the global warming phenomenon is real. I think it is significant. I do not believe we can regulate our way out of it. I think we have to prove that we can grow our way out of it. I was in California about a week ago at a housing development for moderate and low income working people, where the energy usage on average in the homes was 40 percent less than typical because you can now have solar panels on your home that look like ordinary shingles, they're so thin. You can now buy a window for a low income home that lets in more light but keeps the heat in in the wintertime and the heat out in the summertime. And if you'll pay twice as much money to get light bulbs, they'll last 3 to 4 times as long. Now, we have to do these things on a huge scale in America. If we get to the point where we can build fuel injection engines, fuel cells in our cars, we can cut greenhouse gas emissions from transportation by 80 percent. They won't cost any jobs they'll create jobs. They won't hurt the economy it will improve the economy. I cannot tell you how important I think that is. Just two more things I think are big longterm challenges. We've got to prove that we really can be one America. We talk about it all the time. We've got to prove we can do it. And I think the two most critical things are, one, developing not only tolerance but respect and appreciation for people who are different than we are in every way. And you know I've worked pretty hard on that. Some people have made fun of me for doing it some people have outright condemned me for doing it. But it's not only because I grew up in the South but also because I've been your President. I've seen what happens from Bosnia to Kosovo, to Rwanda, to Haiti, to Northern Ireland, to the Middle East when people decide that they only matter when they've got somebody to look down on, and that what is really important in their lives is that thank God they're not like those other people. I've seen what happens when people believe their lives only have meaning when they descend into an ever escalating cycle of violence. And I'm telling you, things like that could happen here on a smaller scale. But the flip side is, if we can prove we are the world's most truly integrated diverse democracy, we can be a model for the 21st century that will give us a moral force in the world that cannot be overestimated. There is one school district across the Potomac River from the White House in Virginia that has children now from 180 different racial and ethnic and national groups, speaking as their native tongues over 100 different languages. It's not just a black white Hispanic deal anymore. And that's exciting to me. In a global economy, rooted in ideas and communication, it is a godsend. But we cannot take it for granted. And the second thing I want to say is perhaps the best way we can help to build that one America is to inculcate in our children a sense of citizen service. Elaine mentioned this, but I'm very proud of the fact that AmeriCorps, which was in large measure modeled on City Year and my experiences here in Boston when I ran for President, will soon have 100,000 young people who will have earned college credit by serving in local communities, helping people to make the most of their own lives. When people work together and learn together and play together and serve together, they're far more likely to get along together. So this is very important. The last thing I want to say is, I have done my best as President to convince the American people that there is no reasonable dividing line any longer between foreign and domestic policy, in economics, in security, in many ways. What are the major security problems of the 21st century? Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction falling into the wrong hands, narcotraffickers, organized crime, people who can get in an airport and fly someplace else. These things require a high level of cooperation and a recognition that we live in an interdependent world. If you want the United States to lead the world, we must be willing to fulfill our responsibilities. If you want other people to help us share the load, we must do that. One of the greatest things about what happened in ending the war in Bosnia is that we are there, shoulder to shoulder not only with Russian troops but with troops from two dozen other countries. If we want to continue to have that kind of influence, we can't run away from our obligations to trade with the rest of the world. We have to keep expanding trade, not trying to close up trade. Congress ought to give me the authority to have trade agreements. We have to keep cooperating with other countries in environmental matters, in health matters, in all these things. But the American people have got to believe deep in the marrow of their bones that every part of our national life has to require us to have an international global perspective. I fought very hard to save our space program, which was in danger when I became President. And one of the things I've asked the Congress to do is to invest in the 21st century research fund as a gift to the millennium that will dramatically increase all our research and development budgets. But one of the things that made it possible is that the international space station has European contributors, Japanese contributors, Canadian contributors, and a Russian contribution. And that's good. If you're going to have a place where people can go and stay a long while in space that's bigger than a football field, we need to work together. And we cannot have an attitude in Congress or in the country that says, we will be involved in the world only when it suits us, only our own terms, and we reserve the right to have some sort of fight here at home which will allow us to walk away from our obligations. And let me just give you two examples that go to the heart of Boston the Irish peace process and the Middle East peace process. If I took a vote in Boston about whether I did the right thing to finally get America involved in the peace process in Ireland, even though it required us to break a few eggs at the time, most people would say that we did the right thing and you're glad we did. Yesterday we announced a modest but significant package of initiatives that we want to put into Northern Ireland, and we hope that it will be positive in persuading undecided voters there to vote in the next few days in the Irish referendum for the peace process and for it to implement the agreement that has been made. I had a great talk with Prime Minister Major, and we talked about whether there is anything we can do when we meet together in just a few days in Europe. Why? Because there are more Irish in Massachusetts than there are in Ireland. Because your heart is there, and you know it. If I took a vote in this crowd tonight and I said, do you want America to be a positive force for peace in the Middle East, and would you expect us, if the parties could make an agreement, to make more investments there, to grow the economy, and to guarantee the security of the parties so that we can unravel this incredible knot about peace versus security so that everybody can believe they can only have one with the other, whether you agree with everything I've said or everything the current government in Israel does, you agree with both of us or disagree with both of us, that proposition would pass overwhelmingly here in Boston. Yes, the United States should reach out a hand. Yes, we should be faithful to our friendship with Israel. Yes, we should be faithful to our passion for peace in the Middle East. Yes, if the Palestinians are going to enforce security and stop terrorism, we ought to help them have a decent life, and it's terrible that their per capita income has dropped 30 percent since the Oslo accords were signed. You would all say, "Yes, let's do that." Now, that's good, but you are also citizens of the world. We're not just Irish Americans and Jewish Americans. We have to say that America now is composed of people from everywhere. I'm going to India and Pakistan and Bangladesh later in the year. I'm about to leave for China. You don't have to be a Chinese American to understand how important our relationship with China is. And you don't have to be from the Indian subcontinent to know that in 30 years India will be the biggest country in the world. They already have the biggest middle class in the world. And if somehow the Indians and Pakistanis could unravel their differences, their future potential as an economic market for us and as a force for peace in Asia, bearing responsibilities that otherwise we might have to bear, is absolutely staggering, even though you may never read a newspaper article about it. So I ask you here in Boston not only to be proud of your Irish roots, not only to be proud of your Jewish heritage but to be passionate about the role that America has for peace and freedom and prosperity in the world, because the only way we can make the 21st century America's greatest days is if we do the right things at home and the right things abroad. The last point I want to make is this. I have the great good fortune, being President, that people send me books all the time. Even Lester sends me books from time to time. And because I travel around a lot, I read a lot of them. And one of the things that I've tried to do the last 2 years is to read a lot about periods of American history that most Americans don't know much about. For example, a lot of Americans know about what happened in the Constitutional Convention and during the Revolutionary War and then in George Washington's and Thomas Jefferson's and John Adams' Presidency. And then a lot of Americans know about what happened in Abraham Lincoln's Presidency and immediately thereafter. Most Americans don't know very much about what happened between James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. Most Americans don't know much about what happened between Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Most Americans don't even know a great deal about what happened between Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. So I've really tried to read about this. I just read a magnificent biography by Robert Remini of your fellow Massachusetts citizen Daniel Webster, which tells a lot about what happened in one of those gaping periods. But if you look at all the great breakpoints in American history how we started, what happened in the Civil War, what happened in the industrial revolution, what happened in the Depression and the Second World War, the civil rights revolution you look at every time there was a great challenge in this country's history, we always had to do three things over and over and over again as we rose to a higher and higher and higher level of democracy. Every time, we had to deepen the meaning of freedom to include more people and to make their freedom real we had to widen the circle of opportunity so that citizenship meant your chance at the brass ring and we had to strengthen the bonds of our Union. Now, you remember that. The Democratic Party, I'm sad to say, was not always on the right side of all three of those issues in the 19th century. But since Woodrow Wilson became President, throughout the 20th century, we haven't always been right on every issue, but we've always been on the right side of our history. And I am determined that when we start this new century, this country will have deepened our freedom, widened our opportunity, and strengthened our Union. If we do the right things, our kids will have the best America ever. Thank you, and God bless you. May 08, 1998 Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for your wonderful remarks and your sterling leadership of the Department of Defense. To Governor Carper and Congressman Castle, Colonel Grieder, Colonel Keitel, Mayor Hutchinson to the Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, who is here with me today to all the members of the United States Air Force, their families, their friends, and thank you especially for bringing the children today. And I'd like to say a special word of thanks to the Dover High School Band for their welcome and their music. I don't know if the recruiting officer has been to see them, but they have sufficient enthusiasm to be in our military service. Great job. I am delighted to be here, back at Dover Air Force Base, home of the 436th Military Airlift Wing and the 512th Reserve Wing, those of you who work around the clock to support and defend our freedom. I've already had a chance to be on the C 5 and speak with some of you individually. I'd like now to say a few words to all of you. Delaware calls itself "Small Wonder." It's not too small, however, to have two leading United States Senators, Bill Roth and Joe Biden, who play very important roles in our national security, most recently in leading the struggle in the Senate to make Europe a safer place by guiding NATO and offering membership to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The people of Delaware can be very proud that they have two Senators playing a leading role in such an important national security area. And Delaware is not too small to house these mammoth C 5's to do so much of America's heavy lifting, not too small for a new 60,000pound Tunner loader moving heavy cargo on and off the giant planes. I know it's hard for the logistics people here to wrestle with those pallets, but hopefully the new loader makes things just a little easier. Your efforts are essential. We live in a time of enormous promise, but you know from your own work that there is also a tremendous responsibility for the United States out there both to take advantage of the promise and to meet the challenges of the post cold war era. From Guatemala to Mozambique, from Bosnia and now to Ireland, peace is taking hold in countries and regions that have endured terrible violence. Revolutions in technology and communications are spurring enterprise and opportunity all across the globe. Today we saw that the unemployment rate in America has dropped to 4.3 percent, the lowest since 1970. And that's good news for America. But one third of our growth, one third of the over 15.2 million jobs the American people have enjoyed new jobs since 1993, comes from our trading relations with other countries. Like it or not, our future and the future of every child in this audience today is bound up with our ability to maintain leadership for peace and freedom and security and opportunity throughout the world. In March, I was in Africa. I visited Uganda, not so long ago run by a brutal dictator, now a country with strong economic growth and a commitment to educating all its children. I was in Senegal, where American soldiers are working with African soldiers to establish new peacekeeping units run by Africans in Africa, to support their continent's security. I was in South Africa, where citizens are building a strong, multiracial democracy. And guess what? On my whole trip, you provided the transportation, you provided the helicopters, and you provided the communications. I thank you. The trip to Africa was good for America. Last month, I was in Chile, once ruled by terror, now a thriving open society, at the second Summit of the Americas, after the first one I convened in 1994 in Miami. Thirty four of the thirty five nations of the Americas are now democracies, and we plotted a common future in the area where our trade is growing the most and where freedom has taken deepest hold. And guess what? You provided my transportation and communication, and I thank you. In a few days I will leave for Europe, where the powerful yearning of the people for liberty has provided the chance not only to end the war in Bosnia, but through expanding NATO and making an agreement between NATO and Russia and NATO and Ukraine, we've now got the chance to build a Europe that is peaceful, undivided, and free for the first time in all of history. It will be a very important meeting, and if nothing happens to the chain of command, you're going to provide my transportation and communication, and I thank you for that. Because freedom is on the march and because of all the changes going on in the world, the 21st century in which these children will grow up will be America's greatest time, if we do our part to protect freedom and security, to stand for human rights, and to stand for our interests and our values around the world. For the world is still not free of dangers, not by a long shot. All of you know that, clearly. In fact, all of the openness, the communications revolution, what all you can find on the Internet, all of the things that have given so much opportunity in the world and brought us so much closer together have created a new vulnerability to the organized forces of destruction, to the terrorists, the organized criminals, the narcotraffickers. We still see the incredible power the flaming power of religious, ethnic, and regional conflicts and hatreds. We know that not all of our democracies are solid. We know that natural disasters, environmental destruction, the spread of disease can cross national borders and threaten the lives and welfare of the American people. In this environment, our leadership is more important than ever. In order to make the American people safe at home and give them all a brighter future, the United States must continue to lead in the world, and that means we need you more than ever. Here at Dover, you are leading the way. A strategic airlift capacity is crucial to our strategy of global engagement, and you are responsible for a full 25 percent of America's strategic airlift. You supply our troops in the Persian Gulf, and Saddam Hussein knows we're serious because our diplomacy is backed by the finest military in the world. We could not send them there and keep them there if you couldn't supply them. You led the way by helping to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Just 3 weeks ago, two of your C 5's and their crews secured dangerous nuclear material in the Republic of Georgia and transported it for safekeeping to the United Kingdom. The material could have posed a tremendous risk if it had come into the wrong hands. You made sure that it didn't. And now you know it's someplace safe, and we're all more secure because of it. I thank you for that. You supply our troops in Bosnia, where, with a remarkable lack of violence, we have been able to see the end of a conflict and the beginning of a peace taking hold. If our troops hadn't been there, the war would still be raging. They couldn't be there without you, and you should be very, very proud of helping to end the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. I hope you are. You lead the way in providing humanitarian relief to people in the former Soviet Union. When a ferocious typhoon struck Guam, you brought water and blankets and electricity to people there. When flooding destroyed or damaged 90 percent of the homes around Grand Forks, North Dakota, you brought relief and comfort to the victims there. For all that, for the many sacrifices you make, I want to say a profound thank you. As most of you know, this Tunner loader that everybody talked to me about today is not called a Tunner because it lifts a lot of tons. It was named for the late General William Tunner, who commanded three historic airlifts the airlift of supplies and personnel over the Himalayan Hump from India to China in World War II the massive Berlin airlift in 1948 and '49, 277,000 flights that supplied food and fuel to the people of West Berlin during Stalin's blockade and the Korean War Combat Cargo Command, which airdropped supplies to our troops trapped in North Korea. General Tunner said, "We can carry anything, anywhere, anytime." Now, next week, by coincidence, I will be in Germany to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Berlin airlift. Like you, the people who were involved in that effort used airlifts to protect freedom. When the Soviet leaders finally abandoned the blockade, it might have been because they had witnessed our staggering capabilities to airlift supplies to the people in West Berlin. Perhaps it was because they read what General Tunner said about his supply line "We can keep pouring it on for 20 years if we have to." That kind of confidence I know invigorates the work you do here. I know you are ready for any challenge anytime, whenever America calls for your help. So let me just say this in closing. When your joints ache from muscling pallets, when you've stared at one load plan too many, when you fly all night through turbulent skies, when you're too far from home and you wonder sometimes what you are doing it for, please remember, in ways large and small, you are making a huge difference in making the world a better place for the children that share this roof with us today. Children all over the world have food to eat, clothes to wear, safe streets to walk, all because you at Dover make it happen. You deliver. You are essential to America's security. You make this a better country, and you make us all very proud. Thank you very much, and God bless you. May 06, 1998 President Clinton. Good afternoon. Please be seated. I have very much enjoyed having this opportunity to welcome the Prime Minister to Washington again. For more than 50 years Italy has been among our closest allies. Today we charted a course to strengthen our cooperation for the next 50 years. We discussed our common efforts to build an undivided Europe at peace. We welcomed the Senate's recent vote on NATO enlargement and hope the Italian Parliament will also act favorably soon. I thanked the Prime Minister for Italy's contributions in Bosnia and more recently in Albania, where Italian troops played a critical role in bringing an end to violent unrest. We also discussed our deep concern over the situation in Kosovo. The absence of genuine dialog there is fueling a conflict that could threaten regional stability. We're working urgently to establish unconditional talks that can avert escalating violence. But we must and will be ready to substantially turn up the pressure on Belgrade should it keep blocking the search for a political solution or revert to indiscriminate force. I congratulated Prime Minister Prodi on the historic step Italy and other EU members took this past weekend on the European Monetary Union. I admire the way he has led Italy on a path of fiscal responsibility and genuine recovery. I'm confident that a strong Europe with open markets and healthy growth is good for America and good for the world. We discussed new ideas to reduce the remaining barriers to trade and boost prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm pleased that we've agreed to begin the next round of talks on an open skies agreement, with the goal of concluding an agreement as soon as possible to bring greater choice and better service to our tourist and business travelers alike. We're also looking forward to the G 8 Summit in Birmingham, where we'll take the next steps in preparing our nations for both the opportunities and the challenges of the future. As to the challenges, from terrorism to drug trafficking, from international crime to environmental damage, threats that disregard national borders demand international responses. Italy has been at the forefront of international efforts to fight crime. It has led in getting the G 8 to join forces in combating crime rings that smuggle illegal immigrants for sweatshop labor and for prostitution. This will build on the work America and Italy have begun together to fight the horrendous international crime of trafficking in women and children. Victims are lured with promises of jobs, opportunity, and hope, too often to find themselves instead in conditions of virtual slavery and actual physical danger. In Birmingham we'll announce a new joint action plan to crack down on crime rings that smuggle