CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: FAMILY VALUES
Article 4425 of alt.politics.clinton:
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Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Monday, 17 Aug 1992 22:41:58 CDT
From: Mary Jacobs <U45301@uicvm.uic.edu>
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Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: FAMILY VALUES
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Family Values Address
Governor Bill Clinton
Cleveland City Club
Cleveland, Ohio
May 21, 1992
Thank you. Thank you very much. It certainly was a unique
introduction and it was partly true. Maybe you ought to run for
President.
I have really looked forward to coming here today, and I thank you
for the opportunity to appear. As has already been said, I want to
depart from the standard message I normally give talking about my
eleven years as governor and the work I've done to generate jobs
and educate children and balance budgets and bring people together
and try to ignore traditional Democratic and Republican solutions
to problems when they are plainly out of date.
For several weeks, I have planned to come here to discuss what
stands at the heart of America's Dream, and as much of the core of
the disappearance of the American Dream: the American family and
its problems.
But this topic has acquired, as all of you know now, quite a bit
more currency because of the recent speeches that the President
gave at the Notre Dame commencement and the speech that the Vice
President gave at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco the other
day.
The President's speech extolled the virtues of family life,
lamented the breakdown of the family, said family life had more to
do with what happens in America than what goes on in Washington --
that's probably true, and thank goodness. But it offered no real
action agenda for improving the plight of our most troubled
families.
The Vice President's speech has become known by its reference to
the television show "Murphy Brown" -- and you've all probably had
your laughs about that -- but the fact is that the Vice
President's speech had more substance than the President's.
While the President urged Notre Dame graduates to help solve our
nation's social and family crisis, it typically offered no agenda
and assumed no responsibility. Vice President Quayle, while
repeating the sad statistics of teen pregnancy and divorce and
out-of-wedlock birth in America, reiterated the empowerment agenda
that is most closely identified, among Republicans, with HUD
Secretary Jack Kemp, and among Democrats with the Democratic
Leadership Council -- a group that I chaired when we came here to
Cleveland and met in national convention last year -- more home
ownership for poor people, urban enterprise zones, and welfare
reform designed to encourage work and independence.
Unfortunately, the Vice President's speech also is, in my view,
cynical election-year politics in that it ignores the relationship
of our family problems to our national economic decline, holds out
Murphy Brown as a bigger problem than TV's crass commercialism and
glorification of selfishness and violence, and denies the
Administration's responsibility to face the full range of
America's staggering family problems.
I want to talk about these issues today because family questions
are terribly important to our nation and to me personally. As a
public official, I have worked on family issues harder and longer
than anybody else running for president this year. And I do
believe that they are at the heart of our national discontent.
And as well as anyone, I know the importance of family values to
personal growth. In 1946, I was born to a widowed mother. My
father died in a car wreck three months before I was born. Shortly
after I was born, my mother went back to nursing school to learn
skills that would enable her to support me. Until I was four, I
was fortunate enough to be was raised by loving grandparents of
modest means but great determination -- who began teaching me to
count and read when I was two.
My mother's extended family included great-grandparents and great-
uncles and aunts, all of whom were poor or nearly so, but they
were wonderful, old-fashioned country people who brought love and
joy and values to my life.
When I was four, my mother remarried. And though their marriage
was not free of difficulty -- some of which has been reported in
the press -- my brother and I benefited from the love of my step-
father and his extended family. They enriched my life and my sense
of what I could do with it. My mother has been widowed in her life
three times, but luckily is married to a wonderful man who has
also been a friend and inspiration to me.
Every year I ask all the relatives from all my extended families,
and my wife's family, to gather at Christmas time. It's an amazing
celebration of the different threads of family, a broad fabric of
love and support that raised a child from modest means to a
rewarding career in public service and a serious campaign for the
presidency of the United States. I know the value of family.
Over 20 years ago, I met and fell in love with a wonderful woman
in law school who would become my wife and a lot of my life. It
was Hillary who, in 1971, was already concerned about the problems
of poor children and their parents, and who began to teach me
about them then.
In 1975, we married. In 1977, after I became Attorney General in
my state, my wife founded a remarkable organization called the
Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children. In that year, long
before it was the national rage, she organized the conference
called Parenting is Primary.
In 1979, when I first became governor, with my wife's help, we
began to try and build a pro-family policy for our state. In 1980,
our one and only child Chelsea was born. She's been the great joy
of our life, and watching her grow and flourish has given me a
greater sense of urgency about the task of helping all of our
children and their parents to do better.
