Christopher Reeve: 'So many of our dreams at first seem impossible', Democratic National Convention - 1996

26 August 1996, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Thank you very, very much.

Well, I just have to start with a challenge to the President: Sir, I have seen your train go by, and I think I can beat it.

I'll even give you a head start.

And over the last few years we have heard a lot about something called "family values". And like many of you, I have struggled to figure out what that means. And since my accident, I've found a definition that seems to make sense. I think it means that we're all family. And that we all have value.

Now, if that's true, if America really is a family, then we have to recognize that many members of our family are hurting. And just to take one aspect of it, one in five of us has some kind of disability. You may have an aunt with Parkinson's disease, a neighbor with a spinal chord injury, or a brother with AIDS, and if we're really committed to this idea of family, we've got to do something about it.

Now first of all, our nation cannot tolerate discrimination of any kind.

And that's why the Americans with Disabilities Act is so important.

It must be honored everywhere. It is a Civil Rights Law that is tearing down barriers, both in architecture and in attitude.

Its purpose -- its purpose is to give the disabled access not only to buildings but to every opportunity in society.

Now, I strongly believe our nation must give its full support to the caregivers who are helping people with disabilities live independent lives.

Now, of course we have to balance the budget -- and we will. We have to be extremely careful with every dollar we spend. But we've also got to take care of our family -- and not slash programs that people need. We should be enabling and healing and curing.

Now, one of the smartest things we can do about disability is to invest in research that will protect us from diseases and lead to cures.

This country already has a long history of doing it. When we put our minds to a problem, we find solutions. Our scientists can do more. But we've got to give them the chance. And that means more funding for research.

Right now, for example, about a quarter million Americans have a spinal cord injury, and our government spends about 8.7 billion a year just maintaining these members of our family. But we only spend 40 million a year on research, that would actually improve the quality of their lives, and get them off public assistance, or even cure them. We have got to be smarter and do better.

The money we invest in research today is going to determine the quality of life of members of our family tomorrow.

Now, during my rehabilitation, I met a young man named Gregory Patterson. He was innocently driving through Newark, New Jersey, and a stray bullet, from a gang shooting, went through a car window, right into his neck and severed his spinal chord. Five years ago, he might have died. Today, because of research, he's alive.

But merely being alive -- merely being alive is not enough. We have a moral and an economic responsibility to ease his suffering and to prevent others from experiencing such pain.

And to do that, we don't need to raise taxes. We just need to raise our expectations.

Now, America has a tradition that many nations probably envy. We frequently achieve the impossible. That's part of our national character. That's what got us from one coast to another. That's what got us -- that's what got us the largest economy in the world. That's what got us to the moon.

Now, on the wall of my room when I was at rehab, there was a picture of the Space Shuttle blasting off, and it was autographed by every astronaut now at NASA, and on the top of that picture, it says, "We found nothing is impossible."

Now that -- that should be our motto. It's not a Democratic motto, not a Republican motto, it's an American motto. It's not something one Party can do alone. It's something we as a nation have to do together.

So many of our dreams -- so many dreams at first seem impossible. And then they seem improbable. And then when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

So if we can conquer outer space, we should be able to conquer inner space, too.

And that's the frontier of the brain, the central nervous system, and all the afflictions of the body that destroy so many lives, and rob our country of so much potential.

Research can provide hope for people who suffer from Alzheimer's. We've already discovered the gene that causes it. Research can provide hope for people like Muhammad Ali and the Reverend Billy Graham, who suffer from Parkinson's. Research can provide hope for the millions of Americans like Kirk Douglas, who suffer from stroke. We can ease the pain of people like Barbara Jordan, who battled multiple sclerosis. We can find treatments for people like Elizabeth Glaser, whom we lost to AIDS. And now that we know that nerves in the spinal cord can regenerate, we are on the way to getting millions of people around the world, millions of people around the world like me, up and out of these wheelchairs.

Now, 56 years ago, F.D.R. dedicated new buildings for the National Institutes of Health. He said that (quote), "The defense this nation seeks involves a great deal more than building airplanes, ships, guns, and bombs. We cannot be a strong nation unless we are a healthy nation."

He could have said that today.

President Roosevelt showed us that a man who could barely lift himself out of a wheelchair could still lift this nation out of despair.

And I believe, and so does this Administration, in the most important principle -- the most important principle that F.D.R. taught us: America does not let its needy citizens fend for themselves.

America -- America is stronger when all of us take care of all of us. Giving new life to that ideal is the challenge before us tonight.

Thank you very much.

Bill Clinton: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman', Press Conference - 1998

26 January 1998, White House, Washington DC, USA

Thank you.

Now I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech, and I worked on it till pretty late last night, but want to say one thing to the American people, I want you to listen to me, I’m going to say this again, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky, I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.

Bill Clinton: 'Barack Obama is the man for this job', Democratic National Convention - 2008

27 August 2008, Denver Colorado, USA

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I am honored to be here tonight.

(APPLAUSE)

Sit down.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

I am honored to be here tonight. Please, stop.

AUDIENCE: Bill! Bill! Bill!

CLINTON: Please stop. Sit down. Sit down. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Bill! Bill! Bill!
Continue reading the main story

CLINTON: Please sit. Please sit.

You know, I -- I love this, and I thank you, but we have important work to do tonight. I am here first to support Barack Obama.

(APPLAUSE)

And, second -- and, second, I'm here to warm up the crowd for Joe Biden...

(APPLAUSE)

... though, as you will soon see, he doesn't need any help from me.

(LAUGHTER)

I love Joe Biden, and America will, too.

What a year we Democrats have had. The primary began with an all-star line up. And it came down to two remarkable Americans locked in a hard-fought contest right to the very end. That campaign generated so much heat, it increased global warming.

(LAUGHTER)

Now, in the end, my candidate didn't win. But I'm really proud of the campaign she ran.

(APPLAUSE)

I am proud that she never quit on the people she stood up for, on the changes she pushed for, on the future she wanted for all our children. And I'm grateful for the chance Chelsea and I had to go all over America to tell people about the person we know and love.

Now, I am not so grateful for the chance to speak in the wake of Hillary's magnificent speech last night.

(LAUGHTER)

But I'll do the best I can.

(APPLAUSE)

Last night, Hillary told us in no uncertain terms that she is going to do everything she can to elect Barack Obama.

(APPLAUSE)

That makes two of us.

(APPLAUSE)

Actually, that makes 18 million of us...

(APPLAUSE)

... because, like Hillary, I want all of you who supported her to vote for Barack Obama in November.

(APPLAUSE)

And here's why. And I have the privilege of speaking here, thanks to you, from a perspective that no other American Democrat, except President Carter, can offer.

Our -- our nation is in trouble on two fronts. The American dream is under siege at home, and America's leadership in the world has been weakened. Middle-class and low-income Americans are hurting, with incomes declining, job losses, poverty, and inequality rising, mortgage foreclosures and credit card debt increasing, health care coverage disappearing, and a very big spike in the cost of food, utilities, and gasoline.

And our position in the world has been weakened by too much unilateralism and too little cooperation...

(APPLAUSE)

... by a perilous dependence on imported oil, by a refusal to lead on global warming, by a growing indebtedness and a dependence on foreign lenders, by a severely burdened military, by a backsliding on global nonproliferation and arms control agreements, and by a failure to consistently use the power of diplomacy, from the Middle East to Africa to Latin America to Central and Eastern Europe.

(APPLAUSE)

Clearly, the job of the next president is to rebuild the American dream and to restore American leadership in the world.

(APPLAUSE)

And here's what I have to say about that. Everything I learned in my eight years as president, and in the work I have done since in America and across the globe, has convinced me that Barack Obama is the man for this job.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, he has a remarkable ability to inspire people, to raise our hopes and rally us to high purpose. He has the intelligence and curiosity every successful president needs. His policies on the economy, on taxes, on health care, on energy are far superior to the Republican alternatives.

(APPLAUSE)

He has shown -- he has shown a clear grasp of foreign policy and national security challenges and a firm commitment to rebuild our badly strained military.

His family heritage and his life experiences have given him a unique capacity to lead our increasingly diverse nation in an ever more interdependent world.

(APPLAUSE)

The long, hard primary tested and strengthened him. And in his first presidential decision, the selection of a running mate, he hit it out of the park.

(APPLAUSE)

With Joe Biden's experience and wisdom, supporting Barack Obama's proven understanding, instincts, and insight, America will have the national security leadership we need.

And so, my fellow Democrats, I say to you: Barack Obama is ready to lead America and to restore American leadership in the world.

(APPLAUSE)

Barack Obama is ready to honor the oath, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

Barack Obama is ready to be president of the United States.

(APPLAUSE) As president, he will work for an America with more partners and fewer adversaries. He will rebuild our frayed alliances and revitalize the international institutions which helped to share the cost of the world's problems and to leverage the power of our influence.

He will put us back in the forefront of the world's fight against global warming and the fight to reduce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

(APPLAUSE)

He will continue and enhance our nation's commendable global leadership in an area in which I am deeply involved: the fight against AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, including -- including -- and this is very important -- a renewal of the battle against HIV and AIDS here at home.

(APPLAUSE)

A President Obama will choose diplomacy first and military force as a last resort.

(APPLAUSE)
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But, in a world troubled by terror, by trafficking in weapons, drugs and people, by human rights abuses of the most awful kind, by other threats to our security, our interests, and our values, when he cannot convert adversaries into partners, he will stand up to them.

(APPLAUSE)

Barack Obama also will not allow the world's problems to obscure its opportunities.

CLINTON: Everywhere, in rich and poor countries alike, hard- working people need good jobs, secure, affordable health care, food and energy, quality education for their children and economically beneficial ways to fight global warming.

These challenges cry out for American ideas and American innovation. When Barack Obama unleashes them, America will save lives, win new allies, open new markets, and create wonderful new jobs for our own people.

(APPLAUSE)

Most important of all, Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are first strong at home.

(APPLAUSE)

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

(APPLAUSE)

Look...

(APPLAUSE)

Look at the example the Republicans have set.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

In this decade, American workers have consistently given us rising productivity. That means, year after year, they work harder and produce more.

Now, what did they get in return? Declining wages, less than one-fourth as many new jobs as in the previous eight years, smaller health care and pension benefits, rising poverty, and the biggest increase in income inequality since the 1920s.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

American families by the millions are struggling with soaring health care costs and declining coverage.

I will never forget the parents of children with autism and other serious conditions who told me on the campaign trail that they couldn't afford health care and couldn't qualify their children for Medicaid unless they quit work and starved or got a divorce.

Are these the family values the Republicans are so proud of?

What about the military families pushed to the breaking point by multiple, multiple deployments? What about the assault on science and the defense of torture? What about the war on unions and the unlimited favors for the well-connected?

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

And what about Katrina and cronyism?

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

My fellow Democrats, America can do better than that.

(APPLAUSE)

And Barack Obama will do better than that.

(APPLAUSE)

Wait a minute. But first...

AUDIENCE: Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can! Yes, we can!

CLINTON: Yes, he can, but, first, we have to elect him.

(APPLAUSE)

The choice is clear. The Republicans in a few days will nominate a good man who has served our country heroically and who suffered terribly in a Vietnamese prison camp. He loves his country every bit as much as we do. As a senator, he has shown his independence of right-wing orthodoxy on some very important issues.

But on the two great questions of this election -- how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America's leadership in the world -- he still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.

(APPLAUSE)

And it is, to be fair to all the Americans who aren't as hard- core Democrats as we, it's a philosophy the American people never actually had a chance to see in action fully until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and the Congress.

Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades actually were implemented. And look what happened.

They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt; from over 22 million new jobs to just 5 million; from increasing working families' incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year; from almost 8 million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty; and millions more losing their health insurance.

Now, in spite of all this evidence, their candidate is actually promising more of the same.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

Think about it: more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that will swell the deficit, increase inequality, and weaken the economy; more Band-Aids for health care that will enrich insurance companies, impoverish families, and increase the number of uninsured; more going it alone in the world, instead of building the shared responsibilities and shared opportunities necessary to advance our security and restore our influence.

They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more.

AUDIENCE: No!

CLINTON: Now, let's send them a message that will echo from the Rockies all across America, a simple message: Thanks, but no thanks.

In this case...

(APPLAUSE)

In this case, the third time is not the charm.

(APPLAUSE)

My fellow Democrats, 16 years ago, you gave me the profound honor to lead our party to victory and to lead our nation to a new era of peace and broadly shared prosperity.

Together, we prevailed in a hard campaign in which Republicans said I was too young and too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief.

(APPLAUSE)

Sound familiar?

AUDIENCE: Yes!

CLINTON: It didn't work in 1992, because we were on the right side of history. And it will not work in 2008, because Barack Obama is on the right side of history.

