REMARKS BY GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION GEORGIA DOME ATLANTA, GA SEPTEMBER 9, 1992 Well, that song might be like Jerusalem. It's all downhill from here. Dr. Richardson, thank you for that wonderful introduction, and I thank the choir and the soloists for that stirring introduction. I thank Dr. Jemison for inviting me here, and I'm glad to see him again. Usually we see each other when I'm in Louisiana 'cause it's a short trip down from Arkansas. I'm glad to be here with all your general officers and with Reverend Jesse Jackson and with all the rest of you. I can't help saying a special word of thanks to two groups of your members. First to all the people here from my home state of Arkansas. Would you raise your hands, at least? Stand up there. Let us see you. We're well represented in this crowd here. I want to thank Reverend P.J. James and Reverend O.C. Jones and all the others from my state who've been so good to me for so many years. The other day we had a meeting of ministers in our state about this campaign and your church was well represented, not only by those from Arkansas but by Reverend Odell Jones from Detroit, who's really from Arkansas, and Reverend Amos Brown from San Francisco and Reverend Clay Evans and Reverend E.J. Jones from Chicago, Reverend Kenneth Wayland from Memphis. I appreciate all of them coming all the way to Arkansas to visit about the future of this country. Ladies and gentlemen, since I have been the nominee of the Democratic Party I have tried to reach out to all Americans. I have had the privilege of appearing before the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Association of Black Journalists, the Urban League, the NAACP, the National Bar Association and even the AME Church. You'll forgive me that, won't you? But I had an amazing experience on Labor Day, which I hope will point us the way to a better future. On Labor Day I was with an African American mayor, Emmanual Clever in Kansas City, and then with an African American mayor, Dwight Tillory in Cincinnati. And guess what? Most of the folks who voted them in were white. They made a decision that they were going to vote for the best people on the ticket. I had a heart-breaking trip to Florida, which was also heart-lifting, after Hurricane Andrew. And I went down to Florida City and soon as I got off the airplane, the little predominantly African-American town that was totally wiped out, and the mayor and I were walking through the city and we came across a big husky burly white guy who had come all the way from Michigan with a truckload of stuff for the folks there, and two of his buddies. They just loaded up the truck and drove down there, and he was so proud of himself he didn't know what to do, and there was an African-American lady standing next to him who had been wiped out by this storm and she looked at him and she looked at me, and she said ``You know, it was nearly, nearly worth losing my home to find out how we can work together--but it's too bad it took a hurricane to prove it.'' Today I was in Clayton Country, Georgia, and I thought again of something Reverend Jackson used to say. I went to a real welfare reform project today called Peach, which is a good name if you're in Georgia, and it stands for a whole bunch of good things that basically say we're going to take people on welfare and give them education and training and help to support their children and give them the capacity to move to work, and then they will. And in Clayton County, Georgia, 70 percent of the people on welfare are white. The other day I was in Spokane, Washington, and I met with about 18 people who had been asked to meet alone without me three days before and review the economic plan I had put before the American people. These people came from five different racial and ethnic groups; they were men and women; there were Democrats and independents and people that thought they were for Ross Perot while he was in the race, and Republicans. They were all over the map. And I could tell they were having a big time with one another when I got there. And when the whole thing was over, I said ``Have you enjoyed this?'' and they said ``We've loved it,'' and I said, well, what have you enjoyed most about it? And they said, we were surprised to find out how much we had in common. I say that because we all know that our country is in trouble. You know from your own life what others read in statistics every month. When the Commerce Department said last week that income for most families dropped $1,100 last year, that was not a surprise to you. When they said that poverty was exploding and more than one in five American children is in poverty today, that was not a surprise to you. When the census figures came out and said that most Americans are working harder today than they were 10 years for less money, that wasn't a surprise to you, because most of you and most of the people you represent are. Isn't that right? What I say to you today, my fellow Americans, is that we are better than that, and we can do better than that. And it's going to be different in January. We have an opportunity not only to win a campaign but to change this country, not just to get a few more votes than our opponents, but to do more to change the lives of the American people, to summon the American people to a new call of opportunity and responsibility and genuine community. And I believe the American people are aching for it. I think most people have got this deal figured out, this trickle-down economics. I was in Harry Truman's home town on Labor Day, and came a big rain and there were thousands of people there, and I said: folks, if you'll stand in this rain, I will--we've been having trickle-down for 12 years; surely we can have it for 12 more minutes. And so we stayed, but not for 12 minutes. I shook hands in that crowd for nearly an hour, all of us drenched, people getting wet because they wanted to change their country. I know now there is a siren song coming from the other side. They're