Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much for the wonderful welcome. Thank you, Tom, for the great introduction. I wish I'd been here to hear…”

“Thank you very much for the wonderful welcome. Thank you, Tom, for the great introduction. I wish I'd been here to hear it. [Laughter] But I appreciate it. You know, I've taken so many controversial positions in the last 3 years, I thought I'd come here and tell you what you ought to do in this election. [Laughter] You should elect--listen to this--you ought to elect an Irish-American from the Bronx who comes out of the Service Employees Union. [Laughter] I just want you to know that whatever you do, I intend to be there with you every step of the way. And I know how important this is. [Applause] Thank you. Let me say before I get into my remarks, I have just come, as I think all of you know, from Hyde Park and a meeting with President Yeltsin of Russia. We made a lot of progress today in agreeing to work toward peace in Bosnia, something that concerns every citizen of the world whose conscience has been shocked by all the children and other innocent people who have been killed there. We also agreed on working together, very importantly, to control the spread of nuclear materials, something that is a very serious problem in the aftermath of the cold war, to minimize the prospect that terrorists will ever be able to get small amounts of nuclear material and make bombs out of them. And finally, President Yeltsin agreed with me that we should go for the strongest possible comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty next year. And that means we will probably get it, and the world will be much safer as a result of it. I know that you have--all of you--and I came here more than anything else just to thank you, because I know that you have waged a strong and passionate grassroots campaign for a year now to oppose the cuts in worker safety and job training, in education and health care, being considered in the Congress. The White House mailroom is jammed with postcards from union retirees. [Applause] Thank you. This may be the high-tech age, but you have got the Capitol Hill switchboards groaning with calls from your members. And I say, send more. And I know that those ads you're running have gotten some Members of Congress suffering with heartburn. And we just need to pour it on a little more. I thank you for that. I come here today with a simple message: This is a very great country. You helped to make it that way. We're on the edge of a new century. We're living in a time of great change. No one can perceive clearly all the implications of that change. We know that we've moved from an industrial age to an information and technology age, which, as all of you know in your own experience, even industry and agriculture is infused today with more technology. We know we have moved from the bipolar world of the cold war to a global village in which we have dreamed of new possibilities but also a lot of new vulnerabilities because of the changes that are going on. And we know we've got to somehow harness this change to benefit ordinary people in our country and throughout the world. We have to do it consistent with the basic values that made America great and that make life worth living, values that your movement embodies: a commitment to opportunity for every American; to the dignity of work; to the commitment that the family should be strengthened and children should be nurtured and parents should be hon- ored; a recognition that we have to go forward or backward together and therefore it is crazy for us to be divided by race, by region, by income, in any way that in any way saps our strength; and the determination to keep this country the strongest nation on Earth. Those are the things which have animated the labor movement in the later half of the 20th century. And those are the values that will take us into the 21st century. Three years ago, you helped the American people to send me to Washington to uphold these values and to turn our economy around. I had a commitment to make the American dream real for all Americans in the 21st century and to make sure that our country would remain the strongest country in the world. I had a simple strategy to harness change to benefit all of us. I thought we needed to be faithful to the mainstream values I just mentioned. I thought we needed a middle class economic strategy to grow the middle class and shrink the under class. I thought we needed a modern Government that would be less bureaucratic, more entrepreneurial, but still strong enough to take care of the business that the people need done. The lion's share of the credit belongs to you and the rest of the American people, but we're moving in the right direction. And I know that our policies had something to do with it. We've got 7\1/2\ million new jobs in this country, after the slowest job growth in the country since the Great Depression, in the 4 years before I took office. We've got 2\1/2\ million more homeowners, 2 million new small business people, the lowest combined rate of inflation and unemployment in 25 years. Our country is safer and stronger. For the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age, there's not a single solitary nuclear missile pointed at the people of the United States of America. And I'm proud of that. And by the grace of God, from