Bill Clinton: “Thank you. Folks, I want you just to take a couple of minutes. You waited a long time here today, and I want to talk to…”

“Thank you. Folks, I want you just to take a couple of minutes. You waited a long time here today, and I want to talk to you about the next 4 years. This election will see the American people elect the last President of the 20th century and the first President of the 21st century. At a time of enormous change in how we work and live and relate to the rest of the world, just think of it: Here we are in a beautiful, traditional American town, a great Main Street here, in a State where one in five jobs is dependent upon our ability to trade with people all around the world. This is a new age. Let me tell you, to the young people here--there are young people in this audience who will soon be doing jobs that have not been invented yet. Many of them will do jobs that have not been imagined yet. You will see miraculous medical discoveries. I'm so glad we have this section here for our friends who have come in wheelchairs. Do you know that just a few weeks ago, for the first time ever, laboratory animals that had their spines severed had movement in their lower limbs because of nerve transplants. There are going to be things happening in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years that we never could have imagined. And we have to be in the forefront. We recently agreed to undertake with IBM--the United States and IBM--to build a supercomputer--listen to this--a supercomputer that will do more calculations in a single second than you can go home and do on your hand-held calculator in 30,000 years. The point I'm trying to make is that we are going to see Americans with more chances to live out their dreams and live up to their God- given abilities than at any point in the history of our great country if we make the right decisions, if we build the right sort of bridge to the 21st century, if we say we want opportunity for all, responsible citizenship from all, and everybody has a place in our community. We want everybody, everybody, without regard to where they start in life, without regard to their race or their background, if you will work hard and be a good citizen, you're a part of our country and we want to walk over that bridge into the next century with you. That's what we have to do. I want us to build a bridge to the 21st century with the best education system in the world. I want every classroom and library in America, from the smallest rural schools to the most remote mountain villages to the poorest inner-city schools, to be hooked up to the information superhighway by the year 2000, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web so that we can say--think of this, here in Centralia, think of this--we will be able to say by the year 2000 for the first time in our history, every child in America, no matter where he or she goes to school, will have access to the same information in the same time at the same level of quality as any other child in the richest school districts in the country, everybody has access to it immediately. Will you help me build that bridge to the 21st century? Audience members. Yes!”