Farewell Address By The President to the Nation
My fellow citizens, tonight is my last opportunity to speak to you from the Oval Office as your president.
I am profoundly grateful to you for twice giving me the honor to serve, to work for you and with you to prepare our nation for 21st century. And I'm grateful to Vice President Gore, to my Cabinet secretaries, and to all those who have served with me for the last eight years.
This has been a time of dramatic transformation, and you have risen to have every new challenge. You have made our social fabric stronger, our families healthier and safer, our people more prosperous.
You, the American people, have made our pessage into the global information age an era of great American renewal.
In all the work I have done as president, every dicision I have made, every executive action I have taken, every bill I have proposed and signed, I've try to give all Americans the tools and conditions to build the future of our dreams, in a good society, with a strong economy, a cleaner enviroment, and a freer, safer, more prosperous world.
I have steered my course by our enduring values. Opportunity for all. Responsibility from all. A community of all Americans. I have sought to give America a new kind of goverment, smaller, more modern, more effective, full of iders and policies appropriate to this new time, always putting people first, always focusing on the future.
Working together, America has done well. Our economy is breaking records, with more than 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the highest home ownership ever, the longest expansion in history.
Our families and communities are stronger. Thirty-five million Americans have used family leave low. Eight million have moved off welfare. Crime is at a 25-year low. Over 10 million Americans recieve more college aid, and more people than ever are going to college. Our schools are better-higher standards, greater accountability and larger invistments have brought higher test scores, and higher graduation rates.
More than three million children have health insurance now, and more than 7 million Americans have been lifted out of poverty. Incomes are rising aross the board. Our air and water are cleaner. Our food and drinking water are safer. And more of our precious land has been preserved, in the continetal United States, than any time in 100 years.
I'm very grateful to be able to turn over the reins of leadership to a new president, with America in such a strong position to meet the challenges of the future.
Tonight, I want to leave you with three thoughts about our future. First, America must maintain our record of fiscal responsibility. Through our last four budgets, we've turned record deficits to record surpluses, and we've been able to pay down $600 billion of our national debt, on track to be debt free by the end of the decade for the first time since 1835.
Staying on that course will bring lower interest rates, greater prosperity and the opportunity to meet our big challenges. If we choose wisely, we can pay down the debt, deal with the retirement of the baby boomers, invest more in our future and provide tax relief.
Second, because the world is more connected every day in every way, America's security and prosperity require us to continue to lead in world. At this remarkable moment in history, more people live in freedom than ever before. Our alliances are stronger than ever. People all around the world to look in America to be a force for peace and prospeity, freedom and security. The global economy is giving more of our own people, and billions around the world, the chance to work and live and rise thier families dignity.
But the forces of intergration that have greated these good opportunitis also make us more subject to global forces of destruction, to terrorism, organized crime and narcotrfficking, the spread of deadly weapon and disease, the degradation of the global enviroment.
The expansion of trade hasn't fully closed the gap between those of us who live on the cutting edge of the global economy and the billions around the world who live on the knife's edge of survival.
This global requires more than compassion. It requires action. Global poverty is a powder keg that could be ignety by our indifferece.
In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson warned of entangling alliances. But in our times, America cannot and must not disentangle itself from the world.
We must work harder to overcome our differences. In our hearts and in our lows, we must traet our people fairness and dignity, regardless of their race, religion, gender or sexual oreintation and regardless of when they arrived in our contry, always moving toward the more perfect union of our founders'dreamd.
Hillary Chelsea and I join all Americans in wishing our cery best to the next president, Geoge W. Bush to his family and his administration in meeting these challenges and in leading freedom's march in this new contry.
As for me, I'll leave the presidency more idealistic, more full of hope than the day I arrived and more confident than ever that America's best days lie ahead.
My days in this office are nearly through, but my days of service, I hope, are not. In the years ahead, I will never hold a position higher or a covenant more scared than that of president of the United States. But there is no title I will wear more proudly than that of citizen.
Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America.
(责任编辑：演讲网 yuanyuan)