(APPLAUSE)

Now, Senator Obama's life is a 21st-century incarnation of the old-fashioned American dream. His achievements are proof of our continuing progress toward the more perfect union of our founders' dreams. The values of freedom and equal opportunity, which have given him his historic chance, will drive him as president to give all Americans -- regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or disability -- their chance to build a decent life and to show our humanity, as well as our strengths, to the world.

We see that humanity, that strength, and our nation's future in Barack and Michelle Obama and their beautiful children.

We see them reinforced by the partnership with Joe Biden, his fabulous wife, Jill, a wonderful teacher, and their family.

Barack Obama will lead us away from the division and fear of the last eight years back to unity and hope.

So if, like me, you believe America must always be a place called Hope, then join Hillary and Chelsea and me in making Barack Obama the next president of the United States.

Thank you, and God bless you. Thank you

Bill Clinton: 'I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned', Prayer Breakfast - 1998

11 September 1998, White House, Washington DC, USA

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the White House and to this day to which Hillary and the vice president and I look forward so much every year.

This is always an important day for our country for the reasons that the vice president said. It is an unusual -- and I think unusually important -- day today.

I may not be quite as easy with my words today as I have been in years past, and I was up rather late last night thinking about and praying about what I ought to say today.

And rather unusually for me, I actually tried to write it down.

So if you will forgive me, I will do my best to say what it is I want to say to you. And I may have to take my glasses out to read my own writing.

First, I want to say to all of you that, as you might imagine, I have been on quite a journey these last few weeks to get to the end of this, to the rock bottom truth of where I am and where we all are.

I agree with those who have said that, in my first statement after I testified, I was not contrite enough.

I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned. It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine -- first and most important, my family, also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people.

I have asked all for their forgiveness. But I believe that to be forgiven, more than sorrow is required. At least two more things: First, genuine repentance, a determination to change and to repair breaches of my own making. I have repented.

Second, what my Bible calls a broken spirit. An understanding that I must have God's help to be the person that I want to be. A willingness to give the very forgiveness I seek.

A renunciation of the pride and the anger, which cloud judgment, lead people to excuse and compare and to blame and complain. Now, what does all this mean for me and for us?

First, I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defense using all available, appropriate arguments. But legal language must not obscure the fact that I have done wrong.

Second, I will continue on the path of repentance seeking pastoral support and those of other -- and that of other caring people so that they can hold me accountable for my own commitment.

Third, I will intensify my efforts to lead our country and the world toward peace and freedom, prosperity and harmony. And in the hope that with a broken spirit and a still strong heart, I can be used for greater good for we have many blessings and many challenges and so much work to do.

In this, I ask for your prayers and for your help in healing our nation. And though I cannot move beyond or forget this, indeed I must always keep it as a caution light in my life. It is very important that our nation move forward.

I am very grateful for the many, many people -- clergy and ordinary citizens alike -- who have written me with wise counsel. I am profoundly grateful for the support of so many Americans who somehow, through it all, seem to still know that I care about them a great deal, that I care about their problems and their dreams.

I am grateful for those who have stood by me and who say that, in this case and many others, the bounds of privacy have been excessively and unwisely invaded. That may be. Nevertheless, in this case, it may be a blessing because I still sinned. And if my repentance is genuine and sustained, and if I can then maintain both a broken spirit and a strong heart, then good can come of this for our country, as well as for me and my family.

(APPLAUSE)

The children of this country can learn in a profound way that integrity is important and selfishness is wrong. But God can change us and make us strong at the broken places.

I want to embody those lessons for the children of this country; for that little boy in Florida who came up to me and said that he wanted to grow up and be president and to be just like me. I want the parents of all the children in America to be able to say that to their children.

A couple of days ago when I was in Florida, a Jewish friend of mine gave me this liturgy book called "Gates of Repentance." And there was this incredible passage from a Yom Kippur liturgy, and I would like to read it to you.

Now is the time for turning. The leaves are beginning to turn from green to red to orange. The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the south. The animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for the winter.

For leaves, birds and animals, turning comes instinctively.

But for us, turning does not come so easily.

It takes an act of will for us to make a turn. It means breaking old habits. It means admitting that we have been wrong, and this is never easy.

It means losing face. It means starting all over again. And this is always painful. It means saying I am sorry. It means recognizing that we have the ability to change. These things are terribly hard to do.

But unless we turn, we will be trapped forever in yesterday's ways. Lord help us to turn from callousness to sensitivity, from hostility to love, from pettiness to purpose, from envy to contentment, from carelessness to discipline, from fear to faith.

Turn us around, oh, Lord, and bring us back toward you. Revive our lives as at the beginning. And turn us toward each other, Lord, for in isolation, there is no life.

I thank my friend for that and I thank you for being here. I ask you to share my prayer that God will search me and know my heart, try me and know my anxious thoughts, see if there is any hurtfulness in me and lead me toward a life everlasting. I ask that God give me a clean heart, let me walk by faith and not sight.

I ask once again to be able to love my neighbor -- all my neighbors -- as myself, to be an instrument of God's peace, to let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart, and in the end, the work of my hands, be pleasing.

This is what I wanted to say to you today. Thank you, God bless you.

Bob Dole: 'Tonight, this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln', RNC acceptance of nomination - 1996

15 August 1995, San Diego, California, USA

Here is the most quoted paragraph from the speech:

If there is anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to every race and religion, then let me recommend to you. Tonight, this hall belongs to the party of Lincoln. And the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.

Here is the full speech:

hank you. And he appreciated it very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, delegates to the convention, and fellow citizens, I cannot say it more clearly than in plain speaking. I accept your nomination to lead our party once again to the presidency of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go!

Thank you. I will.

And I am profoundly moved by your confidence and trust, and I look forward to leading America into the next century. But this moment...

(APPLAUSE)

But this is not my moment, it is yours. It is yours, Elizabeth. It is yours, Robin. It is yours, Jack and Joanne Kemp.

And do not think I have forgotten whose moment this is above all. It is for the people of America that I stand here tonight, and by their generous leave. And as my voice echoes across darkness and desert, as it is heard over car radios on coastal roads, and as it travels above farmland and suburb, deep into the heart of cities that, from space, look tonight like strings of sparkling diamonds, I can tell you that I know whose moment this is: It is yours. It is yours entirely.

(APPLAUSE)

And who am I that stands before you tonight?

I was born in Russell, Kansas,...

(APPLAUSE)

... a small town in the middle of the prairie surrounded by wheat and oil wells. As my neighbors and friends from Russell, who tonight sit in front of this hall, know well, Russell, though not the West, looks out upon the West.

And like most small towns on the plains, it is a place where no one grows up without an intimate knowledge of distance.

And the first thing you learn on the prairie is the relative size of a man compared to the lay of the land. And under the immense sky where I was born and raised, a man is very small, and if he thinks otherwise, he is wrong.

I come from good people, very good people, and I'm proud of it. My father's name was Doran and my mother's name was Bina. I loved them and there's no moment when my memory of them and my love for them does not overshadow anything I do -- even this, even here -- and there is no heighth to which I have risen that is high enough to allow me to allow me to forget them -- to allow me to forget where I came from, and where I stand and how I stand -- with my feet on the ground, just a man at the mercy of God.

(APPLAUSE)

And this perspective has been strengthened and solidified by a certain wisdom that I owe not to any achievement of my own, but to the gracious compensations of age.

Now I know that in some quarters I may not -- may be expected to run from this, the truth of this, but I was born in 1923, and facts are better than dreams and good presidents and good candidates don't run from the truth.

I do not need...

(APPLAUSE)

I do not need the presidency to make or refresh my soul. That false hope I will gladly leave to others. For greatness lies not in what office you hold, but on how honest you are in how you face adversity and in your willingness to stand fast in hard places.

(APPLAUSE)

Age has its advantages.

And the first thing you learn on the prairie is the relative size of a man compared to the lay of the land. And under the immense sky where I was born and raised, a man is very small, and if he thinks otherwise, he is wrong.

I come from good people, very good people, and I'm proud of it. My father's name was Doran and my mother's name was Bina. I loved them and there's no moment when my memory of them and my love for them does not overshadow anything I do -- even this, even here -- and there is no heighth to which I have risen that is high enough to allow me to allow me to forget them -- to allow me to forget where I came from, and where I stand and how I stand -- with my feet on the ground, just a man at the mercy of God.

(APPLAUSE)

And this perspective has been strengthened and solidified by a certain wisdom that I owe not to any achievement of my own, but to the gracious compensations of age.

Now I know that in some quarters I may not -- may be expected to run from this, the truth of this, but I was born in 1923, and facts are better than dreams and good presidents and good candidates don't run from the truth.

I do not need...

(APPLAUSE)

I do not need the presidency to make or refresh my soul. That false hope I will gladly leave to others. For greatness lies not in what office you hold, but on how honest you are in how you face adversity and in your willingness to stand fast in hard places.

(APPLAUSE)

Age has its advantages.

Let me be the bridge to an America than only the unknowing call myth. Let me be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith and confidence in action.

And to those who say it was never so, that America's not been better, I say you're wrong. And I know because I was there. And I have seen it. And I remember.

(APPLAUSE)

And our nation, though wounded and scathed, has outlasted revolutions, civil war, world war, racial oppression and economic catastrophe. We have fought and prevailed on almost every continent. And in almost every sea.

We have even lost. But we have lasted, and we have always come through.

And what enabled us to accomplish this has little to do with the values of the present. After decades of assault upon what made America great, upon supposedly obsolete values, what have we reaped? What have we created? What do we have?

What we have in the opinions of millions of Americans is crime and drugs, illegitimacy, abortion, the abdication of duty, and the abandonment of children.

And after the virtual devastation of the American family, the rock upon which this country was founded, we are told that it takes a village, that is collective, and thus the state, to raise a child.

CROWD: No.

The state is now more involved than it ever has been in the raising of children. And children are now more neglected, more abused and more mistreated than they have been in our time.

This is not a coincidence. This is not a coincidence. And with all due respect, I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: Dole-Kemp! Dole-Kemp! Dole-Kemp!

If I could by magic...

CROWD: Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go!

If I could by magic restore to every child who lacks a father or a mother that father or that mother, I would.

And though I cannot, I would never turn my back on them. And I shall as president vote measures that keep families whole.

And I'm here to tell you that permissive and destructive behavior must be opposed.

(APPLAUSE)

That honor and liberty must be restored and that individual accountability must replace collective excuse.

(APPLAUSE)

And I'm here to say...

(APPLAUSE)

I am here to say to America, do not abandon the great traditions that stretch to the dawn of our history. Do not topple the pillars of those beliefs -- God, family, honor, duty, country -- that have brought us through time, and time, and time, and time again.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

And to those who believe that I am too combative, I say if I am combative, it is for love of country.

(APPLAUSE)

It is to uphold a standard that I was I was born and bread to defend. And to those who believe that I live and breathe compromise, I say that in politics honorable compromise is no sin. It is what protects us from absolutism and intolerance.

(APPLAUSE)

But one must never compromise in regard to God and family and honor and duty and country. And I'm here to set a marker, that all may know that it is possible to rise in politics, with these things firmly in mind, not compromised and never abandoned, never abandoned.

(APPLAUSE)

For the old values endure and though they may sleep and though they may falter, they endure. I know this is true. And to anyone who believes that restraint honor and trust in the people cannot be returned to government, I say follow me, follow me.

(APPLAUSE)

Only right conduct, only right conduct distinguishes a great nation from one that cannot rise above itself. It has never been otherwise.

Right conduct every day, at every level, in all facets of life. The decision of a child not to use drugs; of a student not to cheat; of a young woman or a young man to serve when called; of a screenwriter to refuse to add to mountains of trash; of a businessman not to bribe; of a politician to cast a vote or take action that will put his office or his chances of victory at risk, but which is right.

And why have so many of us -- and I do not exclude myself, for I am not the model of perfection -- why have so many of us been failing these tests for so long? The answer is not a mystery. It is to the contrary quite simple and can be given quite simply.

It is because for too long we have had a leadership that has been unwilling to risk the truth, to speak without calculation, to sacrifice itself.

An administration, in its very existence, communicates this day by day until it flows down like rain and the rain becomes a river and the river becomes a flood.

(APPLAUSE)

Which is more important, wealth or honor?

AUDIENCE: Honor.

It is not as was said by the victors four years ago, the economy stupid. It's a kind of nation we are. It's whether we still possess the wit and determination to deal with many questions including economic questions, but certainly not limited to them. All things do not flow from wealth or poverty. I know this firsthand and so do you.

All things flow from doing what is right.

(APPLAUSE)

The cry of this nation lies not in its material wealth but in courage, and sacrifice and honor. We tend to forget when leaders forget. And we tend to remember it when they remember it.

The high office of the presidency requires not a continuous four year campaign for re-election, but rather broad oversight and attention to three essential areas: the material, the moral and the nation's survival in that ascending order of importance.

And in the last presidential election...

