Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Saturday, 10 Oct 1992 01:18:45 CDT
From: <U56503@uicvm.uic.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: ==> Clinton St. Louis, MO Speech (10/3/92)

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Information in the public interest which does not imply that it
is the opinion of UIC.  Contact 75300.3115@compuserve.com for
further information.
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 "Meet Me In St. Louis"
 Remarks by Governor Bill Clinton
 Soulard Farmers Market
 St. Louis, MO October 3, 1992

      Ladies and gentlemen, there's a great sign here that says, Bill
 can fish, George will cut the bait.

      I love it.  Let me say to all of you, and make no mistake about
 it, this is a debate between more than individuals, it is a debate
 about the great ideas that shape a country's destiny.  Mr. Bush is a
 good debater.  In spite of all of his talk about being at a
 disadvantage to me because I went to Oxford, I never studied debate
 at Oxford.  Mr. Bush went to a country day school and to Yale, I
 think he can take care of himself in debate.

      The issue is not whether he's a good debater or not, it's
 whether he has a good record and a good vision, and the answer to
 that is no.

      This is a president who promised us 15 million new jobs, and
 after the last accounting is in--listen to this--there has been a
 reduction of 35,000 jobs in the private sector in the United States
 of America.  The only job growth--less than a million--has been in
 government, which he so deplores.  There has been a reduction in
 personal income of $1,600 on average for American families in the
 last two years alone.

      Construction and manufacturing and consumer confidence are
 down.  There has been a reduction--listen to this--a reduction of
 nearly 100,000 per month covered by health care, almost 100,000 of us
 are losing our health insurance every month.

      Poverty is up.  There have been more than twice as many
 bankruptcies for every new job created in this country.  One in ten
 of our people is on food stamps.  The cost of health care, housing,
 education, and taxes has exploded for the middle class.

      So jobs are down, poverty's up, income's down, bankruptcies are
 up, construction's down, food stamps are up, health care coverage is
 down, and the cost of health care is up.  As my running mate, Al
 Gore, says, everything that's down ought to be up, everything that's
 up ought to be down, they've turned this country upside down.  We're
 going to put it right side up in November.

      My favorite line--four more weeks.  That's right, four more
 weeks.  This is not a debate between two people hurling charges, it
 is a debate about the direction of the country.  As my favorite line,
 that I didn't get in this election, that my running mate developed,
 is when they say four more years it sounds more like a threat than a
 promise.

      I tell you, my fellow Americans, we cannot afford four more
 years of trickle down economics.  We have tried it their way.  Their
 way is to say that the government has no responsibility to the
 American people, to the great middle class, other than to cut taxes
 for the richest Americans and wait for the benefits to trickle down.

      Well, for the first time in 70 years the top one percent of the
 American people control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent, but
 the benefits have not trickled down.  This administration has the
 worst performance in 50 years.

      I offer you a new approach, not trickle down economics, not
 tax-and-spend economics, but putting the American people first,
 investing in our jobs here at home, educating our people, controlling
 health care costs, challenging our people to partnerships, to compete
 and win in the global economy, that is what this election is all
 about.

      And my fellow Americans, the most impressive thing to me, as I
 have travelled across this country, for one year now, is to see how
 the American people are uniting across regional and party and racial
 and income lines.  Just in the last couple of weeks, the Clinton-Gore
 ticket has been endorse by the executives of 21 high-tech companies
 in Silicon Valley in Northern California, two-thirds of them are
 Republicans, but they know there must be a partnership between
 government and the private sector if we're going to compete with good
 jobs in America.

      In Chicago, over 400 business executives from all across
 America, over one-third of them Republicans, endorsed the
 Clinton-Gore ticket because they know we've got to have a partnership
 to bring our economy back, and this administration will never give it
 to them.

      The other day, Admiral William Crowe, the chairman of the Joint
 Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Reagan and Bush, endorsed the
 Clinton-Gore ticket because he knew because he said he had served his
 country in uniform for 47 years, but you can't be strong abroad
 unless you're strong at home, and we have to face the problems of
 America here at home.

      And just this week, people who were top officials in both
 Democratic and Republican administrations endorsed our health care
 plan and said--listen to this--that under my health care plan, all
 Americans will have basic health insurance.  Under Bush's plan, 27
 million still won't have it by the end of the decade.  Under my plan
 the average American family will save--they said this, not me--$1,179
 a year by the year 2000, while health care costs will continue to
 explode under the Bush plan.  There is no choice, we need a new
 direction, and everybody knows it.

