REMARKS GIVEN AT LITTLE ROCK FUNDRAISER GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON APRIL 20, 1992 Thank you very much. Welcome to the first statewide convention of Arkansans whose comments about Bill Clinton have not yet been printed in major news media. It's wonderful to see you all here and to know that this luncheon represents the breaking of an almost unbelievable $2 million barrier in our state. I don't know if any state has ever given any candidate for President the equivalent of a dollar a person before, or if it will ever happen again. But, no one will ever receive who is more grateful and who knows from whence it came more than I. You know they say people are cynical about politicans, and I understand that. My good friend, Bill Clark, just told me a joke that his 9-year-old grand daughter made up. This is what I'm fighting against -- a 9-year-old kid makes up the following joke: Child to father: "Do all fairy tales begin 'once a upon a time'?" Father: "No. Some begin when I'm elected." I mean, I don't have a chance, look at that. I want to say to all of you, when I'm elected, it won't be a fairy tale, it won't be a free ride, it won't be easy; but they'll be four of the most exciting years this country has ever had. To those of you who have been with me for many years, I promise, George Jernigan, in return for his brief introduction, which he almost overdid, that I would tout this Saturday's Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, held here, $35 a piece to here my friend and supporter and former colleague, Senator Jay Rockefeller from West Virgina , who'll be speaking here on Saturday night. So I hope you will come . To the state officials who are here, I thank you for being here. To Congressman Thornton, I thank you for being here, since we're here in your district. I'm glad to be here. I want all of you to know that your Congressional district representatives and our Senators have been wonderful to me in this campaign. Both Senator Bumper and Senator Pryor went to New Hampshire. Congressman Anthony has been very aggressive in rounding up superdelegates, and all of our legislators have been terrific. I have been worried that David Pryor would not be healing up enough to turn his whole life over to the campaign, but he's trying; and I'm grateful for that. To all of you who are here, I want to say that this is the beginning of our endeavor, not the end of it. I am gratified by the work that's been done by this campaign and by the volunteers. Even I was almost impressed when David Wilhelm said we had 1400 delegates and that that was a couple hundred more than Governor Dukakis had four years ago. But, remember why we -- all of us -- got into this: not to win a nomination, or even to win an election, but to change this country. I entered this race in October after working for you for about 11 years: trying to get and keep jobs for decent people who deserved it, trying to help educate the children of this state, trying to help solve the problems that people have that they have through no fault of their own, and trying to pull people together to work together in partnerships. People who don't understand Arkansas -- how it works now, and how it has over the years -- have often criticized me because I get along with people. I thought the object of politics was to get things done. The object of politics in Washington for too long has been to ignore whether you get anything done or not, but always to make sure you're postured right for the evening news. I have improved one thing -- I'm not very slick -- I often say something I shouldn't that permits the evening news to look just a little bit off kilter, so that that characterization that they love to make of me can be reinforced one more time; but I'll tell you something: I believe that the purpose of politics is to get things done, and I don't believe there would be a thousand people here today if you didn't think that, together, we had gotten things done for the last 11 years. It's amazing, the people who don't count for much in the coverage: a young man from Guy, Arkansas who came up to me at Yale and said, "You sent me to the Governor's school, and by creating it , you changed my whole life. I'm graduating from yale; I hope I can give something back to my country like you've tried to do." This young lady, Amberly Wanrer, who sang for me on my 40th birthday -- back a century ago, seems like -- I've watched her grow up and do well. All the people I have seen in this state who have jobs because of the things that we've done together: We ranked in the top ten states in America in job growth last year. That counts for something, especially for the people that have the work. I could give you example after example after example. That is what politics is all about to me: It's people and their lives and their promise and their problems and their pain. It's the sort of thing I was raised to believe was important. I saw the other day in the paper that my childhood home had burned. I wondered if it was a bipartisan effort or a real accident. I was thinking about that old house in Hope and how, when I was a child there I watched from a second-story window on a room that burned, a house burn down across the street. And all the things that have happened in the years since I was in that old house: the people who have come in to my life and enriched it, those who have stayed and those who have gone away, people without whom I would not be here today, including so many of you in this room. I just want you to remember that, as we go through the rest of this primary process and on into the fall, remember not to be too discouraged by the setbacks of the moment and the cynicism people have about politics. For there are reasons for it. Look at what has happened to our country in the last generation, beginning in the 60's with what happened in Vietnam. And then we had a President, Richard Nixon, who, after two assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, was elected in an environment of frustration. And his Vice President resigned, and then he was driven from office. And then Jimmy Carter got elected - - the promise of a new age. In the end of his term, we were gripped with inflation and interest rates of unmanageable proportions and the humiliation of our hostages kept for over a year in Iran. Then we elected two Presidents who told us it was a good thing to hate government: it couldn't do anything anyway; the less you did the better. And for 11 years we have been in the grip of a theory of government that tells us that America can go its own way in the world: We can ignore what these other high growth countries are doing. We can let state and local government and the private sector -- what Mr. Bush calls a 1000 points of light -- worry about whether people have work or can educate their kids, or can even come in off the street at night. That's not up to the federal government to worry about. If taxes are low and shifted from individuals at the top to individuals at the middle and at the bottom, everything else will be just hunky-dory. But it isn't. It isn't. And it isn't because we have refused, in a way, to grow up as a country. We've refused to roll up our sleeves and put our shoulders to the wheel and face the hard realities of life today, so that we can take advantage of all the opportunites that are out there waiting for us at the end of the Cold War. I got into this race because it was clear to me that we could create jobs and jobs and jobs, and we'd still have an unemployment rate that was too high and incomes that were too low. We could tax ourselves year in and year out to improve education, and we still would invest too little. We could work and work and work on solving the human problems of our people, and in the absence of a national strategy to do what every other successful country has done, we would fail to give every man and woman in this state and in this country thechance to live up to their God given potential. This is not rocket science to me. It's simple, old-fashoned, strait-forward common sense. Either we will or we will not decide in this election that we want a leader who will take responsibility for the pain and the promise of this country, some one who will say, "It's time we had a national economic plan, too." Congressman Thornton calls it a Marshall Plan for America. Are we going to be a hard-worked, low wage country? More than half of us are going that way, working harder for less than 10 years ago, going from first to tenth in the world in wages. Or, are we going to be a smart-work, high-wage country, where people are encouraged to use their minds and rewarded for their efforts? An economic strategy; a strategy to control health costs and provide decent health care to everybody; a national education strategy where there are real, meaningful standards for what our children should know; a way of managing them, measuring them; and a way of creating opportunity so that everbody can seize the educational advantages that this world holds. Are we going to do that as a nation or not? It's a pretty simple proposition. I can tell you this, we will never do it without a President who will lead. Are we going to have a family policy which rewards the most important thing of all in our or any other country: the raising of children? People are out there working 40 hours a week, millions of them working 40 hours a week, walking on dangerous streets to and from work, coming home at night still with wages below the poverty line. Shouldn't they have access to child care for their children? Shouldn't the tax system at least lift them above poverty, if they are out there killing themselves 40 hours a week? And if a kid gets sick, shouldn't the parent be able to go home without losing a job? Shouldn't we say that we're going to do what other nations do: recognize thatchildren and their rearing and education and training, still, that is the central work of any nation? Only if we get a different President. And look at the deficit. You know what the press asked me on the way in here -- typical example of the national, Republican gall -- the said, "Well, don't you think you've got a Dukakis situation on your hands? Here you are cutting the budget again?" I said ," No, if everybody cut the budget and they didn't have any money, we'd be better off." I'm doing the reverse thing. You look at Arkansas's budget in the last 11 years. Everybody wants it both ways. They want to attack you for not spending more and then attack you when you won't run a deficit. They want to attack you if you raise taxes for investing in education, and they want to attack you if you underspend in education. It's time that we grew up and recognized that we have to make tough choices. The national columnists always say, "I wish these politicians would talk about cutting entitlements." Heck, we've been cutting entitlements down here, Mr. Speaker, for a decade. We know how you do it. You just don't have any more money, and so you quit spending. I know how to do that. But, I'm not going to give people the satisfaction of saying I'm going to cut entitlements on the poor and the middle- class elderly and the disadvantaged, when I know we're wasting $60 billion in the organization of our health care. I say people should pay who can pay first, and then take care of the others. So, It's just a question of whether we really want to change, because you can't change without a President. You won't get actions on the deficit, you won't get action for investment, you won't get action for growth unless you change. The second thing we have to ask ourselves is: What kind of people are we going to be? Because, a President is one person, a congress 535. They can make several thousands and hundreds of thousands of decisions in the course of a few days; but the 250 million people who are Americans, they make billions every day, many of them beyond the reach of politics. Thank goodness. That's what limited government is all about. And so it's not just a question of whether we're going to take a different direction in the government, it's also a question of what kind of people we're going to be. For 11 years we've been told that we have very few responsibilities to one another to bear one another's burdens: that what we should do is turn a quick buck, and get it while we can and forget about everybody else. Well, it hasn't been very good for us economically. Last year the Germans and the Japanese had much higher growth rates than we do. And we have homeless problems, poverty problems, social problems, children's problems far greater than other places. People ask me sometimes, "Well, what's the toughest and the best thing that's happened to you in this campaign?" It would be hard to say what the best thing is, so many wonderful things have happened and a lot of great people out there. And they've been great to me. They keep voting for me in these primaries after everybody tells them how sorry I am. So I have to like them. But, the toughest thing for me has been going to state after state after state to see in yet another town, in yet another city, in yet another