What follows below is a rough transcript of Bill Clinton’s speech.
Thank you very much, good morning California Democrats. (Other thank-yous, yadda yadda.) [juls notes that the song Bill entered to was the song that Kerry entered to at the DNC in 2004.]
This has been an unprecedented election year in terms of voters and donations. You didn’t have to be against everyone. This has been an amazing election year, and there’s been a reason. The American people know that the country has to change, our position in the world is out of place and we have to restore security, peace and cooperation. They know that and they have lifted the energy in the Democratic primary process.
What I want to get out of the way is the idea that we’re going to weaken the party in the fall. But on June 2, 1992, when I won the Democratic primaries in New Jersey, Ohio and California, I was running behind Ross Perot and Bush. So that’s how much you can pay attention to the polls. Ross was first. But then when the Democratic Convention opened, I and Gore were in first place and we never lost. And the fact that we had a vigorous debate in the primary turned out to be a blessing in surprise. So don’t let people tell you in [all the states that vote next] that they don’t count. So chill out, and let everybody have their say. Don’t forget, it was Will Rogers who said that he didn’t belong to an organized political party, he was a Democrat.
We’re organized, we’re full of energy. I don’t know anybody, any Democrat, who believes that we should continue 4 more years of the current economic and Iraq policies. We want to change the future of this country.
I’ve been to California 70 times because Chelsea was in schol, but there were a bunch of disasters, etc. Hillary said in Wyoming that she would have someone in the White House who would take care of the smaller states in teh mountain west. What you do is governed by four things: doing what you’re trying to do. Second is the emergencies that come in. How you deal with it and when you deal with it. Third is the Congressional Calendar, and the fourth is how you organize the White House. California was better off because there was someone who was called the Secretary of California because he was responsible for everything that was on the plate, everything we did, and Hillary wants to do that in the West.
We have to campaign in every state [ed note: except the ones that are irrelevant?]. But let’s talk about where we are. Why did all these people show up for us? Twice as many voters and money! We live in an independent world, and America has been absorbing too much of the bad and not enough of the good. We’ve been facing a financial meltdown, and I think the Reserve did what they had to do to avoid a meltdown, but more than 1 million of our citizens are dealing with foreclosures, just because people were trying to keep the housing market going. I’ve gotten several of these and read them. and a lot of them never missed a mortgage payment. Not a single one of these people were told that the mortgage companies were going to bottle up their mortgage into stock making the mortgages worthless so they had to extract more from the borrowers. Compton had teh highest rate of foreclosure in the nation, but it’s no different in the rest of the nation.
That’s because the only thing you ask yourself when you make the down payment is, can you make the monthly payment? But whenever a home is foreclosed it costs the economy $250,000. Now, a lot of people are waiting on these rebate checks, but if we foreclose on a million citizens, it will swamp whatever positive impact these checks are going to have and catapult this country into a crisis. Hillary’s position is clear: moratorium for 90 days, and then we ought to guarantee a mortgage payment for five years. That’s better economics than letting them foreclose. If you foreclose on them, you never get your money back because you’ll never get your money back. We’ll give you 20% and you eat the other 20%. If this country can stop Bear Stearns behavior, we ought to be able to save a million working Americans in their homes.
In a larger sense, where are we with this economy? After a second big bite, we realized that trickle-down economics is a failure. And if you compare this economy with the 90s, there’s a reason we study history and it’s so that we don’t make the same mistake twice. Most people think we’re in a recession. And they are, but the country is not. The country isn’t in recession, which is 6 months of negative economic growth, and the country hasn’t had that. But people have. The average family will pay more for food, gas and healthcare. So since the fist time since I ran for president, I go to community meetings, and I hear people who say, have to be careful at the grocery store or I won’t be able to buy medicine. 90% of the benefits have gone to the top income earners. Now, we Americans don’t resent people having money, but we want shared prosperity and shared responsibility.
When I entered the White House, I was the poorest first family. But I was fortunate after leaving. And they started throwing tax cuts at me while we had soldiers overseas and we were borrowing money from China. And that is wrong. So how are we going to get out of it? Look at what the problem is: trickle-down economics is a failure. In the 1990s, we had 22.7 million new jobs. This decade, only 5 million. And 5 million have fallen into poverty, most of them working full time. In my administration the bottom 20% grew more than the top 5%. But in this decade, median family income is $1,000 (lower?) than it was last decade.
I support Hillary because I think she has the best plan and greatest ability to turn this economy around, reclaim the future for the middle class. And when I give a speech, I get the feeling that half the people look at me cross-eyed thinking that I won’t be able to go home at night if I don’t. But knowning what I know about the Presidency and the condition of America around the world–I’m going to be there for here even if we hadn’t been married because I think she’s the best candidate in 40 years. And my daughter asked me if she thought Hillary would be a better president than me, and she said yes. And I agree with her. If she’s fortunate enough to be elected and her plans pass, we’ll have more prosperity than we did when I was in office. I really believe that. But in order to do that you have to get the job machine going.
