Lamar Alexander speech from Portsmouth, NH Rotary Club Luncheon,
January 18, 1996.  Recorded and transcribed by Michaleen Driscoll
UNiversity of New Hampshire.

Alexander: Thank you, Cliff, Mar--Mary Jane, Mayor, former Governor,
ladies and gentlemen, members of the largest Rotary club in New England. 
Um, I have a presentation to make to Cliff before he sits down.  Several
of you have noticed that I am in disquise today, I didn't wear my shirt. 
I would have been fined.  Um, I have walked one hundred miles across New
Hampshire, from Concord toward the Sea.  And I have gotten to Lafayette
school, which is about a mile and a half from Memorial Bridge, as we have
discussed it, I am going to, uh, pick that walk back up a day or twobefore
the New Hampshire Primary and I hope there is going to be a small army of
red and black shirted citizens who help finish that walk across the state. 
Along the way, my red and bla ck shirt has caused some comment, not all of
it favorable.  In fact some of the national news media have felt down
right antagonistic for it.  I expected that my, my issues would be
distorted, I expected that my piano playing would have been made fun of,
but I never expected that my red and black shirt would have beenso
viciously attacked as it has been over the last few months.  So, uh, the
Washington Post Style section even did an entire article on my shirt and
found someone to say that my shirt wasn't fit to wear to a possum
skinning.  So I bought, I bought a hundred more, I sent one to the writer
of that, I sent one to Michael Kinsley from Crossfire, who especially
doesn't like my shirt, he since retired.  And I give one out to a
distinguished American everyday.  And for that introduction today, Cliff,
you're today's distinguished American. 

Cliff: It's worth the dollar fine. 

Alexander:  I called up my friend Senator Howard Baker before I
began that walk from Concord to the Sea.  I said "Howard, I'm going
to walk across New Hampshire from Concord to the Sea."  And there
was this very long silence on the other end of the phon e.  Finally
he said, "If it were me, I believe I'd walk from Portsmouth to the
Sea."  It's been a wonderful walk, I'm from the heart of Tennessee. 
It's a lot like New Hampshire, we  don't have the water, we don't
have the Sea.  But we're mountain people.  We're mostly Republican. 
My ancestor was asked his politics and he said  "I'm a Presbyterian
and a Republican.  I fought to save the Union and I vote like I
shot."  So that's our, that's our area, and we're just the other
end of the mountains that are part, are part of New Hampshire. 
When I walked across Tennessee, a lot of people laughed.  But it
made me a better candidate and it made me a better governor.  And
walking across New Hampshire these twenty days, I believe it will
make me a better President.  What I'd like to do is to take twelve
or fifteen minutes of your time and give you a sense of why I'm
running for President.  Where I hope our country is going as we
enter the next century and how I would help to get there.  And then
what I would like to invite you to do is take another ten or twelve
minutes, or until Mary Jane stands up, and ask me some questions
or give me your comments because that might make sure that my
answers are more on point with what you're, with what you're about.

 In three and a half weeks, the country will turn it's attention to
electing the first President of the next century.  The person who
will sit in the White House during the whole year 2000, in his
first term.  There should be only one issue in this election, and
that is about our future.  What kind of country are we going to
have in the year 2000 and beyond.  There are a lot of ways to tell
how you are doing in a Presidential race.  One is by the
Legislators Polls, in Iowa, where I came from last night, I have
twenty-six legislators supporting me, Senator Dole has twenty-four.
In New Hampshire, we're about even, about fifty and fifty.  Another
way is to is to make sure that you pass the Mo Udall test, which so
far I have passed.  No one has yet said to me what they said him
when he ran for President.  He walked up to the owner of a country
store in Georgia and stuck his hand out and said "I'm Mo Udall and
I'm running for President."  And the owner of the store barely
looked up and said, "Yeah,  I know.  We were just laughing about
that yesterday."  