(APPLAUSE)

In the last presidential election, you the people were gravely insulted. You were told that the material was not only the most important of these three, but in fact, really the only one that mattered.

I don't hold to that for a moment. No one can deny the importance of material well-being. And in this regard, it is time to recognize we have surrendered too much of our economic liberty. I do not appreciate the value of economic liberty nearly as much for what it has done in keeping us fed, as to what it's done in keeping us free.

(APPLAUSE)

The freedom of the marketplace is not merely the best guarantor of our prosperity. It is the chief guarantor of our rights, and a government that seizes control of the economy for the good of the people ends up seizing control of the people for the good of the economy.

(APPLAUSE)

And our opponents portray the right to enjoy the fruits of one's own time and labor as a kind selfishness against which they must fight for the good of the nation. But they are deeply mistaken, for when they gather to themselves the authority to take the earnings and direct the activities of the people, they are fighting not for our sake but for the power to tell us what to do.

And you now work from the first of January to May just to pay your taxes so that the party of government can satisfy its priorities with the sweat of your brow because they think that what you would do with your own money would be morally and practically less admirable than what they would do with it.

And that simply has got to stop. It's got to stop in America.

(APPLAUSE)

It is demeaning...

(APPLAUSE)

It is demeaning to the nation that within the Clinton administration, a core of the elite who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned, should have the power to fund with your earnings their dubious and self-serving schemes.

(APPLAUSE)

Somewhere, a grandmother couldn't afford to call her granddaughter, or a child went without a book, or a family couldn't afford that first home because there was just not enough money to make the call, or to buy the book, or to pay the mortgage. Or, for that matter, to do many other things that one has the right and often the obligation to do.

Why? Because some genius in the Clinton administration took the money to fund yet another theory, yet another program and yet another bureaucracy. Are they taking care of you...

CROWD: No.

... or are they taking care of themselves?

CROWD: Yes.

I have asked myself that question. And I say, let the people be free. Free to keep...

(APPLAUSE)

Let the people be free to keep as much of what they earn as the government can strain with all its might not to take, not the other way around.

(APPLAUSE)

I trust the American people to work in the best interest of the people. And I believe that every family, wage earner and small business in America can do better -- if only we have the right policies in Washington, D.C.

And make no mistake about it, my economic program is the right policy for America and for the future, and for the next century.

(APPLAUSE)

Here's what it will mean to you. Here's what it will mean to you. It means you will have a president who will urge Congress to pass and send to the states for ratification a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution.

(APPLAUSE)

It means you will have a president and a Congress who have the will to balance the budget by the year 2002.

(APPLAUSE)

It means you will have a president who will reduce taxes 15 percent across-the-board for every taxpayer in America.

(APPLAUSE)

And it will include a $500 per child tax credit for lower and middle income families in America.

Taxes for a family of four making $35,000 a year would be reduced by more than half -- 56 percent to be exact. And that's a big, big reduction.

(APPLAUSE)

It means you will have a president who will help small businesses, the businesses that create most new jobs, by reducing the capital gains tax rate by 50 percent. Cut it in half.

(APPLAUSE)

It means you will have a president who will end the IRS as we know it.

(APPLAUSE)

It means you will have a president who will expand individual retirement accounts, repeal President Clinton's Social Security tax increase, provide estate tax relief, reduce government regulations, reform our civil justice system, provide educational opportunity scholarships and a host of other proposals that will create more opportunity for all Americans and all across America.

(APPLAUSE)

And I will not stop there. Working with Jack Kemp and a Republican Congress I will not be satisfied until we have reformed our entire tax code and made it fairer and flatter and simpler for the American people.

(APPLAUSE)

The principle involved here is time-honored and true, and that is, it's your money.

(APPLAUSE)

You shouldn't have to apologize for wanting to keep what you earn.

(APPLAUSE)

To the contrary, the government should apologize for taking too much of it.

(APPLAUSE)

The Clinton administration -- the Clinton administration just doesn't get it. And that's why they have got to go.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: Go Bob Dole! Go Bob Dole! Go Bob Dole!

Thank you.

The president -- the president's content with the way things are. I am not. We must commit ourselves to a far more ambitious path that puts growth, expanding opportunities, rising incomes and soaring prosperity at the heart of national policy.

(APPLAUSE)

We must also commit ourselves to a trade policy that does not suppress pay and threaten American jobs. And by any measure, the trade policies of the Clinton administration has been a disaster. Trade deficits are skyrocketing and middle income families are paying the price.

(APPLAUSE)

My administration will fully enforce our trade laws and not let our national sovereignty be infringed by the World Trade Organization...

(APPLAUSE)

...or any other international body.

Jack Kemp and I will restore the promise of America and get the economy moving again, and we'll do so without leaving anybody behind.

(APPLAUSE)

And I have learned in my own life, from my own experience that not every man, woman or child can make it on their own. And that in time of need, the bridge between failure and success can be the government itself. And given all that I have experienced, I shall always remember those in need. That is why I helped to save Social Security in 1983 and that is why I will be, I will be the president who preserves and strengthens and protects Medicare for America's senior citizens.

(APPLAUSE)

For I will never forget the man who rode on a train from Kansas to Michigan to see his son who was thought to be dying in an Army hospital.

When he arrived, his feet were swollen and he could hardly walk because he had to make the trip from Kansas to Michigan standing up most of the way. Who was that man? He was my father. My father was poor and I love my father. Do you imagine for one minute that as I sign the bills that will set the economy free, I will not be faithful to Americans in need? You can be certain that I will.

For to do otherwise would be to betray those whom I love and honor most. And I will betray nothing.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: Go Bob Go! Go Bob Go! Go Bob Go! Go Bob Go!

Let me speak about immigration. Yes. Let me speak about immigration. The right and obligation of a sovereign nation to control its borders is beyond debate. We should not have here a single illegal immigrant.

(APPLAUSE)

But the question of immigration is broader than that, and let me specific. A family from Mexico arrives this morning legally has as much right to the American Dream as the direct descents of the Founding Fathers.

(APPLAUSE)

The Republican Party is broad and inclusive. It represents -- The Republican Party is broad and inclusive. It represents many streams of opinion and many points of view.

But if there's anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion, then let me remind you, tonight this hall belongs to the Party of Lincoln. And the exits which are clearly marked are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.

(APPLAUSE)

And though, I can only look up -- and though I can look up, and at a very steep angle, to Washington and Lincoln, let me remind you of their concern for the sometimes delicate unity of the people.

The notion that we are and should be one people rather than "peoples" of the United States seems so self-evident and obvious that it's hard for me to imagine that I must defend it. When I was growing up in Russell, Kansas, it was clear to me that my pride and my home were in America, not in any faction, and not in any division.

In this I was heeding, even as I do unto this day, Washington's eloquent rejection of factionalism. I was honoring, even as I do unto this day, Lincoln's word, his life and his sacrifice. The principle of unity has been with us in all our successes.

The 10th Mountain Division, in which I served in Italy, and the Black troops of the 92nd Division who fought nearby were the proof for me once again of the truth I'm here trying to convey.

The war was fought just a generation after America's greatest and most intense period of immigration. And yet when the blood of the sons of immigrants and the grandsons of slaves fell on foreign fields, it was American blood. In it you could not read the ethnic particulars of the soldier who died next to you. He was an American.

(APPLAUSE)

And when I think how we learned this lesson I wonder how we could have unlearned it. Is the principle of unity, so hard-fought and at the cost of so many lives, having been contested again and again in our history, and at such a terrible price, to be casually abandoned to the urge to divide?

The answer is no.

Must we give in to the senseless drive to break apart that which is beautiful and whole and good?

CROWD: No.

And so tonight I call on every American to rise above all that may divide us, and to defend the unity of the nation for the honor of generations past, and the sake of those to come.

(APPLAUSE)

The Constitution of the United States mandates equal protection under the law. This is not code language for racism. It is plain speaking against it.

And the guiding light in my administration will be that in this country, we have no rank order by birth, no claim to favoritism by race, no expectation of judgment other than it be even-handed. And we cannot guarantee the outcome, but we shall guarantee the opportunity in America.

(APPLAUSE)

I will speak plainly -- I will speak plainly on another subject of importance. We're not educating all of our children. Too many are being forced to absorb the fads of the moment.

Not for the nothing are we the biggest education spenders and among the lowest education achievers among the leading industrial nations.

The teachers unions nominated Bill Clinton in 1992. They're funding his re-election now. And they, his most reliable supporters, know he will maintain the status quo.

CROWD: Boo!

And I say this -- I say this not to the teachers, but to their unions.

(APPLAUSE)

I say this, if education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying.

And to the teachers union, I say, when I am president, I will disregard your political power for the sake of the parents, the children, the schools and the nation.

(APPLAUSE)

(APPLAUSE)

I plan to enrich your vocabulary with those words you fear -- school choice and competition and opportunity scholarships.

(APPLAUSE)

All this for low and middle income families so that you will join the rest of us in accountability, while others compete with you for the commendable privilege of giving our children a real education.

(APPLAUSE)

There is no reason why those who live on any street in America should not have the same right as the person who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue -- the right to send your child to the school of your choice.

(APPLAUSE)

And if we want to reduce crime -- if we want to reduce crime and drug use and teen pregnancies, let's start by giving all our children a first-class education.

(APPLAUSE)

And I also want these children to inherit a country that is far safer than it is at present. I seek for our children and grandchildren a world more open and with more opportunity than ever before.

But in wanting these young Americans to be able to make the best of this, I want first and foremost for them to be safe. I want to remove the shadow that darkens opportunities for every man, woman and child in America.

(APPLAUSE)

We are a nation paralyzed by crime. And it's time to end that in America.

(APPLAUSE)

And to do so...

(APPLAUSE)

... to do so, I mean to attack the root cause of crime -- criminals, criminals, violent criminals.

(APPLAUSE)

And as our many and voracious criminals go to bed tonight, at say, 6:00 in the morning, they had better pray that I lose this election...

(APPLAUSE)

... because if I win, the lives of violent criminals are going to be hell.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go! Go, Bob, Go!

During the Reagan administration -- during the Reagan administration we abolished parole at the federal level. In the Dole administration we will work with the nation's governors to abolish parole for violent criminals all across America.

(APPLAUSE)

And with my national instant check initiative, we will keep all guns out of the hands of criminals.

(APPLAUSE)

And I have been asked if I have a litmus tests for judges. I do.

(LAUGHTER)

My litmus test for judges is that they be intolerant of outrage; that their passion is not to amend, but to interpret the Constitution...

(APPLAUSE)

... that they are restrained in regard to those who live within the law, and strict with those who break it.

(APPLAUSE)

And for those who say that I should not make President Clinton's liberal judicial appointments an issue in this campaign, I have a simple response. I have heard your argument.

The motion is denied.

(APPLAUSE)

I save my respect for the Constitution, not for those who would ignore it, violate it or replace it with conceptions of their own fancy.

My administration will zealously protect civil and constitutional rights while never forgetting that our primary duty is protecting law abiding citizens, everybody in this hall.

(APPLAUSE)

I have no intention of ignoring violent -- I said violent criminals, understanding them or buying them off. A nation that cannot defend itself from outrage does not deserve to survive. And a president who cannot lead itself against those who prey upon it does not deserve to be president of the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

I am prepared to risk more political capital in defense of domestic tranquility than any president you have ever known.

The time for such risk is long overdue.

And in defending our nation from external threats, the requirements of survival cannot merely be finessed. There is no room for margin of error. On this subject perhaps more than any other, a president must level with the people and be prepared to take political risks. And I would rather do what is called for in this regard and be unappreciated, than fail to do so and win universal acclaim.

(APPLAUSE)

And it must be said because of misguided priorities there have been massive cuts in funding for our national security. I believe President Clinton has failed to adequately provide for our defense. And for whatever reason the neglect, it is irresponsible.

(APPLAUSE)

I ask that you consider these crystal-clear differences. He believes that it is acceptable to ask our military forces to more with less. I do not.

He defends giving a green light to a terrorist state, Iran, to expand its influence in Europe. And he relies on the United Nations to punish Libyan terrorists who murdered American citizens. I will not.

(APPLAUSE)

He believes that defending our people and our territory from missile attack is unnecessary. I do not.

(APPLAUSE)

And on my first day in office, I will put America on a course that will end our vulnerability to missile attack and rebuild our armed forces.

(APPLAUSE)

It is a course President Clinton has refused to take. And on my first day in office, I will put terrorists on notice. If you harm one American, you harm all Americans.

(APPLAUSE)

And America will pursue you to the ends of the earth.

(APPLAUSE)

In short, don't mess with us if you're not prepared to suffer the consequences.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Thank you. And furthermore, the lesson has always been clear, if we are prepared to defend, if we are prepared to fight many wars and greater wars than any wars that come, we will have to fight fewer wars and lesser wars and perhaps no wars at all.