immigrants, bring the perpetrators to justice, and protect the lives of innocent victims. This is not only about public safety, it is about basic human rights. The partnership between our two nations is far reaching. Our extensive collaboration in science, technology, and space exploration makes that clear. But the friendship is anchored in basic values at the core of both our societies liberty, tolerance, love of family, devotion to community and country. In closing, let me note that this is the 50th year of the Fulbright program between the United States and Italy, a program that has given generations of our young people the chance to live with and learn from one another. As we celebrate all the ties that bind us, we are looking ahead to the next 50 years, to an even stronger and more vibrant partnership which will shape a brighter future for all our people. Mr. Prime Minister. Prime Minister Prodi. Thank you. Very few comments to add to your speech. I enjoyed so much to exchange our views in what I can call the magic moment of American Italian relations. We have no point of disagreement. We have our goal is only to build up a stronger relation and to bring them into the future. In a moment that is very favorable that we did in the last weekend, we concluded one of the most important achievements, never seen in world history, to put 11 different currencies together. And this will bring, I'm sure this is my firm opinion a new period of strong growth, very similar to the period that you did in your country, President. And it's very rare to see 8 years of continuous growth without inflation, with decreasing unemployment, as you did in your country, and to think that the euro may give us the same possibility for Europe. But Europe needs a renewed set of relations between Europe and the United States because this new event needs a new organization of our relations. So I am very favorable to the proposal of transatlantic a new set of economic and political relations. To this new set, we shall start to work immediately and with a realistic program and with a long range view. Second, we analyzed our bilateral relations, and this was the easiest chapter because there are no fundamental problems of dissent. But we also analyzed the hot point of the regional difficulties in the Balkan and Mediterranean area. In this, we have not only to act together but to have the continuous fine tuning of our action. Kosovo is a source of worry for us. But Bosnia is still there, with all the problems and with these long term solutions that, briefly, you have indicated that we are executing together. But another point that we analyzed is the Mediterranean area, not only the Middle East that is, of course, the object of our attention but the pivotal problem of Turkey, the Greece Turkish relation, Cyprus, and all of that in the end, the enlargement of the European Union to the east and the consequence that this enlargement will bring in world politics. This has been the agenda. And I'm so happy that we could discuss this not only in deed but with a strong, strong common commitment. President Clinton. Thank you. Terry Terence Hunt, Associated Press , would you like to go first? We will alternate. I will call on an American journalist the Prime Minister will call on Italian journalists. We'll just go back and forth. Court Decision on Executive Privilege Q. Mr. President, while the matter remains under seal, lawyers familiar with the case say that a Federal judge has denied your assertion of executive privilege in the Monica Lewinsky investigation. Do you intend to appeal that decision? And what's the difference between your case and Richard Nixon's effort to stop the Watergate investigation? President Clinton. Well, first of all, as you pointed out, the matter is still under seal. And as I've said in all these cases, at least one party in every case should follow the judge's orders, preferably it's better if both do. So I can't comment on it. But let me remind you, I have asked for the release of the briefs and the pleadings in the case so that you and the American people can evaluate my position and any differences that exist between that which we have asserted in previous assertions of executive privilege. I would also remind you that the facts are quite different in this case. Q. How so, sir? Europe U.S. Relations Q. Mr. President, would you consider the four European countries part of the G 7 as the more natural counterpart to the U.S., even more so now that there is a European Central Bank not a central political authority in Europe? And do you subscribe to the work of President Prodi for the launching of a new transatlantic negotiation for a new marketplace? And for Mr. Prodi, the French President is resisting the idea of transatlantic negotiations. Will you take a leadership with that against his position? President Clinton. Well, the answer to your second question to me, would I support the launching of new negotiations to broaden our partnership, the answer to that is yes. I think the proper answer to your first question is that from the day I took office, I have supported increasing unity within Europe and any specific step that the Europeans might decide for themselves to take, including a common currency. And what I want is a strong, united Europe that is our partner in dealing with the challenges and in seizing the opportunities of the 21st century world. That's what I look forward to. I think that is one of the legacies I would like to leave when I leave office in 2001. So for me, this is a positive step, these things which are happening now. Q. I'm sorry, on the G 7 though, Mr. President, I mean, there is no counterpart to the European Central Bank President Clinton. Well, on the G 7 we all in the G 7, we operate by consensus, so it's not like we do everything together anyway. Prime Minister Prodi. On my side, it's true that the French oppose it at the present time, the negotiation. But they didn't oppose the general idea. They opposed the specific proposal, and we decided to go on. We decided that we must make a very concrete, step by step approach. We have a lot of things that we can deal with unanimity now, but we have decided that this is one of the most important issues, not because of Far East crisis but because of the future of humanity. We think that the relations between Europe and the United States are still the foundation of the world peace. This is what we told, and so we will have to accompany them with increasing economic and political relations. From the point of view of the transatlantic negotiation, we shall find concrete steps to start immediately for the negotiation. I can't take the initiative alone, because I am part of the European Union, but I am happy to start this type of pressure in order to convince all my colleagues to have a quick starting of this negotiation. I want to express also my gratitude I already have done in another interview to President Clinton, to the American people, for the attitude they had during this process of monetary union. It's completely infrequent to be so clear, so transparent, not to put any obstacle, any suspicion in this such a big change it will be a change also for American policy. This is enormous change in the world economy. And this is, I think, the real meaning of what is a longterm friendship. President Clinton. Lori Lori Santos, United Press International . Middle East Peace Process Q. Sir, Israel's Prime Minister says he won't accept U.S. dictates in the Middle East peace process. What will you do if Israel rebuffs the U.S. proposal for a 13 percent withdrawal? President Clinton. Well, I don't believe Israel or any other country should accept the dictates of the United States in a peace process. We cannot and we should not attempt to impose a peace on parties because they have to live with the consequences. What we have tried to do for a good year now is to listen to both parties, look at the situation on the ground, understand their respective concerns, and come forward with a set of ideas that we believe are most likely to get the parties to final status talks. Keep in mind, they're supposed to finish these talks a year from this month, by their own agreement. Now, the ideas we put forth, as Secretary Albright said, were accepted in principle by Mr. Arafat. The Prime Minister said he was unable to do so, but he asked that he be permitted to go home not permitted but that he be given time to go home and talk through with his Cabinet what might be an acceptable position, bring it back to us, and see if we could bring the parties together. That is what we are trying to do. And keep in mind what we are trying to do. We are not talking about here a final settlement of all the outstanding issues between Israel and the Palestinians. We are talking about a settlement of sufficient number of issues that will permit them to get into the final status talks within the framework embodied by the agreement signed here in September of '93. And the first person to advocate a more rapid movement to the final status was Prime Minister Netanyahu. I have tried to find a way actually to do what he suggested. He said, "The facts have changed. The Government is different. Things are different than they used to be. Let's go on and go to final status talks and try to resolve all this at once in a package." I thought it made a lot of sense at the time, and I have done my best for a year now to find the formula that would unlock the differences between them to get them into those final status talks. That's all I'm trying to do. There's no way in the world I could impose an agreement on them or dictate their security to them, even if I wished to do that, which I don't, because when the agreement is over, whether it's in the Middle East or Ireland or Bosnia or anyplace else, they have to live with the consequences. Q. Will you go Monday, if it's not inaudible ? President Clinton. Well, I expect to do first of all, we are working let's wait and see what, if anything, Prime Minister Netanyahu comes back with. Let's wait and see, and then see where we are. I hope very much I would like very much if we could get the parties together so they could get into the final status talks. I do believe if they could get over this hurdle, if they could demonstrate good faith to one another, and then they got in the final status talks and everything were on the table, all the outstanding pieces, then I think that give and take would be more likely to produce a final agreement. So I'm very anxious to get them over this hill, so they can get into discussing the final arrangements. That's one thing I thought Prime Minister Netanyahu was right about, but I hope that both sides will help us get there. That's what we're trying to do. Italy's Role in the United Nations Q. President Clinton, you have been praising Italy as a faithful ally of the United States. Now Italy is also a major contributor of the United Nations. Do you think that your Government would support a reform of the U.N. Security Council which would give Italy a bigger role? President Clinton. Well, we would support an expansion of the Security Council with the membership still to be determined. I don't think we can dictate it all. And we would support other efforts to give Italy a larger role, generally. First of all, let me say that as long as I have been President, for 5 years, the Italians have been as forthcoming as any country in being willing to make contributions to solving our common problems, whether it's in Bosnia or the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia or now in Albania, where you took the initiative. And all we had to do, if you will, was to sit on the sidelines and cheer you on and try to be supportive. Then, in the government of Prime Minister Prodi, we see a remarkable strength and cohesion and singularity of purpose, which has led to a marked improvement in your economic situation, early entry into the European Monetary Union. So I think the prospects for greater roles of leadership for Italy in many, many different forums are quite good. And I would support that. I think that Italy can justifiably say, "We should be a part of more and more of these decisionmaking bodies because we're making a bigger contribution." And in general, I think that's a positive thing. Randy Randy Mikkelsen, Reuters , you have a question? U.S. Forces in the Persian Gulf Q. Mr. President, there are reports today that the United States has cut the level cut its aircraft carriers in the Gulf from two to one. What does that say about the level of threat in the region and the state of U.S. relations with Iraq? And what can you say about reports that morale among U.S. troops there is at an all time low? President Clinton. Well, we have sent the Eisenhower is sailing on schedule, as you probably know. And there's been some speculation about the timetable there, but I can tell you that I have not Secretary Cohen has not recommended a final decision to me on this, and I have certainly not made one, and we've done our best to keep all of our options open. The main thing I want to reaffirm is our determination to see the United Nations resolutions complied with and the inspection regime continue until it finishes its work. But no final decision has been made on that yet. Q. And the morale issue, sir? President Clinton. I can't really comment on that. I think you should talk to Secretary Cohen about that to see if he agrees with the assessment of it. But one of the things that we recognize is that as we ask more and more and more of our men and women in uniform and they have longer deployments, we're going to have to work harder to make sure they get adequate support and their families back home get adequate support in order to keep morale high. I can't comment on the specific assertion because I'm not sure that it's so. But I am sure that our men and women in uniform, because we have so many responsibilities in so many parts of the globe, are called upon to do quite a lot and be away from home base for extended periods of time. And that puts a bigger responsibility on those of us who make these decisions, beginning with me, to do everything we can to give them the support they need and to make sure their families are taken care of. U.S. Aircraft Incident in the Italian Alps Q. Prime Minister Prodi, are you satisfied with the way the American authorities are dealing with the accident in the Italian Alps? Prime Minister Prodi. Since the first moment when I called personally President Clinton, I found a very warm and prompt response to the problem. And I have to thank Ambassador Foglietta, who is here, who he understood immediately how big was our sorrow, how deep was our regret. And the following evolution of the problem they've always kept with a daily communication between the American Government and the Italian authorities. So I am waiting for the future development of the case, but I've seen a deep involvement of the American political authorities. President Clinton. I'd like to just make a brief comment about that. This was a horrible human tragedy. I can't even describe how I felt the first moment I heard about it, and Prime Minister Prodi. I do remember your call. President Clinton. My regret is profound. Since that time, we have done everything we could both to cooperate with the Italian Government in the investigation into the case and to handle the disposition of the charges, as well as the treatment of the families of the victims, in accordance with the agreements signed between our two countries and to be as faithful to it as we could. And we will continue to do that. I regret terribly what happened. And I cannot bring back the people who perished, but I will do my best to make sure that we behave in a completely honorable way, in a way that is completely consistent with the commitments we have made. Stewart Stewart Powell, Hearst Newspapers . Cuba Q. Thank you, Mr. President. I wanted to ask you about Cuba for a moment. President Clinton. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Q. Your former Atlantic Commander, Jack Sheehan, came back from a visit to Cuba he spent a week there, spent 8 hours with Fidel Castro and returned with seeing opportunities for some rapprochement with Castro. I wonder if you're now willing to undertake some steps to ease the embargo or take additional steps to provide humanitarian relief in Cuba, and secondly, whether you're willing to undertake any steps to dismantle or ease the defense perimeter around Guantanamo Bay as a symbolic gesture toward Cuba at this moment? President Clinton. Well, in the aftermath of the Pope's visit to Cuba, I did take some steps which I hope would send the right signal to the Cuban people inaudible in the hopes that it would help to support a move toward a civil society there. As you know, what further steps I could take are clearly circumscribed by the passage of the Helms Burton Act. And furthermore, there have been mixed signals coming out of the actions of the Government in Cuba since then about whether they really wish to have a rapprochement that is more than government to government and maybe trade to trade but also includes what our real concern is. Our real concern is for the people of Cuba Can we move the society toward freedom and human rights and a democratic system? These things don't have to be done overnight, but then again, they have to be done. There has to be some clear signal. I understand the desire of the Cuban Government to keep its health care system, to keep its commitment to universal literacy to even its poorest citizens. That's a commendable and laudable thing. But I do not accept, nor can I ever accept, some of the antidemocratic and, frankly, clearly anti human rights policies of the Government. So we have to have some basis for doing more, especially given the constrictions of the law. Now, nothing would make me happier than to see some basis for doing more. I think all Americans would like to be reconciled with Cuba because of our ties of blood in this country and because of its proximity to us. Capital Punishment Q. Mr. President, you have spoken of the common values that unify our two countries, but there is one big issue that is opening an ever widening gap between the two countries, and it has a lot to do with values, and it is the issue of the death penalty. And I was wondering, because this issue is seen with tremendous sensitivity in our country, if you could give us a sense of what your personal feelings are on this issue. And I hope Mr. Prodi might want to add his own comment. President Clinton. Well, first of all, I do not believe that our different views on the death penalty should drive a wedge between our two countries, since that is a matter of essentially domestic, not foreign, policy and since in our country criminal defendants are given extensive procedural protections to avoid abuse as well as extensive rights of appeal. I support capital punishment under certain circumstances. The law in our country is that for most cases involving murder, it is up to the States of our Republic to decide whether to have the death penalty. Some States do have the death penalty, and some States don't. It is a question of State law. There are a few crimes on the Federal books for which capital punishment can occur. But it's, by and large, most of the cases the great majority of the cases are matters of local law, State law in our country. And unless the Supreme Court were to reach a contrary decision and invalidate all death penalty laws, which it has explicitly refused to do, under our Constitution it would remain that way. Prime Minister Prodi. From my point of view, I belong to a country which the death penalty has been abolished since a long time. It is in the roots of our tradition, of our values, of our society not to have it, and I stick on it. President Clinton. Wolf Wolf Blitzer, CNN . Hubbell and McDougal Indictments Q. Thank you, Mr. President Mr. Prime Minister, Mr. President. Mr. President, since your last news conference, Ken Starr has indicted Webster Hubbell and Susan McDougal once again. And at the same time Congressman Dan Burton has released all these prison tapes involving Webster Hubbell and his wife and his lawyer and others. I wonder how you would assess all of this in light of the problems that you and your supporters are facing as this investigation into the Monica Lewinsky matter continues to escalate and perhaps reach some sort of conclusion sooner rather than later. Obviously your thoughts on all of this would be interesting to all of us. Laughter President Clinton. Well, I think it was clearly a violation of privacy of Mr. and Mrs. Hubbell for the tapes to be released. And I think virtually everyone in America now recognizes it was wrong to release selected portions of the tapes, apparently to create a false impression of what the whole record indicated. On the other matters you mentioned, the parties have spoken for themselves about what they think was behind it, and I can't really add anything to that. Kosovo Q. Mr. President, did you discuss the eventuality to send troops to Kosovo? And to Mr. Prodi, is our country available to send troops to Kosovo? President Clinton. I suppose the literally accurate answer to your question is we did not discuss that. But I have made it clear, and I believe we have made it clear between us, that, at least from my point of view, no option should be ruled out. We do not want another Bosnia in Kosovo. Too many people have died there already in indiscriminate violence. And of course, it happened very quickly. Neither, however, do we want to get in the position where Italy has to send troops to every one of its neighboring countries and the United States has to send troops every time there's a dispute in that part of the world. But I don't think we can rule out any option, because we don't want another Bosnia to happen, and we don't want both in terms of the human loss of life or in terms of the regional instability. So I wouldn't rule out any option. But I think the most important thing is to keep the carrots and the sticks we have on the table and for a genuine dialog to occur. Look, this is not we have a saying in America sometimes this is not rocket science. You've got a part of Serbia which is 90 percent Albanian, and they want some kind of autonomy and to have their legitimate concerns addressed. The Serbs don't want to give up a big part of their country which they believe and is legally part of their country. So they obviously need to sit down and talk through how the legitimate aspirations of the Kosovo Albanians can somehow be manifest in giving them some measure of self government and decisionmaking authority over their lives within the framework of Serbia. There are 50 different ways this could be worked out in a humane, legitimate way. They do not have to kill each other to get this done, and they should not do that. Prime Minister Prodi. I completely agree, but probably the question was not put in the right way. The problem is not to send troops in the general way, but there is the problem of how to protect the border in order to avoid in the short term the problem of smuggling weapons from one side to the other one. Even this option is dangerous because, in some ways, whenever you send troops, you send hostages, potential hostages, to the situation. But as President Clinton told, we didn't rule out any solution. We are just making an effort to arrive to a peaceful solution. And also we had a long conversation concerning the possibility of helping the civilian recovery of Kosovo in this difficult situation, in which Kosovo has been abandoned in some ways. But of course, you can't rule out anything now. President Clinton. Thank you all. May 06, 1998 Prime Minister, Mrs. Prodi, members of the Italian delegation, welcome to the White House and welcome to the United States. Hillary and I are delighted