  [laughter]
  So I made it that far.  But the Republican Primary is a family
discussion.  And it is entitled to plain talk and even though this
isn't a political meeting, and since we're three and a half away,
weeks away from the start in Iowa, and then just another ten days
away from the New Hampshire 
Primary, and really only eight weeks away from knowing who the
Republican Nominee will be, I hope you won't mind if I try to let
you know what I believe the differences are between me and the
other candidates.  And I believe I can do that showing the proper
respect for them.  
  I'm here to issue a challenge to the conventional wisdom, a wake
up call and to offer you a choice.  The choice is for those of you
who think that the Republican party would be stronger and the coun
try would be better off if we had new Republican leadership as our
nominee.  Someone who could paint a picture of the future, someone
who knows the world outside of Washington, someone of the next
political generation.  A common sense conservative, new Republican
leadership.  The challenge to the conventional wisdom is this,
Washington and some experts have already decided that the race is
over, even before you get to vote.  They say, "It's Dole versus
Clinton and Clinton will probably win."  And the discussion is
all about Washington, apparently all they're going to do in
Washington for the rest of the year is talk about the budget.  It
reminds me of the team showing up at the Super Bowl and putting on
their suits and asking for applause.  I think what most of the fans
in the stands would say was "Why don't you go out and play
the game for a while and then we might give you a cheer."  Or it
reminds me of a boy scout coming home and saying give me a merit
badge I told the truth.  I think that what we would say is, you're
supposed to tell the truth.  Get busy and earn the cooking badge or
the hiking badge or something else and we might give you a merit
badge.  
  I'm all for balancing the budget.  I believe I'm the only one
running for President who has a chance to be elected whose ever
balanced one.  I've balanced eight, in Tennessee, I never had to
shut down the state government for one day to do it.  I also
actually reduced debt.  Nobody made me to do that.  We also
had a AAA bond rate.  And year in and year out we were usually the
best managed state.  And we funded our pension system with cash and
we have the fifth lowest tax rate.  But if all I'd ever done was
balance the budget in  Tennessee we'd still be the third poorest
state.  We had to go to work on building roads, and recruiting
aoutmobile factories and improving our schools.  And reducing the
infant mortality rate and cleaning up the water and getting our
feet on the ground and heading into the future.  That's
what an agenda-setting chief executive is supposed to do and that
is what the Presidential race ought to be about.  We're headed into
a Presidential race if the conventional wisdom holds, it's going to
be all about OMB's and CBO's and who can get a bill out of a
sub-committee. 
  I think the country is hungry for something very different from
that.  And if all Republicans can talk about is budgets instead of
families, and Congress instead of neighborhoods, and getting a bill
out of a sub-committee, instead of creating jobs, I believe Bill
Clinton will be re-elected and so will a Democrat Congress and the
Speaker will be named Gephardt.  I think the country is getting
pretty well fed up.  With this business of bickering and back and
forth, in no certain direction for the country.  I think the elec
tion is going to be about which way do we go?  The Clinton way or
a Republican way.  And if the Republican candidate for President
loses, I believe the Republican Congress will as well.  Because the
country is gonna respond to whomever can paint the picture of the
future, and let's say for a while, "Let's go this way, we're
heading into the next century."  So what I intend to do, in the
next few weeks, and I hope you'll help me do it, is to get the
campaign out of Washington, DC, beyond the budget and talking about
what needs to be talked about in this country. 

  There are people changes jobs everyday who didn't expect to. 
There are lots of people in New Hampshire, I walked by the Burger
King in Windham and the-three of the ladies there told me their
husbands had all lost their jobs in the last month.  The econom y
may be good, but people are changing jobs. A lot of people are
afraid to walk in their own neighborhoods after dark.  They drop
their kids off at school wondering if they'll be safe and they will
learn. 
