For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
March 27, 2002
Remarks by the President at the Graham for Senate Luncheon - Greenville, SC
The Palmetto Expo Center
Greenville, South Carolina
11:30 A.M.EST
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much. Thank
you, all. It is nice to be back in South
Carolina. Please be seated. Thank you.
My only regret is I didn't bring Laura with me. I can't
tell you how proud I am of her. She is -- she is a
fabulous wife and a great lady. She's flying Barney and
Spot and the cat down to Crawford, Texas, as I
speak. America is getting to see why I married
her. A lot of people are wondering why she said
"yes." (Laughter.)
Lindsey, thanks for mentioning Laura. She is -- I love
her dearly, and she's a great First Lady. (Applause.)
And you're going to be a great senator for South
Carolina. I'm here with one message: I want
Lindsey Graham elected to the United States
Senate. (Applause.) It is in South Carolina's
interest that he get elected to the United States
Senate. And it's in our nation's interest that he get
elected to the United States Senate.
And, frankly, it's in my interest that he get elected to the United
States Senate, because I've got a lot I want to do. And I
look forward to working with him to get it done. So I'm
proud to be here on Lindsey's behalf and I want to thank you all -- the
organizers of the event and you all for coming to support this good man
for this important cause.
I also want to thank Jim DeMint. It's important that he
win, as well. Jim is the kind of fellow that I like to work with in
Washington. First of all, he understands his district
well. And he loves the people of his
district. We've got the kind of relationship where I welcome
him into the Oval Office, to sit down and discuss important
issues. And we can have frank discussions and come to
agreement.
Now, I know there are some of them here picking on him because of
textiles. Because of Jim DeMint's leadership, my
administration has got a plan to strengthen the textile industry, and I
want to thank him for his leadership on this issue and so should the
people of this district. (Applause.)
And I want to thank Congressman Henry Brown for coming all the way
up from the coast. It's nice of you all to let him
in. (Laughter.) And he's doing a fine job, as
well.
As you know, I'm fortunate enough to make a lot of friends in your
great state and I want to thank you all for giving me a chance to be
your President. But I also want to thank some of those that
I spent a lot of time with in South Carolina for coming over
today: Carroll Campbell, and Iris, thank you all for being
here. They tell me Beasley is around here
somewhere. Beasley, how are you? Good to see
you. I appreciate your coming. (Applause.)
And the Speaker -- I've got no better friend than the Speaker.
Election Day, he took me to the Ham
House. (Laughter.) I'm still running off the
pancakes. (Laughter.)
The Lieutenant Governor, Peeler, and Attorney General Condon, two
fine friends of mine. And I was proud to call them friends
back in 2000, and I'm still proud to call them friends. And
it's great to see you guys, and thank you all for being here, as well.
And I want to thank my friend, Barry Wynn, as
well. Barry and I have been friends for a while and he
helped me get to where I am, and so did many of you all.
I've got a lot to do in Washington. And we need somebody
who can help get that done in the United States Senate from South
Carolina. Listen, you've had a fine, fine man in Strom
Thurmond representing you all. And what you need is a young
visionary leader to take his place. (Applause.)
He understands how Washington works. I want the voters
of South Carolina to remember he was for a strong military prior to
September the 11th. He understood we need a strong military
to defend our freedoms. He doesn't need to be educated, once
he gets to Washington, on this issue. He's a member of the Armed
Services Committee and has served proudly. And I look
forward to working with Lindsey as we fight this war on terror.
He also has been a leader on education reform. For too
long, our party was identified as being anti-school; that we weren't
for educating children. That's changed. I had the
honor of signing a piece of legislation which recognizes the importance
of education in our society; refusing to allow for mediocrity;
challenges the status quo when children are simply shuffled through the
system, regardless of whether they can read or not; insists that every
child -- I mean every child -- can read in America.
And Lindsey Graham stood by my side on this important piece of
education reform. And not only that, he's sponsoring a piece
of legislation, which I strongly support, that will forgive loans to
teachers who teach in the neediest areas in America. He's a
reformer when it comes to education, and the South Carolinians ought to
be proud of his record. (Applause.)
Now, we've got a lot to do. We've got a lot to
do. There's a lot to do at home. As you know --
let me put it to you this way. I was campaigning in Chicago
one time and a fellow said, would you ever allow for deficit spending,
would that ever enter your vocabulary?