(APPLAUSE)

It has always been so and will ever be so. And I'm not the first to say that the long gray line has never failed us, and it never has.

For those who might be sharply taken aback and thinking of Vietnam, think again. For in Vietnam the long gray line did not fail us, we failed it in Vietnam.

(APPLAUSE)

The American soldier -- the American soldier was not made for the casual and arrogant treatment that he suffered there, where he was committed without clear purpose or resolve, bound by rules that prevented victory, and kept waiting in the valley of the shadow of death for 10 years while the nation invaded the undebatable question of his honor.

No, the American soldier was not to be thrown into battle without a clear purpose or resolve, not made to be abandoned in the field of battle, not made to give his life for indifference or lack of respect. And I will never commit the American soldier to an ordeal without the prospect of victory.

(APPLAUSE)

And when I am president, and when I am president every man, and every women in our armed forces will now the president is commander- in-chief, not Boutros Boutros-Ghali or any other UN secretary general.

(APPLAUSE)

CROWD: U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

(APPLAUSE)

This I owe not only to the living, but to the dead, to every patriot, to every patriot grave, to the ghosts of Valley Forge, of Flanders Field, of Bataan, the Chosin Reservoir, Khe Sanh, and the Gulf.

This I owe to the men who died on the streets of Mogadishu not three year ago, to the shadows on the bluffs of Normandy, to the foot soldiers who never came home, to the airmen who fell to earth, and the sailors who rest perpetually at sea.

This is not an issue of politics, but far graver than that. Like the bond of trust between parent and child, it is the lifeblood of the nation. It commands not only sacrifice but a grace in leadership embodying both caution and daring at the same time. And this we owe not only to ourselves. Our Allies demand consistency and resolve, which they deserve from us as we deserve it from them. But even if they falter, we cannot, for history has made us the leader, and we are obliged by history to keep the highest standard possibly (sic).

(APPLAUSE)

And in this regard may I remind you of the nation's debt to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. President Nixon engaged China and the Soviet Union with diplomatic genius. President Ford, who gave me my start in 1976, stood fast in a time of great difficulty, and with the greatest of dignity.

Were it not for President Reagan, the Soviet Union would still be standing today.

(APPLAUSE)

He brought the Cold War to an end, not, as some demanded, through compromise and surrender -- but by winning it. That's how he brought the Cold War to an end.

(APPLAUSE)

And President Bush, with a mastery that words fail to convey, guided the Gulf War coalition and its military forces to victory.

A war that might have lasted years and taken the lives of tens of thousands of Americans passed so swiftly and passed so smoothly that history has yet to catch its breath and give him the credit he is due.

(APPLAUSE)

History is like that.

(APPLAUSE)

History is like that. Whenever we forget its singular presence, it gives us a lesson in grace and awe.

And when I look back on my life, I see less and less of myself and more and more a history of this civilization that we have made that is called America.

And I am content and always will be content to see my own story subsumed in great events, the greatest of which is the simple onward procession of the American people. What a high privilege it is to be at the center in these times -- and this I owe to you, the American people.

I owe everything to you. And to make things right, and to close the circle, I will return to you as much as I possibly can. It is incumbent upon me to do so. It is my duty and my deepest desire. And so tonight...

(APPLAUSE)

And so tonight, I respectfully -- I respectfully ask for your blessing and your support.

(APPLAUSE)

The election will not be decided -- the election will not be decided by the polls or by the opinion-makers or by the pundits.

It will be decided by you. It will be decided by you.

(APPLAUSE)

And I ask for your vote so that I may bring you an administration that is able, honest, and trusts in you.

For the fundamental issue is not of policy, but of trust -- not merely whether the people trust the president, but whether the president and his party trust the people, trust in their goodness and their genius for recovery.

That's what the election is all about.

(APPLAUSE)

For the government cannot direct the people, the people must direct the government.

(APPLAUSE)

This is not the outlook of my opponent -- and he is my opponent, not my enemy.

And though he has tried of late to be a good Republican..

(LAUGHTER)

... and I expect him here tonight...

(LAUGHTER)

... there are certain distinctions that even he cannot blur. There are distinctions between the two great parties that will be debated and must be debated in the next 82 days.

He and his party brought us the biggest tax increase in the history of America. And we are the party of lower taxes -- we are the party of lower taxes and greater opportunity.

(APPLAUSE)

We are the party whose resolve did not flag as the Cold War dragged on. We did not tremble before a Soviet giant that was just about to fall, and we did not have to be begged to take up arms against Saddam Hussein.

We are not the party, as drug use has soared and doubled among the young, hears no evil, sees no evil, and just cannot say, "Just say no."

We are the party that trusts in the people. I trust in the people. That is the heart of all I have tried to say tonight.

My friends, a presidential campaign is more than a contest of candidates, more than a clash of opposing philosophies.

It is a mirror held up to America. It is a measurement of who we are, where we come from, and where we are going. For as much inspiration as we may draw from a glorious past, we recognize American preeminently as a country of tomorrow. For we were placed here for a purpose, by a higher power. There's no doubt about it.

(APPLAUSE)

Every soldier in uniform, every school child who recites the Pledge of Allegiance, every citizen who places her hand on her heart when the flag goes by, recognizes and responds to our American destiny.

Optimism is in our blood. I know this as few others can. There once was a time when I doubted the future. But I have learned as many of you have learned that obstacles can be overcome.

And I have unlimited confidence in the wisdom of our people and the future of our country.

Tonight, I stand before you tested by adversity, made sensitive by hardship, a fighter by principle, and the most optimistic man in America.

(APPLAUSE)

My life is proof that America is a land without limits. And with my feet on the ground and my heart filled with hope, I put my faith in you and in the God who loves us all. For I am convinced that America's best days are yet to come.

May God bless you. And may God bless America. Thank you very much.

Bill Clinton: 'My days in this office are nearly through, but my days of service, I hope, are not', farewell address - 2000

18 January 2001, Oval Office, Washington DC, USA

My fellow citizens, tonight is my last opportunity to speak to you from the Oval Office as your President. I am profoundly grateful to you for twice giving me the honor to serve, to work for you and with you to prepare our Nation for the 21st century.
And I'm grateful to Vice President Gore, to my Cabinet Secretaries, and to all those who have served with me for the last eight years.
This has been a time of dramatic transformation, and you have risen to every new challenge. You have made our social fabric stronger, our families healthier and safer, our people more prosperous. You, the American people, have made our passage into the global information age an era of great American renewal.
In all the work I have done as President—every decision I have made, every executive action I have taken, every bill I have proposed and signed—I've tried to give all Americans the tools and conditions to build the future of our dreams in a good society with a strong economy, a cleaner environment, and a freer, safer, more prosperous world.
I have steered my course by our enduring values: opportunity for all, responsibility from all, a community of all Americans. I have sought to give America a new kind of Government, smaller, more modern, more effective, full of ideas and policies appropriate to this new time, always putting people first, always focusing on the future.
Working together, America has done well. Our economy is breaking records with more than 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the highest homeownership ever, the longest expansion in history. Our families and communities are stronger. Thirty-five million Americans have used the family leave law; 8 million have moved off welfare. Crime is at a 25-year low. Over 10 million Americans receive more college aid, and more people than ever are going to college. Our schools are better. Higher standards, greater accountability, and larger investments have brought higher test scores and higher graduation rates. More than 3 million children have health insurance now, and more than 7 million Americans have been lifted out of poverty. Incomes are rising across the board. Our air and water are cleaner. Our food and drinking water are safer. And more of our precious land has been preserved in the continental United States than at any time in a 100 years.
America has been a force for peace and prosperity in every corner of the globe. I'm very grateful to be able to turn over the reins of leadership to a new President with America in such a strong position to meet the challenges of the future.
Tonight I want to leave you with three thoughts about our future. First, America must maintain our record of fiscal responsibility.
Through our last four budgets we've turned record deficits to record surpluses, and we've been able to pay down $600 billion of our national debt—on track to be debt-free by the end of the decade for the first time since 1835. Staying on that course will bring lower interest rates, greater prosperity, and the opportunity to meet our big challenges. If we choose wisely, we can pay down the debt, deal with the retirement of the baby boomers, invest more in our future, and provide tax relief.
Second, because the world is more connected every day, in every way, America's security and prosperity require us to continue to lead in the world. At this remarkable moment in history, more people live in freedom than ever before. Our alliances are stronger than ever. People all around the world look to America to be a force for peace and prosperity, freedom and security.
The global economy is giving more of our own people and billions around the world the chance to work and live and raise their families with dignity. But the forces of integration that have created these good opportunities also make us more subject to global forces of destruction, to terrorism, organized crime and narcotrafficking, the spread of deadly weapons and disease, the degradation of the global environment.
The expansion of trade hasn't fully closed the gap between those of us who live on the cutting edge of the global economy and the billions around the world who live on the knife's edge of survival. This global gap requires more than compassion; it requires action. Global poverty is a powder keg that could be ignited by our indifference.
In his first Inaugural Address, Thomas Jefferson warned of entangling alliances. But in our times, America cannot and must not disentangle itself from the world. If we want the world to embody our shared values, then we must assume a shared responsibility.
If the wars of the 20th century, especially the recent ones in Kosovo and Bosnia, have taught us anything, it is that we achieve our aims by defending our values and leading the forces of freedom and peace. We must embrace boldly and resolutely that duty to lead - to stand with our allies in word and deed and to put a human face on the global economy, so that expanded trade benefits all peoples in all nations, lifting lives and hopes all across the world.
Third, we must remember that America cannot lead in the world unless here at home we weave the threads of our coat of many colors into the fabric of one America. As we become ever more diverse, we must work harder to unite around our common values and our common humanity. We must work harder to overcome our differences, in our hearts and in our laws. We must treat all our people with fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, and regardless of when they arrived in our country—always moving toward the more perfect Union of our Founders' dreams.
Hillary, Chelsea, and I join all Americans in wishing our very best to the next President, George W. Bush, to his family and his administration, in meeting these challenges, and in leading freedom's march in this new century.
As for me, I'll leave the Presidency more idealistic, more full of hope than the day I arrived, and more confident than ever that America's best days lie ahead.
My days in this office are nearly through, but my days of service, I hope, are not. In the years ahead, I will never hold a position higher or a covenant more sacred than that of President of the United States. But there is no title I will wear more proudly than that of citizens.
Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America

Bill Clinton: "In the spring of 1971 I met a girl,", DNC - 2016

26 July 2016, Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

In the spring of 1971, I met a girl.

The first time I saw her we were, appropriately enough, in a class on political and civil rights. She had thick blond hair, big glasses, wore no makeup, and she had a sense of strength and self- possession that I found magnetic. After the class I followed her out, intending to introduce myself. I got close enough to touch her back, but I couldn’t do it. Somehow I knew this would not be just another tap on the shoulder, that I might be starting something I couldn’t stop.

And I saw her several more times in the next few days, but I still didn’t speak to her. Then one night I was in the law library talking to a classmate who wanted me to join the Yale Law Journal. He said it would guarantee me a job in a big firm or a clerkship with a federal judge. I really wasn’t interested, I just wanted to go home to Arkansas.

Then I saw the girl again, standing at the opposite end of that long room. Finally she was staring back at me, so I watched her. She closed her book, put it down and started walking toward me. She walked the whole length of the library, came up to me and said, look, if you’re going to keep staring at me…

…and now I’m staring back, we at least ought to know each other’s name. I’m Hillary Rodham, who are you?

I was so impressed and surprised that, whether you believe it or not, momentarily I was speechless.

Finally, I sort of blurted out my name and we exchanged a few words and then she went away.

Well, I didn’t join the Law Review, but I did leave that library with a whole new goal in mind.

A couple of days later, I saw her again. I remember, she was wearing a long, white, flowery skirt. And I went up to her and she said she was going to register for classes for the next term. And I said I’d go, too. And we stood in line and talked — you had to do that to register back then — and I thought I was doing pretty well until we got to the front of the line and the registrar looked up and said, Bill, what are you doing here, you registered morning?

I turned red and she laughed that big laugh of hers. And I thought, well, heck, since my cover’s been blown I just went ahead and asked her to take a walk down to the art museum.

We’ve been walking and talking and laughing together ever since.

And we’ve done it in good times and bad, through joy and heartbreak. We cried together this morning on the news that our good friend and a lot of your good friend, Mark Weiner, passed away early this morning.

We’ve built up a lifetime of memories. After the first month and that first walk, I actually drove her home to Park Ridge, Illinois…

…to meet her family and see the town where she grew up, a perfect example of post World War II middle-class America, street after street of nice houses, great schools, good parks, a big public swimming pool, and almost all white.

I really liked her family. Her crusty, conservative father, her rambunctious brothers, all extolling the virtues of rooting for the Bears and the Cuba.

And for the people from Illinois here, they even told me what “waiting for next year” meant.

It could be next year, guys.

