Remarks at a Tribute to Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., of North Carolina

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 30, 2000

October 24, 2000

Thank you very much. Well, first of all, to all our friends from North Carolina, welcome to Washington. I'm glad you're here. The two previous speakers have been two of the closest friends I've had in politics and two of the best Governors with whom I've ever served. And so I thank them both.

I want to start by saying a word about Governor Patton and then get into the tribute to Governor Hunt and what all that means for what we're doing as Americans right now in this election season.

First of all, Paul Patton ran for Governor and won in Kentucky after Jim Hunt and I had been out working on a lot of this stuff for years and years and years, going back to the seventies. I have personally never seen anybody learn so much so fast and have such an impact as Governor Patton did in Kentucky. I've never seen anybody get up to speak so fast on things that he had not previously lived with and worked with and have an immediate impact. And along the way, he found the time to help Al Gore and me carry Kentucky in 1992 and 1996, against enormous odds, where we had absolutely no right to think we could win. And we sort of squeaked by both times. And he has done a magnificent job.

But let me just give you one example. Several years ago, when Secretary Riley, who also served with Jim and me as Governor back in the seventies, early eighties, was--we persuaded the Congress to adopt a bill saying that all the States ought to have academic standards. Then we persuaded Congress to say that States getting Federal money ought to at least have a system for identifying their failing schools.

Paul Patton said, "Well, if we're going to identify them, we might as well do something about them." And so when I was--and I have been trying to pass, with the support of Jim Hunt and Paul Patton, an accountability measure that Vice President Gore has advocated in his campaign that basically says that the recipient--it's real accountability. If Jim and Paul and I had time, if we had another 30 minutes, we could explain to you why the proposal of the Democratic nominee for accountability will work better than the proposal of the Republican nominee for accountability, based on our combined half-century of experience in this.

Anyway, Patton says we ought to have--if we've got to identify these failing schools, we ought to do something about them. So he comes up with this system. I went to western Kentucky with Governor Patton a few months ago, to try to persuade the Congress to pass our bill, saying if you get this Federal aid, you must not only identify the failing schools, you have to turn them around within 2 years or shut them down and reopen them under new management.

Now, Jim has done something very like that in the most comprehensive way in North Carolina, and I'll come back to that. So I'm in this school in western Kentucky, in this low-income area, where over half the kids are on school lunch, where 4 years ago this was one of the worst schools in Kentucky. And they go through this system, and in 3 years, this is what happened: They went from 12 percent of the kids reading at or above grade level to about 60 percent; they went from 5 percent of the kids doing math at or above grade level to 70 percent; they went from zero kids in the whole school doing science at or above grade level to 63 percent--in 3 years.

And what does that show you? First of all, for those of us who have been doing this for 20 years, we know something now we didn't know in the late seventies, or we didn't know in '83 when the "Nation at Risk" report was issued. We actually know that you can identify failing schools and turn them around. And nobody, no State has done it any more systematically then he has. That school that was an abject failure is now one of the top 20 schools in the State of Kentucky.

Thank you Governor, for your leadership.

I want to start with something personal. When I was elected Governor in 1978, I got to serve with Jim Hunt, starting in '79. And he was a big deal, even then. [Laughter] And I was 32 and looked like I was about 25. You guys have taken care of that in the last 8 years. [Laughter] And you know when you come to the end of a certain period in your life, as I am coming to the end of my service as President--and this is the first election in 26 years where I haven't been on a ballot somewhere, and most days I'm okay about it--but you can look back over your life and see a handful of people who did this, that, or the other thing for you, without whom you might never have become President.

And in 1979 Jim Hunt told the Democratic Governors they should make me the vice chairman of the Democratic Governors' Association, which, in turn, would entitle me to become chairman. And I was, by 9 years, I think, the youngest Governor in the country at the time. And nobody had--it would never have happened--the only reason it happened is because everybody thought he knew what he was talking about, and so they said okay. [Laughter]

And it was the first significant national position of any kind I had. And in 1980 I did become chairman of the Democratic Governors' Association and got involved in a whole range of things that I had never been involved with before and might never have come in contact with. So for good or ill, depending on what you think of the Clinton Presidency--[laughter]--I'm not sure I'd be here if it weren't for you.