CLINTON CHALLENGES SELF, NATION

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 19, 1993                   TAG: 9301190210
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
CLINTON CHALLENGES SELF, NATION
President-elect Bill Clinton, saying he was beginning "to prepare mentally to become president," made building a better world the theme of his first full day in the capital Monday.
Whether it is improving the U.S. military's response to "new and continuing threats," energizing the young to serve their nation, or pursuing the dream of Martin Luther King, Clinton sounded a call to make the nation and the world a better place to live.
On a day when American-led warplanes thundered into Iraq, Clinton told a meeting with diplomats: "America cannot and should not bear the world's burdens alone. But if we work together we can make great progress in making this a better world for all of our citizens.
"We can address global problems - environmental decay, the scourge of AIDS, the threat to our children and our communities of narcotics trafficking and the plight of millions of refugees around the world."
He recalled the influence, while he was a student at Georgetown University, of a professor who argued that the "defining idea of Western civilization" was the notion of "future preference" - "the idea that the future can be better than the present and that each of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so."
Clinton said to students Monday at the university: "I ask you to remember that we ran to give you a better future, but also to challenge you to build that future. We'll do our part. . . . You have an obligation - you cannot let yourselves be the first generation of Americans to do worse than your parents.
"You can do better than we have done in healing the racial and other wounds of this country, and pulling this country together."
And at a ceremony honoring King at Howard University, Clinton quoted the Dec. 17, 1964, speech at Harlem Armory in New York City, in which King said receiving the Nobel Peace Prize had taken him to the "mountaintop," but that he was called back to "the valley" by people in need of hope and escape.
Picking up the theme, Clinton said: "I was born in the valley, and lifted to this office on the hopes and dreams of people in the valleys all across this country, people who could far more easily find us on a bus than at an airport.
"Now in these heady days on America's mountaintop, we must remember, with Dr. Martin Luther King, that we have much work to do, against stiff odds, with not a day to waste."

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB