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From @lex-luthor.ai.mit.edu:[e-mail] Mon Apr 26 00:25:39 1993
Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1993 22:20-0400
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
Subject: Text of the President's Speech in Boston  4.25.93
To: [e-mail]

                         THE WHITE HOUSE

                  Office of the Press Secretary

_________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                              April 25, 1993

                     REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
               TO THE 1993 ANNUAL CONVENTION OF THE
                 NEWSPAPER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

                          Grand Ballroom
                   Marriott Copley Place Hotel
                      Boston, Massachusetts

4:14 P.M. EDT

         THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  Frank, I am
delighted to be here.  You reminded me when you said that I came
last year to the Waldorf that I was in Los Angeles last year on
the day before this convention.  And I was flying back, and I got
somewhere around Las Vegas, and our plane malfunctioned.  We had
to go back to California.  And I took the red-eye into the
Waldorf.  I've always thought that was why I was the first
Democrat in 28 years to receive a majority of the newspaper
endorsements in the last election.  (Laughter.)  I was thinking
today whether there was some stunt I could pull that would have
the equal effect.  (Laughter.)

         When Frank was giving me the introduction -- he said
it was a just a year ago, and this young, charismatic governor
was out -- I thought to myself, what happened to that guy?
(Laughter.)  People ask me all the time whether there was
anything really different about being President and is it
different from being a governor or some other job.  And it really
is.

         One of the things is that people walk around on
eggshells all the time and they're always trying to protect you,
even from things that aren't necessarily in need of protecting.
The other day I came down from the residence floor at the White
House to the first floor, and I didn't know this, but my wife was
having a meeting with some women there, about 30 of them, talking
about health care.  And the meeting just let out as I got off on
the floor.  I was going around the corner to another little room.
And all of a sudden I found myself in the middle of 30 people
whom I had never met before.  I literally just walked out into
the midst.  So I shook hands with them, said hello.  It was quite
pleasant.  And this young aide who was working there, a man who's
a full-time employee of the White House, said, oh, Mr. President,
I'm so sorry that I let you out in the middle of all those
people.  (Laughter.)  And I looked at him and I said, that's all
right, young man, I used to be one.  (Laughter and applause.)
That's the way I sort of feel sometimes.

         I want to tell you how very proud I am to be here
today with you, all of you who offer our fellow countrymen and
women the information, the analysis, the range of opinions that
they need to make decisions about their future.

         I know that there's always a healthy tension between
the people in public service and the press.  And when I have bad
days I remember that another president who had a few bad days
with the press himself, Thomas Jefferson, said that if he had to
choose between having a government without newspapers or
newspapers without a government, that he would not hesitate for a
moment to prefer the latter.  I think that was on one of the days
when he got a good press.  (Laughter.)

         I want to say, in all seriousness, that I've had the
opportunity over the last several years to read a fairly large
number of newspapers from around the country.  As all of you
know, I believe very strongly that over the last 10 to 12 years
the political system, which includes both parties, in many
important ways failed our people.  And oftentimes, it was
newspapers of our country who continued to put the human concerns
of people back at the center stage of public debate -- reporting
on the stagnation of living standards that created so much
anxiety for the middle class and so much despair for the poor.

         I think, in particular, of the incredible series run
by the Philadelphia Inquirer, called "America:  What Went Wrong?,
And the detail in which that series documented what happened to
the middle class in America, as most families worked harder for
lower wages and had more insecurity in the fundamentals of their
lives.

         But many other papers, perhaps all of them all
across the country, issued various reports on other problems that
were neglected for too long -- how we went from a $1 trillion to
a $4 trillion deficit in debt -- national debt, in 12 years.  How
most of the gains, the economic gains of the 1980s went to people
in the top three to four percent of income brackets.  How we came
to spend over 33 percent more than any other country in the world
on health care and still had over $35 million people without
health insurance and millions of others at risk of losing it at a
moment's notice.  The problems we had in our school systems, our
welfare systems.  The problems we had with drug abuse and crime.
The problems we have in the rising tide of people in what may
well be for them a permanent underclass -- most of them young
women and their little children, or young, single, unemployed and
uneducated men.

