Transcript of Remarks -- Governor Bill Clinton Democratic Leadership Council New Orleans, Louisiana May 2, 1992 Thank you very much. To my good friends, Congressman Bill Jefferson, whose life has in so many ways paralleled my own; Daryl Landroux, who has been my friend and supporter; Senator John Bowl, who has done such a magnificent job in leading the Democratic Leadership Council; to all the delegates here assembled and especially those from my home state of Arkansas, who have come done the way a little to cheer me on; to the staff of the DLC who has worked for so many years to try to put ideas back into the forefront of this party to change our party without giving up our values, to win elections without sacrificing principles, to change this country in ways that were good and decent and urgent: I am so glad to be here. I can't help expressing a little bit of personal pride. The magnificent rendering of "God Bless America" by Earl Taylor, whose son, Earl Jr., works for us, and whose son, Ricky, introduced me in Georgetown when I first spoke there as a Presidential candidate about my hopes for this country. He not only sings with a gift from God, he has raised two children that are testament to the enduring importance of a father's love. All of you know that I believe deeply in the work of the DLC. I love the ideas we have espoused. I have searched for opportunity and responsibility. I have searched for means to empower people to take advantage of their own destiny . I have searched for ways to change government and make it work, to make it less bureaucratic and more entrepreneurial and creative, to have more partnerships with the private sector in ways that would generate explosive futures for America. I know that we have been hurt by a leadership without a strategy to restore our economic strength. I know that we have been hurt by leadership that was irresponsibly divisive, denying of America's problems. But today I want to talk to you without the benefit of a prepared text and with some of my legendary scribble notes, which even I can't read once I write them down, about the other part of the DLC message which I have worked so hard to craft over the last several years. I want to talk about our American community. Thomas Jefferson once said that the crisis of slavery is "a fire bell in the night". The crisis in Los Angeles is now our fire bell in the night. It is clear evidence once again of the profound divisions in our community -- divisions that have been ripped to shreds in Los Angeles. People outraged by the Rodney King verdict who say the system does not work. People not voting because they have given up. People now who say they will vote for a third party candidate because what he says sounds good, and he has the inestimable virtue of never having served in public office; because they believe all politicians have failed. People who are looting because they are not part of the system at all anymore. They do not share our values, and their children are growing up in a culture alien from ours: without family, without neighborhood, without church, without support, often finding that only in a gang is there an identity bigger than themselves and are they the most important person in the world to anyone. We must begin with the hard truth that race is at the root of much of this. In the 1950's when I was a little boy I can remember the racial tensions beginning to flair in the open in my state. I had the virtue of being raised until I was four by a grandfather who had only a fourth grade education, but who believed passionately in the cause of equal rights. But I watched my state sundered and torn when the President of the United States had to call out the National Guard simply to integrate Little Rock Central High School. Then , in the 1960's I saw the civil rights movement lead to the burning of churches and the wreckage of lives in cities like Birmingham. I watched Martin Luther King shot in Memphis on the eastern border of my state. I was living in Washington when the city erupted in flames, and I remember as if it were yesterday sticking a red cross on my car and taking supplies into the inner-city, where people were huddled in the basements of churches, waiting for food. And now in the 90's we have what has happened in Los Angeles, and to a lesser degree, what has happened in other cities around the nation. In the 1950's and 60's there were arguments over equal access, over race, over poverty, over politics. To be sure, in the 1990's we have made a great deal of political progress. I was introduced today by a magnificent man who, if he were fifty years older, would not have been voting at this time in his life. Birmingham, Los Angeles, Memphis, The District of Columbia and Atlanta all have black mayors. We have made a great deal of progress for those of us who live in the mainstream of America. But what has happened beneath that? Beneath that there are those who are not part of our community, whose values have been shredded by the hard knife of experience, where there is the disintegration of family and neighborhood and jobs, and the rise of drugs and guns and gangs. Since I started this campaign I have seen in New York City two little children, black teenagers, ripped off the streets of New York and beaten and painted white because God made them black. And then a few days later a girl was taken off the street and assaulted in retaliation, simply because she was white. I was in Chicago when an eight year-old child took his big brother's gun to school and shot another eight year-old, barely understanding what he was doing. I was in Houston with the police who told me that they had found it necessary to put metal detectors in the front doors of eleven elementary schools to take