Remarks to the Louisiana Economic Development brunch

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 12, 1996

The President. Thank you so much. Senator Johnston, I appreciate that, especially since you don't have to run for reelection, that you said such a nice thing. [Laughter]

Senator Johnston, Senator Breaux, Congressman Hayes, Chairman Livingston - that's a nice tie for you. You're going to change your whole image up here. [Laughter] Thank you. Lieutenant Governor Blanco, ladies and gentlemen. John Breaux told me I should come to this event. He said, this is the largest number of people in my State that you will ever see at one time when they're all in a good humor. [Laughter]

I'm really going to miss Bennett Johnston in the Senate. I always find it so helpful to have him there in getting my budgets passed. All I had to do was give 40 percent of all the discretionary money to Louisiana and - [laughter] - things went right through. It was easy.

The person in this audience that I really envy today is Buddy Leach. I'm a President, he's a king. [Laughter] I have to run for office, he doesn't have to get elected anymore. [Laughter] I have to persuade; everybody has to agree with him. [Laughter] Do you want to switch jobs? [Laughter]

Let me say to all of you - I want to, first of all, just kind of take my hat off to the State of Louisiana for coming up here and doing this event every year, and for the level of cooperation that you have throughout your State in trying to develop your economy. I know we've got people here from all over the State, from all the communities, and I really think it's a good thing to do.

I guess if I had to say the thing that surprised me most about becoming President when I was elected, as compared with being Governor of your neighbor to the north, it is that the atmosphere is much more partisan than I expected it to be, and that the way we were presented to the rest of the country was even more partisan than we are, the way that the story sort of spins out across the country. And I went home after I'd been President about 4 months, and we were sitting around with a bunch of my friends, and I said, "Shoot, if all I knew about me was what I saw on the evening news, I wouldn't be for me either." [Laughter]

And we have tried to sort of move away from that. Mr. Livingston and I tried. We played golf one day, and the course was so hard it took us 6 hours to finish the round. But by the end of it I completely lost any sense of partisan difference.

I want to say to you that yesterday we did something here that, to me, is the embodiment of what we ought to be doing as we look toward the future. I signed the telecommunications bill into law yesterday, a bill that was passed almost unanimously with overwhelming bipartisan support, the first significant reform of our communications laws in over six decades.

Everyone concedes that it will create tens of thousands of high-wage jobs, perhaps hundreds of thousands of high-wage jobs for America; that it will give vast new opportunities to ordinary citizens for communications, for information, for learning, and for entertainment. It also embodies some of our most sacred values. The Congress required that all new television sets, after a couple of years, carry with it a V-chip so that parents will have more control over the content of the programs that their children watch, so you can get more information, but you can also filter it out for a change. And we're using technology not just to rush society ahead but to give basic fundamental control back to citizens and families.

And it was all done not only in a bipartisan fashion, but taking all these incredibly powerful and diverse interests - and they are powerful and very diverse - that have a stake in how this thing is going to unfold and somehow reconciling them.

And I just - I want to applaud the Congress for what they did and the way they did it and the way they worked with me, and it is the way we ought to conduct our business, especially now - especially now, because when times are changing, profoundly, and make no mistake about it, my fellow Americans, times are changing now as profoundly as they have in this country in a hundred years. The time through which we are living is most nearly parallel, in my belief, to the time in our history a hundred years ago when we moved from being a rural, agricultural country to an urban, industrial country.

Now we're moving into an economy dominated by information and technology and dominated by global markets and a global village, in which urbanization will still be important because people will want to live next to each other and work together but where people, no matter where they live, will be able to do almost any kind of work within a fairly short time, face to face with others, through the communications revolution.

And whenever you have a change of time like that, there is a great uprooting, so that a whole lot of people do terrifically well and other people are dislocated. And if you're not careful, the society, its values, its institutions, get dislocated. It's very important to see everything we do up here in that context.