         Editorial writers warned us about organized interest
having too much dominance over public policy, and the slogans and
the smears and the sound bites having too much dominance over
public debate and election decisions.  Newspaper after newspaper
reported on the profound disaffection of so many of our people
from the political process itself.

         When the political system seemed brain-dead and
deadlocked, with so many people locked into yesterday's rhetoric
and yesterday's policies, many in the newspapers helped to give
the American people not only the information they need, but the
sense that with that information something profound could be done
to change the course of our nation's history.

         I don't think there's any question that the size of
the turnout last November, the nature of the turnout, which so
many people from traditionally underrepresented groups in the
electorate, including so many millions of young people, indicated
that the American people wanted some fundamental change in the
way our government does the people's business.  And fortunately
for me, I was given the opportunity to try to lead that change.

         Now that we have taken office and had almost a
hundred days to work at it, I know that you are about the
business of playing your roles, not as a cheering section for our
administration, but as a conscience for the nation, measuring the
deeds against the words, reminding us still always, no matter
what happens in Washington, of the hurts and the hopes and the
capacities of the people who do the voting and who challenge us
now to live up to the promise of America.

         For those who serve in government, and for those who
watch government up close in Washington, it's all too easy to
concentrate on the daily events and the inside stories to worry
about who's up or down or in or out, who won or who lost the
moment's battle; too easy to forget about the real people whose
real lives will be changed for better or worse by what we do or
do not do -- the unemployed people; the people who are afraid of
losing their health insurance; the teenagers who wonder if
they'll have a chance to work this summer; the families who feel
less safe on their streets when we don't provide enough law
enforcement officials, and on and on.

         We can't forget, amidst all the gamesmanship of
American political life, which is a high form of entertainment,
that there are real people with real stories, and they are what
all of our efforts are ultimately about.

         Every day, I try to devote some time to looking past
the deadlines, to look ahead of the headlines, to look beyond the
beltway; to go beyond the false choices and the failed policies
and philosophies that still grip so much of the debate that I
must confront every day; to go beyond the politics of abandonment
or the politics of entitlement; to think about how we can all be
in this together.  No more every person for himself or herself,
and no more something for nothing.

         I am doing my best to offer every American an
opportunity to succeed and to challenge every American to give
something back to our country.  Everyone who is willing to work
hard and play by the rules ought to have a chance to be a part of
this American community, and I think we all know that that is not
the case today.

         In the first 96 days of this administration, I think
we have begun to fundamentally change the direction taken by the
government over the past decade -- to go beyond trickle-down and
tax-and-spend to a new approach to our deficit and to
government's role that reduces the deficit and increases
investment in our future.  With an economic plan that reduces the
deficit by over $500 billion in the next five years has led to a
20-year low in mortgage rates, and which the business writers say
this year alone, if we can keep the interest rates down, will
result in refinancings which will put over $100 billion back into
this economy.

         An economic plan that includes an attempt to avoid
the inevitable conflict between the environment and the economy
by finding ways to create jobs with responsible environmental
policy.  An economic plan which tries to deal seriously with the
enormous problems occasioned by the dramatic reductions in the
defense budget and the impact that's had on high-tech, high-wage
employment in the United States.  And I might add that, tomorrow
here in Boston we're going to have the first of five national
conferences on that subject here to try to work in partnership
with the private sector to use the fact that the Cold War is over
and the defense budget is going down, to find new ways for these
people to work, to bring their talents and their knowledge and
their enormous experience to bear.

         We've tried to go in the trade debate, beyond the
old debate between free trade and protectionism to a new policy
rooted in the notion that we ought to expand trade to grow our
economy and to grow the economy of our trading partners.  That is
driving us, as we seek to conclude a new agreement on the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trades, as we seek to conclude a treaty
with Mexico and Canada, to integrate our economies over the
longrun, and as we seek to redefine our relationship with Japan
in the economic area.