The only source of new jobs in rich countries that’s producing a rising middle class is a commiting to energy independence and green energy. We want to put a huge number of solar panels in California Universities.
I was in Texas, and the wind was blowing 56 miles an hour. We can have solar energy and wind energy, and all the people who say we can’t electrify America with wind energy, that’s wrong, because the Department of Energy says that we can do it just with the wind from Texas to North Dakota.
We also need to develop 100mpg vehicles. Eventually, we’ll have no-gas vehicles too. But we need to put more money into research to get something out of that. This research, human genome research. These are basically hybrids on steroids. Instead of an electric battery operating until 25 mph, do 55mph instead. And then we can say, charge whatever you want for oil, because we don’t care, we’ll keep our 350 billion at home.
Now we don’t have enough lithium to make the batteries to get all of them made, but that’s what a President is for, is to do that research. And if we can be the first to the moon, we can be the first to build a better car battery.
Healthcare. There’s a reason the AHA broke with tradition and endorsed [interrupted by a phone call.] If you had any other country’s system, you’d be paying $700 billion less. So if you really want affordable health care, support Hillary and she’ll give it to you.
We have to dramatically change No Child Left Behind. And it’s not that we don’t want California’s children to compete. We know they can. Studies show that 98% of the people have the brain capacity to learn everythiing they need to know. But there’s an achievement gap in America. Kids in other countries go to school longer, they pay their teachers longer and train them harder. They have national standards. We have something good too: we don’t put our disabled in a closet.
But No Child Left Behind requires 5 tests every 5 years. Every year, they teach to the test and every year our children learn less. So it has to be changed. The federal government should recognize that too many teachers are about to retire, and we need to concentrate on replacing them with qualified teachers. And we need to pick a representative body from the schools that are reaching international standards, figure out what they’re doing right and implement that.
Can you believe some of our kids are paying 16% interest a year? That needs to be stopped and Hillary will do that. In the middle of the campaign, Hillary went back to pass a bill that allows students to convert their student debt, and with the cost of college exploding, allowing people to repay these loans is a must because we can’t afford for people not to go to college because they’re afraid of the money.
I have to make a full disclosure. There is an issue that Hillary is more conservative than Bush on: the budget. We paid the debt down when we didn’t have any instability in the economy. And if you go to Hillary’s site you’ll see that every last dollar in her budget is paid for. The point I’m making is that we can’t enforce our trade laws because of our deficits with Japan, China, Korea, and Canada, Saudi Arabia and Mexico. And guess who owes us in trade? The same countries. This is one area that Democrats should be more conservative. It makes good sense for the future of the young people in this audience not to borrow this money.
Another thing very briefly is that Hillary will be the best commander in chief. That also means diplomat in chief. We have to send a very different signal to the world. They’re made for getting out of the nuclear test ban treaty while telling others that they can’t have nuclear weapons. How can you sell saying, “You can’t have one of what I have 1500 of and what I want to build more of?”
We want to be bound by the Geneva Convention on Human Rights regarding torture. Having one set of rules for America is not what we’re about. and what Hillary wants to say is that America is back in the cooperation and diplomacy business with friend and foe alike. So what does that mean about Iraq? She believes strongly that we need to bring our troops home. A brigade or two a month. Andn I hope you all agree–we owe it to the translators and the drivers to let them come home to America. The Bush Admministration is against that–now, she would leave a small special forces group in the north where there’s no fighting in case Al-Qaeda gets out of hand. No permanent bases, but staying there as a small stabilizing force. We have been there longer than WWII, our army serves in 15-month deployments, longer than WWII, there are huge family problems for people who serve multiple deployments.
It is time to bring the troops home. Because of her membership in the Armed Services Committee, she has the support of 34 retired generals who all think we need to bring the troops home. We’re now training Navy reserves in army tactics and deploying them to the gulf. This is unsustainable. And the Iraqis need to decide how to share oil money and the political power.
One last thing: we can save most of the $120 billion we’re spending there. We can’t end an unpopular war without continuing our obligations to the people who served there. There are 200,000 homeless veterans. One of the reasons she’s going to win Pennsylvania is that John Murtha thinks that she will be the best one to take care of veterans.
One last thing again: You have to decide what you want the next president to do. now, not when it’s over. She said I’d like to be able to say that the American people will be better off when I’m done than when I started. And to do that, you need to be a change agent. The issue isn’t the historic nature of the candidates. I was in North Carolina, and this woman asked me to look at her girl. And she has a lovely teenager daughter (did you really want to say that, Bill?}…
I’m sorry, I’ve lost my interest in this speech, and he’s talking too fast…
