 Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Well, thank you. Thank you all very much, and welcome to the White House. It's a real pleasure for me to have the charter members of GOPAC here today. Not only are you doing great things for America, but you're also such good company. You know, ever since the postal rates went up, I'm not getting many letters anymore. But I especially want to thank Bo Calloway, Newt Gingrich, and Joe DiGuardi for their hard work and persistence that have made GOPAC so effective. Bo, after your service to our nation as Secretary of the Army, and more recently as Chairman of the Colorado GOP, two tough jobs, I'm very pleased that you've taken on the big challenge of guiding GOPAC in its vital political mission. And Newt, with your hands full, tangling with the liberal Democrats in Congress, I'm delighted that you can find the time to make GOPAC the success it is. In fact, my staff has told me that Newt was on the phone about three times a day, seven days a week, when we were setting up today's visit. And Congressman Joe DiGuardi, thanks for all your efforts for GOPAC and in the House. I think these three deserve a round of applause, don't you? You know, I believe for some time that it's inevitable that we'll become the majority party. But even when something is inevitable, it still takes a lot of effort and dedication to make it happen sooner rather than later. And that's why I want to thank all of you for your tremendous support for the Republican Party. You know, I'm reminded of an old story. Things usually do remind me of a story. I hope you haven't heard it because I've been telling it a lot. It's about an old, and I just think of it in connection with what I've talked to you about the job we all face. It's about an old farmer who had a piece of Creek Bottom land on his property, and it was all studded with rocks and covered with brush. And one day he started in on it, and he grubbed out the brush and he hauled away the rocks. Then he ploughed and he cultivated and he fertilized and he planted, and pretty soon he had quite a garden spot there on that Creek Bottom land. And one Sunday morning in church after the service, he asked the ministry, kind of told him what he'd been doing and said, you know, I'd like to have him come out and see it while the minister came out to see it. And when he looked, he said, oh, this is marvelous. He said, I've never seen such melons. How the God has blessed this land. And look at that corner, tall corn there. He said, the God has certainly been good to all of this. And he went on this way and the old man was getting a little bit jittery, fidgety as this went on and finally turned to him and he said, oh, he said, what a wonderful thing has been done here with the help of the Lord. And the old boy says, Reverend, I wish you could have seen it when the Lord was doing it by himself. But your goal and also my goal is to win a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. You know, the Republicans haven't controlled the house since 1954. And even worse than that, as of now, in 1988, the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives for 54 of the 56 years leading up to this year that we're in right now. For only four years, two years Truman had a Republican Congress. I had one for two years. But for the rest of the time, every Democratic president, except me, has had both houses of the legislature in Democratic hands, Republican presidents, as well as the Democratic presidents having that. And then I was lucky enough to get one house, the Senate, for the first six years. And all of these gains that we've made couldn't have been made if we hadn't had that one house. Now we're back to two again against us. GOPAC not only knows what we're trying to do can be done, I think this has been one of the Democrats' key instruments of political control. With your support, we're going to change that. And as I said, GOPAC knows that this can be done and it also has a plan for how it can be done. Not overnight, but over the course may be of several elections. By starting at the grassroots and building upward, your common sense program of electing Republicans to the state legislatures is a superb strategy. Because when I was governor, except for one brief year, I had a Democratic legislature, both houses, for seven years. It reminds me of your strategy of one great baseball player years ago who's asked what his secret was for getting base hits. He led the league in that. He says, I just hit him where they ain't. Well, in these legislative races, you get a big impact from your expertise and resources. You build the party at the local level. You groom top-notch candidates for Congress. And you help assure the American people and the Republican Party that the next redistricting is a fair one. And that's coming up just about a year or so. And why have they been victorious all this time? Well, because they've been in charge of the reapportionment for a half a century now. For example, in California in 1984, Republican House candidates won a majority of the popular vote statewide. But the Democrats got 60 percent of the House seats. That's due to that gerrymandering. And according to projections, after the 1990 census, California could gain as many as five more, Congressman. And so control of the state legislature will be essential to ensuring that the new congressional districts are fairly drawn. And to take