         We seek to go beyond inertia and ideology, to
experimentation and initiative and a reliance on more individual
responsibility and social policy with initiatives in welfare
reform and national service and national health care and
community policing.  We seek to go beyond politics as usual to
political reform with a serious effort to reduce the influence of
lobbying in our political process, to reform the campaign finance
system, to reduce the federal bureaucracy and increase the amount
of your tax dollars that can be invested in ways that directly
promote the health and welfare and economic well-being of the
American people.  We seek to go beyond the divisive rhetoric of
family values to an administration that values families -- one
that gives everybody a chance to be part of America's families.
That's what the Family and Medical Leave Act was all about.
That's what repealing the ban on fetal tissue research so that we
could save the lives of children afflicted by diabetes and other
dangerous diseases was all about.  That's what the effort to
immunize all of our children is all about.

         There is such an incredible gulf in this country
between what we say and what we do, it is an awful burden to bear
if you're a serious American citizen.  You hear all this talk
about how much we care about our children. Well, I'll tell you
something.  We make over half the vaccines in the world in this
country, and we have the third worst immunization record in the
Western Hemisphere.  And everybody goes around piously talking
about how all this government stimulus program I had was a bunch
of pork barrel.  It wouldn't have been pork barrel for the kids
we would have immunized against preventible childhood diseases.
(Applause.)

         In the aftermath of the Cold War, we are trying to
fashion a new world, rooted in democracy and human rights and
economic reform, a world in which the United States will lead,
but in which we will continue to work with our allies.  There is,
as we speak now, a Russian election  which has just concluded.
We don't know how it came out.  I can tell you that I know the
polls show that the American people think that the President of
the United States should not have spent time or their money on
Russia.  But I respectfully disagree.

         I grew up in an age when the biggest threat to my
future as a little child was whether there would be a nuclear war
between the United States and what was then the Soviet Union.
Historic events in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe
have given democracy new hope.  The START I and START II
treaties, if they can both be implemented by all the nuclear
powers, give our children new hope.  We cannot afford to withdraw
from the struggle of promoting democracy, human rights, market
reforms, and an end to imperialism in that part of the world.
And whatever happens today, we must engage the Russian people on
those fronts, because my children and our country's future -- all
of our futures and all of our children's -- are at stake there.

         We have other interests as well in Bosnia.  The
United States in the last 96 days has tried to increase the
efforts of the West to bring about a settlement.  We got a -- we
led the effort to put a no-fly zone and to enforce it through the
United Nations.  We started airlifts of supplies to people who
were isolated. We got two of the three parties to sign on to the
Vance-Owen peace process.  We have dramatically increased the
enforcement of tougher sanctions.  It has not been enough.  And
now we are considering what our other options are.

         I say, frankly, it is the most difficult foreign
policy problem this country faces, but we have to try to bring an
end to the practice of ethnic cleansing and to bring a beginning
of peaceful resolution of the conflict there.

         We told the American people -- I and the people who
work with me -- that we would restore real, not just rhetorical
responsibility to the actions of government.  That's what our
education initiative to write the national education goals into
the law of this country to have real standards is all about.
That's what the initiatives that the HUD Secretary, Henry
Cisneros, is undertaking to have certain strict rules of conduct
for people who live in public housing is all about.  That's what
the initiatives we're taking to help people move from welfare to
work is all about.

         We told the American people we would try to
accomplish what no other administration has ever been called up
to do in the history of this country before.  We would try to
reduce this massive federal deficit and increase investments in
areas critical to our future; because, funny enough, in the last
12 years we exploded the deficit and reduced our investment in
areas critical to our future.

         We have to do that, because we have to free this
economy of the burden of debt we are shouldering, and we have to
invest because while we're doing it, we have to realize that
we're in a competitive global economy and we still have
technologies and workers and students that have to have the
benefit of appropriate investments in order to be fully
competitive.

