Remarks in Fall River, Massachusetts

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 7, 1996

And I'm for balancing the budget, too, because that will lower your interest rates on your student loans, your car payments, your house payments, on your credit card payments. It will lower your interest rates. It will keep interest rates down for business loans so that we can keep creating new jobs and build on the economic record of the last 4 years. But I am not for doing it and using that as an excuse to wreck Medicaid, which has given our commitment, our solemn commitment of health care to poor children, to the elderly in nursing homes, most of them themselves the parents of middle class families. I don't want to see us walk away from middle class working families who because of Medicaid have had family members with disabilities who could live in dignity without driving their families into poverty. We don't have to do that to balance the budget, and I won't do it.

We don't have to cut back on education or environmental protection. And we have to continue investing in research and technology. Yesterday, folks, I was in Houston, and I welcomed home that magnificent astronaut Shannon Lucid when she came home after 6 months. A lot of you saw her come home. When she was a little girl, she told an adult she wanted to be a rocket scientist when she grew up. And she was told, there is no such thing, and if there were it wouldn't be a girl. [Laughter] Well, guess what? There are a lot of them now, and a lot of them are women. And the young girls of America and the young women liked seeing Shannon Lucid up there.

What is the point of that? President Kennedy believed we could go into space and make a success of the space program, and he fought for it. I'm glad he did. I'm glad he supported it. I'm glad I have supported it. And I'm glad we've still got it. And I think those who thought it shouldn't be done were wrong. We have to continue to invest in research to build a better future. I want the young people here to be able to do those jobs of the future. We are today building a supercomputer with IBM that will do more calculations in one second than you can do on a hand-held calculator in 30,000 years. And we have to do that.

We are today seeing experiments with laboratory animals whose spines who have been severed, who have movement in their lower limbs again because of nerve transplants. We have doubled the life expectancy of people with HIV and AIDS in only 4 years. We have to keep going and investing, and we're better off when we do that, building a better future, being on the right side of history, building that bridge.

So here's what I want to know from you. For 38 days, for 38 days, will you help us build that bridge to the 21st century? [Applause] Will you talk to your friends and your neighbors, your coworkers, people in Massachusetts and your friends beyond in other States and say, we have got to keep building that bridge to the 21st century, and we've got to go across it together? We cannot be divided by race, by gender, by religion, by ethnic group. We are a great, great country, and our best days are still ahead if we are committed to going across that bridge together. Will you do it?