VARIOUS TOPICS: Speech - Boston, MA - 9/25/92 Remarks by Governor Bill Clinton Fanueil Hall Boston, MA September 25, 1992 Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Flynn, for your leadership, your example and your support. Thank you, Reverend Stith for so many years of friendship. Thank you, Senator McGovern, for your eloquent words. Thank you, Congressman Kennedy. He did sound like a southern Baptist preacher up here. I thought he was great. And thank you, Senator Tsongas, for your courageous campaign to restore America. Thank you, Senator Tsongas, for being the conscience of the next generation for the last year while this administration has squandered the birth right of Americans repeatedly. You know, President Bush says this election is about trust. That's what he was saying before the revelations of the last couple of days. But anyway, he says the election is about trust. Well, we've only made one decision in common--George Bush and I. My decision was Al Gore, and I think I did a pretty good job. Anyway, Al Gore has got this line. He says, you know, in this country, poverty is up and jobs are down. Bankruptcies are up and incomes are down. Everything that's down should be up. Everything that's up ought to be down. They've got it upside down and we're going to turn it right side up on election day. You know, last Tuesday I went to East Lansing, Michigan to debate George Bush. Where was George? I'll tell you where he was. Put yourself in his position. It isn't that he is a bad debater, but how do you explain the worst economic performance in 50 years? How do you explain after 12 years of trickle down economics the fact that two -thirds of our people are working harder for lower wages than they were making 10 years ago? How do you explain high unemployment and rampant insecurity? How do you explain 100,000 Americans per month losing their health insurance? How do you explain living with over a million people that are HIV-positive and never even mentioning the word AIDS while you're president of the United States? How do you explain? I'll tell you how he explains it. He just doesn't. He gets in an airplane and he flies around my state and tells everybody how bad Arkansas is. Now, if he really believes that, of course, he could come and debate me and I could answer him. You know, I was so interested the other day when Mr. Bush skipped out on the debate, instead skipped around the states that surround Arkansas, telling them all about how bad my state was. He forgot to tell them that we ranked first in the country in job growth this year. He forgot to tell them that we had 72,000 new private sector jobs since he's been president and the country has lost 40,000 private sector jobs since he's been president. He forgot to say all those things. Why? Because this is an administration that's run out of ideas, that's run out of vision, that's run out of commitment, and it should be out of time. It's time to change it. My fellow Americans, increasingly as the days go by, the people in this country are moving beyond the comfortable categories of political debate. They are shedding all this useless rhetoric. They are beginning to wonder about what America would be like the day after the election, and they are more and more and more turning off the same old negative, tired, hackneyed, trite phrases that George Bush has used to stay in power. They are saying no. They are saying no in every region of this country. They are saying no without regard to party or walk of life. In the last several days, in California, in Silicon Valley, 21 executives of high tech companies, two- thirds of them Republicans, endorsed the Clinton-Gore ticket because George Bush has refused to face the problems of America. In Chicago, 400 business executives, one-third of them Republican, endorsed our ticket because the other side has no plan to revive the American economy and to make the business sector healthy and to provide jobs for Americans. And last week, in one of the most moving encounters in which I have ever been involved, Admiral William Crowe, who was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under Presidents Reagan and Bush, endorsed Bill Clinton for president because he wants the problems of America solved here at home. I ask you here, all of you in this crowd, to think about your responsibilities as Americans and the potential we have now to change this country. We cannot go on for four more years where most people work harder for less, where millions of Americans wake up every day waiting for a pink slip, where there is no sense of movement and progress. We have to stop saying no to our people. We have to stop trickle-down economics, no more across-the-board tax cuts, but instead incentives to start new businesses, to start new jobs, give people breaks if they put the American people to work and if for no other reason. Let's put this country back on the right footing. We have to say in this state, which has long been thought to have the best system of higher education in these universities in the entire Western world -- that we know, no matter how good our economic policies are, unless our people have the skills to compete in a global economy, they will be ground down. And so we have to say we do not have a person to waste, education is for everyone, and we will have a real commitment for that. In this town of great universities, let us never forget that ours is the only advanced country in the world that has no system for dealing with the needs of all those young people who do not go to the four-year colleges and universities. They deserve help, too. And if we prevail on November 3rd, we will establish a system by which every young American not in college will have at least two years of further education and training to get good jobs, not dead end jobs. Let us remember here that the college drop-out rate in America is more than twice the high school drop-out rate in part because the cost of a college education has gone up even more than health care. So on November 3rd, one of the issues in this election is opening the doors of college education to all Americans. That's what Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent. In 1960, President Kennedy started the Peace Corps and gave young brilliant Americans like Paul Tsongas a chance to go around the world to help other people. In 1992, let us resolve to establish a domestic Peace Corps to rebuild America. Let us say to every young American, we will loan you the money to go to college, no questions asked, no income limits -- but you must in turn play it back either as a percentage of your income after you go to work or even better, before or after you go to college, do something for your country. Be a police officer, a teacher, work with children, with the elderly, work with people with disabilities. Revitalize our housing markets, solve the problems of our country. That would be the best money we ever spent. We could educate a whole generation of Americans. That is what this election is all about. Let us resolve--let us make it clear on November 3rd that we are tired of being told what America cannot do. We have been told over and over and over again by this administration that there is something funny about America. We are the only advanced country that cannot bring health care costs in line with inflation and provide basic health care to all Americans. I believe we can and with your help we will. We do not propose, as George Bush says, a health care system with the compassion of the KGB and the competence of the House Post Office. That's his line. And keep in mind, when George Bush criticizes my health care plan, he's been on socialized medicine for a dozen years. We paid all his bills. We've taken good care of him. I want you to have a health care system where you can pick your doctor and