Remarks at Staten Island "Get Out The Vote" Event

At a "Get Out the Vote" event on Staten Island, Hillary Clinton discussed her plans to raise incomes and deliver results for all communities, keep Americans safe, and unite the country. Hillary also reaffirmed her pledge to work hard for every vote ahead of Tuesday's Democratic primary in New York, take nothing for granted, and make this campaign about the people she will fight for every day as president.

Thank you so much, Maxine. Didn't she do great? That is a terrific story. Wow, what a way to start. I am excited and happy to be back in Staten Island with all of you.

I had the greatest honor and delight in representing you for eight years. And it just is always so, I don't know, heartwarming for me to come here. This is a place of neighborhoods. This is a place where people still try to have Sunday dinner with their families. This is a place that holds each other up and supports each other. I saw that most tragically after 9/11, when we lost so many of our first responders, our firefighters, our police officers and others, and so many from families here in Staten Island.

So coming back, for me, is a way of saying thank you.

Thank you for the people here, what you stand for, who you are. I actually think Staten Island values are New York values, and New York values are American values.

I want to thank John Gulino, the Staten Island Democratic County chair; Debi Rose, councilmember; Matt Titone, assembly member; Mike Cusick, assembly member; your state senator, who I've had the privilege of knowing for a long time now, Diane Savino; and Public Advocate Tish James. Thank you all for being here with me.

I also want to thank this wonderful place for welcoming us here on this bright spring afternoon. Thank you for letting us be here and be part of Staten Island's history, which is so storied and impressive, and something that gives I think a lot of texture to this borough and what it stands for.

We have a big election on Tuesday--the Democratic primary. And I'll tell you what I see: I see this overall election, this 2016 presidential election, as one of the most consequential we've had in a long time.

Now, everybody who runs for office says something like that, but let me tell you what I mean: We are seeing a very distinct difference between the visions of what we can achieve as Americans, the values that should keep motivating and uniting us, and a divisive, mean-spirited rhetoric that sets people against each other.

Now, I am all for tough political battles. People who have different political views, arguing it out. When I ran in 2000, I didn't carry Staten Island. When I ran in 2006, I did--because we spent our time getting to know each other, listening to each other. So I've got no problem with people having political disagreements. That's in America's DNA, isn't it? But what I absolutely worry about is deliberate efforts to set Americans against each other.

That's especially important in this city and state, because we are a diverse group of folks. We don't all look alike. We don't all sound alike. We don't all worship alike. But we're united in our own efforts to get ahead and stay ahead and help others along the way.

So when we have candidates running for president on the Republican side who are deliberately inciting divisiveness--who are insulting whole groups of Americans; who are saying things like "build the walls," not the bridges, the walls; make it impossible for some people to come to this country because of their religion, a country founded on religious liberty--when we see that, it really bothers me.

Because I begin to think: We are the most extraordinary invention in all of human history--this democracy of ours that has kept going longer than any other anywhere, this nation of immigrants with Lady Liberty in the harbor welcoming people, this place where opportunity is still available. Just as you heard Maxine say, every one of us could tell a story of a hard time, me included--every single one of us. But America has always had our back. Are we perfect? No. But are we better than anywhere else and are we already great? The answer is yes.

I am sick and tired of people running for president who view our country through a negative lens.

Part of what we have to do every election is actually look at our problems and figure out how we're going to solve them. It is not enough to diagnose the problem. A lot of people can do that. We need people who are going to roll up our sleeves and get to work on solutions. That is what I tried to do for eight years as your senator.

When Maxine mentioned the Children's Health Insurance Program--I helped to start that when I was first lady because, call it boring, but I think it's important to actually help people if you hold a public trust, and that's what I've tried to do. And that's what I will continue to do if you give me the honor of serving as your president.

I know what it's like to be knocked down. I understand that completely. And I understand, too, what it is to get yourself back up--like Maxine did, and like I bet so many of you in this crowd have done.

The question is not whether you get knocked down. It's whether you stay down. And for every problem we've got in America right now, there are solutions.

So I'm done with the hand-wringing and all the negative talk. I am done with people saying America's best days are behind us. I'm done with that.

Because here's what I see: When I ran for senate, the people of New York took a chance on me. I will never forget that. You had no basis for doing that.

Well, it turned out pretty well. But it was within my first year serving as your senator that 9/11 happened, and the necessity of pulling together drove everything we did. We had a Republican mayor, we had a Republican governor, we had a Republican president. I did not for one minute stop and say to myself, "Well, I don't know. Can we work together?" How absurd is that? We were facing a crisis of unbelievable proportions. We had 3,000 people murdered--and we pulled together. Politics was totally left behind.

I'll tell you, I criticize George W. Bush. I criticize him because I didn't like the way that he took the economy he inherited from my husband--23 million new jobs and incomes going up for everybody--and drove us into a ditch. I didn't like that. But I'll tell you, when we needed him--when Chuck Schumer and I were in that Oval Office on the Thursday after 9/11, and he asked us what we needed, and we were just the two of us, with the two senators from Virginia, because the Pentagon had been attacked, and I said, "We need $20 billion, Mr. President, to rebuild New York, to take care of families," we didn't yet know about all the health consequences, which I then later spent much of my Senate years dealing with, but we said, "We need $20 billion."--he said, "You've got it."

