tv Clinton Campaign Appearance CSPAN November 15, 2015 10:30pm-11:11pm EST
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rights here in the united states would take decades. and is ongoing, some would say. the work of the museum focuses heavily on the personal story. it is my job to help bring that personal story to the public. you can read numbers all day long. 16 million americans served in world war ii. but who were these americans? who were these people? how can i identify with him today? how can i make my neighbor identify with this experience? and to make that experience, alive is really important to me and to the institution. each week until the 2016
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presidential election, american history tv will bring you the campaign trail. next, we look back to the 1992 campaign of arkansas governor bill clinton. he announced his candidacy on october 3, 1991. visiteds later, he franklin high school in new hampshire where he ate lunch, played basketball, and took questions from students. gov. clinton: what is your name? i am governor clinton. hello. how are you? good to see you. can you shake hands? thank you. looks good. i like it. i will try not to cheat. what is your name? you were in there, where you?
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you did not get to ask your question? what is this? ok, shoot. how are you? do you have skim? thank you. what is your name? i am bill clinton. hello. how are you doing? what is your name? >> teresa. gov. clinton: how long have you worked here? nice to see you. appreciate you. thanks. hello. how are you? what is your name? how long have you worked here? >> i have worked here a long time. gov. clinton: taking care of the kids? good? you come with me. where are we going? i have got to ask her a question. go ahead. >> with all the political changes, do you think it is important for the presidential
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candidate to have a background in foreign affairs and the military? gov. clinton: i think it is important for a presidential a cleare to demonstrate vision for what our national security and foreign policy ought to be to keep america safe and strong. toon't think you should have have had a of foreign policy expressed before. after all, president reagan had no foreign policy experience when he became president. president gorbachev in russia have no experience in foreign affairs and he became president of russia. i am the longest-serving governor in america. i have had a lot of experience in international economic relations which will be at the center of our foreign policy in the 1990's, how we compete in the international economy. so i think i should be required to demonstrate an understanding of where our country is and what it takes to keep us safe and strong, to define national policy in the post-cold war era.
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but i don't think we should say only people who have foreign policy sprints can run for president because there is too much evidence we have many good presidents in foreign policy who did not come out of the foreign policy area. >> but you have to deal with the world. gov. clinton: but that is not the most difficult part of the job. the most difficult part is what to do it home. i think it is clear what we should do dealing with the subject -- soviets. in the debates, everybody will be given an opportunity to say what you think the national interest of the country are, what you think foreign policy is, when it is appropriate to use force, how we keep america safe and strong, how we should relate to the soviet union. keep in mind, we have had many good presidents who came out of domestic politics but who understood our country and what its interests were. just look at president reagan,
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had more success in foreign policy arguably than domestic policy. new experience. the best experience is gorbachev who literally came out of a life of domestic politics and has been more successful abroad than at home. >> [indiscernible] gov. clinton: not just that. when i graduated from the school of foreign service with a degree in international affairs from georgetown university, i would be the only president ever elected who studied foreign affairs in college. i worked with the foreign relations committee of the senate. i spent 11 years working on global economic affairs. i'm very involved in a portion of this. thingk the more important is, do you know what to do and do you have good judgment and what is your policy going to be? that's an excellent question. i'm sorry i didn't get to answer that out there. >> i would like to wish you good luck in the future. gov. clinton: thank you.
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what is your name? bill clinton. hello, bill clinton. what is your name? do you teach here? what do you teach? gov. clinton: good for you. i have a daughter longs to be a scientist. she has a mother who is a lawyer and a father was a lawyer-politician. she is interested in it but wants to be a scientist. she is in one of our junior high schools. she just started seventh grade in the little rock public schools and they have a magnet program in math and science. she entered the math and science track, so i am really proud of her. that is what i am hoping for. good to see you. is that where i just was? do the kids make good use of the library?