to see you again, and I look forward to our talks today which will deepen our relationship. But first let me say, I was terribly saddened to hear of the torrential rains and mudslides in southern Italy which have resulted in the loss of Italian lives. United States forces from Aviano are now transporting Italian civilians to the scene to assist in rescue efforts. The history of our partnership is long and special. Every schoolchild knows that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, soon to be followed by other great Italian explorers, Amerigo Vespucci, John Cabot, Giovanni da Verrazano. That was only the beginning of a relationship that has now flourished for centuries, bringing us together in new ways generation after generation. Today, Italians once again are expanding the world's horizons. Italy stands at the forefront of a new Europe, leading efforts to promote peace and unity throughout the Continent, from economic and monetary union to military cooperation. In recent months, Italy has led efforts to restore civil order in Albania and is seeking to avert a deepening conflict in Kosovo. Italian and American troops patrol alongside one another in Bosnia, and we will continue to work together to build stability throughout southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean. And finally let me say, we are deeply grateful for Italy's hospitality toward United States forces working to preserve peace in Europe. Mr. Prime Minister, under your leadership Italy is building a better future. Enterprise is thriving the rule of law prevails. Today's dreams are being shaped into tomorrow's reality. Together we are exploring outer space, fighting crime and terrorism, restricting the spread of dangerous weapons, and creating a climate where goods and ideas can be freely exchanged between our countries and around the world. Truly, Italy is setting an example for the new Europe. This week in Washington and next week at summits in Europe, we will forge even stronger bonds of cooperation to equip our people to succeed in the global economy, to combat international crime and other threats to the security of our citizens, to nurture the health of our planet. The year from now, we look forward to meeting here again when the NATO alliance celebrates its 50th anniversary and acts to make the alliance stronger for the next 50 years. The great seal of the United States contains the words novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages. Those words were written by Vergil in Italy more than 2,000 years ago. But they have fresh meaning today, as a new generation builds a new order of peace and freedom, prosperity and security for the 21st century. Vergil's words apply to your deeds, Mr. Prime Minister, and we are very glad to welcome you to the United States of America. April 18, 1998 President Frei, distinguished heads of state, leaders of the Chilean Congress, Supreme Court, members of the diplomatic corps, President Wolfensohn, President Iglesias, Secretary General Gaviria, Secretary General Ruggiero, Director General Alleyne 4 years ago in Miami, we, the democratic nations of this hemisphere, met in the historic Summit of the Americas and pledged ourselves to a common future rooted in shared values, shared burdens, shared progress, and embodied in our call for a free trade area of the Americas by 2005. I thank all my fellow leaders and their governments for their faithfulness to the summit process. I thank especially those who helped us to begin the Summit of the Americas in 1994. Now we come together in Santiago. What shall we do? First, we should celebrate a new reality in the Americas, the march of freedom, prosperity, peace, and partnership among our nations. Second, we should recognize that in all our nations too many people have not felt this new reality, and we should resolve to continue to work together until they do. As we look back on the 3 1 2 years since the Miami summit, there is much to be proud of, as our report, "From Words to Deeds" documents. The economy of the region has grown 15 percent. Last year average growth was 5 percent, and inflation was the lowest in 50 years. Chile and Uruguay have set the standard for poverty reduction and fiscal responsibility. Brazil and Argentina have slowed inflation to a crawl. Mexico has overcome adversity, transformed its economy, broadened its democracy. Bolivia has attracted new foreign investments and given its citizens a greater stake in their future. Venezuela's Apertura program is drawing investment to develop its energy resources. Peru and Ecuador, with a little help from their friends, are working towards a peaceful end to their decades long border dispute. Central America, after years of strife, is well on the way to achieving its long held vision of democracy and integration and growth. Caribbean nations are joining forces to expand their economies and to defend their shores against drugs and crime. Together we have begun to create the free trade area of the Americas, a thriving market of 800 million people invested in each other's future, enriching each other's lives, weaving a tapestry of interdependence that strengthens every nation. The Americas have set a new standard for the world in the defense of liberty and justice through our collective commitment to defend democracy wherever it is at risk in our hemisphere. Concerted action by neighbors and friends already has helped to restore or preserve democracy and human rights in Haiti, Guatemala, and Paraguay. Our cooperation in the fight against drugs has intensified, based on an understanding that drugs are a problem for all of us and all of us must work together to attack both demand and supply. We've adopted tough new measures against money laundering, forged the first multilateral treaty in the world to fight corruption, so that our societies will be governed by the rule of law. We have signed an historic convention to stop the illegal trade in guns in our hemisphere. We're working to advance the environment and public health. Our people are healthier, our water safer, our air cleaner than 4 years ago. We are wiping measles off our hemisphere's map, dropping from more than 23,000 cases in 1994 to less than 500 so far this year. We're phasing out lead from gasoline. In 1996, 12 nations achieved this goal by 2001, there will be 20. We're working together to promote a clean energy future and to meet the challenge of climate change. I thank the efforts of many people in this regard, the Vice President and our Government and many in other governments throughout this hemisphere. The Miami summit was a watershed in the history of our hemisphere, as the leaders of free people embraced a common vision of the future and a common strategy for achieving it. The journey from Miami to Santiago has been filled with progress toward our goals. Now, here, and on the road forward from here, we must do more to ensure that the path of reform and democracy and integration actually lifts the lives of ordinary people in all our nations. Poverty throughout the hemisphere is still too high income disparity is too great civil society too fragile justice systems too weak too many people still lack the education and skills necessary to succeed in the new economy. In short, too few feel change working for them. Therefore, with democracy and free markets now in place, we must vigorously launch a second generation of reforms for the next generation of Americans. No priority is more important than giving our children an excellent education. The fate of nations in the 21st century turns on what all citizens know and whether all citizens can quickly learn. Too often, resources are spent primarily on higher education for the few. We must all redirect our focus toward higher quality education for all. I especially thank Presidents Frei, Cardoso, Menem, and Zedillo for their leadership to give all our children a good education, with well equipped classrooms, welltrained teachers, high standards, and accountability. This is a goal we must vigorously embrace and work hard to realize. We will also work here to deepen democracy and respect for human rights. We know free elections are democracy's first step, not the last. We'll support the Organization of American States special rapporteur for freedom of expression launch a regional justice center to train judges and prosecutors strengthen local government institutions to bring power closer to people and in its 50th year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we will redouble our efforts to protect the human rights of all people. We will also do more to defend democracy against its enemies, corruption, terrorism, and drugs. The new hemispheric alliance against drugs we will launch here will encourage, support, and improve all our national efforts to fight this common threat as partners. We'll continue to promote our common prosperity by launching negotiations for a free trade area of the Americas. I want to underscore the importance we attach to a special civil society committee that will allow a broad array of stakeholders, within all our societies, the opportunity to make their voices heard. If economic integration in a global economy is to work for all people, we must demonstrate that we can have economic growth and lift labor standards for all our workers. We must demonstrate that we can grow the economy and preserve, indeed, even improve the environment. This civil society committee will give the peoples of our nations the chance to make that argument, and we must prove that we can make the argument work. Let me reaffirm to all my colleagues, the United States may not yet have fast track legislation, but we will. And I assure you that our commitment to the free trade area of the Americas will be in the fast lane of our concerns. We must do that. After all, more than onethird of the United States growth in the last few years has come from expanded trade. More than 40 percent of our exports go to our neighbors seated on this platform. We can only continue to grow and create jobs in the United States if we continue to reach out to our neighbors for more open markets and freer trade. That is the fundamental observation that all of us share. Your prosperity lifts ours our prosperity lifts yours. As more good jobs are created in any nation, as economies grow and people thrive, they become better partners for each other and for others around the world. Finally, we must take further steps to lift people from poverty and spread the benefit of progress to every member of society, from supporting women's full participation in the lives of our countries to providing loans to microentrepreneurs to broadening property ownership. Now, this Santiago agenda is ambitious, but it is imperative. Again, let me applaud President Frei for his leadership, for bringing us all here together and for supporting such a broad and deep agenda. If we are to seize the opportunities and meet the challenges of our time, we must pursue this agenda, and we must do it together. The first broad meeting of representatives from our hemisphere took place in 1889 in Washington, DC. Times were different and slower then. The delegates met for more than 6 months and toured around our Nation by train. The only bad thing was they had to listen to even more speeches. But in that meeting our predecessors, drawing on Bolivar's vision of hemispheric unity, set a precedent for cooperation that grew over 50 years later from that seed into the OAS. Four years ago at Miami, we planted the seed of a new partnership for a new century. Now we can and must do what is necessary for that seed to grow to grow in freedom and opportunity and cooperation. The Americas can be a model for all the world in the 21st century. That is, after all, the spirit of the Summit of the Americas and the promise of Santiago. Thank you very much. April 17, 1998 Thank you very much. To the President of the Senate, the President of the Chamber of Deputies, to the members of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, members of the Chilean Cabinet, members of the diplomatic corps, my fellow Americans, including members of our administration, Members of Congress, the Governor of Puerto Rico, ladies and gentlemen. First, let me thank you for the warm reception that Hillary and I, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Education, and our entire delegation has received not only here but by the people of Chile. We are honored to be in this great nation, a place of marvelous gifts and well earned accomplishments. Visitors here marvel at the beauty and extraordinary contrast of your landscape, from the desert north to the towering ranges of the Andes, to the mysteries of Easter Island, to the southern beaches where penguins brave Antarctic winds. Your culture moves the world in poetry and prose and music and dance, in theater and films, haunted by the spirits of the past, enriched by dreams of the future. Your Nobel Prize winning poets, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, have moved readers everywhere. Neruda's words and rhythms still come alive on every continent his echo still heard in internationally acclaimed Chilean works like the novels of Jose Donoso and Antonio Skarmeta. Your economic success is admired the world over. Indeed, more and more other nations, whether developed or developing, want to be able to learn from your example. But over and above all those gifts and achievements, Chile possesses something older than the achievements, and perhaps even more valuable than nature's gifts your devotion to freedom and democracy, a long and proud tradition. Not so very long ago now, freedom loving people everywhere in the world cheered and cheered when the people of Chile bravely reclaimed their democratic heritage. Our hemisphere's longing for democracy goes all the way back to George Washington and Simon Bolivar. Today, we work to claim its full blessings, for a strong democracy honors all its people, respecting their dignity and fundamental rights, giving them the responsibility to govern, demanding that they tolerate each other's differences in an honorable fashion. It honors its children, giving all of them the opportunity to learn so that they can live their dreams. It honors its poor, its ill, its elderly, offering them support, leaving no one without hope. It honors entrepreneurs with efficient and honest government, offering the chance to create prosperity. It honors its writers, its artists, and its press, ensuring freedom of expression, no matter, and perhaps especially, when it is painful to hear. It honors its soldiers for their commitment to defend the people, not to rule them. This principle was strongly championed by Diego Portales early in Chile's history. Democracy is never perfect, but because it is open and free, it is always perfectible. In the words of our President Franklin Roosevelt, who tried so hard to be a good neighbor to Latin America, democracy is a never ending seeking for better things. At different points in this century, many nations of the Americas lost their democracy. Some of them lost it more than once. No one loves freedom more than those who have had it and lost it. No one prizes it more than those who have lost it and regained it. I know, here, I am in a room full of people who love freedom. Freedom's victory now has been won throughout the Americas. With a single exception, the day of the dictators is over. The 21st century will be a century of democracy. To those anywhere in the Americas who would seek to take away people's precious liberties once again, or rule through violence and terror once again, let us reaffirm President Aylwin's historic words at Santiago Stadium, "nunca mas." Never again. This commitment has now gone beyond those words it is written into solemn compacts among the nations of our hemisphere. Here in Chile in 1991, the members of the Organization of American States unanimously adopted a commitment that we will stand together to defend democracy wherever it is threatened. And last year the OAS amended its founding charter so that member nations may actually suspend any regime that overthrows a government elected by its people. We have backed our words with actions. In Haiti, nations from across the Americas, joined by others, participated in the United Nations' sponsored effort to restore a democracy that had been stolen by military force. Nations of this hemisphere stood with the people of Paraguay to preserve democracy when it was threatened there in 1996. A message should be clear to all We have made a decision that in this hemisphere the people govern. Now, having resolved to protect democracy, we must now do much, much more to perfect democracy. And we must do it throughout our hemisphere. Free elections are democracy's essential first step but not its last. And strong democracies deliver real benefits to their people. Across the Americas, there are still too many citizens who exercise their right to vote, but after the election is over, feel few benefits from the decisions made by their officials. This kind of popular frustration can fuel the ambitions of democracy's foes. As Chileans understand perhaps more clearly than any of their fellow Americans, there must be a second generation of reforms, beyond free elections and free markets, because for democracy to thrive, people must know that everyone who is willing to work will have a fair chance to share in the bounty of the nation. Leaders must ensure that the political system, the legal system, the economic system are not rigged to favor those who already have much but instead give everyone a stake in shaping the future. A strong and thriving democracy requires, therefore, strengthening the rule of law, the independence of judges, the professionalism of police, for justice must be honest. It requires a strong and independent legislature to represent all the people, even when on occasion, they do not do what the President would like them to do. It requires a constant campaign against corruption so that public contracts are awarded based on merit and not bribes. It requires bank and securities regulation to permit growth while guarding against cheaters and collapses. It requires a credit system not only for those who are obviously successful but for enterprising people no matter how poor or remote their conditions. It requires a robust, free press that can raise serious questions and publish without censorship or fear. A strong democracy also requires protecting the environment and attacking threats to it. It requires good schools and good health care. It requires protecting the rights of workers, standing up for the rights of women and children and minorities, fighting the drugs and crime and terrorism that eat away at democracy's foundations, reaching out across all sectors of society from the corporate executive to the grassroots activists to the working family again, to ensure that everyone has a stake in shaping the future. Tomorrow, democratically elected leaders will assemble in Santiago for the second Summit of the Americas, to launch the next steps in our united efforts to build strong democracies that deliver for all our peoples. Chile is a shining star in America's constellation, stable and resilient with budget surpluses, a high savings rate, a high growth rate, low unemployment, and low inflation. But Chile also is trying to do more to give everyone that precious stake in the future. In his first address after taking office, President Frei pledged to work for all of Chile's people, and he has. Poverty has been cut in half compared to 1990 levels. The quality of education has improved, especially in poorer areas. Yesterday President and Mrs. Frei took Hillary and I to a neighborhood in Santiago where we talked to ordinary citizens who had benefited from educational opportunities and business opportunities in ways that enabled them to change their lives. Your citizens are working hard to protect the environment, although just like those of us in my country, we've still got a ways to go. The success of this nation goes beyond your borders. As President Frei noted last year in Washington, Chile was once known as the "end of the Earth." Now it is known as the forefront of progress, a leader for peace and justice and prosperity, a leader in this hemisphere and throughout the world. I thank you for what democratic Chile has done to promote peace in El Salvador, Haiti, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf, between Peru and Ecuador. Your country served on the United Nations Security Council. You have taken the initiative to attack corruption and crime across the Americas. For all that, I thank you. In the future, we must work together as we have in the past indeed, as we have from the beginning to strengthen our democracies and brighten our people's lives and broaden our children's futures. The friendship between the United States and Chile goes back to 1810, when our still young Nation recognized your independence. Our friendship was off to a good start, but in all the long years and ups and downs, it has never been stronger or broader than it is today. We are your largest trading partner, and trade between us has grown at an average of 13 percent a year since 1993. We want and will resolutely pursue a free trade agreement that includes our two nations. And I will not be satisfied until we achieve that goal. Chile and the United States must be full partners in the 21st century. We must also be full partners with like minded democracies throughout our region. Tomorrow we will take a big step toward that full partnership as we begin the historic effort envisioned 4 years ago at the first Summit of the Americas in Miami, to create a free trade area of the Americas by 2005. Meanwhile, as all of us know, the private sector is visibly proceeding as if it had already happened expanding trade and investment, building successful joint enterprises in everything from mining to insurance to retailing. We know that more trade and commerce will increase our collective prosperity. But we must resolve, again I say, to pursue that second level of reforms to ensure that prosperity is widely shared. As President Frei has repeatedly said, clearly, for every nation, education is the key. More than ever before as nations and as individuals, our destiny depends upon what we know and how quickly we can learn. In a world where the volume of knowledge is doubling every 5 years, strong schools can give children the skills they need it can also encourage their dreams. It can give people the power to overcome the inequalities between rich and poor. It can give nations the opportunity to fulfill their destiny. President Frei and I have committed ourselves to work together and to learn from each other to improve the quality and the reach of education in both our nations. All of us all of us should apply our best efforts to that until we have done much better than we are doing now in every nation of the Americas. As we travel into the 21st century, Chile can continue to rely on the United States as a friend and an ally. We have a great stake in your continuing success. You make the hemisphere safer and more prosperous. You are a strong partner in meeting our common challenges in this hemisphere and throughout the world. Indeed, we welcome the growing strength of all nations that believe in freedom and human dignity and work for a brighter future for their people, so that the partnership between our two people, as we will see at the Summit of the Americas, is really part of a larger community of values sweeping across our hemisphere. As we all come together this weekend, we do so to make democracy work in ways that our people can feel, to advance the fight against common threats and for wider economic opportunity and deeper democracy. In the words of Neruda, our dreams become one. On this very day, a consortium of