Remarks to the United Michigan Clergy in Detroit

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 28, 1996

The President. Thank you very much. Well, the bishop has prayed over us so well, and my longtime friend Reverend Jones, who shares my roots in Arkansas, has spoken with such passion, and you've made Senator Levin more energetic than I ever heard him before. He's on fire. [Laughter] And Mayor Archer is on his way to becoming the world's greatest mayor. He did so well, I think I should quit while I'm ahead. He was wonderful.

I want to thank all the religious leaders behind me and all those in front of me. I thank Senator Levin for being here, along with the other Members of Congress who are here: Congressman Conyers, Congressman Dingell, Congressman Levin. I'm not sure if Congressman Bonior is here or not, but if he's not, you pretend like he's here. He's been working for you in Washington overtime. Our nominee for Congress, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, thank you for being here, Carolyn. Thank you, my good friend Governor Blanchard, for being here.

I want to thank the people who performed before I came out, Witness and the Craig Brothers. And I want to thank the people who did that remarkable and unique job of our national anthem, Mr. Benjamin Pruitt and Sister Nancy Bradley. Thank you. If she had gone up one more "America," I was going to volunteer to withdraw from the campaign and become her agent. [Laughter] It was so amazing.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a wonderful array of people of faith here. We have Christians who are Catholic and Protestant; we have American Jews here; we have American Muslims here. And there is one person I think I know would be here if his health permitted him to be, Father William Cunningham, who does a brilliant job. You all know him. And I've been to a lot of places in my career in public service all across America where people are keeping hope alive and giving people a chance to make the most of their God-given abilities. But the work that Father Cunningham has done is truly unique. And he's had a pretty tough time lately, and he's doing a little better. But I'd like to ask if we could each in our own way just take a few seconds in a moment of silent prayer for Father William Cunningham and his health and God's will.

[At this point, a moment of silence was observed.]

The President. Amen.

Audience members. Amen.

The President. Let me say to all of you how glad I am to be here. I thank the mayor for mentioning the opportunity I had. I thought it was an opportunity to give the Nation's highest civilian award, the Congressional Medal of Freedom, to Rosa Parks. She symbolized the empowerment that will come to every American on election day.

And the mayor went through the issues, and I think you know what the differences are in the choices we face. So what I want to say to all of you is that we're going into a big, different, brilliant new world. I was just with the mayor and Wayne County Executive Ed McNamara out at the airport. We were breaking ground on this new $1.6 billion project that will bring you 20,000 jobs and companies from all over the world coming here to the Detroit area to invest, putting people to work. And I was thinking about that on the one hand and then, on the other, what has been done here by the businesses in this area when Detroit won in a competition, fair and square, the right to become one of our first six urban empowerment zones and then put together $2 billion worth of private commitments to invest in the city and then in a matter of a couple of years cut the unemployment rate by more than 50 percent in this city - in just a matter of a couple of years.

Those are the two great things I want you to focus on. One is we're going into a big new world full of new possibilities, dominated by technology, information, and the raw speed of transfer of information, ideas, money, technology, and people around the world and across national borders. The second is that if we want to make the most of those developments, we've got to do a better job of developing ourselves from the grassroots up. That's what the Detroit empowerment zone represents, making the most of the human potential. The greatest untapped economic market for America is still the Americans that aren't working up to the fullest of their capacities, learning up to the fullest of their capacities, or living up to the fullest of their capacities. And the great choice before us is whether we believe that we have an obligation to work together to make the most of this new world and to meet the challenges that remain or whether we would be better off sort of on our own or with our own little crowd.

I do believe it takes a village to raise a child, build a city, build a State, and build a nation. And I do believe that we have to build a bridge to the future that's big and strong enough for all of us to walk across and that all of us will do better if everybody has a chance to get on that bridge and go right on across into that new century. That's what I believe.

When I became President, I told you when I came here that I would give you an administration that looked like America but that I would do my best not to give any person a job for which they were not qualified. I said I'd try to do both things. And it was amazing to me that when I got to Washington some of the people wrote about this as if this was some strange and radical idea, some crazy notion.