all saying well, they want to change America, too. You know, Mr. Kemp was here earlier today. I kind of like Mr. Kemp. I confess he's got some pretty good ideas, but they just trot him out when they get in trouble. They don't pay any attention to him when they don't. The other guys remind me of that great old church story about the preacher that thought he'd preached the sermon of his life. Everybody was amening him to death and when he got to the climax of the sermon he said I want everybody who wants to go to heaven to stand up right now, and the while congregation stood up except one woman that hadn't missed a Sunday in 40 years. And he was crestfallen and he said Sister Jones, don't you want to go to heaven when you die? And she looked right up and said oh, Preacher, I thought you were trying to get up a load to go right now. That's the way the other guys are. Two months before the election, they've got lots of good ideas but they just never want to go right now. It's always later when they want to go. I'll tell you, folks. We've tried it their way for 12 years and I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go right now. We need a new direction in this country and I would say we need three things. First, we need a partnership. We cannot go forward unless we go forward together, without regard to race or region or income. We need a partnership. I was stunned when I went to South-Central Los Angeles, not after the riots but three years before the riots occurred, and I found that they told me when you got here, Governor, you're the first statewide elected official from any state that's ever been down here talking to our community group. They were not talking to one another. They were not working together. We've got to have a partnership. We don't have a person to waste. We're going up or down together and we'd better start acting like it. This election needs to prove that we can have a partnership. All these fine people from my state that say I'm from Arkansas, ask me about my governor--ask them about our partnership. I would not be standing here today if it weren't for the support of the African American citizens in my state. I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have been reelected governor in 1982. But after the election was over, that's when the partnership began. And you remember this. After the election is over, that's when our real partnership must begin because we have so much to do, so many hills to climb, so many rivers to cross, so many obstacles to confront and such a clear course we must pursue, it's going to take all of us working in the right direction and being a part of it. Nobody's smart enough to have all the answers, but if we all feel like we're on the same train, going in the same direction, we will believe we are making it better and then we will. So the partnership that I seek with you is not one for elections and votes. It's one that will go way, way beyond that. Ask the folks from my state about that. The second thing I want to say is we need a plan. And we need a plan not just for the election season but one that dominates our every waking minute after the election is over. Not just something to say to make into a television ad or a pretty speech, but something that guides the energies and the directions of every member of the Cabinet, every member of the White House staff, every agency director out there in every state, people reaching out to the church, reaching out to the community leaders, reaching out to the business leaders, reaching out to the educators and saying this is where we are going. And it can't be trickle down. We've tried that for 12 years. When we started on the trickle down enterprise, which basically says lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans and get out of the way, and they will do all the rest for us, we started that in 1980, when we had the highest wages in the world. We're down to 13th and dropping. You know the Census says that a big increase in the number of working poor, people working for a living and still poor. You know that wages are going down even as people work harder. There's a sign--on our little bus trip there was a guy with a sign in the crowd the other night that said I'm not tired and I'm sure not lazy, I'm just bushed. But we don't need another just song for the election. We need a plan, a plan that puts people first, a plan that says trickle down didn't work; we've got a $400 billion deficit, so tax-and-spend won't work; we've got to invest and educate, cooperate and grow. We've got to create jobs and incomes. You think about it. If in every community that you represent, if people had jobs, and if their jobs led to growing incomes, and if the free enterprise system reached into the inner cities and into the poor rural areas, so that everybody had a chance to borrow money to go into business, we would have far fewer problems than we now have. And so I have put before the American people a plan I call putting people first. It says let's invest more money to create jobs here at home. It says we don't mind people making money. I want to make a lot of millionaires during my term as president, but I've got this crazy idea. I'd like for them to make it the old-fashioned way by putting the rest of America back to work, not by cutting deals or moving jobs, but by putting America back to work. I want to take all this money by which we've been cutting defense and spend every dollar of it to put it back into the American economy to create jobs for the 21st century and transportation and communications, and environmental cleanup, and putting the people to work where the work is to be done, in the cities and in the rural areas all across this country, creating jobs where the work is to be done for our people. I want to have a program which includes for the first time in a dozen years a real effort to get serious about providing affordable housing for Americans and putting people to work. I want to begin by looking at this vast inventory of government housing