Remarks at a rally for Senator Tom Harkin in Indianola, Iowa

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 23, 1996

The President. Thank you very much. It's good to be back. How many of you were here 4 years ago? [Applause] How many of you weren't here 4 years ago? [Applause] Four years from now, we're going to have to rent the next farm to have this. Let's keep going.

Let me say to all of you how very happy I am to be here. I'm sorry I wasn't here from the beginning. I'm sorry I missed Tom Arnold and my buddy Jerry Jeff Walker. Maybe they'll play a little on the way out while I'm shaking hands. But I'm glad they came here and thank them both for being here.

I want to thank those who are here to support us: Attorney General Tom Miller, Agriculture Secretary Dale Cochran. Mike Peterson gave a heck of a speech up here a few minutes ago. He'll be a good candidate someday. I want to thank Mayor Kelly of Indianola, Mayor Davis of Des Moines.

I want to thank Tom and Ruth and Jenny and Amy for serving the State of Iowa. I want you to know that Ruth Harkin has played a major role in the efforts that our administration have made to sell more American products around the world and get more American investment and have fair as well as free trade. And I thank her. You should all be very proud of her for the work she did as head of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation.

I thank Senator Harkin for what he said but, more importantly, for what he has done and been to the people of Iowa, to the people of the United States, and to the President. He has been nothing short of magnificent in his service to our country and to this State in the last 4 years since I've been in Washington.

I can't tell you all the times that I have turned to Tom Harkin in the last 4 years when things were on the line for America, when we had to pass an economic plan to get the deficit down, to get the interest rates down, to get the economy going again. And Iowa is a strong two-party State; we're going to try to change that a little this time. And our friends in the other party were saying, "Oh, the President's economic plan is just awful. It will increase the deficit; it will bankrupt the economy; it will hurt people." Every single one of them to the person lined up and said no. It's unfortunate for them because 4 years later we got 10 1/2 million new jobs, lower interest rates, record numbers of small businesses, American exports at an all-time high, businesses owned by women and minorities at an all-time high. They all said no, but Tom Harkin said yes. We got a 7 1/2-year low in our unemployment rate. Thank you, Tom Harkin, for making the difference and for fighting for us.

Then there was the family and medical leave law. They all said - their nominee is still saying, "It was a terrible mistake, that law, bad for business. Glad he led the fight against it." We just had a bipartisan survey about the family and medical leave law, and the 12 million American families that got to take a little time off from work when a baby was born or a parent was sick without losing their jobs, they said it didn't hurt. And I say one of the biggest challenges you have today, every one of you, is to create a country in which families can succeed at home and at work. It's good for the economy to help people be good parents, good children, good family members. Thank goodness we had Tom Harkin to fight the good fight.

We said the crime rate was too high in America and we needed to do something to bring it down. We ought to put 100,000 police on the street. They didn't like that idea very much. And I might add, in the last 2 years, for reasons that totally escape me, they've tried to stop us from continuing to finish the job. But for the first time in who knows how long, the crime rate has gone down in America for 4 years. And if you leave Tom Harkin on the job and give us a little help, we'll take it down for 4 more years, so the American people can feel safe on their street.

I thank you for what you said, Tom, about the flood. When I was a Governor in a State that had a lot of natural disasters, I learned that the Federal response was too often disorganized and inadequate, driven by appointees who got the job because of their politics instead of their knowledge about the issue. So I put a person in charge of our emergency management who had done it for me at home and, before that, had been a county judge dealing with disasters and didn't care anything about the politics of it; he just wanted the American people in their time of need to be well-served, taken care of, and thought somebody in Washington ought to understand what it takes to get the job done. That's why we were able to serve Iowa and the rest of the Middle West well in that 500-year flood.

And I thank you for what you said, but when I ran for President I wanted to make good things happen. And when I look at the farm prices, when I look at farm assets, when I look at the direction of the economy here, I'd say we're a lot better off than we were 4 years ago and we ought to keep going in the same direction.

Let me say to you, to echo what Senator Harkin said, this is a huge election. This is the last election of the 20th century, to elect the first President of the 21st century.