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June 12, 1990
Governor of Arkansas; Chairman, Democratic Leadership Council
Winston Churchill's greatest contributions may have come at times when he was not recognized. In the l930s when Stanley Baldwin was the "Don't worry, be happy" politician of his age, Churchill kept saying, "This Hitler's no good. I don't care what you say." Churchill was a pariah.
Then during the war, when the Allies finally began to win Churchill began to plan for the post-World War II world, to think about what the shape of that world should be. Some of the ideas that he had led to some of the very good changes that we have seen in the last year or so.
Fifty years ago Churchill gave one of his most remarkable speeches. As the German bombers headed toward London, he said on June 18, 1940, "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for 1000 years men will say, 'This was their finest hour.'"
Year of Change
In the last year and a half we've seen the most remarkable changes. The Berlin Wall came down. I've been giving a lot of high school commencement addresses, telling students that the Berlin Wall came down when they were in high school, and went up when I was in high school.
In the years in between, our whole view of the world was shaped by that wall. It divided light from darkness, freedom from oppression, free enterprise from state communism. It forced us to define our national security in terms of the number of soldiers under arms and weapons that we had. It led us into mind-boggling computations, arms-control treaties, and attempts to figure out just how many times we could destroy one another.
Now all of that has changed, in part because the people behind that wall realized their system wasn't working, but also because in our country and in Britain during World War II and the years immediately after, we "braced ourselves to our duties."
The things we have lived through in the past year and a half have nearly nothing to do with what most of us have done in the last few years, in government or as private citizens. We have seen the triumph of the three great ideas that we began to push immediately after World War II: national independence, market economies, political democracy.
It is exhilarating, and every person who had anything to do with that war or the shaping of the post-war world should be proud of it.
Did you ever think you'd live to see Gorbachev elected, do as well as he has, and have his biggest problems from people who think that he's not changing fast enough?
Last year they had an election in Leningrad for mayor. The mayor had no opponent and he was defeated anyway. As an incumbent politician, I thought that this was carrying democracy a little too far.
We are celebrating the fruits of a former generation's vision and our faithful adherence to that vision. The arms build-up we began under Jimmy Carter and accelerated under Ronald Reagan had problems but, by forcing the Russians to match it, it did accelerate the undoing of their system and expose its inherent weaknesses. I don't want to minimize the contributions of anybody along the way, but I do want to clarify this: All those contributions flowed from a set of ideas and principles that were forged during and immediately after World War II.
Managing Our People
Now that we have made this new world, the central question of this last decade of the 20th century is whether we Americans are prepared to lead the world we have made. If you look at the facts, you'd have to say that that is in doubt.
If Churchill were here today, he'd say that there is a gathering storm. Why? Because of all the advanced countries in the world, we do the worst job of managing that most important issue, our people.
We do a poor job of bringing babies into the world. Our infant mortality rate is the 19th highest in the world. At the worst of Daniel Ortega's oppression, a child in Nicaragua had a better chance of living to be a year old than a child in Washington, D.C. We have more children who are drug abusers, and more teen pregnancy and more people who are functionally illiterate-including people with high school diplomas-as a percentage of our workforce than any other country in the world.
We have a lot of good things going too. We generate jobs more quickly. We have a vibrant entrepreneurial economy. We have the best system of higher education in the world. Things are not all bad. But if you look at where our future is, which is in our people, we don't measure up very well.
Environment, Investment, Taxes
The record on the environment is more mixed. It is clear that we ought to be leading a global environmental charge that reconciles economic growth with environmental preservation. We've got a long way to go there. We don't have any sort of investment strategy related to our long-term economic growth and high levels of productivity.
Because we say, "read my lips," because we don't raise the gas tax in California until people literally can't drive or breathe, because we don't raise the school tax in Arkansas until disaster threatens or teachers threaten to strike, because the politics of the 1980s were so charged with evasion of responsibility and asking people not to make painful decisions before they were forced to, we have invested insufficiently in our physical as well as our human capital.
We have failed to face the tough questions about our long-term position, especially in technology-related sectors of our economy.
What are we going to do about it? Can we lead the world we have made? I believe we can. There are several things we can do.
Government's Role
First we have to get over the notion that the government is the source of our problems. We have to see the government as any other institution in society, as the instrument of solving the problems that it is best-suited to solve, problems that require public investment, problems in which there is plainly a community interest, problems in which at least there has to be a partnership between the public and the private sector.
By the same token we can't see government as the solution to all of our problems. I recently met with a business round-table. Executive after executive, most of whom were Republicans, told me they were alarmed by the condition of their work forces, that they would give entry-level job examinations and 70 percent of the people taking the test would fail, even though they only had to read at about the ninth-grade level and understand very basic math to pass, and even though most of the people taking the test had a high school diploma.
We need to search for approaches that promote more involvement by people, more individual responsibility, more concern for personal security, and that empower people to make decisions that are good for them and their communities and by extension good for the rest of us. Let me just give you a few examples of that in the area of education.
Examples In Education
When President Bush and the governors worked together to write the national education goals, we said the first goal was to make available everywhere in this country, especially to children at risk, a quality parent-rooted preschool program.
