1/11/01 Remarks by the President to the People of Dover, NH
                              THE WHITE HOUSE

                       Office of the Press Secretary
                          (Dover, New Hampshire)

___________________________________________________________________________
__
For Immediate Release                                   January 11, 2001


                         REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
                     TO THE PEOPLE OF DOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

                             Dover High School
                                      Dover, New Hampshire


12:15 P.M. EST


     THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  Thank you.  Thank you all so
much.  (Applause.)  Governor, thank you very much for being here and for
your leadership and your friendship.  And I agree, that four more years
sounded good to me, too -- for you.  (Applause.)

     I want to thank my good friend, Ron Machos, and his wonderful wife,
Rhonda; and my buddy, Ronnie and his brothers for being here.  Don't cry,
Ronnie, I'm just not going to be President, I'm still going to be around.
(Laughter.)  For being to me the symbol of what my efforts in 1992 we're
all about.

     I want to thank the Mayor for welcoming me to Dover and giving me the
key to the city.  I told him -- he said, you don't have to carry this if
it's too bulky.  He gave me a little ribbon.  I said, I might wear it
around my neck.  (Laughter.)

     I want to thank the Green Wave Band.  Weren't they great?  I thought
they were terrific and they did a great job.  (Applause.)

     On the way in, George Maglares was reminding me of all the times I've
been to Dover, and he said, now, when you get up here, you're going to have
my mother and my first-grade teacher.    I met her in the bingo center in
Dover in 1992.  (Laughter.)  And I would say, ma'am, I've aged a lot more
than you have in the last eight years.  (Laughter.)

     I can't tell you what a great trip this is.  Some of my friends in New
Hampshire actually came up here from Washington with me, and a lot of the
-- all the people who worked in the campaign wanted to come.  Nick Baldick
is here.  Of course, he's practically been here since I left.  And David
Neslin came with me who worked in that campaign.

     And every day for eight years, by the way, every single day I have
been reminded of New Hampshire because I had in my private office off the
Oval Office a painting done by my friend, Cindy Sexton Lewis -- she and her
husband, John, helped me so much -- of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, right
before the primary with David Neslin and me.  We're walking across the
street together.  And Cindy gave me the painting, but right before I was
inaugurated, because it was 10 days before the primary and everybody said I
was dead as a door nail -- (laughter) -- and she said, I looked at your
expression in the paper, and you had your fist clenched and your jaw
clenched, and I thought you would win anyway.  So I painted this and I
decided I would wait, and if you won I would give it to you.  (Laughter.)
So I thought that was a pretty good reminder.  And all the tough days I'd
go back and look at that picture and I would remind myself of why I ran for
President and what we were doing.

     It was a tough time eight years ago for our country when I came here.
You just heard a little bit about it.  It was also a fairly tough time for
me.  I was taking a whipping in the press and I was dropping in the polls.
But I said then, and I would like to say again, that was nothing compared
to the punishment that the people of this state and this nation were
enduring.  As I said to -- you heard Ron talking about it.

     I remember walking down Elm Street in Manchester with now Judge
Broderick.  I'm glad I'm not here on a political trip so you can come to my
meetings for a change.  It's nice to see you, John -- Patty, thank you.
Half the stores were vacant.  Nobody could find a job.  I remember a man in
Merrimack who told me he had lost his job 30 days -- 30 days -- before his
pension vested.  I remember a little girl telling me that she could hardly
bear to go to dinner anymore, when I was in a high school in Manchester,
because her father had lost his job and he wept at the dinner table because
he felt he had let his family down.

     These and so many other New Hampshire stories became the lifeblood of
my campaign.  Across America, 10 million of our fellow citizens were out of
work, most with jobs were working harder for less, interest rates were
high.  The government deficit was $290 billion a year and rising.  Our debt
had quadrupled in the previous 12 years.  There was a crushing burden on
our economy and on our kids.

