Bill Clinton: “But you have to decide. Four years ago, I came to New Mexico and the people voted for the Vice President, Al Gore, and…”

“But you have to decide. Four years ago, I came to New Mexico and the people voted for the Vice President, Al Gore, and me and gave us a chance to serve. Four years ago, you took me on faith and the word of my friends in New Mexico, including many who are on this stage. Now there is a record, and we know the difference. We have a record. My opponent has a record. The leaders of his party in Congress have a record. We know what has happened in our country when our policies have been put into effect. We know that they said my economic program would wreck the economy and increase the deficit. But we've reduced the deficit in all 4 years of a President's term for the first time in the 20th century. Incomes are up after 10 years of stagnation; homeownership at a 15-year high; the deficit at a 15-year low; the combined rates of unemployment, inflation, and home mortgages at a 27-year low; child poverty, the biggest drop in 20 years; and 10.7 million new jobs. Our approach is right, and theirs is not. The evidence shows it. There is evidence. When I offered the American people a tough crime bill to put 100,000 police on the street and take drugs and gangs and guns off the street, the other guys, they said the 100,000 police would never happen, it would do no good, and all I wanted to do was to take away weapons from sportsmen and women. Well, they got a lot of votes saying that, but that was 2 years ago. Now we know. We've had 4 years of declining crime rates, the lowest crime rate in America in a decade. Not a single sportsman or woman has lost a weapon, but 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers couldn't get handguns because of the Brady bill, or assault weapons. It was the right thing to do. Now, there are a lot of other good things that have happened: almost 2 million fewer people on the welfare rolls; child support collections up 50 percent, $4 billion a year. That is what we have tried to do. We raised the minimum wage for 10 million Americans. Twenty-five million Americans have been told now you can't have your health insurance just taken away from you because you changed jobs or someone in your family gets sick. We passed a bill that said that no more can mothers and their newborns be kicked out of the hospital after 24 hours by the insurance companies. We passed legislation to help small-business people take out pensions and afford health care. We gave a $5,000 tax credit to families that will adopt a child that needs a home, and I hope more people do as a result of it. We're moving this country in the right direction. Now, there's something else I had to do in the last 4 years--really, in the last year--that Jeff Bingaman and Bill Richardson had to help me with. When our friends in the other party won the Congress, they got to try to put their vision into effect. Their vision was a budget which cut Medicare 3 times more than the trustees said was necessary to stabilize it and ran the risk of creating a system in which the oldest, the poorest, and the sickest of our seniors were left behind. Their budget would have ended a 30-year guarantee that we as Americans have made to the poorest children, to our seniors in nursing homes, to families who have family members with disabilities that we'll help them with health care. Their budget contained the first cut in education in modern history, cutting everything from Head Start to student loans and Pell grants. Audience members. Boo-o-o!”