Over the last 12 years, those efforts have evolved into
initiatives to lower the infant mortality rate through expanded
material and child health services. To reduce teen pregnancy
through aggressive and often controversial but value-based sex
education efforts. To enhance child care for working families
through an innovative voucher system. To reduce long-term welfare
dependence by aggressively promoting more education, and training,
and child care, and medical coverage for the children of welfare
families, then requiring parents to take available work. To
increase pre-school programs for poor children with a special
emphasis on involving parents as their children's first teachers
through a remarkable program we borrowed from the nation of Israel
called HIPPY -- Home Instruction Program for Pre-School Youngsters
-- a program in which even illiterate parents are taught to spend
20 minutes a day, five days a week, 30 weeks a year preparing
their children to learn.
And finally, we've worked to increase child support enforcement
through innovative efforts like reporting every delinquent parent
who owes more than a $1,000 to every major credit agency in our
state.
The thrust of all these efforts is to find, what I would call, a
third way to approach the American family -- beyond the
traditional politics of both parties, beyond the Administration's
cheerleading for family values on the one hand, and on the other
hand, the old big-government notion that there's a program for
every social problem.
There is a third way, a common-sense path that offers more
opportunity to families in return for more personal responsibility
and the assumption of more family values. Family values alone
can't feed a hungry child. And material security alone cannot
provide a moral compass. We must have both.
There is a way to embrace family values and enhance the value of
America's families at the same time. A president should do both.
President Bush is right to lament the high rate of teen pregnancy,
yet he does not bring value-based sex education and health clinics
into our schools to prevent pregnancies in the first place.
He is right to decry the high divorce rate, yet he has no national
economic plans to help families under economic strains.
The President is right to speak out on the violence that stalks
our children. And I believe he's been wrong to cut back the funds
that cities like Cleveland can use to hire more policemen for
their streets -- and he is wrong to oppose the Brady Bill that
your Congressman sponsored and even President Ronald Reagan
supports to require a waiting period before people can purchase
handguns so that their criminal and mental health history and
their ages can be checked.
Like any parent, I'm troubled by the gratuitous violence and sex
and mixed moral signals we see on television. The same tough value
questions for America's children and parents run from the affluent
suburbs on New England to the poorest blocks of South Central Los
Angeles -- and they reach into our own family too, with Hillary as
a working mother and our daughter Chelsea, who's about to become a
teenager.
And if those questions are hard for us, with all the privileges
that God has given us, think about how much tougher they are for
most families who are working harder for less money these days,
and how devastating they can be for those families confronted with
layoffs, illnesses, alcohol and drug abuse, poverty, or a violent
neighborhood.
The question is not are family values important? Of course they
are. It's not are they under fire? You bet they are. It's not is
TV destructive of family values. All too often it is. The question
is what are we going to do about it?
It isn't enough for America's leaders to blame past social
programs or current TV programs. It isn't enough for Americans to
change channels. We need to change course.
Family values can't simply be Washington code for Beltway
Republicans who really mean, "you're on your own" -- or Beltway
Democrats, who want to spend more of your tax money on programs
that don't embody those values.
If family values are going to mean something, we must offer a
nation a third way. A nation that guarantees opportunity for every
family, but a society that demands responsibility from every
individual.
Of course there's a values crisis in America. But there's an
action gap as well. Addressing one without the other isn't a plan
of action, it's posturing to distract from inaction.
Today the dominant message from this Administration is, "You're on
your own."
Parents have to work two jobs and spend more hours at work and too
little time with their kids because wages are declining in
America, you're on your own. If parents without health care who
live in deadly fear they won't be able to care for their children
without going bankrupt, they're on their own. If poor, uneducated
parents need pre-school for their children so they'll have a
chance to do better than their parents, well, they're on their
own.
The problem is, nobody is on their own in this country, we're all
in this together. The more we ignore these problems today, the
more we'll all pay for them tomorrow in lost economic strength, in
increased violence, in costlier jails, in poorer schools, and lost
futures. As my friend Governor Ann Richards of Texas said of the
looters and the shooters of the streets of Los Angeles: "These
young hoodlums who burn and batter and turn our streets into
killing fields were once our children -- small and helpless and
needing our attention and our love, and we let them go --- tossed
them aside like yesterday's news. Now they are making headlines
that we don't want to read. God may forgive them but we can't
condone their action or reclaim their lives. They are lost to us.
This tragedy must end with this generation. It must stop now."