     We were also in trouble as a society.  Welfare rolls, crime, drug
abuse, teen pregnancy, income inequality, all of these things were rising.
And some people said they didn't think we could do anything about it, but I
didn't believe that for a minute -- because as I traveled around this
state, as I traveled around my own home state where I had been governor for
a dozen years.

     I went across this country; I saw a lot of determination and hope,
good people with good ideas for solving problems.  I knew the American
people could turn the country around if we had some good ideas and we acted
on them.  That means -- to me, that meant that we had to have, first, a
government that was on the side of the people, that put the American people
first, changed to meet the challenges of a new era.

     And so I set out, as Governor Shaheen said, nine years ago in New
Hampshire with this simple conviction, that the American people were hungry
for ideas, and sick of the politics of personal destruction and paralysis.
(Applause.)

     I put out this little book, which I bet some of you still have copies
of, called the Plan for America's Future.  And people made fun of me.  They
said, what's this guy doing running for President with all this -- look at
this single-spaced type.  Who's going to read that stuff?  And we went to
Keene one night, early in the primary.  And the people helping me up there
said, now, look, here's the way New Hampshire works.  If we get 50 people
at this town meeting -- I was running fifth in the polls here, by the way,
at the time -- if we get 50 people at this town meeting, you won't be
embarrassed.  They won't write in the newspaper that you're an abject
failure.  (Laughter.)  If we get 150, it will be a triumph.  Four hundred
people showed up, when I was running fifth in the polls, and they had --
the fire marshal wouldn't let them all in.  (Applause.)  And I said, holy
Moses, something's going on here.  It turns out, people really do care.

     And I remember talking to Hillary, and saying, you know, we actually
have a chance here.  When 400 people showed up in Keene, I knew we had a
chance.  (Laughter.)  And, by the way, my wife said to tell you hello and
thank you and when you really need it, you might have a third United States
senator now.  (Applause.)

     So, we were getting toward the end of the primary, and I came to
Dover.  And as I was reminded on the way in, we were at the Elks Club, I
think.  There were tons of people there, the place was packed.  And I
didn't have any notes, and all the experts said I was dead.  But I said
what we really needed was to think about what we were going to do as a
people, that we needed a new government, less bureaucratic, but more
active; a new kind of politics that treated issues not as a way of dividing
people, but as a way of solving problems together; a new set of
common-sense ideas for the economy, for education, for crime, for welfare,
for the environment, tied together by a simple philosophy:  opportunity for
every responsible American.

     I said, you know, if you elected me President, we might not solve all
the problems, but at least you would know if you supported me, when you got
up in the morning you wouldn't have to worry about whether your President
cared if your business is failing, if you were losing your home, if you
couldn't get an education for your kids.  And I promised in that now-famous
line, that I would work my heart out for you until the last dog dies.
(Applause.)  After eight years, and with almost exactly nine days to go,
the last dog is still barking.  (Applause.)

     I've worked hard for eight years to make good on the commitments I
made to you.  Here in Dover, the unemployment rate then was nearly 8
percent; today it is 1.7 percent.  (Applause.)  Across the nation, the
unemployment rate has dropped from 7.5 percent to 4 percent, the lowest in
40 years.  (Applause.)  We have the longest economic expansion in history,
the lowest female unemployment rate in 40 years, the lowest Hispanic and
African American unemployment rate ever recorded, the highest home
ownership in history.  (Applause.)

     We've gone from record deficits to record surpluses.  At the end of
this budget year, which is the last one for which I am responsible, we will
have paid off over $500 billion of the national debt.  (Applause.)  Since
1993, after inflation, the yearly income of the typical family is up
$6,300, hourly wages up by more than 9 percent.  This economy has created
-- I'm proud to say -- yes, more billionaires and more millionaires, but
unlike some previous recoveries, this rising tide has lifted all votes.
All income groups have had their income increase and in the last three
years the biggest percentage increase has come in the 20 percent of our
workers that are earning the lowest wages.  We are moving forward together.
(Applause.)

