All Smiles, Except For Big Government
- President Clinton kicks things off by thanking American military personnel and celebrating the recent peace deal in Bosnia.
- Clinton brags about the state of the economy and the decreasing number of Americans on welfare and food stamps.
- The big questions for the night: how do we preserve and expand the American dream for everyone by working together? Yeesh, you'd think this was a motivational seminar.
- Clinton utters the defining line of the speech: "the era of big government is over" (7.4). He says there is "not a program for every problem," (7.2) and pledges to give the American people a "smaller, less bureaucratic government" (7.3).
- Taking a page out of the Republican playbook, the Democratic president deploys the rhetoric of "self-reliance" as well as "teamwork," pressing for cooperation between State and local governments and smaller organizations like churches.