pd03jy95 The President's Radio Address...

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country song, ``They Changed Everything About Me But My Name.'' 
[Laughter] That's beginning to change as well. I want to have--for just 
a moment I want to have a serious conversation. The Vice President has 
outlined a great deal of what we have done--and I use the word ``we'' in 
the largest sense. One of them, our proudest achievements, has very 
little to do with me except that I made it possible, and I think the 
history books will reflect that Al Gore was the most influential and 
effec- 

[[Page 1115]]

tive Vice President of the United States in the history of our Republic 
through the 21st century.
    We were at the Small Business Conference the other day; we hauled 
out 16,000 Federal regulations that we were getting rid of because of 
the reinventing Government task force: cutting half the regulations of 
the Small Business Administration, 40 percent of the regulations of the 
Department of Education, dramatically changing the way the Occupational 
Safety and Health Administration is going to work, reducing the 
paperwork burdens of the Environmental Protection Agency by 25 percent, 
setting up a hotline so that if a small business person calls the EPA 
now, that person cannot be fined if he or she is calling for help to try 
to figure out how to solve a problem.
    These are important changes in the way our Government relates to 
people. But I have to tell you that what is going on in America today is 
more than just whether this administration is achieving things that are 
or are not known about. This is a period of deep and profound change in 
the whole world and in this country, the way we work, the way we live, 
the conditions in which we raise our children, the opportunities 
available to us, and the challenges confronting us. They're different. 
And all of us are the product of our own experiences. I tell everybody 
that works at the White House all the time, especially young people who 
see things they don't understand, I keep telling everybody we all see 
the world through the prism of our own experience. Even our imaginations 
are limited by what we have known and felt and seen.
    And yet, all these things are happening around us, some utterly 
wonderful and some utterly horrible that go beyond our ability even to 
imagine a resolution of. A lot of good things, the end of the cold war, 
the growth of the information age, the fact that a kid in the most 
remote mountain school in Arkansas can now hook into an Internet which 
will pull information out of a library in Australia, just for example, 
now, these are wonderful things. And we see all these things, and it's 
just staggering it's so wonderful. We see a lot of our old problems 
appear to be getting better. The crime rate as a whole is dropping in 
almost every major city in America. That's the good news. And I could 
give you 50 other examples of good news. We had the biggest expansion of 
trade opportunities in our country in the last 2 years that we have had 
in a generation, maybe ever.
    But underneath that, it seems that every opportunity has within it 
the possibility of something new going wrong. Crime rate goes down, but 
the arbitrary rate of violence among teenagers goes up, giving us 
chilling feelings about what the crime rate might be like in 10 or 15 
years. And more and more and more young kids are just being kind of left 
alone out there to raise themselves, struggling to figure out what to 
do, stuck in home environments, community environments, and school 
environments that aren't likely to help them to turn around the 
challenges they face.
    All this wonderful technology and this easily accessible information 
has its dark underside. You can get on the Internet now and tap into one 
of these fanatic extremists, and they will explain to you how you, too, 
can make a bomb just like the one that blew up the Federal building in 
Oklahoma City. The explosion of technology means that a radical 
religious group in Japan can figure out how to get a little bitty vial 
of gas and walk into a subway and break it open and kill a bunch of 
totally innocent people and put hundreds of others in the hospital.
    So you see the point I'm trying to make: There is so much good in 
the world, so much new possibility, but the Scripture tells us that the 
darkness that is in the human soul will be with us until the end of 
time, and those dark forces are finding new expressions as well. And 
we're all sitting around here trying to figure out how to make sense of 
this and what to do, so that what is really going on in Washington, 
which is confusing to people, is not much different than what's going on 
inside a lot of people's heads, which is confusing to people. And it's 
because it is really new.
    I am proud of the fact that this administration negotiated 
agreements, which means that there are no nuclear weapons pointed at the 
children of Arkansas since the dawn of the nuclear age. I'm proud of 
that. But the paradox is--let me just give you the para- 

[[Page 1116]]

