But we also face stiff challenges. Challenges we must meet and meet together if we are to preserve the American dream for all Americans, maintain America’s leadership for peace and freedom, and continue to come together around our basic values.

These are the seven challenges I set forth Tuesday night — to strengthen our families, to renew our schools and expand educational opportunity, to help every American who’s willing to work for it achieve economic security, to take our streets back from crime, to protect our environment, to reinvent our government so that it serves better and costs less, and to keep America the leading force for peace and freedom throughout the world.

We will meet these challenges, not through big government. The era of big government is over, but we can’t go back to a time when our citizens were just left to fend for themselves.

We will meet them by going forward as one America, by working together in our communities, our schools, our churches and synagogues, our workplaces across the entire spectrum of our civic life.

– President William Jefferson Clinton, January 27, 1996.

The Obama Administration has done something over the past 2 months that I never thought could be done. It makes me long for the days of the Clinton Administration. Sad.