Remarks to the Saxophone Club in Culver City, California

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 17, 1996

The President. Thank you very much.

Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!

The President. Thank you. First of all, let me say a special thank you to Don Fowler, the chairman of the Democratic Party, for coming out here to California with me. Thank you, Don. I want to thank Alec Baldwin for his years of support and for his wonderful, loyal devotion to this country. You know, I heard Alec up here giving this speech, and I thought, if he ever gets tired of making movies, he'd be a pretty good candidate, wouldn't he? [Laughter] He did well. I want to thank Joe Walsh and his band. And since he played "Rocky Mountain Way" - you may not know that since you've been in here, Colorado won the Stanley Cup, the hockey championship tonight, so I thought that was good. I want to thank John Fogerty for all of his music and everything he's done over the years. Thank you, John. I thank my good friend Whoopi Goldberg for being here earlier. She had to leave, but I know she was great and did a great job for you.

And let me thank all of you who have been part of the Saxophone Club, especially the people who have been working on it. There are people here who have been working on this idea of the Saxophone Club for years now. And the whole idea was we would find a way for Americans who maybe didn't have a lot of money to participate, to contribute, to be a part of our political campaign and our movement to change America, beginning back in 1992, especially younger Americans.

And as I look out at you tonight, I know you've been having a good time, and we ought to spend most of our time just sort of listening to music and chanting, "Four more years!" It's been a hard week. I like hearing that. [Laughter] But I'd like for you to think just for a couple of minutes about what this election is about, because most of you are considerably younger than I am, and most of you, therefore, have a much bigger stake in the consequences of the election in the future than I do. And I want you to think about it.

When I was out here shaking hands during the music, one young woman over here said, "Take care of us, Mr. President." And I said, "I'm sure trying to do that." And I am. But what does that mean? What does that mean? If you think about all the things that are going on in our country today and in our world, all these incredible changes, most of them are working out pretty well for most of you. The future is going to be a time when there will be more different things for people to do to live out their dreams than at any point in human history.

And if we do the right things in America, the best days of this country are still ahead of us, because there's no country in the world that is capable of creating opportunity for so many people; no country in the world as capable of bringing together so many different peoples across all the racial and ethnic and religious and other lines that divide us, into a common family; no nation in the world so capable of leading the world toward greater peace and freedom and human dignity and prosperity, And that's really what this election is all about.

You are lucky enough to be living through the period of greatest change that our country has experienced in the way we work, the way we live, and the way we relate to the rest of the world in 100 years, since we've moved from farm to factory and from the country to the city. Now we're moving from a national economy and the cold war to a global village, away from an industrial age to one dominated by information, technology, computers. Bill Gates, the great computer genius, says that the microchip has launched the greatest revolution in communication not in 100 years but in 500 years. That's what all of you have inherited. And we have to decide what we're going to do with it. And that's what this whole debate is about.

I believe the purpose of my office and your Government is to, first and foremost, create opportunity for everybody; to give every person, without regard to where they start in life, a chance to live out their dreams. I believe that, therefore, it is worth fighting to do what we've done. We've cut the deficit by more than half. Our economy has produced almost 10 million new jobs. We're moving forward in a dramatic way. I think that's important.

But not everybody has the opportunity to participate in this, and I won't be satisfied until everybody does. That's why, if you will reelect me, I'll do everything I can to guarantee that every single American citizen has a guarantee of 2 more years of education after high school, for every single, solitary person, that every American will be able to afford to go to college, and that you will be able to deduct the cost of college tuition from your income taxes - that every American will always have access to lifetime education. Most of you will be doing things 10 or 20 years from now or many of you will be doing work that literally has not even been invented yet.

And if I could do one thing for this country as President to create a structure of opportunity that would carry us way into the next century, it would be create a seamless web of lifetime education that every American could move in and out of, just like rolling down a river - very important.