the guns and the knives from the eight and nine year-old children as they came through the door to school every day. Little wonder that one of the most moving things that has occurred to me in the whole course of this campaign was an encounter I had with a man in hotel uniform in New York as I was going in to give a speech. He grabbed me and said, "Governor, my boy studies politics in school. He is ten years old. He says you should be President and since I trust my boy , I will vote for you." But he said, "I have to ask you something. Where I came from we were poor, but at least we were free. Here in America we are no longer free. When my boy cannot walk across the street to the park in my neighborhood and play unless I am with him, he is not free. When my boy cannot walk down the street to the school in our neighborhood unless I walk with him, he is not free. If I do what my boy asks and vote for you, will you make my boy free?" That is the cry of millions of Americans today, who know that they have no community day in and day out in this country. Let us face those fears. White Americans often fear that violence has only a black face. They see it on the news. They see it in the movies. They are gripped by the isolation of their own experience where, especially in many of our larger areas, too many white Americans still simply have no friends of other races and do not know any differently. Blacks fear that too often violence has a black face and no one cares. There was a memorial service in New Haven, Connecticut a few weeks ago for children who were killed in the endless bout of drug wars in that city, and Reverend Jesse Jackson said that if white Americans killed white Americans like this, there would be an explosion of interest in the judicial system until the matter was solved; and if black Americans killed white Americans at this rate, there would soldiers in the street everywhere until it would stop. But black Americans are leading other black Americans to the slaughter, and no one steps into the breach. Oh, to be sure, most of us still love our country, and we are still capable of being a community. In a time of crisis during the Gulf War , we were one. I believe in our pain and anguish in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict: After we had seen fifty-six blows rained in eighty-one seconds, we were one. When we lose a president, or a national hero, we are one. When Magic Johnson comes forward and, with courage, tells us he has AIDS, we are one. But when the crisis passes, when we go back to the day to day ordinary living of life, I say to you: We are not a community. We have too many people who are totally disconnected, totally divorced from the mainstream of our life. We are raising a generation of Americans isolated, literally in a different culture, without family, often without home, without education, without jobs, without a future. We should be afraid my fellow Americans, but we must face our fears and stop running from them. White people have been scared for so long that they have fled to the suburbs of America to places like Simi Valley and Macomb County in Michigan. I understand those fears. I live in a city, and my daughter goes to a city public school. She's a seventh grader in the public schools of Little Rock where we've had an incident of violence a year or so ago -- a tragedy. Someone came onto school grounds, and death ensued. She tells me stories that sometimes cause me to fear, but I believe we must face our fears and not run from them, because she has gotten a good education. She revels in the bi- racial life she lives, and there has been more hope than fear in her experience. And besides, there is no place to hide. When I was in Michigan, in Macomb County, the home e of the Reagan Democrats, in a town meeting, one of the first things I was told is that there, in the place that people ran to, a fifteen year-old had just shot another fifteen year-old in another act of mindless, teenage violence. We have no place to hide. Rodney King said it well: "I never meant my verdict to be an excuse for this kind of behavior." But neither will his verdict make the streets safer for others, especially for black Americans. After all, more than any other racial group in this country, it is their children who are shot on the street, their neighborhood that are savaged by crack cocaine, their businesses and dreams that are crushed. Let us not forget that we now live in a multi-racial society, Los Angeles more than any other city in America. I spoke at the University of California at Los Angeles a couple of years ago to students from 122 countries. What of the Hispanics, what of the Asian Americans, what of the other Americans who have come here from different nations? What is to become of them? Will they be part of the mainstream community or the other community of America? This situation cries out for leadership. Last night our President made what I thought was a very fine statement on the security measures he had taken, on the action he had urged the justice department to undertake, and on the need for all of us to respect the law and honor the quiet heroes of the violence in Los Angeles who stepped in to save people's lives. But the truth is we must do more. You and I have to admit here today that one of the reasons we came to the Democratic Leadership Council is that we knew deep down inside that the political system, including both parties, had failed to reach some of the fundamental problems of the United States of America and this, to be sure, is the most fundamental of all. The Republicans, when they needed to prove that Michael Dukakis was soft on crime, brought out Willie Horton. The Republicans, when they need to cover up for their senseless economic