Now, her mother was different. She was more liberal than the boys. And she had a childhood that made mine look like a piece of cake. She was easy to underestimate with her soft manner and she reminded me all over again of the truth of that old saying you should never judge a book by its covers. Knowing her was one of the greatest gifts Hillary ever gave me.

I learned that Hillary got her introduction to social justice through her Methodist youth minister, Don Jones. He took her downtown to Chicago to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak and he remained her friend for the rest of his life. This will be the only campaign of hers he ever missed.

When she got to college, her support for civil rights, her opposition to the Vietnam War compelled her to change party, to become a Democrat.

And then between college and law school on a total lark she went alone to Alaska and spent some time sliming fish.

More to the point, by the time I met her she had already been involved in the law school’s legal services project and she had been influenced by Marian Wright Edelman.

She took a summer internship interviewing workers in migrant camps for Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee.

She had also begun working in the Yale New Haven Hospital to develop procedures to handle suspected child abuse cases. She got so involved in children’s issues that she actually took an extra year in law school working at the child studies center to learn what more could be done to improve the lives and the futures of poor children.

So she was already determined to figure out how to make things better.

Hillary opened my eyes to a whole new world of public service by private citizens. In the summer of 1972, she went to Dothan, Alabama to visit one of those segregated academies that then enrolled over half-a-million white kids in the South. The only way the economics worked is if they claimed federal tax exemptions to which they were not legally entitled. She got sent to prove they weren’t.

So she sauntered into one of these academies all by herself, pretending to be a housewife that had just moved to town and needed to find a school for her son. And they exchanged pleasantries and finally she said, look, let’s just get to the bottom line here, if I enroll my son in this school will he be in a segregated school, yes or know? And the guy said absolutely. She had him!

I’ve seen it a thousand times since. And she went back and her encounter was part of a report that gave Marian Marian Wright Edelman the ammunition she needed to keep working to force the Nixon administration to take those tax exemptions away and give our kids access to an equal education.

Then she went down to south Texas where she met…she met one of the nicest fellows I ever met, the wonderful union leader Franklin Garcia, and he helped her register Mexican- American voters. I think some of them are still around to vote for her in 2016.

Then in our last year in law school, Hillary kept up this work. She went to South Carolina to see why so many young…

…she went to South Carolina to see why so many young African- American boys, I mean, young teenagers, were being jailed for years with adults in men’s prisons. And she filed a report on that, which led to some changes, too. Always making things better. (APPLAUSE)

Now, meanwhile, let’s get back to business. I was trying to convince her to marry me.

I first proposed to her on a trip to Great Britain, the first time she had been overseas. And we were on the shoreline of this wonderful little lake, Lake Ennerdale. I asked her to marry me and she said I can’t do it.

So in 1974 I went home to teach in the law school and Hillary moved to Massachusetts to keep working on children’s issues. This time trying to figure out why so many kids counted in the Census weren’t enrolled in school. She found one of them sitting alone on her porch in a wheelchair. Once more, she filed a report about these kids, and that helped influence ultimately the Congress to adopt the proposition that children with disabilities, physical or otherwise, should have equal access to public education.

You saw the results of that last night when Anastasia Somoza talked.

She never made fun of people with disabilities; she tried to empower them based on their abilities.

So the second time I tried a different tack. I said I really want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it.

And she smiled and looked at me, like, what is this boy up to? She said that is not a very good sales pitch. I said I know, but it’s true. And I meant it, it was true.

I said I know most of the young Democrats our age who want to go into politics, they mean well and they speak well, but none of them is as good as you are at actually doing things to make positive changes in people’s lives. (APPLAUSE)

So I suggested she go home to Illinois or move to New York and look for a chance to run for office. She just laughed and said, are you out of you mind, nobody would ever vote for me.

So I finally got her to visit me in Arkansas.

And when she did, the people at the law school were so impressed they offered a teaching position. And she decided to take a huge chance. She moved to a strange place, more rural, more culturally conservative than anyplace she had ever been, where she knew good and well people would wonder what in the world she was like and whether they could or should accept her.

Didn’t take them long to find out what she was like. She loved her teaching and she got frustrated when one of her students said, well, what do you expect, I’m just from Arkansas. She said, don’t tell me that, you’re as smart as anybody, you’ve just got to believe in yourself and work hard and set high goals. She believed that anybody could make it.

She also started the first legal aid clinic in northwest Arkansas, providing legal aid services to poor people who couldn’t pay for them. And one day I was driving her to the airport to fly back to Chicago when we passed this little brick house that had a for sale sign on it. And she said, boy, that’s a pretty house. It had 1,100 square feet, an attic, fan and no air conditioner in hot Arkansas, and a screened-in porch.

Hillary commented on what a uniquely designed and beautiful house it was. So I took a big chance. I bought the house. My mortgage was $175 a month.

When she came back, I picked up her up and I said, you remember that house you liked? She said yeah. I said, while you were gone I bought it, you have to marry me now.

The third time was the charm.

We were married in that little house on October the 11th, 1975. I married my best friend. I was still in awe after more than four years of being around her at how smart and strong and loving and caring she was. And I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career was a decision she would never regret.

A little over a year later we moved to Little Rock when I became attorney general and she joined the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi. Soon after, she started a group called the Arkansas Advocates for Families and Children.

It’s a group, as you can hear, is still active today.

In 1979, just after I became governor, I asked Hillary to chair a rural health committee to help expand health care to isolated farm and mountain areas. They recommended to do that partly by deploying trained nurse practitioners in places with no doctors to provide primary care they were trained to provide. It was a big deal then, highly controversial and very important.

And I got the feeling that what she did for the rest of her life she was doing there. She just went out and figured out what needed to be done and what made the most sense and what would help the most people. And then if it was controversial she’d just try to persuade people it was the right thing to do.

It wasn’t the only big thing that happened that spring my first year as governor. We found out we were going to be parents.

And time passed. On February 27th, 1980, 15 minutes after I got home from the National Governors Conference in Washington, Hillary’s water broke and off we went to the hospital. Chelsea was born just before midnight.

And it was the greatest moment of my life. The miracle of a new beginning. The hole it filled for me because my own father died before I was born, and the absolute conviction that my daughter had the best mother in the whole world.

For the next 17 years, through nursing school, Montessori, kindergarten, through T-ball, softball, soccer, volleyball and her passion for ballet, through sleepovers, summer camps, family vacations and Chelsea’s own very ambitious excursions, from Halloween parties in the neighborhood, to a Viennese waltz gala in the White House, Hillary first and foremost was a mother.

She became, as she often said, our family’s designated worrier, born with an extra responsibility gene. The truth is we rarely disagreed on parenting, although she did believe that I had gone a little over the top when I took a couple of days off with Chelsea to watch all six “Police Academy” movies back-to-back.

When Chelsea was 9 months old, I was defeated for reelection in the Reagan landslide. And I became overnight, I think, the youngest former governor in the history of the country. We only had two-year terms back then.

Hillary was great. Immediately she said, OK, what are we going to do? Here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to get a house, you’re going to get a job, we’re going to enjoy being Chelsea’s parents. And if you really want to run again, you’ve got to go out and talk to people and figure out why you lost, tell people you got the message and show them you’ve still got good ideas.

I followed her advice. Within two days we had a house, I soon had a job. We had two fabulous years with Chelsea. And in 1982, I became the first governor in the history of our state to be elected, defeated and elected again.

I think my experience is it’s a pretty good thing to follow her advice. The rest of the decade sort of flew by as our lives settled into a rhythm of family and work and friends.

In 1983, Hillary chaired a committee to recommend new education standards for us as a part of and in response to a court order to equalize school funding and a report by a national expert that said our woefully underfunded schools were the worst in America.

Typical Hillary, she held listening tours in all 75 counties with our committee. She came up with really ambitious recommendations. For example, that we be the first state in America to require elementary counselors in every school because so many kids were having trouble at home and they needed it.

So I called the legislature into session hoping to pass the standards, pass a pay raise for teachers and raise the sales tax to pay for it all. I knew it would be hard to pass, but it got easier after Hillary testified before the education committee and the chairman, a plainspoken farmer, said looks to me like we elected the wrong Clinton.

Well, by the time I ran for president nine years later, the same expert who said that we had the worst schools in America said that our state was one of the two most improved states in America. And that’s because of those standards that Hillary developed.

Now, two years later, Hillary told me about a preschool program developed in Israel called HIPPY, Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters. The idea was to teach low-income parents, even those that couldn’t read, to be their children’s first teachers.

She said she thought it would work in Arkansas. I said that’s great, what are we going to do about it? She said, oh, I already did it. I called the woman who started the program in Israel, she’ll be here in about 10 days and help us get started.

Next thing you know I’m being dragged around to all these little preschool graduations. Now, keep in mind, this was before any state even had universal kindergarten and I’m being dragged to preschool graduations watching these poor parents with tears in their eyes because they never thought they’d be able to help their kids learn.

Now, 20 years of research has shown how well this program works to improve readiness for school and academic achievement. There are a lot of young adults in America who have no idea Hillary had anything to do with it who are enjoying better lives because they were in that program.

CLINTON: She did all this while being a full-time worker, a mother and enjoying our life. Why? Well, she’s insatiably curious, she’s a natural leader, she’s a good organizer, and she’s the best darn change-maker I ever met in my entire life.

Look, this is a really important point. This is a really important point for you to take out of this convention. If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure of change is how many people’s lives are better, you know it’s hard and some people think it’s boring. Speeches like this are fun.

Actually doing the work is hard. So people say, well, we need to change. She’s been around a long time, she sure has, and she’s sure been worth every single year she’s put into making people’s lives better.

I can tell you this. If you were sitting where I’m sitting and you heard what I have heard at every dinner conversation, every lunch conversation, on every lone walk, you would say this woman has never been satisfied with the status quo in anything. She always wants to move the ball forward. That is just who she is.

When I became president with a commitment to reform health care, Hillary was a natural to head the health care task force. You all know we failed because we couldn’t break a Senate filibuster. Hillary immediately went to work on solving the problems the bill sought to address one by one. The most important goal was to get more children with health insurance.

In 1997, Congress passed the Children’s Health Insurance Program, still an important part of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. It insures more than 8 million kids. There are a lot of other things in that bill that she got done piece by piece, pushing that rock up the hill.

In 1997, she also teamed with the House Minority Leader Tom DeLay, who maybe disliked me more than any of Newt Gingrich’s crowd. They worked on a bill together to increase adoptions of children under foster care. She wanted to do it because she knew that Tom DeLay, for all of our differences, was an adoptive parent and she honored him for doing that.

Now, the bill they worked on, which passed with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, led to a big increase in the adoption of children out of foster care, including non-infant kids and special-needs kids. It made life better because she’s a change-maker, that’s what she does.

Now, when you’re doing all this, real life doesn’t stop. 1997 was the year Chelsea finished high school and went to college. We were happy for her, but sad for us to see her go. I’ll never forget moving her into her dorm room at Stanford. It would have been a great little reality flick. There I was in a trance just staring out the window trying not to cry, and there was Hillary on her hands and knees desperately looking for one more drawer to put that liner paper in.

Finally, Chelsea took charge and told us ever so gently that it was time for us to go. So we closed a big chapter in the most important work of our lives. As you’ll see Thursday night when Chelsea speaks, Hillary’s done a pretty fine job of being a mother.

And as you saw last night, beyond a shadow of a doubt so has Michelle Obama.

Now, fast forward. In 1999, Congressman Charlie Rangel and other New York Democrats urged Hillary…

…urged Hillary to run for the seat of retiring Senator Pat Moynihan. We had always intended to go to New York after I left office and commute to Arkansas, but this had never occurred to either one of us. Hillary had never run for office before, but she decided to give it a try.

She began her campaign the way she always does new things, by listening and and learning. And after a tough battle, New York elected her to the seat once held by another outsider, Robert Kennedy.

And she didn’t let him down. Her early years were dominated by 9/11, by working to fund the recovery, then monitoring the health and providing compensation to victims and first and second responders. She and Senator Schumer were tireless and so were our House members.

In 2003, partly spurred on by what we were going through, she became the first senator in the history of New York ever to serve on the Armed Services Committee.

So she tried to make sure people on the battlefield had proper equipment. She tried to expand and did expand health care coverage to Reservists and members of the National Guard. She got longer family leave, working with Senator Dodd, for people caring for wounded service members.

And she worked for more extensive care for people with traumatic brain injury. She also served on a special Pentagon commission to propose changes necessary to meet our new security challenges. Newt Gingrich was on that commission, he told me what a good job she had done.

I say that because nobody who has seriously dealt with the men and women in today’s military believes they are a disaster. They are a national treasure of all races, all religions, all walks of life.

Now, meanwhile, she compiled a really solid record, totally progressive on economic and social issues. She voted for and against some proposed trade deals. She became the de facto economic development officer for the area of New York outside the ambit of New York City.

