From: U45301@uicvm.uic.edu (Mary Jacobs)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: RAINBO COALITION NAT CONV
Date: 19 Aug 92 07:30:06 GMT
Article-I.D.: uicvm.92232.023006U45301
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago

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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.