universities from Chile, the United States, and other nations starts work on a powerful new telescope in northern Chile. Their astronomers will look up to the heavens, gazing deep into outer space and, therefore, deep into the past, so that they can learn things which will help us all to build a brighter future. We must never forget our past, but we must use it. We must not use it to open old wounds or to rest on the laurels of escape from its worst moments but, instead, to quicken our imagination of a better tomorrow and to propel us toward it. Together, let us resolve that when this summit is done, the leaders of the United States and Chile will not rest until we have shined the light of freedom and lit the spark of hope in every corner of our nations, in every part of our hemisphere. That is a worthy mission for the new century in the new millennium for two peoples who have loved freedom for a long, long time. Thank you very much. April 11, 1998 Good morning. Across America and around the world, this is a holy weekend for three of the world's great religions. Christians are celebrating Easter Jews, Passover and Muslims have just ended their annual pilgrimage, the Hajj. On this special weekend, the eyes of the world and the prayers of so many are focused on Northern Ireland, as an historic peace agreement was reached among representatives of all the major parties to that long and tragic conflict. I especially want to salute the leadership of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain, and the leaders of all the parties who came together in a remarkable display of courage to set aside differences in the pursuit of peace. I also salute the previous Prime Ministers of Ireland and Great Britain, who started and nourished this peace process. And all Americans should take a special measure of pride that the talks in Northern Ireland were chaired by George Mitchell, the former majority leader of the United States Senate, who has served his country and the cause of peace very, very well. I thank him for his brilliant leadership. Of course, we understand that the pain and hatred of so many years cannot and will not be washed away in one weekend. So on behalf of the American people, I pledge the continuing aid, support, encouragement, and prayers of the United States to the effort to build a lasting peace and an enduring prosperity in Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the last analysis, the future of that region lies in the hearts and hands of its people. Like so many Americans, part of my family calls Ireland home. And having been there, having met with so many remarkable Irish men and women from all sides of the conflict, I have seen the future in their eyes a future in which children can grow up free from fear a future rich with the lilt of Irish laughter, not the pain of bitter tears. There may be those who seek to undermine this agreement by returning to violence, so we are resolved that the acts of peace and courage will triumph over acts of cowardice and terror. Tomorrow the dawn will break on Easter morning. All across Ireland, Catholics and Protestants will, in their own way, proclaim their faith in the triumph of life over death. On this Easter, their leaders have lifted their Christian beliefs and have lived them by giving the people of Ireland and Northern Ireland the chance to choose peace over conflict, indeed, to choose life over death. When I visited Ulster, and later the Republic of Ireland, the great Nobel Prize winning Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, gave me a stanza from a poem he wrote that today hangs on the wall of my office in the upstairs of the White House. Its message has a special meaning today. Here's what it says 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. What a wonderful Easter gift for the Irish, Irish Americans, and lovers of peace everywhere. Thank you for listening. April 07, 1998 Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. Thank you, Governor Carnahan, for your leadership on so many areas and your friendship. I'd like to thank the leaders of this fine institution for welcoming us here and for the mission they perform every day. I thank Senators Kerrey and Santorum for their concern longstanding for Social Security reform and their presence here, and Representatives Hulshof and Pomeroy, who are participating in the program, and Representative McCarthy and also Representative David Dreier from California, who is a native of Kansas City, who are here. I thank the members of our administration who have come, who will be participating the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Frank Raines the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Larry Summers the Director of the National Economic Council, Gene Sperling and the Administrator of Social Security, Ken Apfel. Attorney General Nixon, Treasurer Graeber, Insurance Commissioner Sebelius, thank you all for being here. Mayor Cleaver, thank you for hosting us. I don't know if Mayor Marinovich is here or not, but if she is, hello. Laughter I'd also like to thank the leaders of the AARP, including Horace Deets, and the leaders of the Concord Coalition, including Martha Phillips, for their hosting of this forum. The AARP has long been a leading voice for the elderly, the Concord Coalition long a leading voice for fiscal responsibility over the long run, and their willingness to work together is very important. I'd also like to thank the Speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader, and the House and Senate Democratic leaders for nominating and being represented here today by the Members of Congress who are on the program. As the Governor said, this is a good time for America and a time of great hope. Our economy is the strongest in a generation. Many of our social problems are on the mend. Our leadership in the world is unrivaled. Within the next year, we will have a balanced budget. And where once there were deficits projected as far as the eye can see, we now have projected surpluses as far as the eye can see, a trillion dollars' worth over the next decade. But this sunlit moment is not a time to rest. Instead, it is a rare opportunity to prepare our Nation for the challenges and the opportunities of the 21st century, or in the words of the old saying, to fix the roof while the sun is shining. In the coming century, the aging of our society will present both great challenges and great opportunities. I hope to live to be one of those people and so, to me, it's a high class problem. But because a higher percentage of our people will be both older and retired, perhaps our greatest opportunity and our greatest obligation at this moment is to save Social Security. In the State of the Union Address, I called on Congress to set aside every penny of any surplus until we had dealt with Social Security first. Both parties in both Chambers of Congress have joined in this call. That is the good news. Today we turn to the business at hand, building public awareness of the nature and scope of the problem and building public consensus for the best changes. Clearly, we will strengthen Social Security and reform it only if we reach across lines of party, philosophy, and generation. And that is one reason for the broad representation of age groups in this audience today. We have to have open minds and generous spirits. And we all have to be willing to listen and to learn. For too long, politicians have called Social Security the "third rail" of American politics. That's Washington language for "it's above serious debate." This year we must prove them wrong. This conference, with its wide participation, is a good start. On the political calendar, 1998 is an election year. But on the Social Security calendar, we must resolve to make it an education year, when we come to grips with the problems of the system and come together to find the answers. This issue is complicated, so we need the best ideas, whatever their source. The issue is controversial, so we have to have a national consensus on both the nature of the problem and the direction we must take. That's why I've asked all the Members of Congress to also host townhall meetings in their own districts. I'll be talking with several of them by satellite later today, and we'll hold more additional forums like this one around the country. In December there will be a White House Conference on Social Security. In January I intend to convene the leaders of Congress to draft a plan to save it. With this effort, we can forge a national consensus, and we must. For 60 years, Social Security has meant more than an ID number on a tax form, more than even a monthly check in the mail. It reflects our deepest values, the duties we owe to our parents, to each other, to our children and grandchildren, to those whom misfortune strikes, to our ideals as one America. Missouri's native son, Mark Twain, once said, "I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed a man can't prove anything without statistics." So I thought we would begin today with a few statistics. Today, as the first chart shows, 44 million Americans depend upon Social Security, and for two thirds of our senior citizens, it is the main source of income. For 18 percent of our seniors, it is the only source of income. But Social Security is more than just a retirement program. Today you can see that more than one in three of the beneficiaries are not retirees they are children and spouses of working people who die in their prime they are men and women who become disabled, or their children. So Social Security is also a life insurance policy and a disability policy, as well as a rocksolid guarantee of support in old age. That is why we have to act with care as we make needed repairs to the program occasioned by the huge growth in retirees. Since its enactment over 60 years ago, Social Security has changed the face of America. When President Roosevelt signed the bill creating the Social Security system, most seniors in America were poor. A typical elderly person sent a letter to FDR begging him to eliminate "the stark terror of penniless old age." Since then, the elderly poverty rate has dropped sharply. You can look here and see that in 1959 the poverty rate was over 35 percent for retirees. In 1979 it had dropped to 15.2 percent. In 1996 the poverty rate is down below 11 percent. Now, there's something else I want to say about this. Even though most seniors need other sources of income in addition to Social Security to maintain a comfortable lifestyle, if Social Security did not exist today, half of all American retirees would be living in poverty 60 percent of all women. Fifteen million American seniors have been lifted out of poverty through the Social Security system. Today the system is sound, but the demographic crisis looming is clear. The baby boomers, 76 million of us, are now looking ahead to their retirement. And people, clearly, are living longer, so that by 2030, there will be twice as many elderly as there are today. All these trends will impose heavy strains on the system. Let's look at the next chart here. You can see that in 1960 wasn't so long ago there were over five people working for every person drawing Social Security. In 1997, last year, there were over three people 3.3 people working for every person drawing. But by 2030, because of the increasing average age, if present birthrates and immigration rates and retirement rates continue, there will be only two people working for every person drawing Social Security. Now, here's the bottom line The Social Security Trust Fund is sufficient to pay all the obligations of Social Security both retirement and disability until 2029, after which it will no longer cover those obligations. Payroll contributions will only be enough to cover 75 cents on the dollar of current benefits. Now, if we act now, we can ensure strong retirement benefits for the baby boom generation without placing an undue burden on our children and grandchildren. And we can do it, if we act now, with changes that will be far simpler and easier than if we wait until the problem is closer at hand. For example, 100 billion of the budget surplus, if used for Social Security, would add a year or more to the solvency of the Trust Fund with no other changes being made. Other changes which could be made can be phased in over time, and keep in mind, small changes decided on now can have huge impacts 30 years from now. So how should we judge the proposals to change the Social Security system? Here are principles that I believe we should follow, and they're on the next chart here. I believe, first of all, we have to reform Social Security in a way that strengthens and protects a guarantee for the 21st century. We should not abandon a basic program that has been one of the greatest successes in our country's history. Second, we should maintain universality and fairness. For half a century, this has been a progressive guarantee for citizens we have to keep it that way. It was not until 1985 that the poverty rate among seniors was lower than the poverty rate for the population of America as a whole. It is an astonishing achievement of our society that it is now so much lower, and we should not give it up. Third, Social Security must provide a benefit that people can count on. Regardless of the ups and downs of the economy or the financial markets, we have to provide a solid and dependable foundation of retirement security. Fourth, Social Security continue to provide financial security for disabled and low income beneficiaries. We can never forget the one in three Social Security beneficiaries who are not retirees. And fifth, anything we do to strengthen Social Security now must maintain our hard won fiscal discipline. It is the source of much of the prosperity we enjoy today. Now, these are the principles that will guide me as we work to forge a consensus. I hope they're ones that all of you can also embrace. This national effort will call on the best of our people. It will require us to rise above partisanship. It will require us to plan for the future, to consider new ideas, to engage in what President Roosevelt once called "bold, persistent experimentation." It will remind us that there are some challenges that we can only meet as one nation acting through our National Government, just as there are others we can better meet as individuals, families, communities. This is also a challenge for every generation. To the older Americans here today, let me say, you have nothing to worry about. For you, Social Security is as strong as ever. To the younger people here today who may believe that you will never see a Social Security check indeed, I saw a poll which purported to be serious that said that Americans in their twenties thought it was more likely they would see a UFO than that they would ever draw Social Security. Laughter That skepticism may have been well founded in the past, but just as we put our fiscal house in order, we can and must put Social Security in order. And above all, to my fellow baby boomers, let me say that none of us wants our own retirement to be a burden to our children and to their efforts to raise our grandchildren. It would be unconscionable if we failed to act, and act now, as one nation renewing the ties that bind us across the generations. Thank you very much. March 26, 1998 Thank you very much, Premier Molefe, for that fine introduction. Mr. President, Deputy President Mbeki, Madam Speaker, Mr. Chairman of the National Council of Provinces, Members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply honored to be the first American President ever to visit South Africa and even more honored to stand before this Parliament to address a South Africa truly free and democratic at last. Joining my wife and me on this tour of Africa, and especially here, are many Members of our Congress and distinguished members of my Cabinet and administration, men and women who supported the struggle for a free South Africa, leaders of the American business community now awakening to the promise and potential of South Africa, people of all different background and beliefs. Among them, however, are members of the Congressional Black Caucus and African American members of my government. It is especially important for them to be here because it was not so long ago in the long span of human history that their ancestors were uprooted from this continent and sold into slavery in the United States. But now they return to Africa as leaders of the United States. Today they sit alongside the leaders of the new South Africa, united in the powerful poetry of justice As I look out at all of you, I see our common promise. Two centuries ago, the courage and imagination that created the United States and the principles that are enshrined in our Constitution inspired men and women without a voice, across the world, to believe that one day they too could have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Now, the courage and imagination that created the new South Africa and the principles that guide your Constitution inspire all of us to be animated by the belief that one day humanity all the world over can at last be released from the bonds of hatred and bigotry. It is tempting for Americans of all backgrounds, I think, perhaps to see too many similarities in the stories of our two countries, because sometimes similarities which appear to be profound are in fact superficial. And they can obscure the unique and complex struggle that South Africa has made to shed the chains of its past for a brighter tomorrow. Nonetheless, in important ways, our paths do converge by a vision of real multiracial democracy bound together by healing and hope, renewal and redemption. Therefore I came here to say simply this Let us work with each other let us learn from each other to turn the hope we now share into a history that all of us can be proud of. Mr. President, for millions upon millions of Americans, South Africa's story is embodied by your heroic sacrifice and your breathtaking walk "out of the darkness and into the glorious light." But you are always the first to say that the real heroes of South Africa's transformation are its people, who first walked away from the past and now move with determination, patience, and courage toward a new day and a new millennium. We rejoice at what you have already accomplished. We seek to be your partners and your true friends in the work that lies ahead overcoming the lingering legacy of apartheid, seizing the promise of your rich land and your gifted people. From our own 220 year experience with democracy we know that real progress requires, in the memorable phrase of Max Weber, "the long and slow boring of hard boards." We know that democracy is always a work still in the making, a march toward what our own Founders called a more perfect Union. You have every reason to be hopeful. South Africa was reborn, after all, just 4 years ago. In the short time since, you've worked hard to deepen your democracy, to spread prosperity, to educate all your people, and to strengthen the hand of justice. The promise before you is immense a people unshackled, free to give full expression to their energy, intellect, and creativity a nation embraced by the world, whose success is important to all our futures. America has a profound and pragmatic stake in your success an economic stake because we, like you, need strong partners to build prosperity a strategic stake because of 21st century threats to our common security, from terrorism, from international crime and drug trafficking, from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, from the spread of deadly disease and the degradation of our common environment. These perils do not stop at any nation's borders. And we have a moral stake, because in overcoming your past you offer a powerful example to people who are torn by their own divisions in all parts of this Earth. Simply put, America wants a strong South Africa America needs a strong South Africa. And we are determined to work with you as you build a strong South Africa. In the first 4 years of your freedom, it has been our privilege to support your transition with aid and assistance. Now, as the new South Africa emerges, we seek a genuine partnership based on mutual respect and mutual reward. Like all partners, we cannot agree on everything. Sometimes our interests and our views diverge, but that is true even in family partnerships. Laughter Nonetheless, I am convinced, we agree on most things and on the important things because we share the same basic values a commitment to democracy and to peace, a commitment to open markets, a commitment to give all our people the tools they need to succeed in the modern world, a commitment to make elemental human rights the birth right of every single child. Over the past 4 years, we put the building blocks of our partnership in place, starting with the Binational Commission, headed by Deputy President Mbeki and our Vice President Al Gore. This remarkable effort has given highlevel energy to critical projects, from energy to education, from business development to science and technology, cutting through redtape, turning good words into concrete deeds. We are deeply indebted to you, Mr. Mbeki, for your outstanding leadership, and we thank you for it. The BNC brings to life what I believe you call "Masihlangane," the act of building together. As we look toward the future, we will seek to build together new partnerships in trade and investment through incentives such as OPEC's new Africa Opportunity Fund, already supporting two projects here in South Africa in transportation and telecommunications. We will seek to expand joint efforts to combat the grave threat of domestic and international crime through our new FBI and customs and immigration offices here in South Africa. We will seek to strengthen our cooperation around the world, for already South Africa's leadership in extending the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty and creating an Africa nuclear free zone have made all our children's futures more secure. I also hope we can build together to meet the persistent problems and fulfill the remarkable promise of the African continent. Yes, Africa remains the world's greatest development challenge, still plagued in places by poverty, malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, and unemployment. Yes, terrible conflicts continue to tear at the heart of the continent, as I saw yesterday in Rwanda. But from Cape Town to Kampala, from Dar es Salaam to Dakar, democracy is gaining strength business is growing peace is making progress. We are seeing what Deputy President Mbeki has called an African renaissance. In coming to Africa, my motive in part was to help the American people see the new Africa with new eyes and to focus our own efforts on new policies suited to the new reality. It used to be when American policy makers thought of Africa at all, they would ask, what can we do for Africa, or whatever can we do about Africa? Those were the wrong questions. The right question today is, what can we do with Africa? Throughout this trip I've been talking about ideas we want to develop with our African partners to benefit all our people ideas to improve our children's education through training and technology to ensure that none of our children are hungry or without good health care to build impartial, credible, and effective justice systems to strengthen the foundations of civil society and deepen democracy to build strong economics from the top down and from the grassroots up to prevent conflict from erupting and to stop it quickly if it does. Each of these efforts has a distinct mission, but all share a common approach to help the African people help themselves to become better equipped, not only to dream their own dreams but, at long last, to make those dreams come true. Yesterday