Bill Clinton: “You all relax. When people don't have a side of their own to make, they try to shout their opponents down. Just relax.…”

“You all relax. When people don't have a side of their own to make, they try to shout their opponents down. Just relax. Just relax. Let me tell you, Max Cleland has kept on giving for a lifetime, with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, always reaching out his hand to other people. Now, the other side, their idea of sacrifice is to take Head Start away from 5-year-olds, college loans away from students, to take the environment away from all of our people, and to weaken our future economy for short-term promises. I think Max Cleland's idea of service to America is the right one, and I believe Georgians will agree. [Applause] Thank you. Now, you know, I want to talk most, if anything, to the young people today. This is your election, and we need you. You have most of your tomorrows in front of you, you have your future out there ahead of you, and you have to decide about that. I appreciate what Senator Nunn said about the last 4 years. It is true that we're better off than we were. It is true that we have more jobs, that the other side talked about being conservative but our administration is the first one to take the deficit down in each of our 4 years in the 20th century. It is true that the other guys talked about how bad the big old Federal Government was, but it's our administration working with our allies in Congress who has cut the size of the Federal Government, the number of regulations, the number of Government programs, and we have privatized more Government operations than the last two Republican administrations did in 12 years combined. That's the truth. But there is a difference. We still believe that we have responsibilities to move forward together. And that's what you have to decide, all you young people, whether you want a future in which you're told, ``You're on your own, and we hope you have a nice life,'' or whether you believe it does take a village to raise a child, protect the environment, and build a future. You have to decide. You have to decide. What is this future of yours going to be like? Well, we know it will be dominated by information and technology. We know that ideas and information and money and technology will move around the world in a split second. We know that the borders that divide us will increasingly come down and we'll be drawn closer together with people all around the world. We know there will be new security threats even as the cold war fades away: terrorism, the proliferation of chemical and biological and other sophisticated weapons. We know that ethnic and racial and religious hatreds can cross national borders. We know all that. And we know that there will be new challenges to the way we work and live and relate to each other. We know today, already, that most parents, even parents with very comfortable incomes, face repeated challenges in fulfilling their obligations to their children as parents and succeeding in the workplace. We know there will be a lot of changes. When Becky Ahmann was up here talking, she told you how she was able to leave her business in New York, move to Georgia, and keep working for her business in New York by working at home. When I became President, there were 3 million Americans doing that; today there are over 12 million Americans like Becky Ahmann. When we start that new century just 4 years from now, there will be 30 million Americans like her. That's how fast we're changing. We know we're pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. We have funded a project with IBM to develop a supercomputer in the next couple of years that will do more calculations in a second than you can do on your hand-held calculator in 30,000 years. We have seen for the first time in history laboratory animals with their spines completely severed having movement in their lower limbs because of nerve transplants from other parts of their body to their spines. It's just a matter of time until we can do that for Americans and for people all over the world. We have uncovered, in the last 4 years, two of the genes which cause breast cancer. It's just a matter of time until we have the earliest possible detection and eventually prevention. Because of the space program, we have developed sophisticated imaging technology that soon we can put across human bodies and find cancers in their very incipiency so that we'll be able to save more lives than ever before. We have more than doubled the life expectancy for people who have HIV and AIDS in the last 4 years; it's on the verge of becoming a chronic illness. These things have happened. That is the world we have to prepare for. And that is the world you must decide about. And so I say to you: If you want to have a future and a world like that, like I do, where everybody has a chance to live up to their God-given capacity, where everyone who is responsible should have a chance to live out their dreams, where everybody respects everyone else's right to work and live and we come together in a community, we're not divided, race against race, man against woman, among each other, if that is the America you want, then you have some responsibilities, too. You must decide whether you want to balance the budget to keep our economy growing while we protect our investments in education, the environment, Medicare, Medicaid, and research or whether you want to adopt a risky scheme that will blow a hole in the deficit, require bigger cuts in those things, and take us backward. That is your decision. The young people of America must decide that. You must decide whether you believe we can improve the environment and grow the economy. I know we can. Today, the air is cleaner, your drinking water is safer, your food is safer. We have set aside more lands for national parks. We are saving the Florida Everglades. We protected Yellowstone Park from a gold mine. But we are also making America economically healthier. And if you will help me, I'll do something I know is close to John Lewis' heart. In the next 4 years we're going to clean up 500 more toxic waste sites so our kids will be growing up next to parks, not poison. This is an important election for young people. You will have to decide whether we are going to reform a welfare system in a way that gives poor people a real chance. It's one thing to say to people, you must go to work if you're able-bodied. It's quite another thing to go to work. There has to be a job at the end of that requirement. And I'm committed to doing that. You will have to decide. More than anything else, you will have to decide if you really believe now that we've gotten the crime down to a 10-year low--the crime rate has gone down 4 years in a row in America. We can actually make our streets safe again if we do more to prevent our kids from getting in trouble in the first place, to finish the job of putting 100,000 police on the street, to keep the safe and drug-free schools program alive in our schools. The other side wants to cut back on all that. It is your decision. I think you want safe streets, a drug-free youth, and a safe school program. You will have to decide. More than anything else, your decision about what kind of educational opportunities we offer to the American people will shape the future. I want an America in which we have a country where every classroom and every library and every school is hooked up to the information superhighway. Will you help us do that? [Applause] I want an America where, for the first time in history, children in the poorest and smallest rural school districts in Georgia and Arkansas have access at the same time in the same way at the same level of quality to the same information children in the wealthiest, best funded school districts in America have. Will you help us do that? [Applause] And we can build an America in which for the first time every single person who is willing to work for it can go on to college. Under our plan, we propose to give people a tax credit, a dollar-for-dollar reduction on their taxes to give up to 2 years of college and make it as universal as high school is today, an American version of Georgia's HOPE scholarship. Will you help us do that? [Applause] We propose in our balanced budget plan to give people a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for any kind of college tuition. Will you help us do that? [Applause] But we also need your help to do some things. Forty percent of the 8-year-olds in America today, 40 percent of them can still not read a book on their own. All these children I want to go to college, all these children we want to fool with the computers, if they can't read, they can't succeed. I have proposed to put together one million volunteers so that we can help the parents and the schools of this country, so that in 4 years every 8-year-old in the United States can pick up a book and say, ``I can read this all by myself, all by myself.'' And I challenge all of you---- Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!”