Bill Clinton: “Thank you very much. Folks, this is supposed to be informal, so I'm going to sit down if you don't mind. That…”

“Thank you very much. Folks, this is supposed to be informal, so I'm going to sit down if you don't mind. That introduction you just heard is a good illustration of Clinton's first law of politics, which is whenever possible, get somebody you've appointed to high office to introduce you. They'll lie about you every time. [Laughter] I'm glad to be here with your secretary of agriculture, your secretary of state, and your Governor, my longtime friend. We served together for a long time. And when he got elected Governor, he was 3 months younger than me. He displaced me from being the youngest Governor. Now there are 10 or 12 Governors younger than we are. We've hung around too long and worked ourselves into middle age. I'm glad to be here with Congressman Jim Leach and with Congressman Lane Evans, who's the Congressman from across the river in Illinois. I want to say we had some contact with Senator Grassley before I came today, and Senator Harkin called me the day before yesterday and gave me a long litany of everything I was supposed to be doing. I said, ``Well, Tom, I don't even need to go to Iowa now. I've been educated, you know.'' [Laughter] It is true that there wasn't much of a sales job to get me to come here. If you could come to Iowa on the Fourth of July or stay in Washington and burn up, what would you do? [Laughter] So I'm glad to be back here. The last time I was in this part of Iowa was when I was on my bus trip. And actually, our bus trip went through almost every place that's badly flooded here, starting in northern Missouri and Iowa and Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin. And of course, you got some pretty substantial damage in South Dakota also. I am very glad to be back. I want to thank Secretary Espy for coming out here so promptly. I wish I could have come a few days earlier, but the legislative and other schedules in Washington just wouldn't permit it. I do want to say that I appreciate, Dale, what you said about Secretary Espy. One reason I asked him to be Secretary of Agriculture is that he represented a district in Congress that bordered my State, and I wanted to appoint somebody Secretary of Agriculture that actually represented farmers and that had seen crops flood and also seen crops burn, often on the same land. If you hang around long enough, you see it on the same land. And we are trying up there to be responsive and to be helpful. And I want to thank all the people here in Iowa and all the people throughout this Mississippi River area who have been very cooperative with us and have helped us. I came here mostly to listen to you today, but I wanted to talk about--I've got three or four notes here. I want to just make sure I don't forget to say anything. Of the things we already know, we know that the damage from this flood is going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. We feel that it is, anyway. I have only $100 million right now in my disaster fund under present law. And I signed a letter releasing that fund before I came out here. There is also a new law which has been passed by the Congress which provides disaster payments for 1993. It's got about $297 million in it. It is on my desk, and I will sign it as soon as I get back. And don't think I'm derelict. You couldn't get get the money even if I signed it yesterday. It'll take a while to get. So we're still going to be real short of funds. So I'm going to ask Congress on an emergency basis to provide some additional funding, and Secretary Espy is going to be working with the rest of the people in the executive branch and your Representatives from here to put together legislation that will adequately take care of the problems insofar as we can under Federal law. We are going to ask that the producers here receive the same benefits as the people who were affected by Hurricane Andrew and other major disasters last year, which is something that the congressional delegations and the Governors have asked us to do, and we're going to do that. And we will eliminate the August 1st deadline for disaster filing, which is what's in the present law. We'll present a bill to do that, and I've already talked to the leadership in the House and the Senate on a bipartisan basis from other States. And they don't have any problem with doing that. They know that we need to. The last thing I'd like to mention before I open it to your comments and questions, because you may have some other specific things we can do, is that I have asked Secretary Espy to work with the other Federal agencies and with the appropriate people in Congress on a long-term reform of the crop insurance system. Any farmer who's ever fooled with it knows it's a good thing if you've got it, if you've got insured what goes wrong, in just the way it's supposed to be. But it's nowhere near what it ought to be. If you don't get your beans planted in the first place, for example, you can't get any insurance on it, even if you pay and pay and pay for years. That's a big issue. I come from a State that has not near as much corn as Iowa, just a little bit of corn, but a whole bunch of soybeans. It's not a program crop, and if you take out crop insurance against it and then it gets wet and you can't plant it at all, under the present system you can't recover. It's just not a very good, comprehensive, or appropriate system in my opinion. So we're going to try to see if we can't get some reforms up that people will agree to. And there are some other actions that Secretary Espy can take that he may want to talk about or you may want to ask about. But these are the specific things we think we can do. I hope it will be enough so that we don't lose a lot of farmers who are operating on the margins. I went through that whole thing in the 1980's when I was a Governor of a big farm State, and every other day I had a friend who was dropping out of farming. And we're going to do what we can to move as quickly and as aggressively as we can. I hope it will help. I think it's real, real important to get this long-term reform of the crop insurance system and work it out so that people can access it, and then if they got it, it amounts to something when they suffer a loss. So we're going to do what we can to get that done. I thank you for spending part of your Fourth of July with me. I know you could be out shooting fireworks, and I'm sorry about all the water. We had a whole lot of my State under water 3 or 4 years ago when the Arkansas River flooded, and we had towns under water, house under water like what I saw today, a town and an awful lot of farmland. I know what you're going through. I'm very sorry. I hope this will help, and I assure you we'll be very diligent in pushing to get this action through Congress. If you have any other ideas or suggestions we would be glad to have them. And thank you again, Governor. Thank you, Mr. Secretary. Thank you, Madam Secretary. Congressman Leach, I'm glad to be in your district and see you looking so hale and hearty. And thank you all very much for having us. [At this point, a participant expressed appreciation for the President's visit and discussed severe weather conditions in 1988 and 1991.]”