in Entebbe we took an important step forward. There, with leaders from eastern and central Africa, we pledged to work together to build a future in which the doors of opportunity are open to all and countries move from the margins to the mainstream of the global economy to strengthen democracy and respect for human rights in all nations, to banish genocide from the region and this continent so that every African child can grow up in safety and peace. As Africa grows strong, America grows stronger through prosperous consumers on this continent and new African products brought to our markets, through new partners to fight and find solutions to common problems from the spread of AIDS and malaria to the greenhouse gases that are changing our climate, and most of all, through the incalculable benefit of new ideas, new energy, new passion from the minds and hearts of the people charting their own future on this continent. Yes, Africa still needs the world, but more that ever it is equally true that the world needs Africa. Members of Parliament, ladies and gentlemen, at the dawn of the 21st century we have a remarkable opportunity to leave behind this century's darkest moments while fulfilling its most brilliant possibilities, not just in South Africa, nor just in America, but in all the world. I come to this conviction well aware of the obstacles that lie in the path. From Bosnia to the Middle East, from Northern Ireland to the Great Lakes region of Africa, we have seen the terrible price people pay when they insist on fighting and killing and keeping down their neighbors. For all the wonders of the modern world, we are still bedeviled by notions that our racial, ethnic, tribal, and religious differences are somehow more important that our common humanity, that we can only lift ourselves up if we have someone to look down on. But then I look around this hall. There is every conceivable difference, on the surface, among the Americans and the South Africans in this great Hall of Freedom. Different races, different religions, different native tongues, but underneath, the same hopes, the same dreams, the same values. We all cherish family and faith, work and community, freedom and responsibility. We all want our children to grow up in a world where their talents are matched by their opportunities. And we all have come to believe that our countries will be stronger and our futures will be brighter as we let go of our hatreds and our fears and as we realize that what we have in common really does matter far more than our differences. The preamble to your Constitution says, "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, united in our diversity." In the context of your own history and the experience of the world in this century, those simple words are a bold clarion call to the future, an affirmation of humanity at its best, an assurance that those who build can triumph over those who tear down, that truly, the peacemakers are blessed, and they shall inherit the Earth. Thank you, and God bless the new South Africa. March 25, 1998 Thank you, Mr. President. First, let me thank you, Mr. President, and Vice President Kagame, and your wives for making Hillary and me and our delegation feel so welcome. I'd also like to thank the young students who met us and the musicians, the dancers who were outside. I thank especially the survivors of the genocide and those who are working to rebuild your country for spending a little time with us before we came in here. I have a great delegation of Americans with me, leaders of our Government, leaders of our Congress, distinguished American citizens. We're all very grateful to be here. We thank the diplomatic corps for being here and the members of the Rwandan Government and especially the citizens. I have come today to pay the respects of my Nation to all who suffered and all who perished in the Rwandan genocide. It is my hope that through this trip, in every corner of the world today and tomorrow, their story will be told that 4 years ago in this beautiful, green, lovely land, a clear and conscious decision was made by those then in power that the peoples of this country would not live side by side in peace. During the 90 days that began on April 6 in 1994, Rwanda experienced the most extensive slaughter in this blood filled century we are about to leave families murdered in their homes, people hunted down, as they fled, by soldiers and militia, through farmland and woods as if they were animals. From Kibuye in the west to Kibungo in the east, people gathered seeking refuge in churches by the thousands, in hospitals, in schools. And when they were found, the old and the sick, the women and children alike, they were killed, killed because their identity card said they were Tutsi or because they had a Tutsi parent or because someone thought they looked like a Tutsi or slain, like thousands of Hutus, because they protected Tutsis or would not countenance a policy that sought to wipe out people who just the day before, and for years before, had been their friends and neighbors. The Government led effort to exterminate Rwanda's Tutsi and moderate Hutus, as you know better than me, took at least a million lives. Scholars of these sorts of events say that the killers, armed mostly with machetes and clubs, nonetheless did their work 5 times as fast as the mechanized gas chambers used by the Nazis. It is important that the world know that these killings were not spontaneous or accidental. It is important that the world hear what your President just said They were most certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles. Indeed, these people had lived together for centuries before the events the President described began to unfold. These events grew from a policy aimed at the systematic destruction of a people. The ground for violence was carefully prepared, the airwaves poisoned with hate, casting the Tutsis as scapegoats for the problems of Rwanda, denying their humanity. All of this was done, clearly, to make it easy for otherwise reluctant people to participate in wholesale slaughter. Lists of victims, name by name, were actually drawn up in advance. Today, the images of all that, haunt us all the dead choking the Kigara River, floating to Lake Victoria. In their fate, we are reminded of the capacity for people everywhere, not just in Rwanda and certainly not just in Africa, but the capacity for people everywhere, to slip into pure evil. We cannot abolish that capacity, but we must never accept it. And we know it can be overcome. The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name genocide. We cannot change the past, but we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear and full of hope. We owe to those who died and to those who survived, who loved them, our every effort to increase our vigilance and strengthen our stand against those who would commit such atrocities in the future, here or elsewhere. Indeed, we owe to all the peoples of the world who are at risk because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable, we owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the horror. So let us challenge ourselves to build a world in which no branch of humanity, because of national, racial, ethnic, or religious origin, is again threatened with destruction because of those characteristics of which people should rightly be proud. Let us work together as a community of civilized nations to strengthen our ability to prevent and, if necessary, to stop genocide. To that end, I am directing my administration to improve, with the international community, our system for identifying and spotlighting nations in danger of genocidal violence, so that we can assure worldwide awareness of impending threats. It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror. We have seen, too and I want to say again that genocide can occur anywhere. It is not an African phenomenon and must never be viewed as such. We have seen it in industrialized Europe we have seen it in Asia. We must have global vigilance. And never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence. Secondly, we must, as an international community, have the ability to act when genocide threatens. We are working to create that capacity here in the Great Lakes region, where the memory is still fresh. This afternoon in Entebbe leaders from central and eastern Africa will meet with me to launch an effort to build a coalition to prevent genocide in this region. I thank the leaders who have stepped forward to make this commitment. We hope the effort can be a model for all the world, because our sacred task is to work to banish this greatest crime against humanity. Events here show how urgent the work is. In the northwest part of your country, attacks by those responsible for the slaughter in 1994 continue today. We must work as partners with Rwanda to end this violence and allow your people to go on rebuilding your lives and your nation. Third, we must work now to remedy the consequences of genocide. The United States has provided assistance to Rwanda to settle the uprooted and restart its economy, but we must do more. I am pleased that America will become the first nation to contribute to the new Genocide Survivors Fund. We will contribute this year 2 million, continue our support in the years to come, and urge other nations to do the same, so that survivors and their communities can find the care they need and the help they must have. Mr. President, to you, and to you, Mr. Vice President, you have shown great vision in your efforts to create a single nation in which all citizens can live freely and securely. As you pointed out, Rwanda was a single nation before the European powers met in Berlin to carve up Africa. America stands with you, and will continue helping the people of Rwanda to rebuild their lives and society. You spoke passionately this morning in our private meeting about the need for grassroots efforts, for the development projects which are bridging divisions and clearing a path to a better future. We will join with you to strengthen democratic institutions, to broaden participation, to give all Rwandans a greater voice in their own governance. The challenges you face are great, but your commitment to lasting reconciliation and inclusion is firm. Fourth, to help ensure that those who survived, in the generations to come, never again suffer genocidal violence, nothing is more vital than establishing the rule of law. There can be no place in Rwanda that lasts without a justice system that is recognized as such. We applaud the efforts of the Rwandan Government to strengthen civilian and military justice systems. I am pleased that our Great Lakes justice initiative will invest 30 million to help create throughout the region judicial systems that are impartial, credible, and effective. In Rwanda these funds will help to support courts, prosecutors, and police, military justice, and cooperation at the local level. We will also continue to pursue justice through our strong backing for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. The United States is the largest contributor to this tribunal. We are frustrated, as you are, by the delays in the tribunal's work. As we know, we must do better. Now that administrative improvements have begun, however, the tribunal should expedite cases through group trials and fulfill its historic mission. We are prepared to help, among other things, with witness relocation, so that those who still fear can speak the truth in safety. And we will support the War Crimes Tribunal for as long as it is needed to do its work, until the truth is clear and justice is rendered. Fifth, we must make it clear to all those who would commit such acts in the future that they too must answer for their acts, and they will. In Rwanda, we must hold accountable all those who may abuse human rights, whether insurgents or soldiers. Internationally, as we meet here, talks are underway at the United Nations to establish a permanent international criminal court. Rwanda and the difficulties we have had with this special tribunal underscores the need for such a court. And the United States will work to see that it is created. I know that in the face of all you have endured, optimism cannot come easily to any of you. Yet I have just spoken, as I said, with several Rwandans who survived the atrocities, and just listening to them gave me reason for hope. You see countless stories of courage around you every day as you go about your business here. Men and women who survived and go on, children who recover the light in their eyes remind us that at the dawn of a new millennium there is only one crucial division among the peoples of the Earth. And believe me, after over 5 years of dealing with these problems, I know it is not the divisions between Hutu and Tutsi, or Serb or Croatian and Muslim and Bosnian, or Arab and Jew, or Catholic and Protestant in Ireland, or black and white. It is really the line between those who embrace the common humanity we all share and those who reject it. It is the line between those who find meaning in life through respect and cooperation and who, therefore, embrace someone to look down on, someone to trample, someone to punish and, therefore, embrace war. It is the line between those who look to the future and those who cling to the past. It is the line between those who give up their resentment and those who believe they will absolutely die if they have to release one bit grievance. It is the line between those who confront every day with a clenched fist and those who confront every day with an open hand. That is the only line that really counts when all is said and done. To those who believe that God made each of us in His own image, how could we choose the darker road? When you look at those children who greeted us as we got off that plane today, how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children, to experience the joy of another morning sunrise, to learn the normal lessons of life, to give something back to their people? When you strip it all away, whether we're talking about Rwanda or some other distant troubled spot, the world is divided according to how people believe they draw meaning from life. And so I say to you, though the road is hard and uncertain and there are many difficulties ahead, and like every other person who wishes to help, I doubtless will not be able to do everything I would like to do, there are things we can do. And if we set about the business of doing them together, you can overcome the awful burden that you have endured. You can put a smile on the face of every child in this country, and you can make people once again believe that they should live as people were living who were singing to us and dancing for us today. That's what we have to believe. That is what I came here to say. And that is what I wish for you. Thank you, and God bless you. March 23, 1998 Thank you. President and Mrs. Rawlings, honorable ministers, honorable members of the Council of State, honorable Members of Parliament, honorable members of the judiciary, nananom to the chiefs , and the people of Ghana. Mitsea mu. America fuo kyia mo My greetings to you. Greetings from America . Now you have shown me what akwaaba welcome really means. Thank you, thank you so much. I am proud to be the first American President ever to visit Ghana and to go on to Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana, and Senegal. It is a journey long overdue. America should have done it before, and I am proud to be on that journey. Thank you for welcoming me. I want to listen and to learn. I want to build a future partnership between our two people, and I want to introduce the people of the United States, through my trip, to the new face of Africa. From Kampala to Cape Town, from Dakar to Dar es Salaam, Africans are being stirred by new hopes for democracy and peace and prosperity. Challenges remain, but they must be to all of you a call to action, not a cause for despair. You must draw strength from the past and energy from the promise of a new future. My dream for this trip is that together we might do the things so that, 100 years from now, your grandchildren and mine will look back and say this was the beginning of a new African renaissance. With a new century coming into view, old patterns are fading away The cold war is gone colonialism is gone apartheid is gone. Remnants of past troubles remain. But surely, there will come a time when everywhere reconciliation will replace recrimination. Now, nations and individuals finally are free to seek a newer world where democracy and peace and prosperity are not slogans but the essence of a new Africa. Africa has changed so much in just 10 years. Dictatorship has been replaced so many places. Half of the 48 nations in sub Saharan Africa choose their own governments, leading a new generation willing to learn from the past and imagine a future. Though democracy has not yet gained a permanent foothold even in most successful nations, there is everywhere a growing respect for tolerance, diversity, and elemental human rights. A decade ago, business was stifled. Now, Africans are embracing economic reform. Today, from Ghana to Mozambique, from Cote d'Ivoire to Uganda, growing economies are fueling a transformation in Africa. For all this promise, you and I know Africa is not free from peril the genocide in Rwanda civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, both Congos pariah states that export violence and terror military dictatorship in Nigeria and high levels of poverty, malnutrition, disease, illiteracy, and unemployment. To fulfill the vast promise of a new era, Africa must face these challenges. We must build classrooms and companies, increase the food supply and save the environment, and prevent disease before deadly epidemics break out. The United States is ready to help you. First, my fellow Americans must leave behind the stereotypes that have warped our view and weakened our understanding of Africa. We need to come to know Africa as a place of new beginning and ancient wisdom from which, as my wife, our First Lady, said in her book, we have so much to learn. It is time for Americans to put a new Africa on our map. Here in Independence Square, Ghana blazed the path of that new Africa. More than four decades ago, Kwame Nkrumah proposed what he called a "motion of destiny" as Ghana stepped forward as a free and independent nation. Today, Ghana again lights the way for Africa. Democracy is spreading. Business is growing. Trade and investment are rising. Ghana has the only African owned company today on our New York Stock Exchange. You have worked hard to preserve the peace in Africa and around the world, from Liberia to Lebanon, from Croatia to Cambodia. And you have given the world a statesman and peacemaker in Kofi Annan to lead the United Nations. The world admires your success. The United States admires your success. We see it taking root throughout the new Africa. And we stand ready to support it. First, we want to work with Africa to nurture democracy, knowing it is never perfect or complete. We have learned in over 200 years that, every day, democracy must be defended and a more perfect union can always lie ahead. Democracy requires more than the insults and injustice and inequality that so many societies have known and America has known. Democracy requires human rights for everyone, everywhere, for men and women, for children and the elderly, for people of different cultures and tribes and backgrounds. A good society honors its entire family. Second, democracy must have prosperity. Americans of both political parties want to increase trade and investment in Africa. We have an "African Growth and Opportunity Act" now before Congress. Both parties' leadership are supporting it. By opening markets and building businesses and creating jobs, we can help and strengthen each other. By supporting the education of your people, we can strengthen your future and help each other. For centuries, other nations exploited Africa's gold, Africa's diamonds, Africa's minerals. Now is the time for Africans to cultivate something more precious, the mind and heart of the people of Africa, through education. Third, we must allow democracy and prosperity to take root without violence. We must work to resolve the war and genocide that still tear at the heart of Africa. We must help Africans to prevent future conflicts. Here in Ghana, you have shown the world that different peoples can live together in harmony. You have proved that Africans of different countries can unite to help solve disputes in neighboring countries. Peace everywhere in Africa will give more free time and more money to the pressing needs of our children's future. The killing must stop if a new future is to begin. Fourth and finally, for peace and prosperity and democracy to prevail, you must protect your magnificent natural domain. Africa is mankind's first home. We all came out of Africa. We must preserve the magnificent natural environment that is left. We must manage the water and forest. We must learn to live in harmony with other species. You must learn how to fight drought and famine and global warming. And we must share with you the technology that will enable you to preserve your environment and provide more economic opportunity to your people. America has good reason to work with Africa 30 million Americans, more than one in ten, proudly trace their heritage here. The first Peace Corps volunteers from America came to Ghana over 35 years ago over 57,000 have served in Africa since then. Through blood ties and common endeavors, we know we share the same hopes and dreams to provide for ourselves and our children, to live in peace and worship freely, to build a better life than our parents knew and pass a brighter future on to our children. America needs Africa, America needs Ghana as a partner in the fight for a better future. So many of our problems do not stop at any nation's border international crime and terrorism and drug trafficking, the degradation of the environment, the spread of diseases like AIDS and malaria, and so many of our opportunities cannot stop at a nation's border. We need partners to deepen the meaning of democracy in America, in Africa, and throughout the world. We need partners to build prosperity. We need partners to live in peace. We will not build this new partnership overnight, but perseverance creates its own reward. An Ashanti proverb tells us that by coming and going, a bird builds its nest. We will come and go with you and do all we can as you build the new Africa, a work that must begin here in Africa, not with aid or trade, though they are important, but first with ordinary citizens, especially the young people in this audience today. You must feel the winds of freedom blowing at your back, pushing you onward to a brighter future. There are roughly 700 days left until the end of this century and the beginning of a new millennium. There are roughly 700 million Africans in sub Saharan Africa. Every day and every individual is a precious opportunity. We do not have a moment to lose, and we do not have a person to lose. I ask you, my friends, to let me indulge a moment of our shared history in closing. In 1957 our great civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, came to Accra to help represent our country as Ghana celebrated its independence. He was deeply moved by the birth of your nation. Six years later, on the day after W.E.B. Du Bois died here in Ghana in 1963, Dr. King spoke to an enormous gathering like this in Washington. He said these simple words "I have a dream, a dream that all Americans might live free and equal as brothers and sisters." His dream became the dream of our Nation and changed us in ways we could never have imagined. We are hardly finished, but we have traveled a long way on the wings of that dream. Dr. Du