     But I want to talk today about some of the other issues, too, because
one of the things that really touched me in New Hampshire was if people
were not just interested in the economy as miserable as it was.  People
cared about health care here.  They cared about the environment.  They
cared about education.  They cared about crime policy. They cared about
welfare policy.

     In the closing weeks of my administration, I've been trying to give a
few speeches recapping where we were, how we've gotten where we are, and
where I hope we will go.  I went to the University of Nebraska at Kearney,
the only state I had not visited as President.  I told them, just because
they never voted for me didn't mean they weren't better off, and I thought
I ought to come and say I was glad.  (Laughter and applause.)  And I talked
about the world challenges we faced, the foreign policy challenges.

     I was in Chicago, talking about the education record and where I hope
we'll go there.  And so, I want to try to talk about these social issues
today, where we're going as a people, because we're not just better off,
we're a stronger, more united country.  Crime is down, welfare down nearly
60 percent.  Teen pregnancy is the lowest rate it's been in decades.  We
are growing more diverse, but we're also growing more united.

     And so, I came here one last time as President to New Hampshire to
thank you for making me the Comeback Kid -- (applause) -- but more, and far
more important, to thank you for making America the Comeback Country.
(Applause.)  Through all the ups and downs of the last eight years, I never
forgot the lesson I learned from you here in those amazing weeks in the
winter of 1991 and 1992.

     What's important is not who is up or down in Washington, what's
important is who is up or down in Dover.  (Applause.)  So let's talk a
little bit about that booklet I had and what it's meant.

     We abandoned a lot of the false choices that had paralyzed Washington.
You had to be liberal or conservative, you had to be left or right, you had
to be this or that.  And we replaced them with a new set of ideas that have
now come to be called the Third Way, because they've been embraced not just
here in America, but increasingly all across the world by people who were
trying to break out of outmoded political and economic and social
arrangements to deal with the real challenges of the 21st century.

     Let's just go through a few of them.  Number one, in the past people
believed you either had to cut the deficit or increase investment, but
nobody thought you could do it at the same time.  I thought that was a
false choice.  I thought we had to do both if we were going to move forward
as a nation, which meant we had to get rid of a lot of inessential
spending, eliminate a lot of government programs that weren't necessary
anymore, get the deficit down.  And we even asked the people who had been
most fortunate in the 1980s to pay more taxes, but we promised to use it to
get their interest rates down and we said they'd be better off.

     So we cut the deficit and we got lower interest rates.  That meant
more business investment, lower home mortgage rates, lower car loans, lower
college loans.  It meant more jobs, higher incomes, and a rising stock
market.  At the same time, we doubled our investment -- more than doubled
our investment in education, and increased our commitments in health care,
the environment, research and technology -- the things that are necessary
to build the capacity of America for this new age, and all these young
people who are in this audience.

     On welfare, in the past all the debate was, our compassionate
obligation to help the poor, on the one hand, or other people saying, no,
everybody ought to just go to work.  We thought that was a false choice.
And we replaced yesterday's welfare system with one in which work is both
required of those who can work, but rewarded; and one in which the children
are not punished for the challenges facing the parents.

     So we cut the welfare rolls by 60 percent nationwide.  Millions of
people have moved from welfare to work.  We insisted, however, that if
people are required to work they should have job training and child care
and transportation, and that the parents should not lose their children's
rights if they're low-income workers, to Medicaid and to food support, so
that you can succeed at home and at work, even if you're a poor worker.  I
think that's very, very important.  (Applause.)

     And we raised the minimum wage and we doubled the earned income tax
credit.  That earned income tax credit goes to the lowest earning workers
in our society, especially those with children, because I don't believe
anybody who works 40 hours a week ought to raise a kid in poverty.  I don't
think that's right.  If somebody's out there doing what they're supposed to
do, they ought to do that.  (Applause.)

