Bill Clinton: “I'm coming to you. [Laughter] Oh, no, no, no. I'm coming to you. I've got a special thing to say about you. So here's…”

“I'm coming to you. [Laughter] Oh, no, no, no. I'm coming to you. I've got a special thing to say about you. So here's what I want you to think about. I want all of you to think in your own mind: What do I want my country to look like when we start this new century? What do I want my country to look like when my children are my age? What kind of legacy do I want to leave to my grandchildren? If we have more opportunity, more responsibility, and we're one American community, there is no stopping this country. Our best days are ahead. That's what I've been working on. Number one, I knew when I became President we had to get that deficit down to get interest rates down to put people back to work. Now we've got over 10 million new jobs, and we're just getting warmed up. We brought the deficit down 4 years in a row for the first time in a President's administration since before the Civil War. We would have a surplus today in our budget--a surplus--if it weren't for the interest we have to pay on the debt run up in the 12 years before I showed up. But I'm working on it, and I want you to let me finish the job. I want you to let me finish the job. And we did this, and we're going to balance that budget without cutting education, cutting environmental protection, and breaking the backs of Medicare and Medicaid. And we have to make sure that ordinary Americans can benefit from this economy. We have got to do that. We had a good week for ordinary Americans last week. We raised the minimum wage for 10 million workers. The same bill contained a tax cut for small businesses, who create most of our jobs, so they can invest more in their businesses, and made it easier for them to take out pensions for themselves and their workers and for the workers in small businesses to keep those pensions when they change jobs. That was a good thing. The same bill gave a $5,000 tax credit to adults who will adopt children, and even more if the children have disabilities. And it removed the barriers to cross-racial adoption. There's a lot of kids out there that need a happy home. That was a good thing to do, that we did. And the Congress passed the Kassebaum-Kennedy bill that your two Members here had been working for for a long time. It says to 25 million Americans, just because somebody in your family has been sick, they can't take your insurance away from you anymore. It says you don't lose your insurance when you change jobs. This is a good thing. But we have to do more. We have to do more. We ought now to say just because you can't lose your insurance doesn't mean you can pay for it. We ought to help families that are unemployed keep their health insurance for 6 months. I'm for that. I want to help people who have someone in their family with Alzheimer's and they're trying to care for them, get a little respite care. That's in my balanced budget plan, too, so they can keep their families and take care of them. We have to do more. And I want you to believe that we can do these things. The most important thing we have to do is to make sure every child in this country and every adult in this country can get the education they need. And I want to say to you--I don't know about the rest of you, but I wouldn't be standing up here if it weren't for my teachers, the people that believed in me. And I know that not every school is perfect and not every class is successful, but we've still got a public education system that is doing its best to take everybody that comes in the door and give all those kids a chance. And some of these teachers are laboring under great difficulties. And so I say to you, we need to make a commitment that we're going to do what we can to take responsibility for our schools and lift up the people that are trying to make them work, not get out here and bash them day-in and day-out. We need to be lifting them up. I want to see--I want to see every classroom in this country, every single one, in 4 years not only have the computers they need, not only have teachers trained in the computers, but I want every single classroom hooked up to the worldwide information superhighway--everyone. Now, consider what this means. This could mean that for the first time in the history of the United States ever, children in the poorest urban classrooms, children in the most remote hill or hollow of Appalachia, would have access to the same information in the same time at the same quality as the children in the wealthiest, best financed schools in the United States of America. It has never happened before. Then we'll see what happens on those test scores. Then we'll see what happens. I want to see an America where every young person can go to college and every adult can go to college. Four years from now, I want 2 years of education after high school, the equivalent of a community college diploma, to be just as universal as a high school diploma is today. And I want to give you a tax credit to pay for those 2 years and a deduction for all college costs to up to $10,000 a year of tuition. That's a tax cut. That's a tax cut we can pay for and a tax cut that will pay for itself many times over. We need to do that. Well, there's a lot more I'd like to tell you, but you get the idea. We've got 10 million more jobs, 1\1/2\ million fewer people on welfare. Twelve million people took advantage of the family and medical leave law and didn't lose their jobs, and that's a good thing for America. We've got 4\1/2\ million new homeowners, 10 million American families who refinanced their homes at lower interest rates, 50 million Americans breathing cleaner air. We cleaned up more toxic waste dumps in 3 years than the previous administrations did in 12. You get the picture. You get the picture? Audience members. Yes!”