And despite intense Republican pressure to back down, he never did. So I publicly say, "Thank you, President George W. Bush, for making sure we got the money that we needed to rebuild our city."

I have no time for people who are partisan for the sake of being partisan, who point fingers from whatever side of the political divide. America is always challenged to move forward, to maintain that opportunity and freedom that is at the core of who we are. That shouldn't be partisan.

We can--again, we can disagree about the best way to create good jobs with rising incomes, the best way to ensure that every child in every zip code has a good teacher and a good school, the best way to make sure everybody gets the health care they need, the best way to make sure Social Security is there for future generations. I have no problem with a good debate.

What I don't understand is folks who think it's their way or no way, people who believe that only they have access to the truth.

Well, as your secretary of state, I went to 112 countries, and I'll tell you what: A lot of those places were run by dictators, authoritarian regimes, theocracies that thought they had a monopoly on the truth. You don't want to go there; you sure don't want to live there. But we have to remind ourselves every election is what's at stake. And what's at stake is whether or not we're going to keep making progress together.

So that's why I've laid out plans, because I want you to know what I intend to do--plans for getting more jobs, infrastructure jobs, advanced manufacturing jobs, combating climate change with clean, renewable energy jobs.

And some people--look, I do understand some people actually make fun of that. They say, "Oh, there she goes with her plans. Why doesn't she just get up and rant and rail and"--well, you know, I like to do that every so often.

But I want you to know what I think we can do together. I've set some big goals for clean, renewable energy. Let's deploy half a billion more solar panels and have enough clean energy to provide electricity to every home in America in 10 years.

And let's do more to help small business. Staten Island is a borough of small businesses; let's do more to help small businesses. It's out of small businesses that we're going to get about two-thirds of the new jobs, and I am proud that New York has led the way with a minimum wage increase, so people who work full time are not mired in poverty.

And I do want to finally guarantee equal pay for women's work. I got to tell you, this--this, of course, is a women's issue, but it's not just a women's issue; it's a family issue. If you have a wife, a mother, a sister, a daughter who is working and is not being treated fairly when it comes to pay and benefits in the workplace, the family suffers, the economy suffers.

Now, I've been shopping my entire life--that's a long time--and I've never gotten up to the cashier at the supermarket or at the department store or anywhere else where they say, "Okay, you're a white woman, you only have to pay 78 cents on the dollar;" or "You're a black woman, you only have to pay 68 cents;" or "You're a Latina woman, you only have to pay 58 cents." That's not the way it works.

People who work and do the job should get equal pay, and that should not even be debatable.

And I am absolutely committed to improving education, because, as you heard Maxine, it is still the pathway. But I want to make a couple of points that probably you haven't heard about education.

First, we need early childhood education, and I'm glad New York City is providing universal pre-k for the kids here. And the early studies show that it's making a difference for a lot of kids. We need to do that. Every child should be prepared to learn when he or she gets to school.

And then once we get elementary and secondary school, I want to work with and support our teachers who are doing that important job for all of us. There has just been too much scapegoating, too much criticism, and in fact, I think that we've got work to do to make sure we are going to recruit and keep the teachers of the next generation. And it will be essential if we're going to be competitive in the world.

Thirdly, we're going to make college affordable. I have a plan for debt-free tuition. And I do want to make community college free, because there's a lot of skills you can acquire in community to go immediately to work.

And I really want to stress two other points. One, not everybody has to go to college. There are a lot of good jobs that we need filled by people. We've got to provide the apprenticeship programs, and I want to boost what labor unions are doing to provide more apprenticeship operations. There are currently about 1.2 million jobs in this country for machinists and welders and tool and die makers and other skilled labor. And very often, these are good union jobs, which is at the core of the middle class. So let's do more to encourage more people to go that route.

And I have a plan to help you refinance your student debt. If you can refinance your mortgage or your car payment, why can't you refinance your student debt? And we're going to make it possible for you to do that. We're going to get the cost down and we're going to put a date certain where the payments end. Because honestly, it should be an investment in our future that we are helping young people get their education. I do not think the federal government should be making money off of lending money to send young people to college.

And we're going to build on the Affordable Care Act. Before there was something called Obamacare, there was something called Hillarycare. And I really tried hard and I got my head handed to me by the drug companies and the insurance companies. I love it when all these other folks, including my opponent in the primary, talks about taking on the interests and--where were you? I mean, really, we were fighting tooth and nail trying to get universal health care coverage passed.

But we got to improve it. We've got to get the costs down--out-of-pocket costs, deductibles, copays. We need more competition. And we have to go after--and win this time--against the drug companies to get drug costs under control.

I am excited about all the work we can do together. And I know that it's not easy. I understand that. But anybody asking for your vote should be able to tell you what they want to do to meet the test of, can you improve people's lives? Can you provide a positive difference? And the second test is, can you keep us safe?

