Remarks on the Congressional Elections and an Exchange With Reporters in Atlanta

The President. [Inaudible]—the elections will help, because the elections will give an opportunity for the facts to come out. The Georgia economy's doing well. It's done much better since I've been elected President. The economic program, which we passed—a lot of the Republicans, including some of the prominent Republicans in Georgia, accused us of raising income taxes on everybody. Now they know, the American people know, only 1.2 percent of the American people paid higher income taxes. And this year, one in six working families will get a tax cut. We're reducing the deficit. And under our administration, we'll have 3 years of declining deficits for the first time since Truman.

So the economy's doing better. We passed sweeping education and training reforms. We're passing the toughest crime bill in American history. We're going to pass welfare reform. We're dealing with the problems of America. And I think by election time that should be very helpful. That'll be a good environment in which Democrats can run. We Democrats don't have the kind of machine, in a way—media machine—that the Republicans do, sort of spewing out all this venom and all this labeling and name-calling all the time. So we get down sometimes, but we'll get back up.

Georgia—Atlanta has benefited greatly from the trade initiatives of this administration, from the North American Free Trade Agreement, from the worldwide trade agreement, from our outreach to Asia. So I think the record—the economic benefits and the fact that we reflect middle class values and welfare reform, the crime initiative, and other things, all those things will help the Democrats by November.

Q. Do you take a fairly relaxed attitude about the fact that some Members of the Georgia delegation, congressional delegation, would just as soon stay in Washington and not right now come down and be with you?

The President. Sure, I take a fairly relaxed attitude about whatever they want to do. But I think the—you've got to understand, in the rural South where you've got Rush Limbaugh and all this right-wing extremist media just pouring venom at us every day and nothing to counter that, we need an election to get the facts out. So I really—I welcome the election— American people find out the truth, they're going to support people who didn't say no every time.

Essentially these Democrats, most of them have said yes to America. They've said yes on crime, yes on getting the deficit down, yes on getting the economy going, yes on moving the country forward. We have ended gridlock. It took us years and years and years to pass some of this anticrime initiatives and other things that we're doing now. And when the American people see the facts, even in the places which were tough for us, I think that the Democrats will do very, very well, because they'll have their own record to run on. So I'm kind of looking forward to it.