Remarks to the Community in Milwaukee

Whoa! Thank you, Jasmine, and thank you, J.P. Weren't they great? [Applause] Those kids were great. Thank you. Governor Thompson, County Executive Ament, Mayor Norquist, Attorney General Doyle, ladies and gentlemen. Chancellor Kohl and I are delighted to be here. We thank the city of Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin for a wonderful, wonderful welcome.

I want to also say a special word of thanks to the Rufus King High School Marching Band that played our national anthem and those who performed before us, the Alta Kameraden Band, the choir Mosbach, from Mosbach, Germany, and the Milwaukee High School for the Arts Jazz Ensemble. Thank you all.

I was asked to say that Senator Feingold and Senator Kohl wanted to be here, but they had to stay in Washington to vote on the budget. Chancellor Kohl is trying to find some way of being related to Senator Kohl; he thinks he will inherit half of the basketball team if he does. [Laughter] We are researching the records even as I speak. [Laughter] Congressman Barrett and Representative Kleczka also had to stay behind because they wanted a chance to vote on an increase in the minimum wage for the people of Milwaukee.

I want to say also a special word of thanks to the people who run the German immersion school. It's the only public elementary school in our country where the entire curriculum is taught in German. They won a blue ribbon award from the Department of Education and, as you can see, my German is a little rustier than theirs is, but I thought the children were wirklich wunderbar. They were terrific, and I believe we should congratulate them.

Just 2 years ago, when Hillary and I were in Germany, Helmut and Hannelore Kohl opened their home to us. World leaders don't often get to visit in each other's homes, and I thought that there ought to be something I could do to kind of repay his extraordinary hospitality. So I thought he ought to have a chance, after 23 trips to Washington, DC, to come to a place where he could get some really great bratwurst, where everywhere he turns around there's a sign with a German name on it, and where he could feel at home in America's most German-American city. So thank you, Milwaukee, for making him feel so welcome.

My fellow Americans, we stand on the verge of the greatest age of possibility in all human history. Because of the advances in technology, the arrival of the information age, the end of the cold war, the emergence of a global society, there are enormous opportunities for people to live in peace and prosperity, for Americans, for Germans, for people all around the world.

But if we want to seize those opportunities, we must decide that we are going to be united with our friends all around the world, with friends like Germany—and America has no better friend than Germany—and we have to decide that amidst all of our diversities in the United States we're going to be united here, too, one Nation under God, reaching across the lines of race and region and income to grow and go forward together as one American family.

As I look out on this vast crowd today, I see a picture of America, all different kinds of people, different races, different religions, bound together by the American creed. And I thank you for that. I want my fellow Americans to know that the United States has no better friend anywhere in the world than Germany and especially the Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl. I am grateful to him, and all of us should be.

And I want the German Chancellor to know that America has no better example of a State committed to reach out to the rest of the world than the State of Wisconsin, a State which is making the new global economy work for its citizens. You know, J.P. Tucker and Jasmine, they reminded me, with their German, that a century ago—listen to this—a century ago half a million American children learned German in their elementary schools. New York, which had the second largest population of any city in the world, and Chicago had the eighth largest, and Milwaukee was, even then, the most German city in our Nation. There, every third citizen here was born on the other side of the ocean.

So when you hear Jasmine Brantley and J.P. Tucker, remember that they are recapturing a sense of our being involved with other countries, which we once took for granted. A hundred years ago we knew we were a nation of immigrants. And a hundred years later, we dare not forget it.

The German immigrants who helped to build cities across our land, founded our Nation's businesses, including some that made Milwaukee famous: Pabst and Blatz and Schlitz. More importantly, they made our communities successful with their strong families and their hard work. But it's important to remember that when the Germans and the other immigrants came here a hundred years ago, they faced new, enormous challenges. They arrived at a time of dramatic change, when our country was just moving from an age of agriculture to an age of industry; when more people, finally, were living in cities than were living in the rural areas; when instead of rising to the sun, they woke to a factory whistle. That was a very different time, the time that our grandparents and our great-grandparents brought to America. But it led to the enormous prosperity that the American people enjoyed in the 20th century.

