CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: RAINBO COALITION CONVENTION

 

Article 4907 of alt.politics.clinton:

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Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago

Date: Thursday, 20 Aug 1992 02:08:25 CDT

From: Mary Jacobs <U45301@uicvm.uic.edu>

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Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: RAINBO COALITION CONV

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Remarks of Governor Bill Clinton

Rainbow Coalition National Convention

Washington Sheraton Hotel, Washington, DC

June 13, 1992

Thank you very much.  Thank you very much Reverend Jackson for

reminding us of the biblical lessons applicable to the present.  I

want to thank you and acknowledge you and your wonderful family and

the family of the Rainbow Coalition.

I want to say as the proud father of a daughter, I wish I had a

dozen pictures of Jesse's face when his daughter was up here

singing.  There is no joy in life like the joy in the eyes of a

father at a moment like that.

I also want to thank you for giving birth to this Rebuild America

program.  There is a remarkable commonality in the analysis you

have of the last twelve years and the prescription you have for

what we ought to do to rebuild this country.  What I have been

saying for years and what I have said from the moment I entered

this presidential campaign.  And more than anything else I thank

you for not just pointing the finger of blame but taking up the

burden of responsibility.

This is an interesting presidential year in which it appears a

person can come nearer the White House and its responsibilities by

going on Arsenio Hall than by going on the offense in election

states.

If you can laugh when a man like Mr. Hall says that when I played

the saxophone he was glad to see a Democrat blowing something

besides an election.

An election which may be turned on such important findings as that

discovered by the Washington Post reporter who travelled the 35

miles of farmland and cattle ranches and pine trees between my

hometown of Hope, Arkansas and Ross Perot's hometown of Texarkana,

Texas and concluded that after all I had even more humble

beginnings than he did.

Or the reporter Chris Matthews in San Francisco who somehow got me

to speculate about whether I would be the last person ever to run

for president who once lived in a home without and indoor toilet.

He asked me what the worst things about it were, I said, "winter

and snakes".

I don't know what all this has to do with being elected president

but I do know what you're here about has a great deal to do with

what happens to this country.  We have to rebuild America to bring

our country together, to bring fundamental change, to go beyond the

greed and special interests and paralysis of the last twelve years,

to put our people first for a change and invest in them for a

change.

The President used to talk a lot about the "New World Order".  With

the election just five months away he has decided on the 500th

anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America to sail the ship of

state here and discover America himself.  But his ship of state

lacks a compass and a vision.

And the scripture says that where there is no vision the people

perish.  We are in the process of living out that admonition.  Even

after the riots in Los Angeles, the President could only discover

one person in his administration, Jack Kemp, who had ever said

anything about cities, and he had been kept in a closet until Los

Angeles burned.

Now the centerpiece of their proposal is a program called "Weed and

Seed".  Now I agree, actually, with the goals of that program.  I

wish, for the sake of those struggling to be liberated from drugs,

that it were properly funded and more extensive, but I can't help

pointing out that notwithstanding weed and seed, we've gotten a lot

more fertilizer than crop production from this administration.

This is an administration that promised us thirty million jobs and

then vetoed a tax bill to invest in new plant and equipment, to

encourage people to start new businesses, to encourage people to

build housing in inner cities, because all those tax incentives

would have been payed for by increasing taxes on the rich whose

incomes went up and taxes went down in the 1980's.

This is an administration that extols family values and vetoed the

Family Leave Bill so working people could be better parents.

This is an administration that promised us an environmental

presidency and then vetoed the environmental agreement at Rio de

Janeiro to reduce global warming in a way that could have improved

the economy of America by investing in alternative energy policies

here at home.

This is an administration that promised us an education presidency

and then with a straight face said nobody should get a scholarship

from the Federal government if they have an income of over ten

thousand dollars a year, they were too rich.  But if your income

was over three hundred thousand dollars a year you were still poor

enough to need a capital gains tax.

This is an administration that promised us a balanced budget

amendment while quadrupling the deficit and never proposing

anything that approached a balance of investment and budget in

America.

This is an administration that promised to make it easier for

people to get health insurance but year in and year out made it

more difficult by never, never taking on the health insurance

companies and the health care companies that have exploded the

price of health care and made it harder for people to get.