         Doing these things will expand job opportunities and
incomes for middle-class people and help others to move into the
middle class, something that has all but stopped in the last
couple of years.

         When I submitted to the Congress the core elements
of my budget plan, designed to change these policies of debt and
disinvestment and decline in return for thrift and investment and
growth, the Congress adopted that budget plan in record time --
the first time in 17 years a budget resolution has passed
Congress on time.

         When people say to me, well, what did you do in your
first 100 days, I say, what did the other guys do in their first
100 days?  (Applause.)  The United States Congress deserves a lot
of credit for taking all the heat after all these years of
antitax rhetoric -- no such thing as a good tax, taxes are
terrible.  They adopted a budget with 200 specific budget cuts
over and above the last budget adopted under the previous
administration, and some tax increases, 70 percent of which fall
on people with incomes above $100,000; over 50 percent of which
fall on people with incomes above $200,000; with an energy tax
that the middle class will have to help pay that is good for
conservation and good for the environment and good for the long-
term direction this country needs to go in -- budget cuts and
revenue increases.

         And we are already seeing the fruits of that.
Because of interest rates going down, the deficit this year is
going to be less than we thought it was going to be.  This is
something of very significant importance.  The financial markets
have clearly responded.  Stock prices are at all-time highs, and
many key interest rates, including home mortgage rates are at 20
year lows.

         As I said, this means $100 billion more in money
coming from refinancing of homes and businesses, credit card
rates, automobile interest rates going directly into the economy
over the next year.  And that's not my figure -- those are the
figures of the business writers who have examined the
circumstance that exists.

         These refinancing possibilities mean that farmers
and small businesspeople and homeowners are going to have a
better deal in their ordinary lives, but that money will then
flow back to more productive purposes in the economy.

         Along with the $514 billion deficit reduction
program, we're also trying to confront the long-term economic
problems of this country with a life-long learning package that
includes an attempt to devise apprenticeship opportunities of two
years after high school for every American who does not go on to
college; with initiatives to build a 21st century infrastructure
that focuses on technology as well as physical infrastructure;
with efforts to revitalize our community and to strengthen our
economy.

         As I said, I think to get this done -- and we're
coming back now to try to pass the details of the budget -- we
will have to begin to see the world new -- not as tax-and-spend,
not as trickle-down, but as invest-and-grow.  We'll have to think
of government not as the sole problem or the sole savior, but as
a partner with the private sector in trying to work our way out
of the problems that we have.

         We'll have to think about new approaches based on
old values, like work and faith and family and opportunity,
responsibility and community.  Our success will ultimately be
measured not by how many programs we've passed, but by whether we
improve the lives of our fellow Americans.  Not simply by what we
do for people, but by what we help people to do for themselves.

         We start, I think as we must, with honoring and
rewarding work.  Just 17 days into this administration, we made
family and medical leave the law of the land after eight years of
gridlock and delay and two vetoes.  Hard-working men and women
now can know that if they have to take a little time off for a
genuine family problem, they can do it without losing their jobs.
         Again, I say, I heard all the clamor about what a
terrible bill this was.  And I looked around the world, and a
hundred and some nations have found a way to give family leave
that we just couldn't find it in our heart, our minds, a way to
provide before we got around to doing it.  It's time Americans
put their actions where there rhetoric is, and that's what this
administration is trying to do.  (Applause.)

         Forty-four days into the administration we were
called upon to extend unemployment compensation to hundreds of
thousands of jobless men and women -- something now Congress will
do as a matter of course without regard to party.  Everybody is
willing to pay people to remain unemployed.  But this time we
changed the law so that we spend a small portion of that money to
offer the unemployed new opportunities for job training and
counseling to try to move them back to work more quickly, based
on a New Jersey experiment which shows clearly that we can do
that if we don't just pay people to stay out of work, but we take
some of that money to get them back to work.

