Bill Clinton: “----and don't give every kid a cell phone.'' [Laughter] Don't be--I'm just glad it didn't happen to me. [Laughter] This…”

“----and don't give every kid a cell phone.'' [Laughter] Don't be--I'm just glad it didn't happen to me. [Laughter] This is--I was just really trying to see if you all were paying attention. [Laughter] This is a big deal. The United States Government has never been for both approaches. We have never done both at the same time. We've had periods where we really thought we were coming out for education reform. Then we've had periods where we knew we had real needs, and we provided funds. We've never been serious about saying, ``We're going to raise the standards. We're going to judge results. We expect children to learn. We're tried of patronizing poor kids and saying they can't learn, but we're not going to brand them failures. We're going to have more after- school programs. We're going to have more mentoring programs. We're going to have more summer school programs. We're going to give them the chances they need.'' This is a huge deal. No serious person believes that America has an adequate system of elementary and secondary education for every child in this country. And as we get more and more diverse, it will become more and more important that we do that. Every one of you know about the additions to economic value that all people have when they have a better education. So this is a big issue. We've got the best system of higher education in the world. It's open. We've now made it pretty much affordable for everybody, with the tax credits, the HOPE scholarships, the student loans, the work-study programs, the AmeriCorps program. Now we've got to spend 2 years really doing some things. And I'm telling you, it won't be popular. There are people who are going to scream to high heaven when I--we've got to reauthorize the $15 billion we're spending on schools. And they'll say, ``Okay, we'll give it to you again next year, but we would like you to show some results to keep getting it or at least get caught trying.'' And I don't mean to denigrate--most people do a good job. But the people that do a good job don't need it one way or the other. What we want to do is to make sure we take what works and replicate it throughout the country. Any person who's ever spent any serious time working on education reform will tell you two things. One is that every challenge in American education has been met superbly by somebody somewhere. Two is, we are not very good at replicating what works. Most of you who have been in entrepreneurial, competitive environments would quickly go broke if somebody did what you were doing better and you didn't figure out how to at least meet the competition. We do not do that. And we have to find a way to do it. And I think I've given some good ideas here. Let me just mention one last issue. I think that we have convinced the American people that we can bring the benefits of free enterprise to people who have not previously enjoyed it. You have poverty rates going down. You have the lowest unemployment rates among minorities ever recorded in this country. We finally have wages going up. But we should be under no illusion that everybody in America has participated in this recovery. It is simply not true. In almost every big city in the country, there are huge census tracts--big blocks of areas where there has been no new investment. There are rural areas where the unemployment rates are still quite high. And because of the financial crisis overseas and a few other factors, our farmers are facing the worst financial crisis they've had in 20 years, at a time when we've got this record low unemployment. And I have asked the Congress to pass a series of tax credits and loan guarantees which would give incentives to people like a lot of you in this room, like take Mr. Titelman here from Philadelphia, to go to the--let's say there's a big section of Philadelphia that hasn't had any new investment in a long time and if it can qualify--kind of like the empowerment zone program that the Vice President is already doing such a good job of running the last several years. But let's suppose you could get a $300 million investment in a place like that. If this bill passes there would be a 25 percent tax credit on the first $100 million for the investment. And the next two-thirds of the investment would be subject to getting a loan guarantee, just like American investment in designated foreign countries is today. It just seems to me that it is elemental good sense to set up the same sort of financial incentive structure for people to invest in underdeveloped markets and people in the United States that we give our American investors to invest overseas. And I hope this has great appeal to the Republicans, because it gives us a real chance. You just think about it. Think about how many places in this country you could say, ``If we raise $300 million and we invest it in place X in a viable-going concern that meets all the criteria for getting credit, we only have $75 million at risk.'' That's not a bad deal. That's not a bad deal. If we can't take a few chances to develop the rest of America now, when will we ever get around to it? The unemployment rate in New York City is still too high--the unemployment rate in a lot of rural communities, not just out in the South and the Mississippi Delta or in Appalachia but in the Mid-Atlantic States, in New England, other places. We need to do these kinds of things, face the big challenges, get them right. The last point I want to make is this--I don't want to talk about Kosovo tonight, for obvious reasons--I made the best argument I could today when I spoke to the AFSCME group, and they, I understand, showed extensive coverage of it on the media. But I will say this. I want to make two points only. One is, I talked until I was blue in the face when I ran for President in 1992 about the fact that we can no longer make a clear distinction between domestic and foreign policy. We live in not just a global economy, a global society. We are being drawn closer together in ways that are good, in ways that are uncomfortable or potentially dangerous. And we have got to stop as a people putting this little box over here and calling it ``foreign policy'' and having a big box over here and calling it ``domestic policy'' and every now and then say, ``Oh, I've got to go pick up this other box.'' We have to see it together. What does that mean for the Democrats? It means, number one, I've got a responsibility to do everything I can to modernize the financial architecture of the world so we don't have another crisis