Home > 1996 Presidential Documents > pd04no96 Telephone Remarks With Religious and Community Leaders in Atlanta,...pd04no96 Telephone Remarks With Religious and Community Leaders in Atlanta,...
<DOC> [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents] [frwais.access.gpo.gov] [Page i-ii] Monday, November 4, 1996 Volume 32--Number 44 Pages 2181-2264 Contents [[Page i]] Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents [[Page ii]] Addresses and Remarks Anti-cancer initiatives, announcement--2193 Arizona, Arizona State University in Tempe--2251 Colorado Community in Denver--2246 Democrats in Denver--2241 Democratic National Committee Saxophone Club Presidential victory concert--2234 Georgia Macon--2185 Religious and community leaders, telephone remarks in Atlanta-- 2181 Henry Ossawa Tanner painting, presentation--2233 Illinois, Chicago--2217 Michigan, Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti--2235 Minnesota, Minneapolis--2211 Missouri, University City--2207 Nevada, Las Vegas--2256 Ohio, Ohio State University in Columbus--2220 Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia--2225 Radio address--2191 Addresses and Remarks--Continued Tennessee, Vanderbilt University in Nashville--2200 Virginia, Springfield--2195 Bill Signings National Invasive Species Act of 1996, statement--2193 Presidential and Executive Office Accountability Act, statement-- 2192 Proclamations National Adoption Month--2230 National American Indian Heritage Month--2234 To Modify Provisions on Upland Cotton and for Other Purposes--2231 Statements by the President See Bill Signings Supplementary Materials Acts approved by the President--2264 Checklist of White House press releases--2263 Digest of other White House announcements--2262 Nominations submitted to the Senate--2263 Editor's Note: The President was in Las Cruces, NM, on November 1, the closing date of this issue. Releases and announcements issued by the Office of the Press Secretary but not received in time for inclusion in this issue will be printed next week. WEEKLY COMPILATION OF ------------------------------ PRESIDENTIAL DOCUMENTS Published every Monday by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC 20408, the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents contains statements, messages, and other Presidential materials released by the White House during the preceding week. The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents is published pursuant to the authority contained in the Federal Register Act (49 Stat. 500, as amended; 44 U.S.C. Ch. 15), under regulations prescribed by the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register, approved by the President (37 FR 23607; 1 CFR Part 10). Distribution is made only by the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents will be furnished by mail to domestic subscribers for $80.00 per year ($137.00 for mailing first class) and to foreign subscribers for $93.75 per year, payable to the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. The charge for a single copy is $3.00 ($3.75 for foreign mailing). There are no restrictions on the republication of material appearing in the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents. [[Page 2181]] <DOC> [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents] [frwais.access.gpo.gov] [Page 2181-2185] Monday, November 4, 1996 Volume 32--Number 44 Pages 2181-2264 Week Ending Friday, November 1, 1996 Telephone Remarks With Religious and Community Leaders in Atlanta, Georgia October 25, 1996 Thank you very much, my good and long-time friend Andrew Young. And I want to thank all of those who are gathered here at Paschal's in Atlanta. We have a good crowd of folks here. I know we've got about 300 ministers and 600 elected officials from across the country. We've got people in homes and churches and church conferences. I'm glad to be joined here by two of my good friends and associates, Alexis Herman, who is the Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison at the White House; and Carol Willis, who is with the Democratic National Committee, who helped to put this phone call together. I know that Mayor Cleaver is on the phone; Congressman Donald Payne, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus; Congressman and Reverend Floyd Flake, my longtime friend and one on my earliest supporters; our campaign cochairs, Alma Brown and Congressman John Lewis, who was just with me at this rally in Atlanta. And I understand that Reverend Henry Lyons, the president of the National Baptist Convention, is on the phone, and I want to thank you, Reverend Lyons, for your efforts to restore calm in the aftermath of last night's unfortunate events in St. Petersburg. We all have a responsibility to foster a climate of reconciliation and peace and to address the underlying causes of this outbreak of violence as well, and I thank you for what you're doing there in St. Petersburg; it's important to all of us in America. And I want to say a word of recognition to Bishop Chandler Owens of the Church of God and Christ and to others in that congregation. Let me say one of the oldest and most distinguished pastors of the Church of God and Christ, from my home State of Arkansas, passed away the day before yesterday, Elder Famous Smith, and I want to extend my sympathies to all of you who knew him. We just have a few days to go in this election. We just had a great rally in Atlanta, and we had several thousand people there, and we focused on young people and their future. I talked about my plans to open the doors of college education to all Americans. I also challenged these young people to take some time to serve in their communities, especially to teach young children to read. And I guess that I'd like to begin by saying I ran for President not only to enact certain policies that I think are important for the 21st century--to give us a strong economy, a clean environment, the world's best educational system, a way of dealing with the problems abroad to make America safer and more secure and a way of driving down the crime rate and the violence rate here at home. I had certain policies I wanted to implement, but I also wanted to change the way our country was working. Politics for so long in America has been about dividing people. And at the national level, especially, the whole rhetoric, the language that you use, the labels that are put on people, always about dividing us one from another, whereas that's not the way we run anything else. Those of you that are listening to me, you couldn't run a church that way. Atlanta couldn't have put on the Olympics that way. We're having a brilliant Major League World Series; if all of a sudden one of the teams starts calling their own team members names in public, they're not going to win. I tell you, whichever team does that, the other team is going to win. And so our national politics had gotten to the point where we were running it the way we wouldn't run our families, our businesses, our churches, our common community