dox--the paradox is a year or so ago, Hillary and I went to Riga, 
Latvia, to celebrate the withdrawal of Russian troops there for the 
first time since before World War II, tens of thousands of people in the 
street weeping with joy, loving America. A poll just came out and said 
that Bill Clinton was the most popular politician in Latvia. I'm trying 
to figure out how to get on the ballot there, give them some electoral 
votes. [Laughter]
    But then we go into--it was a wonderful survey. It wasn't me; I was 
America. It didn't have anything to do with me; I was the United States. 
But then we go behind closed doors into a meeting and the first thing 
they ask me for is an FBI office. Why? Because when you rip away the 
iron hand of communism and you take out the Russian army--there is this 
huge port, the largest city in Northern Europe that most people couldn't 
even find on a map here, that they're now terrified will become a great 
transit point for drug trafficking and organized crime of all kinds. The 
most popular thing we've done in Russia in the last year is not 
dismantling the nuclear weapons, it's opening an FBI office in Moscow. 
Why? Because they got rid of communism, and they didn't have things like 
the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Securities and Exchange 
Commission, so within no time at all, half of their financial 
institutions were controlled by organized crime.
    I say this to make a point. We have to go back deep inside now to 
our basic values and our basic institutions. And the debates we are 
having in Washington now are over fundamental things that we used to 
take for granted.
    When I was Governor here, in all the years until the last year when 
I ran for President, we only had an unemployment rate below the national 
average one month, one month. A lot of my legislators are out there. 
They remember how we struggled with that, but we had a consensus. We 
disagreed on the details, and we fought at election time, but there was 
a general consensus that if we made our State more attractive 
economically and that if we continued to invest in the skills of our 
people, that in the end that strategy would be rewarded. And it might 
take a decade to turn it around, but it would be rewarded.
    And I'm convinced that everybody in this room, in addition to the 
great leadership we have in our State today, played a role in the fact 
that we have an unemployment rate below the national average today. It 
did not happen overnight. It's all of you who are entrepreneurs, all of 
you who built your own companies, all of you who came in here and 
invested in our State from beyond our State's borders, sometimes from 
beyond our Nation's borders. It happened--being driven in a direction.
    But we basically accepted fundamental assumptions. A lot of that is 
out the window now. And I want you to try to understand what we're going 
through and why sometimes it doesn't seem to make sense when you see it 
over the airwaves. We are debating now really first principles in 
Washington. For example, there's a significant number of people in 
Congress who believe all of our problems are personal and cultural in 
nature, and if everybody would just wake up tomorrow and behave 
themselves, we wouldn't have any problems, and therefore, we don't need 
the Government to do anything, whatever the Government does will only 
make it worse. And if we just give you the money back, everything would 
be fine, because all of our problems are personal and cultural.
    Now, at a certain level that is true, isn't it? I mean, no matter 
what we do with the government in Arkansas or Washington, if people 
won't behave themselves and do right and make the most of their own 
lives, nobody can do that for you. That's something you have to do for 
yourselves. At some point, no matter how much adversity people face, 
some people make it, and some don't. And it's their responsibility.
    On the other hand, if you play the odds, you know that really 
successful communities, States, and nations do the best they can to make 
sure that everybody has the best chance to make the most of their own 
lives. I don't see it that way. I don't think that it's either--that 
it's an either/or thing, that all of our problems are personal or 
cultural on the one hand or political or economic on the other. I think 
the answer is both. But because things are changing and people are 
confused,

[[Page 1117]]

the extreme sides of the debate are really being argued out all over 
again, just as they were literally decades ago to the beginning of this 
century when the excesses of the industrial revolution were being felt.
    Let me give you another example leading from that. A debate--we 
never had that debate in Arkansas. We never saw any inconsistency 
between fighting teenage pregnancy on the one hand and trying to get 
more responsibility and investing more money in preschool education on 
the other. The idea was both, right?
    Give you another example--a lot of people feel flowing from the 
first debate that since the Government only messes things up, the 
fundamental responsibility of the Government is to maintain national 
defense, cut taxes, and balance the budget as quickly as possible 
without regard to the other consequences of what's being done. They 
honestly believe this. This is not a--I'm being, I think, fair and 
accurate.
    Then there are others who feel that the budget deficit is a terrible 
thing but not the only deficit the country has; and that if we don't 
educate our kids and if we don't at least take care of our fundamental 
obligations to the elderly people on Medicare who don't have enough 
money to live on as it is, that the country will come apart at the seams 
more; and that we have certain common responsibilities. And some people 
think that if we never balance the budget, it's better to keep investing 
that money.
    But I don't see it that way. I think that we ought to balance the 
budget, because we never had a permanent deficit before 12 years ago--I 
mean, 12 years before I took office--we haven't had a balanced budget 
since '69. But in the seventies, all of you will remember we had all 
that stagflation. Oil prices were going crazy, and the reasons for the 
deficits were largely localized and--we never had a built-in deficit 
every year, year-in and year-out, in this country's history until 1981. 
And we've taken it down by a trillion dollars over a 7-year period since 
I've been in office.
    We ought to balance the budget. Next year--we'll be seeing more 
money on interest on the debt next year than we will spend on national 
defense. The budget would be balanced this year, right now, because of 
the cuts we've already made, were it not for the interest we have to pay 
just in the 12 years before I showed up up there. That's how big a 
problem it is. It erodes our competitive position in world markets. It 
drives our incomes down. And it undermines our ability to borrow to 
invest in the future.
    You know, there's a difference between borrowing money to build a 
business or buy a house and borrowing money to go out to eat tonight. 
There's a big difference. And we've got it all mixed up. You can't tell 
what we're doing now. So we need to do that.
    But we also have to realize--I think that we do have more than one 
deficit. And at the end--in this information age and this global 
economy, for us to be cutting education is like cutting defense at the 
height of the cold war. I don't think it makes any sense.
    But there is this ideological debate over--and the third big debate, 
maybe the most important one of all, is the one that--there are people 
who honestly believe that if you think all of our problems are personal 
and cultural and moral, if you believe the Government can't do anything 
right but mess up a one-car parade, the only thing it's supposed to do 
is national defense, cut taxes, and balance the budget, then a lot of 
the same people believe that anyone who disagrees with them are 
intrinsically a threat to the Republic and anything you do to beat them 
or put them in a bad light is all right, so that the politics of 
demonization, the meanness quotient of our politics, the distortion 
level of it has increased quite a bit in recent years.
    Now, I think it's good to fight and argue, but I think we're around 
here after way over 200 years because, no matter how the arguments came 
out, we kept this thing going in the middle of the road and going 
forward, not too far left, not too far right, but always forward. And 
that's why we're still around.
    But I'm just telling you these are fundamental debates that are 
going on so that it's no longer the kind of normal debate you see in 
Washington. Instead of the range of difference being like this, it's 
more like this now. And it's because of all these changes that are going 
on in the country and in the world.