She worked for farmers, for winemakers, for small businesses and manufacturers, for upstate cities in rural areas who needed more ideas and more new investment to create good jobs, something we have to do again in small-town and rural America, in neighborhoods that have been left behind in our cities and Indian country and, yes, in coal country.

When she lost a hard-fought contest to President Obama in 2008, she worked for his election hard. But she hesitated to say yes when he asked her to join his Cabinet because she so loved being a senator from New York.

So like me, in a different context, he had to keep asking.

But as we all saw and heard from Madeleine Albright, it was worth the effort and worth the wait.

As secretary of state, she worked hard to get strong sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. And in what The Wall Street Journal no less called a half-court shot at the buzzer, she got Russia and China to support them. Her team negotiated the New START Treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear weapons and reestablish inspections. And she got enough Republican support to get two-thirds of the Senate, the vote necessary to ratify the treaty.

She flew all night long from Cambodia to the Middle East to get a cease-fire that would avoid a full-out shooting war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza to protect the peace of the region.

She backed President Obama’s decision to go after Osama bin Laden.

She launched a team, this is really important today, she launched a team to fight back against terrorists online and built a new global counterterrorism effort.

We’ve got to win this battle in the mind field.

She put climate change at the center of our foreign policy.

She negotiated the first agreement ever — ever — where China and India officially committed to reduce their emissions. And as she had been doing since she went to Beijing in 1995 and said women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights…

…she worked to empower women and girls around the world and to make the same exact declaration on behalf of the LGBT community in America and around the world.

And nobody ever talks about this much, nobody ever talks about this much, but it’s important to me. She tripled the number of people with AIDS in poor countries whose lives are being saved with your tax dollars, most of them in Africa, going from 1.7 million lives to 5.1 million lives and it didn’t cost you any more money. She just bought available FDA-approved generic drugs, something we need to do for the American people more.

Now, you don’t know any of these people. You don’t know any of those 3.4 million people, but I’ll guarantee you they know you. They know you because they see you as thinking their lives matter. They know you and that’s one reason the approval of the United States was 20 points higher when she left the secretary of state’s office than when she took it.

Now, how does this square? How did this square with the things that you heard at the Republican convention? What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can’t. One is real, the other is made up.

You just have to decide. You just have to decide which is which, my fellow Americans.

The real one had done more positive change-making before she was 30 than many public officials do in a lifetime in office.

The real one, if you saw her friend Betsy Ebeling vote for Illinois today…has friends from childhood through Arkansas, where she has not lived in more than 20 years, who have gone all across America at their own expense to fight for the person they know.

The real one has earned the loyalty, the respect and the fervent support of people who have worked with her in every stage of her life, including leaders around the world who know her to be able, straightforward and completely trustworthy.

The real one calls you when you’re sick, when your kid’s in trouble or when there’s a death in the family.

The real one repeatedly drew praise from prominent Republicans when she was a senator and secretary of state.

So what’s up with it? Well, if you win elections on the theory that government is always bad and will mess up a two-car parade…a real change-maker represents a real threat.

So your only option is to create a cartoon, a cartoon alternative, then run against the cartoon. Cartoons are two- dimensional, they’re easy to absorb. Life in the real world is complicated and real change is hard. And a lot of people even think it’s boring.

Good for you, because earlier today you nominated the real one.

Listen, we’ve got to get back on schedule. You guys calm down.

Look (INAUDIBLE) a long, full, blessed life, it really took off when I met and fell in love with that girl in the spring of 1971. When I was president, I worked hard to give you more peace and shared prosperity, to give you an America where nobody is invisible or counted out.

But for this time, Hillary is uniquely qualified to seize the opportunities and reduce the risks we face. And she is still the best darn change-maker I have ever known.

You could drop her into any trouble spot, pick one, come back in a month and somehow, some way she will have made it better. That is just who she is.

There are clear, achievable, affordable responses to our challenges. But we won’t get to them if America makes the wrong choice in this election. That’s why you should elect her. And you should elect her because she’ll never quit when the going gets tough. She’ll never quit on you.

She sent me in this primary to West Virginia where she knew we were going to lose, to look those coal miners in the eye and say I’m down here because Hillary sent me to tell you that if you really think you can get the economy back you had 50 years ago, have at it, vote for whoever you want to. But if she wins, she is coming back for you to take you along on the ride to America’s future.

And so I say to you, if you love this country, you’re working hard, you’re paying taxes and you’re obeying the law and you’d like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back.

If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. We want you.

If you’re a young African American disillusioned and afraid, we saw in Dallas how great our police officers can be, help us build a future where nobody is afraid to walk outside, including the people that wear blue to protect our future.

Hillary will make us stronger together. You know it because she’s spent a lifetime doing it. I hope you will do it. I hope you will elect her. Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows tend to care more about our children and grandchildren. The reason you should elect her is that in the greatest country on earth we have always been about tomorrow. You children and grandchildren will bless you forever if you do.

God bless you. Thank you.

Pat Buchanan: 'it's not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call "God's country"', RNC Concession speech - 1992

17 August 1992, Astrodome, Houston, Texas, USA

What a terrific crowd this is. What a terrific crowd.

This may even be larger than the crowd I had in Ellijay, Georgia. Don't laugh. We carried Ellijay.

Listen, my friends, we may have taken the long way home, but we finally got here to Houston. And the first thing I want to do tonight is to congratulate President George Bush and to remove any doubt about where we stand. The primaries are over; the heart is strong again; and the Buchanan brigades are enlisted -- all the way to a great Republican comeback victory in November.

My friends -- My friends, like many of you -- like many of you last month, I watched that giant masquerade ball up at Madison Square Garden, where 20,000 liberals and radicals came dressed up as moderates and centrists in the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political history.

You know, one -- one by one -- one by one the prophets of doom appeared at the podium. The Reagan decade, they moaned, was a terrible time in America, and they said the only way to prevent worse times is to turn our country's fate and our country's future over to the Party that gave us McGovern, Mondale, Carter, and Michael Dukakis. Where do they find these leaders? No way, my friends. The American people are not going to go back to the discredited liberalism of the 1960s and the failed liberalism of the 1970s, no matter how slick the package in 1992.

(Hold it, my friends.)

You know, the malcontents -- the malcontents of Madison Square Garden notwithstanding, the 1980s were not terrible years in America. They were great years. You know it. And I know it. And everyone knows it except for the carping critics who sat on the sidelines of history, jeering at one of the great statesmen of modern time: Ronald Reagan. You know out of -- Remember that time out of Jimmy Carter's days of malaise, Ronald Reagan crafted -- Ronald Reagan crafted the greatest peacetime economic recovery in history: three million new businesses, and 20 million new jobs. Under the Reagan Doctrine, one by one, it was the Communist dominos that began to fall. First, Grenada was liberated by U.S. airborne troops of the U.S. Marine Corps. Then, the mighty Red Army was driven out of Afghanistan with American weapons. And then in Nicaragua, that squalid Marxist regime was forced to hold free elections by Ronald Reagan's Contra army, and the Communists were thrown out of power. Fellow Americans you ought to remember, it was under our Party that the Berlin Wall came down and Europe was reunited. It was under our Party that the Soviet Empire collapsed, and the captive nations broke free.

You know it is said that every American President will be remembered in history with but a single sentence. George Washington was the father of his country. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the Union. And Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. And it is time -- And it is just about time -- It is just about time that my old colleagues, the columnists and commentators, looking down on us tonight from their sky boxes and anchor booths, gave Ronald Reagan the full credit he deserves for leading America to victory in the Cold War. Most of all, my friends -- Most of all, Ronald Reagan made us proud to be Americans again. We never felt better about our country; and we never stood taller in the eyes of the world than when "the Gipper" was at the helm.

But we are here tonight, my friends, not only to celebrate, but to nominate. An American President has many roles. He is our first diplomat, the architect of American foreign policy. And which of these two men is more qualified for that great role? George Bush has been U.N. Ambassador, Director of the CIA, envoy to China. As Vice President, George Bush co-authored and cosigned the policies that won the Cold War. As President, George Bush presided over the liberation of Eastern Europe and the termination of the Warsaw Pact. And what about Mr. Clinton? Well, Bill Clinton -- Bill Clinton couldn't find 150 words to discuss foreign policy in an acceptance speech that lasted almost an hour. You know, as was said -- as was said of another Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton's foreign policy experience is pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes.

You know, let's recall what happened -- let us look at the record and recall what happened. Under President George Bush, more human beings escaped from the prison house of tyranny to freedom than in any other four-year period in history.

And for any man -- let me tell you -- for any man to call this a record of failure is the cheap political rhetoric of politicians who only know how to build themselves up by tearing America down -- and we don't want that kind of leadership in the United States.

The presidency, my friends -- The presidency is also an office that Theodore Roosevelt called America's "bully pulpit." Harry Truman said it was "preeminently a place of moral leadership." George Bush is a defender of right-to-life, and a champion of the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs upon which America was founded.

Mr. Clinton -- Mr. Clinton however, has a different agenda. At its top is unrestricted -- unrestricted abortion on demand. When the Irish-Catholic Governor of Pennsylvania, Robert Casey, asked to say a few words on behalf of the 25 million unborn children destroyed since Roe v Wade, Bob Casey was told there was no room for him at the podium at Bill Clinton's convention, and no room at the inn. Yet -- Yet a militant leader of the homosexual rights movement could rise at that same convention and say: "Bill Clinton and Al Gore represent the most pro-lesbian and pro-gay ticket in history." And so they do. Bill Clinton says he supports "school choice" -- but only for state-run schools. Parents who send their children to Christian schools, or private schools, or Jewish schools, or Catholic schools, need not apply.

Elect me, and you get "two for the price of one," Mr. Clinton says of his lawyer-spouse. And what -- And what does Hillary believe? Well, Hillary believes that 12-year-olds should have the right to sue their parents. And Hillary has compared marriage and the family, as institutions, to slavery and life on an Indian reservation. Well, speak for yourself, Hillary.

Friends -- Friends, this -- This, my friends -- This is radical feminism. The agenda that Clinton & Clinton would impose on America: abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat units. That's change, all right. But that's not the kind of change America needs. It's not the kind of change America wants. And it's not the kind of change we can abide in a nation we still call "God's country."

The President -- The President of the United States is also -- The President of the United States is also America's Commander-in-Chief. He's the man we authorize to send fathers and sons and brothers and friends into battle. George Bush was 17 years old when they bombed Pearl Harbor. He left his high school graduation; he walked down to the recruiting office; and he signed up to become the youngest fighter pilot in the Pacific war.

And Mr. Clinton? And Bill Clinton? I'll tell you where he was. I'll tell you where he was. I'll tell you where he was. Let me tell you where he was. I'll tell you -- I'll tell you where he was. When Bill Clinton's time came in Vietnam, he sat up in a dormitory room in Oxford, England, and figured out how to dodge the draft.

Let me ask the question to this convention: Which of these two men has won the moral authority to send young Americans into battle? I suggest respectfully -- I suggest respectfully, it is the American patriot and war hero, Navy Lieutenant J. G. George Herbert Walker Bush! My fellow Americans -- My fellow Americans, this campaign is about philosophy, and it is about character; and George Bush wins hands down on both counts. And it is time all of us came home and stood beside him.

As his running mate, Mr. Clinton chose Albert Gore. But just how moderate is Prince Albert? Well according to the National Taxpayers Union, Al Gore beat out Teddy Kennedy, two straight years, for the title of "biggest spender in the U.S. Senate" and Teddy Kennedy isn't moderate about anything. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding about Teddy. How many 60-year-olds do you know who still go to Florida for spring break?

You know up at that great -- at that great big costume party they held up in New York, Mr. Gore made a startling declaration. Henceforth, Albert Gore said, the "central organizing principle" ofgovernments everywhere must be: the environment. Wrong, Albert. The central organizing principle of this republic is: freedom. And from the ancient -- And from the ancient forests -- from the ancient forests of Oregon and Washington, to the Inland Empire of California, America's great middle class has got to start standing up to these environmental extremists who put birds and rats and insects ahead of families, workers, and jobs.

One year ago -- You know, one year ago, my friends -- One year ago I could not have dreamt I would be here tonight. I was just one of many panelists on what President Bush calls "those crazy Sunday talk shows." But I disagreed with the President and so we challenged the President in the Republican primaries, and we fought as best we could. From February to June, President Bush won 33 of those primaries. I can't recall exactly how many we won. I'll get you the figure tomorrow.

But tonight I do want to speak from the heart to the 3 million people who voted for Pat Buchanan for President. I will never -- I will never -- I will never forget you, or the great honor you have done me. But I do believe -- I do believe deep in my heart that the right place for us to be now, in this presidential campaign, is right beside George Bush. This Party -- This Party is my home. This Party is our home and we've got to come home to it. And don't let anyone tell you any different.

Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him for the freedom to choose religious schools, and we stand with him against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women. We stand with President Bush -- We stand with President Bush for right-to-life and for voluntary prayer in the public schools. And we stand against putting our wives and daughters and sisters into combat units of the United States Army. And we stand, my -- my friends -- We also stand with President Bush in favor of the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture. We stand with President Bush in favor of federal judges who interpret the law as written, and against would-be Supreme Court justices like Mario Cuomo who think they have a mandate to rewrite the Constitution.

Friends, this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America. And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side. And so to the Buchanan Brigades out there, we have to come home and stand beside George Bush.

In these six months of campaigning from Concord, New Hampshire to California, I came to know our country better than I have known it ever before in my life, and I gathered up memories that are going to be with me the rest of my days.

There was that day-long ride through the great state of Georgia in a bus Vice President Bush himself had used in 1988 called Asphalt One. The ride ended in a 9:00 PM speech in a tiny town in southern Georgia called Fitzgerald.

There were those workers at the James River Paper Mill, in Northern New Hampshire in a town called Groveton -- tough, hearty men. None of them would say a word to me as I came down the line, shaking their hands one by one. They were under a threat of losing their jobs at Christmas. And as I moved down the line, one tough fellow about my age just looked up and said to me, "Save our jobs."

Then there was the legal secretary that I met at the Manchester airport on Christmas Day who came running up to me and said, "Mr. Buchanan, I'm going to vote for you." And then she broke down weeping, and she said, "I've lost my job; I don't have any money, and they're going to take away my little girl. What am I going to do?"

My friends, these people are our people. They don't read Adam Smith or Edmund Burke, but they come from the same schoolyards and the same playgrounds and towns as we came from. They share our beliefs and our convictions, our hopes and our dreams. These are the conservatives of the heart. They are our people. And we need to reconnect with them. We need to let them know we know how bad they're hurting. They don't expect miracles of us, but they need to know we care.

There were the people -- There were the people that, my friends -- There were the people of Hayfork, a tiny town up in California's Trinity Alps, a town that is now under a sentence of death because a federal judge has set aside nine million acres for the habitat of the spotted owl -- forgetting about the habitat of the men and women who live and work in Hayfork.

And there were the brave people -- And there were the brave people of Koreatown who took the worst of those L.A. riots, but still live the family values we treasure, and who still deeply believe in the American dream.

Friends, in these wonderful -- In these wonderful 25 weeks of our campaign, the saddest days were the days of that riot in L.A., the worst riot in American history. But out of that awful tragedy can come a message of hope. Hours after that riot ended, I went down to the Army compound in South Los Angeles, where I met the troopers of the 18th Cavalry who had come to save the city of Los Angeles. An officer of the 18th Cav said, "Mr. Buchanan, I want you to talk to a couple of our troopers. And I went over and I met these young fellows. They couldn't have been 20 years old. They could not have been 20 years old. And they recounted their story.

They had come into Los Angeles late in the evening of the second day, and the rioting was still going on. And two of them walked up a dark street, where the mob had burned and looted every single building on the block but one, a convalescent home for the aged. And the mob was headed in, to ransack and loot the apartments of the terrified old men and women inside. The troopers came up the street, M-16s at the ready. And the mob threatened and cursed, but the mob retreated because it had met the one thing that could stop it: force, rooted in justice, and backed by moral courage.

Now, Greater -- Greater love than this -- "Greater love than this hath no man than that he lay down his life for his friend."¹ Here were 19-year-old boys ready to lay down their lives to stop a mob from molesting old people they did not even know. And as those boys took back the streets of Los Angeles, block by block, my friends, we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country.

God bless you, and God bless America.

Bill Clinton: - "Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms Lewinsky that was not appropriate", Address to nation - 1998

17 August 1998, Washington DC, USA

Good evening.

This afternoon in this room, from this chair, I testified before the Office of Independent Counsel and the grand jury.

I answered their questions truthfully, including questions about my private life, questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.

Still, I must take complete responsibility for all my actions, both public and private. And that is why I am speaking to you tonight.

As you know, in a deposition in January, I was asked questions about my relationship with Monica Lewinsky. While my answers were legally accurate, I did not volunteer information.

Indeed, I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible.

But I told the grand jury today and I say to you now that at no time did I ask anyone to lie, to hide or destroy evidence or to take any other unlawful action.

I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.

I can only tell you I was motivated by many factors. First, by a desire to protect myself from the embarrassment of my own conduct.

I was also very concerned about protecting my family. The fact that these questions were being asked in a politically inspired lawsuit, which has since been dismissed, was a consideration, too.

In addition, I had real and serious concerns about an independent counsel investigation that began with private business dealings 20 years ago - dealings, I might add, about which an independent federal agency found no evidence of any wrongdoing by me or my wife over two years ago.

The independent counsel investigation moved on to my staff and friends, then into my private life. And now the investigation itself is under investigation.

This has gone on too long, cost too much and hurt too many innocent people.

Now, this matter is between me, the two people I love most - my wife and our daughter - and our God. I must put it right, and I am prepared to do whatever it takes to do so.

Nothing is more important to me personally. But it is private, and I intend to reclaim my family life for my family. It's nobody's business but ours.

Even presidents have private lives. It is time to stop the pursuit of personal destruction and the prying into private lives and get on with our national life.

Our country has been distracted by this matter for too long, and I take my responsibility for my part in all of this. That is all I can do.

Now it is time - in fact, it is past time - to move on.

We have important work to do - real opportunities to seize, real problems to solve, real security matters to face.

And so tonight, I ask you to turn away from the spectacle of the past seven months, to repair the fabric of our national discourse, and to return our attention to all the challenges and all the promise of the next American century.

Thank you for watching. And good night.

Bill Clinton: 'Many believe there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values', UN General Assembly - 1998

21 September 1998, United Nations HQ, New York, USA

This was President Clinton's first major speech after his admissions in relation to the Lewinsky affair on 17 August 1998. He chose the topic of terrorism.

Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mr. Secretary-General, the delegates of this 53d session of the General Assembly, let me begin by thanking you for your very kind and generous welcome and by noting that at the opening of this General Assembly the world has much to celebrate.

Peace has come to Northern Ireland after 29 long years. Bosnia has just held its freest elections ever. The United Nations is actively mediating crises before they explode into war all around the world. And today, more people determine their own destiny than at any previous moment in history.

We celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with those rights more widely embraced than ever before. On every continent, people are leading lives of integrity and self-respect, and a great deal of credit for that belongs to the United Nations.

Still, as every person in this room knows, the promise of our time is attended by perils. Global economic turmoil today threatens to undermine confidence in free markets and democracy. Those of us who benefit particularly from this economy have a special responsibility to do more to minimize the turmoil and extend the benefits of global markets to all citizens. And the United States is determined to do that.

We still are bedeviled by ethnic, racial, religious, and tribal hatreds; by the spread of weapons of mass destruction; by the almost frantic effort of too many states to acquire such weapons. And despite all efforts to contain it, terrorism is not fading away with the end of the 20th century. It is a continuing defiance of Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says, and I quote, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person."

Here at the U.N., at international summits around the world, and on many occasions in the United States, I have had the opportunity to address this subject in detail, to describe what we have done, what we are doing, and what we must yet do to combat terror. Today I would like to talk to you about why all nations must put the fight against terrorism at the top of our agenda.

Obviously, this is a matter of profound concern to us. In the last 15 years, our citizens have been targeted over and over again: in Beirut; over Lockerbie; in Saudi Arabia; at home in Oklahoma City, by one of our own citizens, and even here in New York, in one of our most public buildings; and most recently on August 7th in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, where Americans who devoted their lives to building bridges between nations, people very much like all of you, died in a campaign of hatred against the United States.

Because we are blessed to be a wealthy nation with a powerful military and worldwide presence active in promoting peace and security, we are often a target. We love our country for its dedication to political and religious freedom, to economic opportunity, to respect for the rights of the individual. But we know many people see us as a symbol of a system and values they reject, and often they find it expedient to blame us for problems with deep roots elsewhere.

But we are no threat to any peaceful nation, and we believe the best way to disprove these claims is to continue our work for peace and prosperity around the world. For us to pull back from the world's trouble spots, to turn our backs on those taking risks for peace, to weaken our own opposition to terrorism, would hand the enemies of peace a victory they must never have.

Still, it is a grave misconception to see terrorism as only, or even mostly, an American problem. Indeed, it is a clear and present danger to tolerant and open societies and innocent people everywhere. No one in this room, nor the people you represent, are immune.

Certainly not the people of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; for every American killed there, roughly 20 Africans were murdered and 500 more injured, innocent people going about their business on a busy morning. Not the people of Omagh, in Northern Ireland, where the wounded and killed were Catholics and Protestants alike, mostly children and women—and two of them pregnant—people out shopping together, when their future was snuffed out by a fringe group clinging to the past. Not the people of Japan who were poisoned by sarin gas in the Tokyo subway. Not the people of Argentina who died when a car bomb decimated a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Not the people of Kashmir and Sri Lanka killed by ancient animosities that cry out for resolution. Not the Palestinians and Israelis who still die year after year, for all the progress toward peace. Not the people of Algeria, enduring the nightmare of unfathomable terror with still no end in sight. Not the people of Egypt, who nearly lost a second President to assassination. Not the people of Turkey, Colombia, Albania, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, and countless other nations where innocent people have been victimized by terror.

Now, none of these victims are American, but every one was a son or a daughter, a husband or wife, a father or mother, a human life extinguished by someone else's hatred, leaving a circle of people whose lives will never be the same. Terror has become the world's problem. Some argue, of course, that the problem is overblown, saying that the number of deaths from terrorism is comparatively small, sometimes less than the number of people killed by lightning in a single year. I believe that misses the point in several ways.

First, terrorism has a new face in the 1990's. Today, terrorists take advantage of greater openness and the explosion of information and weapons technology. The new technologies of terror and their increasing availability, along with the increasing mobility of terrorists, raise chilling prospects of vulnerability to chemical, biological, and other kinds of attacks, bringing each of us into the category of possible victim. This is a threat to all humankind.

Beyond the physical damage of each attack, there is an even greater residue of psychological damage, hard to measure but slow to heal. Every bomb, every bomb threat has an insidious effect on free and open institutions, the kinds of institutions all of you in this body are working so hard to build.

Each time an innocent man or woman or child is killed, it makes the future more hazardous for the rest of us, for each violent act saps the confidence that is so crucial to peace and prosperity. In every corner of the world, with the active support of U.N. agencies, people are struggling to build better futures, based on bonds of trust connecting them to their fellow citizens and with partners and investors from around the world.

The glimpse of growing prosperity in Northern Ireland was a crucial factor in the Good Friday Agreement. But that took confidence— confidence that cannot be bought in times of violence. We can measure each attack and the grisly statistics of dead and wounded, but what are the wounds we cannot measure?

In the Middle East, in Asia, in South America, how many agreements have been thwarted after bombs blew up? How many businesses will never be created in places crying out for investments of time and money? How many talented young people in countries represented here have turned their backs on public service? The question is not only how many lives have been lost in each attack but how many futures were lost in their aftermath.

There is no justification for killing innocents. Ideology, religion, and politics, even deprivation and righteous grievance, do not justify it. We must seek to understand the roiled waters in which terror occurs; of course, we must.

Often, in my own experience, I have seen where peace is making progress, terror is a desperate act to turn back the tide of history. The Omagh bombing came as peace was succeeding in Northern Ireland. In the Middle East, whenever we get close to another step toward peace, its enemies respond with terror. We must not let this stall our momentum. The bridging of ancient hatreds is, after all, a leap of faith, a break with the past, and thus a frightening threat to those who cannot let go of their own hatred. Because they fear the future, in these cases, terrorists seek to blow the peacemakers back into the past.

We must also acknowledge that there are economic sources of this rage as well. Poverty, inequality, masses of disenfranchised young people are fertile fields for the siren call of the terrorists and their claims of advancing social justice. But deprivation cannot justify destruction, nor can inequity ever atone for murder. The killing of innocents is not a social program.

Nevertheless, our resolute opposition to terrorism does not mean we can ever be indifferent to the conditions that foster it. The most recent U.N. human development report suggests the gulf is widening between the world's haves and have-nots. We must work harder to treat the sources of despair before they turn into the poison of hatred. Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote that the only revolutionary is a man who has nothing to lose. We must show people they have everything to gain by embracing cooperation and renouncing violence. This is not simply an American or a Western responsibility; it is the world's responsibility.

Developing nations have an obligation to spread new wealth fairly, to create new opportunities, to build new open economies. Developed nations have an obligation to help developing nations stay on the path of prosperity and— and—to spur global economic growth. A week ago I outlined ways we can build a stronger international economy to benefit not only all nations but all citizens within them.

