Article 4425 of alt.politics.clinton: Path: bilver!tous!peora!masscomp!usenet.coe.montana.edu!caen!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!news.acns.nwu.edu!uicvm.uic.edu!u45301 Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago Date: Monday, 17 Aug 1992 22:41:58 CDT From: Mary Jacobs Message-ID: <92230.224158U45301@uicvm.uic.edu> Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: FAMILY VALUES Lines: 483 SEND COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS REGARDING THIS INFORMATION TO THE CLINTON/GORE CAMPAIGN AT 75300.3115@COMPUSERVE.COM (This information is posted for public education purposes. It does not necessarily represent the views of The University.) ======================================================================== Family Values Address Governor Bill Clinton Cleveland City Club Cleveland, Ohio May 21, 1992 Thank you. Thank you very much. It certainly was a unique introduction and it was partly true. Maybe you ought to run for President. I have really looked forward to coming here today, and I thank you for the opportunity to appear. As has already been said, I want to depart from the standard message I normally give talking about my eleven years as governor and the work I've done to generate jobs and educate children and balance budgets and bring people together and try to ignore traditional Democratic and Republican solutions to problems when they are plainly out of date. For several weeks, I have planned to come here to discuss what stands at the heart of America's Dream, and as much of the core of the disappearance of the American Dream: the American family and its problems. But this topic has acquired, as all of you know now, quite a bit more currency because of the recent speeches that the President gave at the Notre Dame commencement and the speech that the Vice President gave at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco the other day. The President's speech extolled the virtues of family life, lamented the breakdown of the family, said family life had more to do with what happens in America than what goes on in Washington -- that's probably true, and thank goodness. But it offered no real action agenda for improving the plight of our most troubled families. The Vice President's speech has become known by its reference to the television show "Murphy Brown" -- and you've all probably had your laughs about that -- but the fact is that the Vice President's speech had more substance than the President's. While the President urged Notre Dame graduates to help solve our nation's social and family crisis, it typically offered no agenda and assumed no responsibility. Vice President Quayle, while repeating the sad statistics of teen pregnancy and divorce and out-of-wedlock birth in America, reiterated the empowerment agenda that is most closely identified, among Republicans, with HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, and among Democrats with the Democratic Leadership Council -- a group that I chaired when we came here to Cleveland and met in national convention last year -- more home ownership for poor people, urban enterprise zones, and welfare reform designed to encourage work and independence. Unfortunately, the Vice President's speech also is, in my view, cynical election-year politics in that it ignores the relationship of our family problems to our national economic decline, holds out Murphy Brown as a bigger problem than TV's crass commercialism and glorification of selfishness and violence, and denies the Administration's responsibility to face the full range of America's staggering family problems. I want to talk about these issues today because family questions are terribly important to our nation and to me personally. As a public official, I have worked on family issues harder and longer than anybody else running for president this year. And I do believe that they are at the heart of our national discontent. And as well as anyone, I know the importance of family values to personal growth. In 1946, I was born to a widowed mother. My father died in a car wreck three months before I was born. Shortly after I was born, my mother went back to nursing school to learn skills that would enable her to support me. Until I was four, I was fortunate enough to be was raised by loving grandparents of modest means but great determination -- who began teaching me to count and read when I was two. My mother's extended family included great-grandparents and great- uncles and aunts, all of whom were poor or nearly so, but they were wonderful, old-fashioned country people who brought love and joy and values to my life. When I was four, my mother remarried. And though their marriage was not free of difficulty -- some of which has been reported in the press -- my brother and I benefited from the love of my step- father and his extended family. They enriched my life and my sense of what I could do with it. My mother has been widowed in her life three times, but luckily is married to a wonderful man who has also been a friend and inspiration to me. Every year I ask all the relatives from all my extended families, and my wife's family, to gather at Christmas time. It's an amazing celebration of the different threads of family, a broad fabric of love and support that raised a child from modest means to a rewarding career in public service and a serious campaign for the presidency of the United States. I know the value of family. Over 20 years ago, I met and fell in love with a wonderful woman in law school who would become my wife and a lot of my life. It was Hillary who, in 1971, was already concerned about the problems of poor children and their parents, and who began to teach me about them then. In 1975, we married. In 1977, after I became Attorney General in my state, my wife founded a remarkable organization called the Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children. In that year, long before it was the national rage, she organized the conference called Parenting is Primary. In 1979, when I first became governor, with my wife's help, we began to try and build