Remarks to African-American Community Leaders - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 6, 2000

So, number one is, what's the best way to keep the prosperity going? Question number two, how do you build on the progress of the last 8 years with a cleaner environment, with a lower crime rate, with the welfare rolls cut in half, with the schools improving, the college-going rate going up, the number of people without health insurance going down? How do you do that?

Well, I believe you have to have some funds to invest in helping working people whose children we're now insuring get health insurance, too; helping people who leave the work force when they're 55 and don't have health insurance anymore buy into Medicare; in adding this prescription drug benefit for seniors; in funding the college tuition program Vice President Gore has recommended, tuition deduction for college. I think these are very important, and continuing to invest until all our kids who need preschool and after-school have it; continuing to invest because you're going to have 2 million teachers retire over the next 10 years, and we've got to replace them. And if we keep unemployment low and the economy high, we'll have to pay them more, do signing bonuses, do a lot of work on that. So how do you build on the progress? I think you don't just stay still, but the question is, are you going to change in the same direction you're moving in or take a different direction?

So, question number one, how do you keep the prosperity going? Question number two, how do you build on the progress? Question number three, how do you keep building one America?

We've come a long way, but we still have real challenges. We have to figure out a way to work through this racial profiling issue, to stop it without in any way giving anybody the impression that we want any criminal to get away with anything. That's not what this is about. We all want strong law enforcement; we want a safe society. We like the fact that the crime rate is going down, but we don't like people being targeted just because of who they are, rather than whether there is a reasonable suspicion that they've committed a crime.

How do you deal with the fact that we still have a lot of hate crimes in America, based not just on race but on sexual orientation, even a few every year based on disability? Do we need a hate crimes bill? I think we do.

How do you deal with the fact that even though I have named 62 African-American Federal judges--3 times as many as the previous two administrations combined--we still don't have a black judge on the fourth circuit, where there are more black Americans than any other Federal circuit in America?

How do we keep closing the digital divide? It's still out there, within our country and beyond our borders. And I could just go on and on and on. We have big challenges in our continuing effort to build one America.

How are we going to do more to guarantee equal pay for women? I don't know if you saw the news story today, but now married couples with children where both the man and the woman are in the work force are now a majority of married couples--now a majority. Fifty-nine percent of the women in America with a child one year or younger are in the work force now--59 percent. And yet, there is still a yawning pay gap, which is not only bad for women; it's bad for the men that are married to them. [Laughter] I mean, this is not a good deal here.