     Now, what is the result?  We have the lowest poverty rate we've had in
20 years, and last year we had the biggest drop in child poverty in 34
years.  This is working.  You can reward work.  (Applause.)

     We also tried to do some important things in health care.  We made
sure people with disabilities could go to work without losing their health
care coverage.  We provided coverage in Medicare for screenings for breast
and prostate cancer.  We provided health care coverage for women with
breast cancer or cervical cancer.  We did dramatic things in diabetes
research and health care coverage, and sped the delivery of drugs to people
who needed it, with HIV and AIDS, which has changed the entire landscape
from 1992 and the length and quality of life.  (Applause.)

     And we made sure that people who lose their jobs or who switch jobs
can do so without losing their health insurance.  And we limited the
ability of people to be dropped for preexisting conditions.  We created the
Children's Health Insurance Program, which has enabled states to insure the
children of lower-income working families, so that now 3.3 million more
kids have health insurance, and for the first time in a dozen years the
number of people without health insurance is going down in America.
(Applause.)

     Now, I remember at these town meetings we've talked a lot about crime.
And I had been attorney general of my state and governor, and I spent a lot
of time on this.  And one thing a politician knows, running for office, you
will never get in trouble as long as you sound like you're the toughest
person on the block about crime.

     So nobody has to think, you just say somebody commits a crime, put
them in jail and throw the key away.  But if you look at the facts where
crime is going up and crime is going down, it is more complicated.  Yes,
serious offenders should be punished and punished severely.  But it was
clear that we had to do more to change the environment.

     We had had a tripling of violent crime in America in the previous 30
years, the number of police on the beat had only gone up by 10 percent.
And so, he said, we need to do more to put more police on the beat, we need
to do more to help keep kids off the street and out of trouble, we need to
do more with common-sense measures to keep guns out of the hands of
criminals and children.  And we can do that without interfering with the
legitimate rights of hunters and sportsmen.  And that's exactly what we
did.

     We put 100,000-plus -- we're now to about 130,000 police on the
street.  We passed a lot of measures to keep kids out of trouble and give
them positive things to do.  Six hundred thousand people who were felons,
fugitives or stalkers were not able to get handguns because of the Brady
law.  (Applause.)  And notwithstanding all the recent election-season
rhetoric, not a single missed an hour in the deer woods, not a single
sports person missed a sporting event, but we have the lowest crime rate in
25 years.  (Applause.)

     One of the things that really impressed me about being in New
Hampshire in '92 and late '91, as terrible as the economy was, there were
still people who cared passionately about the environment and who
understood -- (applause) -- the beauty that you have been graced with in
this gorgeous state, and who did not believe that we had to sacrifice a
clean environment for a strong economy.  But that was the prevailing view
not only in America, but in a lot of the world, that you couldn't have --
if you wanted to continue to have economic growth, you just had to put up
with a certain amount of environmental degradation.  It just was
inevitable.

     But the truth is, in the new economy of the 21st century, which is
based more on ideas and information and technology than on using more
energy in ways that are destructive to the environment, that is not true
anymore.  So what do we do?  We had new standards to clean the air, and the
air is cleaner; the water is cleaner, the drinking water is safer.  We've
cleaned up more toxic waste dumps, twice as many in our eight years as in
the previous 12 years.

     We've set aside more land than any administration since Theodore
Roosevelt.  (Applause.)  It includes not only the big, famous places like
protecting Yellowstone, the California Redwoods, the Florida Everglades,
the great roadless tracks of our national forests, but green spaces in
communities all across America.  And it turned out it worked.  It hasn't
hurt the economy one bit, and we should do more of it, not less.
(Applause.)

     Now, in education, the debate in the past was I thought a horribly
false choice -- raise standards or spend money.  The people that wanted to
raise standards said if you just throw more money into the education
system, it won't improve the schools.  People that wanted to spend more
money said if you raise standards without spending more money, you're just
going to punish innocent children.  I thought to myself, having spent
enormous amounts of time in schools, that that was the nuttiest debate I
ever heard.  (Laughter.)