that is now in the possession of the government, all boarded up, not doing anybody any good. You've got people sleeping on the streets in boarded-up housing in the same block in the United States. We ought to turn some of that housing over to cities, to community organizations, and to churches who are willing to participate in rehabilitating the housing and making it available as affordable housing for the homeless, for the elderly, for the people in need. What good is that housing doing all boarded up? And you could put people to work fixing it up. We have to recognize that we live in a world where what we earn depends on what we can learn. And I want everybody to listen to this: That nobody running for office can ever promise you to make the American economy the way it used to be. You know, where you could take one job and hold it for 30 years and every year it just got a lot better no matter--you just kept on doing the same thing and you got more for it. We're living in the world where change is the law of life, but because we have responded wrongly to it, we have been punished by the changes in the world. What I seek is to reward the people who will embrace change and make it our friend. And that means we've got to educate everybody, I mean everybody; everybody. A lot of these kids don't have a chance today because they didn't get an education. It means Head Start and other pre-school programs for every child who needs it--not just talking about it, but doing it. It means smaller classes in those early grades, and counselors to help the kids who need support and who can't get it at home. It means the opportunity to have access to computers and to labs and to languages. Even if you're a poor inner-city kid or a poor kid in a rural area, you got to have access to those things, too, because your world will be shaped by them just the same as if you're in a very wealthy suburban school. It means knowing when you get an education that it meets some real standard. And that when the kids come out they really know what they're supposed to know, and that if they don't you have some way to improve it. Because there are no standards today and there is no real way of measuring it, we have no way to act on that. It means guaranteeing everybody who gets out of high school at least two years of further education in an apprenticeship program so they can get good jobs, not dead-end jobs. It means opening the doors of college to every American. Do you know the college drop-out rate is more than twice the high school drop-out rate because the price of college is going up so fast. And there has been no response until election year from the other side. But from the day I began this campaign, I said if you'll vote for me I want to establish a national trust fund out of which any American can borrow the money to go to college and then pay it back either as a percentage of their income after they go to work or, even better, by being part of a Peace Corps here at home to rebuild America: pay your college loan off by working for two years as a teacher or a nurse or a police officer or in a housing program or for the elderly or to keep kids out of trouble, to rebuild the community street by street. You think about it. We could educate a whole generation of Americans, pay for it, solve a lot of our problems. It would be the best money we ever spent, and it would be a very small portion of a very big budget. There are those who say we can't afford it. I say we cannot afford not to do it. And, finally, let me say that we cannot do these things and your government cannot take these initiatives unless at last, at last, we follow the lead of the other advanced nations of the world and provide basic affordable health care to all Americans, and control the costs of the health care system we have. Eighty percent of all the strikes in America are over health care benefits now, not over wages. Every year more small businesses go broke trying to pay for health care, and others stop covering their people, leaving them full of anxiety, subject to pain, and when they do get sick they get care anyway and the cost gets passed on to the rest of us. Every year the governments' budgets all over America face bankruptcy because of the rising cost of health care, and we are spending 30 percent more of our income than anybody else and getting less for it, because we're spending more on insurance, on regulation, on paperwork, on drugs, on unnecessary equipment, on procedures that don't have to be done, and because we don't provide what we need more of, which is primary and preventive health care for people in the inner cities and in rural areas in this country. We have too much of same things and too little of others. So we spend more and we get sicker. And none of this will change unless you vote to change the presidency. We'll never get a national health care strategy without a new administration in Washington. So we need a plan. And the third thing we need is a passion for progress and for community. We need an America that stands up for human rights and independence here at home and around the world, in South Africa, in Haiti, in Somalia as well as in Bosnia and the former Soviet Union and in Latin America--all over the world. The end of the Cold War gives us the freedom to stand up for our values, and we ought to do it, here at home and around the world. We've got to have a passion for progress. People got to believe that tomorrow will be better than today if they work hard and play by the rules. And to do it we've got to have a passion for our national community, the notion that we are going up or down together. I urge you to think on these things, and to realize that in the next 55 days the character and the vision, and the will of the American people will be severely tested. While we represent, Al Gore and I, and all of you who support us, the future, a change, a difference, a chance to get America going again and bring America back again. And the other side represents the same old thing except worse; but