We have a program in our state that we borrowed from Israel called the Home-Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPYS). Like all preschool programs, it helps kids get off to a good start. But all the data shows that they lose those gains unless there is a sustained effort to maintain them. What the HIPPYS program really does is change the family learning culture and empower parents as their children's first teacher, to make people who cannot even read a book understand that they can still create a learning environment for their children.
That is not just a government program. It is the expenditure of public funds to generate a very desirable result.
Let me give you one or two other examples. President Reagan signed a welfare reform law which is both liberal and conservative. The conservative part of it-conservative at least in American jargon, although the Scandinavians would take it for granted-is that if you sign up for welfare and your child is one year old or older, you must sign up for work, and you must take a job if it is offered.
The liberal part of it is that we will stop pretending that we're preparing people who can't read for jobs by spending $100 on them. We are authorized to spend up to 10 times more money to train and prepare people to enter the workforce. And if they take low-wage jobs with no benefits like health insurance, we will take care of their kids' health insurance for a year, while they work into the jobs. If they need childcare, we'll pay for that.
So there are three liberal spending programs: more money for training, more money for childcare, more money for health insurance, but people go to work.
Individual Responsibility
The bill also requires every state to set up an automatic withholding program for child-support enforcement. Forty percent of the taxes you pay for welfare would not have to be paid if people who can pay their child support would do it. More than any other country in the world we have parents-normally fathers-in full flight from responsibility for their own children. It is wrong.
Individual responsibility is a very important part of all these programs. Every state that has an overpowering growth of prison population should examine who is going to prison and why, and whether prison is the best approach for everybody.
Who's in prison today? By and large young men who are by and large functionally illiterate, and who more often than not have a problem with alcohol or drug abuse. Every prison system in America should require every inmate not only to work, but to be in school until they can read at a high-school- graduate level.
They're all going to get out of prison. They'll all come back to you in one way or the other. It is wrong to turn them out without an education as well as a work background.
Nonviolent first offenders should be given the chance to go to a military-style boot camp for 120 or 180 days to take drug treatment and try to order their lives in a different way.
Empowerment
Empowerment is an important thing. That's what I like about this preschool program. It makes the parents feel good. That's what I like about the welfare reform program.
We interviewed one of our clients in front of about 500 people. This woman, who had a job as a cook in a restaurant, was asked if she was glad she was required to sign up for work. She said, "I sure am." She was asked if she would have signed up if she hadn't been required to. "No," she said, "I'd be on the couch watching the soaps."
When she was asked what was the best thing about having a job, she said, "when my kid goes to school and he's asked what his momma does for a living, he can give them an answer."
Power. That's what democracy is. It gives the walking-around person power.
That's why I favor a big extension of the earned-income tax credit for the working poor. I don't think poor people should pay taxes if they're working. That's why I favor a comprehensive childcare program, so people can work and be decent parents at the same time.
That's why I favor-though it's somewhat controversial in my party-school-choice programs, which allow children in public school systems to attend schools other than the ones they're assigned to as long as they are not re-segregating the schools. Those are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about.
Stand and Deliver
A lot of you have probably seen the movie "Stand and Deliver" featuring Jaime Escalante, about the teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles who left his more lucrative computer job to work in the schools and led that high school to the largest number of students passing the Advanced Placement tests in advanced mathematics in the country. A lot of people were very moved by that.
George Bush went to Escalante's school in the 1988 campaign and referred to him repeatedly as one of his 1000 points of light. Now, that's a nice story; it's a very important story. But that's not the real story, especially in California. The lesson is that poor Hispanic kids can learn advanced math.
We don't need a nation full of Einsteins. We need a handful of Einsteins. We need a nation full of Churchills-as principals of schools, mayors of towns, governors of states, running businesses that emphasize people development. We need people who are visionary, who believe in themselves and other people in this country, and who have the will and courage and sustained effort it takes to succeed.
Changing the System
There are a whole lot of people in this country who don't believe a polyglot nation like ours can do what it takes to lead the world that we are moving into. If you believe that we can, you will change your behavior. If you are an employer, you'll make sure you have a workplace literacy program. If you're a good citizen, you'll make sure everybody in your workplace has a college degree, you'll make sure every employer in your community has a workplace literacy program.
If you studied our most serious problem, which is what happens to younger workers who don't go on to college, you will try to change the present system we have for moving people from high school to work and put in apprenticeship programs like our European competitors have.
We have a higher percentage of school kids working today than ever before, but they're almost all in jobs that don't have anything to do with what they'll be doing five years after they get out of school. They're doing it to make a car payment, buy designer jeans, and go out on the weekends. They're encouraged by a lot of people to take dumbed-down courses so they'll have even more time to work. It is a foolish waste of resources.
Workers under 25 in this country today who have only a high school diploma are making about 28 percent less than they were 15 years ago because they're not working in the world economy.
If we had an apprenticeship program like Sweden or Germany or a number of other countries that gave young people the chance to work and earn money in an environment in which they were encouraged to look to the future and keep taking difficult courses-even if they weren't going to college-it would change the shape of opportunity for millions of Americans, increase our productivity, our income, and our future prospects. Think about that.
Think about whether you really believe we can lead the world we have made, and if so, can we do it by just rocking along like we are, or do we have to sound some alarms? The world is very different now. The things the world rewards are the things that we have to work harder for.
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