         That's why we are trying to dramatically increase
the earned income tax credit to working poor people.  It is a
solemn commitment to those who work or care for our sick or tend
to our children or do our most difficult and tiring jobs, that
we're going to do our best to enshrine in our tax law and in our
country's life the principle that if you work for a living 40
hours a week and you've got children in the house, you should not
live in poverty.  I think that is an important principle and one
that's worth fighting for.  (Applause.)

         And that is why I tried to several weeks to pass an
emergency jobs program through the Congress which, I want to
point out, I did not campaign on in the campaign on 1992.  I ran
a fiscally responsible campaign.  I did not offer to do anything
that we did not pay for in the moment we did it.  And this jobs
program was a responsible approach based on the fact that the
American economy was not producing new jobs, even though we were
allegedly into the second year of a recovery.

         We're supposed to be in the 24th month of a
recovery, according to the economic statistics.  But jobs have
increased by only eight-tenths of one percent.  And private
sector jobs have not increased in that period.  If we were
following the trend of typical past recoveries, jobs would have
growth by more than seven percent.  We are still 3.5 million jobs
behind the rate generated in a normal economic recovery.  And we
have reclaimed only one-half the jobs we lost in the last
recession.  This past week, jobless claims went up yet again.  At
a time in which 16 million men and women are our of work, are
looking for full-time work with part-time jobs, I'm fighting to
give them a chance to earn a paycheck, to do useful work, to
support their families, to contribute to their communities.

         Now, the stimulus package that I offered, the jobs
plan, would not have revolutionized the economy.  It was a $16
billion program in a $6 trillion economy.  The purpose of it was
to do just exactly what it would have done.  It would have
lowered the unemployment rate by half a percent.  And it might
have sparked a new round of job creation in other sectors of the
economy.

         I decided to do it even though it was not part of my
campaign, because the economy was sluggish and because as I
looked around the rest of the world, I discovered that all of the
advanced industrialized countries were having great difficulty
creating jobs, even in recovery.

         If you go back and look at what happened to Europe
in the last decade, they had two different economic recoveries
that have produced virtually no new jobs in many of those
countries.  And all I wanted to do was to try to find a way to
deal with what I think is the number one problem.  If everybody
in this country who wanted a job had one, we wouldn't have half
the other problems we've got.  And I think every one of you,
without regard to party or philosophy, would agree on that.
(Applause.)

         There were two objections raised to the program.
Some said, well, you ought to pay for it all right now.  Well, we
had a five-year deficit reduction plan that reduces the deficit
by $514 billion.  And Congress pays for things all the time over
a multi-year period, number one.  Number two, because of
unpredicted reductions in defense, if we'd spent every penny I
recommended, we'd still be under the spending levels approved by
the Congress for this year.

         And the other thing people said, well, was, there's
a lot of pork in this plan.  Well, I don't know how you define
that.  I think if you put 700,000 kids to work this summer,
particularly under our plan, which for the first time said that
the at-risk kids had to do some education as well as take jobs --
(applause) -- we tried to take more pork out and put more
standards in -- it would be a good thing.  (Applause.)

         I think if you open these immunization centers this
summer; I think if you had more kids in summer Head Start and you
paid people to work in that; I think if you rehired 20,000 of
these police officers who were laid off because of tough economic
times and made the streets safer; I think if we accelerated
funding under the highway program, which has always had enormous
support from the other party, as well as from the Democrats; and
I think if we gave some more money to the mayors and the
governors of this country for job purposes, that would be a good
thing.  I don't think it would be a lot of pork.  It was amazing
to me to listen to some of the debate about the community
development program.

         I was a governor for 12 years.  I used that program.
You might quarrel with some of the things we did, but usually
what we did was good for creating jobs in my state.