endeavors. [[Page 2182]] Yesterday I was in the town of Lake Charles, Louisiana--has a very dynamic young woman mayor named Willie Mount. And she got the community, which is a very biracial and increasingly multiethnic community, to adopt the slogan of ``moving forward together.'' Atlanta now, I think, is one of the, literally, the urban centers of the world, because 40 years ago it became the city too busy to hate. And yet, national politics was dominated essentially by negative political ads and name- calling. And we changed all that. I wanted to have an administration that looked like America and an administration that worked more like the other things that worked in America. And one of the reasons I spend so much time on community colleges and one reason I try to open the doors of college to every American, to make sure every person would be guaranteed at least 2 years of education after high school is that I think our country ought to work more the way these community colleges do. If you go to one, they're not bureaucratic; they're flexible; they're changing all the time. They have to meet high standards of performance or they go broke. Everybody that graduates from them gets hired. And they're open to everybody and everybody is treated the same. That's what I'm trying to do for America. So I'm proud of the results we've achieved. It's not only true that the overall economy is better, but we have, according to the Government statistics from the Census Bureau just last month, the biggest decline in inequality among working people in 27 years, the biggest drop in child poverty in 20 years, the biggest drop in poverty among female head of households in 30 years, and the lowest overall poverty rate among African-Americans and American senior citizens ever recorded. Now, African-Americans have had a higher increase in their average earnings in the last 2 years, even in the overall economy. And things like homeownership, which is at a 15-year high overall, are much up among African-Americans. The Small Business Administration has doubled its loans overall and tripled its loans to women and minorities. And we haven't been making loans that violate our standards of quality. We're just outreaching, working hard, trying to move this country together and move this country forward. I'm sure most of you on this phone call know, we have appointed more African-Americans to important positions in the Cabinet and the White House, in the administration, on the Federal bench than any other administration in history by a good long ways. And yet, I'm proud of the fact that my Federal judges, even though there have been more women and minority appointments by far than any previous administration, the American Bar Association has given higher ratings to my Federal judges than any other President since the rating system began, which proves that we can have excellence and diversity, which proves you can have affirmative action and equal opportunity and high standards. When we were fighting for the battle over affirmative action, the battle which still rages in our country, and it became all the rage to just say, ``Let's get rid of it,'' I said, ``No, we ought to mend it, not end it.'' And I believe my view is beginning to prevail in the world and in the United States. I was in Houston the other day, which is hardly a bastion of strength for the Democratic Party and the mayor there, who is a very talented mayor, explicitly, forthrightly, and aggressively defended the city's affirmative action policy and still won support for reelection from over 80 percent of the people in his city. And so I think our ``mend it, not end it'' policy in the end will prevail. I believe that the economic efforts we have made are important. You know, our campaign became the first campaign ever to invest some of the money that we have to save that we get from the taxpayers and we have to save to pay bills and make up for any mistakes that have been made and make sure all the accounting is right. Peter Knight, our campaign chairman, announced that we were going to deposit millions of dollars in four leading minority banks in America; no campaign had ever done this-- two African-American banks, including the Citizens Trust here in Atlanta, and two Hispanic banks, and I'm proud of that. The empowerment zones that we created and the enterprise communities we created, and the community development banks that [[Page 2183]] we created, including one worth almost $500 million in Los Angeles-- these are beginning to loan money to people and to create jobs. In Detroit, under the leadership of Mayor Archer, when I took office, the Detroit unemployment rate was nearly 9 percent. Today, the unemployment rate in Detroit is 4\1/2\ percent. The empowerment zone has generated $2 billion in private sector capital. So we can turn our cities around. In virtually every city in the country there has been a big drop in the violent crime rate as we put more police officers on the street and adopt strategies to prevent crime from happening in the first place. So I believe we're moving in the right direction there. We still have a lot of challenges in the future, and I would just like to mention two or three, if I might, that you can play a particular role in. Our young people are still faced with a lot of challenges. And you know that as well as I do. If anyone had told me 4 years ago we could bring the violent crime rate in America down 4 years in a row to a 10- year low, but we just barely make a dent in crime among young people, people under 18, I would have had a hard time believing that. If anyone had told me 4 years ago our efforts would stem a lot of the flow of drugs into America, we'd have a 30 percent decline in cocaine use and a 13 percent decline in overall casual drug use among adults, especially young adults, but drug use would go up among children under 18, I would have had a hard time believing that. So we've got some challenges to meet there, and let me just make some suggestions. First of all, we should do no harm; we should keep doing what we've been doing, getting that message out in our churches and in our schools that drugs are illegal and wrong and can kill you. We definitely should not do what the other side wants to do, which is to cut the safe and drug-free schools program. We need more things for our children to say yes to. We shouldn't cut our school programs that--we're giving funds now to schools to stay open after school so kids will have something else to do. We're trying to help our cities start things like sports leagues to give kids positive things to be involved in, to increase recreational opportunities. And so the fight I had with folks in the other party when they wanted to cut out the summer job program or cut back on the safe and drug-free schools program and undermine that is that I just don't think you can punish these children into obedience. I think we have to lead Other Popular 1996 Presidential Documents Documents:
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