pd08my95 Digest of Other White House Announcements...

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Julia Child was eating at the same restaurant. So the people who were 
running the show decided that they should have everything Julia was 
having, plus whatever they ordered. According to my wife, anyway, they 
had a 10-course, 4-hour meal--[laughter]--after which they were wheeled 
out on gurneys. [Laughter] The good news is, I got home from New York 
last night about 1:30 a.m., and it was perfectly easy to get Hillary up 
to talk with me. [Laughter]
    I want to say a special word of appreciation to Ellen Malcolm, for 
her vision and her work, her phenomenal energy have played an 
immeasurable role in electing more women to high public office in this 
country than would have been conceivable before she began her important 
work.
    I thank her for her recitation of the work that our administration 
has done. We have tried to involve women at an unprecedented level. I 
notice when I started this administration, people were, even in some of 
the great establishment newspapers, they were always criticizing me for 
trying to have a diverse administration, as if there were something 
wrong with it. Well, I never had any quotas, and evidence of that is, we 
still only have only 44 percent of my appointees are women, but that's 
about twice as good as anybody else ever did, and I'm proud of that.
    But I have always believed we could achieve excellence with outreach 
and effort, without quotas, and I always thought we had kind of a stupid 
quota system before. It was just never stated. There were just some 
things that weren't women's work. Now that's a quota system, and we paid 
for it. And our country's better off now that we're scrapping it.
    In the beginning, they used to criticize the judicial appointments 
process. But after 2 years, mercy, they looked up, and we'd named more 
judges in that time period than previous administrations and more women 
and minorities than the three previous Presidents, Democratic and 
Republican, combined. But the thing that was interesting and important 
to me is, we had the highest percentage of people rated well-qualified 
by the American Bar Association of any administration since they'd been 
keeping records.
    So, under the leadership of Erskine Bowles, who is now my Deputy 
Chief of Staff, the Small Business Administration increased loans to 
women businesses by over

[[Page 745]]

80 percent in one year. And they did it without reducing the number of 
loans to white males, and they did it without making a single 
unqualified loan.
    We can do this, folks. The old system was the quota system. We need 
a system where everybody in America has a chance to serve and live up to 
the fullest of their God-given abilities.
    Women's health is a terribly important issue to me. Ellen talked 
about it. My grandmother and my mother were working women and nurses. 
And this morning Hillary kicked off a new chapter in our campaign 
against breast cancer. The most important issue in women's health this 
week is the need to raise our voices in support of Dr. Henry Foster to 
be our Surgeon General.
    He is a good man. He is a good doctor. He has spent his entire life 
delivering babies, bringing health care to people who wouldn't otherwise 
have it, training doctors to go out and help give health care to people 
who otherwise wouldn't have it, and spearheading a nationally 
televised--nationally recognized program to reduce teenage pregnancy. It 
received one of President Bush's Point of Light awards. Henry Foster is 
a pro-life, pro-choice doctor who deserves to be confirmed as Surgeon 
General.
    Henry Foster's record should be seen in the lives of thousands of 
babies that he has helped come into this world in a healthy way and the 
people he has tried to educate and the people he has tried to help. And 
he deserves to be more than a political football in the emerging 
politics of this season.
    We are on the verge of a new century and a difficult and different 
time when everything is changing and everything, including our politics, 
is somewhat unpredictable. As we look into the next century, there's a 
lot to be happy about, the end of the cold war, the receding of the 
conventional nuclear threat, the emergence of the information age, and 
all the exciting possibilities of the global economy. But the great 
challenge of this age and the great challenge I predict to you of the 
next 50 is that all the forces that are lifting us up and opening 
unlimited possibilities to our children and our grandchildren, all the 
forces that are driving us toward a more integrated and cooperative 
world have a dark underside of disintegration. Because of so many of the 
things that are happening, we are lifting people up and seeing people 
beat down at the same time. There is great economic division in all the 
advanced countries. Why? Because more than ever before, education 
determines income and future prospects. So there is a great fault line 
in the great American middle class today which is responsible for a lot 
of the anxieties and a lot of the political issues and a lot of the 
divisiveness in our country. Those that have a good education are being 
lifted up; those that don't are being left behind.
    More than half--more than half--of the male workers in this country 
are working a longer work week for a lower wage than they were making 10 
years ago. That is a phenomenally important fact, not just economically 
but psychologically. All over America, men come home from work at night 
and sit down across the table with their families and know they're 
working as hard as they can, and they feel less secure, and they wonder 
if they've let their families down.
    We have to do things that will change that. We have to bridge the 
economic divide and unleash the potential of all of our people. And the 
key issue there is education, constant, unrelenting dedication to 
excellence in education for a lifetime. It is necessary if we're going 
to bring this country back together.
    We have these profound social divisions in our country. We have so 
much diversity now it is really a--it's a gold mine for us. Ann Richards 
took the lead in trying to get the Congress to ratify the NAFTA 
agreement because she knew that we had to be more closely connected with 
other countries in the world and that our ethnic and racial diversity is 
a gold mine. But when people are frightened, it's easy to focus that 
fright on people who look different than we do or who think differently 
than we do about certain things. So there is this great social division: 
Will our diversity become a source of unity and strength, or will it be 
a source of our undoing?
    And then there are deeper moral divisions that I want to talk about 
today which are most clearly manifested in the varying attitudes in this 
country toward violence. And it's some- 

