From: barrett@cc.gatech.edu (James Barrett)
Subject: Text of Clinton/Gore appearance on The Nashville Network
Organization: Georgia Tech College of Computing
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1992 16:03:49 GMT

                   Clinton, Gore Transcript
    The following is the Reuter transcript of Democratic
 presidential candidate Gov Bill Clinton and his wife
 Hillary, and Sen Al Gore (D-Tenn) and his wife Tipper,
 appearing on the Nashville Now program at the TNN Studios,
 Nashville, Tenn, Wednesday, Aug 26, 1992:
    Q: We are delighted to welcome to "Nashville Now" some
 folks that I'm sure you are becoming increasingly well
 acquainted with, through television and through their visits
 to your home towns across America. Tonight we have Governor 
 Bill Clinton and Mrs Clinton, Senator Al Gore and Mrs Gore.
 We'd like to welcome all of you to Nashville.
    GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON: Thank you. We're glad to be here.
    (Applause)
    Q: I'd like to ask you a question I always ask people who
 are not in our business. Are you a country music fan?
    GOV. CLINTON: Have been all my life. I watch your
 show, as a matter of fact.
    Q: Thank you. I appreciate it.
    (Applause) 
    GOV. CLINTON: You know, when I was a kid growing up
 in Arkansas I used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the
 radio. I can still remember the old Grand Old Opry, Ernest
 Tuggs and Carl Perkins, Patsy Kline. I remember I loved it
 when I was a kid.
    Q: And of course from Nashville over into Arkansas is not
 that far away.
    GOV. CLINTON: Not that far.
    Q: And Senator Gore, of course, he lives even closer, 
 over here at Carthage, Tennessee, and his father--
 Tennessee's very proud of Senator Gore.
    (Applause)
    SENATOR AL GORE: Thank you, Ralph.
    Q: The Gores have been a part of Tennessee politics for a
 long time. And we have known them and known them well.
    Governor, if I might, I've got a few questions that the
 audience submitted, if you don't mind.
    GOV. CLINTON: Have at it.
    Q: I'll tell you right off the top that most of the 
 questions were about jobs. I'll give you an example. This is
 from Robert Besaw (phonetic) of Bowling Green, Kentucky. I'm
 a worker at the GM Corvette plant in Bowling Green,
 Kentucky. What would you do to slow down the moving of
 plants like General Motors to low-pay countries like Mexico?
    GOV. CLINTON: I would first of all try to convince
 everybody that we can slow it down. If you look at a country
 like Germany, for example, they have twice the percentage of
 their workers in manufacturing jobs, high wage jobs, that we
 do. So we can do that. 
    I would do several things. Number one, I would change the
 tax code to give incentives to manufacturers to always
 modernize their plant and equipment in this country. Today
 the American tax system actually gives you more incentives
 to shut your plant down and move it overseas than to
 modernize it here. We ought to reverse that. More incentives
 to stay home, no more tax breaks to move overseas.
    The 2d thing I would do is to control health care costs,
 and until we do that we're never going to be competitive in 
 manufacturing. The average American car's got nearly $1100
 in health care costs. We're spotting all our competitors
 $600 or $700. So when you go to Mexico, the labor cost alone
 is only $300 difference per car. It costs you $500 to bring
 the car back to the US
    So what kills us is the health care costs. If we could
 bring health care costs in line with inflation, we'd be
 competitive again. Those 2 things alone would make a huge
 difference in our ability to keep a manufacturing base in
 America. 
    (Applause)
    Q: All right. Ron Hicks of Raymore, Missouri says tell us
 one specific way you can create blue collar jobs.
    GOV. CLINTON: Well, I just gave you one specific way
 but let me give you another one. Everybody knows the defense
 budget's going to be reduced, as we don't have to confront
 the Soviet Union. It's already been reduced a lot. We've
 lost a million jobs because all the money's gone into the
 deficit, to inflation of health care costs and the S&L 
 bail-out.
    Senator Gore and I favor taking every dollar by which
 defense is reduced and investing it in creating jobs here at
 home--in building roads and bridges and water systems, in
 waste recycling systems, in high speed rail systems, in
 creating an economy for the 21st century and investing in
 things that other countries are doing a better job than we
 are. That will all put people to work in the private sector.
 That is, that money will cause contracts to be let by people
 who will give blue collar jobs at good wages to Americans. 
    That plan alone will create another million jobs a year
 in each of the next 4 years.
    Q: Governor, is this the most frequently asked question
 out on the campaign tour--how are we going to get back to
 work?
    GOV. CLINTON: People are more concerned about jobs
 and incomes. The unemployment rate is 8 %. It's actually
 higher, as you know, 'cause we only measure people that are
 always looking. And even more troubling, to me, is that more 
 than 2-3ds of the people in this country--and I'll bet you
 most people in this audience tonight--are working harder for
 less money than they were making ten years ago.
    (Applause)
    And that is a very troubling development.
    So as a country, we have to make a decision. Are we going
 to keep on being a hard work/low wage country where every
 year we put more and more pressure on families, more hours
 at work, less time with the children, less time to
 themselves? Or are we going to be a smart work/high wage 
 country?
    My plan is to create a smart work/high wage country. I
 just don't think the American people are getting what they
 deserve and I think we can do better.
    (Applause)
    (Commercial break)
    Q: I wanted to ask Mrs Clinton what HIPPY is.
    HILLARY GOV. CLINTON: Oh, HIPPY stands for home instruction
 program for preschool youngsters. And it's a program that we
 found out about that started in Israel, where mothers are 
 taught to teach their own children, even mothers who
 themselves are without much education, even illiterate. And
 we brought it to Arkansas and now have the biggest program
 anywhere in the world, and it's just making such a
 difference in both the children's lives and the mothers'.
