The most important thing to know about Hillary is that all her life, she's been an agent of change, somebody who can both see other people's problems and solve them. After law school where we met, she could have taken a job in a big law firm in Chicago or New York. Instead she took an extra year at the Yale Child Study Center and the Yale-New Haven Hospital to learn more about the problems of poor and abused children. After law school, her first job was not in a big law firm. It was working for the Children's Defense Fund, going door to door in New Bedford, Massachusetts, visiting people to find out why their kids had dropped out of school. She discovered that a lot of them were not in school because they had disabilities that kept them from succeeding in school. She helped write a report that went to Congress and helped lead to the passage of a federal law to provide those children an equal, appropriate educational opportunity. Then she moved to a small university town in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she'd barely visited, and married a guy whose political career consisted of one lost race for Congress. I was making $16,450 a year and had a campaign debt of $42,000. And what did she do? She organized a legal aid program there to serve poor people who didn't have access to legal services. Then we moved to Little Rock when I became attorney general and governor, and she became really worried about children who were being raised in families with devoted mothers and fathers who had little to no education.
So she started looking around for a good preschool program. And she learned about one that began in Israel, called Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters. It taught parents how to be their kids' first teachers. Soon she had me driving to these graduation sites to see young preschoolers and their mothers, beaming and proud that they were teaching their kids to read and had learned how to keep them healthy. Now this program is in 25 states and the District of Columbia. Thousands and thousands of kids have had their lives changed because she came to Arkansas years ago and started solving problems. She's an agent of change. In 1983, I asked Hillary to lead a committee to reform our schools in the wake of an educational expert saying that a child could get a better education in any state other than Arkansas. We had 265 high schools offering no advanced biology, 217 offering no physics, 177 offering no foreign language, and 164 offering no advanced math. After Hillary's report, the legislature adopted higher standards and implemented them in our schools. In 1986, eleventh-graders in Arkansas took an exam, competing with four other Southern states. They finished first in the region. By the time I left office, the state's graduation rate was the highest in the South. The same expert who had said we had the worst schools in America said we had made outstanding progress, and things had changed immeasurably. Hillary held no public office then, but she was an agent of change. She gave tens of thousands of kids a better future. In the early 1980s, Hillary told me about Mohammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank, which gave small loans to poor people in Bangladesh to start businesses, and about a Chicago bank doing the same thing for African-American carpenters and Croatian electricians. She thought we should establish one in Arkansas. She helped to raise the money to establish one of America's first rural micro-credit banks. It's still operating. Thanks to her, when I became president we passed community development legislation and funded micro-credit loans all over the United States. And when I became president, I asked her to lead our health care reform effort. You know she didn't succeed, but Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter didn't either. It's hard. But Hillary gave a good effort, and she didn't quit. As a result, we passed the Children's Health Insurance Program, which today gives health care to six million kids, the largest expansion since Medicare. We immunized 90 percent of our kids against serious illness for the first time. She helped get more research, screening, and care for breast cancer and cervical cancer. She helped improve diabetes care. She helped protect insurance coverage when people change jobs. And for the first time in 12 years, we had a reduction in the number of people without health insurance, with health costs increasing no more than regular inflation, unlike today. Hillary is an agent of change. While we were in the White House, Hillary worked with Republicans and Democrats to double the number of children being adopted out of foster homes. And she represented America in more than 80 countries, seeing not just leaders but also visiting villages to encourage education and economic development. When Hillary spoke at the 1995 Women's Conference, the Chinese were so worried about what she was going to say that they moved the talk out of the city, and it was pouring rain. Women from all over the world were drenched getting out there to hear her say that all over the world, "Women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights." It broke like a thunderclap. And after all this time, in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, people in villages will come up to me and say, when your wife made that speech, it changed everything for us. We knew that nobody could deny our daughters the right to get an education, to make a living and to contribute to society. She has always been an agent of change. When the leaders of the new government in Northern Ireland recently came to see the president, they wanted to see somebody else too: Hillary. Why? Because as they repeatedly reminded me, even though they are exceedingly grateful for what I did, she had an independent role in the peace process because she helped to encourage groups of Catholic and Protestant women to pressure the men to stop fighting and make peace. Why am I telling you all this? Because it's one thing to talk and another thing to do. All her life she has been an agent of positive change, though she never ran for office until 2000. When she got to the Senate, what happened? She made alliances with Republicans and Democrats. She and John McCain traveled to the northernmost village on the planet in Norway, and the northernmost town in America, Point Barrow, Alaska, with skeptical Republicans to show them the growing impact of global warming. She worked with the Republican Senate Majority Leader, a doctor, to co-sponsor a bill to give everybody electronic medical records. If we all had electronic medical records, it would cut $80 billion from medical costs. That's almost 80 percent of what it would cost us to insure every man, woman, and child in America. She has worked with a Republican senator from South Carolina to pass legislation to speed up providing body armor for out troops, and to provide the same health benefits regular service members have to the members of the National Guard or Reserves who serve in combat. And recently, they passed a bill to extend the Family and Medical Leave Law to ensure that relatives of military personnel who suffer from physical or emotional trauma are entitled to time off for them without losing their jobs. The reason I think she should be president is that she's got a 35-year record of being an agent for positive change. She has never been in a situation that she hasn't left better than when she found it. And that's all that really matters: whether people are better off when you finish than when you started. Do children have a better future? Are we moving in the right direction? Are we coming together? You will never have another chance to vote for anyone who has done more creative, effective things to make a positive difference in other people's lives than Hillary. So do I think that it's great that people around the world think a lot of her? I do. Am I proud of the policies she's advocating? I am. I love her health care and education and economic and climate change plans. But the reason you ought to support her is the reason she would be the best president, because she's the best change agent. | 
