Thank you very much, President-Elect Wooten, President Gallucci, Anne Bryant. I understand the teacher of the year, Kimberly Oliver, is here. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for that wonderful welcome.

I saw a few of you, and I do mean a few, now that I see how many are here, on the streets in San Francisco yesterday, when I was out taking one of my heart walks. And as a matter of fact, one of the delegates caught me getting a huge ice cream cone. I knew I was coming here, and I thought it was like getting caught talking in class or something. It was awful.

I must say, that was a wonderful introduction and a wonderful welcome.

When I left the White House, barred by the 22nd amendment from ever running again, which made half the country ecstatic and all the Democrats who wanted to be President happy, I began to get all these crazy letters about where else I could run for President.

It turned out that, because on my mother's side my people are Irish and they come from County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, from a little village right on the border of the Irish Republic, if I bought a house there and established a residence for few months, I could actually run for President of Ireland.

Under the French Constitution, I could also run for President of France. If you are born in a place that was ever at any time part of the French empire, and you establish residence in France and learn to speak French, then you can run for President. I never thought that one of the privileges of being born in Arkansas, which was part of the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon by Thomas Jefferson, would be eligibility to run for President of France. So for all of you who are part of the Louisiana Purchase, you have got a whole new future opening up before your very eyes right now.

I am very grateful to be here and grateful for the work you do. I was Governor for a dozen years, President for eight, and therefore for two decades had the opportunity to work closely with this association and with lots of individual school boards and school board members.

I am grateful for the mention earlier of the work we did on the Community Learning Centers and the effort we made to open the schools to serve more people and to bring in information technology.

Here in San Francisco, Al Gore and I had a press conference in 1994 about trying to bring the Internet into all of our schools. At the time, only 35 percent of our schools had an Internet connection. Only about four percent of our classrooms did. When we left, 98 percent of our schools (and over 65 percent of our classrooms) were connected.

We devoted more than a billion dollars to help repair old schools and expand overcrowded ones, the first such construction program from the federal government since World War II. We were more than a third of the way home toward putting another 100,000 teachers in the classrooms in the early grades to deal with the largest school population in our history, the first one to exceed the Baby Boom generation.

We started a program called Gear Up, which many of your schools use, which has now provided early college preparation to hundreds of thousands of young people from low income areas who are in their middle school years. We did a lot of other things together.

One I am particularly proud of is that there were no federally-funded supports for after-school programs when we started, and when we left we had 1.3 million kids in after-school programs with federal support.

We also strongly supported all kinds of school reforms and higher standards. I would be the last person in the world to criticize testing programs. I didn't come here to talk about this, but if I were dictator, I would get with you and make some changes in that Leave No Child Behind law, because I think there are some that should be made. If there are changes, and I hope there will be, I think they would impose some more responsibilities on the school board, because I think you don't need to test everybody every year. Maybe three tests would be enough. And I think you do need some more uniform benchmarks of performance.

But real excellence in education, it seems to me, based on almost 30 years of working in it now, comes from school cultures. Yes, there are some individual kids learning against all the odds, but we have got to take care of everybody, so we have to try to achieve excellence in entire schools.

When the Nation At Risk report was issued in 1983, when President Reagan was in office and Terrel Bell was the Secretary of Education, and all the states worked to raise standards. We did, too. And then when I was President, we continued to work at it with Dick Riley, who was a great Secretary of Education for eight years. I was really proud of him.

But there was never a time when every problem in American education hadn't been solved by somebody somewhere. In the mid-'80s, when everybody said the inner cities of America were going straight to the devil in a hand basket, there was a junior high school less than a mile from the nation's capital that was 98 percent minority, most of the kids were lower income, and three out of four years they sent a team to the final four of the national mathematics championship for junior high school students.

There was a school in Chicago where the principal was an African American woman from the Mississippi Delta in my home state, and a great friend of mine, now retired, in a neighborhood with the highest crime rate in all of Illinois. They had no playground facilities, none of the things that you normally think of. They were a school choice school, but there was no screening for income or IQ. You just had to agree to play by the rules. Every week there were 150 mothers and 75 fathers in that school, and they had a zero dropout rate. They had zero weapons in the schools. They had everybody going to high school on time. They scored above the Illinois average on the test scores.

