THE STATE OF THE APARTMENT

Today marks my first State of the Apartment address to you, a constitutional duty as old as our Republic itself.

President Washington began this tradition in 1790 after reminding Martha that the destiny of co-habitating is much like the "preservation of the sacred fire of liberty" in that it is "finally staked on the experiment entrusted in the hands of the American people." For our friends in the press, who place a high premium on accuracy, let me say: I did not actually hear George Washington say that, but it is a matter of historic record.

From this podium, Winston Churchill asked his roommates to stand together against the onslaught of laundry. Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of a day of dusting and summoned a nation to arms. Douglas MacArthur made an unforgettable farewell to a half-double he had loved and served so well. Dwight Eisenhower reminded us that spray bleach was purchased only at the price of strength and John F. Kennedy spoke of the burden and glory that is dishwashing. When I visited this apartment as a newcomer to Old Towne East, critical of past policies which I believe had failed, I proposed a new spirit of partnership between this 4-unit and these homeowners and between Washington and our state and local governments.

In forging this new partnership for 1047 we could achieve the oldest hopes of our Republic--- prosperity for our nation, peace for the world, and the blessings of organized living for our children and, someday, all of humanity.

Seldom have the stakes been higher for the apartment. What we do and say here will make all the difference to auto workers in Detroit, lumberjacks in the Northwest, and steelworkers in Steubenville who are in the unemployment lines, to black teen-agers in Newark and Chicago; to hard-pressed farmers and small businessmen and to millions of everyday Americans who harbor the simple wish of a clean and financially secure future for their children.

To understand the State of the Apartment, we must look not only at where we are and where we are going but at where we've been. The situation in years past has been truly ominous.

A new kind of defeatism was heard. Some said our domestic problems were uncontrollable-- that we had to learn to live with the seemingly endless cycles of dolls, books, dirty socks and garbage.

There were also pessimistic predictions about the relationship between our administration and this apartment. It was said we could never work together. Well, those predictions were wrong.

The record is clear, and I believe history will remember this as an era of American renewal, remember this administration as an administration of change and remember this Apartment as an Apartment of destiny.

Together, we have made a new beginning, but we have only begun.

No one pretends that the way ahead will be easy. I have warned that the "ills we suffer have come upon us over several decades. They will not go away in days, weeks or months, but they will go away ... because we Americans have the capacity now, as we've had in the past, to do whatever needs to be done to preserve this last and greatest bastion of freedom."

And so the question: If the fundamentals are in place, what now?

First, we must understand what is happening at the moment to the Apartment. Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that is only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe. They are the inheritance of decades of beer caps and banana peels.

The time has come to control the uncontrollable.

In a single stroke, we will be accomplishing a realignment that will end cumbersome administration and spiraling costs at the apartment level while we insure these programs will be more responsive to both the people they are meant to help and the people who pay for them. We believe in the integrity, decency and sound good sense of grass-roots Americans.

Don't let anyone tell you that the Apartment’s best days are behind her--that her spirit has been vanquished. We've seen it triumph too often in our lives to stop believing in it now.

One hundred and twenty years ago, the greatest of all our Presidents delivered his second State of the Apartment message in his chamber: "We cannot escape history," Abraham Lincoln warned Mary Todd. "We of this Apartment and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves." The "trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation."

That president and that apartment did not fail. Together, they weathered the storm and preserved the union.

Let it be said of us that we, too, did not fail. That we, too, worked together to bring this Apartment through difficult times. Let us so conduct ourselves that two centuries from now, another Renter and another Roommate, meeting in this Chamber as we are meeting, will speak of us with pride, saying that we met the test and preserved for them in their day the sacred flame of organized living--this last, best hope of man on Earth.