Bois, a towering African American intellectual, died here as a citizen of Ghana and a friend of Kwame Nkrumah. He once wrote, "The habit of democracy must be to encircle the Earth." Let us together resolve to complete the circle of democracy, to dream the dream that all people on the entire Earth will be free and equal, to begin a new century with that commitment to freedom and justice for all, to redeem the promise inscribed right here on Independence Arch. Let us find a future here in Africa, the cradle of humanity. Medase. America dase I thank you. America thanks you . Thank you, and God bless you. March 20, 1998 Thank you. Thank you very much, Secretary Albright, General Shelton, General Sandler, Mr. Berger, Senator Roth, to the members and representatives of the Joint Chiefs, members of the diplomatic corps, and other interested citizens, many of whom have held high positions in the national security apparatus of this country and the military of our country. We're grateful for everyone's presence here today. I especially want to thank the Members of the Senate who are here. I thank Senator Roth, the chairman of the NATO observer group Senator Moynihan Senator Smith Senator Levin Senator Lugar Senator Robb and Senator Thurmond. Your leadership and that of Senators Lott, Daschle, Helms, and Biden and others in this Chamber has truly, as the Secretary of State said, made this debate a model of bipartisan dialog and action. The Senate has held more than a dozen hearings on this matter. We have worked very closely with the Senate NATO observer group. And I must say, I was immensely gratified when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16 to 2 in support of enlargement. Now, in the coming days, the full Senate will act on this matter of critical importance to our national security. The admission of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO will be a very important milestone in building the kind of world we want for the 21st century. As has been said, I first proposed NATO enlargement 4 years ago, when General Joulwan was our commander in Brussels. Many times since, I've had the opportunity to speak on this issue. Now a final decision is at hand, and now it is important that all the American people focus on this matter closely. For this is one of those rare moments when we have within our grasp the opportunity to actually shape the future, to make the new century safer and more secure and less unstable than the one we are leaving. We can truly be present at a new creation. When President Truman signed the North Atlantic Treaty 49 years ago next month, he expressed the goal of its founders in typically simple and straightforward language to preserve their present peaceful situation and to protect it in the future. The dream of the generation that founded NATO was of a Europe whole and free. But the Europe of their time was lamentably divided by the Iron Curtain. Our generation can realize their dream. It is our opportunity and responsibility to do so, to create a new Europe undivided, democratic, and at peace for the very first time in all history. Forging a new NATO in the 21st century will help to fulfill the commitment and the struggle that many of you in this room engaged in over the last 50 years. NATO can do for Europe's East what it did for Europe's West protect new democracies against aggression, prevent a return to local rivalries, create the conditions in which prosperity can flourish. In January of 1994, on my first trip to Europe for the NATO summit, we did take the lead in proposing a new NATO for a new era. First, by strengthening our alliance to preserve its core mission of self defense, while preparing it to take on the new challenges to our security and to Europe's stability second, by reaching out to new partners and taking in new members from among Europe's emerging democracies and third, by forging a strong and cooperative relationship between NATO and Russia. Over the past 4 years, persistently and pragmatically, we have put this strategy into place. NATO has shifted to smaller, more flexible forces better prepared to provide for our defense in this new era, but also trained and equipped for other contingencies. Its military power remains so unquestioned that it was the only force capable of stopping the fighting in Bosnia. NATO signed the Founding Act with Moscow, joining Russia and history's most successful alliance in common cause for a peaceful, democratic, undivided Europe. We signed a charter to build cooperation between NATO and Ukraine. We created the Partnership For Peace as a path to full NATO membership for some, and a strong and lasting link to the alliance for others. Today, the Partnership For Peace has exceeded its mission beyond the wildest dreams of those of us who started it. It has more than three dozen members. Now we're on the threshold of bringing new members into NATO. The alliance's enlargement will make America safer by making NATO stronger, adding new forces and new allies that can share our security burdens. Let me be very clear NATO's core mission will remain the same, the defense of the territory of its members. The addition of new members will strengthen and enhance that mission. In pursuing enlargement, we have made sure not to alter NATO's core function or its ability to defend America and Europe's security. Now I urge this Senate to do the same and, in particular, to impose no constraints on NATO's freedom of action, its military decisionmaking, or its ability to respond quickly and effectively to whatever challenges may arise. NATO's existing treaty and the way it makes defense and security decisions have served our Nation's security well for half a century. In the same way, the addition of these new members will help NATO meet new challenges to our security. In Bosnia, for example, Polish, Czech, and Hungarian soldiers serve alongside our own with skill and professionalism. Remember, this was one of the largest, single operational deployments of American troops in Europe since World War II. It was staged from a base in Taszar, Hungary. It simply would not have happened as swiftly, smoothly, or safely without the active help and support of Hungary. As we look toward the 21st century, we're looking at other new security challenges as well the spread of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile technology, terrorism and the potential for high tech attacks on our information systems. NATO must be prepared to meet and defeat this new generation of threats, to act flexibly and decisively under American leadership. With three new members in our ranks, NATO will be better able to meet those goals as well. Enlargement also will help to make Europe more stable. Already, the very prospect of membership has encouraged nations throughout the region to accelerate reforms, resolve disputes, and improve cooperation. Now, let me emphasize what I've said many times before and what all NATO allies have committed to NATO's first new members should not be its last. Keeping the doors open to all of Europe's new democracies will help to ensure that enlargement benefits the security of the entire region, not just the first three new members. At last summer's summit in Madrid, NATO agreed to examine the process of enlargement at our next summit in 1999. Neither NATO nor my administration has made any decisions or any commitments about when the next invitations for membership should be extended, or to whom. I have consulted broadly with Congress on decisions about the admissions of the first three members. I pledge to do the same before any future decisions are made. And of course, any new members would also require the advice and the consent of the United States Senate. For these reasons, I urge, in the strongest terms, the Senate to reject any effort to impose an artificial pause on the process of enlargement. Such a mandate is unnecessary and, I believe, unwise. If NATO is to remain strong, America's freedom to lead it must be unfettered and our freedom to cooperate with our other partners in NATO must remain unfettered. A unilateral freeze on enlargement would reduce our own country's flexibility and, perhaps even more important, our leverage, our ability to influence our partners. It would fracture NATO's open door consensus it would undermine further reforms in Europe's democracies it would draw a new and potentially destabilizing line, at least temporarily, in Europe. There are other steps we must take to prevent that division from reemerging. We must continue to strengthen the Partnership For Peace with our many friends in Europe. We need to give even more practical expression to the agreements between NATO and Russia and NATO and Ukraine, turning words into deeds. With Russia and other countries, we must continue to reduce our nuclear stockpiles and we thank you, Senator Lugar, for your leadership on that to combat the dangers of proliferation, to lower conventional arms ceilings all across Europe. And all of us together must help the Bosnian people to finish the job of bringing a lasting peace to their country. If you think about where we were just a year ago in Bosnia, not to mention 2 years ago, not to mention 1995, no one could have believed we would be here today. It would not have happened had it not been for NATO, the Partnership For Peace allies, the Russians, all of those who have come together and joined hands to end the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. Now we have to finish what America started 4 years ago, welcoming Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic into our alliance. If you look around at who is in the room today, you can see that they are more than willing to be a good partner. They will make NATO stronger they will make Europe safer and in so doing, they will make America and our young people more secure. They will make it less likely that the young men and women in uniform who serve under General Shelton and the other generals here, and their successors in the 21st century, will have to fight and die because of problems in Europe. A new NATO can extend the blessings of freedom and security in a new century. With the help of our allies, the support of the Senate, the strength of our continued commitment, we can bring Europe together, not by force of arms, but by possibilities of peace. That is the promise of this moment. And we must seize it. Thank you very much. March 11, 1998 President Clinton. Let me begin by saying that I'm delighted that the Secretary General is here. We share a strong commitment to curtailing the threat of weapons of mass destruction in general and to continuing the work in Iraq. And again let me say how pleased I am at the agreement that he worked out with Iraq to continue the inspections, as well as the access which has been provided to the UNSCOM inspectors which was previously denied. All that is encouraging. Now, I think we have to remain vigilant. The last 6 days is not the same as the next 6 months, but it's all very hopeful. And the Secretary General deserves a lot of appreciation from the United States and from all Americans for the work that has been done. Secretary General's Agreement With Iraq Q. Mr. President, are you both on the same wavelength in terms of what would happen if there is a breach in the agreement in the aftermath of that implementation? We understand there's some little friction. President Clinton. Well Secretary General Annan. Between the President and me, or the President and someone else? Q. Between the President and you. Secretary General Annan. I see. Okay. President Clinton. Well, over the weekend the Secretary General said he thought that under the resolution there would have to be some consultations before any military force could be taken or used. We believe that the resolution gives us the authority to take whatever actions are necessary. But of course, we would consult. It would be unthinkable that we wouldn't do that. We do that all the time anyway. I spent an awful lot of time on the telephone with large numbers of world leaders in the last several weeks as this difficulty has unfolded, and so I'm not sure there is a conflict between our positions. Q. What do you think, Mr. Secretary General? Secretary General Annan. I think what the President has said is exactly what I said on television on Sunday. And not only was the President himself informed, as you will recall, Mrs. the Secretary of State Albright consulted Council members, Ambassador Richardson, Secretary of Defense Cohen and so there was consultation even this time around. So the consultation is an ongoing process and part of the way we do business in the international community. And I agree with what the President has said. Q. Mr. President, what do you think about Senator Lott's criticism that this agreement is a sellout? President Clinton. I just don't believe it is. The agreement on its own terms is clearly not a sellout. The agreement on its own terms preserves the integrity of the UNSCOM inspections. It does add some diplomats to the inspection process in the Presidential sites, but if the agreement is complied with and again, I think the Secretary General did a good job working through these issues over the weekend then we will be able to do what the United States has always wanted, which is to complete the inspection process. Again, let me say I know I don't need to beat this dead horse, but I think it's worth repeating one more time. I see this issue with Iraq in the larger context of the threat I believe will be presented to the world for the next few decades from biological and chemical and perhaps even, God forbid, small scale nuclear weapons a different sort of weapons of mass destruction threat than we have faced in the past. And world leaders simply have to come to grips with the potential that is out there for organized groups not just nations but terrorist groups, narcotraffickers, international criminals to make and deploy such weapons for their own purposes, so that this is very important on its own merits. But it's also very important as the first of what I believe will have to be a many, many year effort by all peace loving people to deal with this issue. Independent Counsel's Investigation Q. Mr. President, how would you feel about testifying or talking to the grand jury and in some way giving your side of the story in the ongoing controversy? President Clinton. Well, you know I'm not going to talk about that today. I can't. I've got to do the work that the people of this country hired me to do, so I can't I'm not going to discuss that. Q. Sir, with your pledge to cooperate fully, as you mentioned when this story first broke Secretary General Annan. I wish you would concentrate on my issues. President Clinton. I just don't have anything else to say about it. Tobacco Legislation Kosovo Q. Sir, are you going to embrace the Conrad bill for tobacco, sir? President Clinton. Let me say I'd like to answer that question and then, if I could, I'd like to make one comment about Kosovo before you leave. I have said that the Conrad bill embraces the principles that I feel strongly about. I haven't reviewed all of its provisions, and I'm not sure exactly what it does, for example, on the tobacco farmer issue, but in general I think Senator Conrad has put out a very good bill. And what I hope will happen is that either his bill will attract bipartisan support or that it will lead to a bipartisan bill reflecting the principles that I've outlined in the tobacco settlement for the tobacco settlement. I personally believe, even though there are now less than 70 scheduled work days left in this year, that Congress ought to have no higher priority than to get this done. We need to do this and get this behind us. There are a thousand lives a day on the line. We do not need to wait until next year. Let me just make one comment if I might about Kosovo, because the Secretary of State has just returned from an arduous trip. The United States and I condemn in the strongest possible terms excessive violence that has led to the death of innocent civilians there. We believe the cause of it is the inadequate response by the Serbian Government to the legitimate concerns of the Albanian minority in Serbia, but majority in Kosovo. I believe that the decision that the Secretary and other world leaders reached in the last few days, the reimposition of the sanctions, and the strong statements that were made coming out of the Contact Group, and the unity of the countries gives us some hope that we can resolve this. But this is a matter of great concern to me I know it's of great concern to the Secretary General. We do not want the Balkans to have more pictures like we've seen in the last few days, so reminiscent of what Bosnia endured. And I just want to make it absolutely clear that to me it's a very serious issue. Secretary General Annan. I agree. Q. Inaudible consider military action, sir, as your Secretary of State has said in the past, and others? President Clinton. We believe that no option should be ruled in or out now. But the Secretary of State, along with all of her colleagues and there's been remarkable unanimity on this they've taken a position that gives us a chance to avoid further bloodshed by all parties under all conditions. That's what I want. Q. Have you been in touch with Milosevic? President Clinton. Not directly, I have not. President's Planned Visit to Africa Q. Will you have some travel tips on Africa for the President? Secretary General Annan. I think I'll be discussing a few interesting things, and I have one or two ideas that I would want to put to the President. I think it's great that he's going to Africa, and I think it's good for U.S. African relationship, and the entire continent is excited that for the first time a sitting U.S. President is doing this. And it's a sign that U.S. African relationship is on the upswing. And I'm very pleased about that. Independent Counsel's Investigation Q. Mr. President, will the American people hear your version in the Lewinsky matter? Press Secretary Mike McCurry. Thank you, everyone. We're done. And the President has already answered that question. Good bye. Q. Do you all Press Secretary McCurry. No, we're done. Middle East Peace Process Q. Inaudible Middle East inaudible ? President Clinton. Well, we're going to discuss that. I hope it will. We're working very hard on that. We're doing everything we can to get it back on track. And I hope we can have a chance to talk about it. Q. Will this visit have helped in some way? President Clinton. It certainly can. It certainly can. March 09, 1998 Thank you very much for that warm welcome. And thank you, Dr. Wootton. He was giving his talk, and I was listening, and I was thinking I agree with all that there's nothing left for me to say. If I knew a couple of funny stories, I could just tell them and leave and thank you for the opportunity. Laughter Dr. Dickey, congratulations on being the president elect. Dr. Reardon, thank you for serving on the Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality. Dr. Smoak, thank you for telling me there's nothing incompatible between a doctor named "Smoke" and a campaign against tobacco. Laughter Dr. Jensen, ladies and gentlemen. I am honored to be here and to be working with the AMA on so many important fronts. We have, in the past, sometimes had honest differences on policy but have always agreed on our profound obligation to the health of our Nation's families. We're walking together in a step by step approach to health care reform, expanding the promise of new medical technologies, extending health care opportunities to the most vulnerable Americans. Together we've helped Americans to keep their health coverage when they change jobs or someone in their families gets sick. And in last year's balanced budget agreement we helped to make sure that up to 5 million uninsured children will get the medical coverage they deserve and the help they need, with the biggest increase in health coverage for children since 1965. We have worked to increase medical research and to support greater efforts at preservation and care for conditions from breast cancer to diabetes. Last year, in our balanced budget plan, the diabetes component was said by the American Diabetes Association to be the most important advance in the treatment and care of diabetes since the discovery of insulin. We found the right family doctor for America, Dr. David Satcher, our new Surgeon General. Last month your voices were strong and united in support of his nomination, and I thank you, and America's families thank you. The lesson of these endeavors is that when we work together, we can get things done. This is a very great moment for America on the edge of a new century, a new millennium, and a completely new economy and new global society. We see dramatic changes in the way our people work and live and relate to each other and the rest of the world. Our economy is the strongest it's been in a generation. In 5 years, we have 15 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, the lowest inflation rate in 30 years, the highest homeownership rate in the history of the country. Our social problems are on the mend. Crime is at its lowest rate in 24 years. The welfare rolls are the lowest in 27 years. Teen pregnancy and outof wedlock births are declining. Our leadership is unrivaled around the world as we work for peace and freedom and security. Still, as I said in the State of the Union Address, these good times do not give us the opportunity to rest or withdraw. Instead, if we are wise, we will use this as a time to act and to build, to secure our prosperity and strengthen our future, first of all, by not spending this budget surplus we waited 30 years for before it exists and putting Social Security first, saving Social Security for the 21st century so that the baby boom generation does not either bankrupt Social Security or bankrupt their children and their retirement. That's what we should do before we spend that surplus. This is a time to widen the circle of opportunity. That's what we're doing with adding 5 million children to the health care rolls. In spite of the fact that we have a 4.6 percent unemployment rate, there's still neighborhoods, mostly in urban America, sometimes in rural America, where the recovery has not yet been felt. And our greatest opportunity to continue to grow the economy with low inflation is to bring the miracles of free enterprise and high technology into these neighborhoods that have not yet felt them. We also have to look at our long term challenges. And I'll just mention two or three that go beyond health care but will affect you, your children, and your grandchildren. First, as the recent international math and science test results for seniors showed, we may have the best system of college education in the world, and we have now opened the doors of college to everyone with tax credits and scholarships and work study provisions and community service provisions, but no one seriously believes we have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world. And we must keep working to raise standards and increase accountability and increase performance until we do have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world. Second, we have to recognize that what you do for a living, worry about people's health, is going to increasingly be affected by global development. Global travel patterns have given us something called "airport malaria" now, a phenomenon no one ever knew about. And we have to recognize furthermore that a lot of what we deal with in health care will be affected by the overall condition of the environment. That's why the issue of global climate change is so important. We have malaria now at higher altitudes than ever before recorded because of climate change. A lot of you are probably noticing, as you hear from me, that your