      There is no more painful and gripping example of the neglect of
 this administration than the recent report on national television
 that this administration has been spending our tax dollars to finance
 the shutdown of American plants and the relocation of those plants in
 Central America.

      The Agency for International Development has supervised giving
 low interest loans to people if they will shut their plants down in
 America and move them to Central America, but they won't give low
 interest loans to people to modernize their plants so they can stay
 here in the United States.  That's what we should be doing.

      They have spent your tax dollar to train workers in other
 countries to take jobs that were in America, but they won't spend as
 much money to train people to keep their jobs here in America.  It is
 literally true that this administration has spent $150 million to
 train workers in other countries, and only $100 million to train
 workers in our country who have lost their job because of foreign
 competition.  We've got our priorities backwards, and I'll set them
 straight.

      This administration spent your tax dollars to advertise the fact
 that people could shut their plants down here and get 57 cent and
 hour labor in Central America--they advertised it with your tax
 dollars.

      An employee of your government, paid for by you, was filmed on
 television saying to a person who said he was a manufacturer from
 Miami, and he asked this fellow, well if I shut my plant down here
 and move it to Central America, will these workers be reliable, and
 someone you paid for said, oh these people are more reliable than the
 workers in Florida.

      Then the man asked, well what about labor unions, and a person
 paid for with your tax dollars said, oh you can fire those people,
 we've got them blacklisted, there's no problem here--a plain
 violation of international law.  That is how insensitive they are.

      Now my fellow Americans, let me tell you that I am not against
 trade, and I am not against investment and I am not against
 investment and I am not against helping Central America.  You heard
 Congressman Gephardt talk about John Kennedy.  I was inspired by
 President Kennedy's call for an Alliance for Progress.  But when we
 invest in Central America, I want to help them promote progress in
 their own country, not poverty there and poverty here.  That is a
 policy of the Bush administration.

      I believe in expanding trade with all nations--a wealthy country
 can only grow richer by expanding trade--but it has to be on terms
 that are fair to us.  This administration has been taken for a ride,
 this administration has not tried to help our farmers in trade.  This
 administration has had a very narrow view of what it means to expand
 trade, and this administration has been insensitive to the fact that
 two-thirds of the American people are working harder for lower wages
 than they were making ten years ago, and you know it as well as I do.

      But I say to you that the debate I want is not just a debate
 about their record, but a debate about where we must go.  We cannot
 keep going on with trickle down, we cannot go back to tax-and-spend
 and the idea that if you tax the wealthy more and divide it, that we
 will have a good economy.  We have got to grow this economy, we need
 to grow more jobs, we need to grow faster incomes, we need to grow
 more opportunity, and that is what I offer.  I ask you to join with
 me in a new crusade that will give people even more incentives if
 they invest in American jobs, American factories, American
 businesses, American agriculture.  That's what kind of incentives we
 need in this country.

      I ask you here in Missouri, where there are so many people who
 did so much to win the cold war, not to leave those people out in the
 cold.  Under our plan, instead of just cutting defense, we would take
 every dollar by which we reduce defense, every last dollar, and
 reinvest it in an American economy for the 21st century, putting
 those people back to work in high- speed rail, light rail, road
 construction, environmental construction, solid waste recycling, the
 kinds of jobs that will build an economy for the 21st century.  We
 cannot abandon them.

      I ask you to support a real education presidency.  Let me say
 this very clearly, no president can promise you to make the American
 economy the way it used to be.  No one can promise to turn the clock
 back.  What we have to do is to make all these changes that are going
 on in the world today beneficial to us instead of harmful.  We have
 been punished for long enough because we refuse to adjust to the
 changes in the world.  I want change to be our friend, not our enemy,
 and to do it we have to have a world class system of education and
 training in this country for people throughout their lifetime.

      And how will we do that?  We will do that by guaranteeing a
 program that will say to every high school graduate who does not go
 on to college, here is two years of further apprenticeship training
 so you can get a good job, not a dead-end job.

      We will provide incentives to teach every person in the work
 force today to read at the high school level and to get a high school
 diploma within the next five years so that they can learn the skills
 of the new economy.