strategy that is driving income down for most American families while they work harder, blame it on quotas so that there can be racial resentment instead of honest analysis of our economic falsehoods. Even if they plead for unity, the Republicans now send their Vice-President out across the country to talk about welfare in a way that makes it clear that they intend to act as a wedge to divide the American people, instead of as an instrument to liberate the poor in the United States of America. But we Democrats have also let the American people down , too. Those who sit on the sidelines don't want to vote for the President but don't participate in our primary. Too often they think we haven't paid as much attention to the victims of crime as we should have. Too often they think we have clung to putting their tax money into programs year after year, whether they work or not. Too often they have heard members of our party say that those who seek to reform the welfare system are the enemies of the poor. And so we have had too often a leadership in the nation's capital, paralyzed and divided, mirroring a country all too divided. And when that happens, my fellow Americans, we all pay. We pay when the crime rate in America spirals higher than any other country in the world. We pay for it when your taxes build jail cells, even as we're closing down school rooms. When other nations are investing more in education, we're spending more on jails. Oh yes, we pay. Every single one of us pays. We pay it when ignorance leads people to jails instead of jobs, when they take our tax money where it helps them instead of paying taxes into our system to educate a new generation of Americans, to build a new generation of high-speed rail and other high technology infrastructure, to convert from a defense to a domestic economy in a way that explodes opportunity. Oh no, we pay. We have to put people in jail; we can't afford to build a future. We pay. We pay when we live in the most violent country in the world, and so the emergency rooms of our hospitals are full every weekend with people cut up and shot. We all pay as the health costs go up, and we find it harder and harder and harder to compete in a global economy. We all pay. We pay when we stick our heads in the sand instead of reaching out to these young children. We have the highest teen pregnancy rate, the highest low- birth weight rate, the highest explosion of AIDS of any advanced country in the world. We will all pay for it because we refuse to face the underlying hard truth and go after these problems. We all pay when we are divided. We pay when we blindly accept a permanent underclass in America, a culture of poverty where no one dreams of a better future, where people only wait for the next check or to drug deal on the corner, because they have no way of imagining that life can be different. We pay. Abraham Lincoln once said in a very different context that it was his job to prove that government of, by, and for the American people had not vanished. I tell you that government of, by and for the American people does not exist for millions of Americans today. Most people would hear this and say, "this sounds very good." That's what they say to me all over America. They say, "this sounds so good, but you are a politician. How can I believe you?" Well, I say you can believe me, but first you have to believe in you. First , we have to begin honest talks about race, about culture, about values. We have to strip away all the intermediaries between the people who are elected and those they are supposed to serve. And we must honestly say: Here is what the leaders should do, and here is what the people must do. Unless we close the gap in understanding between what the leaders must do and only the people can do, we will go on and on and on in frustration after frustration. And anybody who wins an election will find his or her ability to change things drastically undermined. So what would I do if I were president? Number one, I would start with the elemental proposition that the people in the other America deserve the same law and order that the rest of us demand, and I would work to make the streets safer. Through the reallocation of national resources, through the establishment of a national service plan that the Democratic Leadership Council has so long embraced, I would seek to put more police officers on the streets as friends -- not enemies -- of their neighbors. I want to see everywhere in America what I saw in Philadelphia when I walked down the street with the mayor and two fine police officers. I saw the neighbors in a bi-racial neighborhood come out of their houses and welcome the police officers, knowing that they were working together, the neighbors willing to walk the street at two and three o'clock in the morning to run the drug dealers out. And the police were willing to be there twenty- four hours a day, the people working together to reclaim their rightful destiny to live in peace with their neighbors. I have seen it in Chicago, in public housing projects where twenty-four hours a day the police and the tenants work together. And believe it or not, not so very long ago, I saw it in Los Angeles. I have wondered so often what might have happened if that King incident had occurred in one of the neighborhoods I visited, where the police were there on two minutes call for neighbors that had beepers and emergency phone numbers, where the citizens walked the streets, and people treated one another as people. I have often wondered if it would have been different. The second thing we ought to do is fine something besides jail for our youngest and least violent offenders, who have no prospects. I believe in community punishment, in community boot