By Governor Bill Clinton
Palace Theatre, May 18, 1992

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much my longtime friend David Mixner - he's been making speeches in his mind for thirty years, he's about to get good at it -for that wonderful statement. Thank you Roberta Achtenberg for your statement and for your friendship. Thank you Scott and Diane and Roberta and Bob, all the rest of you who were co-chairs and active in this event.

And I want to say a special word of thanks to ANGLE for their work on my behalf over the last several months. I want to thank John Garamendi, my state chair, for being here and all the others who are here in support of this event.

'You know, I have said many times that a campaign for president has two purposes. One is for the country to get to know the candidate, and the other is for the candidate to get to know the country. If the candidate does not grow and deepen in understanding and compassion and feeling, then the race itself is already half lost.

There are people in this room today to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude, for you have helped me to get to know my country better than I did when I began.

We just finished the worst urban riots in our history in Los Angeles. And as the people here begin to pick up the pieces, I think it might be well for us to note where we are at this moment in our history as a nation. Not just here in Los Angeles, and not just in the cities of our great land, but all of us, all across America.

We should be dancing in the streets with joy today because the Cold War is over. If three years ago anyone had told any of you that within three years the Berlin Wall would fall, all of the governments in Eastern Europe would fade away, the Soviet Union itself would collapse and cut its defense budget by 50% in a year, and the threat of nuclear annihilation would begin to fall into the distance of history, no one would have believed it.

If anybody had told you that would happen and we would still be deeply divided and anxiety-ridden at election time, it would be difficult to believe. But we are. And we are because as we celebrate the triumph of our values around the world, we see them lying in tatters here at home. A country defeated in so many ways economically-a country in the grip of political paralysis...a country under immense social strain practicing denial instead of responsibility, division instead of unity.

Today I have made three stops in which I have been able to now talk about three things that I care about a great deal. This morning I met with 4,000 workers at a shipyard in San Diego -- the only place in America where people, Americans, are still making ships.

An employee-owned company with seven unions and management working together, against all of the odds, to make the leap from a defense to a domestic economy. And I talked to them about my vision to bring real job growth back to a peacetime America.

And then I went to the University of Oregon in Eugene where there were thousands - I don't know how many, but at least 4,000 students. And I talked to them about the future that they have - so much more ahead of them than I do - and what I hoped it would be, and what role education should play in that.

Tonight, I want to talk to you about how we can be one people again - without regard to race or gender or sexual orientation or age or region or income, how we can be one again.

This country has so often been divided, especially at election time. The pollsters and the political consultants tell people all the time how to cut the electorate up in just "this little slice and that little slice" so that we cannot be one again. And yet, it is against all our natures, against our basic values, against the statements of all our basic laws, and still we do it, over and over again.

This election is almost about the paradigm of Willie Horton on the one hand, and what Roberta Achtenberg and I went through on Mother's Day at the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco on the other. All kinds of Americans, hundreds of them homeless, there holding hands, worshipping, reaching out for their better selves.

And we're going to have to decide in this election, all of us, what kind of people we are and where we want to go. The American people are plainly going to be divided if this administration has its way, by gender over the choice issue. Some of us are old enough to remember what it was like before there was a Roe v. Wade. I am. I am. I remember when I was a boy seeing someone who was running an abortion mill put into a police car and taken off to jail and asking who that person was and why he was being arrested. And I tell you, it may be good politics at election time, but it would be a terrible mistake for this country to change the fundamental law of the land and repeal the right to privacy and the right to chose. If we want to be...if we want to be pro-child and pro-family, let us embrace the cause of life. Let us aggressively seek to reduce unwanted pregnancies and thereby reduce the number of abortions. Let us give people the health care they need and birth and the pre-school their children need. And let's provide for child-care and family leave and meaningful child support enforcement and supports that people need to raise their children. But don't criminalize a decision that belongs in the private recesses of a person's soul.

Let us not be divided again by race. I was so sad when Michael Woo and I were walking amid the ruins and when Maxine Waters took me through her district to see the tensions still there between African American and Hispanic and white and Korean communities and people looking at each other with great suspicions thinking that some of this that has happened was due to the color of their skins.

I grew up in the segregated South. But I lived long enough to see my daughter in a public school where she is in the racial minority, but where she learns every day intellectually, where she thrives and where she learns how to be a person in a multi-racial society and where she has the emotional space and freedom to do what Martin Luther King said he wanted for his children: to judge people, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. And the great passion of my life has been education and telling people we don't have a person to waste. The great heartbreak is seeing people wasted. Three years ago before it was fashionable, I was in south-central Los Angeles meeting with community groups, before I was a candidate for president. And I met with a dozen sixth graders in a public school - all of them minorities, Hispanic and black - who told me their greatest fear was being shot going to and from school. I had never heard such a thing before.

I later went to Houston and found eleven elementary schools where the children were walking through metal detectors every day so the guns and knives could be taken from the eight and nine-year-olds. And I wonder about those children now they're ninth graders. And when this riot occurred, my wife and I asked ourselves how many are in gangs now, who stayed home because their parents asked them to and who looted and whether they are all still alive. We don't have a person to waste.