This is and administration that talks tough on crime but for one

solid year has let the Brady Bill languish un-enacted in Congress

because of its own ideological preferences when a simple bill could

at least make it possible in every state in America to check for

criminal history, for mental history, for age, in everybody who

wants to put a gun in their hands in the streets of the cities of

the United States.

We could go on and on in doing this.  We could laugh and then we

could cry but in the end we have to do what you have tried to do,

not simply to rail against the night, but to build a new American

order, a plan of action to put our own people first, to honor and

reward work, to develop the God-given capacities of the American

people.

Vice President Quayle is now the hit person for this administration

and their family values crusade.  Reverend Jackson has already

talked about that.  He said the other day, Vice President Quayle

did, that I was leading a cultural elite, Jesse's part of a

cultural elite, Mario Cuomo, specifically, singled out, is part of

a cultural elite -- Mario Cuomo who graduated first in his class at

St. John's Law School and did not get a Wall Street law firm to

offer him a job because he was the son of an Italian immigrant

grocer who worked his fingers to the bone.  How dare Dan Quayle

talk like that about anybody who knows what it's like to live the

American dream and live by family values when there's no food on

the table.  I'm tired of people with trust funds telling people on

food stamps how to live!

The real story of Los Angeles is in these people we stood up and

clapped for.  That's the real story.  Let's not forget folks, most

people who live in that city did not burn, or loot, or riot.  Most

little children were home with their parents.  Even the poorest

children were sitting in their houses when they could have been

looting goods because their parent told them it was wrong to steal

from their neighbors.  It violated the Ten Commandments.  They

could have gotten away with it and they didn't and they were poor.

They really live by family values.  And we ought to honor that.

I'll tell you the families I'm worried about.  I'm worried about

the families that live by family values and play by the rules and

still get the shaft.  Those are the people we ought to be fighting

this election for.  They are the people whose future is at stake.

And that includes about eighty percent of the people who live in

this country today.  Well over two-thirds of us are working harder

for less money than we had a decade ago, but what are we going to

do?

At the end of World War II, when I was born, our country rebuilt

Europe and Japan.  At the end of the Cold War, we must rebuild our

own nation, re-train our people, re-tool our factories, revitalize

our business sector, restore our ability to compete.  Surely we can

do for America what we once did for Europe and Japan.

If we do not, make no mistake about it, we can go from being a

military superpower to and economic has-been in one generation.

When the President went to Japan last year, the whole trade mission

ended with the Japanese Prime Minister saying he felt sympathy for

the United States.

Now he did not feel sympathy for us because we lack ships or planes

or weapons of war.  We have missiles that will go down chimneys and

through front doors.  He felt sympathy for us because he thought

our best days were behind us, because he believes that we do not

have the discipline, or the vision, or the will to rebuild America.

Because the Japanese and the Germans know, even if the Americans do

not, that national security begins at home.  If you're not strong

at home, you cannot be strong abroad.  It is true for each and

every one of us in our own families and it is true for the family

of our nation.

We didn't get into this mess overnight.  We won't get out of it

overnight.  And we will have to change.

I want America to chart a new course, to depart from twelve years

of dominance by special interests and big government that have

given one percent of the American people at the top more wealth

than the bottom ninety percent for the first time since the 1920's,

that have cost us our economic leadership, our growth rates, and

the reward for work which ought to be part of the American Dream.

That have undermined the strength of our families and have raised

the awful specter that we may be rearing the first generation of

Americans to do worse than their parents.

We should honor and encourage work, invest in our people, rebuild

our communities.  We should reward those who play by the rules and

do the reverse for those who don't.

Don't let this election be about Willie Horton or Murphy Brown.

Don't let this election be about the denial of the need for new

directions by all people of both parties in Washington.  Don't be

prisoners of the past or the politically correct.  Let us be bold

and chart a new course.

Today I would like to talk about a few specific examples which will

exemplify where I'm coming from and you can measure for yourself

how much it does or does not square with the program you have

outlined.

One of the most striking things I heard when I was in Los Angeles,

three years before the riots and three days after the riots, was

the unanimous endorsement of community leaders at the grass roots

for bold new steps to bring in money from the private sector as

well as the public sector, venture capital, small business loans,

start up finances.

Most people I talked to in Los Angeles didn't want more big

government.  They wanted more jobs and they wanted small business.