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>> yes, i am in the middle of moving everything around. gov. clinton: thanks for letting me use the room. you balance the books? this gentleman was in the meeting. what is your name? what do you teach? >> allergy and anatomy. gov. clinton: very good. nice to meet you. good to see you. i want to ask you some questions. >> i thought it was supposed to be the other way around. gov. clinton: you can ask me questions, too. >> i'm in english and journalism teacher. some of my kids tracking you down. gov. clinton: they did a terrific job. is this where i am supposed to sit? where am i supposed to be? where do you want me to sit? let's sit down. please. where are you going to sit? what?
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oh, i see. you told me to sit facing the coke machine. i just do what i am told. if you believe that, i have some land in arizona i want to sell you. thank you. well, worked you proud of your students -- weren't you proud of your students? >> really proud of them. s.e questions are their nice to see. gov. clinton: tell me, are you a counselor here? >> no. gov. clinton: what is the size of the school? >> 425. we do have state standards. how many counselors at the high school level. it is not bad.
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gov. clinton: do you have elementary standards? 300.ementary is one to middle school is about the same. we have a counselor for the whole school and [indiscernible] required in 83, we rewrote our school standards. it was the first time we ever required elementary counselors. we adopted pretty stiff standards. we wound up hiring 1400 extra counselors statewide. it was a good investment. >> in missouri, they have been doing that. it is amazing how far the south and midwest is in the guidance program. all these kids that come into grade schools from troubled families, and even where parents are doing their
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best to do a good job, they may be very poor and have no formal and kids come-- in from single-parent houses. what is really good is when we can get more male counselors in the earlier grades because it really enriches the kind of interaction these kids can have. >> how are your schools finest in arkansas? by the state? gov. clinton: almost the reverse of new hampshire. if there is a 50-state continuum, let's look at it like this. on one end is new hampshire and on the other hawaii. new hampshire, over 90% of the public school costs are paid at the local level. hawaii, 100% of the public school costs except for federal money is paid for at the state level. hawaii has one school district and the property tax. about 2/3 of the kids in hawaii go to public schools. there is a huge network of
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church schools set up by mormon missionaries. you have new hampshire which is a most completely local. hawaii which is completely state. all others are in between. my state is up your close to hawaii. we are probably 62% state financed now. that.slightly more than about 8% federal and the rest local. we are probably in the top -- before our last funding from the we were 13th top in state funding. now we are probably ninth or eighth, something like that. most of the southern states are fairly high for two reasons. an historic is aversion to property taxes in the south. two is the south has a much higher percentage of kids living below the poverty line. a lot of them tend to be concentrated.
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if you don't have a high proportion of state funding, you don't get anything like school equalization. you don't even get close. even though we have the majority of state funding and we change our school funding formula, and just tried to equalize it again last time, it is a never ending struggle because of the movement of student population. at least you get closer if you have a high percentage coming from the state. >> do you have a sales tax? gov. clinton: we have a sales tax and income tax. the sales tax is 4.5% state with a local option. the income tax maxes out at 7%. the property tax is 49th in the country. not only in dollars, but a percentage of income. >> what percentage of your budget goes to state? gov. clinton: over 70% if you count higher at. public schools alone in arkansas
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-- it is one of the highest in the country. public schools alone in arkansas take about half the state budget. what we call the public school fund, direct aid, transportation aid or vocational aid is a little under half. when you add the cost of the department of education and the cost of the school for the blind and deaf and cost of the public tv network, you are over half budget. then between vocational and community college and four-year college education, probably another 22%. i have not run the numbers since the latest funding. but it was 70, so probably about 73. >> [indiscernible] become a citizen of new hampshire. [laughter] gov. clinton: it is interesting because in the 1980's, we were still, in spite of the fact that that we had school tax increases
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and road tax increases, according to the last study, we were one of the bottom 10 states in overall state spending increases. the last numbers i saw, we were still in the bottom five in the percentage of income going to state and local taxes. we have just the reverse. you have high local taxes and low state taxes. you have to look at them together to see how a state really stacks up. >> we have the state setting the standards and local people are expected to pay it. therefore, the cities with the smaller property base pay a higher tax rate and don't get equalized schools. gov. clinton: even if you pay a higher tax rate, you may not have enough money for kids.