         And the Republican Party had always supported
community development block grants before.  They thought mayors
and governors were smart enough to make the decisions.  I wanted
to give money to Governor Weld, a Republican Governor of
Massachusetts.  I thought he had enough sense to figure out how
to best spend the money here for the Massachusetts economy.  Or
the Republican mayor of York, Pennsylvania.  Or the Republican
mayor from Indiana, who's the head of the Republican Mayors
Association.  You know, all we did was change the occupants of
the White House.  We didn't change the party or the personality
of the governors and the mayors.  I don't know what happened that
made that program such a bad idea all of a sudden.  It was a good
idea.

         And, again, I tell you that it is not nearly as
important as the big picture budget that has already passed.  But
it is symbolic of the idea battle that we have to fight.  We have
to be prepared to think anew.  Now, if no western country is
creating jobs, even in the midst of economic recovery, it is not
readily apparent that the $100 billion we're going to put back
into the economy with lower interest rates are going to lead to a
whole lot of new jobs.  They may; it depends on how the money is
invested.

         That's the big deal -- the fact that we've got
interest rates down, we've passed the budget resolution, it's
going.  All I wanted to do was to strike a little match to that
and see if we couldn't put several hundred thousand people back
to work in useful places and see if that would help the economy
to get going on the job machine.  I think still think it was a
worthwhile effort.  And I'd a lot rather get beat trying to put
people to work than get beat fighting putting people to work.
(Applause.)

         Let me also tell you that I regret the partisan tone
of the rhetoric of the last several days, because a lot of the
things that I support have a lot of support among Republicans.
I'm for the line-item veto.  There are Democrats that are against
it, and Republicans that are for it.  I'm for the crime bill.  I
hope we can pass it with bipartisan support -- the Brady Bill and
more police on the street.  I'm for cuts in the budget that a lot
of people in my own party won't support.  But a lot of them voted
for cuts in the budget, because they thought it was a responsible
way to go overall.

         There are lots of things that I think we need to do
that I hope we can get bipartisan support for -- toughening the
child support system, having a national service program that will
give every young person in this country a chance to borrow the
money to go to college and pay it back either as a percentage of
their income at tax time so they can't beat the bill, or by
working it off and giving something to their country.  These are
things that ought to  have bipartisan support.  We cannot solve
the problems of this country if every last issue that comes up,
just because the President recommends it, becomes a source of a
filibuster in the Senate -- or, frankly, attracts only members of
my own party.  I don't want that.  I want us to debate these
ideas anew, to look at them anew, to take our blinders off.  And
I'm not going to be right about everything I recommend, but at
least I want us to be up there all working together fighting for
change.

         And let me say one thing in particular about the
work that two very important people in my administration are
doing -- the Vice President and the First Lady.  I had several
people -- I met with a lot of you before I came out here -- and
several of you said, well, I generally support what you're doing,
but you ought to bring that deficit down more.  And I will say to
you what I say to everybody:  Send me a list of the things you
want cut, because we found 200 things that we were cutting that
weren't cut in the previous budget, and we're not done yet.

         But I want you to know what this government is like
now.  In my judgment, if you want further meaningful cuts, you
have to do two things:  You have to look at the whole way the
federal government is organized, because there is a limit to how
much you can get just out of cutting defense unless you deal with
the way it is organized, like procurement and issues like that --
structural things.  And that's what the Vice President is
involved in -- this whole initiative to reinvent the government.
We've got hundreds of gifted people from all over America, coming
to work with us in Washington now, reexamining every last
government program, every last government organization, committed
to thinking about it anew.

         This fall, when we come out with our program, we're
going to ask the American people to think about the role of the
federal government -- what it should do, how it should be
organized -- and it's going to be a very challenging report.  I
hope all of you will read it and give it a lot of publicity.  And
on the tough things that we recommend, in terms of changes, I
hope we can get some good support without regard to party,
because a lot of the things that we have to do now require us to
rethink how this whole thing is organized.

         We've already cut 14 percent in administrative
costs, 25 percent of the personnel in the White House, and a lot
of other things that we can do symbolically and substantively
that will save billions of dollars.  But to get more, we're going
to have to literally rethink the whole government.