Now, maybe we take that more seriously here in New York, but we should. And we are going to do everything we can to keep America safe. And I am so proud of the way New York pulled together after 9/11, and has stayed focused, to make sure that we do everything possible to protect ourselves.

That's why it really bothers me when you hear Trump talking about no Muslims coming to the United States.

We have to defeat the terrorists. That is my goal. And how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to do it in coalition with other nations--European nations, Arab nations, some of whom are actually Muslim nations.

I know how hard it is to put together a coalition because I put together the coalition that brought Iran to the negotiating table, including Russia and China. It took me a year and a half. We got it done, and then we negotiated a deal. And I can tell you this--I think it's kind of common sense: It's harder to put a coalition together if you've got somebody running for president of the United States who insults the religion of the nations you're trying to get into your coalition.

And it's very clear people around the world are paying close attention to this election. I'm getting a lot of incoming questions and messages like, "What is going on?" And I say, "Oh, don't worry about it. The American people will never vote for that."

And then I cross my fingers and cross my heart and pray to God.

And then Ted Cruz comes along and has the brilliant idea--exactly, the perfect Staten Island response to the mention of his name.

So Ted Cruz comes along and says, "Oh, we need special police patrols of Muslim neighborhoods in America." Now, I think the two best responses to that idiocy--which actually is not only offensive, it's dangerous, because we need everybody to report anything they think is suspicious; that's how we keep ourselves safe--so the two best responses: Number one was one of the chiefs of the force of the NYPD who--I lived his understatement--he said, "Well, so what am I supposed to do with the 1,000 American Muslim police officers?" And then Bill Bratton's comment: "He does not know what the hell he's talking about."

So in order to keep us safe, as any president must do, we need to have close connections with everybody. And everybody needs to be encouraged: You see something suspicious, you hear something suspicious, you call, NYPD, FBI, or wherever you might be in the country. That's what we've been doing, and we've got to keep doing it. And we don't need divisive rhetoric that excludes and marginalizes any community.

The third big test that is facing the next president is how are you going--how are you going to unify our country? Now, I'll tell you my experience, both as first lady and senator and as secretary of state. There's nothing easy about doing this. But I will go anywhere, any time, to meet with anyone to find common ground.

When we talk about the CHIP program, that was--that was because we got Democrats and Republicans to work together. And 8 million children, like Maxine's child, get the health insurance they need, regardless of the challenges facing their families.

When I was your senator, I told you we had to work with Republicans, and I gladly did so to make sure we got what we needed.

And then, as I began to hear from firefighters, and police officers, and construction workers, and EMTs, and volunteers--people who had run toward danger, who had stayed there, some of whom were assigned there, some of whom were part of the cleanup, and after months of exposure to the toxins they began to suffer; you know that, there are people you know, or you know somebody who knows, right here on Staten Island--and so I went and I said to the Bush administration, "In this case I'm not happy about it. Something wrong is going on, and we need to help."

And they denied it. Nothing wrong with the air. No problems. I held a hearing downtown near the ferry and had people come in and tell me their stories, have experts come in. I knew there was something wrong. And we began to work, and we built a coalition. And finally we got the Zadroga Act passed, and finally we made sure that we're not turning our backs on anybody.

Anybody who was there, anybody who stayed there, anybody who worked there: We will never turn our backs. And certainly, as president, if I'm so fortunate enough to be there, you can count on that. We will continue to provide whatever health care is needed.

And what I have found over all these years is you just gotta get up every day trying to see whether you can find somebody who will work with you.

Actually, when I have these jobs, Republicans say nice things about me. Yeah, they do. I'm a good colleague. I'm easy to work with. Because I tell them, look. I will seek common ground, but I'll stand my ground. I think that's the combination that you want in an elected representative.

So that's what I'm interested in--all of these contentious problems. What are we going to do to get comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship? What are we going to do to take on the gun lobby to get comprehensive gun safety measures to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn't have them in the first place?

These are contentious issues. I make no bones about that. They're contentious. But they don't get solved by people just yelling at each other. You got to come together. You got to sit down. You've got to spend the hours listening and then working toward some kind of solution.

That's what I promise you. I'm telling you what I will do. You can go to my website and read about it.

I'm also telling you everything I've proposed I will pay for without--and I'm the only candidate who has said this--I will not raise taxes on the middle class at all, period.

There is plenty of money. There's plenty of money in rich people's pockets. And it's time they started paying their share to support this country that has made them successful in the first place.

So I'm telling you what I will do, how I will go about getting it done--and I want you to hold me accountable. I will be coming back to Staten Island when I am your president.

But I can't do any of this without your help.

Tuesday's a big, big primary, because we want to send a message that New York wants the kind of future that is going to be positive, that's going to produce good results for people.

People willing to work hard should be rewarded. We need to have a country again where we believe in the promise of America, where we deliver on the potential of every child.

If you will go out and vote for me on Tuesday, I will fight for you during this campaign and I will fight for you every single day in the White House!

Thank you and God bless you, Staten Island!

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