Remarks to African-American Community Leaders - Transcript

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 6, 2000

You know, I came late to this issue because my wife made more money than me until I got elected President. [Laughter] And now I'm going to let her try public service, I hope, and I'll see if I can make more money. [Laughter] I want you to laugh and have a good time, but this is serious. How are we going to build one America?

So, one, how do you keep the prosperity going? Two, how do you build on the progress we're making in every aspect of our social life? Three, how do we keep building one America? Four, how do we create a world that is safer for our children, more just, more decent, and more prosperous?

For me, passing the trade bill for Africa and the Caribbean is an important part of that. For me, immigration fairness is important to that. For me, this debt relief initiative, which I am profoundly grateful--I must say, I've tried to emphasize to people, the parties do not fight over everything in Washington. This election ought to be about where our honest differences are. But one of the most moving things to me in this congressional session has been, we actually reached a bipartisan agreement to have America pay its fair share of relieving the debt of the poorest countries in the world that agree to give honest government and put the savings into education, health care, and development. This is a huge deal.

But we've got to keep building that kind of world. I'm proud of the role we played for peace in Northern Ireland. I'm proud of our renewed efforts in Africa. I'm proud of what we did in the Balkans, in Kosovo and Bosnia, to stop ethnic cleansing. We did the right thing. I'm glad we're still struggling to try to build peace in the Middle East through this very difficult period that's taken a lot of our minds and hearts, those of us who have been working on this for the last 8 years.

But that's another thing I want to say. The African-American community should, in my judgment, support America's increasing ties to the rest of the world in a positive way because we are an immigrant nation. Every one of us came here from somewhere else, except the Native Americans, and even their ancestors at one time probably crossed the Bering Straits when it was all land. We all got here from somewhere else.

And so, I asked you to come here today because this is an unusual election season for us. In my lifetime, we have never had an opportunity to go to the polls with so much peace, so much prosperity, with the absence of domestic crisis or looming foreign threat. So we actually are required, all of us, to kind of look inside ourselves and say, what are our dreams here; what is really at stake here; does it matter whether I and all my friends vote here?

And I wanted you to come here just to say, you know, I'm not running for anything--[laughter]--but I don't believe there's been an election where it was any more important to vote, because the American people, in a fundamental sense in this season, are free to chart their own future. And all the best stuff is still out there.