[[Page 746]]

thing we're all living with in a very personal and human way because of 
the way we have shared the grief and outrage of Oklahoma City.
    The condition of women in all three of these areas is profoundly 
important. And the response of women to all of these changes is 
important. As Ellen said, we've made a good beginning to try to help 
deal with these problems, to strengthen families and support incomes 
with the Family and Medical Leave Act. The earned-income credit this 
year will give the average family of four with an income of under 
$25,000 an average tax cut of $1,000. We have set in motion a plan under 
the leadership of Secretary Shalala to immunize all the kids in this 
country under the age of 2 by 1996. Those are important things.
    This Congress of the last 2 years voted virtually to fully fund the 
Women, Infants and Children program to make sure that child nutrition 
and care for pregnant women was on the front burner. We have had 
dramatic expansion in our education efforts, from Head Start to 
apprenticeships for young people who don't go to college but want good 
jobs, to more affordable college loans for millions of people, to the 
national service program which has enabled young people to serve their 
communities and earn money to go to college. All these things are 
terribly important.
    We have a future economic agenda and a families agenda that involves 
raising the minimum wage, which I hope you will all support. Two-thirds 
of all the beneficiaries of an increase in the minimum wage will be 
working women--working women.
    There was a remarkable show on one of our television stations up 
here the other night, a news program on a little town south of here that 
had a lot of minimum wage workers. And they went and interviewed a woman 
working in a factory. And the news reporter said, ``Now, you know, your 
employer says that if the minimum wage goes up that they'll either have 
to put more money in machines or they'll lose business. In any case, you 
might lose your job if the minimum wage is raised.'' And she looked at 
him and said, ``Honey, I'll take my chances''--[laughter]--which I 
thought was the best one-line response I've seen on the news in a long 
time. If we don't raise the minimum wage next year it will be at a 40-
year low. That is not my idea of what America should look like as we 
move into the global economy.
    We ought to have welfare reform, but it ought to be the right kind 
of welfare reform. We shouldn't be punishing people for mistakes in the 
past. We should be giving them opportunity and imposing responsibility 
as they move into the future so people can succeed as successful workers 
and successful parents. It ought to be a work-based, parent-based strong 
program that lifts people up, not puts them down, basically just as a 
guise to save money. That is very important. You should be involved in 
the welfare reform effort.
    And we should continue to invest more in education, not less. I say 
to the Congress over and over, we have two deficits, not one. Yeah, 
we've got a budget deficit, but we've also got an education deficit, and 
if we try to solve the budget deficit at the expense of the education 
deficit, we will be cutting off our nose to spite our face because we 
will lower the incomes of America and their capacity to pay taxes. So 
there are things we can do to deal with the economic divide where the 
fault line is education. And we are working to do things that will bring 
us together and to lessen these social tensions by lifting up everybody 
in their work and in their family life.
    But we have to say that America has special problems which we have 
all begun to think more about because of the heartbreak of Oklahoma 
City, and that is violence. It has many forms. We live with it in our 
streets and our schools and our homes, where we work, where we live, 
where we play. Yes, we see it visibly if there is an action against a 
clinic where legal abortions are performed. But we also see it in some 
of our churches and synagogues. I never will forget being in Brooklyn 
one day with Congressman Schumer and driving by a synagogue with a big 
swastika on it--in the United States in 1992.
    We also see it, unfortunately, in our families. Violence can do a 
lot of damage in a country and it certainly has here. In Oklahoma City, 
we suffered a terrible wound because it was an act of terrorism. And as 
we mourn the dead and heal the injured, console

[[Page 747]]