And those of you who are here tonight, you represent a community of our nation's gifted people whom we have been willing to squander. We can't afford to waste the capacities, the contributions, the hearts, the souls, the minds of the gay and lesbian Americans.

For every day that we discriminate, that we hate, that we refuse to avail ourselves of the potential of any group of Americans, we are all less than we ought to be. You heard Roberta give my speech for me tonight better than I could have.

As soon as the Pentagon issued a study - ironically by a spokesperson who himself was said to be gay - which said that there was no basis in national security for discriminating based on the sexual orientation of Americans who wish to serve in the military, I said I would act on the study. It seemed to me elemental that if a person, a man or woman, wanted to serve their country, they ought to be able to do it. The presumption should

be in favor of doing it unless there is some reason not to.

The Pentagon had a study which said there was no reason not to. The Secretary of Defense, himself, obviously personally very uncomfortable at not changing the rules, said it was a "quaint little rule." Well, my fellow Americans, we have too much to do to endure "quaint little rules."

I want people like David Mixner and Roberta Achtenberg, Dr. Scott Hitt, some of you in this audience, to be a part of a Clinton Administration, not because of or in spite of your sexual orientation, but because America needs you. And if I become the President of the United States, I owe it to my country to find the best and most gifted and most knowledgeable people in the United States of America to solve the problems and

embrace the challenges of this time.

We cannot afford to do otherwise. I want to crack down on those who do want to do otherwise, who now practice hate crimes that the Justice Department should move against. And perhaps more importantly than anything right now, I'd like, for a change, for there to be a real war on AIDS.

When children are shot going to and from school, are shot in their own schools as those two children were in Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn not very long ago, a place where I spoke a month before the shooting, we can say, they are all our children, and we cry. But well over 100,000 Americans have died of AIDS, and they are all our children, too.

Over a million people, over a million Americans are now HIV positive. And yet, the administration is still curiously silent until the famous fall. Until, like Magic Johnson, they come forward, or like Arthur Ashe, someone takes advantage of their privacy. Then someone says something appropriately touching.

But this administration ignores its own commission reports, under funds research and treatment, leaves red tape binding science and drug trials and research, and says behavior modification is the issue. But then, unlike Dr. Koop, refuses to embrace the cause of sex education in our schools which would give our children the chance to save their lives.

When it comes to AIDS, there should be a Manhattan Project. One person should be in charge. One person who can cut across all the departments and agencies, who has the President's ear and the President's arm. One person who can make sure that we begin by implementing all those recommendations and those two commission reports now gathering dust in Washington, D.C. One person who will launch a real national education campaign - someone as forthright as Dr. Koop was, telling the American people - starting with our children - the hard truth and giving them a fair chance to save their lives and other people's lives as well.

Someone who will see that women and people of color are included in the research and in the drug trials. And, I might add, for women especially, that is a problem for general application, not just as it relates to AIDS, but as it relates to breast cancer and any other health problem.

We have got to improve our approach to women's health. Someone who will fund the Ryan White Act fully, someone who will approach this problem with compassion and teach the American people what he has learned. That is what I will try to do.

There are two things that I would like to mention again to make sure you know I am serious. The first is that I want to make a major speech on AIDS to a non-traditional group of Americans, who may not cheer at every word but who need to hear the message.

The second is, that I have pledged to see that someone who is HIV positive, but also has a positive attitude, come before the American people at the Democratic National Convention to speak about this issue.

And now, before I leave, I want to say something which is not part of a political program.

I just want to thank the gay and lesbian community for your courage and your commitment and your service in the face of the terror of AIDS. When no one was offering a helping hand, and when it was dark and lonely, you did not withdraw, but instead you reached out to others.

And this whole nation has benefited already in ways most people cannot even imagine from the courage and commitment and the sense of community which you practice.

It was your community who created the first AIDS service organizations, who did the first important work in pioneering AIDS drugs, who sounded the alarm and created the first education programs, who stood strong in the face of all governmental opposition and discrimination and killing silence.

This nation owes you thanks for that, and I want to give you my thanks and respect for that struggle today.

Finally, let me say again, this is not an election, or it should not be, about race or gender or being gay or straight or religion or age or region or income. What kills the country is not the problems it faces. There will be problems even until the end of time. What kills the country is to proceed day in and day out with no vision, with no sense that tomorrow can be better than today, with no sense of shared community.

What I came here today to tell you in simple terms is I have a vision and you are a part of it. I believe tomorrow will be better than today if we act. And we are all a part of the same community, and we'd better start behaving as if we are.

If I could, if I could wave my arm for those of you that are HIV positive and make it go away tomorrow, I would do it, so help me God I would. If I gave up my race for the White House and everything else, I would do that.

Let us never forget, there are things we can and cannot do. But the beginning of wisdom is pulling together and learning from one another and being determined to do better.

And this country is being killed by people who try to break us down and tear us up and make us be little when we have to be big.

This is a big time. Let us rise to the challenge.

Thank you and God bless you all.