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Article 4425 of alt.politics.clinton:
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Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Monday, 17 Aug 1992 22:41:58 CDT
From: Mary Jacobs <[e-mail]>
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Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEXT: FAMILY VALUES
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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         to problems when they are plainly out of date.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.