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Local News

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Bill Clinton rouses UF audience

Newspaper In Education - The Courier
By JOHN GRABER

STAFF WRITER

Hillary Clinton should be the next president because she would be the best change-maker, executive officer and commander in chief, her husband and former president Bill Clinton said Friday to a cheering crowd of about 1,200 in the University of Findlay's Croy Gymnasium.

He drove that point home by pledging her support in finding a solution to Findlay's flooding problems.

“If you elect Hillary president, you won't have to worry about the federal government saying they can't help you with flood mitigation, it'll be five or 10 years, they'll get around to it when they can,” he said. “She will be here with you, a partner by your side.”

Clinton said it is fitting that the Democratic primary race between Hillary Clinton, a New York senator, and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, whom he never mentioned by name, is coming down to Texas and Ohio. Clinton said his wife's first job as a political activist was registering Hispanic voters in southern Texas, and Ohio delivered the Democratic nomination and the presidency for him.

“I did not know the outcome of the election in November of 1992 until our family was gathered in the governor's residence in Arkansas, we were watching television on that night and all of a sudden there was a map of the United States and an outline of Ohio started blinking. They said, 'Gov. Clinton has carried Ohio, he's been elected president.'”

He also noted that no Republican has ever been elected president without carrying Ohio.

“If you (Ohioans) vote for Hillary on Tuesday, and you vote for her in November, she will be the next president of the United States,” he said.

Clinton's visit to Findlay was one of five scheduled Ohio stops for him on Friday. He and daughter Chelsea Clinton also have campaigned in Bowling Green, Tiffin and Dayton during the week.



Change

Clinton described how his wife had been “making change in other people's lives” since her days as a law school student and has advocated for health care and women's rights throughout the world.

“Hillary says, 'You should vote for me because I've spent a lifetime driven by my religious convictions and my personal upbringing in the belief that my job was to see that other people have the same chances in life I have had. I think you need a change-maker for other people in the White House. What matters is whether the president can change other people's lives. I've got the best record of doing that and the best ideas to do it in the future.'”

Clinton said Hillary has championed child abuse laws and legislation accommodating special needs children in schools.

“When I became president, I asked Hillary to work on health care reform,” he said. “When we didn't succeed in insuring everybody, she got up off the mat, as she always does, and helped to pass the Children's Health Insurance Program, which now provides health care to more than six million children in America. It was the biggest expansion of health care since Medicare and Medicaid. She was changing other people's lives.”

And that effort reaches out to both sides of the aisle, he said.

“She and Sen. John McCain, who is apparently going to be the Republican nominee ... took reluctant Republicans all over the world together, to show them how the earth is literally, physically changing because of global warming,” he said.

“They went to the northern-most American settlement, Barrow, Alaska. The Eskimos, your fellow Americans, told them their way of life is coming to an end. Guess what, we now have a bipartisan majority in the Senate to do something about this problem in a way that will grow the American economy.”



Executive officer

“The president alone is personally responsible for changing the good intentions of a campaign into real changes in your life,” Clinton said.

America has been operating far too long under the trickle down theory of economics, which just isn't working for many people, he said.

“What's the basic problem in America?” he asked. “People are broke at the end of every month. They feel their jobs are insecure and they're worried about the housing crisis, whether people are going to be thrown out of their homes.”

Hillary would reverse that by taking $55 billion in subsidies and tax breaks given to the energy industries and investing it in clean renewable forms of energy, he said.

“If you look around the world, the only rich countries that are growing jobs and increasing incomes are those that have gone for energy independence. It will create jobs, not only for college graduates but also for high school graduates and high school dropouts because you can train anybody to be a green collar worker.”

Clinton predicted that effort would create five million new jobs.

Clinton said his wife also would install labor and environmental standards in all of America's trade agreements in order to put American workers back on equal footing with those around the world. He said she would work to make college accessible to more students and less financially burdensome, which drew applause from the university crowd.

Hillary also would offer universal health care that would give access to health insurance similar to what is available to Congress and other federal employees, he said.

“If it's good enough for my family, it's good enough for your family, that's her position,” he said.

Universal health care would eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs and money spent by insurance companies looking for ways to deny access to people, he said.

Many business leaders support the plan “because they know they're going to go broke if health care costs keep doubling every seven years,” he said.

She also would allow President Bush's upper level income tax breaks for the wealthy to expire, he said.

“Those rates would revert to where they were when I was president, when we had more millionaires than ever before,” he said.



Commander in Chief

“Hillary believes, among other things, if we're going to restore our standing in the world, and restore diplomacy and cooperation, we have to bring our troops home from the Iraq conflict,” Clinton said.

He said her plan includes leaving a small contingent of special forces in the northern part of Iraq to ensure al Qaeda does not re-establish a foothold there.

“But that's not all we have to do,” he said.

Hillary would repair an American image that has been tarnished around the world, he said.

“The world is mad at us for a lot of reasons,” he said. “We have basically said to the world for the last seven years, it's our way or the highway.”

Clinton said his wife would bring democracy back into the Oval Office.

“If you vote for Hillary, she will send a very different message to the world,” he said. “She will say, 'America is back. We are back.'

“We are going to cooperate with you whenever we can and act alone only when we have to. We are going to have diplomacy with friend and foe alike whenever we can and use military force only when we have to. We are back in the cooperation business.”

Contact staff writer John Graber at: (419) 427-8417

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