There is a high school near me in Harlem, the Frederick Douglass Academy, a New York public school, which has an almost 100 percent minority student body, a significant percentage of people living below the poverty line. They have a 93 percent on time high school graduation rate. Ninety percent of the kids go on to college, and 90 percent of them graduate. For a long time, we have had in New York a Regents Exam that you have to take to get your high school diploma. Their scores rank not above the New York city average, but above the New York state average.

So, we can all clap. But isn't that stating our challenge? Because we have to ask ourselves, if they can do that, why can't we replicate excellence? We either have to replicate it or create it school by school.

So I would like to see a debate over this Leave No Child Behind which would be supportive of you, supportive of the teachers, supportive of accountability, but something that would lead to greater excellence, and not just more tests and teaching to the tests and giving them every year and letting everybody decide what the passing score is instead of having some sort of uniform standards. That's what I would like to see, but that's not what I came here to talk to you about. I came here to ask for your help on something entirely different.

America has, as all of us know, significant education challenges. We need more people in science and mathematics and engineering. There are people working in some of your schools, like the National Academy Foundation, trying to address this.

America also has, as we all know, a significant health care challenge. We spend more of our money on health care than any other country, 16 percent of GDP, and nobody else spends more than 11 percent. That's over $700 billion that we spend on health care every year that we wouldn't spend if we had any other health care system on earth.

And you might say, “Well, it must be better than every else's.” We cover 84 percent of our people. All the other rich countries cover 100 percent. Then you say, “Well, the 84 must be getting something nobody else gets.” Our overall health ranking among all advanced economies is 37th, and our life expectancy is 34th. And this money is money we are not spending on education or on becoming more competitive economically. So we have a big health care challenge.

We have a huge economic challenge in America, because in a global economy where people are just as smart as we are and do things for wages we can't live on, we can't possibly keep a middle class lifestyle unless we find a big source of new jobs every five to eight years. And that, too, is related to education and health care and to energy. Unless we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, we are going to have a terrible problem with climate change, or our children will. And if we did it right, we would create the most awesome economic boom our country has had in 30 or 40 years. They are all connected.

Yesterday I went to a community forum with two or three thousand people to talk about health care. Today I come to you to talk about health care and to ask for your help. After I had my heart surgery, I started thinking about the health care system all over again, first of all, with enormous gratitude for what is good about it. You know, if what happened to me had happened to me a generation ago, I wouldn't be up here giving a speech today. I had massive blockage. I had passed all my physicals, but 10 percent of the people who have heart attacks do.

But I should have known. I had other manifestations of it for years. But I didn't pick it up, and I shouldn't be here. Every day for me is a gift. And I decided that I ought to do what I could with the rest of my life to see that no one younger than me was deprived of the chance to live their dreams, and certainly no one I could stop from dying would die before their time.

So I got into health care again, and I decided that we have three problems with our health care system. One is it costs too much. Two is that we not only leave 16 percent of our people uninsured, there are millions of more people that are underinsured. They think they’ve got insurance until they need it. A lot of you know people like that. The third problem is that we spend a ton of money on people like me when we are sick, but we spend very little to keep people from getting sick, to promote wellness, to create a healthy society. We have a moral imperative to cover everybody, and I think we have an economic imperative to try to bring costs in line with other countries.

I will just give you one example. Some of the people I met yesterday on the street were from Michigan. Now, I grew up in the automobile business. My father and my uncle were in the Buick business, and I was in a parts department and under a car when I was six years old.

We are in danger of losing a lot of our automobile business today. One reason is General Motors has $1,500 a car in health care costs, and Toyota has $110. Now, I think I am pretty good at running things, but I don't believe I could take over General Motors, spot Toyota $1,400 a car, and beat them in the marketplace.

All these things are tied together. For example, we spend 34 percent of every health care dollar on administrative costs between the providers and the insurers. Nobody else spends more than 19. That's almost $300 billion a year. It would only cost $100 billion to provide insurance to the 16 percent who don't have it.

This could be done, but if we keep only dealing with sickness and not promoting wellness, within a very few years the explosion of costs from the consequences of that, from obesity and diabetes alone, will swallow up all the savings and benefits we get, and the health care system will collapse anyway.

More importantly, we have run the risk, because of our exercise habits and because of the way we make, distribute, and consume food, of raising the first generation of children to live shorter lives than their parents.

That’s why after my heart surgery, I agreed to join with the American Heart Association in creating what we call the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Our goal is to stop and then reverse the rise in childhood obesity and its attendant consequences, principally manifested now in rising rates of diabetes. Today there are about 12.5 million children who are overweight and 13 million more at risk of it.