         The second point I want to make is, you can do all
that and, unless we address this health care crisis, the
government's deficit cannot be erased.  Under every scenario we
saw, from every political source -- that is, the Republicans and
the Democrats agreed, the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office
agreed, everybody agreed -- no matter how much we cut the
deficit, we could bring it down for five years.  But after that,
it would start going right back up again because of the
breathtaking increase in health care cost.

         The estimates are now that over a five-year period,
federal spending for Medicare and Medicaid alone will go up by 67
percent in five years.  Taking away the defense cuts, taking away
the interest savings, taking away the cuts in other government
programs, taking away the cuts in farm support programs, taking
away -- you name it; anything you want cut, you're just
transferring the money to health care.  And not new health care,
more money for the same health care.  So that this is not only an
incredibly compelling human issue -- how do you give coverage to
those who don't have it?  How do you give courage to those who
want to change jobs but can't because they had somebody in their
family sick, and the preexisting condition keeps them from
getting any health insurance -- but how do you restore sanity to
the nation's budget?

         And, by the way, how do you restore health to big
chunks of our economy?  A lot of our biggest and best companies
striving to me more competitive.  We say, we desperately want you
to start investing in America and stop investing so much of your
money to create jobs somewhere else.  And they say, give me a
break -- I'm spending 19 percent of payroll on health care.

         This country is spending 15 percent of its income on
health care.  No other country is up to 10 percent.  Only Canada
is over 9 percent.  So when people say -- you'll hear it all --
they'll say, oh, they're dealing with health care again, there
they go again; it's all taxes and terrible and everything -- you
figure out what you're paying right now.  Every one of you figure
out what you're paying for health care -- in taxes, premiums,
uncompensated care that gets shifted on to your health insurance
bills.

         And so I say to you, we have got to face some other
big fundamental issues.  Not just this budget, but how the
government is organized, what it delivers, whether it needs to
deliver what it does, whether it needs to stop doing some things
altogether.  And then, what are we going to do about health care?
We cannot go on ignoring the fundamental problems.  If you've got
it, it's still the best health care system in the world.

         There are a lot of things about it that are
wonderful.  I want the delivery system to stay in private hands.
I want people to still be able to pick their doctor.  I want the
best things about this health care system to stay just as it is.
But you cannot look at it as long and hard as we have without
concluding that we are spending a dime on the dollar on
unnecessary paperwork and bureaucratic and regulatory expenses.

         People say to me all the time, you've got to do
something about doctors' feels.  Let me tell you just one little
interest number.  In 1980, the average doctor, working in a
clinic, took home 75 percent of the money that came into the
clinic.  By 1990, that doctor was taking home 52 percent of the
money coming into the clinic.  Where did the rest of it go?
Mostly to paper, to regulation, mostly from the proliferation of
insurance policies, but some from what the government did.

         We can do better.  We must.  And we're going to bust
a gut trying in this administration.  We're going to do our best.
(Applause.)

         The last thing I want to say about this is, I ask
for your scrutiny and your understanding as we get into the
difficult business of political reform.  I intend to ask the
Congress to pass a tough campaign finance reform law.  I intend
to ask the Congress to adopt some restrictions on lobbying and
some disclosure requirements that are not there now.  We had the
toughest ethics rules any president ever imposed on his appointee
that prevent people from leaving my administration and going to
work anytime in the near future to make money as lobbyists in the
areas in which they worked for us.

         These things are important.  It may never be
possible to be perfect, but it is important that we take these
things on and that the voters of this country understand what is
at stake as these matters begin to be debated.

         And finally let me say -- I think it's important to
talk about today -- I'm doing my best to restore a sense of real
community in this country.  As I said right when I came to you
last year, we'd just seen Los Angeles racked by riots and we were
all talking about how we had to learn to live together without
regard to race or income or region.  I want to reiterate what I
said to you a year ago:  We don't have a person to waste in this
country, and we're wasting them by the bucketful.  We're letting
people go -- this way, that way, and the other way.  And that's
one of the reasons that I have said that we have to fight for a
society that is not at all permissive, but that is tolerant.