Northern Ireland to Haiti to the Middle East, now to Bosnia, the United States is a strong partner in pushing for peace. Maybe most important of all, this country seems to be slowly coming together around its values again. It's hard to turn a great country around, but when we get going in a certain direction, we can make a real difference. In almost every State, in this great city where you're meeting, the crime rate is down; the murder rate is down; the welfare rolls are down; the food stamp rolls are down. Believe it or not, the poverty rate is down, and the teen pregnancy rate has dropped for 2 years in a row. America is coming back and moving together. And we proved you could do it together. Instead of just condemning the Government the way my predecessors did, we made a partnership with the Federal employees, and in a balanced and fair and disciplined way, we tried to downsize the Government so that this big Government attack is a myth today. But we left our Government strong enough for the employees that are there to do their jobs. And we just didn't throw anybody on the street; we gave them good buyout provisions. We tried to protect their retirement. We treated them and their families with decency and the honor and the respect they were entitled to after the years they had served the United States of America. And that's the way this ought to be done everywhere. Let me tell you what the Federal employees are doing, just a few things. I could talk all day about it. But Federal employees working in the Commerce Department, in the Export-Import Bank, in other areas, have helped to create good jobs, many of them union jobs, in America by increasing our exports 4 percent, 10 percent, and 16 percent this year, in the last 3 years. A lot of that was done because of aggressive actions by people who work for the United States Government. The Federal Emergency Management Agency--we've had as many natural disasters to deal with in the last 3 years as any time I can remember. And it is probably the most popular arm of the Federal Government because the Federal employees have been there in a timely, aggressive, effective fashion when they were needed, whether it was for floods in the Middle West or fires and earthquakes in the West or anything else. And I am proud of that. And let me tell you something I'm especially proud of. Business Week magazine, which is hardly an arm of the Federal Government or the Democratic Party, every year gives awards to businesses that perform at the highest level of efficiency in a number of categories. And one of their categories is for customer service over the telephone. So the businesses that compete, for example, are Southwest Airlines or L.L. Bean or, you know, anybody that you call on the telephone. You know who won this year? The Social Security Administration of the Federal Government won that award. These Federal employees operate a Medicare program that has a 2 percent administrative cost, lower than any private insurance program in the United States of America, something you rarely hear about in the debate going on in Congress today. They have implemented a crime bill that's putting 100,000 police on the streets of America, and they're doing it on time and under budget. They have implemented the motor voter law, the family leave law, both those things that you helped to get. They have been able to be much tougher in capturing large quantities of drugs before they come into this country. Without going into a bunch of immigrant bashing, they have been able to in a disciplined way strengthen our ability to reduce the problems of illegal immigration in the United States. And they have fought discrimination, something that was out of fashion for the Federal Government to do until this administration came in. And I thank them for it. And guess what? We've been able to prove you can grow the economy and be decent to working people, something that the people who were there before and the people who are in the Congress today in dominant positions apparently don't believe. If you look at what's happened--and I'm sure Tom mentioned a lot of this--but when we repealed my predecessors' antiunion Executive orders that denied American workers their rights from private industry to public service, it didn't hurt the economy. The economy got better, not worse. When we said in no uncertain terms that you ought to have a fair, decent, effective NLRB, and we did our best to provide that, the economy got better, not worse. It didn't undermine the American economy. When we refused to go along with repealing Davis-Bacon and the service contract law, the economy didn't collapse; it helped to create more high-wage jobs, not fewer. And when we began to crack down on sweatshops where unscrupulous employers make illegal immigrants work in prisonlike conditions, depriving them of the minimum wage, overtime pay, a safe workplace, and the right to organize, it will make us stronger, not weaker. And when we have refused to go along with the attempts of some people to weaken our ability to provide a safe workplace, it has not weakened the economy; it has helped to make the American economy stronger. It is time we accepted a fundamental lesson: Treating working people in a decent, fair, humane, enlightened way gives you a stronger American economy, not a weaker one. Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!”