your hospital, but where we control health care costs, we reform insurance, we say to people, you will not be denied insurance nor the right to change jobs because someone in your family has been sick in the past and has a medical condition. You will not be able to have insurance priced out of your range because you're a small business person or a farmer and if you do not work we will find a way to cover you, too. I have given this country a health care plan that will save us hundreds and billions of dollars, enable us to bring the deficit under control and revitalize the American economy. Don't let George Bush take it away from you. Grab it on November 3rd. Don't let him do it. On November 3rd, send a loud and clear signal that you did not buy the argument that George Bush and Dan Quayle have so passionately put forward, that every time you help the environment you hurt the economy. Tell them you've got it figured out. Look what happened at the earth summit at Rio de Janeiro. Our president goes to Rio and spends all his time beating the global warming treaty, beating the bio-diversity treaty. What did the Germans and Japanese do? They signed off on that the first day and they spent the rest of their time selling high technology, environmental cleanup projects to other countries, taking markets away from us and jobs away from us, the work that ought to be done by the scientists, the engineers and the factory workers that are thrown out of work by the Cold War. We could use them to build a new and peaceful and cleaner world, and under our administration we will. Tell George Bush, on November 3rd send him a signal that we know something about family values and we want a president who values the family. On Tuesday, after Mr. Bush bypassed the debate, he spent the day flying around bad-mouthing me, he flew back in the dark of the night after the newspaper presses were down, after the evening news was over, to veto for the second time the family leave bill. Now, what is the message there? Seventy-two nations-- hear me again, 72 nations--72--guarantee working men and women a little time off when there is a baby born or a sick parent without losing their jobs. But once again, Mr. Bush says, we can't, we can't, we can't. I don't know if any of you have ever known anybody who lost their job because of a sick family member. A couple of years ago, I was jogging in downtown Little Rock and I stopped at a local McDonalds, and this lovely young couple started talking to me about their child who was in our Children's Hospital suffering with cancer. They were two bright, fine young people who were fired from their jobs because they came to Little Rock because they wanted to be there if their child did not live, and they were living in a homeless shelter because we don't have a family leave law in America. Al Gore tells the story that he and Tipper, when their son was in Johns Hopkins Medical Center, met a couple from one of the Southern states who had to bring their child there for special medical treatment. They lost their entire income because we don't have a family leave law. I'll tell you something. I'll get up every day worrying about your families, and I will tell you we can, not we can't. I'm tired of we can't. In 39 days, you will be called upon to do what Americans have always done when they had to do it, to have the courage to change the course of this country. I want us again to be a beacon of freedom and hope. At the end of the Cold War, we have unparalleled opportunities to stand up for freedom and democracy and human rights all around the world, in our hemisphere, in Haiti, in Latin America, and in China and other countries in Asia and around the world. We should be a voice for freedom. But never forget this. In 1960, President Kennedy hammered over and over and over again, go back and read the speeches and the debates, we cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home. The American people must rise up from within. So I ask you to think once again about the stories that Joe Kennedy told. We now take our great triumphs as a nation for granted. We take the triumph of the Boston Tea Party, of Paul Revere's ride, of the winning of the Revolutionary War, perhaps even more remarkably, of our decision to become one nation instead of 13 separate colonies, we take that for granted. But my fellow Americans, it was a miracle. It was a miracle. When George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers said, we can't stay apart, we can't have 13 armies and 13 separate currency systems and 13 independent economies, there was a whole crowd there that said, this is crazy, we could do worse. But Washington and Jefferson were in the we-can-do-better crowd and they prevailed, and so did we because of that. At the outbreak of the Civil War, it was far from certain that this great nation would stay together. When Abraham Lincoln was elected, only 39 percent of the American people had voted for him. The finest military commander of his age, Robert E. Lee, had gone home to fight to break the Union apart. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, no one could have known for sure that it would become real in the lives of the black Americans who lived at that time. It was a miracle. Lincoln's own wife lost three brothers fighting for the other side, but he gave his life to preserve the Union. What we take for granted today happened because Americans had the courage to stay the course for change. In 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was elected president of the United States and lifted this country up from his wheelchair, Herbert Hoover said about him the same things that George Bush is saying about me. They haven't learned any new lines in 60 years. Herbert Hoover said, he's trying to do what they're doing in Europe. It sounds like all that Russian socialism. It's just terrible what Roosevelt wanted to do. But Roosevelt said, we have to change. We have to do what works. We have to use the power of government to help people and move this economy and face our problems and he lifted the country from his wheelchair and the rest is history. But it was not foreordained. The American people made it happen. We made it happen. The cause of change is always difficult to make. It is always easy to stay with a proven path even if it is failure. It takes courage to change. In 1960 President Kennedy was elected by 110,000 votes, less than one vote per precinct. My fellow Americans, this election is about what happens to our children and grandchildren. It is about whether we'll have four more years in which we double the debt again or one in which we increase investment and bring the debt down and take a stand for our children's future. It is about whether we have four more years with an out of control health care system or finally a system that provides affordable health care to all Americans. It is about whether we have four more years of idle rhetoric about energy and the environment or we begin to sustain our energy and our environment and our education system for the 21st century. It is about more than whether these young children from Clinton High School -- have their namesake in the White House. It's about whether their children will have an America they can be proud to grow up in. That is what this election is about. And so I ask you for 39 days, every day in every way you can, think about you responsibilities as Americans. Talk to your friends and neighbors and family members. If you have friends in other states, call them and write them, ask them to be part of a crusade for change. It is our responsibility at this time to lift this country up, to move this country forward, to move beyond a vision to possibility. This can be the greatest age in America's history and it is up to you to make it so. Thank you and God bless you all.