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you have people pay higher taxes with less money to spend. >> and to maintain approval of the schools and accreditation. our equalization with foundation aid is 7%. that leaves us at the whims of the bettors. >> our community was in the top five cities and towns in the state. and yet we are down at the bottom of expenditures per student. gov. clinton: do you think you could build outlook support for greater state aid for the schools? is there an aversion to a state tax? >> we are working on it. i really don't know. i think the fear is, and it is justified, if you add another layer of taxation, it won't give immediate relief and perhaps you
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[indistinct chatter] gov. clinton: good. our bob. our ball. [applause] [laughter] gov. clinton: they won. >> these guys are going to the state tournament. >> as part of his tour of franklin high school, governor clinton met with students were a -- for a question-and-answer session. franklin high school is located north of concorde in a community
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of about 8500 residents. >> if i could have your attention -- it is with great pleasure today that franklin high school is able to host a democratic presidential candidate. i would like to thank our principal for arranging this visit in our class time. governor clinton was born in arkansas. he was educated at the georgetown school of foreign services. he was a very distinctive rhodes scholar and received his law degree from yale university. he's married and has one daughter. we are very privileged to have the governor here today. before the governor speaks, i would like to introduce the president of the
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franklin student council, hymie hernandez. [applause] >> on behalf of the franklin high school student body, i would like to welcome governor clinton to our school today. i believe this is a great opportunity for the students of franklin to hear the views of a presidential candidate. i would like to thank governor clinton for taking the time to come and speak to us today and i wish him the best of luck. [applause] gov. clinton: mr. clinton: thank you very much. i would like to thank your principal and my friend, the mayor for accompanying me here. ,i want to say a word for jaime says he is kind of nervous standing up here. he's a better politician than i am, but he reminded me that this is homecoming week and i reminded him if he makes a few more touchdowns, he might get another term even after he leaves the high school. we need to give him a hand.
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i thought he did a good job. this is not easy. [applause] gov. clinton: thank you. let me tell you first of all, i want to talk for a few minutes and then allow as much time as we have for questions. if you have any questions, you might be thinking of them. when i am home in arkansas, i spend a lot of time in schools like this. i come from a family like most of your families average , middle-class family, came up through the public schools and if it weren't for the public schools, i would not be standing here today as a candidate for president. i decided to run in large measure because i worked for 11 years in my state to try to improve the economy and educational opportunities for people like you. i believe there are limits to how much any governor can do without national leadership and a national partnership to open up economic opportunities for you. i grew up in a very different time than you did and i want you to think about this. when i was your age, we were in
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the middle of the cold war, the war between the soviet union and the united states for the hearts minds of people in the world. the contest between democracy and communism which was symbolized by huge arsenals of nuclear weapons. when i was a young boy, we would go to school assemblies and watch movies about what it would be like if atomic bombs fell on us. we had people saying you have to have a bomb shelter near you so if there is a nuclear war -- you may remember this. you could run to a bomb shelter and be under a lot of concrete if the bombs dropped. you don't think about that much, do you? i hope you never have to think about that. president gorbachev and president bush announced they're going to reduce more nuclear weapons. we are in a disarmament race right now that is wonderful. you will probably be able to raise your children in a world in
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which you never have to think about that. on the other hand, the world i grew up in had one thing everybody took for granted -- america's economic supremacy. when i graduated from high school in 1964, we had virtually no unemployment in america. we had a high rate of economic growth. everybody who wanted to work at a job and every year, you could look forward to making a little more money than you did the year before. we had 6% of the world's people and controlled about 40% of the world's wealth. today, we have a little less than 5% of the world's people and we have 20% of the world's wealth, but it is dropping fast. the german economy growing more rapidly than ours and the japanese economy growing more rapidly than ours. our most urgent task, and you can see it in new hampshire with all your economic problems, is to restore the economic leadership of the united states so you are not the first generation of young americans to
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grow up in a world in which you do not do as well as your parents did. that's the number one job of the next president. but even if we create new economic opportunities, they can only be seized by young people who are educated to do it. the main thing i want to say is to ask you to believe a few basic things. you are growing up in a world in which what you can earn depends on what you can learn. in which just graduating from high school will not be enough. we need 100% of people to get a high school diploma and then you must find some way to get at least two years of further education and training if you want to be competitive in the world we are living in. the average 18-year-old going to work today will change work seven or eight times in a lifetime, even if you never change employers. it's not only important what you
