Remarks in Macon, Georgia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 4, 1996

The President. Thank you. Hello, Macon.

Audience members. Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!

The President. Thank you so much. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, thank you for a beautiful day in a beautiful city. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for the Macon Whoopee hockey jersey. [Laughter] You know, tomorrow is Hillary's birthday; maybe I ought to give that to her. [Laughter] If that gets on the news before I get home tonight, I'm in deep trouble. [Laughter]

I want to thank all of our musicians here, the Central High School Marching Charger Band, the Northeast High School Raider Band. I thank the Community Church of God choir, the New Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church choir, the Swift Creek Church choir. Thank you all.

I thank the Mayor again for welcoming me here. I thank Mayor Floyd Adams, who has come all the way from Savannah to be with us - one of the most beautiful cities in America. Thank you. I thank the legislators and the others who are here. I thank Rosemary Kaszans, who's running for Congress in Georgia, and wish her well.

I want to say a special word of thanks to the person who seeks to be your Congressman here, Jim Wiggins. Jim Wiggins is really what a Member of Congress from this district ought to be, a distinguished American veteran, a distinguished prosecuting attorney who did an excellent job as the United States Attorney here. I frankly hated to lose him in that position. But I was proud of him for coming back home and wanting to run for Congress to try to give this district to the people of Georgia and to its future. Thank you, Jim Wiggins, for your [inaudible] -

Thank you, Richard Gallo, and the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, for your support. One of the most moving things to me in this election has been to have every major law enforcement organization in the country endorse 4 more years for Bill Clinton and Al Gore. We're making the streets of this country safer. If you give us 4 more years we'll do a better job and people will feel safe in their streets, in their neighborhoods, and in their schools.

I want to say a special word of thanks, too, to Congressman Sanford Bishop. What a fine, fine Member of Congress he has been. He will be an even greater Member of Congress when you give a young man like him some more terms, some more experience, and greater capacity to help this State, his district, and the people. So if any of you here live in his new district, give him a boost, he's earned it. You need to help him. Thank you, Sanford Bishop.

There are some people here, too - I know that Hershel Gober, the Deputy Director of the department of veterans administration, and Mary Lou Kenner are up here on the stage; they're veterans for Clinton-Gore, taking caravans all through Georgia. Thank you very much. There they are over there. Thank you, I treasure your support.

I want to say now a special word about my friend Governor Zell Miller. Zell Miller spoke at the '92 convention about growing up in a house his mother built herself with her own hands. It was about the most moving talk I ever heard at one of those political conventions, maybe because it was so personal, so human, and because the political positions that Zell Miller holds flow out of the experience of his life. He's been a teacher, a United States marine, and a brilliant, brilliant Governor of Georgia.

He wrote the new platform that the Democrats are running on. And I got so tickled when our friends met in San Diego and their nominee, my opponent, said - they said, "Well, what about this platform. Do you agree with the things in this platform?" And he said, "Oh, I haven't read it." They were running from their platform, just like they're running from what they did in 1995 and early '96. Well, I want to tell you something, folks. I'm not running from the platform Zell Miller wrote. I'm running on it, and I'm proud of the new Democratic Party that he's helped to chart.

I was honored to take Zell Miller to Princeton University with me when I proposed an American version of Georgia's HOPE scholarships to make 2 years of college as universal in America as a high school diploma is today, and I thank you, Zell Miller, for that as well.

And I want to thank Senator Sam Nunn for his early support, for the ideas he has contributed to our administration, for the work that he's done to make sure our military remains the strongest in the world, and the many, many contributions he has made to making Georgia and America a better place. There are some AmeriCorps folks out here; Sam Nunn was out there supporting national service before I became President. And when I got in office I was able to take the advocacy that Sam Nunn had had for so long and now we've given 60,000 Americans a chance to serve in their local community, to solve problems at the grassroots level, and pay their way through college. Thank you, Sam Nunn.

Senator Nunn told you that very moving story about seeing the Russian nuclear sub destroyed. But he was characteristically too modest. I wrote him a letter the other day and I said, Senator, when the history of this era is written and people talk about how the cold war came to an end and how we moved into a bright new day of security, the name of Sam Nunn will loom large because it was Sam Nunn's leadership, along with Senator Dick Lugar, that got the funds through Congress that helped us to contribute to the effort to make sure that the nuclear missiles were removed from the non-Russian Republics of the former Soviet Union and helped us to reduce nuclear arsenals by two-thirds and helped make sure that today, as we stand here in Macon, Georgia, there are no Russian missiles targeted at the United States of America. Thank you, Sam Nunn.