         Today in Washington, many Americans came to
demonstrate against discrimination based on their sexual
orientation.  A lot of people think that I did a terrible
political thing -- and I know I paid a terrible political price
-- for saying that I thought the time had come to end the
categorical ban on gays and lesbians serving in our military
service and that they should not be subject to other
discrimination in governmental employment.

         Let me tell you what I think.  This is not about
embracing anybody's lifestyle.  This is a question of whether if
somebody is willing to live by the strict code of military
conduct, if somebody is willing to die for their country, should
they have the right to do it?  I think the answer is yes.
(Applause.)  If somebody is willing -- (applause).

         But in a larger sense, I want to say to you that I
think the only way our country can make it is if we can find
somehow strength out of our diversity, even with people with whom
we profoundly disagree, as long as we can agree on how we're
going to treat each other and how we're going to conduct
ourselves in public forums.  That is the real issue.

         It's very ironic to me to see that the traditional
attacks on the position I've taken on this issue have come from
conservatives saying that I am a dangerous liberal.  I took on
two issues like this as Governor of Arkansas, and I was attacked
by liberals for what I did, and I want to tell you what they
were.  One was the leadership role I took in crafting a bill that
permitted people to educate their children at home, consistent
with their religious beliefs and their educational convictions,
as long as the kids could take and pass a test every year.  And
people say, oh, that's a terrible thing.  All those kids should
be required to be in a school.  How can you do that?  And I said,
because at least these people have coherent families and that's
still the most important unit of our society, and people ought to
have a chance to try other things.  And it wouldn't do the
schools any harm to have a little competition -- unsubsidized by
the taxpayers, just letting people do it.

         Two, when the fundamentalist religious groups in my
state were confronting a legal issue that swept the country in
the mid-'80s, a bunch of them came to me and said, we do not mind
having our child care centers subject to the same standards that
everybody else is subject to.  But it is a violation of our
belief to have to get a state certificate to operate what we
think is a ministry of our church.  Don't make us do that.  I
don't know if you remember this, but in one or two states there
were preachers that actually wound up going to jail over this
issue -- the certification of child care centers.

         We sat down and worked out a law that permitted
those churches to operate their child care centers without a
certificate from the state as long as they were willing to be
subject to investigation for health and fire safety, and as long
as they agreed to be in substantial compliance with the rules and
regulations that those who were certified observed.  And people
said, how can you do that?  You know how many complaints we've
had coming out of that, to the best of my knowledge?  Zero.  Not
a one.  Why?  Because they were good people; and they were
willing to play by the rules; and they wanted to have their
religious convictions; and they wanted to stick up for their
minister; and they desperately love the children that were in
their charge.  And we protected the public interest.

         But all the criticism I got was from the left, not
the right.  This doesn't have anything to do with left or right,
this is about whether we are going to live in a country free of
unnecessary discrimination.  You are free to discriminate in your
judgments about any of us -- how we look, how we behave, what we
are.  Make your judgments.  But if we are willing to live
together according to certain rules of conduct, we should be able
to do so.  That is the issue for America.  And it has ever been
unpopular at certain critical junctures.  But just remember this:
A whole lot of people came to this country because they wanted a
good letting alone.  (Applause.)  And that's what we ought to be
able to do today.  (Applause.)

         That's it.  I've already talked longer than I meant
to.  I'll still stay and answer the questions for the allotted
time.  We've got to change the direction of the country.  We've
got to compete in a new world we don't understand all the
dimensions of.  But we ought to be guided by three simple things:
How can we create opportunity; how can we require all of us to
behave more responsibly; and how can we build a stronger American
community.  And I don't believe that the answer necessarily has a
partisan tinge.  And I hope we can begin tomorrow the business of
going forward with what this country urgently needs to do.

         Thank you very much.  (Applause.)

                               END4:55 P.M. EDT