I said, well, under certain circumstances: only if we're
at war or there was a national emergency or there was a
recession. Little did I realize we'd draw the
trifecta. (Laughter.)
But I want to make it clear about how we dealt with the latter, and
then I'm going to talk about the first two. The slow-down in
our economy. The best way to make sure an economy recovers is to trust
the people with their own money.
You see, when people have more money in their pocket, when they've
got more money to spend, that increases demand for goods and
services. And when there's an increase in demand for goods
and services, somebody is going to produce goods and
services. And as they produce goods and services, it firms
up the job base. We cut the taxes on the American people at
exactly the right time, and our economy is improving because of
it. (Applause.)
Lindsey understood that, and he was a strong proponent of the tax
relief for the American people. He was describing the other
fellow's position. He said he wouldn't have supported the
tax increase. Yet another reason why Lindsey Graham ought to
be in the U.S. Senate, it's because we trust people with their own
money. The tax money is not the government's money, it is
the people's money and when we can give it back and afford to give it
back, we ought to do so. (Applause.)
Now, there are some of them up there that believe in times of a
recession, you increase the taxes on the people. But that's
not the textbook that Lindsey and I have been reading. Our
textbook starts with, you trust the American people -- particularly
when it comes to their own money.
So I need to have an ally in the United States Senate who
understands how our economy works and who trusts the private sector and
trusts the people with their own money. We're going to have
some issues coming up and, I'll tell you one. We got rid of
the death tax, but because of the law, it can conceivably come back
into life nine years from now. We need to make the repeal of
the death tax permanent. (Applause.)
That's an important issue for small business
owners. It's a particularly important issue for South
Carolina farmers, South Carolina ranchers. And we need
somebody in the U.S. Senate who will vote to make that tax relief
permanent. Listen, we don't need a tax system that
encourages somebody to work all their life to build up an asset base
and have it taxed again, have it taxed twice. What we need
is a system that encourages hard work, the entrepreneurial spirit and
allows people to pass on their assets to whoever they want to pass on
their assets to. (Applause.)
We need an energy plan in America. We need a plan that
not only encourages conservation and the development of exciting new
technologies, but we also need a plan that reduces our dependency on
foreign sources of crude oil. (Applause.) We need
a plan that encourages biomass, ethanol, interesting alternatives.
But I want you all to understand something Lindsey understands and
I darn sure know, is that we now import over 50 percent of our energy
from overseas. Sometimes we get it from nations that aren't
really pleased with U.S. foreign policy. For the good of
national security, we need to explore, in environmentally friendly
ways, for energy in our own country, so we can reduce
dependency. It's in our national security interests that we
do so. (Applause.)
We need to get a faith-based initiative out of the United States
Senate. We need to rally the great compassion of our country
in order to stand up in the face of evil. We need to
understand that the best welfare programs sometimes are those that come
out of our churches and synagogues and mosques.
Our federal government must not fear faith in our
society. We must welcome faith -- faith programs that heal
hearts, that provide hope to the hopeless, that give people the
opportunity to realize the American Dream. And that's incredibly
important at this stage of our nation's history.
Because in order to win the war on terror, we must not let terror
affect the hearts and souls of the American people -- quite the
opposite. It's important for me and all of us in positions of
responsibility to rally the great compassion of America so that we can
stand squarely in the face of evil; so that we can say, out of evil
acts of September the 11th have come incredible goodness.
And that's what's going to happen in America. I firmly
believe it. I believe that out of this evil will come great
goodness because of the compassion of the American
people. (Applause.)
I just had the honor of speaking to a lot of folks who wear the
uniform in Greenville, South Carolina and surrounding neighborhoods,
the police and the fire and the EMS folks, to talk about a homeland
strategy that Tom Ridge and my administration is developing; a strategy
that provides a significant amount of money in the new budget to
provide first responders not only with a strategy, with ample money to
be able to be prepared for any emergency that might arise.
We've got money in our budget for bioterrorist attack, a possible
bioterrorist attack. We've got money in the budget to make
sure that the INS, the folks who are supposed to know who is coming in
and out of our country, do a better job of understanding who is coming
in and out of our country.
We're buttoning-up the homeland. And I want to tell you
that my biggest job is to make sure that we do everything in our power
to make sure that innocent lives are not lost in America
again. I want the moms and dads to know that my priority is
to make sure your children can grow up in a peaceful
country. And we're making progress.
