Bill Clinton: “Thank you. Thank you up there. Thank you very much. Well, I know that it's a little wet out here, and as I said last…”

“Thank you. Thank you up there. Thank you very much. Well, I know that it's a little wet out here, and as I said last night, I've been coming to Washington for several years now, and it has never rained on me before. I feel that finally you have accepted me as one of your own. I want to thank you for coming out in such large numbers, and I can tell that a little rain has not dampened your spirits. Are you ready to fight for the next 6 weeks and 5 days? [Applause] Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for your welcome and for your leadership. Congratulations on so many things you are doing here in Tacoma, but especially, from my point of view, congratulations on winning the President's Excellence Award for Exporting in 1994, and for keeping Tacoma and Washington open and reaching out to the rest of the world, not turning away from it. I hope you will continue to do that. Thank you, Bridget Woods, for getting up here and making that brave speech. There aren't many 16-year-old girls speaking to 28,000 people, and you did a fine job today. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you, Norm Dicks, for being a great Congressman and a great friend and a visionary leader, not only for the people of your district, for the people of this country. And thank you--thank you so much, Adam Smith, for running for Congress. And thank you, Jeff Coopersmith, if you're here, for running for Congress. And I want you folks to send them there. Just remember--just remember--2 years ago, just 2 years ago, our friends in the other party were crowing that Washington State had led the way in the Republican revolution, that the people of Washington were dying to see our economic policies reversed and our crime policies reversed. They told you that we raised the income taxes of ordinary Americans; it wasn't true. And then they turned around and tried to raise the income taxes of 9 million of the hardest working Americans in the country with kids and low incomes. They told you that our economic plan was going to fail. Well, it's inconvenient for them, but 10\1/2\ million jobs later, record new exports, record new businesses, record businesses owned by women and minorities, 60 percent reduction in the deficit, the first time since before the Civil War the deficit's gone down in all 4 years of an administration, you now know that they were wrong in 1994. We were right. Send Adam Smith and Jeff Coopersmith to the Congress, and give Norm Dicks some help to move you forward and our country forward into the next century. And thank you, Gary Locke, for your distinguished career in public service, for the fine and positive campaign you have run for Governor of the State of Washington. I want all of you to do what you can in the next few weeks to make sure that this fine man is the next Governor. It is very important to your future, more and more responsibilities are devolving upon the State. The next Governor of Washington will, among other things, have the responsibility of working with local communities to create an unprecedented number of new jobs for people we are trying to move from welfare to work in a way that supports families and supports children and does not walk away from our responsibilities to them. I think you know who will do a better job of that, and I hope you will help him win this election. I want to thank the other officials who are here, but most of all, I want to tell you that you can't imagine what it's like to pull up in a bus and see 28,000 people in the morning, in Tacoma, standing in the rain. That's because you know that America is on the right track to the 21st century, and we intend to keep it on that track, and I want you to help us. I have said before, let me say again: We are living at a moment of enormous possibility. The young people in this audience will have more chances to live out their dreams than any generation of Americans in history if--if--we build a bridge to the 21st century that opens opportunity for all, expects responsibility from all, and is big enough, broad enough, and strong enough for every American who is willing to work for it to go across, arm in arm, without regard to race or gender or income, or where you start out in life or condition of disability. Everybody should be able to go across the American bridge to the 21st century, and that's what I'm asking you to help us build. My fellow Americans, there is a reason that the economy is better than it was 4 years ago. There is a reason the crime rate has gone down for 4 years in a row. There is a reason that the welfare rolls have gone down and the child support collections have gone up. There is a reason that the air is cleaner, our drinking water is protected, our food is going to be safer. There is a reason that the toxic waste dumps that we cleaned up in the last 3 years were greater than those cleaned up in the 12 years before we took office. There is a reason that we were able to declare the Grand Cascade-Escalante national monument in southern Utah yesterday, 1.7 million acres, to save Yellowstone from a gold mine, to reach a historic agreement here in Washington State just 2 days ago to protect the old-growth forests of Washington and Oregon, to reach an agreement to restore the salmon in the Columbia River. This does not happen by accident. This happened because we replaced the old Washington politics of who can we blame and hot air with ``What are we going to do about it?'' Let's don't talk, let's roll up our sleeves, join hands, and actually do something to help the American people make the most of their own lives and to move forward, and that is what we proposed to do. So I come here to Tacoma to ask you to help me build a bridge to the 21st century. A bridge that focuses first and foremost on making sure that every American has the chance to make the most of his or her own life, and that means world-class education. A bridge to the 21st century where, as the Vice President said, we hook up every classroom and every library and every school in the United States to the information superhighway, to the Internet, to the World Wide Web, that we give all of our children, for the first time in history, whether they're in the poorest urban districts, the most remote mountain districts--every single child at the first time in history will have access to the same information in the same time at the same quality as the children in the richest schools of America. We have never done it before, we can do it now. Will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century? [Applause] I want to build a bridge to the 21st century where college is available to every American of any age who needs to go. We propose, first, to say people can save more in their individual retirement accounts, their IRA's, and then withdraw from it, tax-free, to pay for a college education. Second, that we want at least 2 years of education after high school by the year 2000 to be just as universal as a high school diploma is today, and we propose to guarantee it by giving people a tax credit, a dollar-for-dollar reduction in the taxes for the typical costs of community college tuition in this country. And third, that we propose to give a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for the costs of any college tuition--undergraduate, graduate, for people who are young or middle-aged or old. Let's do that and build a bridge we can all walk across to the 21st century. Will you help us build that bridge? Audience members. Yes!”