I was overweight as a kid. When I was 13, I was 5'8" and weighed 185 pounds. But it's not just that. There is less exercise today. The composition of the food is changing. The metabolic impact of that on children is dramatic. And we are now seeing for the first time in the history of our country, and sadly in other countries as well, a statistically significant number of schoolchildren with what we used to call “adult onset diabetes,” type 2 diabetes. In New York City, we have kids as young as nine who have been diagnosed with adult onset diabetes. The medical professionals have basically scrapped the term and gone back to the more specific term “type 2” to describe the kind you are not born with.

What this means is that unless we do something about it, we are going to have more and more people at younger and younger ages suffering from heart attacks, strokes, blindness, and requiring amputations in a way that will explode the costs of health care.

In 2004, Emory University in Atlanta did a study alleging that rising obesity rates accounted for 27 percent of the growth in health care spending in the decade when I served as President.

Now, all of you know that health insurance premiums have risen a staggering 90 percent since 2001. Obesity can't explain all of that, but it's a part of it. States spend more than $75 billion a year on obesity-related illnesses, California alone almost $8 billion a year. Imagine what your schools could do if we divided up another $75 billion on a pro rata basis.

What we want to do is to try to halt the rise by 2010 and have it clearly reversed by 2015. Literally untold lives are resting on it.

Mr. Wooten mentioned in the introduction that former President Bush and I worked on the Katrina relief. It's been a great joy to me. I have loved working with him. He is a very fine man, and I think we did some good down there. But one of the most shocking experiences I had in the aftermath of Katrina was not in New Orleans, it was in Biloxi. I went to Biloxi because there was a neighborhood, an African American neighborhood, where the people had bought their own homes with the help of a project sponsored by the United Council of Negro Women, headed by a woman named Dorothy Height, who is 98 this year. Dr. Dorothy Height is an amazing person, almost 100 years old and still going great guns.

But anyway, these people had gotten their homes 30 years ago. They lost their homes within a year after they had finally paid their mortgages off, and it was tragic. I went there, and I was so impressed by the can-do spirit of the neighborhood, and they were cleaning up the trash and trying to collect on their insurance and thinking about the future. But one of the people who came to see me was a woman who could not have been a day over 35 years old sitting in a wheelchair with her leg amputated below the knee because of her diabetic condition. And we are going to see more and more of that.

Now, all of this didn't happen overnight. And you should know it's happening around the world. There is now a national campaign against childhood obesity in Ireland. There is one in the United Kingdom. Diabetes and its attendant conditions is probably the biggest new health problem in India, as the country grows more prosperous and chucks what I believe is the most interesting diet on earth in favor of fast foods with a lot of trans fats and sugar and big portions.

How did all this happen? Part of it is that about half the country doesn't participate in our rising prosperity. Median wages are pretty much flat in this decade, and have been for 30 years now, except for my second term, when information technology jobs basically lifted wages and diminished income inequality.

So if people's incomes compared to inflation are pretty much flat, look what's happened to everything else. Housing has gone up more than that, health care has gone up more than that, a college education has gone up more than that, the cost of transportation has gone up more than that.

What has gone up in a family's essential budget less than the rate of inflation? Clothes, consumer electronics, and food. Meanwhile, more and more people are in the workforce and have less and less time to prepare food at home. Thirty years ago, 70 percent of our food dollars were spent on food prepared at home. Today it's about 50-50. And half of the dollars that are spent eaten out are spent at fast food places where people with limited incomes look for a premium of volume for dollar and the mix of the food has changed.

Meanwhile, more and more schools have felt economic pressures to contract out their cafeteria programs, and more and more of those contractors bring in things that kids may like to eat, but they are not particularly nutritious. More and more cities have had a hard time funding their public budgets, and so there are fewer playgrounds, fewer sidewalks built in developments, and there’s less exercise overall. The combination of all these things has been destructive. And alas, I say again, it's not just us. Other countries are following along here, and we are setting the stage for a calamitous crisis in health care in all wealthy countries caused only by our own eating and exercise activities.

Well, how can we work our way out of it? We have got to do this together. We have to do it in the homes, in the schools, in the free time of our children, and everybody has a role to play.

