Remarks in Chillicothe, Ohio

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 2, 1996

The President. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.

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

The President. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It's great to be back in Chillicothe. The last time I was here it was 3 degrees, and we still went running in the park. And I'm amazed I can move. But I survived it, and I'm glad to be back. It's a wonderful place. [Applause] Thank you.

Thank you, Senator John Glenn, for your heroic career, your magnificent service to Ohio and to the United States. Thank you for your leadership in defense and foreign policy and in helping Al Gore and me to give this country the smallest Federal Government in 30 years and the most efficient since John Kennedy was President of the United States.

And thank you, Ted Strickland. I want to thank you for a couple of things. I want to thank you for coming to me personally and riding with me on Air Force One and pleading with me to help you keep open the gaseous plant in Portsmouth. I want to thank you for helping work with me on the enterprise community designation for Portsmouth. I want to thank you for having the courage - and I think it cost you your seat in '94 - to vote for that economic plan when our friends in the opposition said it was tax-and-spend. And of course, it wasn't. We cut taxes for 15 million of the hardest working Americans. We made 90 percent of the small business in this country eligible for a tax cut.

But we did cut the deficit. And our friends in the opposition said, "Give us the Congress. Bill Clinton's plan will bankrupt the country, increase the deficit, cost us jobs." Well, the verdict is in, friends. Four years later, we have 10 million more jobs, the deficit has gone down 4 years in a row under the same administration for the first time since before the Civil War. Ted Strickland was right, and his opponent was wrong.

I want to thank you for voting for the family and medical leave law. Twelve million working Americans have been able to take some time off in the last 3 1/2 years when there was a baby born or a parent sick without losing their jobs. And we just got a bipartisan study that said 90 percent of the businesses said it was no problem.

We have grown jobs faster in this economy in the last 4 years than, as Senator Glenn said, any Republican administration since the 1920's. And we still passed the family and medical leave law so people could succeed at home and at work. Thank you, Ted Strickland. You were right, and they were wrong.

And let me say one other thing. After Ted left the Congress, they had a chance to implement their "Contract With America." Don't forget that either, folks. I'll have more to say about that in a minute. This man was a good Congressman. He did you proud. He's a good human being. He's a good person. And he ought to be given a chance to represent this place again.

Let me also say, I brought some people with me: your State treasurer and our national Treasurer, Mary Ellen Withrow, thank you for coming; my good friend and a former official in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose farm I visited in Ohio in 1992, Gene Brandstool; our nominee for the Senate last year, Joel Hyatt. And we have several members of the Ohio Legislature and officials of the party, State Representatives Mike Shoemaker and Bill Ogg. I know we have County Auditor Steve Neal; State Senator Jan Michael Long.

Somebody told me that in this crowd the lady who gave me a handcrafted quilt last time was here, Leona Long. Are you here? Thank you very much if you're here. There you are. God bless you. Thank you. And I told you I'd save those quilts, and I've still got yours. [Laughter] And a young woman who introduced me at the last town meeting, Melissa Hagen, I think she's here, too, somewhere. Thank you, Melissa, if you're here. There you are back there. Thank you.

I'd like to thank all the bands that were here. I'd like to say that my daughter, Chelsea, and I are delighted to be here. Hillary started this train trip with us, but you know, she's from Chicago so she had to fly home to make sure everything was all right when we got there. The Vice President said to tell you hello, and he's in Chicago as well.

And I know that this is not the most direct route to Chicago, but I've been in Huntington, West Virginia, and Ashland, Kentucky, today, and now I'm in Chillicothe, and I've been in all kind of places along the way saying hello to people because I wanted to go to the convention to accept the nomination of my party for another term as President by seeing the people that I ran for President to represent. And I wanted you to see me on this train because I wanted you to remember we're not only on the right track to Chicago, we're on the right track to the 21st century, and we need to stay on the right track.

In 1992 when I came here the country had high unemployment, slow job growth, stagnant wages, rising crime. We weren't facing up to our challenges; we were drifting apart. But I said then and I'll say again tonight, I think our best days are ahead. I think this new world we are moving into offers people more chances to live their dreams than any period in human history.