control of the California Senate or assembly, the Republicans need just five additional seats in either chapter. So the situation will be much the same in other states. Gains of just two seats in the Illinois Senate or in the Pennsylvania House, for example, will win Republican control of those legislative chambers. In fact, just by picking up 70 key seats in state legislatures across the country and keeping the ones we have, the Republican Party would have control of a majority of the state legislative chambers in the United States. That's just 70 more victories out of more than 5,000 legislative seats at stake this year. And with Vice President George Bush and his tremendous record at the top of our ticket, and with the Massachusetts liberal at the top of theirs. I think we'll make big gains in 1988. You know, the way they so carelessly talk. I just was reading a clipping here about the wife of our presidential opponent, our candidate, opposition, and how she just casually said to the people with regard to her interest in the fight on drugs, and of course part of her fight is she wants to legalize them or she thinks that might be all right. But that I took away half the funding of the Coast Guard at a time when they're needed for the fight on drugs. I didn't take a penny away from them. The United States Congress took that money away from them. And we'd like to have it given back because we know what a job they've been doing in helping us intercept drugs. Well, as I say, the state legislatures are much more than just a stepping stone. They're increasing to the site of key domestic policy decisions that until recently were decided in Washington. You see, by limiting the growth in federal programs and appointing judges who respect federalism, we've shifted power back toward the states. This is a key part of our conservative philosophy, and GOPAC, by helping to elect solid Republicans to state and local office, is helping to bring good, effective, limited government to the whole country. For nearly a decade, GOPAC has been planting Republican seeds across the nation, and that the political climate in America has changed. All of you deserve much of the credit. A lot's happened that we can be proud of. We rebuilt our armed forces. We liberated Grenada from the Communists and helped return the island to democracy. We struck a firm blow against Libyan terrorism. He hasn't been half as noisy as he was before. And the Soviets have begun to pull out of Afghanistan. The INF Treaty has ratified, and we're working on the Strategic Defense Initiative to defend ourselves and our allies against nuclear terrorism. We've filled nearly half the federal judiciary with judges committed to the law and the Constitution. The United States has had 66 consecutive months of economic growth. That is the longest peacetime expansion in our nation's history. We've created nearly 17 million new jobs. And contrary to what they say, the most of those jobs, the great majority, have been in the higher income-earning brackets, not down there at menial type jobs and so forth. The top personal tax rate has been cut in half, and we've brought inflation, unemployment, and interest rates down to their lowest levels in years. And it seems to me that all in all, that's not a bad record if you only work a few hours a day. But I just want to thank you for what you're doing and let you know that it really makes a difference. I'll be going around the country this year campaigning for the Republican Party and working to elect George Bush. And I look forward to telling the people, George has been an active part of all the things that we've accomplished in this administration so far. I started that back when I was governor, that I didn't believe that a vice president or a lieutenant governor should be just sitting there taking your pulse. I said they should be like an executive, vice president, and a corporation. And that's what George Bush has been, and as I say, has participated in all the great actions and led some of them. Well, I'll probably see a lot of you along the way, and I'll look forward to that also. So I want to thank you, and God bless you, except I can't resist something now that I've got you captives here. I have a new hobby. I collect stories that I can prove are told by the Soviet citizens among themselves. And they show a great sense of humor in the part of those people, but also kind of a little cynicism about their system. And so my latest acquisition along that line came as after I got back from the summit, one of our Secret Service agents told me, this one that he found was being told there, that Gorbachev and I were in a limousine, and I had the chief of my Secret Service unit with me, and he had his head security man with him, and we were sightseeing. And we pulled up at a waterfall, a big waterfall, and got out to look at it. And Gorbachev said to my agent, he said, go ahead, jump, go over the falls. And my agent said, I've got a wife and three kids. So he turned to his man and he said, hey, go on, jump, go over the falls. And he did. Well, my man scrambled down the rocks to the bottom of the falls to see what had happened and found him down there wringing out his clothes. And he said, when he told you to jump, why did you do that? Why'd you jump? He says, I've got a wife and three kids. I've got to get on my way now, but I just thank these three again and thank all of you for all that you're doing.