What we have tried to do with our Alliance for a Healthier Generation is, first of all, to engage children's media. Nickelodeon, the kids' channel, has helped us, along with the NBA and Scholastic Channel 1, to develop something called the Go Healthy Challenge. Last year, we broadcast that to millions of young children between the ages of six and 11, and over 200,000 of them signed up to change their own habits and to try to get their contemporaries to live healthier lifestyles.

We also have done what we can -- and a lot of you are familiar with this -- to reach agreements with both the beverage producers and the snack food producers to alter the caloric content and the sugar content of the snacks and beverages provided to children during school hours. We have tried to work with them in a way that all of you could live with.

We have had a couple of interesting cases where the local beverage people haven't wanted to let the school district out of the contract they had already signed, for reasons that will be painfully apparent to all of you. But that's an exception, not the rule, and we are trying to work through that. But I want to say I am really grateful to the American Beverage Association, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes for taking the leadership here, and to the snack food people, Campbell's, Dannon, Kraft, Mars, and again PepsiCo, for agreeing to help us do this. This can reduce at least the dangerous inputs for over 35 million school kids.

We are trying to get more recreational facilities in communities, with a wonderful non-governmental group called KaBOOM! that I have worked with in other contexts. They just go in and, in the bleakest of circumstances, build playgrounds and exercise grounds for adults.

We are working to help schools, not just the students, but also the teachers and the other school personnel, to try to help improve healthy lifestyles and do the right kind of nutrition education.

We are now involved, either directly or over the Internet, with more than a thousand schools in 44 states, and over the next four years, as our capacity increases, we intend to serve 30,000 schools, one in four of the schools across America, where the largest number of high-risk kids are.

I think that all of this can help. I have already seen examples from the reports I have gotten. A Native American school in a rural district in northern Minnesota has changed the recess schedule and altered a lot of the patterns of the school day so that the kids can do well. It's a big issue, because Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanics are genetically more disposed to diabetes, so they are more vulnerable to the same forces that are affecting all of our kids.

I don't believe anybody ever wanted this to happen. I don't believe anybody ever thought it would happen. This is a confluence of factors that have to do with how we work and live and raise our children. But we have to change it.

We have an Alliance phone number if any of you are interested in this. It's the only promo I am going to do today. But we have a toll-free number that we use to have schools call us, or school board members, or interested others who want to help in their own communities. It's 1-888-KIDHLTH -- “kid health,” without the “E” and the “A.”

Ginny Ehrlich, the Director of our Healthy Schools programs, and Christy Manso, our expert on the beverage agreement, are both here at this convention, and I know they are going to hold a session later today. But we can't do this without your help.

But think about this. What if tomorrow every one of your school districts knocked the charts out of every test everybody asked your kids to take? What if tomorrow all the teachers were happy, all of the principals wanted to stay forever, you were doing well, you had none of the problems that you hassle with every day, none of the problems that make being an elected school board member, maybe after being President, the toughest job in the country in terms of trying to please everybody?

What if they all went away and right before your eyes you saw the reason that you ran in the first place, the welfare of the children, taken away from you as a realistic possibility for things that have nothing to do with what you do all day, every day? That is happening before your eyes. We cannot allow this to happen.

Furthermore, as I explained a few minutes ago, nothing we do to reform health care in terms of universal coverage or bringing all these other costs into line with our competitors is sustainable if we keep lowering the age of eligibility for diabetes, lowering the age of eligibility for blindness, lowering the age of eligibility for amputations, lowering the age of eligibility for heart attacks and strokes, and putting a weight on the back of our health care system that none in history has ever been asked to sustain.

I don't want this to be a downer. We can turn this around. And by the way, you know how kids are. We can't turn it around if all we do is talk in negative terms. We have got to make this fun and interesting, and we have got to make kids know there is nothing wrong with them; they didn't do anything wrong.

We have let our society be so concerned with work and business, and we have been, in my opinion, insufficiently sensitive to the staggering financial burdens on middle class parents, and particularly those who are in jobs where they don't ever get a raise. Most people have just done the best they can in very difficult circumstances.

A lot of schools have made decisions that they might not have otherwise made about feeding programs, or physical education programs, or the kind of education programs about how food works and how exercise works, because of budgetary pressures brought on by the fact that, unlike the Baby Boom generation, this generation of kids is more likely to have parents who are first-generation Americans and therefore not yet homeowners. So it's hard to get local property tax increases through to do a lot of what we might used to have done on the quality-of-life agenda.