The law enforcement -- law enforcement at the federal level and the
state level and the local level are communicating a lot better than
they have ever before. Every morning, like this morning, I
ask the FBI Director Mueller, what are you doing in running down
leads? Are you hunting them down here on the homeland, if we
get a hint that somebody do something against us? And we
are. We're chasing down every single lead.
But I want to tell you all, the best way to secure the homeland is
to hunt the enemy down wherever they hide and bring them to justice and
that's exactly what we're going to do. (Applause.)
The budget I submitted to the United States Congress not only makes
our homeland security a priority, it makes the defense of the United
States a priority. It's the largest increase in defense
spending in 20 years. And the reason why is twofold. One,
whenever we commit people who wear our uniform into battle, they must
have the best equipment, the best training, the best pay
possible. The price of freedom is high, no question about
it. But it is not too high, as far as I'm
concerned. (Applause.)
And the other reason why I've submitted a significant increase in
the defense spending is because we're in this thing for the long
haul. We defend freedom. We're fighting
murderers, cold-blooded killers who hate what America stands
for. They hate our religious tolerance. They hate
the fact that we speak freely. They can't stand our
democracy. And they want to hit us again.
And we're going to chase them down one by one, until we rid the
world of the global reach of terror. We have no other
choice, my fellow Americans. We fight for our children's
freedom. (Applause.)
They must have not understood who they were dealing with on
September the 11th. I guess they thought we were so
materialistic and so self-absorbed that all we would do is file a
lawsuit. They found out we think differently here in
America. They found out when it comes to defending our
freedom, we will take whatever means are necessary.
They found out what I meant when I said either you are with us or
you're against us. And they found out in the first theater
on the war against terror what I meant when I said if you harbor a
terrorist, if you hide a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you're
just as guilty as the murderers who attacked New York City and
Washington, D.C. on September the 11th. (Applause.)
Thanks to our mighty United States military and a vast coalition of
freedom-loving countries, we upheld that latter
doctrine. The Taliban found out exactly what I
meant. They are no longer in power, thank goodness, for the
people of Afghanistan.
I want to assure you that we did not go into that theater, or any
theater, to seek revenge. We seek justice. And
when we went into Afghanistan, we didn't enter as conquerors, we
entered as liberators. This past weekend, young girls, many
young girls, for the first time in their life went to
school. And I am proud of a nation that is not only tough
and strong, but a nation that is compassionate and cares deeply about
the lives of all citizens around the world. (Applause.)
Thankfully, our nation is united and determined, because we've got
a lot more work to do. There are still a lot of them out
there that would like to harm our country. And the best way
to deal with them is to treat them like international criminals,
precisely who they are, and keep them on the run, and deny
sanctuary. And be patient and deliberate and tough and
determined. The world watches the United States of
America. If we were to blink, I think they might go to
sleep. But I can assure you, we're not going to
blink. We're determined, no matter how long it takes, this
administration will lead this nation in chasing down the killers.
And not only that, we must not allow and will not allow the world's
worst leaders to develop the world's worst weapons that could
conceivably hold the United States and our allies and friends
hostage. There is an axis of evil in the world, and the
United States of America will deal with it in a firm
way. (Applause.)
We are patient, we are deliberate. We will consult with
our allies. But the world must understand, we love freedom, we hold
freedom dear to our hearts. And we will not let our freedoms
be threatened or our freedoms taken away from us.
You know, one of the most interesting -- not interesting, one of
the most compelling and moving moments during this -- from September
the 11th on, was Flight 93. It was a time when America got
to see that there are people in our society who are willing to serve
something greater than themselves. This was an airplane
flying toward who knows -- the White House, or the
Capitol. Americans on that plane on their cell phones told
their loved ones goodbye. They said a prayer, told them they
loved them and said, "let's roll," and drove the plane in the ground so
somebody else could live.
I believe out of this evil will come incredible good. On
the one hand, if we're tough and strong and firm, the world will be
more peaceful. I believe that when the United States leads with firm
resolve, we have a much better chance to solve the world's most
intractable problems.
But I also know that by unleashing the compassion and goodness of
America, by following the example of others who are willing to
sacrifice for something greater, that we can rally the great compassion
of the country so that the American Dream extends its hope into every
neighborhood, in every corner of this great country.
Out of evil will come great good because the great strength of the
nation is in the hearts and souls of an incredible country.
Thank you all for being here. May God bless you
all. Send Lindsey Graham to the United States
Senate. (Applause.)
END 11:50
A.M. EST
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