Most people said what they really wanted was a Washington that

would support their efforts at work and they knew that Washington

had failed them but also that their banks had not met their

responsibilities to re-invest in their communities.

Risk alone cannot explain this.  Surely, a small loan to a local

entrepreneur is more sound than a lot of the loans the S & L's made

to go bankrupt in the worst financial scandal in the history of

this country.

One community leader in Los Angeles told me that in that vast place

we know as the inner city, there were 177 check cashing stands in

the neighborhood where the riots began and only thirty-three banks.

In the Washington, DC area there are fifty major banks but only two

have branches in Anacostia and neither of them has a lending

office.

If free enterprise can tear down the Berlin Wall, if we want to

bring it the Eastern Europe and to the former Soviet Union, if we

insist on restoring democracy and free enterprise in Haiti, if we

press for it still and wait for the day it will return in Cuba, if

the President is so eager to nurture free enterprise in China that

he will put up with intolerable violations of human rights, why

shouldn't we cultivate it in Baltimore, or Washington, or Detroit,

or Denver?

Part of a new American order ought to be a national network of

community development banks in all the cities of this country

modeled on those which have worked, like the South Shore

Development Bank in Chicago, operating under what today has become

a radical premise: that banks ought to loan money to people who are

in their neighborhoods and who deposit in them.

We ought to stake our future, in other words, with the people who

butter our bread. Shore Bank's successes can be replicated.  I know

that.  My wife and I, my administration, and others in our state,

helped established a similar bank in the Mississippi Delta Region

of our state. Today that bank has made more than $12 million in

development loans and investments in small, rural Arkansas towns

way out in the country where people thought they would never get a

bank loan again.

That money has generated more jobs, new businesses from summer

camps to medical practices to farms and small factories. The bank

also loans small amounts of money and large amounts of know-how to

local people who lack experience and collateral, but have a lot of

drive and determination.

Virtually, 100% of the loans go to people who are poor and 80% are

minorities. They're just the kind of people the present system has

cast aside and cast out, and yet the loan repayment rate of these

folks is 95%. If it had been that way for the S&L's, we wouldn't be

in the mess that we're in today.

Investing in our people is not simply the right thing to do morally

and politically; it's also good economic sense. George Bush's

economic policy is we're all in this alone. Our economic program

ought to be we're all in this together.

Everybody, everybody has something to contribute. We also have to

recognize that we must invest more public money and more private

money in other ways in this country. The president said years ago

that we had all these problems but we've got more will than wallet.

I tell you one thing, one of my iron rules of politics is, when a

politician says it is not a money problem, he's always talking

about somebody else's problems. We're at $500 billion to the S&L's

this year and with all the deficit we got, boom, overnight found

another $105 billion dollars but not $5 billion so that every child

can be in the Head Start Program.

We have $80 billion in tax reductions for the upper 1% of

individuals in corporations but not a half a percent of that, $4

billion, to lift the working poor above poverty. Anybody working 40

hours a week, with a child in the house, ought to be lifted above

poverty by our tax system. We can do it for one-half a percent of

the tax breaks given to the top 1% in the last twelve years.

We have to have a plan that invests in our people again. Ask the

wealthy to pay their fair share and really gives us a chance to

recover economic growth. We need more investment.

For the last eight months, I have gone across this country with the

most detailed plan of any candidate. I promised at the end of the

primary process, way back when I started, that I would learn

something from the American people. I would listen to them. I would

scan the landscape of this country and try to see what else needed

to be done and that at the end of the primaries, I would review

what we had recommended and update it and strengthen it. That is

what I am doing now.

We need more investment in America. I know we have a $400 billion

deficit and we must bring it down and I will do that. But we also

recognize that one of the criminal aspects of this deficit is that

in the last twelve years, we quadrupled our debt and reduced our

investment in the United States.

Everybody in this room just about has borrowed money. If you borrow

money to build a house, or to buy a car, or to start a business, or

to replace a piece of equipment, or if you are a mayor to build new

streets, you don't feel bad about that because you think you will

get more back in return on your investment than what you borrowed.

But if you have to borrow money to feed your family tomorrow; you

worry about that because there is no return. Farmers call that

eating their seed corn. That's what this country's doing if we had

borrowed this money to invest in America the last twelve years,

we'd be the richest country on the face of this earth, and we could

pay the debt back in a heartbeat. But we borrowed the money and

spent it, because we did not have the discipline to invest in our

country, to control health care costs, and to put our priorities

right.

