pd07fe00 Videotape Address to the People of Puerto Rico on Efforts To Resolve the...

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<DOC>
[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
 [frwais.access.gpo.gov]
                         

[Page i-iii]
 
Monday, February 7, 2000
 
Volume 36--Number 5
Pages 181-231
 
Contents

[[Page i]]

Weekly Compilation of

Presidential

Documents



[[Page ii]]

  

  


Addresses and Remarks

    Ballou Senior High School--209
    Commerce in firearms report--225
    Illinois, community in Quincy--181
    Legislative agenda--202
    Memorial service for Bob Squire--227
    National Conference of State Legislatures dinner--214
    National Prayer Breakfast--220
    Radio address--184
    Reception for Jane Harman--223
    Switzerland, World Economic Forum--185
    Vieques Island, videotape address to the people of Puerto Rico on 
        efforts to resolve the impasse--204

Communications to Congress

    France-U.S. treaty on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters, 
        message transmitting--200
    Greece-U.S. treaty on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters, 
        message transmitting--208
    Latvia-U.S. fisheries agreement, message transmitting--202
    NATO Strategic Concept, message certifying no new commitments--201
    Romania-U.S. treaty on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters, 
        message transmitting--223

Communications to Congress--Continued

    U.S. Air Force operating location near Groom Lake, NV, message--201
    U.S. Arctic Research Plan, message transmitting revision--208
    World Intellectual Property Organization treaties, letter 
        transmitting report--202

Communications to Federal Agencies

    Independent States of the Former Soviet Union, memorandum on 
        assistance--209
    International Financial Institutions and Other International 
        Organizations and Programs, memorandum on funding--201
    Resolution Regarding Use of Range Facilities on Vieques Island, 
        Puerto Rico, memorandums--197, 198

Interviews With the News Media

    Exchanges with reporters
        Cabinet Room--202
        South Grounds--225

Letters and Messages

    Lunar New Year, message--206

Proclamations

    American Heart Month--207
    National African American History Month--199
  
(Continued on the inside of the back cover.)

Editor's Note: The Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents is also 
available on the Internet on the GPO Access service at http://
www.gpo.gov/nara/nara003.html.

              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 
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There are no restrictions on the republication of material appearing in 
the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents.



[[Page iii]]

Contents--Continued

Resignations and Retirements

    Senior Adviser to the President for Policy and Strategy, statement--
        184

Statements by the President

    See also Resignations and Retirements
    Alaska Airlines flight 261, crash--206
    Export controls on high-performance computers and semiconductors--
        206
    National debt, paying down--196
    Puerto Rico, action to resolve the impasse over Armed Forces 
        training on Vieques Island--197

Statements by the President--Continued

    Representative Bruce F. Vento, retirement--214
    Senate confirmation of Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal 
        Reserve Board--222

Supplementary Materials

    Acts approved by the President--231
    Checklist of White House press releases--231
    Digest of other White House announcements--229
    Nominations submitted to the Senate--230

[[Page 181]]




<DOC>
[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents]
 [frwais.access.gpo.gov]
                         

[Page 181-183]
 