    Q: Do you think this could be instituted in every state?
    HILLARY GOV. CLINTON: I do believe that. I think if we really
 focused our attention on helping parents be the very best
 parents they could be, we'd solve a lot of the problems that
 we currently have. 
    (Applause)
    Q: Senator, I was fortunate enough to be on the New York
 Times bestseller list for 25 weeks. How long were you on
 there?
    SEN. GORE: Not nearly as long as your book "Memories"
 was on there, Ralph.
    Q: I just thought I would put the knife in a little bit.
 You have an excellent book. I assume that this is going to
 be one of your concerns in the next few years, what happens 
 to the planet.
    SEN. GORE: Absolutely. I'm taught, in my religious
 tradition, that we're giving dominion over the earth but
 we're required to be good stewards of the earth. And we're
 not taking very good care of it right now. And the whole
 relationship between people and God's earth has been changed
 by the huge increase in numbers, the population explosion,
 all these powerful new technologies and chemicals and an
 attitude that our great grandparents wouldn't recognize,
 where we just feel like we don't have to take account of 
 what we do or take responsibility for it. And I think that
 ought to be changed. We ought to take better care of it.
    (Applause)
    Q: Can the industrial companies in this country be
 environmentally safe and make a profit at the same time?
    SEN. GORE: Oh, absolutely. And you know, the funny
 thing about it is some of the people who pose this false
 choice between jobs and the environment don't realize that
 Japan and Germany are both saying to everybody who will
 listen that the biggest new market in the history of world 
 business is the market for the new, more efficient products
 and processes that make it possible to have progress without
 environmental destruction. That's what the marketplace is
 wanting, and we can drag our feet and pretend that we ought
 to protect the old, polluting, inefficient ways of the past,
 but if we do that, we just better be prepared for the fact
 that once again, our competition overseas is going to move
 out more rapidly. And we need to stop protecting the old,
 inefficient ways and start leading the environmental
 revolution and create millions of new jobs in the process. 
    (Applause)
    Q: I wanted to say something to Mrs Gore. You are in a
 city in which we, one of our main products that we
 manufacture and create is records. And in the past, you've
 had a problem with some record companies. I wondered if your
 campaign is on- going year after year about the content of
 what's in the record groove and if they are being properly
 labeled.
    TIPPER GORE: Well, I'm glad that you've given me a chance 
 to talk about this. A couple of years ago the national PTA
 and the group I cofounded, the Parents Music Resource
 Center, asked the music industry if they would respond to a
 new problem--the issue of graphic lyrics, usually sexually
 violent lyrics, sold to an audience that includes some young
 children. And we asked them if they could solve that for the
 consumer in a complex marketplace.
    They said yes, we can do that by putting on voluntarily a
 label that says explicit lyrics. They've been doing that for
 the past 2 years and I think the music industry is to be 
 commended in providing this tool for parents.
    (Applause)
    Q: Governor, I know that in a moment they are going to
 take you away--I'm enjoying this--they're going to take you
 away and you're going to the Opry House for a tremendous
 rally. Would you do something that we discussed during the
 break? I asked him, I said you're from Arkansas, you've got
 to know how to do that sooey pig yell. Do we have any
 Razorbacks in the audience?
    GOV. CLINTON: If everybody from Arkansas will stand 
 up and do it with me, I'll do it. Come on, everybody from my
 home state, stand up there. Come on. Anybody else from
 Arkansas, stand up. All right, we're going to call hogs, one
 time.
    Q: Wait, Governor, I need to give you that.
    GOV. CLINTON: No, I didn't want a microphone. You
 don't understand (laughing).
    All right, we're going to call the hogs one time. Ready?
 One, 2, 3. Whoo pig, soy (laughing).
    (Applause) 
    I know you're a great collector and Al and Tipper and
 Hillary and I wanted to give you this model of our bus that
 we've been taking across America, reaching out to ordinary
 people, most of whom, like us, are country music fans. And
 we're going to start our bus tour in Texas tomorrow morning
 in San Antonio and we thought if we'd give you this you
 might think of us now and then, and we hope you will keep it
 and enjoy it and think about us out there reaching out to
 the heartland of America. 
    We'd also like to say tonight that our thoughts and
 prayers are with the people in Florida and Louisiana, with
 what they're dealing with. And I know all the people who
 watch you are thinking about them, too.
    (Applause)
    Q: Governor, thank you very much. I appreciate that. This
 will make a wonderful keepsake.
    And you go to Texas tomorrow.
    GOV. CLINTON: Tomorrow. We're going to do a 2- day 
 bus tour.
    SEN. GORE: Tonight.
    GOV. CLINTON: Well, we're actually going tonight.
 We'll be there, after we leave our rally at Opryland, then
 we're going to Texas tonight, San Antonio.
    Q: Is that the only city?
    GOV. CLINTON: Oh, no, we're going all the way up
 north to Waco, through Austin, and then we're going east all
 the way in East Texas to Tyler.
    Q: Well, good luck. 
    GOV. CLINTON: So we'll be stopping along the way in
 Texas.
    Q: I hope you'll be safe.
    GOV. CLINTON: We'll be safe.
    Q: Thank you for coming.
    GOV. CLINTON: Thank you very much. Thank you so much.
    (Applause)
 
    Q: Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Mrs Clinton, 
 Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee and Mrs Gore, thank you
 very much.
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James C. Barrett (barrett@cc.gatech.edu)| "If your so damned smart, why are
Georgia Tech College of Computing       |   you doing what your doing, and I'm
                                        |   president of the U.S.?" - G.Bush
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