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learn in high school, it is important that you take out of here the ability to continue to learn in your lifetime. our job, those of us in politics and government, is to create a structure of opportunity, to give you good schools and teachers and some way of keeping score so you know you are learning what you need to know. when you leave high school, we need a national apprenticeship system so that those of you who don't want to go to college can get continuing training programs. all the countries we compete with do that. if you want to get a college education, i think our country owes you, no matter what your family background, the right to borrow money to go to college. if you will pay it back either as a small percentage of your income over several years or with a couple of years of service to your country here at home in areas where we need your help -- more teachers, policemen, nurses, other things that need to be done. what i want you to believe is
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you owe something to yourselves and your families and your futures. one of the biggest problems we have in american education today is there are too many students and parents who don't believe all children can learn. there are too many students and parents who believe that how much you learn at school is basically determined by what i.q. you were born with and what your family income is. the people we are competing for the future with depend on how much you do hard work. i don't mean hard work means to be boring, there are a lot of exciting things in education that should make learning fun. but what i hope you believe is you have a responsibility to yourselves and your future to learn more . and no matter how much opportunity we put out here, the efforts you make will determine as much as anything else what you learn. let me close with this example. a few years ago, in 1987, a representative group of korean
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and american high school seniors took a math test. the koreans did much better than the americans. that should not surprise you because they go to school 220 days a year, and we go to school 180 days. by the time they are seniors, they've been in school two years longer. so they should win the math test , unless you believe we are inherently superior to them, which is not true. before the kids took the test, the koreans were asked are you good in math? 26% said yes. the american kids were asked are you good in math and 70% said yes. but the koreans won the test. it's because they work longer and harder. my job is to figure out a way to create opportunity and your job is to seize it. your teachers and your principal are trying to create opportunity. you have to believe you can learn what you need to know to succeed and that is largely related to the effort you make, not the i.q. or income you were
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born with. i ask you to think about that. i want you to know that i don't want to be part of the first generation of americans that leaves their children worse off than they were. i want this to be the most exciting time in american history and it should be. you should grow up in a world in which you have more opportunity, choices and a more exciting life than any group of americans before you. but it will depend in large measure on your commitment to your own education. i hope you will make that commitment and in this campaign, commitment to try to make it as good as it needs to be. thank you very much. [applause] gov. clinton: questions? you, then you, then we will go along. i will repeat the question in case you can't hear it. >> what steps do you intend to take to reform education on the local level in the first year of your presidency? gov. clinton: she asked what steps do i
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intend to take to reform education at the local level. it's a good question for you to ask me because i was one of the principal authors of the national education bill the governors of the president achieved in late september of 1989. let me run through those goals. first, every child should be ready to start school by the year 2000, mentally and physically. that means if there needs to be a partnership with the national government to guarantee the very best medical care for pregnant women and their children through age five. we should have universal coverage for preventive and primary care. every child who needs it should have access to a preschool program with strong parental involvement. a lot of kids come to school and the time they show for kindergarten, they don't other colors or shapes, their numbers, they don't know how to properly pronounce or spell their names.
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it is very difficult for teachers to take into account all those differences if they have not had access to a preschool program. second, we should raise the high school graduation rate to an international standard of 90%. third, we should define what every child needs to know in math and science, history, language and social studies as a minimum and then devised national standards to measure that at the fourth, eighth, and 12th grade. we should rise to the leadership of the world in math and science education. take all of those together, the federal government, the resident, congress has a responsibility to offer incentives to upgrade skills and improve their ability to teach
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according to the latest available teaching skills and methodologies. we need a program to put the best equipment into our schools and we need national standards, not that are standards, but national standards for what you should know and a system that measures it instead of the bureaucratic gobbledygook. not to punish you but to give you a roadmap. we need incentives which should come from the state and local level for young people to stay in school and for alternative learning environments. then, establish a national oppression network so we can identify kids who don't want to go to college and if it is in their interest, we can do that. let's suppose you are a junior in high school and you don't want to go to college or you think you might not want to go to college. let's take germany. you wouldn't work for a few hours a week. a lot of americans do that now.
