Telephone remarks with religious and community leaders in Atlanta, Georgia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 4, 1996

Thank you very much, my good and longtime friend Andrew Young. And I want to thank all of those who are gathered here at Paschal's in Atlanta. We have a good crowd of folks here. I know we've got about 300 ministers and 600 elected officials from across the country. We've got people in homes and churches and church conferences.

I'm glad to be joined here by two of my good friends and associates, Alexis Herman, who is the Special Assistant to the President for Public Liaison at the White House; and Carol Willis, who is with the Democratic National Committee, who helped to put this phone call together.

I know that Mayor Cleaver is on the phone; Congressman Donald Payne, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus; Congressman and Reverend Floyd Flake, my longtime friend and one on my earliest supporters; our campaign cochairs, Alma Brown and Congressman John Lewis, who was just with me at this rally in Atlanta. And I understand that Reverend Henry Lyons, the president of the National Baptist Convention, is on the phone, and I want to thank you, Reverend Lyons, for your efforts to restore calm in the aftermath of last night's unfortunate events in St. Petersburg. We all have a responsibility to foster a climate of reconciliation and peace and to address the underlying causes of this outbreak of violence as well, and I thank you for what you're doing there in St. Petersburg; it's important to all of us in America.

And I want to say a word of recognition to Bishop Chandler Owens of the Church of God and Christ and to others in that congregation. Let me say one of the oldest and most distinguished pastors of the Church of God and Christ, from my home State of Arkansas, passed away the day before yesterday, Elder Famous Smith, and I want to extend my sympathies to all of you who knew him.

We just have a few days to go in this election. We just had a great rally in Atlanta, and we had several thousand people there, and we focused on young people and. their future. I talked about my plans to open the doors of college education to all Americans. I also challenged these young people to take some time to serve in their communities, especially to teach young children to read.

And I guess that I'd like to begin by saying I ran for President not only to enact certain policies that I think are important for the 21st century - to give us a strong economy, a clean environment, the world's best educational system, a way of dealing with the problems abroad to make America safer and more secure and a way of driving down the crime rate and the violence rate here at home. I had certain policies I wanted to implement, but I also wanted to change the way our country was working.

Politics for so long in America has been about dividing people. And at the national level, especially, the whole rhetoric, the language that you use, the labels that are put on people, always about dividing us one from another, whereas that's not the way we run anything else. Those of you that are listening to me, you couldn't run a church that way. Atlanta couldn't have put on the Olympics that way.

We're having a brilliant Major League World Series; if all of a sudden one of the teams starts calling their own team members names in public, they're not going to win. I tell you, whichever team does that, the other team is going to win. And so our national politics had gotten to the point where we were running it the way we wouldn't run our families, our businesses, our churches, our common community endeavors.

Yesterday I was in the town of Lake Charles, Louisiana - has a very dynamic young woman mayor named Willie Mount. And she got the community, which is a very biracial and increasingly multiethnic community, to adopt the slogan of "moving forward together." Atlanta now, I think, is one of the, literally, the urban centers of the world, because 40 years ago it became the city too busy to hate. And yet, national politics was dominated essentially by negative political ads and name-calling. And we changed all that.

I wanted to have an administration that looked like America and an administration that worked more like the other things that worked in America. And one of the reasons I spend so much time on community colleges and one reason I try to open the doors of college to every American, to make sure every person would be guaranteed at least 2 years of education after high school is that I think our country ought to work more the way these community colleges do. If you go to one, they're not bureaucratic; they're flexible; they're changing all the time. They have to meet high standards of performance or they go broke. Everybody that graduates from them gets hired. And they're open to everybody and everybody is treated the same. That's what I'm trying to do for America. So I'm proud of the results we've achieved.

It's not only true that the overall economy is better, but we have, according to the Government statistics from the Census Bureau just last month, the biggest decline in inequality among working people in 27 years, the biggest drop in child poverty in 20 years, the biggest drop in poverty among female head of households in 30 years, and the lowest overall poverty rate among African-Americans and American senior citizens ever recorded.