neighborhood, children killing each other. That is the toughest thing. Eleven grade schools in Houston, Texas with metal detectors in the front door, so they can get the guns and the knives off the 8 and 9-year-olds when they come in the front door. And then we went to Chicago, which was very good to me, and saw that maybe they needed that because an 8- year-old had stolen his big brother's gun -- his big brother was 15 or 16 -- and taken it to school and shot another 8-year-old in school. Then I went to Michigan, to Macomb County, home of the Reagan Democrats, the blue collar white folks who ran away in white flight from the city of Detroit, knowing that their problems were racial in nature. And in Macomb County a white teenager shot another one. This is the most painful but by no means the only manifestation of a nation that no longer values people as the most important products of any society. We've got this homeless problem. In Arkansas, I bet you there are 600 houses that HUD's foreclosed on. Thousands. Tens of thousands. In Philadelphia the other day I visited a house that HUD had foreclosed on -- uninhabitable. And the local ACORN group, affiliated with the one here, had gotten a woman into the house and $15,000 of repair work; and she and her children were personally rehabing that house so they could move into it. There are examples like that all over America of good things that are happening. But, if we don't make up our minds, that at the grass- roots level we're going to reach out to one another and get out of this idea that we can be divided by race, by gender, by region, by income; we're going to be in deep trouble. And there's nothing I can do to overcome that. And so you have to decide with me to tell people that story, too. Because I'm really proud of what we've done in this state to build new partnerships across old lines of division. I'm proud of the fact that we find ways to work together even if it disappoints those people who'd rather see us fighting all the time. I'm proud of the fact that after this year's fights, we find next year's opportunity to move our state forward. And the country would be a lot better off if we had more of that in every state, in every city of this country. So, what kind of government are we going to have, what kind of people are we going to be, that's what this is all about? Let me just say the last thing: It must be bewildering to those of you who've known me for all of these years to see these national polls that say "Well, Clinton is smart enough and tough enough to be President -- you probably doubted both of those things. He's got way the best ideas." Everybody in this room has thought I've been crazy at one time or another. "But we wonder whether he has the character and the honesty to President." Well, we already established the fact that there's a lot of background to that: a generation of disappointment in politicians. So someone like me, who is dumb enough to be honest and say "Hey, I like this; this is the only system we've got." You're automatically suspect. I mean, when a 9-year-old can make up a joke about you, and you've never even heard it, you're in trouble. I just want to remind you of one thing: More than half the time in this country's 200 year history, the people have made the right decision. The real and larger truth usually comes out. I don't know how many people I've heard say, " Well, I'm tired of talking to those reporters 'cause I don't tell them anything bad, so my name never gets in the paper. I'm not going to help you anymore." I don't know how many people I've heard say that they're glad they put their phone number in the newspaper in New Hampshire because somebody called them and asked them if I was really as bad as they had read. I don't know how many people who've made those long trips to those other states to campaign for me have said, "You know, I know I've made a difference, because people do not know." Well the first thing I want to tell you, from what Hillary said and from what I said, that we're not particularly discouraged. One thing, as my good friend Mike Espy, the first black Congressman from Mississippi since reconstruction, reminded me of when all this negative stuff started to come out, Mike said, "Bill, just remember what my grandmama always said: It aint what they call you; it's what you answer to." I answer to you, and you know the truth. So I ask you now. One more time, we have raised a phenomenal amount of money here; but what we have to do is get the essential truth of this campaign beyond the borders of this state, into the fabric of our national life, swimming against a generation of cynicism, and the imparities of modern-day coverage that always elevate what is bad over what is good. Because, I believe we can do better. I can tell you one thing: If it was just the matter of the lifestyle, I'd rather stay home with you this afternoon. This is not about lifestyle. It is not about winning an election. It is about changing a country. The people of this state that I have worked with, all these years, deserve better than they can get from me or anybody else, until we have a nation with a leadership mature and strong enough to take responsibility for the future. The people of this country -- the millions, the tens of millions of them living lawfully, courageously, against all the odds -- deserve that. All these kids that are out there getting into gangs because they have no other home, no person, no place, no belief larger than themselves to connect to. They deserve better. Together, we can do better I would not be in this race today, still, if it hadn't been for you: the money that was there early that sustained us through the storms, and all the people who just forced themselves to go to other states and stand up for us and what we tried to do here. There is no way that between now and New York and November, that this campaign can prevail and be about something that is bigger than me, bigger than Hillary, bigger than one more speech, unless you are willing to go back to the hedge rows, call your friends in Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and New York and New Jersey, and California, and all across the country, and tell them what you know about what we're trying to do. Go when you can. Call when you can't. Stand up for what you know is true. Write when you see something that makes you mad, but always remember: Do not defend me. Instead, defend what we have stood for and fought for and believed in , because that is what America needs to embrace in 1992. Thank you and bless you all