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.