Remarks to the Granoff Forum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 28, 2000

February 24, 2000

Thank you so much. Dr. Rodin, thank you for bringing me here to Penn and to this magnificent hail. Mr. Mayor, thank you for all the kind things you said. I enjoyed working with you and with Mayor Rendell for Philadelphia. I don't think any American can understand our history, our present, or our future without knowing something about Philadelphia.

And I want to thank the Members of Congress who have joined us today: Representatives Chaka Fattah, Representative Joe Hoeffel, Representative Brady, thank you all for being here. I want to thank my Economic Adviser, Gene Sperling, and Karen Tramontano for coming from the White House, because they had a lot to do with whatever success we have enjoyed. And I want to thank Michael Granoff for giving me a chance to attend one more inaugural than I'm entitled to under the Constitution. [Laughter]

They actually promised me a banquet with a Philadelphia cheese cake--I don't know--cheesesteak I mean. I don't know if I got it yet. [Laughter] If you knew how many cheesesteaks I have consumed since I became a candidate here--[laughter]--I think I could get a special line of credit for the revival of the city's economy just as a consumer.

It's hard for me to believe that it was almost 8 years ago when I came here then as a candidate for President. It was a very memorable day for me. I had just come off an entire week without saying a word publicly, because I had lost my voice, and my doctor ordered me to stop speaking. Now, that's torture for any politician, doubly worse if you're in a campaign you could still lose and awful if you think you might have something to say.

In those 8 years, a lot of wonderful things have happened to me. I look out in this audience, and I see so many people, young, old, and in-between, that I have gotten to know in the years since then. Judith talked about how different it is now from the time when I was elected Governor when I was 32, in 1978. It's also quite a bit different than it was in 1992.

When I took the oath of office as President, there were 50 sites on the WorldWide Web. There are millions and millions now. At that time, we had high unemployment, deepening social problems, political gridlock, diminished hope. The Philadelphia Enquirer had just run a series which became a best-selling book entitled, "America: What Went Wrong." It was, unbelievably, a question that was on virtually everyone's lips just 8 years ago.

I had some pretty basic ideas that all boiled down to my conviction that there was nothing wrong with America that couldn't be fixed by what's right with this country and that the job of Government was to create the conditions and give people the tools to make the most of their own God-given abilities, their ideas, and their efforts.

When I came to Penn, I came here to outline a plan that I believed would unleash the pent-up potential of the private sector to build a new economy for all Americans, one that would literally breathe new life into the American dream. One of the things that I focused on then was the importance of advancements and investments in science and technology.

Here at Penn before--even then, it was before the first graphical web browser had been created--I said we ought to have a national strategy to create a national information network to build on the promise of the Internet, to link every home, every lab, every classroom, every business in America. Well, today, thanks to the hard work of the American people and the vision of American entrepreneurs, we are seizing the potential of the Internet and other technologies. We have ushered in an economic transformation as profound as that of the industrial revolution, creating a high-performance economy powered by technology, driven by ideas, rewarding the values that are literally at the core of the American character: innovation, flexibility, and enterprise.

And 7 years and some-odd months later--one month, I guess--we have almost 21 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years; the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates ever recorded; the lowest poverty rate in 20 years; the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years; the highest homeownership on record; the longest economic expansion in our history.

Today I want to use this inaugural lecture to talk fairly briefly about how we got here and where we go from here, to focus on how powerful new technologies are energizing every sector of our economy and how to keep this expansion going and to bring its benefits to people and places still far, far from the American mainstream.

For me, today's forum is a prelude to a major economic conference I intend to convene at the White House on April 5th, to deal with the big, cutting-edge economic issues still before us, with some of the Nation's top economists, CEO's, and other experts. I want to ask them to identify ways we can build on America's strengths and deal with our continuing weaknesses, to take what President Theodore Roosevelt called the "long look ahead" for America over the next several decades.