     So we said, look, here's a simple strategy based on what principals,
teachers and parents say; based on the fact that we had schools, even then,
all across America, including in New Hampshire, that were succeeding
against enormous odds; that we needed a strategy which said, higher
standards more accountability, more investment and equal opportunity.  And
we set about doing that.

     I asked Dick Riley, the Governor of South Carolina, who had a superb
record in education, to be the Education Secretary.  He is the
longest-serving and the finest one in our history, I believe.  (Applause.)
And here's what happened.  In 1992, there were only 14 states that had core
academic standards for what all kids should learn.  Today, there are 49.

     We more than doubled our investment in schools.  We've expanded and
improved Head Start.  The last budget had the biggest Head Start increase
in history.  We're now providing federal support for the very first time
for summer school and after-school programs.  This year, we'll cover 1.3
million children.  (Applause.)

     We've helped schools across America to hire 37,000 new teachers to
lower class size in the early grades, well on our way to meeting our goal
of 100,000 new teachers, which will give us an average class size of 18
throughout America, up to grade 3.  (Applause.)  This year, for the very
first time, we got federal support -- since World War II, the very first
time since right after World War II, when my generation was in school, the
baby boomers -- we got federal support to help to repair the most severely
distressed schools, over a billion dollars.  It's a huge problem.  We've
got schools that are so old and so overcrowded, they literally -- I've been
in school buildings where all the power went out when they tried to hook up
to the Internet.  They literally can't do it.

     The Vice President supervised a program that -- we did an event in a
school here in New Hampshire to highlight this -- to try to hook up all of
our schools and classrooms to the Internet.  In 1994, when we started, 3
percent of the classrooms and 35 percent of the schools had an Internet
connection.  Then we passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that had the
e-rate, to make sure that even the poorest schools could afford to hook up.
We got the private sector involved.  Today, 2000, we've gone from 3 percent
of the classrooms to 65 percent, from 35 percent of the schools to 95
percent of the schools connected to the Internet.  And SAT scores are at a
30 year high, in no small measure because there's been a 50-percent
increase in the number of kids taking Advanced Placement courses.

     We've got more people then ever going on to college, thanks in large
measure to the biggest increase in college aid since the G.I. bill passed
50 years ago.  (Applause.)  We passed the HOPE Scholarship tax credit, to
make the first two years of college affordable to all Americans.  We passed
the Lifetime tax credit for junior-senior years, for adults going back to
school, for graduate schools -- 13 million American families are taking
advantage of this.

     We raised the maximum Pell Grant; it will be about $3,700, a little
more actually, this year.  (Applause.)  And with the Direct Student Loan
Program, we cut the cost of college loans by $9 billion over the last seven
years to our students.  It's worth about a $1,300 savings on every $10,000
a student borrows to go to college.  We've opened the doors of college to
all Americans, and I'm very proud of that, and I think you should be.
(Applause.)

     In the past, there was this big debate about the cities.  Some people
thought if we just poured a lot more money into the cities, we could solve
all those problems.  Other people thought they were a lost cause, and more
money wouldn't help.  I thought both sides were wrong.  So what we said is,
we need to drive crime out, empower people to take responsibility for their
own lives and get more private sector investment in, because we know that
government programs alone can't do the job.

     So we brought in more money through the Vice President's empowerment
zone program, through community development banks, through strengthening a
law called the Community Reinvestment Act, which had been on the books for
over 20 years, but had never really been enforced.  Over 95 percent of the
investment by private banks in poor areas in America has occurred since
we've been in office.  And it's worked.   It's paid off.  Bank profits are
up.  There are jobs up.  Businesses are up.  (Applause.)