like the one we had in Asia. It means, number two, we have got to find a consensus on trade, because a big part of our growth has come from selling more things overseas. We've got 4 percent of the population and 22 percent of the wealth. It's not rocket science to figure out, if that's where you are, you've got to sell something to somebody else. But on the other hand, we have been caught in the vice where some Members of Congress, representing a lot of people in America, are worried about the dislocations of trade, and other Members, many in the other party, see the benefits of trade but don't worry about the dislocation. So we wind up, well, are you going to get the benefits and say too bad about these people, or are you going to protect these people but slow down the economic prospects of the country? This is a dumb thing to do. It is very wrong to make either one of these decisions. We need to build an American consensus in which we say ``We're going to reach out. We're going to lead the world. We're going to open up our borders.'' We've got a lower unemployment rate than any other advanced country, for the first time in decades, even lower than Japan. But we ought to say, we also--``We're the party that believes in preserving the environment. We're the party that believes in the dignity of labor and elemental labor standards, and we're going to create a global economy where we lift people up instead of hold them down.'' And we just ought to do it and quit wringing our hands about it. It's very important. And the last thing that I would say about that is, I think it is terribly important that we recognize that economics cannot exist in a global context in the absence of security and peace and freedom. So that if you really believe that our future depends on that and that Europe is a big trade and investment partner of ours, we have to ask ourselves, don't we have a responsibility when our friends in Europe ask us, through a group that we all belong to, NATO, to help end the kind of chaos we see that we had first in Bosnia and now that we have a chance to prevent the most severe manifestations of in Kosovo--isn't that more than just a foreign policy issue? Even though I think there's a huge moral component there, it will have direct personal benefits to Americans if we have a stable, free, united Europe. The last point I want to make is this--and then I'll stop. Both at home and abroad, there are two great dynamics going on in the world today. One are the forces of integration that you see most positively in the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web and everybody sharing information and everybody knowing--you know, pulling us together. Secondly, there are great forces of decentralization, when they're positive, and disintegration when they're negative. And you see that in the decentralization of all kinds of operations. When I ran for President in 1992, 3 million people were making a living primarily out of their own home. When I ran for reelection in 1996, 12 million people were. In 1998, by the mid-term elections, 20 million people were. Rising exponential--decentralization, that's all the flexible work rules, and all the stuff you know about. And all ethnic groups, you know, recovering their heritage in a happy way, having festivals. And you know, Hillary's from Chicago. I love to go to Chicago every year, when they have the ethnic festival, because I can eat for 3 miles--[laughter]--and never have the same thing twice. [Laughter] You know, decentralization--you have all these little companies coming up, fitting certain niches in the market, all these specialty magazines, everything--and you see it all over the world. That's the good news. The bad news is, decentralization when you see the ethnic fights in the Balkans, or people unable to get along. They want to be apart. The American idea, modernized for the 21st century, is that out of many, one. E pluribus unum. Believe me, the Founding Fathers never had a clue what they were talking about. They could never have--I don't mean that in a pejorative way. They weren't thinking about the Fairfax County school system in Virginia, right across the river from me, that has children from 180 different racial and ethnic groups, speaking 100 different native languages. They never--they didn't have a clue about that. That's not what they were thinking about. You had to be a white male property-owner to vote when they started. But they had the right idea. And we've been struggling for over 200 years, now, to cram the new facts and our new perceptions and our true values, into that idea. And so that's the last thing I want to say to you. I think that--if somebody asked me why I was a Democrat now, in 1999, I would say, because I really believe everybody who's responsible enough to work for it ought to have the opportunity to live out his or her dreams, and because I really believe in the idea of community, of belonging, of mutual responsibility. I do not believe that my life or my child's life will be as good as it would otherwise be, unless everybody else has a chance to fulfill themselves. I believe we can do more together than we can apart. I like the fact that we all look different from each other, but I think what we have in common is more important than even all the interesting things that we have that are different about us. And believe me, the big threat the world faces today is the marriage of modern integrating technologies with the negative disintegrating forces of people with primitive notions that their lives only matter when they've got somebody they can look down on, somebody they can put their foot down on their neck on, somebody they can--lift themselves up by pushing somebody else down, whether it's in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Bosnia, the tribal wars in Africa, or you name it. You plug all that negative stuff into access to how to make missiles, how to make chemical weapons, how to make biological weapons, how to jam records, computer records in banks or powerplants, or all these sort of--you know, what may seem like fictional scenarios. That is the threat our children will face, the combination of primitive disintegration with modern integrating technology. And we, America, we have to say, ``Hey, the people that started us were right.'' We have--out of many, we must be one. And we've got to be willing to carry our load in the world. And today, I can tell you that the Democratic Party, by far, is more likely to bring that kind of approach to the world, and home to every American community. And in the end it counts more than everything else. Thank you very much.”