Monday, February 7, 2000
 
Volume 36--Number 5
Pages 181-231
 
Week Ending Friday, February 4, 2000
 
Remarks to the Community
in Quincy, Illinois


January 28, 2000

    Thank you very much. I think I should begin by thanking you all for 
waiting in this cold weather all morning. Your welcome to me has been so 
warm, I don't care what it's doing outside; inside, it still feels like 
Florida to me here. I thank you very much.
    I want to begin by thanking your mayor, who flew in here with me 
today; and your fine Congressman, Lane Evans; our two United States 
Senators, Senator Durbin and Senator Fitzgerald; Congressman Shimkus; 
Congressman Hulshof; thank you all for being here. Let's give them a big 
hand here today. [Applause] Didn't Kayt do a good job? [Applause] All I 
can tell you is that when I was her age, I could not have given a speech 
anywhere near that good; so she's well on her way.
    I want to thank all the people that gave us our music: the Quincy 
High School Band, the Quincy Park Band, the Quincy Notre Dame Marching 
Band. Thank you all very much. I want to thank all the people who are 
here today who represent State and local government and the people of 
this community, the police officers, business leaders, day care 
providers, AmeriCorps members, and other public servants, the students, 
the teachers, all represented up on this stage today. And, of course, 
``Mr. Quincy'' there. Thank you very much, sir, for being here.
    Ladies and gentlemen, last night when I gave the State of the Union 
Address, I was fulfilling a requirement of the United States 
Constitution that requires the President to report every year on the 
state of the Union. Then, I wanted to come out today to the heartland of 
America to say what that was all about. Maybe we ought to change the 
Constitution, Senators and Congressmen, to require the President to come 
to Quincy the day after the State of the Union Address every year.
    You know, I never will forget the night I actually did talk to the 
mayor and Senator Paul Simon, who was not pretending to be me, and you 
were going through that horrible flood, and I monitored your progress, 
and this community became a symbol of hope and what people can do when 
they pull together. I loved hearing the mayor today again recount the 
rich heritage of your city, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, the Underground 
Railroad, the sanctuary offered so long ago to those fleeing religious 
persecution.
    I loved driving here from the airport today and remembering the bus 
tour that Vice President Gore and Hillary and Tipper and I took in 1992 
through so much of this part of America, and I saw so many of the same 
pictures all along the way: young children out with their signs; people 
saying, ``My birthday's August the 19th, too''; some people like my dog; 
some people like my cat; some people like them and don't like the 
President very much. The whole day was wonderful. It was a wonderful 
thing.
    And I think that what you show here today and every day is that when 
we join hands and join hearts, we can climb any mountain and turn back 
any tide. That is what our Nation has proved these last 7 years. And as 
I look out here on all of you, I see fresh evidence of what I said last 
night, folks: The state of our Union today is the strongest it has ever 
been, thanks to you.
    If you saw the speech last night, you know that I quoted President 
Theodore Roosevelt, one of my favorite predecessors. He's the last 
sitting President to come to Quincy. I don't know what the others were 
thinking about. [Laughter] But Roosevelt had a great quote at the dawn 
of the last century, which was a time that has a lot of parallels to our 
present-day experience. He reminded us that ``a growing nation with a 
future must always take the long look ahead.'' And what that

[[Page 182]]

means is, you know, when you folks were worried about the flood taking 
your town away, everybody concentrated and went to work. And then when 
you had all the problems and you needed the ferry and the mayor said the 
river was 6 miles wide, everybody concentrated and went to work. 
Sometimes people get in trouble not when times are tough, but when times 
seem to be so good people think they don't have to do anything, they 
don't have to worry, they don't have to work together.
    And what I want to tell you is, never in my lifetime have we had the 
combination of economic prosperity and social progress with so little 
internal crisis or external threat, and I know from my experience that 
we should be using this time wisely to deal with the long-term 
challenges and seize the long-term opportunities that the children of 
Kayt's generation will have to deal with in the new century; and that's 
what I want the American people to support.
    I want you to support us in saying we made a mistake to quadruple 
the debt of the country. Now we're paying off the debt; let's stay at 
the job until America is debt-free for the first time since 1835. The 
number of people over 65 is going to double in 30 years. I hope to be 
one of them. The baby boomers must not--we must not--impose the burden 
of our enormous numbers in retirement on our children. That means we 
need to take the interest savings from paying down the debt, put it in 
the Social Security Trust Fund, take it out to 2050, then the baby 
boomers' retirement will not impose a burden on our children and our 
children's ability to raise our grandchildren.
    We need to make sure every child in this country starts school ready 
to learn and graduates ready to succeed and has access to a college 
education. Now, I just want to mention one of your schools, because I 
hear people all the time saying, ``Aw, the President acts like we can 
turn schools around; that's not true.'' Well, it is true. I believe all 
children can learn. I believe all schools can work.
    Washington Elementary School, here in Quincy, a few years ago was in 
trouble; today, it's one of the best-performing schools in your school 
district because you've got a good principal, community involvement; 
you've got money from our program to reduce class size with more 
teachers, to expand after-school programs, and now you've got a 
successful situation. I'm telling you, I only wish Washington, DC, 
worked as well as Washington Elementary School. And I want to thank the 
principal, Terry Mickle, for being with us today. Let's give her a hand. 

[Applause]
    So, what I've asked the Congress to do is to invest more in Head 
Start, invest more in these after-school and summer school programs, 
invest more in helping more schools turn themselves around, and to give 
the American people, for the first time, a tax deduction for the cost of 
college tuition, to open the doors of college.
    The other thing that I hope we can do is to give more families the 
tools to succeed at home and work--to lengthen the life of Medicare for 
25 years; to give people on Medicare the right to a voluntary 
prescription drug program--too many of our senior citizens need this 
medicine and cannot afford it; it's the difference in what kind of life 
they can have. And I hope you will support our efforts to achieve that.
    There's just one other issue I want to mention today, because it 
affects a lot of people in this neighborhood. A few years ago, before I 
ran for President, I had the honor of coming to southern Illinois, to 
Senator Simon's hometown of Makanda, because I was head of something 
called the Lower Mississippi River Delta Development Commission. And I 
found that the counties in southern Illinois had unemployment rates as 
high as they did in the Mississippi Delta and the South, where I came 
from.
    One of the things that really bothers me about this astonishing 
economic recovery of ours is that not everybody has participated in it. 
And I think all Americans will support us in saying that this is the 

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