  On my drive across the country in 1994, I went into the largest
women's hospital in Michigan.  And the nurses there told me that
8,000 babies are born there every year and 3,000 are born already
exposed to cocaine because their mothers are.  I stood on a street
corner in East Los Angeles, where the principal of the middle
school, who stands there every day to keep gangs from forming.  And
her children gave me a book of their poems, they couldn't have been
over than twelve years old, the children, and the poems are
entitled "Farewell to the Morning."  That is their view
of the future.  This country is hungry for a vision contest.  Not
a contest about alphabet soup in Washington, DC and I intend to try
to see that we have one. 
  I would like to ask you to think ahead to next October.  There
will be a Presidential debate.  Forty-million people will be
watching including almost everyone here.  We know one person who
will be there.  And his name is President Clinton.  And we know wh
at he'll do.  He'll get a very good question, he'll move around the
podium like he does, and he'll walk right over to the person that
asked the question and he'll look them right in the eye.  And he'll
feel their pain, and he'll give a very good answer about principles
and values and the future of our country.  And if we turn around,
the country, to a Republican nominee, who can do nothing more than
talk about OMB's and CBO's and getting a bill out of a
sub-committee, if we have no more vision than that,  we will lose. 
  Which is why I think we need, as Republicans, to bring ourselves
to say with respect, to Senator Dole, that we appreciate your long
service in the Senate, but you're not the right man to have in that
debate with Bill Clinton next October.   And you're not the right
man to lead us into the next century.  It is time for new
Republican leadership, it is time to move on.  
  The vision that I have for this country is a very bright one,
even despite our problems.  I can see a country going into the next
century with more good new jobs than we lose with a 4, 4 1/2
percent mortgage interest rate.  A country strong enough to defend
itself, but wise enough not to become involved in other peoples'
civil wars unless we're prepared to pick one side and win that war. 
A country with divorce rates and abortion rates going down instead
of up and where families stick together and fathers stick around. 
A country where we don't start all of our conversations, or our
thoughts at least, with someone we've just met by wondering about
the color of their skin.  And where you can almost hear the tv sets
clicking off as, families spend more time with each other and
parents spend more time with raising their children. 
  But to have that, I believe, is going to cause a huge change in
the way we live.  For the last sixty years in this country, we have
tried to extend the promise of America line to people, by saying we
must do more.  But "we" means Washington.  And some good things
have come from that, but it's brought us the New Deal, the Great
Society, we won wars, we've extended Civil Rights, we've gone to
the moon by mobilizing ourselves from Washington.  I think the time
has come to turn that completely around, in a few  essential areas. 
And I would like to be a President who leads us into the next
century expecting less from Washington and more of ourselves. 
  Let me give you a few specific examples of exactly what I mean. 
Of course the first President of the next century needs to be the
Commander-in-Chief, able to make executive decision, stopping the
free-falling defense spending, uh, never pointing the gun without
being ready to pull the trigger, not sending our troops into battle
under United Nations Commanders and  should, if it's not already
done, create a post-Cold War role for us in the world that says to
our allies, "We're the only super power, we expect and take more of
our share of the larger engagements, you be prepared to take more
than your share of the bord er controling, the passification and
the peace keeping." 
  The next President should balance the budget.  We've already
talked about that.  I'd do that in a minute.  I don't think
there's, I just can't tell you how strongly I believe that if all
we can do in this country is balance the budget, how dim our future
is going to be.  Of course we should do it but we must do it.  
  We need a new tax system, my idea of a new tax system, the kind
I believe a common sense conservative would propose, would be one
with on lower rates, on income, on inheritence, and on capit al
gains and many fewer deductions.  That would be much simpler, that
would make sense.  I had the opportunity Saturday in our debate in
Iowa with the other candidates, to suggest to Iowans something I'll
suggest to you, you might want to take the time as  I have, to read
the fine print in the Forbes Flat Tax plan.  Uh, we got to about
our third question in the debate, and Mr. Forbes had given the
tax, his tax plan as a solution from everything from improving
racial harmony to-to improving the schools.  An d I suggested to
the Io-the the Iowans, that after I read the fine print, I had
concluded that it was a truly nutty idea in the tradition of Jerry
Brown.  
