Bill Clinton: “Thank you. Let me say how delighted I am to be here today to be a part of this again. I want to begin by thanking a few…”

“Thank you. Let me say how delighted I am to be here today to be a part of this again. I want to begin by thanking a few people. First I'd like to thank Secretary Brown and all the others who are here from the Commerce Department for, I think, giving this country the best Commerce Department it has had in many, many decades, and I thank them for that. Mr. Houghton and Mr. Bradshaw, I thank you and all your team for coming here today. And we want to especially welcome Mr. Houghton's brother, Congress' most prominent musician--[laughter]--Congressman Amo Houghton from New York. I thank the Baldrige Foundation; its Chair, Bob Allen, is here. Thank you, sir, for your work. I want to thank the people in the White House who are my eyes and ears in outreach to the American business community, Mack McLarty and Alexis Herman. Let me say, I have some remarks here I decided not to give because I want to just tell you a little bit from the heart what this means to me. When I became President I had worked for 12 years as a Governor, starting in a State with an unemployment rate that was 3 percent above the national average and that never got down to the national average but one month until 1992, the last year I served. We decided that we had to build a partnership with business. We decided that America would not do well unless manufacturing came back.…”