Look, there are lots of problems here, and I am not asking for defeatism or hand wringing. But every one of you needs to know the dimensions of this. We are playing Russian roulette with our kids' futures. And everything that these Presidential candidates in both parties are about to tell the American people they want to do about health care could be rendered inoperable. No matter how honest and straightforward and passionate they are about what they believe is the solution, they could all be rendered inoperable by this obesity epidemic. We cannot let it happen.

I always see the glass as half full. I am not a pessimist about this. But I am not naïve, either. It is not easy to turn around a cultural phenomenon.

I was out here in California a few months ago trying to raise some funds for this, for my part of this venture. There was an immensely attractive young man who had gotten an MBA at Stanford, was a very successful business person, and he literally looked like a professional athlete. I would say he was in his early 30s. He was hyper-fit. He grew up on the street in the Bronx, but he was real smart, and he had gotten an Ivy League education, and he had come out here and gotten an MBA, and he had gotten a fancy job in LA, and he was making a ton of money.

He said, "You know, I look good because I can afford a trainer and I can go to the gym and belong to a health club, and I can structure my work life so that I can do all this, and I can learn what I should eat and what I shouldn't. Back on the street where I grew up, nobody has any money for a vacation. Nobody can take the whole family out to a restaurant more than once a year. Nobody can even afford to take everybody in the family to a movie. The only fun they have is around meals. That is our only social time. And the only way we could afford to feed everybody and feed them plenty is to get stuff that is probably going to contribute to the obesity epidemic. Everybody wants to do this. It was easy for me, but it’s virtually impossible for the people who live on the street where I grew up.”

Nobody needs to be sanctimonious about this. Nobody needs to be negative about this, but we can do better. When Philadelphia was deemed the most overweight city in America, I guess because of those Philadelphia cheese steaks I do love to eat, the city, instead of throwing a fit or becoming negative, hired a woman to become its health coordinator.

She made up her mind that on every block she would find some recreational space and make it happen, and that in every school and at every playground, that every single public place in the city would become a healthy place, an opportunity place, and the whole city would take it on as a challenge and look at it as a good thing, and nobody would feel bad about where they were starting from, as long as they are going in the right direction.

That's when America works best, when we are not in the whining business, when we are not in the dividing business, when we put ourselves in the solution business. That's where we really work well. We are not very good at whining. We are really not very good at dumping on each other and shooting the wounded. We don't get much progress out of that. But when we make up our mind that together we are going to get something done, we are just about the best there is. That's what we have to do.

I would give anything, on some days, if I were still young and running for office, and I could come here and give you a whoop-de-doo about Leave No Child Behind and what I want to do. I would have gotten four standing ovations, and running out here, I would be counting votes in Iowa and New Hampshire. But that's not my job now. I owe you something for the gift you gave me of being able to serve as President. And what I owe you is to be as honest and candid as I can about these big problems that we have to come to grips with.

Just think about it. You know, I am 60 years old now, and I feel healthy as a horse, and like I already told you, I am lucky to be standing here. I just buried my stepfather at 91. We played golf till he was 88, and if I gave him his handicap, he would beat me half the time. He had a wonderful life and a touching passing. I would like to be just like him when I grow up. Wouldn't it be nice if I could live to be 90? But if I do, it means that I still have twice as many yesterdays as tomorrows. Now, that's not morbid to me. That's a source of gratitude. I cherish my yesterdays and hold on to them. It's a part of the rhythm of life.

But all of us, when we get to a certain point in our life, we just don't want anybody younger than us to die before their time. We don't want anybody younger than us to be deprived of the chance to live their dreams. We don't want people to just be trapped in a system that is inherently designed to cut them off from some of their possibilities.

That's why we have to change this. And you can help. These kids spend more time in school than anyplace else. Some of them, alas, spend more time in front of the computer or the television than they do studying, so we are trying to get them there, too.

But we need you. We are going to have to do this together. So many of you have labored so hard for so long to get the right people in the right places and have the right curriculum and figure out the right measures of progress and do all that stuff you do about education.

The raw material is always the kids, their infinite possibilities, their infinite dreams, their heartbreaking family challenges that you try to help them overcome. That's the reason you all did this. You too could be blocked from doing your job if we don't save this generation of kids.

So I say again, in a way it's an honor to be given a big job, and America works best when we are in the solutions business. If there ever was a challenge that called for us all to be in that business, it is this one.

Thank you, and God bless you.