  Because it would begin by wiping out the mortgage interest rate
deduction and knocking down, uh, the  value of your farm and your
home by ten to twenty-five percent.  It hasn't been long ago since
New Hampshire went through a difficult real estate crash and you
might want to think about having another one.  It would also wipe
out the charitable deduction , just at a, at a time I think we
think we need to encourage more neighborhood charity, charity and
less Washington welfare.  It would be a middle-income tax increase,
it would, it looks like and it would absolutely sink at balancing
the budget. Now that doesn't sound to me like a common sense
conservative tax cutting plan.  
  What the most important thing I would try to do is change our
thinking about less, to less and more from us.  And here's where I
differ from the Senators who are running for President, if they'd
been where I'd been, trying to start a company, after I was
Governor, which is what I think every politician ought to be
sentenced to do, to live and work under the rules you set while
you're in office.  They would have already cut the capital gains
tax because it would have created a Niagara Falls of new jobs.  If 
they had walked across this state, or they'd worked where I walked
and seen the number of people changing jobs.  Or if they would go
and be where I'm going in a little while to Bottom Line
Technologies and see the growth of that company, they would be busy
supporting federal grants and loans for college students.  Because
that includes a lot of older people changing jobs.  You go to
commencements these days and, and you hear "Way to go, Mom!" 
That's what you hear coming out of the audience.  And they take the
$20 billion in federal job training programs that, that we now have
and turn most of them into vouchers for men and women changing
jobs. 
  And, we, we would be looking for ways in our tax code, to make it
easier for pensions and health care to foll ow people as they go
from one job to the next.  That's the real world, of America, that
we need to be talking about. 
  If they'd been where I'd been for a year and a half, fighting the
Teacher's Union in Tennessee to become the only state to pay
teachers more for teaching well, they would already abolish the
United States Department of Education and would be hard at work on
a GI bill for kids, to help middle and low income families have
more choices of their schools.  
  If they'd been walking with me across New Hampshire and Nashua
and the end of the day at Library Hill, had, had, had found a young
couple, 24-years old, with an 11-month old baby, who had been to
the welfare office, and who told me that there they had been
encouraged to separate in order to get higher welfare benefits. 
They would not, the Senators would not, have passed an 800-page
Republican welfare bill f rom Washington about what you're supposed
to do about your welfare system in New Hampshire and what I'm
supposed to do in Tennessee.  That looks like something Lyndon
Johnson would have written if he had been a Republican.  What they
would have done instead is going me in ending the $55 billion
dollars in welfare from Washington, DC and beginning a system of
neighborhood charity using that same money.  I believe in
Portsmouth and in Nashua, that you could find ways to spend the
money you send to Washingto n that would help that young
people, that young couple get back on their feet without
encouraging them not to work and not to marry. 
  In the summer of 1994, on my drive across the country I spent the
night at a homeless shelter in Dallas.  Father Jerry Hill, who runs
it, had been working, has been working with men on the streets for
22 years, he has 300 men sleeping on the floor every n ight there. 
He won't even take a federal grant anymore.  "Why should I fill out
forms all day Friday," he says "to justify what I do Monday thru
Thursday?"  Why don't we leave the money in Dallas and let the
people of Dallas give the money to Father Hill.  He could help 600
men and not have to spend so much time raising money. 
  I spent the night with the Reverend Henry Delaney in Savannah,
Georgia.  When he goes out to be a guest preacher, he's advertised
as 500 pounds of prophecy, he's so big.  He moved in to the
inner-city of Savannah, took back 32nd Street, built his congrega
tion up to 3,000 members.  He bought up the crack houses, put
preachers in them, there are no gun shots at night on that street
and he says, "Why don't they ask me what to do about welfare? I
know what to do." 
  If the Senators had been where I'd been which is going to
Washington for five years and working and getting to know the place
and then going home, being there long enough to get vaccinated but
not infected.  