a pro-family policy for our state. In 1980, our one and only child Chelsea was born. She's been the great joy of our life, and watching her grow and flourish has given me a greater sense of urgency about the task of helping all of our children and their parents to do better. Over the last 12 years, those efforts have evolved into initiatives to lower the infant mortality rate through expanded material and child health services. To reduce teen pregnancy through aggressive and often controversial but value-based sex education efforts. To enhance child care for working families through an innovative voucher system. To reduce long-term welfare dependence by aggressively promoting more education, and training, and child care, and medical coverage for the children of welfare families, then requiring parents to take available work. To increase pre-school programs for poor children with a special emphasis on involving parents as their children's first teachers through a remarkable program we borrowed from the nation of Israel called HIPPY -- Home Instruction Program for Pre-School Youngsters -- a program in which even illiterate parents are taught to spend 20 minutes a day, five days a week, 30 weeks a year preparing their children to learn. And finally, we've worked to increase child support enforcement through innovative efforts like reporting every delinquent parent who owes more than a $1,000 to every major credit agency in our state. The thrust of all these efforts is to find, what I would call, a third way to approach the American family -- beyond the traditional politics of both parties, beyond the Administration's cheerleading for family values on the one hand, and on the other hand, the old big-government notion that there's a program for every social problem. There is a third way, a common-sense path that offers more opportunity to families in return for more personal responsibility and the assumption of more family values. Family values alone can't feed a hungry child. And material security alone cannot provide a moral compass. We must have both. There is a way to embrace family values and enhance the value of America's families at the same time. A president should do both. President Bush is right to lament the high rate of teen pregnancy, yet he does not bring value-based sex education and health clinics into our schools to prevent pregnancies in the first place. He is right to decry the high divorce rate, yet he has no national economic plans to help families under economic strains. The President is right to speak out on the violence that stalks our children. And I believe he's been wrong to cut back the funds that cities like Cleveland can use to hire more policemen for their streets -- and he is wrong to oppose the Brady Bill that your Congressman sponsored and even President Ronald Reagan supports to require a waiting period before people can purchase handguns so that their criminal and mental health history and their ages can be checked. Like any parent, I'm troubled by the gratuitous violence and sex and mixed moral signals we see on television. The same tough value questions for America's children and parents run from the affluent suburbs on New England to the poorest blocks of South Central Los Angeles -- and they reach into our own family too, with Hillary as a working mother and our daughter Chelsea, who's about to become a teenager. And if those questions are hard for us, with all the privileges that God has given us, think about how much tougher they are for most families who are working harder for less money these days, and how devastating they can be for those families confronted with layoffs, illnesses, alcohol and drug abuse, poverty, or a violent neighborhood. The question is not are family values important? Of course they are. It's not are they under fire? You bet they are. It's not is TV destructive of family values. All too often it is. The question is what are we going to do about it? It isn't enough for America's leaders to blame past social programs or current TV programs. It isn't enough for Americans to change channels. We need to change course. Family values can't simply be Washington code for Beltway Republicans who really mean, "you're on your own" -- or Beltway Democrats, who want to spend more of your tax money on programs that don't embody those values. If family values are going to mean something, we must offer a nation a third way. A nation that guarantees opportunity for every family, but a society that demands responsibility from every individual. Of course there's a values crisis in America. But there's an action gap as well. Addressing one without the other isn't a plan of action, it's posturing to distract from inaction. Today the dominant message from this Administration is, "You're on your own." Parents have to work two jobs and spend more hours at work and too little time with their kids because wages are declining in America, you're on your own. If parents without health care who live in deadly fear they won't be able to care for their children without going bankrupt, they're on their own. If poor, uneducated parents need pre-school for their children so they'll have a chance to do better than their parents, well, they're on their own. The problem is, nobody is on their own in this country, we're all in this together. The more we ignore these problems today, the more we'll all pay for them tomorrow in lost economic strength, in increased violence, in costlier jails, in poorer schools, and lost futures. As my friend Governor Ann Richards of Texas said of the looters and the shooters of the streets of Los Angeles: "These young hoodlums who burn and batter and turn our streets into killing fields were once our children -- small and helpless and needing our attention and our love, and we let them go --- tossed them aside like yesterday's news. Now they are making headlines that we don't want to read. God may forgive them but we can't condone their action or reclaim their lives. They are lost to us. This tragedy must end with this generation. It must stop now." A very great Republican President, Theodore