Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much, John, for that introduction. Mr. Vice President, Secretary Reich, thank you for your wonderful work…”

“Thank you very much, John, for that introduction. Mr. Vice President, Secretary Reich, thank you for your wonderful work on this project. Lane Kirkland and Larry Perlman, thank you for being up here with us and for representing the American business and labor communities in the partnership we hope to build. And I want to thank John Hahn from Niagara County, New York. I met him last month. As he said, he was laid off after 28 years at Bell Aerospace, and he learned new skills after 28 years as a biomedical technician. He and Deb Woodbury and Donald Hutchinson were all on our panel. It was a good one, and I learned a lot listening to them. This morning when we were going over the day, early morning in the White House, Mack McLarty mentioned to me, he said, ``We're going to talk about two things today that you ran for President to do something about because it helps all the people we grew up with.'' When I started out on the long quest which led all of us to this particular moment, and I talked to a lot of my fellow Governors and friends who are mayors, and others, it seemed to me that this country was really at some risk of being thrown into the 21st century not being able to preserve the American dream and keep going and that there were at least three huge problems for ordinary Americans. One was that more and more Americans were working harder and harder for stagnant wages and falling closer and closer to the poverty line.…”