 [laughter]
  If they'd done that, they would join me, they would join me in
calling for term limits and the end of million dollar pensions and
cutting their own pay and sending themselves home for half the
year.  I believe a part time citizen in Congress, who spends less
time in Washington and more time with us, w ould be more likely,
more likely to understand the need for expecting less from
Washington and more from us. 
  Let me give you one last example, and then we can go to whatever
questions you might have.  The Senators running for President voted
for a federal law, that sets the weapons policy in every New
Hampshire public school.  I think that shows how far off the cliff
we driven.  I mean if some kid walks into the fifth grade of a
Portsmouth school with a pocket knife, are you supposed to call the
United States Senate and ask them what to do?  I think not.  In the
town I grew up, in Maryville, Tennesse I carried a pocket knife to
school every single day of the year.  So did every other boy.  My
mother heard me say that on C-SPAN and said "Well, you never told
me."  
 [laughter]
  But the reason we never thought about using that pocket knife on
each other had nothing to do with th e United States Senate.  It
had everything to do with the families we came from, with the nosey
neighbors who tried to keep us out of trouble, or the Algebra
teacher who kept her eye on us, with the support of the parents. 
It had to do with the scout mas ter who kept us busy, and the coach
who kept us tired.  And it had to do with whomever it was that
dragged us to church three times a week because it was good for us. 
We have spent a lot of time in this country, over the last forty or
fifty years, trying to find substitutes for strong families, strong
neighborhoods, strong churches, strong synagogues and good schools,
and we've yet to find one.  And in the process, we've broken down
the institutions that we must most heavily rely upon in a changing
world.  
  In Florida a few weeks ago, I was in Mount Dora and someone said
to me, as I was leaving a little beautiful town, that a eighth
grader shot another eighth grader and killed him in our school,
what would you do about that as President of the United States? 
  And I thought for a moment about how the Senators might say
"Well, we passed a federal law to keep guns out of the schools." 
But my answer was, the answer to that is not Washington, DC, the
answer is in Mount Dora.  It is in the families, the neighborhoods,
the churches, the synagogues, and the schools, to make certain that
a tragedy like that never happens again. 
  So my message is a little different.  In the end it doesn't offer
a legislative solution.  It begins by saying that in some areas, we
need less from Washington and we need for the government to make it
easier for us to control our own lives, but in the en d there's
somethings we have to do for ourselves.  I think the next President
needs to be a little bit of a preacher, being willing to say that
we should spend less time trying to figure out what the government
owes us and less time trying to figure out who to blame for what
goes wrong and more time being willing to accept personal
responsibilty for the consequences of our own actions. 
  If the children aren't learning to read, we can read to them.  My
library card came not from the President, but from my mother.  That
still works.  If the babies are being born in Detroit already
exposed to cocaine because their mothers are, we can shoot down a
drug plan, we can appoint a czar in Washington but in the end, the
answer to that is in Detroit.  And if the television is trash, we
can turn it off.  If the kids are running around the streets of
Porstmouth at 3 o'clock, or in Nashville, where I live, we
can go get them.  That is a little different message, but I think
it is what we need to do.  So what I'm here today to do is to thank
you for the privilege of, uh, addressing your club.  To tell how
much I have enjoyed my walk across New Hampshire. 
  To invite you to join us with your own red and black shirt, for
the last, uh, mile and a half a day or two before the primary.  And
to suggest to you, that what our party, if you're a Republican,
really needs, to beat Bill Clinton, and to lead us into the next
century, is not a Chief Legislator, not a President of Washington. 
We're not giving the thank you for a long serving Senator, whom we
respect.  What we need is new Republican leadership who can paint
a picture of the future based on our principles, of job growth, of
freedom from Washington, and of personal responsibility.  And we
need someone who can lead us into the next century expecting less
from Washington and more of ourselves.  That is what made
us such a remarkable country in the first place, that will do it
again. 
 Thank you.