[[Page 1118]]

    Let me just give you some specific examples because I think it's a 
phony debate. I think we need to worry about going forward, now how far 
we can get out on these extremes. I think we need to return to our basic 
values. You know, go back and read the Constitution, the Declaration of 
Independence. We got together as a Nation because we thought it was 
self-evident that all people were endowed by God with certain 
inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
happiness and that it was necessary to form governments to pursue these 
ends.
    And our Constitution was created with the flexibility to enable us 
to change to meet the challenges of new times and with the iron-clad 
guarantees of the Bill of Rights that there were limits beyond which 
Government could not go in infringing upon the freedoms of individuals. 
And all of our debates, if we'll get back to those basic things and the 
facts, will lead us to a practical solution that will push us ahead. But 
I'll just give you some examples.
    The family leave law: There were people who were ideologically 
opposed to the family leave law because they said Government shouldn't 
tell business anything. But the truth is that most parents are also 
workers today. Whether you think it's a good idea or a bad idea, whether 
it's a single-parent household or a two-parent household, most parents 
are also workers. If you believe that the family is the most important 
institution in our society, on the one hand, and you also believe that 
if we're not competitive globally, on the other, we're in deep trouble, 
then this country has no more important objective than enabling people 
to not have to make a false choice. We must enable people to be 
successful parents and successful workers. That's why I was for the 
family leave law.
    But not everybody feels this way. That's big debate up there. And 
when you hear this rhetoric you have to understand that. There are a lot 
of people--there are honest people who honestly believe that it was a 
wrong thing to do.
    It sure didn't hurt the economy. We've had 6.7 million new jobs 
since it passed, record numbers of new business formations in 1993 and 
1994. So all those predictions that it was going to hurt the economy or 
be burdensome were wrong. It's an ideological debate.
    Second, the environment: Most people, I believe, here think that we 
have to be able to grow the economy in a way that preserves the 
environment so our grandchildren and our grandchildren's grandchildren 
will still have Arkansas to live in. And a big part of what we define of 
Arkansas is that. And most of the time when we fought about the 
environment when we were--when I was Governor, we fought over how to 
achieve that goal and whether the Government was going too far, the 
regulations should be done in a certain way or another way. But we were 
fighting over how to achieve that goal.
    That is not the debate up there anymore. The debate is far more 
fundamental. There are people who believe, ``Well, it's a nice thing to 
preserve the environment, but in the end nobody will ever really let it 
go down the tubes. And the Government will mess it up. Get the 
Government out of it. And if the environment is abused in the short run, 
so what. Somehow the planet will regenerate itself.''
    Let me tell you--a committee of Congress just the other day voted to 
eliminate all controls on offshore oil drilling in the United States, 
all of them, everywhere, without regard to any evidence of how much oil 
is there or whether it's worth the risk or whether there's any evidence 
of safe drilling or what the differences in the areas are or what would 
happen to tourism or what would happen to retirement or what would 
happen to anything. Why? Because they're ideologically opposed to the 
Government having any kind of partnership at all with the private sector 
on this.
    And that's just one example. But I'm telling you, folks, it is an 
economic as well as an environmental issue. We're on our way to 
Portland, Oregon, the Vice President and I are, when we leave you. And 
we're dealing with a terrible set of problems up there, where a lot of 
the timber people want to cut more timber in the forest, and because the 
waters have been more polluted they're losing the salmon. And that's 
just one example.
    I believe we've got to find a way to do both. Our State has used the 
Nature Conservancy more than any State in the country,

[[Page 1119]]

I think, to buy land to set aside, because, as Will Rogers said, ``They 
ain't making no more of it.'' And the people who supported it were the 
business people in our State. This is a fundamental debate.
    I'll give you a third example: Dr. Foster. Al Gore alluded to him. 
Dr. Foster. There are people in Washington, and they were--they had 
enough influence to keep his nomination from coming to a vote--who 

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