they are very good at raising the fears of the American people, are they not? They always tell us why we cannot do something. You know, I say well, let's have a health care system that has the best of our system, choose your doctor, and keep the private health care system and keep what's good about it, but let's save money. The Germans do it. They say we can't, and if you try you'll mess it up worse. I say don't you think you ought to be able to get a little time off when there's a baby born or a sick parent, without losing your job? 72, not just the richest countries, 72 nations in the world give that right to their workers, including all of our major competitors. The other side says, oh, we can't do that. They're the ``we can't'' side and we're the``we can'' side. They're going to say from now till November 3rd things could be worse, and we're going to say things can get better. They're going to say everything in the wide world to say why you shouldn't support change. But let me tell you this: you think of it now. We are here in Atlanta, Martin Luther King's home, the home of the heart and soul of the civil rights movement. The home of a great mayor and friend of mine who should be in our prayers because he is recuperating from open heart surgery. You think about it. Where would we be today if in the great crises of American history people have said we don't have the courage to change; might get worse. Think about it. That's what they tried to tell George Washington when he said: we've got to get this country together, we can't be just 13 states running around here all over the place doing our own thing, printing our own money, having our own armies. We'll never amount to anything; we ought to get this country together. The other side said, hey, it could get worse, don't do it, it could get worse. Abraham Lincoln said: we can't let this union be torn apart. And then he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that said I don't care if the Constitution did recognize slavery, it was wrong, it was inconsistent with the basic value that all men are created equal. The other side said, oh, things could get worse. Franklin Roosevelt running against Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt says: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. He's chained to a wheelchair, lifting up the country in the depths of the Depression. The other side said: things could get worse. Harry Truman running against Tom Dewey, a man for whom Mr. and Mrs. Bush cast their first vote. And Harry Truman said: the war's over, we've got to lead the world to a new era of freedom; we've got to stand up to communism; we've got to build a middle class here at home with a veteran's administration and a farmer's home administration, and we've got to put people in their houses and give them a chance to get educated. And we integrated the military. And everybody ought to have a right to health care. That's what Harry Truman said over 40 years ago, and old Tom Dewey said things could get worse. This country is the longest-lasting democracy in human history because whenever we had to, we sent the things-could- get-worse crowd packing--and it's time to do it again. In a race of hope against fear, of change against the same old ways, of grabbing for the future instead of clinging to the past, sometimes the most conservative thing you can do is to change, because the only way you can preserve and conserve what you care most about is to reach out to the realities before you. You know that, everyone of you--you know that. And I say to you today, your vote counts every bit as much as mine or any other American's. You have the power to move this country forcefully into the future, you have the power to break the deadlock, the division, the gridlock in Washington between the Republicans and the Democrats, the gridlock imposed by the special interests, the gridlock dividing people by race and income and region. You can break them. But your numbers must be heard. I want to say here publicly what I have already said privately to Reverend Jackson, which is I am grateful to him for being willing to lead a great national effort to register many, many, many more voters in the next few days on behalf of the national campaign of the Democrats. No one could do it as he will. But he must find a willing ear, and some strong backs and strong hands. Just remember, folks, you're fighting in the greatest tradition of America--the we-can crowd against the we-can't crowd. For all of our flaws and imperfections, this has been the greatest country in human history and the longest-lasting democracy because every time we were challenged, we said we can, because every time our existence, our character and our values were threatened by what we were doing, we had the courage to change-- from Washington to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Martin Luther King, every time, every step along the way, this country somehow found the God-given grace and strength to change. You know, at this Baptist convention I just have to say one more thing. Our adversary said there was something wrong with the Democrats because our platform didn't have G-o-d in it. Well, I got to reading it--I don't think my Constitution has G-o-d in it, but I sure like it. And we Baptists were forged in the conviction that church and state should be separated but that we should never take God out of our hearts. And so I tell you, they'll try to wear us down. You know what they'll do, the this-can-be-worse crowd--it could be worse: they'll try to wear us down, and we must not grow weary, we must not grow weary. We know we will reap if we don't lose heart. And we know if we have God in our hearts and we're faithful to our legacy as Americans, we think about the future we want for our children and grandchildren, then we will have the strength we need. We will do what Isaiah told us to do: ''Mount up with wings as eagles,'' run and not grow weary, walk and not get tired--and win on November 3rd. Thank you, and God bless you all.