Remarks to African-American Community Leaders - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 6, 2000

October 27, 2000

Thank you very much, Secretary Herman, and thank you for the wonderful, wonderful job you have done as Secretary of Labor. I want to thank the others who are here from the White House today: Minyon Moore; Mary Beth Cahill; Ben Johnson; Alvin Brown, the Vice Chair of our Community Empowerment Board that the Vice President has done such a great job leading in the last 8 years; Lorraine Miller, the executive director of the Community Empowerment Board; Jena Roscoe, the Director of African-American Outreach; John Johnson of the NAACP; Norman Hill of the A. Philip Randolph Instibite; Wade Henderson; Yvonne Scrugg Leftwich; and of course, my great friend Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson from Texas. Thank you for being here.

Thank you all for joining me today. I wanted to talk with you a little bit about the upcoming election and the profound importance that I believe it has for all of you and for all of those about whom you care.

You know, first, let me say I feel so much gratitude as I approach the end of my service as President. If anybody had told me when we started that we would end with 22 million new jobs and the highest homeownership in history and the highest rate of business formation in history and the lowest minority unemployment in history, the lowest recorded African-American poverty rate in history, the lowest child poverty rate in 20 years, lowest welfare rolls in 32 years--cut in half--the lowest crime rate in 26 years, a reduction in the number of people without health insurance for the first time in a dozen years, record rates of college-going--all these things that have happened-I would have been very grateful. And I am grateful.

But today what I want to say to you is that the country is in good shape; we're moving in the right direction. But we are now in a position that we were not in 8 years ago, where we have to ask ourselves not what do we do to get out of the ditch but what do we do to build the future of our dreams for our children?

And we're in a position to choose, which is what voting ought to be about. I've done my best to try to urge the American people and all the political actors to make this a very positive election but a vigorous debate. And they're having their debate, and I don't have to contribute to that, but everybody knows how I feel. But I want to talk about what all this means.

First of all, as Alexis said, we've been driven here for 8 years by some pretty simple ideas. One is that there ought to be opportunity for every responsible citizen. And that meant that we had to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own lives. The other is that we ought to build one America across all the lines that divide us, which meant that we had to take exceptional efforts to make sure that there was participation and empowerment. And finally, I have sought to create in our country the capacity to lead the world for peace and freedom in the post-cold-war era, recognizing that the world is growing ever more interdependent and that every part of the world is important to us.

So we've worked hard at all this. Alexis talked about the economy and the participation of African-Americans in the administration. Since I've been here, we've had--cf my total appointees--12 percent of the Cabinet, 14 percent of the total appointees, and 17 percent of the Federal judicial nominees.

But we've worked hard to affect America at the grassroots level. That's what the empowerment zone program is about, that the Vice President has done such a good job of running these last 8 years. That's what the new markets initiative we're desperately trying to pass through the Congress in the closing days, to give people the same incentives to invest in underdeveloped areas in America we give people to invest in underdeveloped areas in Latin America and Africa and Asia and other parts of the world.

And I feel very good about that. But I'm grateful that we've got childhood immunizations over 90 percent for the first time in the history of our Nation.

I'm also grateful for the progress in education. We had a theory that--we're only spending about 7 percent of the total education budget. It's a State constitutional responsibility, a local administrative responsibility, but a national priority. And when I came to the Presidency, I had already been seriously involved in education for about 14 years. And I wanted to put our money--first, I wanted to get the money up, because we were down below 6 percent and heading south, and so we wanted to turn that around. And even as we got rid of the deficit and turned a $290 billion deficit into a $230 billion surplus, we doubled our investment in education and training. A lot of that money has been in Secretary Herman's shop.

But when we looked at the schools, what we wanted to do was to focus on what the research and the educators say worked: to get high standards, genuine accountability, and then support for the schools and the teachers and the kids and the parents to succeed, to meet the standards. And we've worked very hard. We've expanded preschool. We've invested more in teacher training. We're putting--I believe that we have gotten an agreement for the third year of our 100,000 teacher initiative to have smaller classes in the early grades.