PRESS RELEASE
October 20, 1996

STATEMENT BY JOE LOCKHART
NATIONAL PRESS SECRETARY

There is a reason Bob Dole wants to talk about insults instead of ideas in the last days of this campaign. Bob Dole has been consistently wrong on the issues people really care about. Take a look at the Dole record on education.

Thirty-one years ago today, Bob Dole voted against the creation of federally insured student loans for undergraduate college education. On October 20, 1965, Dole was one of only 63 House members to vote against the 1965 Higher Education Act which established student loans for undergraduate students. And one year later on October 20, 1966, Dole voted to eliminate Head Start when he voted against reauthorization of the Office of Economic Opportunity -- which ran the original Head Start program, Project Head Start.

Three decades later, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich teamed up to write the most anti-education budget in history. The Dole/Gingrich budget would have cut $31 billion dollars from education and training programs over seven years.

And now, Bob Dole is campaigning on a risky election-year economic scheme that experts -- including Businessweek and Time magazines and the bipartisan Concord Coalition -- say could result in across the board education cuts as deep as 40 percent.

President Clinton has a strong record of working to expand educational opportunity and a positive vision for how to build on that record over the next four years. Past, present and future -- Bob Dole has been consistently wrong when it comes to education.

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