Security for Americans Is Key to Change, Clinton Says

President Clinton delivered a much-heralded speech Tuesday intended to lay out the overarching principles that he believes unify his domestic policy initiatives, declaring that “the challenge of our time” is to provide Americans the security to change in a changing world.

The attempt nine months after his election to describe what former President George Bush disparagingly used to call the “vision thing” centered on the theme of “security.”

In Clinton’s eyes, the United States is in the midst of a period of rapid and unsettling change. Successfully adapting to those changes--”making change our friend,” in the President’s oft-repeated phrase--requires the nation to take risks, he said. But for Americans to be willing to take those risks, he argued, they need to be made to feel secure in basic elements of their lives: health care, job prospects, neighborhoods and schools.

Providing that sense of security--Clinton told an audience of 40,000 students, faculty and alumni at the University of North Carolina for ceremonies honoring the 200th anniversary of the school--is government’s prime responsibility in the current era and the unifying principle for his proposals.

“All around our great country today, I see people resisting change,” Clinton said. Too many Americans are “turning inward” and voicing “a yearning for yesterday.”

But, said Clinton, “yesterday is yesterday. If we try to recapture it, we will only lose tomorrow.”

Former President Ronald Reagan used to refer to government security programs as a “safety net” that he pledged he would preserve while reducing the size of government. Clinton, as he outlined a series of initiatives that would increase government’s scope, chose a more active--although perhaps less immediately familiar--simile.

“The security I seek for America is like a rope for a rock climber to lift those who will take responsibility for their own lives to greater and greater pinnacles,” he said.

Clinton insisted that his proposals do not amount to “government doing more for people,” although his health proposal, in particular, would dramatically increase government’s role in one-seventh of the nation’s economy. The goal, he said, is “Americans doing more for ourselves and our families, for our communities and for our country. It is not the absence of risk, it is the presence of opportunity.”

Clinton and his aides have struggled for several weeks to find a way of laying out that argument concisely and cogently. White House strategists believe that his ability to win support for his broad domestic agenda depends in large part on their ability to convince Americans that the parts actually add up to a coherent whole--not just a grab bag of diverse proposals.

One indication of the seriousness of at least White House intentions is that Administration aides distributed text of the speech some three hours before Clinton was scheduled to speak--a record for the President, who throughout his Administration and his campaign has been notorious for fiddling with his speeches until the last minute and sometimes later. As might have been predicted, however, as Clinton sat on the outdoor stage at the university’s football stadium listening to state and university dignitaries speaking before him, he extensively rewrote his speech once again--adding many of his favorite anecdotes and casting aside much of the rhetoric his speech writers had drafted.

Clinton had made at least three somewhat ragged practice runs at explaining his theme in the last eight days--at the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco a week ago, at a Democratic National Committee gathering in Washington Friday and at a Yale Law School reunion in New Haven, Conn., Saturday. In addition, he spent considerable time Monday reviewing and revising speech drafts, aides said.

As set out Tuesday, Clinton grouped his many proposals under three general headings: economic security, health security and personal security.

Repeating one of his favorite statistics--that the average person now entering the work force will change jobs seven times before retiring--Clinton said that the key to economic security is to possess the skills needed to find new and better jobs.

Under that heading, Clinton grouped his Administration’s plans to upgrade school standards, his national service and student loan reform plans designed to make college more affordable, and Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich’s still-forming plans to find ways to smooth the transition from school to work for students who do not go to college.

Another aspect of providing economic security, Clinton said, is the Administration’s proposals to improve job training programs and make them more accessible.

Amid the flow of those programs, Clinton also gave a brief mention and justification of his support for the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, saying that the arguments against the treaty are primarily “the grievances of the 1980s” rather than “reasoned debate” over the future of the economy.

Health security, the second of his three-part agenda, would remove the ultimate fear of working Americans “that they will lose their health coverage if they change jobs,” Clinton said.

While the first two parts of Clinton’s agenda address economic insecurity, the third, personal security, invokes a pledge made by at least the last five presidents: to combat crime. “Our people have the right to feel safe where they live, where they go to school and where they work,” Clinton said.

To pursue that goal, Clinton said, Congress should approve his proposals to spend more money in grants to state and local governments to hire an additional 50,000 police officers nationwide. Congress, he said, should also impose a five-day waiting period on the purchase of a handgun.