      And we will open the doors of college education to all
 Americans.  Under our program, any American will be able to borrow
 the money to finance a college education and pay it back in one of
 two ways.  Either as a small percentage of their income after they go
 to college--when they go to work, or even better, by working for two
 years for our country here at home before or after college.

      Consider this, you think about the life of St. Louis.  If every
 young person from this region said, I want to borrow the money to go
 to college but I'll pay it back, I'll be a teacher, I'll be a police
 officer, I'll work with the elderly, I'll work with people with
 disabilities, I'll help kids stay out of trouble and out of gangs, I
 want to rehabilitate housing to solve the homeless problem.  From the
 grass roots up, we could solve the problems of our country and
 educate a whole generation of Americans.  It would be the best money
 we ever spent.

      My fellow Americans, this is a debate about whether we can do
 better, and whether we are better.  This is a great country, but we
 are going in the wrong direction.   And our people who have worked
 hard and played by the rules have been punished long enough.  This is
 a great country, but we have been divided against one another for
 long enough.  We can no longer afford to be divided against one
 another by race, by region, by gender, you name it, by every sort of
 category.  This administration, at critical junctures, has tried to
 drive wedges between the American people.

      In the first two nights of that Republican convention, they said
 that people who weren't just like them weren't Americans.  One of
 their speakers said we needed a religious war.  They seem--at
 critical junctures for two days, to be more interested in running
 against my wife than running against me.  Well I'll tell you
 something, I'm proud of her and George Bush can't win an argument
 with her.

      You look around this crowd today.  There are all kinds of people
 in this crowd today and we don't all agree with one another on every
 issue.  We don't have all the answers.  We know we did not get into
 this mess overnight, and we won't get out overnight.  We are united
 by a couple of simple convictions--we don't have a person to waste,
 everybody counts, everybody has a place in our America.

      We believe in real family values, we know that there are single
 families, single parent families, extended families, there are all
 kinds of families, and the quickest way to break a family is to spend
 American tax dollars to take their jobs away.

      We believe that the government owes us not only opportunity but
 responsibility--all of you will have to have the courage to change.
 I am interested in making the American people more independent of
 their government so they can make more of their own lives, but you
 cannot do that without a vigorous government working in partnership
 to make sure we can compete and earn a decent living and get a decent
 education and get decent health care--then you will all have to have
 the courage to do what it takes to make sure we keep up with the
 pressures and the challenges of the modern world.

      One year ago today, in Little Rock, Arkansas, I declared for
 president of the United States.

      You know, when I announced, Mr. Bush was at 70 percent in the
 polls and I really don't think even my mother thought I could win.
 But I set out on a journey across this great land.  I've heard
 stories of hope and hardship from the snows of New Hampshire to the
 red clay of Georgia, to the coast of California and points al in
 between.  And I'm honored to be here today to celebrate the first
 anniversary of this campaign with you in the heartland.

      I have seen some troubling things.  I have seen the ugly
 aftermath of the Los Angeles riots, the awful might of Mother Nature
 in Florida, the everyday destruction of unemployment and despair.  I
 have had countless Americans break down and cry, talking to me last
 night.  As I left Michigan late at night, a woman came to the fence
 of the airport and stuck her child's hand through the fence to shake
 hands with me and she said, Governor, I am a home builder here.  And
 two years ago my husband and I had $32,000 in our savings account.
 And she started crying and she got all choked up, she said, now we
 have $5 in it, just to keep the account open.

      Give us something to do again, give us hope again, give us a
 future again, make a difference again, we need you.

      The thing I want to tell you, my fellow Americans, however, is
 that things can be better.  There is still a lot of hope in this
 country.  We're as smart as any people on earth, we have more natural
 resources, we have more rich diversity, it can be a source of
 strength.  And I would like to close by reading you something I said
 a year ago when I entered this crusade for change.

      ``I believe that, with all my heart, that together we can make
 this happen.  We can usher in a new era of progress, prosperity, and
 renewal.  We can and we must.  This is not just a campaign for the
 presidency, it is a campaign for the future, for the forgotten
 hard-working middle class of America who deserve a government that
 fights for them for a change.  A campaign to keep our nation strong
 at home and abroad.  Join with us.  I ask for your prayers, your
 help, your hand and your heart.  Together we can make America great
 again, and build a community of hope that will inspire the world.''

      I still believe that--work with me for 32 days and we'll take
 our country back.  Thank you, and God bless you all.  Thank you.