Remarks at the congressional Asian-Pacific American Caucus Institute dinner

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 20, 1996

We have worked to dramatically increase our protection of the environment from our cities to our rural areas, including our National Parks. We have worked to strengthen families through the family and medical leave law; a family tax credit for working families on modest incomes; an increased effort to collect child support; going for the V chip and for a television rating system to help parents raise their young children without excessive exposure to violence and other destructive elements; and our campaign against childhood smoking, which has attracted a great deal of opposition, but I would just point out, the biggest health problem in America and 3,000 children a day illegally begin to smoke.

The economy is better off, but its important to point out that the crime rate is down, the welfare rolls are down. There are over one million fewer families on welfare today than there were 4 years ago. The poverty rate has dropped, and this country is coming together.

I am grateful for what we have been able to do to make this a more peaceful place. There are no nuclear weapons pointed at the children of the United States for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age. The United States is a force for peace and freedom. From Northern Ireland to Southern Africa, to Haiti, to Bosnia, to the Middle East, we are working to bring the countries of the world together to fight our common enemies of terrorism and organized crime and drug-running and the proliferation of weapons and the destruction of our precious global environment.

But if you ask me to tell you what it is we really have to do to get into the 21st century with these ideals being met, I would say we have to find a way to meet our challenges and protect our values and to do it together.

If you think about so much of the political rhetoric we have heard in America for, well, a long time now, it seems to be designed to divide people, to make neighbors look upon their neighbors as if they're almost alien, to make people believe that public servants that are otherwise perfectly normal people are somehow capable of the utmost depravity.

The truth is, this is a pretty great country, or we wouldn't be here after over 200 years. And we should have our debates and our differences and our heated debates on public policy. But we ought to do it in a way that says that we realize that we all love our country, we all love our Constitution, and we know we're going up or down together. And if we persist in dividing ourselves against one another, we will weaken America. If we unite and make a virtue out of our diversity, there is no country as well-positioned for the 21st century as the United States.

We've tried to do that. In the past year, just for example, we hosted two Asian-Pacific American Education Forums to address the needs of Asian-American students and their teachers. We're approved almost $2 billion in loans from the Small Business Administration to Asian-American businesses. We funded an SBA program targeted to Asian-American women, to provide training and counseling to thousands of women in Chinatown in New York City. We've done all this while shrinking the size of the Government and the burden of regulation.