A very great Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt, once called
the Presidency a Bully Pulpit. Then President Kennedy said that
the Presidency was the vital center of action. Both presidents
were right. A president's words can move a nation, but talk must
be backed up with action or we risk diminishing the Bully Pulpit
into a Pulpit of Bull.
When I was born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946, our state's per-capita
income was barely half the national average. Though my family and
I later moved into a middle-class life, thanks to both my step-
father and my mother working, in the beginning, like most people
in my state, we were poor.
But one of the values my family pounded into me was that if I
worked hard and played by the rules, I'd be rewarded -- and I have
been, beyond my wildest dreams. We were taught to take
responsibility for ourselves and for each other. And we were
taught that if we did, we would do better.
I understand something about hard times and how hard things can
get. My mother was widowed before I was born and I lived with my
grandparents when I was little as I said. My most vivid memory of
my mother and childhood was when I went to visit her at nursing
school when I was three, and when my grandmother and I pulled out
of the station, she knelt down by the side of the railroad tracks
and cried. I remember that to this day. I remember how she bore
her grief every day because she believed that, if she sacrificed
in the short run, in the long run she could build a better life
for me.
Now there are millions of stories like that in America today.
Remember, most poor people, those with and without jobs, did not
loot and riot in Los Angeles, because their values kept them from
doing so. They would not do wrong. Most Americans today do give
their children love and discipline and respect for others and for
the law.
There is a great deal of love in the poorest welfare families in
America today. But we have to face the hard truth that too many
Americans are cut off from these values and the life that we want
them to live, that reinforces those values. And too many Americans
who live by their values are denied the progress they were
promised -- the progress that was real for the poor of my
generation.
We simply cannot go on under these circumstances being the only
major nation in the world without a family policy -- one that
enshrines family values by placing a value on family. We've tried
to develop one in Arkansas. And I outlined it to you a moment ago.
And I think we need on in America.
Here is a good beginning:
First, we should reward work and family. Today millions of
Americans work full time but don't make enough to lift their
families out of poverty. That's wrong. No one who works full-time
and has children at home should be poor in America.
We should expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to guarantee a
"working wage" to lift above the poverty line anyone with a family
who's working full time. This initiative is not terribly
expensive. It won't require us to spend one red cent for any
public bureaucracy. Yet, it will reward work and lift one million
working poor families and their children out of poverty.
Second, we need to reform our welfare system so that it puts
people back to work and ends permanent dependency. In Arkansas,
under the Federal Family Support Act of 1988, which I helped to
draft as the governor's representative, we've created a system of
training, and vouchers for day care, and medical coverage for
children so that welfare families can return to the dignity of a
job once again. As a result, our welfare rolls have grown less
than the national average in the last three years, even in spite
of the recession and high unemployment.
The truth is, most people on welfare don't like it any more than
you do. A few years ago, I asked the woman in our welfare-to-work
program in Arkansas what she liked best about her new job. And she
said -- wasn't earning a paycheck -- it was knowing that when her
son went to school and they asked him what your mother does for a
living, he could give an answer. People want the dignity of work.
We should give everyone the chance to have that kind of dignity.
We should give everyone on welfare the education, training, child
care and medical coverage for their children they need. But I
think we should go beyond the present law. After two years, if
people can't find private sector employment, I think they should
be required to do public service work in return for the income.
We can end welfare as we know it, not by punishing the poor, but
by empowering them to take care of their children and to be role
models.
Third, we need to do more to protect America's children from the
consequences of divorce and absent fathers -- and on some
occasions, absent mothers. I was born to a single mother who was
lucky enough to have the support of an extended family. Today, in
the governor's office, I have old pictures of my grandfather and
my great-grandfather. Unfortunately, too few children know who
their great-grandparents were, and too many have parents who
should pay for their upbringing but don't.
We need to get tough on child support enforcement with a
nationwide crackdown on deadbeat parents. In our state, if you
fall more than a thousand dollars behind in your child support, we
report you to every major credit agency in the state. People
shouldn't be able to borrow money for other things before they
take care of their children.
Because of that and other efforts, like putting the name and
social security number of a father on a birth certificate if a
mother shows up to give birth without a father -- thus shifting
the burden to the man to disprove his heritage -- we collected
more than $41 million from "deadbeat parents" in 1991 -- money
that we didn't have to pay in welfare or other public spending.
These are the kinds of things that we ought to do. We have to do
more of them.
We must make the toughest possible child support enforcement
efforts in this country. We should enlist major credit agencies
all across the country to follow the example that Arkansas and a
few other states have. We ought to say to people everywhere, "Pay
for your children first or you shouldn't get credit." We ought to
have a national system of child support collection utilizing the
Internal Revenue Service and tax records.