     That street in Manchester I mentioned, where half the store fronts
were vacant in 1993, is filled with businesses today, from banks to
Internet cafes.  And that kind of turnaround is going on all over the
country.  Poverty in the inner cities down 23 percent since 1993.  And late
last year, our bipartisan New Markets Initiative passed, which will get
even more money into the inner cities, into small rural communities, into
Native American reservations across America that have been left out and
left behind by this recovery.  (Applause.)

     Now, one other thing I would like to mention, because in some ways
it's the most important of all to me in this whole litany of social issues
-- is embodied by Ron Machos up there talking about his family.  In the
past, every time there was an initiative to make the workplace more
family-friendly, to do more child care, to pass family leave legislation
and things like that, the other said, well, we would like to do that, that
seems like a very nice thing, but it would be too burdensome to the
business economy, and so we can't.  But one thing I learned, traveling here
and then going across the country, is that I hardly met any people who were
working and had children, even people with very good incomes, who hadn't
had experiences in their work life where they felt they were letting their
kids down.  I hardly met anybody who hadn't had moments of tension where
they were afraid that they couldn't do right by their kids or by their job;
they were having to choose.  And it seemed to me to be a terrible dilemma,
n
ot only for families, but for the society, because the most important work
of any society is raising children.  (Applause.)

     Anybody who has ever had kids can tell you that if things aren't going
right for your kids, it doesn't matter what else is going right in your
life.  You know, it just doesn't.  It doesn't matter how much money you've
got, it doesn't matter -- nothing else matters.

     And so, we set about trying to change that.  I am very proud of the
fact the first bill I signed as President was the Family and Medical Leave
Law.  (Applause.)  It had previously been rejected; it had previously been
rejected on the grounds that it was a perfectly nice idea, but if we gave
some people time off from work when their kids were sick or their babies
were born or the parents were sick, it would be so burdensome to the
economy.  Well, 22.5 million jobs later, 35 million people have taken
advantage of the Family and Medical Leave Law.  We have to be pro-work and
pro-family.  (Applause.)

     The work we've done in child care, all this work has been good for
America.  (Applause.)  The last point I want to make is this.   When I
spoke here in Dover back in '92, I said that throughout our country's
history we've always gotten in trouble when we were divided, and when we
were united there was nothing we couldn't do; that we were becoming a much
more diverse country -- racially, religiously.  I was in a school in
Chicago a couple of days ago where half the -- the grade school -- half the
student body was Asian, 18 percent African American, 17.5 percent Hispanic.
The rest were white ethnics, almost all of them Croatian Americans.  And
that's the future toward which we're moving.

     And I said I would do what I could to build one America, to have us
not tolerate each other, but celebrate our differences.  Life's more
interesting when you can argue around a coffee table or in a school or at a
civic club or something, about your differences, and celebrate them, but
you know that you are bound together by shared values and common humanity,
and that those things are more fundamental.  (Applause.)

     One of the things I always tell people is that when it comes to
anything that's social, whether it's your family, your school, your
community, your business or your country, winning is a team sport.  It's
like basketball.  You can take -- Michael Jordan may be the greatest
basketball player that ever lived, but if he'd gone out alone against five
guys, he'd have lost every game.

     And this is a team sport.  And I'm so glad these young people from
CityYear are back here, because the embodiment to me -- (applause) -- I
first visited CityYear in Boston in 1991, and it became the basis for my
proposal for national service, for the creation of AmeriCorps, which is the
embodiment of my idea of one America.  AmeriCorps, since we established it
in '93 and it came into effect in '94, has given 150,000 young people a
chance to serve in communities all across this country and earn a little
money for college.  In six years, more people have served in AmeriCorps
than served in the Peace Corps in the first 30 years of its existence.  We
are building one America together.  (Applause.)

     That's my report to you.  The stuff that was in this little book,
people made fun of me about, is now real in the lives of the American
people.  (Applause.)  The ideas have taken hold, and America is at the top
of its game.  And I just hope that we will continue the progress and
prosperity of the last eight years.

