Bad credit home loan oregon portland

June 12, 1998

Thank you. Thank you very, very much. Stand up here, Darlene. You know, on my body clock it is 1:35 - [laughter] - and Alexis and Darlene are hard acts to follow. [Laughter] I must say, I'm sorry that Alexis had to miss the Shania Twain concert, but if Shania Twain had heard her sing, she might have thought it was the other way around. She was great. You have a great gift, young lady, and I wish you well with it.

I thank the Rose City Brass Quartet for playing "Hail To The Chief." It sounded great - thought the Marine Band had come across the country to be here. Thank you.

I want to thank Governor Kitzhaber and Senator Wyden and Congressman Blumenauer for being here; and my old friend and classmate, John Platt; and the candidates for the House, David Wu and Kevin Campbell. I admire your public officials here. They are visionary and practical, principled and pragmatic. They get things done, and they're a joy to work with. And I especially am proud to be here with Darlene Hooley. My only regret is that as President, I do not have her courage in footwear. [Laughter]

I got to thinking the other day that if Speaker Gingrich wore shoes like that, he might be in a better humor. [Laughter] We might change the whole psychology of the Republican caucus in the Congress - [laughter] - if they just had comfortable shoes every day. [Laughter] Maybe that's what the matter is. Maybe their shoes hurt them all the time. [Laughter]

I also want to say how profoundly indebted I feel to the people of Oregon who have been so good to me and to my wife and to the Vice President and Mrs. Gore, to our whole administration. You've given me your electoral votes twice and have unfailingly supported policies to move this country forward. And I just thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm very grateful, more than you know.

I wanted to come out here for Darlene tonight for a number of reasons, not the least of which is on occasion she has stood up with me and for our country when it was not easy to do so. And she's the sort of independent-thinking person who also has a heart I believe we need more of in politics. She does a great credit to all of you.

Because we have a number of important races in Oregon this year, I'd just like to say a few things briefly. I know the hour is late. But every day I get up, and no matter what the challenges of the day are - and we've had a number lately, the financial challenges in Asia, the difficulties of the nuclear testing between India and Pakistan, the new trouble in the Balkan region in Kosovo, a number of things - but I just - I give thanks for the fact that compared to the day I was inaugurated, and Darlene said something about this, but I just want to read this off to you because you can take a lot of credit for this, but your country now has the lowest crime rate in 25 years. It has 16 million new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in 28 years. It has the lowest percentage of its people on welfare in 29 years. We are about to have the first balanced budget and surplus in 29 years. We have the lowest inflation in 32 years, with the smallest Federal Government in 35 years and the highest rate of homeownership in the history of the United States. That's pretty good for America. [Applause]

And when I ran for President in 1992, and came and asked the people of Oregon to support me, I was deeply disturbed because our country was not moving forward and because our political leadership seemed trapped in a debate that had very little relevance to ordinary people in places like Oregon or in my home State of Arkansas. And I thought to myself, if we would think more about the future, if we would imagine what we wanted America to look like for our children in the 21st century and work back from that, we'd make more sense in what we said and what we do would be better.

And I know that sounds sort of simplistic, but that's actually what I tried to do. And before I ever ran for President, I sat down and asked myself, what do you want your country to look like when we cross that bridge to the 21st century? What do you want your country to look like when your daughter is your age?

And my answers are fairly straightforward. I want the American dream to be alive and well for every person who is willing to work for it. I want America to still be the leading force in a smaller and smaller world for peace and freedom and prosperity and for meeting the challenges that we face together, whether it's from terrorists or weapons of mass destruction or from global environmental destruction.

And I want America to be able to enjoy this dramatically increasing racial and ethnic and other diversity in our country and still be able to live together as one community with shared values, where we respect our differences but we have some core things in common that are most important of all. That's what I want. And that's what I've worked for. That's what I've asked people to join me in doing.

And the first point I'd like to make is that I certainly can't claim full credit for all those statistics I just read off, but I do believe that our administration and those in Congress who have helped us have contributed to those good results, the lion's share of which belong to the American people.

Ideas matter. And actions based on ideas have consequences. That's why it's important to keep people like Darlene Hooley in the Congress. That's why it's important to give us a few more people who are more interested in progress than politics, more interested in unity and moving forward than being divided for short-term political power advantage. That's why it's important. Because ideas and policies matter, they make a difference.

And it is very important that in this election season the American people say, "We want an honest debate about where we are, where we've come from, and where we're going, because ideas and actions matter. We are not going to be diverted. We are not going to be divided, and we are not going to be little. We are going to be large, and we are going to look to tomorrow, to our children's future." If we do, we'll have more people like Darlene in Congress.

We have big issues still to deal with. That's the other thing I want to say. The temptation is to say, "Well, I ought to just vote for a bunch of people who tell me what I want to hear and hope they won't do anything, because things are going well and I don't want to mess it up." [Laughter] And we have often done that. Societies everywhere often do that. That would be a mistake.

It would be a mistake for two reasons. Number one, we have big long-term challenges ahead of us - big long-term challenges ahead of us. That's why I say don't spend any of that surplus that we're going to accumulate this year until we know that we have fixed Social Security for the 21st century. We have to reform Medicare for the 21st century.

We've opened the doors to colleges to virtually all Americans now, with our tax credits, our scholarships, our student loan program improvements, our work-study increases, our national service scholarships. But nobody thinks that we have the best system of public education uniformly in the world yet. And we've got things to do. We've got an agenda there, of smaller classes, better-trained teachers, more charter schools, technology in every single classroom, no matter how remotely rural or how poorly urban, in America. And I want to see that implemented.

We still have too many kids in trouble; Darlene talked about that. The after-school program - we have offered to the Congress a program to hugely increase after-school programs and summer school programs to give not only - not only say, well, we're going to find these kids that do bad things and punish them but to keep more kids out of trouble in the first place.

Let me just tell you one story. A lot of you know that Hillary comes from Chicago, and we spent a lot of time there. When I was a Governor, the Governor of Illinois - the then-Governor of Illinois was a friend of mine, and he and I both have one daughter. And I knew that there was one picture I could see in the newspaper once a year, when his daughter was with him in the Governor's office on the day that the teachers went on strike in Chicago. Every year it happened whether they needed to or not. [Laughter] And there was this great estrangement and everybody thought the schools were dysfunctional.

Today, in Chicago, there has been unbelievable harmony between the teachers and the administration. Every school has a parent council. No child can be promoted that doesn't perform to a certain level. They have mandatory summer school and a massive after-school program. There are literally tens of thousands of children now in the inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago who get three hot meals a day at school, because their parents work. And their summer school, the Chicago summer school, is now the sixth largest school district in America.