Bill Clinton: “Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, 4 years ago I had a pretty tough time here. I ran for President against two…”

“Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, 4 years ago I had a pretty tough time here. I ran for President against two guys from Texas. [Laughter] It hardly seemed fair to me. I'm sure I spent more time in Texas than anybody else who had run for President recently. And you were very good to me. We had a good showing here. I've had an opportunity to come back to Texas many times in the last 4 years, and I want to thank all those who have been my friends and supporters through good times and bad. You know, we had some tough decisions to make when I became President. But think what this country was like 4 years ago. We had high unemployment, the slowest job growth since the Great Depression, growing inequality because working people's wages were stagnant. The crime rate was going up. The welfare rolls were going up. The country was becoming more divided, and people were becoming more skeptical, even cynical, about our politics. And I believed it was because we did not have a unifying vision to take us into the 21st century. And I have a simple, straightforward idea of what I want this country to look like in 4 years when we start a new century and a new millennium. In Longview, Texas, and every town like it all across America, I want the American dream to be alive and well for everybody who is willing to work for it, without regard to where they start out in life. I want this country to be the world's strongest force for peace and freedom and prosperity, because our peace and our freedom and our prosperity depends upon America's ability to lead and stand up for those things in the world. And I wanted us to be a country that's coming together, not being torn apart by our differences. And I believe we can all say we're a lot better off by that standard today than we were 4 years ago. We're on the right track for the 21st century. We've done it by trying to meet our challenges and protect our values with a simple little strategy: opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and an American community that treats everybody fairly and gives everybody a role to play. Now, you look at the results and you think about the tough times in 1993 and 1994. When we were passing our economic plan, Mr. Morales' opponent said, ``If the President's plan passes, unemployment will go up, the deficit will go up, we'll have a terrible recession.'' That's what he said. Well, now we know. A trained economist, they say. Four years later we have 10\1/2\ million new jobs, 900,000 here in Texas; the lowest unemployment rate in America in 7\1/2\ years; the lowest unemployment rate here in 15 years; in every single year a record number of new small businesses; the highest rate of homeownership in 15 years; 4\1/2\ million new homeowners. And yesterday, in the annual report of the United States Census Bureau on how we're doing as a country in terms of our income, we got the following information. Last year, median--that's the people in the middle, direct middle, not the average, the people in the middle--median household income last year increased by almost $900 after inflation, the biggest increase in family income in 10 years. Family income since that economic plan passed has gone up over $1,600. And even more important, more of us who are working are sharing in it. We had the biggest decline in the inequality of incomes and the biggest decline in the number of working Americans living in poverty in 27 years, from one year to the next. We had the biggest decline in the number of children living in poverty in 20 years. We are on the right track, and we need to stay on that track to the 21st century. We have increased education opportunities, from more children in Head Start to a better, lower cost college loan program, to the AmeriCorps program to allow young people to work their way through college by serving in their communities. We're moving in the right direction. The crime rate has gone down for 4 years in a row because of those 100,000 police Ann Richards was talking about. And when they told all the hunters in east Texas that the President was trying to take their guns away when the Brady bill passed, it sounded pretty good at the time, and we took a terrible licking in a lot of places in 1994. You would have thought I was going to knock on the doors myself and take people's guns away. Well, guess what? Now we know. Now we know. Two hunting seasons have come and gone. It turns out that I was telling the truth. When we took the 19 assault weapons off the street we protected 650 kinds of hunting weapons. So 2 years later not a single hunter in Texas has lost their rifle. But 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers could not get handguns because of the Brady bill. So the crime rate went down. The welfare rolls are down by nearly 2 million in America. Child support collections are up by almost 50 percent--nearly $4 billion a year more in child support collections. That's helping to move people off welfare and give families dignity and reinforce the responsibility of everyone to support their children. We are moving in the right direction. And you know, when I ran for President--and I liked what Martha said. You know, she literally reinvented government. She consolidated her job. I heard our friends in the other party, they always said the Federal Government is a terrible thing. It's nothing but waste. It would mess up a one-car parade. And they made a living--they owned the White House for decades, you know, just kicking the Federal Government around. They hated it so much, but they couldn't bear to be outside of it. It kind of tickled me. But they never did anything about it. They bad- mouthed it. They said how bad the Government was. They said we Democrats were nothing but Government lovers and we would defend every program. Well, guess what? Now we know. Our administration reduced the size of the Federal Government by 250,000. It's the size it was now when John Kennedy was President. As a percentage of our work force it's the smallest it's been since Franklin Roosevelt first took the oath of office in 1933. That's what we did to reinvent this Government. We're still serving you, but it is smaller. We have reduced the burden of Federal regulations more. We have eliminated more unnecessary programs. We've given more authority back to State and local government. We've shared more authority with the private sector than they ever did when they had the White House. The only difference is we're doing it because we think it will help to create the conditions and give you the tools to make the most of your own lives. So we still believe we ought to balance the budget, but we don't believe we ought to wreck the Medicare program or the Medicaid program or undermine education or the environment. That's the difference. Folks, you know, I spent the last 12 years of my life before I moved to Washington a lot closer to Longview than to Washington. And I was in Washington at a dinner last night, and Senator Dodd, the chairman of our party, said that he sort of felt sorry for me when I showed up. I'd never been in the House. I'd never been in the Senate. I'd never served in anybody's administration. I'd just been a Governor. I didn't understand how Washington worked, and it was more about talk than action. [At this point, an audience member required medical attention.]”