Bill Clinton: “That's a good question. First of all, let me make one thing clear right away, because I owe it to the people of…”

“That's a good question. First of all, let me make one thing clear right away, because I owe it to the people of California who had been harder hit by the defense cuts than anyone else--the Marine general, the retired general that was talking about cutbacks. California's been hit hard in two ways: first, by base closing but even harder by cutbacks in contracts so that people who work for defense companies lost their jobs, a lot of our high-wage base manufacturing, and that's you guys. One of the problems that we have in California is that when we started cutting defense as a nation back in '87, there should have been in place right then a conversion program so that you wouldn't have to wander around for 2 or 3 years out of work with no real strategy. So there is a catchup here to be done. I'm having to play catchup because we're starting in 1993 something that should have been started in 1987. Now having said that, defense conversion normally means three things, and I'll tell you what we're doing and what I hope to get out of it. Number one, in some cases industries themselves can convert. That is, the employers can find new things to do to keep either all or part of their work force working. The second thing it means is communities converting. That is, communities can figure out how they're going to recruit or start or finance new economic activities which will hire the people who were laid off at the old place. Number three, it means total retraining for workers. I know in my State where an airbase closed and we lost tons of jobs, sometimes people retrained and went to work in the local steel mill or started their own small businesses or started something entirely different. So when you hear defense conversion, it means three things, not one thing. It means: Can the company do something different and keep you working? If they can't, can the community find a way to start new businesses? And regardless, is there some retraining program that would put you back into the work force fairly quickly at more or less the same income you were making before? Those are the three things. We have released this year alone $500 million in a technology initiative designed to try to really focus on creating jobs for people on the theory that if the jobs are there, people figure out how to get trained. That's what our focus is. This year we're going to try to spend about $1.7 billion in all three kinds of activities. But California should benefit primarily from the technology focus. There's been a lag time; I admit it. We waited 6 years too late as a Nation to do this. But I think you're going to see an enormous number of jobs created in this State in the next 4 or 5 years in new uses of technology. I mean, right here in San Diego, there is a consortium trying to figure out, for example, how to use old defense technology to build bridges that won't break in an earthquake. If they could do that, you could go through and rebuild or support bridges, create tens of thousands of jobs, not just people working on the bridges but in all the plants making all the materials and designing and everything. That's just one tiny example. There are an unlimited number of things like that, if we will get at it. So that's what we're trying to do. Economic Redevelopment Strategies”