I'm tired of seeing custodial parents bear the whole burden for
the problem of raising their children. Governments can't raise
children -- people do -- and the people who bring children into
this world should all bear a responsibility for raising them.
Fourth, we need to help parents do the best possible job of
rearing their kids. Government can't create good parents, but it
can make it easier for them to tend to their children's needs.
In 1988, George Bush promised to make sure, and I quote, "women
don't have to worry about getting their jobs back after having a
child or caring for a child during a serious illness." But when
Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, George Bush
vetoed it. I would sign it. Other nations do the same thing.
Millions of Americans are already caught in a squeeze between
taking care of their parents and taking care of their children. We
should not now make them choose between work and family -- not if
we are going to be a pro-family country where most parents have to
work.
Fifth, we can also bolster the family's crucial role in education.
We should fully fund the Head Start program and quit delaying it.
But in doing it, we should put increased emphasis on enlisting
parents, even illiterate parents, as their children's first
teachers. As I said earlier, the HIPPY program in Arkansas trains
welfare mothers to teach their pre-school children to read. The
Head Start programs with the most long-lasting benefits for
children are those in which the parents' role is greatest, no
matter how limited the parents' own educational skills.
Our schools should also reinforce these family values and parental
involvement by bringing more parents in. Schools all over America
can follow the example of the Beasley Academic Center, a public
junior high school in Chicago. It's located in a neighborhood with
the highest murder rate in all of Illinois. But every week, 75
fathers and even more mothers regularly volunteer in the schools.
Against the odds, this school ranks in the top 10% of test scores
in the state, with no guns, no drugs, no dropouts -- in part
because of a culture which includes a dress code, strong family
values, and parental role models. Not just talk, action!
Sixth and lastly, I want to ensure that American families and
individuals make the best personal decisions with their life with
a full sense of personal responsibility and concern for the
consequences of their behavior. That means letting teens know that
it is wrong for children to have children, and also providing them
with the education about how to prevent that.
In Arkansas, my nationally renowned health director, Dr. Joycelyn
Elders and I, fought for school-based health clinics and sex
education. It wasn't popular and it still isn't easy, but with
teen pregnancy and AIDS claiming more and more of our young
people, it is now a matter of life and death.
There are many other issues that we have to face: restoring
economic growth to our nation so we can restore economic strength
to our families, providing affordable health care to all of our
families and their children, giving poor people more say over
their own lives through initiatives like community policing and
tenant management of housing projects and preserving personal and
family privacy -- including, in my view, not repealing Roe v.
Wade.
The President says he wants private school choice even if it means
taking public money away from public schools that are already
underfunded compared to many other nations. He's willing to make
it a crime for a woman to exercise her right to make the most
private choice of all. I don't understand those priorities.
When my daughter was in her last month of sixth grade last year, I
remember taking her to school one day -- as I do everyday when I'm
home -- and seeing a very handsome man walking his child to
school. He had two other little children with him. And one of
these little children came running up to me, holding out his hands
and jumping up into my arms. He held me very tight. Now, as you
know, I'm a politician, so I love that -- I mean, the baby wanted
to kiss me.
But, if you know anything about child development -- this child
was almost two years old -- it's not a very good sign for a two-
year-old child still to be indiscriminately bestowing this sort of
affection. So I asked this man, I said, "How many children do you
have?" He said, "five." I said, "You mean you have the one that
went in there, these two, and two others?" And he said, "Oh, no,
no, these two are not mine." He said, "My wife and I had a
daughter who died. And in honor of her memory, we decided that we
would spend the rest of our lives, serving as foster parents for
children in need. These two children I have are not mine, they
were abandoned by their mother, alone at home, for two whole
days." They were twenty months old.
"So the state gave them to us to care for for a while and we're
loving them and hoping that their mother can learn to love them
and be a good parent and eventually to take them back."
There are millions of children like that all over this country --
hanging in the balance. They are part of our national family. Of
course, we must exhort their parents to do a better job, and we
must write into our social programs incentives for stronger family
values. But we cannot ignore the plain need for a national policy
to value families...to reconnect all Americans to our most
cherished values and the idea of progress for those who live by
those values.
Ultimately, it is up to each of us to build the bridge across that
gulf that stands wide today between what we are as a nation and
what we are meant to be. We must believe that we once again can
make a difference, that tomorrow will be better than today if we
build that bridge and make it so. We have the tools. The question
is do we have the vision and the will. This election will tell the
tale.
Thank you very much.
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