Bad credit mortgage loan arkansas

November 5, 2000

Thank you very much. I'm really glad to see you. [Laughter] I bring you greetings from Hillary and our all-grown-up daughter, who are otherwise occupied in New York today. And she's doing very well, and I'm proud of her. I think she's going to win on Tuesday.

I want to talk today about today and tomorrow. Nostalgia will have to wait. I do want to thank people that are up here on this stage for their friendship. I thank Mark Pryor for taking on this campaign and for getting involved in public life in our State, carrying on his great family tradition while his daddy becomes an ivy league egghead. [Laughter] You notice, I was the only one who was dumb enough to do that before I ran for office; David waited until afterward.

I want to thank Vic Snyder, who has been a great friend and supporter of mine in Congress and a great Representative for this district. It's been my honor to vote for him every time he's been on the ballot.

I want to thank James Lee Witt and Rodney Slater. They have represented our State so well in the Cabinet. They have represented our country. They have done superb jobs, and I'm very proud of them.

We have a few other Arkansans in the crowd. I can't see everybody because the lights are real bright. But I saw Ken Smith and Jim Bob Baker out there. They've also done very well by our administration and there may be others. But I'm really--and Janis Kearney, I think, is here, who--she keeps up with what I do every day, and some day when I want to write my memoirs, I'll be able to read what Janis said I did and so when you read the book, it may be what she said instead of me because I can't remember anything anymore. [Laughter]

But I want to thank all the people who are here. I want to thank Carroll Willis who has been down here working and who has been at the Democratic Party all these years and has done such a great job. And I want to thank my buddy Dale Bumpers. I finally got over being mad at him for leaving the Senate. [Laughter] You know, Dale and Dave and I couldn't quite calibrate our respective schedules and biological clocks so we could go out together. But I sort of envision a remake of the "Three Amigos" movie, where we just get on horses and ride out of Washington and thank hallelujah we survived it all.

Look, I want to talk about this election a little bit. Arkansas is close. Polls say we're a couple points behind. The people in this room could carry this State for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, if you want to bad enough. And I just want to say a few things. I appreciate what's been said, but our public life is always about tomorrow and, yet, yesterday is an indicator of tomorrow.

As near as I can see, the case that the other guys are making is, "Well, the economy is better; crime is down; welfare is down; the environment is better; education is improving; more people than ever are going on to college; we've got a decline in the number of people without health insurance for the first time in 12 years. So what we need to do is bag all those policies and do something entirely different. And among other things, now that we've got this surplus, I'm going to give it all back to you right now, and then some." Now, as nearly as I can see, that's the campaign. And I don't think people understand that. Because, as Vic would say, they run these ads on prescription drugs, and I'll say more about that and the Patients' Bill of Rights and all that. Why is that? Because they know that they've got a lot at stake in this election.

They know there are big differences, and they know that the voters understand what the differences are and what the consequences are that Al Gore and Joe Lieberman will be elected and the Democrats will win the House and the Senate. Therefore, there has to be a lot of muddying of the water. And it's a lot easier to muddy things up than it is to clarify them.

Plus which, I think a lot of people kind of have forgotten what it was like 8 years ago. And sometimes it's harder to make a good decision in good times than it is in bad times. There are younger voters that will be voting in this Presidential election that don't even remember what it was like 8 years ago; even if they tried to think about it, they would have no memory of it.

So here's what I would like you to say to people for the next 3 days. The people in this room can carry this State for Al Gore if you want to bad enough. And this State could literally determine the outcome of the election. There are about 15 to 20 States that are literally within 3 points one way or the other. And no one knows what's going to happen, but what will happen is, the people that want it bad enough will win. That's what's going to happen.

Now, you know they want it bad enough because they don't like what we've done on issues where the majority of the people agree with us, and you know that they'll show up because they have been out a long time. So you've just got to decide whether you think this is worth fighting for; because if you do, we'll win.

Here is what I would like you to say to people. First of all, the Republicans believe that former President Reagan is the source of all wisdom. He said you should decide whether to continue the party in office based on whether you're better off today than you were 8 years ago. So, by the Reagan test, Al Gore wins.

But the real issue is, do you want to continue this prosperity and extend it to people and places that have been left behind? Now look, I want--I've never heard this as clearly explained as I think it needs to be. And the previous speakers talked about it a little bit, but I want you to think about it.

People ask me all the time, they come up to me, and every time I go someplace in the country, they say, "Oh, Mr. President, you've had such a nice, good 8 years, and you've had such a good economy; what great, new idea that you and Bob Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen bring to economic policy in Washington?" And I always answer with one word, "arithmetic." [Laughter] You know, when I'd normally tell them I was from Arkansas and I had been Governor 12 years, and I always found arithmetic was good--I didn't need algebra, calculus, trigonometry. Arithmetic. We made the numbers add up.

And what getting rid of the deficit did was to drive interest rates down, make it cheaper for people to borrow in the private sector. It ballooned the stock market, increased investment in business. It created over 22 million new jobs. And we did it in a way--this is the most important thing to me--it was good for everybody. Poverty went down; average income went above $40,000 for the first time in the history of the country. We all went forward together. But it starts with arithmetic.

Now, you can argue that Governor Bush and Al Gore have different tax plans and which one is better. Most people in Arkansas would be better off under the Gore plan in the short run, because it's more tilted toward middle class working people. But forget about that. Let's just look at the cost. And you can certainly argue about the Social Security plan, about whether it's good or bad to privatize Social Security. Let's forget about that for just a minute.

The projected surplus is $2 trillion. That sounds like a lot of money--just say 2. I don't think it will be that big, by the way, because this Congress put a lot of pork-barrel spending in to get themselves reelected, which I don't think they'll be successful in doing, and I certainly hope not. But give the Republicans their number, 2. Now, the Republican tax cut costs 1.3, but because you re not paying down the debt as much, it has extra interest costs. That's another 300 billion. So it's really 1.6. Now, they have admitted that their privatization of Social Security plan costs a trillion dollars. And as the Vice President said, you can't spend the same money twice; you can't give the same money to young people to put in the stock market and then give it to those of us who are over 50, when our Social Security checks are due. So that's another trillion that has to come out of the surplus. So that's 1.6 and 1.

And then they promise to spend some money, about half a trillion dollars. That's .5. Here's the big issue in this election, economically: 1.6 plus 1 plus .5 is 3.1, and 3.1 is bigger than 2. Now, I'm telling you, this is not rocket science.

You get by all the romance and all the rhetoric, somebody up there has got to have arithmetic. We brought arithmetic back to Washington. The Republicans forgot about arithmetic for 12 years. They quadrupled the debt, and they want to go right back to the same economic policy they had before. And it's higher interest rates, which means trouble for all of you.