Remarks at a fundraiser for Bill Curry in Bridgeport, Connecticut

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 24, 1994

October 15, 1994

Thank you. You know, I've been telling the people at the White House for months, if we could just get the Congress out of town and I could get out in the country, we could have a little fun. [Laughter]

I am delighted to be here with two of the finest Members of Congress, Rosa DeLauro and Barbara Kennelly, and with the leaders of Bill Curry's campaign; the leaders of the Democratic Party; with the State officials, including my longtime friend Attorney General Blumenthal; with the mayor of this city and his wife; and with Bill Curry and his mother.

I want to talk a little today about two or three things that I hope will help to put this Governor's race in perspective. Let me tell you, I used to be a Governor, and it's a pretty good job. There have been a day or two in the last couple of years where I wondered why I ever gave it up. They used to tell me there were times when I could take a boat out in the middle of the Arkansas River and walk back, and the headline would be, "Clinton Can't Swim." I know what it means now. [Laughter]

But I want to say to you today--I want to try, if I can, from my perspective to tell you just how important a Governor's race is and just why I think Bill Curry is not only the right sort of person for this job at this time but also why I think he did a very smart thing in having a bright young mayor as a running mate. And the reason is you cannot see the role of Government anymore as all divided up. You can't look at there's a little box, and that's what mayors do. And there's another little box, and that's what Governors do. And there's another little box, and that's what Presidents do at home. And another little box, and that's what Presidents do abroad. There's another little box, and that's what people in the private sector do. This country needs to stop thinking like that, because we are moving into a global society, not just a global economy but a global society, and we have to look at our work in terms of partnerships. We have got to get the best out of everybody. And we have to have as a goal how to get the best out of everybody and how everyone can live up to the fullest of their own potential.

When I was out at the airport just a few moments ago I said, looking at our role in the world, this was a day of celebration, a day of sorrow, and a day of determination: celebration in the return of President Aristide to Haiti and seeing the people dancing in the streets for democracy; sorrow, of course, because on the day that the long struggle of Prime Minister Rabin and Foreign Minister Peres and Chairman Arafat to bring peace to the Middle East was rewarded with the Nobel Prize, Corporal Waxman, an Israeli soldier and an American citizen, was killed by terrorist thugs who desperately want peace in the Middle East to fail so that they can go on and ply their craft of death; and determination because our men and women in uniform in the Gulf are standing up to one more threat from Iraq to its neighbors, one more attempt to bully the United Nations into backing off its resolutions.

There's a lot to be proud of and a lot to be happy about. Even in the terrible tragedy in Israel, you see shining through that the determination of the people there to keep working for peace and not to turn back, to give not only that troubled region but the rest of us who are so caught up in it and its future a different and a better future.

But if you look at that, and you recognize that we cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home, that is the inner strength of America that permits us to lead the world in bringing democracy back to Haiti. It is the internal strength of America that gave us the power to lead the international coalition first in the Gulf war and now in standing up to what is happening there. It is the symbolic power of America and the fact that we represent the kaleidoscope of the world's cultures and ethnic groups and religions, that make people wish us to be active in helping them to achieve peace in the Middle East or peace in Northern Ireland or conducting the elections in South Africa, which we celebrated recently with President Mandela's trip here.

It is very important to understand that. It is the fact that people believe that we live by our values that enables us to be trusted when we say to the Russians after decades of mistrust, "We know that the future will have differences between us, our interests will be different, our opinions will be different, but we ought to go forward as democracies," and that leads us to the point where today, for the first time since the dawn of the nuclear age there are no Russian missiles pointed at the people of the United States. That is important to know.

So we come to this point in our history, as the First Lady said, at a point of transition, the end of the cold war, the advent of a global economy, with very serious challenges and enormous opportunities. And the question is: What must we do in our country to continue to be able to celebrate the things we just discussed? What is it that we have to do in our time to give new birth to the American dream, to rebuild this country, to empower all of our people to be what God meant for them to be? What is it that we have to do? That is the question, and how must we do it?