Remarks in Tampa, Florida

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 11, 1996

Now, President Lincoln once paraphrased Jesus' sermon in St. Matthew when he said, "The house divided against itself cannot stand." I didn't have time to go back and read it today, but I believe that the whole verse says "A city and a house divided against itself cannot stand" - not Tampa, not St. Petersburg, not Washington, DC, not the United States of America. Four years ago, when I asked for this job, I was worried because our people were divided and dispirited and as a result we were not doing together what we should have been doing to lift our economy or deal with the whole array of problems plaguing our society, involving so many of our children, of their futures.

Now, I know I am preaching to a choir today - [laughter] - but in the next 2 days we need the choir to preach. [Laughter] We will never be what we ought to be if we allow our country to be led by those who believe we are better off on our own and who seek to pursue that path by driving wedges between us and exploiting our fears and convincing us that our brothers and sisters of different races, different faiths, different walks of life are our inherent enemies. That is the prescription for disaster in the Holy Land, in Bosnia, in Africa, and in the United States. And we have only become greater at each stage along the way because every time we had to face the music we chose common ground over the shifting sands of division. And that is what we must do again in this season of our decision.

We have seen the results of the politics of division and gridlock, but now we have seen the results of the politics of opportunity and responsibility and the common ground we seek to build in our American community. We have more jobs, a lower deficit, higher growth, the highest rate of homeownership in 15 years, the highest rates of homeownership and small business ownership among African-Americans, other minorities, and women in the history of America. It turns out giving everybody a chance, not a guarantee but a chance, is good for the rest of us.

While all these big numbers were occurring, we've seen the biggest decline in inequality among working people in 27 years, the biggest drop in child poverty in 20 years, the lowest rates of poverty ever recorded for senior citizens and African-Americans since the statistics have been kept. It is the right thing to do for all the rest of us to see that everybody has a chance, just as the man struggling for the pool at Bethesda was given his chance.

We are seeing the benefits of greater responsibility: The welfare rolls are down; the crime rate is at a 10-year low. We see in so many other areas - 4 years of declining teenage pregnancy, the first drop in out-of-wedlock pregnancy in 20 years, community efforts building up all over the country, more and more people going in our schools to tell our children that drugs are wrong and illegal and can kill you, more and more citizen efforts working with the police to try to help keep the streets safer, more and more communities doing things to try to help our young people stay out of trouble like curfew policies or even school uniform policies and other things. These experiments going on in America, people working together to try to find ways to be responsible citizens. And every place it is done we are better off.