 So, I tell you, we will invest more, much, much, more in the next

four years and have discipline to bring this debt down. In the next

few days, I will be issuing my version of your program which will

tell you exactly how much I think we can invest and where we will

get the money. But don't let anybody tell you that we can grow this

economy again without more investment. We're investing less in high

speed rail, and new airplane transportation, and new highway

technologies, and new water and sewer and waste systems; things

that would put millions of people to work and grow our economy,

we're investing so much less than the Germans, the Japanese, and

other nations.

We are told we can not afford $50 billion a year but Taiwan,

Taiwan, a country less than one-tenth our size, is spending $50

billion a year in the next six years to build new roads, to build

new industrial technology, to clean up their environment. They have

decided that they want to be as rich as Germany and Japan and the

United States, and you know something, they will be and then some,

unless we do what it takes to invest in our country.

We also ought to give people who have money more incentive to

invest in our country. I would change the tax code and say to

people, "Hey, here's some money that you can take off your taxes if

you will build your plants in America, if you'll start new

businesses here, but we're going to stop this ridiculous outrage of

having a tax code that will give you a tax break for shutting your

plant down here and moving it overseas." That is wrong.

This nation is the only advanced nation that literally says

especially to medium and small-sized manufacturers: "We'll give you

a better deal if you shut your plant down here than if you replace

old plant and equipment and stay here. No investment tax credit for

that modern machinery that will keep Americans working at higher

wages, but take a tax deduction for the cost of shutting your plant

down.

Take the loss off it if you start a plant somewhere else and it

loses money. Then when it starts making money, and leave your money

down here and we'll never charge you a penny of taxes. That's what

we do in this country. Other countries think we're crazy. And

they're right. And they're right. This is bad business.

We've got a lot of other things we need to do. We've got to have an

education program that provides apprenticeship training for all the

young people who don't want to go to college and don't want to be

in dead end jobs.

We ought to reverse the policy of the last twelve years and say,

anybody who wants to borrow the money can go to college. The

college drop-out rate is more than twice the high school drop out

rate and part of it is money. So, we ought to say: we're going to

try the best of two American ideas: the G.I. Bill and the Peace

Corps.

The G.I. Bill educated a whole generation of Americans after the

second World War; made us a rich country. The Peace Corps under

President Kennedy sent America's best and brightest people out

across the world to solve their problems. Here's what I want to do,

abolish the present student loan program and put a National Service

Trust Fund in its place, and say to any American you can borrow the

money to go to college but you got to pay it back either as a

percentage of your income after you go to work or better, come home

to Washington, D.C. and give two years of your life to a domestic

peace corps. Be a teacher, be a law enforcement officer, be a

nurse, work with kids, keep them off of drugs and out of gangs.

Solve the problems of America.

I want to reward work. This administration apparently wants to use

welfare in this election as one of those divisive issues. Let's

take that away from them. Let's set up a system that will make

welfare a second chance not a way of life but in a way that rewards

and empowers the poor instead of punishing them. Let's say we're

going to give everybody education and training and child support

and medical coverage for their children, then require them to take

jobs when they can, and if they can't find jobs in the private

sector, provide dignified, important, significant community service

work for people to do.

If we do that we can end welfare as we know it in a way that lifted

all of our people instead of using welfare as a divisive issue.

This crowd doesn't want to do anything about welfare, the

communists are gone and if poor people got fixed they wouldn't have

anybody to kick around anymore. Let us do it.

Finally, let's give the American people a different kind of

government. We may disagree on some issues but I believe that we

can agree that this government needs fundamental reform. I agree

with Reverend Jackson that we need to open up the franchise and

make it easier for people to register and vote. We ought to make

the votes of the people in the District of Columbia mean more than

they do now with statehood.

But, I also agree that the progressive party need not be the party

of government. We, the democrats, started as the party of the

people not the party of government and many of our most innovative

leaders, from Governor Ann Richards in Texas to Mayor Kelly here in

Washington, are people who have tried to make government work

better, make it more efficient, spend less on bureaucracy and more

on people. We ought to be out there on the front lines for that, we

ought to be for programs that promote responsibility like boot

camps instead of prisons for first time non-violent offenders, let

them stay in their communities, get discipline, get education, get

treatment, learn to deal with the community and work with

successful adults.