Roosevelt, once called the Presidency a Bully Pulpit. Then President Kennedy said that the Presidency was the vital center of action. Both presidents were right. A president's words can move a nation, but talk must be backed up with action or we risk diminishing the Bully Pulpit into a Pulpit of Bull. When I was born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946, our state's per-capita income was barely half the national average. Though my family and I later moved into a middle-class life, thanks to both my step- father and my mother working, in the beginning, like most people in my state, we were poor. But one of the values my family pounded into me was that if I worked hard and played by the rules, I'd be rewarded -- and I have been, beyond my wildest dreams. We were taught to take responsibility for ourselves and for each other. And we were taught that if we did, we would do better. I understand something about hard times and how hard things can get. My mother was widowed before I was born and I lived with my grandparents when I was little as I said. My most vivid memory of my mother and childhood was when I went to visit her at nursing school when I was three, and when my grandmother and I pulled out of the station, she knelt down by the side of the railroad tracks and cried. I remember that to this day. I remember how she bore her grief every day because she believed that, if she sacrificed in the short run, in the long run she could build a better life for me. Now there are millions of stories like that in America today. Remember, most poor people, those with and without jobs, did not loot and riot in Los Angeles, because their values kept them from doing so. They would not do wrong. Most Americans today do give their children love and discipline and respect for others and for the law. There is a great deal of love in the poorest welfare families in America today. But we have to face the hard truth that too many Americans are cut off from these values and the life that we want them to live, that reinforces those values. And too many Americans who live by their values are denied the progress they were promised -- the progress that was real for the poor of my generation. We simply cannot go on under these circumstances being the only major nation in the world without a family policy -- one that enshrines family values by placing a value on family. We've tried to develop one in Arkansas. And I outlined it to you a moment ago. And I think we need on in America. Here is a good beginning: First, we should reward work and family. Today millions of Americans work full time but don't make enough to lift their families out of poverty. That's wrong. No one who works full-time and has children at home should be poor in America. We should expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to guarantee a "working wage" to lift above the poverty line anyone with a family who's working full time. This initiative is not terribly expensive. It won't require us to spend one red cent for any public bureaucracy. Yet, it will reward work and lift one million working poor families and their children out of poverty. Second, we need to reform our welfare system so that it puts people back to work and ends permanent dependency. In Arkansas, under the Federal Family Support Act of 1988, which I helped to draft as the governor's representative, we've created a system of training, and vouchers for day care, and medical coverage for children so that welfare families can return to the dignity of a job once again. As a result, our welfare rolls have grown less than the national average in the last three years, even in spite of the recession and high unemployment. The truth is, most people on welfare don't like it any more than you do. A few years ago, I asked the woman in our welfare-to-work program in Arkansas what she liked best about her new job. And she said -- wasn't earning a paycheck -- it was knowing that when her son went to school and they asked him what your mother does for a living, he could give an answer. People want the dignity of work. We should give everyone the chance to have that kind of dignity. We should give everyone on welfare the education, training, child care and medical coverage for their children they need. But I think we should go beyond the present law. After two years, if people can't find private sector employment, I think they should be required to do public service work in return for the income. We can end welfare as we know it, not by punishing the poor, but by empowering them to take care of their children and to be role models. Third, we need to do more to protect America's children from the consequences of divorce and absent fathers -- and on some occasions, absent mothers. I was born to a single mother who was lucky enough to have the support of an extended family. Today, in the governor's office, I have old pictures of my grandfather and my great-grandfather. Unfortunately, too few children know who their great-grandparents were, and too many have parents who should pay for their upbringing but don't. We need to get tough on child support enforcement with a nationwide crackdown on deadbeat parents. In our state, if you fall more than a thousand dollars behind in your child support, we report you to every major credit agency in the state. People shouldn't be able to borrow money for other things before they take care of their children. Because of that and other efforts, like putting the name and social security number of a father on a birth certificate if a mother shows up to give birth without a father -- thus shifting the burden to the man to disprove his heritage -- we collected more than $41 million from "deadbeat parents" in 1991 -- money that we didn't have to pay in welfare or other public spending. These are the kinds of things that we ought to do. We have to do more of them. We must make the toughest possible child support enforcement efforts in this country. We should enlist major credit agencies all across the country to follow the example that Arkansas and a few other states have. We ought to say