Remarks at a fundraising dinner in Houston, Texas

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 23, 1995

What I tried to do at the University of Texas yesterday was to give a clear voice to what I believe was in the hearts and minds of most of the people who showed up there yesterday. But I believe it's in the hearts and minds of most Americans. And I think it is a great tragedy that people who basically share the same values and, frankly, have a lot of the same problems often cannot reach across the divide at one another.

But what I want to tell you is, this country, even more than what you saw at the march yesterday, across racial and gender and age and regional lines, there is a reawakening in this country, a sort of a coming back to common sense and shared values and a determination to go into the future with greater strength and character and devotion to the things that make life worth living.

And I'll just give you a few examples of that. In the last 2 1/2 years, the crime rate is down, the murder rate is down, the welfare rolls are down, the food stamp rolls are down, the poverty rate is down, the teen pregnancy rate is down. A lot of people don't know that. Now, no Government program did that. That's the folks that live in this country getting themselves together and sort of - you know, we're a great big, complicated country, and we change slowly, but that's an awesome thing when you think about that.

Now, I think our policies helped. I think we helped when we cut taxes on 15 million working families who were making modest incomes, so that we'd be able to say, if you work 40 hours a week and you've got kids in your house, you won't be in poverty anymore. I think that was a good thing to do. I think that was an honorable thing to do.

I think the family and medical leave law helped. I don't think people ought to lose their jobs if their parents get sick or their baby's born and they need to be there.

I think the 35 States who we gave permission to experiment with welfare reform - I think that helped. I'll give you an example. One thing that they're doing in Texas that I agree with is they have asked for permission to get out from under Federal rules so that they can say if you want a welfare check and you've got a child, you have to prove your child has been immunized against serious diseases. We have one of the lowest immunization rates in the country. I think it's a great idea. It's a great idea.

And I hope - I think the crime bill helped. I appreciate what Mayor Lanier said. I was very moved by what I saw that he was trying to do in Houston when I ran for President. And that crime bill, by putting 100,000 police on the street and community policing is helping America to lower the crime rate, but also by emphasizing the prevention and giving these kids something to say yes to, that's also helping to lower the crime rate. And I want to say more about that in a minute.

I just want you to remember this little moment from yesterday's speech in Texas - at the University of Texas, I mean. I tried to say that a lot of what has to be done to bridge the racial divide requires first the assumption of personal responsibility by all Americans without regard to race. Second, the ability to talk honestly and listen carefully to one another - we don't do enough of that. We still haven't even scratched the surface of that. But thirdly, there are responsibilities of things we have to do. One of the big fights I'm in now with Congress is whether we ought to just get rid of all this money for prevention. Now, they say they like this, giving the States and localities the right to spend the money; that's what we did. We said, here's the prevention money. I don't know what works in Houston and whether it would work in Hartford, Connecticut. I know one thing, you get enough kids in these programs playing soccer after school or learning to play golf or doing whatever else these kids are doing, you get all of them in there, and your crime rate is going to go down. You're going to save a lot of kids' lives. You won't have to spend all that money building jails and putting them in prison. You can spend less money and educate them and have them do well. I believe that.