allergies are a little worse in the springtime with El Nino even in Washington, when you don't think it could ever be any worse than it is normally. So we have to deal with the climate change issue. We have to deal with the problems of weapons of mass destruction. Even as we reduce the nuclear threat, we see on the horizon the prospect that small scale nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons in the hands of terrorists, drug traffickers, organized criminals, rogue states, could change the whole future of security for our children. We have to cooperate more with other countries for peace and prosperity around the world. In a few days, I'm going to Africa, and I will be the first sitting American President ever to visit the nations in Africa where I'm going to visit. But they're a big part of our future, economically, politically, and in terms of our shared concerns over health and environmental matters. Now, I'd like you to see the particular issues I want to discuss today in this larger context. Are we doing what we should be doing to prepare this country for a new century, to widen the circle of opportunity, to strengthen the bonds that unite us together, to reinforce our values, to make our freedom mean more in the future? All of these issues should be seen against that background. This is a moment of great promise, but it's also a moment of great obligation. Every American decisionmaker, including all the Members of the Congress but all the rest of us as well, must decide whether we believe that, because when times are good, the easiest thing to do is to relax, enjoy it, express relief. If anybody told me the day I took office as President that in 5 years the stock market would go from 3200 to 8500 and we'd have 15 million new jobs and almost two thirds of the American people would be in their own homes, and all the other things, I would have said, "Maybe, but probably not." Having achieved that, and having stepped on all the hot coals that were necessary to get from where we were then to where we are now, it is easy for people to say, "Well, let's relax." That would be a terrible mistake. That's the number one message I have today. We have to move. Prosperity and confidence give us the freedom of movement that we have to seize. We have to move. This is not a time to sit still. It's a time to bear down and go forward, and we need your help. Now, there are fewer than 70 70 working days left in Washington before Congress adjourns. Now, this is an election year, and the work schedule is always somewhat shorter in an election year, and that's understandable. But it's unusually limited this year. How will the 105th Congress go down in history? I want it to go down in history as a Congress that saved lives by passing the Patients' Bill of Rights, by passing tough and sweeping tobacco legislation, by passing the Research Fund for the 21st Century with its big increase in medical research, and extending health care coverage to those who presently are uninsured. That's what I want this Congress to go down with. The next 70 days will tell the tale. Will this Congress go down in history as one that passed landmark legislation to save lives and strengthen America for the new century, or one that was dominated by partisan election year politics? The calendar tells us that this is an election year. That's a good thing we need one every now and then. Laughter Have the debates and have the discussion. But as I have told every Member of Congress in both parties with whom I have discussed this, no matter how much we get done this year there will still be things at the end of the year on which honorable people in both parties disagree, more than enough over which to have an honest, fruitful, meaty election. This election should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the American people want it to be not only an election year but a productive legislative year for the health and welfare of our country and our future. Dr. Wootton has already talked about the Patients' Bill of Rights, but I want to say a few things about it. Because my mother was a nurse anesthetist, I grew up around doctors from the time I was a little boy. They were the first professional people that I ever knew. Most of them were the kind of people we'd all like our children to grow up to be. They were hardworking, able, kind, caring people. Most doctors today are, as well. But the world of medical practice is very different today than it was 40 years ago, when I first started looking at it though the eyes of a child not altogether worse, of course. There are many things that are better. We have higher life expectancy, the lowest infant mortality rate we've ever recorded, the highest rate of childhood immunization, dramatic advances in medicines and medical technologies and all kinds of treatments. We also have more than 160 million Americans in managed care plans. And while there have been some problems with them, all of us have to be glad when health care costs don't go up at 4 or 5 times the rate of inflation. Still, it's often harder for you just to be doctors. When a doctor spends almost as much time with a bookkeeper as with a patient, something is wrong. If you have to spend more time filling out forms than making rounds, something is wrong. And most important to me, when medical decisions are made by someone other than a doctor and something other than the best interests of the patient is the bottom line, then something is wrong. I think we should have a simple standard Traditional care or managed care, every American deserves quality care. We all have our stories, and yours are more firsthand and perhaps fresher than mine. But I never will forget reading a few weeks ago about a woman who worked in an oncologist's office to verify insurance coverage and get authorizations for medical procedures, who told us the story of a 12 year old boy with a cancerous tumor in his leg. The doctor wanted to perform a procedure to save the boy's leg, but the health plan said no. It seems that for that condition, the only approved procedure was amputation. And that was the only procedure the plan would pay for. The child's parents appealed the decision, but they were turned down. They appealed again and were turned down again. Only when the father's employer weighed in did the health plan change its mind. By then, it was too late, the boy's cancer had spread, and amputation was the only choice left. Of course, it was covered by the health plan. That is a choice no family should have to make. If the doctor had been able to do the right thing, the child would have been better off, and the system would have been better served. We have the best trained, best skilled doctors in the world, the best medical education, the best medical technology. We're all getting a lot smarter than we used to be about prevention. The first thing your president said to me is, "I'm a cardiologist. Take this golf club, and stay in good shape." Laughter We're getting better at it. But it is madness to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. And it happens, over and over and over again. There are no fewer than 500 stories that could come up in this audience right now, within a half an hour, not all that different from the one I just told. That is what we seek to address. That's what the Patients' Bill of Rights is all about, to put medical decisions back into the hands of doctors and their patients. I have already acted, as your president said, to ensure that Federal employees and their families, military personnel, veterans and their families, everyone on Medicare and Medicaid, altogether about a third of our people, are covered by the Patients' Bill of Rights. And across our Nation, State legislators and Governors, both Republican and Democratic, are doing what they can. Forty three States have enacted into law one or more of the basic provisions of the Patients' Bill of Rights. But State laws and the patchwork of reforms can't protect most Americans. At least 140 million of them are without basic protection. That's why we need the Federal Patients' Bill of Rights with the full force of Federal law. The Hippocratic oath binds doctors, and I quote, "to follow that method of treatment which according to my ability and judgment I consider for the benefit of my patient." That is your responsibility, and should be your patient's right to know all the medical options, not just the cheapest primary care when possible, specialists when necessary. That's why the Patients' Bill of Rights lifts the gag order on our Nation's doctors and allows patients to follow your best recommendations by appealing unfair decisions by managed care accountants. Patients also should have a right to keep their medical records confidential. Doctors must feel free to write down the whole truth without it ending up on the Internet or in the hands of employers and marketing firms or increasing a patient's insurance rates. Again, the Hippocratic oath says, "all such shall be kept secret." That's why the Patients' Bill of Rights safeguards the sanctity of the doctor patient relationship. Patients have a right to emergency services wherever and whenever they need it. And when the EMT's are wheeling a new arrival into the emergency room, the last thing you or the patient should have to worry about is the fine print on the health plan. Again I say, there are less than 70 days remaining in this legislative session, but there is broad bipartisan support in this Congress for this legislation. We have acted in our administration States have acted the AMA has acted. You must impress upon the Congress the urgency of passing this legislation. Believe me, a majority of the Congress, a huge majority in both Houses and Members of both parties, are for this. It is just a question of mustering the will to get the job done and going through some of the very difficult issues around the edges that have to be resolved. But there is utterly no reason not to do this this year. You can get it done if you work at it. The other great issue before the Congress in health care is, of course, tobacco. Now, you're right, Dr. Wootton, I did read "The Journal of the American Medical Association" special edition on tobacco. I read it all from start to finish. And it was a great service to me and to the American people, and I thank you very much for it. Again, you can argue about some of the fine print, but the big picture is clear Every single day, even though it is illegal in every State in America, 3,000 kids start to smoke 1,000 of them will die earlier because of it. This amounts to a national epidemic and a national tragedy. You know as well as I do that more people die from smoking related illnesses every year than from most other things that cause death in America put together. As physicians, you also know that in the end, the only way that we have to deal with this today with absolute conviction is with preventive care Don't do it in the first place. Now, for more than 5 years, we have worked to stop our children from smoking before they start. We launched a nationwide campaign with the FDA to educate children about the dangers of smoking, to reduce access of children to tobacco products, to put a stop to tobacco companies that spend millions mass marketing to our young people. Last fall I asked the Congress to pass comprehensive, bipartisan legislation to reduce teen smoking by raising the price of cigarettes up to a dollar and a half a pack over the next several years, imposing strong penalties on tobacco companies that keep on advertising to children, and giving the FDA full authority to regulate children's access to tobacco products. If we do this, we can cut teen smoking by almost half in 5 years. We can stop almost 3 million children from taking that first drag. We can prevent almost 1 million premature deaths. But again, the clock is ticking. And yes, there are lots of complicated issues. You know, because this is a five or six part package, there are several committees and subcommittees involved. And because there is some controversy around the edges about how much money should be raised how quickly from the tobacco tax and what it should be spent on, there are some difficult issues to be resolved. And yes, I know that there are only 70 days. But if we know that the lives of 1,000 children a day are at stake, how can we walk away from this legislative session without a solution to the tobacco issue? There are two other issues I'd like to mention to you. The first relates to Medicare. This week or, excuse me last week, I attended the first meeting of the Bipartisan Medicare Commission appointed by the leaders of the House and the Senate and the White House to look for long term reform for Medicare for the 21st century. As you know, we have secured the Medicare Trust Fund for another decade with some very difficult decisions. But there are a lot of unresolved issues out there, and in some ways the complexity of the Medicare problem is greater than the complexity of the Social Security problem. At least it has to be dealt with sooner in time. So I want to urge your support for the Medicare Commission and your involvement in it. I also have made a specific proposal with regard to Medicare that I believe should be passed this year without regard to the work of the Medicare Commission, and I ask you to carefully review it, and I hope you'll support it. It would give a vulnerable group of Americans, displaced workers 55 and over people who either voluntarily take early retirement and they're promised health care but the promise is broken, or people who are laid off and they can't find another job and they lose their job related health insurance and other seniors, principally people who are married to folks who lose their old health insurance because they start being covered by Medicare, but they're not old enough to be on Medicare so they lose the family coverage and they don't have anything it would take this group of Americans and give them the chance to buy into Medicare at cost. The Congressional Budget Office just reported that the policy will cost even less and will benefit even more people than we in our administration had estimated, and agreed with us that it will have no burden whatever on the Medicare Trust Fund. It will not shorten the life of the Trust Fund, nor will it complicate in any way our attempts at the long term reform of Medicare. We're talking about somewhere between three and four hundred thousand people that are just out there, that had health insurance and now don't have any, at a particularly vulnerable time in their lives. So I hope you will support that. The second thing I'd like to ask for your support for involves a project that Hillary has worked very hard on to sort of leave some gifts for our country in the new millennium. The project motto is "Honoring our past, and imagining our future." Among other things, we're working with the Congress to get the funds necessary to save, for example, the Star Spangled Banner, which is in terrible shape. We need to spend, believe it or not, 13 million to restore the flag, and to make sure that the 200 years of lighting don't destroy the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and to try to get every community in the country to find those things in each community which are most important to their history and save them. But we're also looking at the future. And perhaps the most important thing about the futureoriented nature of this project is the Research Fund for the 21st Century, which has a huge increase in research for all forms of scientific research and development but especially have the largest increase in funding for the NIH in history and doubling the funding for the National Cancer Institute. We are on the verge of unlocking a number of medical mysteries, as you know. Last year, for example, we had the first sign of movement in the lower limbs of laboratory animals with severed spines. The human genome project is proceeding at a rapid pace, with implications which still stagger the imagination. Again I say, we have the money to do this. We can do this within the balanced budget. And while there may not be time to resolve every issue I'd like to see resolved in this Congress, we should nail down now this Research Fund for the 21st Century. There has been terrific support in the Republican as well as in the Democratic caucuses. This has not been a partisan issue. It is just the question of getting the job done in the next 70 days. So while you're here, let me say again, a big part of building America for the 21st century is building a healthier America and building an America where people feel secure with the health care they have, and they feel it has integrity. We need the Patients' Bill of Rights. We need action on the tobacco front. We need reform of Medicare, long term. We need to help these people that are falling between the gaps because they're not old enough yet. And we need to continue in an intensified way our commitment to research. Let us take the benefit of our prosperity and finally having a balanced budget and invest the kind of money in research that we know we know will ensure benefits beyond our wildest imagination. We can do all this in the next 70 days, but to do it we'll have to do it together. I need your help. Your patients need your help. Your country will be richly rewarded if you can persuade the Congress to act in these areas. Thank you, and God bless you. March 02, 1998 Thank you very much, Senator, Vicki, Caroline and Ed, other members of the Kennedy family, Paul Kirk. And I say a special word of thanks to all of you who have made this evening possible. I thank Senator Jeffords and Senator Thurmond and Senator Hatch for being here tonight to restrain the partisan impulses that might otherwise overtake Senator Kennedy and me. Laughter I thank Yo Yo Ma and Jill and all the other musicians who have come here. Mr. Secretary General, thank you for the wonderful job you do here at the OAS. I think I should begin by saying that for me this is not an obligation, it is an honor, not only because like every other member of my generation I was inspired by President Kennedy but because Hillary and Chelsea and I have been profoundly moved by the uncommon kindnesses of this family to ours. In 1991 I had an event in New York when no one in New York knew my name, and I looked up and John Kennedy was there. I think it would be fair to say that his name recognition was 5 times higher than mine among all in attendance. Laughter Early in 1992 Mrs. Kennedy came to an event for me and later went out of her way to be helpful and kind to Hillary and to Chelsea in ways that are difficult to relate but impossible to overestimate. The other day we were spending a weekend in Camp David, and I went out with a couple of Members of Congress, cavorting around in the lousy weather. Hillary stayed home with her friends and watched Jackie Kennedy's White House special, marveling again about the incredible work that was done to preserve America's house by Mrs. Kennedy. And I do believe that, no matter who writes the history books, when people look back on this century, they will say that Edward Kennedy was one of the ablest and most productive, most compassionate, and most effective men who served in the United States Senate in the entire history of the country. The JFK Library and its museum are national treasures, but I would like to talk about three things that are to some extent both more intangible and more tangible in the legacy of President Kennedy that will be enshrined forever if all of us do our job and keep this great enterprise going. First, the spirit of citizen service, most clearly embodied in the Peace Corps. President Kennedy said that he wanted to speak to those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery. We pledged to them our best efforts to help them help themselves. Five weeks later, 37 years ago yesterday, the Peace Corps was born. In 3 weeks, when I travel to Africa, my first stop will be Ghana, the first place President Kennedy's Peace Corps volunteers went to serve. Now they have gone, over the years, to 132 nations. Tomorrow America will celebrate these accomplishments during the first ever Peace Corps Day, when thousands of former Peace Corps volunteers, including Secretary Shalala, who was a volunteer in Iran, and I might add has volunteered to go back if it will help our new efforts. Laughter Thousands of Peace Corps volunteers have agreed to talk with students around our country about their life changing experiences. The JFK Library also has a Library Corps, perhaps not as well known as the building itself, started by this foundation, which is inspiring young people in Roxbury, Dorchester, South Boston to work after school on community service projects. Inspired by President Kennedy's example, I have done what I could to advance the cause of citizen service. I just asked for the largest funding increase for the Peace Corps in history, in the hope that we can put 10,000 volunteers overseas by the turn of the century. Our national service project, AmeriCorps, has already given 100,000 young people a chance to earn some money for college while they serve in their communities. One of my happiest days as President was when we walked up the South Lawn of the White House with all the first group of young people, and I met Senator Kennedy, and we signed the bill. Soon, tens of thousands of those young people will be working with elementary school students, to teach them to read, and middle school students, promising to stay with them throughout their careers to make sure they get a chance to go to college, too. So we thank President Kennedy and all of you for the spirit of citizen service. The second thing that I would like to say in appreciation to the legacy of President Kennedy is that he did a lot to remind us all that we owe it to ourselves, to our children, and to our future to cherish and proliferate exposure to the arts. The First Lady and I have tried to do that in our celebration of the millennium. We have been having these Millennium Evenings. We had the great Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn the other night, and this Friday night we will have the brilliant cosmologist Stephen Hawking. A week from tonight we will also highlight four vernacular dances that have entered our unique dance tap, Lindy hopping, jazz, and so help me, I didn't organize this Irish step dancing. Laughter I want to thank Yo Yo Ma for the work that he has done to try to bring the arts, and music in particular, to so many Americans who might otherwise have never had a firsthand experience with what can lead us all to a higher level of understanding and enjoyment of life. Finally, and most personally, I am here because President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, their generation, made me admire and believe in public service and made me understand that it could be fun but that it also carried with it certain responsibilities. They made me believe that it was not a bad thing but a noble thing to want to exercise power but only if it were exercised for some larger purpose. There are many people in this room tonight who could be standing here making exactly the same statement. Just before I came over here, I finished a magnificent new biography of Theodore Roosevelt by H.W. Brands called "The Last Romantic." It's a terrific book, and it's only 820 pages long. Laughter But I was thinking because President Roosevelt died right after the close of the First World War, I was thinking about the whole sweep of the century that President Kennedy's life marked and that his service marked in such a profound way. This century we are about to leave was dominated by the consequences of the industrial revolution, the growth of very big organizations economic organizations, governmental organizations and the attendant wealth