to people everywhere, "Pay for your children first or you shouldn't get credit." We ought to have a national system of child support collection utilizing the Internal Revenue Service and tax records. I'm tired of seeing custodial parents bear the whole burden for the problem of raising their children. Governments can't raise children -- people do -- and the people who bring children into this world should all bear a responsibility for raising them. Fourth, we need to help parents do the best possible job of rearing their kids. Government can't create good parents, but it can make it easier for them to tend to their children's needs. In 1988, George Bush promised to make sure, and I quote, "women don't have to worry about getting their jobs back after having a child or caring for a child during a serious illness." But when Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, George Bush vetoed it. I would sign it. Other nations do the same thing. Millions of Americans are already caught in a squeeze between taking care of their parents and taking care of their children. We should not now make them choose between work and family -- not if we are going to be a pro-family country where most parents have to work. Fifth, we can also bolster the family's crucial role in education. We should fully fund the Head Start program and quit delaying it. But in doing it, we should put increased emphasis on enlisting parents, even illiterate parents, as their children's first teachers. As I said earlier, the HIPPY program in Arkansas trains welfare mothers to teach their pre-school children to read. The Head Start programs with the most long-lasting benefits for children are those in which the parents' role is greatest, no matter how limited the parents' own educational skills. Our schools should also reinforce these family values and parental involvement by bringing more parents in. Schools all over America can follow the example of the Beasley Academic Center, a public junior high school in Chicago. It's located in a neighborhood with the highest murder rate in all of Illinois. But every week, 75 fathers and even more mothers regularly volunteer in the schools. Against the odds, this school ranks in the top 10% of test scores in the state, with no guns, no drugs, no dropouts -- in part because of a culture which includes a dress code, strong family values, and parental role models. Not just talk, action! Sixth and lastly, I want to ensure that American families and individuals make the best personal decisions with their life with a full sense of personal responsibility and concern for the consequences of their behavior. That means letting teens know that it is wrong for children to have children, and also providing them with the education about how to prevent that. In Arkansas, my nationally renowned health director, Dr. Joycelyn Elders and I, fought for school-based health clinics and sex education. It wasn't popular and it still isn't easy, but with teen pregnancy and AIDS claiming more and more of our young people, it is now a matter of life and death. There are many other issues that we have to face: restoring economic growth to our nation so we can restore economic strength to our families, providing affordable health care to all of our families and their children, giving poor people more say over their own lives through initiatives like community policing and tenant management of housing projects and preserving personal and family privacy -- including, in my view, not repealing Roe v. Wade. The President says he wants private school choice even if it means taking public money away from public schools that are already underfunded compared to many other nations. He's willing to make it a crime for a woman to exercise her right to make the most private choice of all. I don't understand those priorities. When my daughter was in her last month of sixth grade last year, I remember taking her to school one day -- as I do everyday when I'm home -- and seeing a very handsome man walking his child to school. He had two other little children with him. And one of these little children came running up to me, holding out his hands and jumping up into my arms. He held me very tight. Now, as you know, I'm a politician, so I love that -- I mean, the baby wanted to kiss me. But, if you know anything about child development -- this child was almost two years old -- it's not a very good sign for a two- year-old child still to be indiscriminately bestowing this sort of affection. So I asked this man, I said, "How many children do you have?" He said, "five." I said, "You mean you have the one that went in there, these two, and two others?" And he said, "Oh, no, no, these two are not mine." He said, "My wife and I had a daughter who died. And in honor of her memory, we decided that we would spend the rest of our lives, serving as foster parents for children in need. These two children I have are not mine, they were abandoned by their mother, alone at home, for two whole days." They were twenty months old. "So the state gave them to us to care for for a while and we're loving them and hoping that their mother can learn to love them and be a good parent and eventually to take them back." There are millions of children like that all over this country -- hanging in the balance. They are part of our national family. Of course, we must exhort their parents to do a better job, and we must write into our social programs incentives for stronger family values. But we cannot ignore the plain need for a national policy to value families...to reconnect all Americans to our most cherished values and the idea of progress for those who live by those values. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to build the bridge across that gulf that stands wide today between what we are as a nation and what we are meant to be. We must believe that we once again can make a difference, that tomorrow will be better than today if we build that bridge and make it so. We have the tools. The question is do we have the vision and the will. This election will tell the tale. Thank you very much.