the grieving and begin the rebuilding, we must also spare no effort to 
bring to justice those responsible. We must also understand that even 
punishing the guilty will not be enough if we cannot protect the 
innocent and the future. So I say to you my fellow Americans: I take a 
back seat to no one in my devotion to the Constitution. But we can 
protect the Constitution and our freedom and be tougher on terrorism in 
America, and we must.
    I have sent to Congress a large number of suggestions that will 
strengthen our hand in dealing with this issue. And again, I urged them 
to act on it and act on it without delay. The stories you do not read in 
the newspaper are those that are most important--the bombs that don't go 
off, the schemes that are thwarted before they succeed--and we must be 
better and better and better at that. Whether terrorism is hatched 
abroad or within our borders, we must be better.
    But we must also stand up against those who say that somehow this is 
all right, this is somehow a political act, people who say, I love my 
country, but I hate my Government. These people, who do they think they 
are, saying that their Government has stamped out human freedom?
    Do you think--[applause]--I don't know if there's another country in 
the world that would, by law, protect the right of a lot of these groups 
to say what they want to say to each other over the short-wave radio or 
however else they want to say it, to assemble over the weekend and do 
whatever they want to do, and to bear arms, which today means more than 
the right to keep and bear arms, it may mean the right to keep and bear 
an arsenal of artillery. Is there a--who are they to say they have no 
freedom in this country? Other countries do not permit that.
    I plead with you--do not lose your concentration on this issue. This 
is a big issue. Remember what I said earlier: The forces that are 
lifting up the world have a dark underside. What makes the global 
society work? What makes the information age work? Openness. Free 
movement. Low barriers to the transfer of people, ideas, and 
information. What does that mean? You can have a terrorist network on 
the Internet exchanging information about building bombs. What does that 
mean? You can build a bomb in one State and get in your truck and drive 
somewhere else freely and without being interrupted. What does it mean? 
It's easier to get into the country than other countries where you want 
to make mischief.
    The open society is at more risk to the forces of organized evil. 
Don't forget about the people in Oklahoma City. Don't forget about their 
families. Don't forget about what they need to rebuild, and don't forget 
about what we need to try to prevent future incidents of this kind. Do 
not lose your interest in this issue as it fades into the past. We have 
a lot of work to do.
    Let me also say that I hope that this incident will focus us a 
little more on the general problem of the extraordinary level of 
violence in our society, to find its common roots as well as to 
understand the differences in the different kinds of violence we have. I 
have to say this, and maybe it's an old-fashioned view, but I believe 
that it is innate in human nature that there is the capacity to do wrong 
and to harm others. And we are all balanced in different ways, subject 
to different forces. There are always excuses or reasons that can be 
given. I'm sorry for whatever terrible thing happened to the suspect in 
the Oklahoma City bombing case, but we have to stop making excuses and 
start thinking about what we can do to build a responsible, nonviolent 
society.
    There is a lot of good news out there. I was in New York yesterday, 
where the crime rate has been going down for several years and where 
this year the murder rate is so far--knock on wood--more than a third 
below what it was last year. And this is happening all over the country. 
But violent crime is much higher today than it was a generation ago. 
There's been rising incidence of sexual assaults, muggings, homicides, 
some of it caused by street gangs, which themselves systematically 
terrorize law-abiding citizens in their area of operation, first in our 
inner cities and now spreading more and more to suburbs and to small 
towns.
    Increasingly, the victims of crime and the culprits alike are young 
people, even children. Today, believe it or not, there are thousands of 
children who stay home from school every day in America because they're 
afraid

[[Page 748]]

that violence will await them there. And even more children go, and 
learn about fear in their classrooms and hallways.
    Sometimes the sole motivation for crime is hate or racial prejudice 
or extreme ideology. We've seen people killed and others wounded only 
because they were working at clinics. In the last decades we've been 
forced to acknowledge the full extent of reality about which we had long 
remained in denial which may not be able to be explained in terms of 
hate, racial prejudice, or extremist ideology, and that is the epidemic 
violence visited on women and children, often in the home.
    I have known about this problem for a long time. I understand how it 
rips up family. Hillary and I were regular visitors at a shelter for 
battered women and their children when we lived at home. I have talked 
with abused children. I know that this problem of domestic violence is a 
difficult one. We have begun to be aggressive with it. America must be 
aggressive with it.
    We see how much of crime among our young people is still due to 
drugs. And it's shocking to me that, for reasons that are not entirely 
understandable, as the economy has gotten better but some places have 
been left behind, casual drug use among some of our young people is 
going up again. This is a bad thing. We must speak against it. It will 
lead to more violence.
    If you look at the profile of every penitentiary in the country, 
every Governor in America, including Ann Richards and Bill Clinton, 
every Governor in the country in the last 15 years has given speech 
after speech after speech about how tough we were on crime and how many 
prison cells we've built. If you go behind those bars you'll see them 
just full of people who basically had two problems. They had no 
education, and they were either addicted to drugs or alcohol. And so we 
continue to pay the price in violence and wrecked lives.
    All of you have cared a great deal about making democracy work for 
all Americans. And you've done a good thing. And when we change our 
economic policy, when we broaden the doors of opportunities for people 
and permit more women and others who have been traditionally denied a 
chance to live up to their fullest capacities a chance to do it, we're 
all better off, and we're all strengthened. But when this country has 
the plague of violence we endure in so many ways, we are all weakened.
    The most tragic thing outside the human loss in Oklahoma City itself 
to me was seeing the absolute terror that inflicted the lives of 
millions of American children who felt vulnerable, who felt that they 
somehow no longer understood what the rules were, didn't know if their 
parents could protect them, didn't know if right and wrong would reign 
in America.
    So I say to you, we need to take a serious look at this whole issue 
of violence. We tried to address it in the crime bill last year with 
more police on the street because we know that that prevents crime, with 
the assault weapons ban and the Brady bill, with stronger sentences and 
prevention programs for our young people, and programs for drug 

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