Some people believe that terrorism's principal fault line centers on what they see as an inevitable clash of civilizations. It is an issue that deserves a lot of debate in this great hall. Specifically, many believe there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political objectives they have, even cold-blooded murder. Some may have the world believe that Almighty God himself, the Merciful, grants a license to kill. But that is not our understanding of Islam.

A quarter of the world's population is Muslim, from Africa to Middle East to Asia and to the United States, where Islam is one of our fastest growing faiths. There are over 1,200 mosques and Islamic centers in the United States, and the number is rapidly increasing. The 6 million Americans who worship there will tell you there is no inherent clash between Islam and America. Americans respect and honor Islam.

As I talk to Muslim leaders in my country and around the world, I see again that we share the same hopes and aspirations: to live in peace and security, to provide for our children, to follow the faith of our choosing, to build a better life than our parents knew, and pass on brighter possibilities to our own children. Of course, we are not identical. There are important differences that cross race and culture and religion which demand understanding and deserve respect.

But every river has a crossing place. Even as we struggle here in America, like the United Nations, to reconcile all Americans to each other and to find greater unity in our increasing diversity, we will remain on a course of friendship and respect for the Muslim world. We will continue to look for common values, common interests, and common endeavors. I agree very much with the spirit expressed by these words of Mohammed: "Rewards for prayers by people assembled together are twice those said at home."

When it comes to terrorism, there should be no dividing line between Muslims and Jews, Protestants and Catholics, Serbs and Albanians, developed societies and emerging countries. The only dividing line is between those who practice, support, or tolerate terror, and those who understand that it is murder, plain and simple.

If terrorism is at the top of the American agenda—and should be at the top of the world's agenda—what, then, are the concrete steps we can take together to protect our common destiny? What are our common obligations? At least, I believe, they are these: to give terrorists no support, no sanctuary, no financial assistance; to bring pressure on states that do; to act together to step up extradition and prosecution; to sign the global anti-terror conventions; to strengthen the biological weapons and chemical conventions; to enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention; to promote stronger domestic laws and control the manufacture and export of explosives; to raise international standards for airport security; to combat the conditions that spread violence and despair.

We are working to do our part. Our intelligence and law enforcement communities are tracking terrorist networks in cooperation with other governments. Some of those we believe responsible for the recent bombing of our Embassies have been brought to justice. Early this week I will ask our Congress to provide emergency funding to repair our Embassies, to improve security, to expand the worldwide fight against terrorism, to help our friends in Kenya and Tanzania with the wounds they have suffered.

But no matter how much each of us does alone, our progress will be limited without our common efforts. We also will do our part to address the sources of despair and alienation through the Agency for International Development in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, in Haiti, and elsewhere. We will continue our strong support for the U.N. Development Program, the U.N. High Commissioners for Human Rights and Refugees, UNICEF, the World Bank, the World Food Program. We also recognize the critical role these agencies play and the importance of all countries, including the United States, in paying their fair share.

In closing, let me urge all of us to think in new terms on terrorism, to see it not as a clash of cultures or political action by other means or a divine calling but a clash between the forces of the past and the forces of the future, between those who tear down and those who build up, between hope and fear, chaos and community.

The fight will not be easy. But every nation will be strengthened in joining it, in working to give real meaning to the words of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights we signed 50 years ago. It is very, very important that we do this together.

Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the authors of the Universal Declaration. She said in one of her many speeches in support of the United Nations, when it was just beginning, "All agreements and all peace are built on confidence. You cannot have peace and you cannot get on with other people in the world unless you have confidence in them."

It is not necessary that we solve all the world's problems to have confidence in one another. It is not necessary that we agree on all the world's issues to have confidence in one another. It is not even necessary that we understand every single difference among us to have confidence in one another. But it is necessary that we affirm our belief in the primacy of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and therefore, that together we say terror is not a way to tomorrow; it is only a throwback to yesterday. And together—together—we can meet it and overcome its threats, its injuries, and its fears with confidence. Thank you very much.

Bill Clinton: 'I want you to know that the world is looking to you', Sydney - 1996

21 November 1996, Sydney Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Australia

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Prime Minister. Thank you, Premier Carr. Mr. Lord Mayor, Mrs. Howard, Mrs. Carr. Andrew Hoy, thank you very much for reminding us how you defeated us in Atlanta—[laughter]— and thank you for what you said about the Olympics.

Premier, you invited me to come back in the year 2000 to the Olympics. I have to make full disclosure—this morning when I woke up, the very first thing Hillary said to me was, "Now, in 2000, I think you ought to make me your official representative to the Olympics in Sydney," which means I suppose I'll have to come back as her valet if I wish to come. [Laughter] But I've had such a good time here, I'd like to come back in any capacity.

I thank you all very much for your hospitality. It's a great privilege for me to stand here in Sydney Harbor, to be in these beautiful botanical gardens, where I had the privilege this morning to go on my morning run right by this site; to see the magnificent opera house, where I had the chance to tour on an impromptu basis this morning. A wonderful and surprised guard even took me up to the organ, and I virtually got to count all 10,500 pipes. [Laughter] This is a magnificent place. I'm also glad to be here in the shadow of Harbor Bridge. If any of you followed our campaign at all, you know I'm kind of into bridges this year. [Laughter] And I think that that's a bridge that will take you into the 21st century in good shape.

As the Prime Minister and the Premier have said, Americans have visited Sydney and felt welcome for a long time. You might be interested to know that almost exactly 100 years ago, our great American writer Mark Twain came to Australia. Now, Mark Twain is famous for many things, his great books "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," "Tom Sawyer," "Huckleberry Finn," all those books, but those of us in public life in America appreciate him because he was always puncturing the pompous and always reminding people that they should have a very sort of philosophical and goodhumored attitude about their troubles in life.

And we got to talking about Mark Twain last night in this very harbor, and I told the Prime Minister—I said, "Prime Minister, you're riding high now, but the first time you get in trouble remember what Mark Twain said about dogs. Mark Twain said, ‘Every dog should have a few fleas; keeps them from worrying so much about being a dog."' [Laughter] Now, whenever I complain at home, that's what my staff tells me. Just once I'd like to be a flea instead of a dog, though, in this business. [Laughter]

Anyway, Mark Twain came here almost 100 years ago, and I found out something that I did not know until we decided to make this trip. Like all of us, he was struck by what he said was "the lavish hospitality of Sydney's people." He liked the warmth of Sydney in every way. But he said that Sydney reminded him, more than any other place, of one particular town in America, which was exactly as far north of the Equator as Sydney is south of it, my hometown, Little Rock, Arkansas. Interesting. Except Sydney got the better of the comparison—[laughter]—because while he said they were a lot alike and the people were very friendly, Sydney was better because it didn't have Little Rock's cold winters. He wrote, "You could cut up an Arkansas winter into a hundred Sydney winters and still have enough left for Arkansas and all the poor." Well, that's another reason for me to come back in Sydney's winter, to see if it's true.

This is a remarkable community and a remarkable nation. In this new global culture that we're all experiencing, Australia's contribution has been far out of proportion to its population in modern art, in learning, in music, in theater, in opera, in the cinema; the novels of Patrick White, Thomas Keneally, David Malouf; the paintings of Sidney Nolan, Russell Drysdale, Utopia artists; the films of Baz Luhrmann, Peter Weir, and so many others; and according to the young people in my group, bands like Midnight Oil and Silverchair; Dame Joan Sutherland; and great jazz musicians. I want to thank you, Prime Minister, for making it possible for me to hear James Morrison and Grace Knight yesterday. They were magnificent. Thank you very much.

I'm glad to stand here today with Andrew Hoy, who did lead your remarkable team to its remarkable showing in the centennial Olympics in Atlanta. His own gold medal performance, repeating his victory in Barcelona, were one of the things that made the games such a great success. And I am very pleased that at the dawn of our new century, the Olympic torch will arrive here in Sydney. We know the Olympics will be an enormous success for Sydney, just as they were for Atlanta.

The Olympics have captured the imagination and the heart of people everywhere. I have thought a lot about why, maybe because we all love athletics and maybe because we all love competition, but I think there's more to it than that. And there's something I hope you will be able to play upon here in Sydney because you're perfectly positioned to do it. I think people yearn for the Olympics today because they work pretty much the way we think the world should work. There are rules and everybody follows them, and everybody has a chance to play without regard to their race or gender or where they start out in life, and people are valued based on their performance and their effort.

Even those who do not win medals—and most of the people who will come to Sydney won't come close to winning a medal—but everybody gets a chance to do his or her best, to reach down deep inside, and everybody's better off for having tried. Unlike so many other human endeavors, including the field of politics, no one wins by tripping his or her opponent up in the competition or standing before a microphone and bad-mouthing the other side. You only win by playing by the rules and doing well. And I think the world should work more that way.

When the world comes to Sydney for the Olympics, either literally or over the electronic media, they'll have a chance to see a city and a nation struggling to meet that ideal. We have a chance on the verge of this new century to make it possible for more people than ever in human history to live out their dreams and to live up to their God-given potential.

This city has people who traced their origins to more than 140 different nations. There are only 197 different national groups represented in the Olympics. In our largest county, Los Angeles County, we have people from over 150 of those groups. We're becoming an increasingly interconnected world. Australia has a higher percentage of immigrants who came here and built decent lives and strengthened your country through hard work than almost any other country on Earth.

When you drive down the streets of Sydney tonight and you look at all these different people making a contribution to your country, think with sadness but prayerful hope about all the people who live around the world who are still being persecuted because they are different from their neighbors, because they have different religious views or they're from different racial or ethnic or tribal groups.

Think of the terrible spectacle we have seen in Africa just in the last few days, hundreds of thousands of refugees trooping back and forth looking for a safe place to spend the night, parents losing their children along the way, just because they're in different tribes. And to those of us of untrained eyes who have never been there, they look the same as those who carry guns and would oppress them.

Think of what it's like in the Holy Land, for all of us who are either Jewish or Muslim or Christians, where people still believe they cannot live with one another because they worship only one God but in a different way.

Think of what it is like in Bosnia, where there is literally biologically no difference between the Serbs, the Croats, and the Muslims; where they belong to different religious groups by accident of political history; where people killed each other's children with abandon after having lived for decades in peace.

But there is a lot of evidence that we can all do better than that. And when the world comes to Sydney, they will see that. So think about that. Think about how every day in every way, when you bring in people who are those like me who trace their roots to England or Ireland or Scotland, to various Asian countries or South Asia or Latin America or the Middle East or Africa—every day you do that when the world is looking at you, you offer a rebuke to all those who would take away the lives and the futures and the fortunes of the children of this world because they are different from them.

We somehow must find a way to let our children define themselves in terms of who they are, not who they are not; in terms of what they believe, not what someone else believes; in terms of what is good inside them and what can be developed into something really beautiful, instead of what can be developed in terms of hatred, so they can know that they're better than somebody else who's different from them. That is the single great challenge that is keeping us from making the 21st century the era of greatest possibility in human history. And I cannot think of a better place in the entire world, a more shining example of how people can come together as one nation and one community than Sydney, Australia.

I'm so grateful that you'll be here for the Olympics in 2000. I want you to know that the world is looking to you. And I also want you to know that America will keep looking to you. The Prime Minister mentioned our comradeship in World War I, the first time our soldiers ever fought together. The Australians had been in combat for more than 3 years when America's troops first went to France. And one of them asked the Americans, "Are you going to win the war for us?" The American answered, "Well, I hope we'll fight like the Australians." Ever since then the spirit of Australia has been renowned in America. We respect it, and we love working with you.

Again let me say, as I did in Canberra yesterday, the United States and people all over the world are especially in your debt for your determination to end nuclear explosions on Earth and your leadership in helping us to complete the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

We are in your debt for setting a standard of caring about people beyond your shores. Time and again you have sent peacekeepers into harm's way to end bloodshed: Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, Cambodia. Almost two-thirds of all the United Nations peacekeeping missions have had Australian troops. Whenever the troubled places of the Earth call out, Australia has always been there to help. Throughout the Asia-Pacific region and the entire world, you are seen as a beacon of strength and freedom and democracy.

Today, when for the first time in history more than half the world's people actually are ruled by governments of their own choosing, we know it is the powerful example of Australia and other freedom-loving peoples that made it possible. Today, more people will live lives of dignity and peace because of the work that Australia has done in the historic struggle for freedom.

So let me say again, I have had a wonderful time here. I have enjoyed it immensely. I am about to go try to survive a golf game with your most famous golfer. But more than anything else, on behalf of all the American people, I want to thank you for what you have done and been for the United States and the world together. And I want to wish you well as we work through this 21st century together. And I want to ask you to remember again when the Olympics comes here, if you can live by the rules which govern the Olympics and show that light to the world, it will stand as a beacon of hope for all that everyone who lives on the face of the Earth can become in this great new century. And that can be the enduring legacy of Sydney in the year 2000.

Thank you. God bless you. God bless Australia and the United States.