     If we continue our policy of fiscal responsibility and investing in
our people, we can keep the prosperity going and be debt-free for the first
time since 1835 when Andrew Jackson was President.  (Applause.)  If we
continue to put more police on the street, keep guns out of the hands of
criminals and gives our kids something to say yes to as well as something
to say no to, we can make this country the safest big nation on earth.

     If we continue to support important environmental initiatives and a
strong economy, we can meet the challenge of climate change and any other
thing that comes down the pike.  If we continue to add people to the rolls
of health insurance -- and we ought to start by including the parents of
all the kids we're insuring with the Children's Health Insurance Program --
(applause) -- and the federal government has the money to help the states
do that now, we can achieve that cherished goal that we talked so much
about in New Hampshire in 1992 in providing health insurance to all
American families.

     If we keep investing more in our schools and demanding more from them,
we can make sure every child gets a 21st century education.  If we continue
to require work, reward work, and support working families, we can expand
the circle of prosperity and still strengthen the fabric of our society.
We've got eight years of evidence to know that these ideas were good for
America, and this direction is the right path.

     The American people chose a vital, common-sense center eight years
ago.  It seemed very foreign back then to Washington.  I can remember
political writers who spent the previous umpty-dump years in Washington
saying, I don't know what this guy believes.  Does he believe anything?  I
mean, you've either got to be a conservative or a liberal.  You can't be
for -- I mean you know, you've got to be in these little boxes we've been
thinking in all these years in Washington -- and they were so good for
America, these little boxes, right?  (Laughter.)

     Guess what?  That's now the new consensus in Washington.  People now
believe that this is the right direction.  It's even basically the
landscape against whence the last election was fought in such a close
fashion.  There is a consensus that we have to find ways to continue to
change consistent with our basic values and our common community and
humanity.

     Now, as you look ahead, let me just say, because conflict is always
more interesting than consensus, I expect most of the press coverage will
continue to be about the politics and the division.  But let's just look at
what happened last year in Congress.  An election year, for Congress and
for the presidency that was very closely fought -- in the Senate, the House
and for the White House.

     Last year, while all this was going on -- and you'd have thought

nobody ever agreed on anything -- here's what happened.  We had the biggest
and best education budget in history, we passed for the very first time in
history a lands legacy initiative to give a stable source of funding to
continue to set aside public lands, from big tracts to local greenspaces,
never happened before -- (applause) -- we lifted the earnings limit on
Social Security, we provided health care coverage for people suffering from
breast and cervical cancer that couldn't get it elsewhere.

     We passed this New Markets Initiative, which is the biggest thing
we've ever done, to try to get private investment into poor areas.  We had
truly historic trade agreements with Africa, the Caribbean nations -- our
neighbors -- with China, with Vietnam, and one with Jordan which has
groundbreaking language that I've always wanted in all our trade agreement
to include basic labor and environmental standards.  (Applause.)

     And we passed something that I think is profoundly important, that
everybody from the Pope to international entertainers have asked us to pass
-- a debt relief package for the poorest nations in the world that they can
get, but only if they invest 100 percent of the money in education, health
care and economic development for their people.  (Applause.)

     Now, that's what happened last year when everybody told you how
divided we were.  There is a new consensus here in this country for moving
forward.  And I just want to ask you -- you're going to continue to be
first in the nation.  You're going to continue to be, in some ways, the
guardians of America's politics.  Don't you ever forget that in the end,
our future is tied to people; that it's more about ideas than a tax.  The
New Hampshire town meetings proved that in '92.  And New Hampshire's
success these last eight years proved that.

     Thank you for lifting me up in 1992.  (Applause.)  Thank you for
voting for me and Al Gore in 1992 and in 1996.  Thank you.  Thank you.  And
don't forget, even though I won't be President, I'll always be with until
the last dog dies.  Thank you.

     END  12:55 P.M. EST


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