Let's take those issues away from the do-nothing party and make it

part of our do something. And let's show a budget discipline. I

think we ought to say we want to invest more we'll have to consume

less. Let's just say we're going to cut 3% across the board out of

the administration of all the federal programs in the next three

years and put it into direct delivery of services to people. We can

do that.

I believe we ought to have a line-item veto so that we can stop

some things that are pork-barrel and put them into real growth and

lasting jobs.

I believe we can prove that we can be the party of governmental

reform.

I believe, in short, that we have do things that will break the

strangle-hold that has kept America from being progressive. Lets us

be for election reform, don't let a PAC give more than a person,

cut the costs of the congressional campaigns, open up the airwaves

to honest debates, if people want to stay in Congress, let them

debate their opponents every two years on television and on the

radio, don't let them buy their way into another seat whatever

their party is.

Don't let people who are lobbyists have a disproportional amount of

control, restrict the revolving door from government to lobbyist;

we can be the party of opportunity again, not the party of

government.

Finally, let's stand up for what has always been best about the

Rainbow Coalition which is people coming together across racial

lines. You talked about Mr. Fields, from Louisiana, the other

night, a great role model. We don't have a lot of time to do this.

We don't have a lot of time.

You had a rap singer here last night named Sister Soul-Jah. I

defend her right to express herself through music, but her comments

before and after Los Angeles were filled with the kind of hatred

that you do not honor today and tonight.

Just listen to this, what she said.  She told the Washington Post

about a month ago and I quote, "If black people kill black people

every day, why not have a week and kill white people.  So you're a

gang member and normally kill somebody.  Why not kill a white

person."

Last year she said, "You can't call me or any black person anywhere

in the world a racist.  We don't have the power to do to white

people what white people have done to us.  And even if we did, we

don't have that low down and dirty nature. If there are any good

white people I haven't met them.  Where are they?"  Right here in

this room.  That's where they are.

I know she is a young person, but she has a big influence on a lot

of people.  And when people say that, if you took the words white

and black and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving

that speech.

Let me tell you, we all make mistakes and sometimes we're not as

sensitive as we ought to be.  And we have an obligation, all of us,

to call attention to prejudice wherever we see it.

A few months ago I made a mistake.  I joined a friend of mine and

I played golf in a country club that didn't have any African-

American members.  I was criticized for doing it.  You know what,

I was rightly criticized for doing it.  I make a mistake.  And I

said I would never do that again.

And I think all of us have got to be sensitive to that.  We can't

get anywhere in this country, pointing the finger at one another

across racial lines.  If we do that, we're dead and they will beat

us.

Even in Reverend Jackson's new math of this election, it's hard to

get to a 34 percent solution or a 40 percent solution if the

American people can be divided by race.

I have seen the hatred and division of the South that Jesse Jackson

and I grew up in.  And I was just lucky enough to be raised until

I was four by a grandfather with a grade school education who

believed that all people were created equal.  Who showed me by the

life he lived how to treat people without regard to race and told

me that discrimination and segregation were morally wrong.

I was lucky.  I learned more from my granddaddy with his grade

school education about that and how to live than I did from all the

professors I had at Georgetown and Oxford and Yale. In the wisdom

of a simple working man's heart I learned something that many of

our youngest people today who are role models no longer believe.

We don't have a lot of time.  And so I say to you, let's all, one

more time, reaffirm the kind of life I'm trying to have my family

live.

My little daughter is a seventh grade student in a public school in

Little Rock, Arkansas where she is in the minority.  But she's

getting a good education, in life and in books.  She's learning

about the real problems of real people, but she's able to do what

Martin Luther King said children ought to do, judge people by the

content of their character.

So that is what I close with.  We have to think big, be big, do big

things in this election.  We've got to give this election back to

the people of the United States and reinvest in our country again.

But we also have to have the courage to make government work and to

challenge people to come together.  If we can win again and be one

again, we can keep the American Dream alive.  That is our

obligation.

I pledge to you, not that we will always agree, but that every day,

in every way, from dawn to dark and beyond, I will work my heart

out to make this country what it ought to be.  Thank you very much.