camps. I believe the most urgent thing we have to do is to reconnect these children to the future we want them to live. If they go astray, leave them at home, give them discipline, education, drug treatment if necessary, let them do community service work and find one person who lives to work with one trouble child, so that at least the child can never say, "I never knew anybody who was a success who cared about me." Let's try that. What have we got to lose by trying? We need to mobilize the energies of the American people in dealing with the troubled youth of our time. I saw a group called the "Untouchables" in Pennsylvania, a group of young black men, most of them junior high school age who gave me one of their T-shirts that said, "Untouchables. We are untouchable by drugs. We are untouchable by guns. We are untouchable by crime. We have our life in our own hands." You know why they felt that way? Not because of a government program, but because one or two people loved those boys enough to give them a chance to live in a different kind of gang -- a good gang, our gang -- where the values were strong and the future was sound. There needs to be more of that in this country. I met a judge in Texas during this campaign who told me that when he was on the trial bench he mobilized 600 people in his own district, not just to go after the young men and women who came before him as violators, but to be with the seven, eight and nine year-olds when they first begin to show signs of trouble in their lives. I'm telling you friends, if you want your country back, if you want those people to be in your community, if you want the next time a riot breaks out to see tens of thousands of poor people who say, "we don't steal, we don't loot, that's not our life"; you've got to go out to those kids and bring them back one by one, because that's the only way we're ever going to get them back. Let me say one last thing about safe streets that it is somewhat unpopular in my part of the country and maybe in other parts. I live in a state where half the people have a hunting or a fishing license or both. But I don't believe ten year-olds ought to have a license to kill. The people in Washington have played politics with the Brady Bill long enough. It is time to pass it, put it on the books, and stop people from buying guns who have no business with them. I can hear all the objections now. I've heard it over and over in the halls of my legislature. You cannot make a case for why a kid needs an assault weapon under the constitution of the United States of America. It is insanity, and it has to stop. If we make our streets safer, we must then make our families stronger. You know what the agenda is as well as I do; we just have to have the will to implement it. We are the only advanced nation in the world where women regularly get pregnant and do not see the doctor six times before the baby is born. We ought to have preventive, primary, maternal health care in America. It would save us money. We don't do it because we don't have the will to do it. We ought to have preschool for every child who needs it, and we ought to involve the parents more in preparing their children to learn as we have tried so hard to do at home. We ought to have child care, and we ought to have family leave, and we ought to have the opportunity for the poorest families to work their way into housing. I love going across America to these so-called "sweat equity projects", where foreclosed-on homes have been turned over to poor folks who stripped the lead paint out and built a house for themselves by working after work. It is a moving experience. But we also ought to remind ourselves that a big part of the problem of family income is people who bring children into this world and will not pay to support them. So I will say again that we need a much tougher system of child support enforcement; because governments cannot raise children, people must. The third thing we have to do is to make schools meaningful to our children. I will say simply this: I have been in more schools in more states than probably any other public figure in the United States. When I think of schools in cities I do not think of those that fail, I think of the Thomas Jefferson Junior High School in Washington, D.C. or the Beasley Academic Center in Chicago, in a neighborhood with the highest murder rate in Illinois and the top ten percent of all test scores, with a wonderful principal from the Mississippi Delta in my state, where the children in a public school have a dress code, strong values, seventy-five fathers and many more brothers volunteering in the schools, and there is a feeling that no one wants drugs or guns in the school because they don't want to leave the schools. The school is their gang. It's our gang. It's a good gang because its about something good. And Cardozo High School in Queens. I could go on and on and on. Why do these things work when so much is failing? What do they all have in common that America lacks? They have leadership that takes responsibility. They have rules by which all must live. They have responsibility for every person, from the principal, to the teacher, to the building maintenance people, to every single child that walks through the door. They have rewards for responsible behavior, and they have love. That's what they have , and it works. If you look at that the next thing we have to do, which is to bring some jobs back into these areas, you will see that investment alone won't work. That's why the DLC's empowerment strategy is so important. There must be rules, responsibility and reward. That's why this empowerment agenda of the DLC must be at the core of any serious attempt to revitalize the other America. When you look at all