and power and possibility and threat that revolution spawned. So that for most of this century, Americans in positions of responsibility and ordinary American citizens have both had an incredible opportunity to find wealth and personal fulfillment and greater expression of freedom because of the organized development of this time. But they have also had an enormous responsibility to stand up against the new horrors that vast organized power presented to them, whether in greed or bigotry or outright totalitarian oppression. John Kennedy made us believe that in public service you could fight for the things that ought to be fought for you could fight against the things that ought to be fought against and that the sole purpose of power, fleeting though it is, was to be applied to the best of your Godgiven ability to those worthy goals. Now, we're about to enter a new century with problems and opportunities unparalleled in history, speeding along at a pace and with a complexity that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. There is a lot of good in the fact that the knowledge of the world is now doubling sheer facts are doubling every 5 years. We see in the human genome project miraculous health discoveries being made almost weekly now. But we also know that in this new world, where the Internet is exploding and 65,000 new sites are being added every hour of every day, that there will be new ways that people who are organized for the abuse of their power will present new threats, perhaps terrorists or organized criminals or narcotraffickers, perhaps in the forms of chemical or biological or smallscale nuclear weapons, perhaps unwise leaders being too greedy in the short run, forcing poor people off their land into the teeming cities of poor countries, devastating the environment, leading to the spread of disease. So we will now live in a new area where humankind will have all kinds of new possibilities for good and all manner of new things that need to be fought against. I hope that the children of this age will find a way to believe in America the way President Kennedy helped me to believe in America and to believe that the political process leaves the ultimate power in the people and gives its elected Representatives a precious chance just to bring out the good and stand against the bad. It is the eternal human obligation. He made it seem fun and noble and good. The least we can do is to keep the torch burning. Thank you, and God bless you. February 18, 1998 Thank you very much. First of all, thank you, Ron and Beth, for having us here, and thank you for being such wonderful friends to me and to Hillary and to our administration and our party. Thank you for the wonderful words. A couple of days ago I actually got a picture of one of those billboards in Israel not a particularly great picture of me and that wonderful, wonderful message. Let me thank all of you for being here. Most of you I have now known a long time, and you've heard me give a lot of speeches, so I won't really give much of one tonight. But I would like to make just two or three very brief points. When I came here in 1993, I did not come to the White House in probably the normal way, and in many ways I was not the normal person who came to the White House. I had never sought to live my whole life in Washington or, indeed, to be in the circle of Washington influence for my whole life. I came here with a determination to change the country, to change the direction of the country, to try to change the way we were living and working, and to try to make America work again. And I think the record is pretty clear that the approach we have taken has worked. And for all of you who played a part in that, I am grateful. I am grateful to Governor Romer and Steve Grossman and Carol and Cynthia and all the officers of the Democratic Party and the staff and all of you who have helped all along the way, those of you who helped me and Al Gore. The State of the Union Address got an unusual response, even for the State of the Union Address, partly because more people watched it than normal, maybe. Laughter There are blessings everywhere you don't expect. Laughter But I think the thing I would like to say about that is that I really feel that I spent 5 years working very hard to try to fix things that weren't functioning very well. And we got the deficit down over 90 percent. And I presented a balanced budget. I think the budget will be balanced this year if the economy isn't slowed by the difficulties in Asia. And we're working hard on those to try to help our friends and, in the process, help ourselves. And the crime rate has come down for 5 years and we now have a strategy that works, born of what people were doing in community after community all we're doing is supporting that. We have the lowest welfare rolls in almost 30 years. And we have now finally, last year, the lower 20 percent of our working people had their income increased by a higher percentage than American income went overall. So we're coming back together again after 20 years of drifting apart. So there's a lot to be grateful for. And what I tried to do in the State of the Union was to say, "Okay, now if we have things going right and the country is essentially working, we should" to use Hillary's phrase "we should be imagining the future. We should be asking ourselves, what do we have to do to strengthen this country for the 21st century, so that when we get there, we really will have the kind of country we want?" And that's what the agenda I outlined was about. And the thing that all of you can do that would be most helpful is to demonstrate to the American people every day in every way that the Democrats are committed to a public agenda that changes their lives for the better, that we do not believe that politics is about power, nor do we believe politics is about personal advantage, nor do we believe politics is about all the things that some people seem to think it's about. We think it's about bringing them a better future. And that's what the that's why I don't want to spend any of the surplus until we save Social Security for the next generation. Easy thing to do is it's election year give people a tax cut spend a little more money. It would be a mistake. That's why I'm determined to reorder, do whatever we have to do to preserve the Medicare program in a way that works for the 21st century and honors our, sort of, intergenerational compact, why I think we have to keep working until we have not only now we've basically opened the doors of college to anybody who will work for it. But we can't say and everybody takes it for granted that we have the best system of higher education in the world. No one believes we have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world, and until we do, we can't rest. It's why I think we have to keep working until we have closed the remaining holes in our health care system. It's why I believe we have to prove one more time that we can deal with any environmental challenge and still grow the economy. We have within our grasp the technological means to reduce global warming, or at least do our share of it, and still continue to grow the economy. We have to prove we can do that. It's why I am committed to proving that the increasing diversity of America will be a blessing, not a curse, amidst all the troubles of the world based on ethnic and religious differences. So I want you to keep going out there and talking to people about America in the 21st century. If you think about the present difficulty we're having with Iraq I don't want to talk about it in any great detail tonight, but I want to say it has it is not a replay of what happened in 1991. It is a forerunner of what could or could not happen in 2010, in 2020, in 2030. The very things we love about the world we're moving into all this interconnection we had 400,000 hits on our website after the State of the Union. We had a 650 percent increase in hits on the millennium website when we had our first lecture, when Bernard Bailyn talked the other night about how our country got started, and shut the thing down briefly. We can all get on a plane tonight and fly anywhere we can do anything. The more open the world is, the more interconnected it is, the more vulnerable we will be to the organized forces of destruction, whether they come from drugrunners or crime syndicates or terrorists. And it is very important that we do everything we can to make the risk that those kinds of people can bring chemical and biological warfare into the lives of ordinary people anywhere in the world, including this country we need to reduce those chances as low as we possibly can, whenever we can, however we can, as soon as we can. And there are very often no easy answers because of the way the world is working now. But I want you to know that's what's driving me. I want tomorrow to be good for America. And to do it, you not only have to seize the opportunities, you have to try to create a structure that will minimize the challenges and the threats as well. The last thing I'd like to say is this. I had a wonderful day 2 days ago. The Vice President and I went up and spoke to the Democratic caucuses, the Senators and House Members, and it was a great thing. We talked about our agenda for '98 and how excited we all were. And the Vice President was in overdrive that day I said I was going to find out what he ate for breakfast and give it to everybody laughter for free, give it to everybody. Laughter But I was thinking, trying to explain to people, you know, we've talked a lot about finding a third way between believing Government was the solution and Government was the problem, using Government as a catalyst, Government as a tool to give people a means to get people the tools to make the most of their own lives. We've talked a lot about the new Democratic Party. But I said something to them I'd like to close with you. I believe at every profound moment of challenge in the history of this country, the party that was doing the most for America has always stood unfailingly for three things for widening the circle of opportunity, for deepening the meaning of freedom, and for strengthening the Union. If you go back to the beginning of America, when people fled other countries to come here why were they coming here? Because they despised absolute, arbitrary, abusive power. And they wanted to live in a country where there was a rule of law that restrained people and where no one was unaccountable. And they had to decide, can we do this with a collection of little States, or do we have to be a nation? And they decided that we had to be a nation. And then George Washington and all of his allies, and especially Chief Justice John Marshall, created a nation for us. They said it will take one nation to protect freedom and to provide opportunity or to allow, in Thomas Jefferson's words, the pursuit of happiness. Abraham Lincoln, that's what he did he died to preserve the Nation and to deepen the meaning of freedom, stop making a mockery of the Constitution. The industrial revolution comes along, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson basically applied those central values to the changes that were going on then. Now, from the beginning of our party, we always said we believed in those things. But frankly, as a party, we didn't perform all that well from the end of Andrew Jackson's Presidency until Woodrow Wilson got elected, with minor interludes. As a result of that, we didn't have the Presidency very often either. Laughter But I think it is fair to say, even though I have tried to modernize the party and point us towards the future, from Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman to John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter and our administration, we have not always been right we have not always been moderate but in the 20th century, we have been the party that pursued not power for its own sake but was always dedicated to widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the reach of freedom, and strengthening our National Union. And now that we are doing the right things in the right way, those old fashioned, eternal elements of America's mission are more important today than ever before. You should be proud to be here, and I hope you can find a way to share that with as many of our country men and women as possible. Thank you. God bless you. February 18, 1998 Thank you very much. First let me join, I know, all of you in thanking Dr. D'Orta for opening this beautiful, beautiful house to us tonight. It's especially nice for me to come back here because I was involved for a long time with Pamela Harriman and with her late husband, Governor Averell Harriman, and their good friend and former great support, Janet Howard, is here tonight. My mind has been reliving a lot of precious memories in this wonderful home. I'm also grateful to Dr. D'Orta for helping Jim Moran, who is one of the finest people I have ever known in public life. I'm here for him tonight for a lot of reasons, but if you think back to where our country was in 1992, when I was running for President that the economy was weak, that we were growing apart economically, that our social problems were getting more severe, that our steps seemed more and more uncertain and you look at where we are today, I can tell you without reservation that one of the reasons we're where we are today is that at very critical junctures, Jim Moran was always willing to stand in the breach and do what was right for our country. In 1993, we passed our economic program to bring the deficit down by only one vote in the House. If Jim Moran had taken the easy way out, if he'd said, "Well, there are a lot of people in my district who will attack me over this," we wouldn't be here tonight having this celebration. Just Jim Moran could have walked away and changed the future of the country. But because he didn't walk away, before we saved the first dollar from the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the deficit had been reduced from 295 billion a year to 22 billion a year, over 90 percent. That alone should get Jim Moran reelected for the rest of his life if he wants it. When we passed the Brady bill and the crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street and ban assault weapons, the people in the NRA and their allies actually defeated a number of our Congressmen in the '94 election by terrifying people and saying we were taking their guns away. But Jim Moran stood in the breach. We didn't win by many votes on the crime bill, and 5 years later, as we've now put over twothirds of those police on the street and taken a lot of the assault weapons off the street, hundreds of thousands of people with criminal records or adverse mental health histories have not been able to buy handguns because of the Brady bill. This is a safer country. Crime has gone down for 5 years in a row in all major categories. In 1994, when the other party won the House and proclaimed that they had a revolutionary contract we Democrats said, on America laughter and they were prepared to shut the Government down to try to force me to accept that contract, the only way we were able to reverse it was that there were enough hearty souls in the Congress who said, "Wait a minute. There's something wrong with this picture. We are reducing the deficit. We're going to balance the budget, but we don't have to give up on our commitment on education or our commitment to the environment or our commitment to health care or our commitment to senior citizens or our commitment to trying to expand the circle of economic opportunity to the people who haven't felt anything in this recovery yet." And we said no. And in the face of the shutdown we defeated the contract on America, thanks to Jim Moran and the people like him who stood with me. If they hadn't done it, I could not have done it alone. So Jim Moran has done a lot of good things. In 1997, we passed the balanced budget law, which, as Jim said, had the biggest increase in child health care in a generation, the biggest increase in investment in education in a generation, and still balanced the budget. This year we estimate the deficit will be 10 billion. But if we get fortunate, if the challenges in Asia with the economy don't slow us down too much, we'll actually probably balance the budget this year. And if we don't, next year we will because of the balanced budget I've submitted to Congress. None of this would have been possible if we hadn't laid the framework, the foundation. And Jim Moran was a critical part of that, because he realized that we had to be responsible with the deficit we just couldn't go on having high interest rates and high deficit and quadrupling the debt every 12 years, but there was a way to reduce the deficit, reduce the size of Government, and increase our investment in the future of our children. And in the last 5 years, we sort have gotten America to working again. And I think people feel that. And now, as I said in the State of the Union, what we need to be asking ourselves, if the country is working well again what do we have to do now to look at the long term? What are we going to do to prepare this country for the 21st century to make sure that it's as strong as it can be? And that's what we're going to be working on in this year and again, why it is so important that he win reelection. If we have, as is projected, not only a balanced budget but several years of surpluses, the easy thing to do in an election year is to go out and promise the people a tax cut or some new spending program that sounds nice. I say we should do neither unless we pay for it, and all the surplus should be resolved until we have saved the Social Security system for the 21st century. That is very important. That is the right thing to do. We have 10 years left on the Medicare Trust Fund, but we have to reform Medicare for the 21st century. It's important how that's done and whether it's done consistent with our most basic values. We have the money, in addition, to continue to open the doors of college education to all to lift the standards in education to try to encourage schools in areas that are underperforming to end social promotion but give children a second chance to lower class sizes to 18 in the first three grades to rehabilitate 5,000 schools or build new ones in places where the kids don't have a decent place to go to school to let people who are between the ages of 55 and 65 who don't have any health insurance buy into the Medicare system if they, or with help from their children, can afford to do so to have the biggest increase in medical research in the history of the country to help us to solve the problems that are still facing us to use the wonders of technological advances to deal with our part of the responsibility to fight climate change and global warming. We have all these challenges before us, and they're significant, but they are wonderful opportunities for us. Hillary has sponsored a project for the millennium you know, we sat around and talked for a long time, and I asked her to think about what gifts we ought to give the millennium, and she calls her project, basically, "Remembering the past, and imagining the future." And I talked about it in the State of the Union. We're trying to raise the funds and get the funds to save the Star Spangled Banner we need 13 million in restoration it would be a tragedy if it were lost to save the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights and make sure they're perfectly preserved to get every community in the country to go out and save their own historic element. There's a house at the Old Soldiers' Home here in Washington, where Abraham Lincoln used to go to work in the summertime. The house is in terrible condition. It ought to be saved. But we also are imagining the future. That's what the medical Trust Fund is about. That's what our international space station is about and sending Senator John Glenn at the age of 77 back into space. Don't worry about him. He's in better shape than I am. He'll be fine. And that is what a lot of our challenges in foreign policy are all about. I'm going to try to pass a Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty this year to discourage other countries from becoming nuclear powers and to slowly let the whole nuclear threat recede. And we have to do that. We are actively pursuing our peace efforts, from Bosnia to the Middle East to Northern Ireland. I'm about to leave on a trip to Africa, which I have looked forward to for a long time. Then I'm going down to Latin America, where every country in the hemisphere but one is a democracy. We are working hard on these things. One of the things that I want you to understand I have not much to add at this moment to what I have already said yesterday in my speech at the Pentagon about the situation in Iraq, but I want you to think about this. There will never be a time as long as we're on this Earth when there won't be people who seek absolute, arbitrary, abusive power. This country was established by people who were fleeing absolute, arbitrary, abusive power. That's how we all got started. And we have been jealous about that from the beginning. One of the things we know is that the more open our global society gets, the more we can all get on the Internet and share information with people around the world, the more we can get on an airplane and fly around the world, the more we can hop from continent to continent to continent, the more we get in touch with each other, the more vulnerable we are to one another's problems and the more open we are to the organized forces of destruction. That's why I tried to take such a hard line against terrorism. That's why I tried to take such a hard line against the development of chemical and biological weapons and very small scale nuclear weapons. Why? Because you don't want people to carry stuff like that around from airport to airport. You don't want to have any unnecessary exposure when people can get on the Internet and find a webpage that will tell them how to make a bomb like the bomb that blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. We cannot make the world perfectly safe, but we have to do everything we can in our time to imagine what the security problems will be like when this young lady here is grown, and she has children of her own. That is our obligation. So what all of this is about at bottom, it is about what kind of world our children will live in and what we have to do, not to make it perfectly risk free we can't do that but we have to do everything we possibly can to minimize the risks that we and our children and our grandchildren will be exposed to as we move into a globalized society where the organized forces of destruction will cause us enough trouble anyway, whether they're narcotraffickers, criminal syndicates, or terrorists. Anything we can do to minimize the chance that anyone will be able to put into play chemical and biological weapons against civilized people, wherever they live, we should do. That is the animating principle here for me. I am doing the best I can with a difficult situation, because I'm thinking about what we have to do to strengthen America and the world for the 21st century. We've got a lot to do. We're going to get a lot done this year. The thing I like about Jim Moran is that he will work with members of the Republican Party whenever they'll work with him in good faith. We know we're hired here to get things done for the American people, but we also know that when November rolls around, there will still be plenty of things on which we honestly disagree in good faith. What we want is to have honest disagreement and to see upright, honest, and truly courageous people like Jim Moran return to public office. America needs it. It's good for our future. Thank you, and God bless you.