I ask you to think about this time, at the dawn of another new century, just as we now know a century ago Americans thought about it. Yes, we have a lot of challenges. Yes, we have economic challenges. Yes, we have social challenges. Yes, we have challenges around the world. But this country is stronger economically. It is facing its social problems. It is trying to come together around the basic ideas of work and family and community. And this is a safer world than it was just a few years ago.

And one reason is, we have enjoyed a remarkable alliance with Germany for 50 long years, achieving unparalleled security and prosperity.

And let me say that Helmut Kohl, as the first Chancellor of a free and unified Germany, is a symbol of that success.

With Germany and our other allies in NATO, we are working to let peace take hold in the former Yugoslavia; to give the Muslims, the Croats, and the Serbs the chance to try to come together in the way we Americans are trying to come together; to say to each other, "You cannot define your life by who you hate; you must be willing to lay down your hatreds and work together for a better, brighter future." That is the future we have fought for at home. That is the future Germany and the United States are fighting for in Bosnia.

Thanks to the support of Germany and the United States for freedom and for free economic systems in Russia, we have taken a giant step back from the nuclear precipice. We are destroying two-thirds of all the nuclear weapons that existed at the height of the cold war. And today, for the first time since the drawn of the nuclear age, there are no Russian nuclear weapons pointed at the people of the United States or American weapons pointed at the people of Russia.

Thanks to the efforts of the United States and Germany, as much as any other two nations in the world, we are creating a system of global trading opportunities where trade will be not only free but fair. And I congratulate and thank the Chancellor today for signing an open skies agreement with the United States. We will be the first two great nations to have completely open freedom in the air routes between Germany and the United States. Anybody that wants to come up with a route can do so, and the American people can go back and forth more cheaply. And the German people can do so as well. So, Governor Thompson, maybe a year from now, we can have 100,000 Germans here in Milwaukee instead of just one or two.

And again I want to say to Chancellor Kohl, the people of Wisconsin deserve a lot of credit for taking advantage of these changes. Exports from Wisconsin have grown 39 percent over the last 3 years, faster than the rest of our country and the greatest export surge in our history. That is creating a 110,000 jobs in Wisconsin, including 18,000 brand new ones. Unemployment in this State is only 3.7 percent. And most important, we know that when we can tie jobs to exports, they tend to pay better and to provide a better living for the families of the people who are working there.

I want to say, too, that we thank Germany for buying Wisconsin products. Wisconsin companies with names like Harnischfeger and Miller are bringing their products to Germany, the country their founders left more than a century ago. People moved here, sending the stuff back home; the marks come back to America in the form of dollars. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

We also want to thank the German investors who have invested their money here and put the people of Wisconsin to work. We thank them again for building a global economy of prosperity and freedom. And finally, we thank Wisconsin for its willingness to experiment in many areas of our national life that need improvement, to find ways to put people from welfare to work, to lower the crime rate, to deal with the problem of growing the economy while preserving the incredible, beautiful natural environment that the people of Wisconsin enjoy. These are the challenges that all of us have to face in the years ahead.

Let me say again in closing my remarks that it is important that every American know that if you look ahead at the opportunities the world will bring us, we cannot seize those opportunities alone. If we want to trade with other nations, it takes two to tango. Germany and the United States are the greatest trading nations in the world, and we have to lead the fight for fair and free trade. If we want to deal with the challenges of terrorism and drug running and weapons smuggling and the proliferation of chemical and biological weapons and global environmental threats where Helmut Kohl has been very outspoken, we cannot do this alone. If you want your children to have a system in which everybody who will work can have an opportunity and a system in which we can solve the new security problems of the 21st century, we cannot do it alone. The United States has to have friends and allies, and we have no better friend and ally anywhere in the world than Helmut Kohl of Germany, my friend, and I thank him for being here today.

And thank you all. God bless you.