this, at what I say about safe streets, strong families, good schools, and economic empowerment, if you're like me you ask yourself, "if it happens somewhere, why doesn't it happen everywhere?" I'll tell you why: Because there aren't enough of "us" and there's to much of "them". "Them". "Them" is the dread word in American politics. The Republicans blame all the problems on "them". Sometimes the Democrats say, "we're going to help 'them'". People don't need help as "them"; they need to be part of "us", of defining their own future. We've got to stop blaming "them" or helping "them" and say, "Hey, come on, be part of us. Be part of our gang, it's a good gang. It will bring America back." I want everybody here to think long and hard about this. Yes, I want to be elected President. I believe I can be a good President. I believe I've got a good plan. Many of you helped me to fashion it , and those of you from Arkansas helped me live it. Oh yes, I want that job, but first I want you to think about what kind of citizens you're going to be, what kind of life you intend to live, what kind of community you are determined to create. My life is a testament to the fact that the American dream works. Leadership, rules, rewards, responsibility, and love. I've come a long way from where I've started. Whenever I come back to this city I think about what is perhaps my earliest childhood memory. When I was about three years-old, my grandmother got me on a train and we came from Arkansas to New Orleans, where my widowed mother was here studying to be a nurse. It was the first time I had ever been in a building with more than two stories, and we stayed high in the old Young Hotel (?). I can still remember being mystified by how people ever got so high off the ground. I remember too, the first and most vivid memory of my mother : When we left after this trip, my grandmother and I, my mother kneeled down at the side of the railroad tracks and cried because her child was going , but she was here so she could make a living to support me. I got to live by the rules that work in America and I ended up here today running for President of the United States of America, because I had the right kind of American community. It went beyond politics, it went beyond programs, it went to values. Three years ago, before all these fights broke out, I went to South Central L.A. , which you have seen in flames. I drove, hour after hour, up and down those streets watching all the buildings, some painted red, some painted blue for the gangs that had jurisdiction in the area. I went into a grade school where the sixth graders told me they dreaded growing older because when they got to the eighth grade, they had do crack and join a gang or be beaten. Those kids are in the ninth grade now. How often I wonder what has happened to them. When my daughter was in her last month of school last year, I remember taking her to school one day and seeing a wonderful, handsome man walking his child to school. He had two other little children with him. The man happened to be a black American. He was a remarkable fellow. One of these little children came running up to me, holding his hands at me, jumped up in my arms, and held me so tight. Now any politician loves that, but if you know anything about child development, you know that's not a very good sign for a child that's two years-old -- to be indiscriminantly bestowing that sort of affection. So I asked this boy, "You want to go home with me?". He said, "yeah". And I said, "I don't have a boy. I'd kind of like to have a boy to go with my girl." We were joking and then I said to the man, "How many children do you have?" And he said, "five". I said, "you mean you have three others besides these two". He said, "Oh no, these two are not mine. My wife and I had one child who died. And we thought that in her memory, we would always, for the rest of our lives, be foster parents for children in need. These two children were left alone by their mother for two days, and so the state gave them to us. And we are loving them, hoping that their mother can learn to be a good parent and take them back." Those children are hanging in the balance. Will they be part of our gang or someone else's gang ? I tell you today that, as Martin Luther King wrote many years ago in his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", "we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere." The thing that is killing America today is not our problems, although they are immense: We don't invest enough. We're losing our productivity lead. We have enormous social problems. We have political gridlock. All those are immense problems, but the thing that is killing our country today is that millions of Americans, from New Hampshire to Southern California, from southern Florida to Washington, get up every day and do not believe that tomorrow will be better. They do not believe anything will change. They do not believe politics can make a difference. They do not believe they can make a difference. This campaign, as I have always said, is a crusade to change this country. But it requires political reform, economic leadership, and the re- establishment of the common bonds of community and humanity without which we can never, ever, hope to change this country. And so I ask you, my fellow Americans, let a part of the new ideas of the Democratic Leadership Council be the old-fashioned wisdom that we have to return meaning and connection to the idea of being an American. There is nothing before us we cannot conquer if we can simply get the energy and drive and joy that will come back into the lives of our people if they can once again believe they matter to us and that tomorrow will be better. Thank you very much. End of Remarks