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your employer would promise to hire you when you got out of high school and continue your education. the government's job agreed to put the partnerships together and pay part of the cost of your education and training even after you got out of high school. so even then, your employer would require a real interest that you do well in high school and you would have an interest in staying in. it would relate to what you do all day. the fifth goal is to establish safe and drug-free schools. that almost exclusively has to be done at the local level but there are some things that need
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to be done there. one is to provide treatment on demand. the second is provide police and the third is to encourage alternative punishments for people who are first-time offenders. we don't need to send a lot of nonviolent offenders to jail -- they should be in military camp programs where they get drug treatment. those are the things that should be done. the last goal is to create a system of lifetime learning. we need to have institutions like the community college i visited where young people and not so young people can go back over and over again.
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next question back here. >> what are your views on the situation in the middle east? governor clinton: i think we -- keep to keep in mind the pressure on him to honor the united nations resolution he signed off on to basically remove his capacity to wage biological, chemical, or nuclear war. we know the guy is a liar and a bully. you don't have to be a genius to know that. we cannot leave him with biological, and michael, or nuclear capacity and i support what the president did in
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putting the planes on alert. with regard to the situation in israel, i look forward to the peace process unfolding. i hope we can have this peace conference and i hope the last remaining procedural issues can be resolved and we can work out a situation in the middle east where we finally bring peace to that region by giving israel genuine security in return for resolving as many of the differences as we can between the israelis, the native palestinians and other arab states. i don't believe we will ever get there now that the borders have proven to be insecure because of missiles until we have a plan to demilitarize the middle east. the arms race in the middle east is still going on unabated and is deeply troubling to me. other questions? to help families get ahead? i think we need to help families in the following ways -- first of all, let's look at the conditions of families today.
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the average middle-class family has a parent or parents spending more hours on the job, less time with their children, bringing home a smaller paycheck to pay more for education, health care and housing than they were 10 years ago. the most urgent job is to get incomes up. the only way to do that is increase the growth rate in america. that means we have to invest more money in this country and give the american people incentives to invest in products and services that produce good jobs. we can talk about that for an hour, but that's the first thing. the second thing is help them deal with the costs that are eating them alive -- primarily health care and education. you've already heard what i think should be done to finance a college education. we also need a plan for universal, quality, affordable health care coverage. i bet a lot of you and your --
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in this room have heard your parents talk about how worried they are about paying for health care. i bet you have heard them about premiums going up, the deductibles going up, the coverage is going down. you may have heard them talk about whether if your grandparents get sick, they don't know how to take care of them. these are serious problems in america. we need a tax that is fair to people, especially those raising children. in the 1980's, middle-class families, incomes were stagnant or went up. the wealthiest people in our country's incomes went up to their tax burden went down. we need tax fairness. >> governor clinton became the sixth leading democrat to enter the presidential race.
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announcing on thursday, october 3, in little rock, his state's capital. the governor's campaign manager is bruce lindsey. this is the first time mr. lindsey has worked on a national campaign. stan greenberg is a consultant to the campaign and frank greer is serving as a media advisor. >> next week on road to the white house rewind, our look back at past presidential campaigns continues with vice president george h.w. bush and the 1988 presidential election. he speaks at the florida party republican convention where he is introduced by his son, jeb bush. join us every sunday morning at 10:00 eastern and continuing through next year's election on american history tv on c-span3. >> c-span has your road to the
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coverage -- road to the white house coverage 2016. this year, we are taking our road to do white house coverage into classrooms across the country with our student cam contest, giving students the opportunity to discuss what important issues they want to hear the most from the candidates. on tv, on coverage the radio, and online at www.c-span.org. located by the u.s. capitol reflecting pool at the base of capitol hill, the ulysses s grant memorial was dedicated in 1922. hundreds of elderly civil war veterans attended the ceremony. next, architect of the capitol, curator michele cohen talks about the construction of the memorial and the attempts to restore the bronze sculpture and marble pedestal.
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